Years ago, there was an article in the Onion entitled, “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested”. As with most late-90s Onion material, it was letter-perfect in its execution. Movies routinely depict characters doing things that would get an actual person some serious jail time. Or at the very least, would not be considered brave or charming, but just downright creepy.
The Onion article was the first thing I thought of when I read this story in The New York Times. The “plot” reads like a bad 80s action movie starring Patrick Swayze (I realize this sentence is redundant). Except instead of becoming the most famous bouncer in America, the protagonist of this story gets a lot of people thrown in jail, ruins a whole bunch of reputations, and inspires millions of dollars in lawsuits.
A federal agent calling himself Sergeant Bill showed up in a small town in Missouri, an area plagued by a methamphetamine problem (in your SAT drug analogies, meth : rural
America :: crack : ghetto). Sergeant Bill vowed to clean up this one-horse town, and the town, which had applied for federal law enforcement grants, was grateful for his help. With the help of local police, he used strongarm tactics to put the dealers out of business
(this is where you’d put the montage of bad guys getting busted). Peace and quiet returned to this sleepy village.
Except a few months into his crusade, it turned out that the “federal agent” was nothing of the sort. Sergeant Bill had deceived local police and politicians through a labyrinthine series of ruses, aided by some collaboration and childlike levels of gullibility. Sergeant Bill had no federal connections whatsoever. He wasn’t even being paid by anyone. He just showed up in the town to smash some drug dealers’ skulls, and the entranced local officials followed him merrily as if he were the Pied Piper of Ass Kicking.