The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [112]
“The military doesn’t care which,” Meyers said.
Heal asked how much the device cost.
“I don’t really have an answer,” Meyers said. “Five thousand for the military one.”
Heal told Meyers that he’d like to see the SWAT team test the laser; he thought three to six months would be a sensible period for a trial. “If they like it, they’ll fight for it,” Heal said.
Then Meyers measured off seventy feet, and we took turns shining the laser at each other. “I’ve been shot with these many times, so I don’t mind,” Heal said. When it was shined at me, I couldn’t see for several minutes to take notes, and Heal said that this was called the afterburn.
IN JANUARY, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Department on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers, including one to teach crowd-and riot-control tactics in China—three days in Canton and three days in Beijing. He has no idea how he came to the attention of the Chinese government. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System—the pain ray. There were also offers to work with a lab that is building a light-emitting diode incapacitator, and another that is working on a means of stopping a car by interfering with its onboard computer.
Heal’s first plan was to ride his bicycle across the Mojave and then through the Great Plains, and eventually to Michigan, stopping at every historical site and library he passed. (He left at the end of April.) “I want to continue with my ‘calling’ and build better non-lethal options and work with developers and law-enforcement agencies,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “But for right now I just want to put my life back in order.” So far, he has agreed only to take part in a study in Washington that focusses on what parallels might exist between law enforcement’s treatment of gangs and the military’s handling of tribes and clans.
Early in April, at a retirement luncheon attended by more than two hundred people, including colleagues from the Sheriff’s Department and the Marines, Heal was given the Distinguished Service Award, one of the department’s highest honors. He also received proclamations from the California Senate and the Assembly, and the five badges he had worn throughout his career. Heal’s place will be taken by the man he worked with the most, Sergeant Brian Muller, who kept a notebook in which he wrote down remarks Heal made.
I ASKED HEAL if he had ever read a letter describing an invention and dropped it in the wastebasket. He shook his head. “I’ll listen to everything.” Then he said that one of the products he likes best was initially among the least plausible. It is a speaker that broadcasts sound by means of magnets, and he took me to Costa Mesa to see it. “This guy called me and made these fantastic, wild, incredible claims,” he said as we drove. “I talked to him, but the things he was claiming were impossible. There is a law in physics called the inverse square law, which says that as the distance is doubled the sound is quartered, and yet this guy was saying that with his invention we can hear sound with clarity at ranges that we’ve never seen before, at factors more powerful.”
The product, he said, was called MAD, for magnetic audio device. “A guy named Vahan Simidian’s the owner, and his chief technical officer’s a guy named Dragoslav Colich. Everybody else was making bigger speakers, adding more power, adding longer wave guides, which is the bullhorn part of the speaker; it’s like a barrel. Anyway, instead of using a speaker this guy’s using magnets, and instead of using an acoustical wave he’s using something called a planar wave. I’ll let them tell you what it is.”
Craning his neck to read a number on a wall, Heal said, “This is it,” and pulled into a parking lot outside a low cement building. “When he demonstrated the system, I went a hundred yards down the road, and he’s playing a Queen