Behind the Badge 

On Jan. 11, 2011, two senior investigators from the Salt Lake County District Attorney knocked on the door of a house in Draper. They had been assigned by District Attorney Sim Gill to arrest Cottonwood Heights patrol officer Beau Babka.

Babka had no idea he was facing arrest until minutes before the investigators arrived at his door. Babka paced the living room in tears, “full of emotional energy,” recalls then-senior D.A. investigator Craig Watson, who had worked a case and taught classes with Babka.

Watson drove Babka to the Salt Lake County lockup—the jail Babka had been in charge of as county under-sheriff just a few years before—where he was booked on two counts of misusing public money. Babka, left all but bankrupt by a failed campaign for Salt Lake County sheriff, had been caught on videotape buying gas for family cars with a credit card belonging to the Cottonwood Heights Police Department.

Less than an hour after his prints and his photograph were taken, Babka walked down the ramp from the jail to be met by reporters who’d been tipped off about his arrest. In his years as a police public-information officer, a congressional candidate, and a candidate for county sheriff, Babka had cultivated relationships with dozens of reporters. But when one reporter asked how he felt about betraying the public trust he’d held for so long, he was silent.

“That was the lowest point, ever,” Babka says now. “Ever.”

On May 12, 2011, Richard Aldrich Babka—Beau is a nickname—took a plea in abeyance on two counts of misuse of public money, which were amended to class A misdemeanors.

“Beau was an Adonis, a beautiful officer,” says attorney Greg Skordas, who represented Babka on the charges of misusing public funds. Skordas saw Babka’s fall from grace as a tragedy. “He was a cop’s cop, and very revered, which was why it broke so many hearts.” Babka’s high-profile image, Skordas says, in effect sealed his fate. “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

It’s been three years now since the gas-theft scandal immolated Babka’s career, and in that time, his jobs have become only more menial. In fall 2013, he started work driving delivery trucks for Nabisco during the day and working the graveyard shift at Walmart filling dairy shelves.

One late night, Babka was stacking milk cartons when he heard giggling behind him. Two well dressed couples were staring at him. “Look,” one of the young men said, “it’s the great Beau Babka, shoveling frozen food.”

CHANGE THE WORLD
After he joined South Salt Lake Police Department in 1992, Babka’s role in the law-enforcement ranks swiftly grew, including a brief reign as the department’s chief of police.

While it was “a small kingdom,” says investigator Watson, “nevertheless, he was the king.” In 2006, Babka’s power was such that Winder and Gill­—then a Salt Lake City prosecutor—sought his political endorsement, for county sheriff and district attorney, respectively.

But Babka’s career also saw three failed election races, a disappointing 18 months as the under-sheriff to Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder, and an eventual public crash & burn in the aftermath of his run for sheriff against Winder.

For someone so focused on advancement, former colleagues and friends say, Babka’s ambition outstripped his resources and experience, both as a leader and as a political player in the precarious, power-heavy world of policing.

Babka finds such criticisms irksome. He says that when people asked him why he wanted to run against then-longtime incumbent county sheriff Aaron Kennard in 2002, his response, basically, was, why not?

“What am I going to wait for?” he asks. “Should I wait until I’m 50 to change things?”

But Babka soon discovered that the complicated power structure of the Salt Lake Valley’s law enforcement was made of stronger stuff than even the force of his personality and never-say-die outlook.

Babka says he was simply a pawn in a much-larger struggle between Winder and Cottonwood Heights Chief of Police Robby Russo that was rooted in what Winder now calls “the still-fresh wounds” of Cottonwood Heights forming its own police department in 2008.

Babka says he’s a risk taker, “that’s the competitor in me. I knew the consequences of going with Winder and Russo. I believed in both men. I just didn’t have the power base to survive.”

Former South Salt Lake Police Chief Bob Gray, who also served as mayor of the city, says that the battle between Salt Lake County and its cities over who gets to run law enforcement in the valley has been raging for 50 years. The turf war resurfaced in the public’s view in early February, when a Sandy resident having a heart attack died after his 911 call went adrift in the valley’s multiple emergency-call systems.

There have been several unsuccessful pushes for voters to support turning the valley into a metro department “where the sheriff would be king,” Gray says. But most cities preferred having local control over law enforcement.

“It all depends on the window you look out of,” says Russo, who worked for 25 years at the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office before landing the top spot in the newly minted Cottonwood Heights Police Department in 2008.

Russo hired Babka in August 2008 after the latter was fired by Winder from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office after it came out that Babka had secretly put his name forward for a sheriff’s position in California.

Russo, according to Babka, held a longstanding grudge against Babka; Babka says Russo hired him in the spirit of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” so that Babka could run against Winder for county sheriff in 2010.

