True story, dude.
I used to work with a guy named Dave. Dave was a little weird. He was very religious and very active in his church. He did not like black people and was very homophobic. He also smelled bad in the summer. I was his immediate supervisor, and twice I sent him home because no one could come near him without feeling nauseous. It was some kind of metabolic problem which happened only in the summer. The shop was not air conditioned, so by about 10 am, Dave would be soaked in sweat that smelled like a meat freezer that had broken down and no one noticed for a week. Other than that, he was easy to get along with and never caused any trouble for me, except for the smell thing.
This is just back story, and actually nothing to do with the story.
Fast Forward:
I moved on to bigger and better things and lost touch with Dave. He was still at the dealership where we worked together. One day, I see a small item in the police report, in the daily paper. Dave has been arrested for soliciting sex from a city policeman. The incident occurred at a public park men's room. The police officer was in plain clothes. (There is a side story about the fact it was no longer illegal to talk to another man about sex in a public place, but that's another story)
Dave's story was simple. He was at the park on a Saturday afternoon, playing with his radio controlled model truck. He needed to take break and when he entered the men's room, the officer handcuffed him and called a patrol car to carry him away. Everybody in our small circle were mystified. We all knew a few men who actually do solicit sex in public toilets, but never suspected Dave would be one of them. If he was, the idea of him approaching a black man made the whole thing even more bizarre. Dave maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal. The district attorney keeps up on current events, so he knew the Louisiana statute that makes this sort of thing illegal, had been struck down by the Supreme Court and was no longer enforceable. The legislature had never taken the time to revise the law, so it remained on the books. After Dave had been booked and got his name in the paper, the case was dropped.
A few months later, the police officer in question was in the paper again. A prostitute claimed he had raped her. A prostitute has to maintain good relations with her local cops, if she wants to stay in business, so she will get to know quite a few of them. In this case, the prostitute went to an officer she trusted and told him the story. These things can get complicated. The friendly officer may have been outraged by the tale, or was worried he was being set up for not reporting a crime. We'll never know, but he reported the rape to his supervisor. All patrol cars had recently been upgraded to carry GPS recording devices. It was a simple matter to review the record and see the accuse officer's car was outside his patrol area, parked at the vacant house, where the prostitute claimed he had taken her and raped her.
Once the rape charge was made public, it all caved in. Several other prostitutes and other women came forward and told similar stories.
In the end, all of his soliciting arrests were found to be bogus. Whenever his supervisor gave him grieve for goofing off, he would go to the park and arrest someone who appeared to be alone. He's in the jailhouse now, but Dave's story was lost in the mix.
