‘The system is broken’

Abigail Goldman, Las Vegas Sun

Sunday, May 14, 2006 | 7:13 a.m.

During his 28 years with Metro Police, Sheriff Bill Young has seen staggering changes in the Las Vegas Valley. In an interview Wednesday with Sun editors and reporters, he talked candidly about the evolution of the Strip and adult entertainment, and problems that have accompanied it.

"I've seen the Strip change drastically. Drastically."

"The nightclub industry - when I was a little younger and on Metro, there were probably three or four or five around town. ... They were closed by three in the morning. Now there are 30 or 40 of them. Every hotel has one or two, and they don't even open their doors until 11 (p.m.). They party all night. The drugs, the prostitution in and around that whole scenario out on the Strip - I'm a little concerned about the direction they're going out there in some ways."

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Bill Young starts to recount the moment as if by rote. He re-creates it matter-of-factly at first, but then his voice rises, slightly, and he sits up in the chair. The three-year-old scene is branded in his memory, the day he suddenly but fully understood that being Clark County sheriff was 24/7/365 - for four years in a row.

Young is vacationing on a small island in the Bahamas and his cell phone doesn't work. He shakes the sand from his shoes and thumbs a golf-cart ride to the island's only pay phone. He wipes the sun block off his credit card and onto his swim trunks, swats at mosquitoes and privately curses a pay phone that only intermittently works.

He is trying to talk to Deputy Chief Doug Gillespie about Young's first major crisis as sheriff, unfolding 2,500 miles away. A videotape had been found in some terrorist's apartment in Detroit, and on it were images of Las Vegas. As the story - later debunked - unfolded, terrorists were plotting something on the Strip.

Call it the education of Bill Young: More than ever in this day and age, no man is an island. And no sheriff should try to vacation on one.

On Wednesday, sitting in a conference room with Sun journalists over bottles of Fiji-brand water, Young is relaxed. The sheriff is resigned - and resigning.

He has accepted that he can't take vacations, accepted insomnia worrying about a city that doesn't sleep, accepted waging war for more cops and less rap music, and accepted raising a "bastard child" police department from tight-pursed parents at City Hall and the County Commission.

He has accepted playing politician. But Bill Young, a cop's cop, couldn't accept running for re-election.

It's not that he hates the job. He just hates the thought of winning it back. "The sad thing about my job is the system is broken," Young says. "I've got to go out and throw myself, grovel for money, go out and shake every hand in town and every political exec and beg people to re-elect me for this job.

"Some people relish it, some people like it, some people are naturally born at it. I'm not. I think I'm a cop, not a politician."

The sheriff, however, wears his badge behind a business suit. Young ran three campaigns in four years: his first race, a hard-won battle to hire more cops, then his now-abandoned re-election bid. Amid campaign politics, Young bounced between homeland security fiascoes, fights over antiterrorism funds and federal apologies when Las Vegas was knocked from the list of top terrorism targets. All this, set to a soundtrack with the fine whine of police politics-as-usual - the complications of county growth on crime, union salary disputes, demands for more buildings, more space, more money.

"Grinding away, grinding away, raising the money, politicians, shaking hands" is just part of the job for any sheriff who wants to leave a legacy of law enforcement, he says.

It was the intersection of campaign costs and civil salaries, however, where Young says that the good cop started to feel like a bad politician:

"Every rich guy in town wants to take you to dinner and cigars, and that leads them to wanting to line your pockets full of campaign contributions. And that's on the good side because I had all that happen to me."

Then there were "sleazeballs like Mike Galardi that want to set you up with every woman that's working for them."

To win in 2002, Young put up thousands of his own dollars and was rewarded with a $51,000 pay cut - from $135,000 as a deputy chief to $84,000 as sheriff (since increased to $134,263). To win a second term, he had raised $1.2 million - his current salary nine times over.

"It upsets me and bothers me that I have to go raise over a million dollars to hold onto my job that I've been doing for four years," Young says. "If that doesn't bother you, you're going to be getting new sheriffs more often than you think."

The outgoing sheriff has an observation and a request: "The system is broken. Fix it is all I'm saying."

Campaign posters hawking the current set of sheriff candidates started popping up last September, 10 months before the primary. Pressure to get out of the gate early pits short-sighted candidates against their highest hopes, Young says, and contenders who can't stretch their salaries across the election are surrounded by a school of remora eager to sink their teeth into them.

Evidence of the poison of local politics, Young says, comes from the recent convictions of former County Commissioners Dario Herrera and Lance Malone.

"The system sets them up for failure. You pay them peanuts, they've got to raise half a million or a million dollars to get the job to begin with and then they're making decisions on zoning and licensing that can effectively realize tens of millions of dollars for developers.

"You're going to continue to have trials like this Galardi thing, and you're going to continue losing people like me who say, hey, I've had a bellyful of this already, 'cause I shouldn't have to go out and grovel for a million bucks to keep my job. But it's the system, and don't take it as complaining. I just wouldn't want to do it again."

Young spent a year in his first campaign, a race he entered after a roundtable of high-ranking officers flattered him into running.

"I had a little circle, a little network of friends that I knew could help propel me into that race quite easily, and other people knew that about me. Plus I have the gift of gab. I don't always show it, but I could hold my own if I want. I like to talk, and I guess the folks that I work with thought I would do a good job," he says. "That's what got me in the race. It was just that quick."

Young found the election trail a slow-bleed "year of hell," set against a backdrop of then-Sheriff Jerry Keller's last months in office.

Young recalls watching Keller during that time:

"The day he said he wasn't going to be sheriff anymore, he was a lame duck. Nobody paid attention to him at Metro, nobody paid much attention to him in the community, and he suffered and was miserable. I watched him come to work and trudge to work every day, saw all the consternation in the department. I had a tough race with a lot of people, and it was brutal on him."

Even lacking a political background, Young says he nevertheless knew that Keller had committed a political gaffe by announcing too far in advance he wouldn't seek re-election.

Young's first inclination to call it quits after one term came in August, when he lost both mother and uncle in a car accident on Interstate 80 west of Elko. It solidified, he says, sometime during an emotional 12 days that fell between the killing of Metro Officer Henry Prendes and the sheriff's 50th birthday, Feb. 13.

Still, Young says, "I can't honestly say I've had a bad four years. It's been a difficult and tough four years, and I've had a few things happen that were unexpected."

Then again, Young never expected to become sheriff.

"Even people that know me slightly know this has never really been my forte - politics. I consider myself a career police officer, not a career politician, and it was just something that I did because it just happened to be there at the time," he says.

So on Tuesday, the man who calls himself a reluctant politician, just a simple guy, made a veteran political maneuver, bowing out of a sheriff's race he really had quit months earlier. He delayed giving notice until three days before the filing deadline, knowing the longer he waited, the less time he'd spend as lame duck.

"I manipulated the system a little bit," Young admits. "And I don't care."

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