Russo denies knowledge of any animosity between him and Babka and says his job offer was a gesture of goodwill to a fellow officer who was qualified to teach Drug Abuse Resistance Education, something his department needed.

Several former Cottonwood Heights officers City Weekly interviewed see it differently. According to one officer, Babka was “appointed to a position that didn’t exist so he could run against Winder. When he lost the election, he was put under the microscope” in order to get rid of him.

And in the days after Winder was re-elected, Babka dutifully provided the opportunity. In a fit of spite over what Babka saw as Cottonwood Heights’ failure to keep its word to support his campaign, he stole gas through his work credit card.

Faced with the possibility of prison if he lost at trial, Babka took a plea deal, leaving questions surrounding his professional demise unanswered.

He’s struggled to find traction in the wake of his disgrace. Now employed by a door manufacturer and residing in a borrowed trailer by an irrigation ditch in Draper, Babka says he lives very much day to day.

“I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives,” Babka says. But while he feels the forces aligned against him were too powerful, he says he does spot a recurring factor in his downfall. “The reason why I got the rug pulled out from under me—and this is what needed to happen—was I had to realize who the real Beau was,” he says. “I lost myself, I lost Beau, through all those years of politics, law enforcement, teaching and family—and it was my own fault.”

“GOLDEN BOY”
Babka grew up in Manhattan Beach, Calif. His athlete father, Rink Babka, was a silver medalist in the 1960 Rome Olympics, his mother “a cute little blonde lady” and airline stewardess who grew up in a Mormon family in Salt Lake City before moving to California.

When his parents entered a lengthy, painful divorce, teenage Beau Babka lived through periods of homelessness, sleeping on sofas in coaches’ houses or on the street. The now 51-year-old father of six says the scars from that time still linger.

Babka’s physical prowess—at one point, he says, he could bench-press double his body weight—led him at age 21 to a year with the Seattle Seahawks pro football team. He met his future wife, Kimberley, in Southern California and converted to her Mormon faith shortly after they moved to Orem, Utah, to be close to her family. Babka entered the police academy when he was 25, and after his graduation, joined South Salt Lake Police Department as a rookie officer in February 1992.

As he drives around one night in a truck, revisiting his South Salt Lake stomping grounds, Babka recalls the meth labs they would routinely bust, the gang- dominated trailer parks, the constant influx of parolees seeking cheap accommodation, and the escort and john stings he and others would conduct on State Street. Many of those stings, he says, would end up with an LDS Church member pulling out his temple recommend rather than his driver’s license.

South Salt Lake, he says, was like the Wild West. He didn’t relish his 18 months on patrol because, he says, it involved “significant life and death experiences,” the details of which he declines to reveal. He preferred administration, public-information duties and the relatively new discipline of community policing to the adrenaline-fueled street work.

“Beau was so good at working with the public and the community,” says former South Salt Lake Chief Gray, who was Babka’s lieutenant and mentored the young officer. Babka ran a highly successful community-policing initiative at South Salt Lake under Gray while also teaching criminal justice at Salt Lake Community College.

It normally takes an officer six or seven years to make sergeant, Gray says. Babka did it in two. Such was his burgeoning reputation, Babka says, that he was approached by four senior Salt Lake County Sheriff officials and a county politician with an offer of a senior desk job and a high salary—sweetened by the promise of a bribe—if he could get South Salt Lake to move its police work to the county. Babka preferred to stay with the city and turned them down.

His rapid rise through the ranks earned him the pejorative label of “golden boy” among his peers, and his political strivings often led him to step on the toes of senior officers.

“As Beau went up the ranks, he had a tendency to burn a lot of bridges behind him,” Gray recalls. “He created enemies, I’d say, because of his ambitions.”

STAND BY ME
As fast as Babka went up the ranks, his political ambition restlessly sought new challenges. In 2002, he ran against Salt Lake County Sheriff Aaron Kennard.

Gray wasn’t convinced it was a good move. “I didn’t feel he was ready for that kind of position,” he says. “I know ambition is good, I like it in people, but you have to control it.”

Babka says his strong showing of 47 percent of the vote, led several Salt Lake County Democratic council members to ask him to run against incumbent Chris Cannon for the 3rd Congressional District seat in 2004. Second time out, despite facing Cannon’s deep pocket, Babka gained a still-credible 33 percent of the vote.

In 2005, Bob Gray successfully ran for mayor of South Salt Lake, inheriting a bitterly divided police department. Gray told Babka that if he made him chief, he had to stay the course and pull the department together. Babka agreed.

At first, Gray says, “it was working really well.” Babka says he inherited a department that was “running amok,” with two officers under investigation for raping arrestees. He was also investigating an officer at another agency for stealing gift cards.

