Protector - Laurel Dewey [9]
With their sudden and extreme financial windfall, the Texas mafia needed to find the perfect fronts for laundering their money. That’s where Bill Stover came into the picture. The 42-year-old business wizard owned a chain of successful Denver convenience stores. He was featured on the cover of local business magazines and newspapers as “Entrepreneur of the Year,” a major contributor to local charities and the annual host of Denver’s Drug Awareness Police Benefit. Stover had always been the quintessential muscular, chiseled-chinned, man’s man. But his physique and temperament were quickly whittling away thanks to his secret addiction to meth. His 210 pound build shrunk to a spindly 175 pounds. A persistent rash covered his body, a result of the vicious toxins let loose through the skin of many meth addicts.
His life may have ended in the front seat of his Range Rover ten days before, but it technically came to an abrupt stop with his first hit of meth in the fall of the previous year. The mob’s lackeys who had been supplying him with the occasional “gift” of Columbian cocaine turned him onto crank. He was hooked from the first high. But like all meth addicts, Stover got sloppy and made a lot of mistakes. The stats tell you that serious addiction to meth can occur after a couple months of use. But Stover experienced a powerhouse, line drive addiction after only a few weeks. Already a talkative guy, meth encouraged that tendency. His constant restlessness, anxiousness and frequent insomnia only fueled his garrulous streak. Between the acute paranoia and false sense of confidence—two more effects of meth addiction—Stover was on a roller coaster that quickly careened into a train wreck. After he was busted in an undercover Denver narcotics sting, his life imploded. He knew that his reputation would be destroyed if word got out that this upstanding, anti-drug, “Entrepreneur of the Year” was a closet meth freak who fraternized with the Texas mob. Stover was the perfect insider who understood how the mob operated; he knew names of the powerful in Denver who danced with the mob and he knew the fronts for drugs and corruption.
So the Denver cops gave him a choice: tell us everything you know about the mob and their inside connections and we’ll keep your good reputation intact; clam up and we’ll make sure you are the daily headline of every Colorado newspaper. Stover knew it was a choice between the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately, he didn’t fully comprehend that by siding with the cops, he was signing his own death certificate. He and his family were killed less than 12 hours before he was scheduled to tell everything he knew to the District Attorney.
It could have been so simple. Stover was told to stay with his family in his house; around-the-clock patrol cars were assigned to watch and protect his residence. But after five days of being housebound, he was “tweaking,” a term meth addicts use for coming down off the drug. Tweaking, which can last for weeks after stopping the drug, causes irrational behavior and periods of violent rage. In this state of mind, Stover announced to the detectives that he was taking his family out to get ice cream on that May evening. They tried to dissuade him from leaving but it was clear that this was a man who always got his way. It was a classic example of Stover’s false sense of bravado reigning over his intense paranoia.
Two undercover cars followed him when he left, leaving Chris and Jane in their car across from the house on Gilpin—a wide, upscale street that skirts Cherry Creek and features two-story brick estates. The Stovers’ long driveway, edged with manicured cedars and a single thick, dark green hedge was the perfect entrance to this grand house. It was also the perfect place to hide a small bomb amidst the greenery. Denver PD had searched every inch of that property, but somehow a crude, homemade bomb with one-third