Part 3: ‘Oh Dover? Nothing Ever Happens There’

This is the third article in a three-part series on the over 40 year career of Dover Police Detective Sergeant Jeffrey Farrell, told mostly in his own words.

Seeing is Believing

For every person that says nothing ever happens in Dover, Farrell has a story to prove them wrong.

"One of the things that has always irked me about this job, when people find out what I do, that their response is almost universal, ‘Oh Dover? Wow, that must be great! Nothing ever happens there.’ and nothing could be further from the truth.

People don’t know, people who live in town don’t know, no one knows really what it is that we do.

For example, we just put a guy in jail for child rape for 12 years.

We’ve had five rape investigations in the last two years, two of them culminating in prosecutions.

Fraud cases have exploded; we get new fraud cases in almost every single day.

We still have a fair amount of drug cases. We spend altogether too much time at the schools doing this kind of stuff.

But it’s a busy police department, we do an awful lot of not simply law enforcement but we do an awful lot of social work, family intervention, and it’s ongoing and it’s every day.

I say ‘Look, I do the same things every other detective does.’ I just don’t do them as often. But I’ve handled just about every kind of case that you can imagine, with the exception of murder. There has been one murder in the time that I’ve been on the job but I wasn’t involved in that.

We’ve done arsons, we’ve done armed robberies, we’ve done all kinds of assault, sexual assaults, all kinds of property crimes, larceny, B&E, everything. It runs the gamut, drugs, all kinds of drugs. So the same things that happen in other communities happen here.

There is a perception out there though both within the town and outside as well that this is an idyllic community where nothing ever happens and it’s perfectly safe.

One of the downsides to that is that I believe over the years, it’s been my experience, that a lot of parents believe that and they think therefore they don’t need to be as vigilant with their kids as they actually need to be and that’s simply not the case."

Sin City and Back

Farrell recently got back from Las Vegas. But unlike most people who come back with souvenirs and empty pockets Farrell came back with exactly what he'd gone there to get.

"It was a fraud case that I’ve been working on since about 2010.

We finally got a guy indicted out there who was in the Nevada National Guard, he’s now been dishonorably discharged, apparently.

So we got a warrant for him, went out and got him and brought him back and he’s now over at the jail on [Route 128] pending trial.

Our victim is out $27,000 but it’s a $10 million [fraud case] that originated in Romania. It was all set up and run from Romania.

They would tell you to wire the money and they’d tell you how to wire the money and where and all that kind of stuff.

There was two of them, an American and a Romanian, in this country, who just trolled for kids and guys and people who were desperate enough or greedy enough that they would provide bank account information…and then they would wire the money into their accounts, have the person go into the bank, withdraw the money, give it to them, that person would get a cut of it.

The guy that sets this all up gets a cut and then the rest of it goes to Romania, the lion’s share.

I got bank pictures of this guy withdrawing the money from Chase Bank, emailed the pictures out to his brigade commander out in the Nevada National Guard who turns out to be a Reno Detective in the sexual assault unit.

We got him IDed by his company commander and by a platoon sergeant and then it was just a matter of getting the indictment through a grand jury and then the DA’s Office authorized a rendition.

So we went out and we picked him up from the Clark County Correctional Facility and brought him back.

It’s always nice to put an end to something like that.

So the two guys, the guy that recruited him and his boss are both in federal custody and one of them has already plead guilty in New York and is pending sentencing and the other one is probably going to go to trial but he’s facing like 10 years.”

The man is currently being held in the Norfolk County House of Correction in Dedham. He is due back in Superior Court March 7, 2012.

Follow All Leads

“Another notable case that we had was we had a home invasion a number of years ago. We got a call one Sunday afternoon and the caller just said ‘Look, I’m a federal law enforcement agent, I’m not going to tell you who I work for and I’m not going to tell you who I am. At 2 o’clock in the morning, you’re going to have a home invasion at this address and they’re going to take the people hostage.’

So you don’t know whether this is a hoax, you don’t know whether to believe this or whatever, but you can’t ignore it either.

So we set up that night and at 2 o’clock in the morning, right on the button, next door to the house that was the target - a woman laying in bed, a flashlight beam goes across her bedroom ceiling and she calls the police to tell us that. She was awake.

So then I thought, ‘[Expletive,] this is going to happen!’ and it did.

We had two guys in the house and they spotted one of them and they ran and the chase was on and it went for three or four hours.

But we rounded up both of them, we got them both. And one of them particularly was a real bad guy, a real bad guy.

There’s a pond in town here that I think still has a gun in it. We were never able to recover it."

Satisfaction Guaranteed

“I’ve been relatively lucky. I mean, I’ve been punched, I’ve been kicked, I’ve been spit on. That kind of stuff, but nobody has ever drawn a gun on me. I have drawn mine a couple of times.

Since [I started] I’ve had more losses than wins but I’ve saved to two people with CPR, I prosecuted some domestic violence cases and did it in such a way that I’ve had one woman who hugged me in court and say I saved her marriage.

But if you’re going to be a policeman you need to derive your satisfaction from those intrinsic kinds of things.

Because you’re never going to get rich as a small town cop that’s for sure and you’re going to have to work lots and lots of hours and you have to really, really like it, and I do.”

Has Sergeant Farrell affected your life in a positive way? Has he ever helped you or someone you know in anyway? Let us know in the comments section or email the editor at benjamin.paulin@patch.com.