Babka’s political clout as chief drew attention from then-Salt Lake City prosecutor Sim Gill and Sgt. Jim Winder of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office. Babka says Winder visited his office multiple times during Winder’s 2006 run for sheriff seeking help with his campaign.

Gill says he warned Winder that Babka had gone back on his promise to endorse Gill in the 2006 district-attorney race and told Winder not to trust Babka. (Babka says he never promised to endorse Gill.) But around Thanksgiving in 2006, the newly elected Winder asked Babka to be his under-sheriff. Winder sought a commitment from Babka of sticking with him for two terms. “He gave me his promise.”

Babka was excited, he says, to “help my friend Jim” with his new responsibilities. While Babka says Gray encouraged him to live his dream, the former mayor expresses disappointment. “I felt like he had kind of not supported me. He wasn’t being fair to me. I put him in that position. I expected things from him.”

CHARMED LIFE
As under-sheriff, Babka was over administrative services, the police fleet, communications and human resources, and took responsibility when Winder was gone.

But, Babka says, he felt isolated from the first months; Winder, he says, favored then-legislator Jackie Biskupski, whom the sheriff had appointed in an administrative position, as his titular second-in-command. Babka says his media profile, including a weekly radio show called Ask Beau, was viewed as competition to Winder’s image-building.

Winder, however, says he quickly learned that Babka preferred to delegate and viewed his position as largely ceremonial. Winder says that, for example, when he asked Babka to oversee a presentation involving a new 911 system, Winder ended up having to take it over one week before it was due.

“I recognized Beau Babka did not know how to administer an organization of our size and had essentially risen through the ranks thanks to his significant personal charms,” he says.

After a year and a half as under-sheriff, Babka was approached by a friend about running for sheriff in Orange County, Calif.

He decided to keep his application a secret, but when he made it to the final eight, a press release announced him as one of the finalists in the running for the job.

Babka says he thought Winder would be proud of him, but he’d more than misjudged the sheriff’s reaction to the news.

“I’ll never forget his face,” Babka says. “It was a ‘I want to physically kill you’ face.”

Winder told him, Babka says, “You’re done.”

Babka’s televised interview for the Orange County sheriff position did not go well. Babka’s statement that “this department needs a father, a leader that’s going to give it integrity,” earned him derision from an Orange County Register reporter who wrote that Babka “came off as a law-enforcement version of Forrest Gump.”

In the face of imminent unemployment, with six children to feed, Babka says, he panicked. Where would he find work as a police chief?

Babka’s salvation came from an unexpected quarter, a man he had once regarded as a nemesis: Robby Russo.

BUTTING HEADS
In the mid-1990s, when Babka was a patrol sergeant running South Salt Lake’s graveyard shift, he found himself butting up against Robby Russo, a similarly up-and-coming young officer who worked in the county’s narcotics units.

Russo and his team gained a reputation while working in county narcotics units for getting low-level dealers to rat out larger players, resulting, Russo says, in seizures of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in drug money, the bulk of which went into the county’s coffers due to the forfeiture laws in place at that time.

Tempers flared with Russo, Babka says, when South Salt Lake annexed the area between 3300 South and 3900 South from the county in the mid-’90s. The annexed neighborhood boasted an unusually high rate of violent felony crimes that kept the county sheriff’s department occupied; it was Russo’s “fun zone,” Babka says.

Russo says the Sheriff’s Association and the Fraternal Order of Police were concerned “about how petitions [for annexation] were gathered/signed; we did ask the Salt Lake County Clerk’s office to review the petitions. I don’t recall ever having any personal contact with Mr. Babka on this issue.”

Further city vs. county (and Babka vs. Russo) controversy emerged in 1998, when in a letter, former South Salt Lake Chief Drew Long complained that Russo and several of his men had pointed red-light scopes at South Salt Lake officers eating at an Arby’s on State Street.

Babka says that after he caught wind of it, he went directly to Russo’s boss to complain.

“I have never pointed a laser device at any police officer,” Russo wrote in an e-mail to City Weekly. “I was the sergeant supervising the detective responsible for using the laser pointer, and he was disciplined.”

But, Babka says, “tensions between the county sheriff’s office and local law enforcement were never far away. There’s always this philosophy the county could do it better, that we were doing things the wrong way.”

And years later, after the highly contested formation of the Cottonwood Heights Police Department in 2008, Russo’s role in the city vs. county struggle had reversed, with little love lost between Russo and Winder. And when Russo offered Babka a job and Babka accepted, Winder says, he was not surprised by what he understood to be a fairly straightforward revenge plot on the part of both men.

“He was being paid by the citizens of Cottonwood Heights to run for sheriff,” Winder says. “Why wouldn’t he go over there? He was pissed off at me, he wanted to be sheriff.”

BURYING THE HATCHET
For Russo, the job offer to Babka was essentially altruistic. “Did we hire him to run against Winder? No,” he says. “It was a nice thing to do. It was an opportunity for me to show there are good guys out here. If there was a longstanding animosity as he proffers, why would I offer him a safe place to land?”

Rather than planning a run against Winder, Babka says, he’d simply bought into Russo’s pitch of helping the new department grow. Along with teaching DARE to middle schools, he would handle the department’s public relations, on a $60,000 salary, half of what he’d earned at the county.

“I thought—unfortunately I’m the eternal optimist—that they were sincere about using my talents to help them with their new department,” Babka says. He “bought in,” he says, to the idea that “we can do this better than the county.”

Babka says that though he was warned that Russo had a long memory when it came to perceived slights, he was treated well, almost like chief-of-police-in-waiting, the assumption being he would apply for a chief’s position when one became vacant.

“I was under the impression we’d buried the hatchet,” he says.

DRAWING A LINE
While Russo’s police history lay in narcotics, once his police department was open for business in the sleepy bedroom community of Cottonwood Heights, DUIs became a primary focus, largely because, Babka says, that was one of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office’s worst statistics when it had served Cottonwood Heights.

So, Babka says, CHPD used tactics “that were like shooting fish in a barrel” to make “no crime into crime.”

And the DUI-related productivity justified the CHPD’s existence through the revenue generated by the steady flow of citations into the justice courts. “Local government at its best, or its worst?” Babka says. “I don’t know.”

Russo says his commitment to DUI enforcement stems from having had to notify a family that their daughter had been killed in a DUI when he was a young officer. He makes no apologies for being “absolute death on DUIs,” and while it does generate more revenue than citations, he notes that the state “takes the lion’s share.”

A year into Babka’s employment with CHPD, Babka, Russo, Cottonwood Heights Mayor Kelvyn Cullimore and former city manager Leanne Stillman met for lunch at the Market Street Grill in Cottonwood Heights. Babka says they encouraged him to run against Winder and told him that they would help any way they could.

Russo recalls the lunch differently. “Mr. Babka was offered our endorsement for his candidacy. The purpose of that meeting was to draw a bright line cautioning Babka about not using any city resources, including the police vehicle to attend political functions. He was warned not to campaign on duty and told he would be accountable for his work hours unless he took a leave of absence.”

Babka says he wasn’t warned of any such issues, but that he “knew that and did it appropriately.” He announced his candidacy on Jan. 30, 2010, in his CHPD uniform, telling a small crowd that he viewed the sheriff’s office as “a higher calling” and one that had to be treated with “reverence.”

During the Days of ’47 Parade, he walked in front of the Cottonwood Heights float, “waving, campaigning at its best. Winder was up in his car, way ahead of me.”

RUNNING OUT OF GAS
But tensions grew between Babka and Russo, Babka says, over what Russo saw as Babka’s failure to campaign aggressively. Babka says that Russo complained that “I wasn’t negative enough, going for Winder’s jugular.”

That wasn’t his approach, he says. “I was going to win on merit. And I didn’t.”

Russo recalls asking Babka why he wasn’t putting out mailers and running TV ads. Babka told him, Russo says, that he didn’t need to; he felt that his name recognition was enough and told Russo, simply, “I’m Beau Babka.”

But come election day, Babka lost for the third time. “I had delegates, I had the party, I had 3,000 Facebook friends, I had popularity, but that’s not what gets you elected. I didn’t have voters.”

A few days after the election, Babka says, his wife called him, distraught. They were late on three house payments. Campaign expenses had drained their bank accounts.

Babka says he’d spent thousands on gas on the campaign, so spending $20 here, $20 there, using his police credit card, would work out. “I was pissed, that was the mindset.”

According to the information filed by the District Attorney’s Office, Russo’s assistant chief had audited the fleet fuel bill and found two days in mid-December that Babka had purchased gas totaling $48.17 for two family vehicles “using his city-issued Chevron card and unique PIN.”

PERFECT OPPORTUNITY
Jan. 3, 2011, the day that Sim Gill was sworn in as the new District Attorney, Babka says, Russo called him into his office and told him he’d known about Babka’s gas thefts for a while.

“As smart as you are, you really make stupid decisions,” Babka says Russo told him before placing him on administrative leave. Babka says he pleaded with Russo for an opportunity to pay the money back.

Russo, he says, was smiling. “I hadn’t seen him smile like that for a long time,” Babka says. Russo asked Babka to hand over his gun, and he was driven home.

Babka was convinced it would be handled internally, that he could explain himself to the CHPD staff investigating the issue—or to an independent police agency brought in to handle the matter—and suffer, at worst, dismissal.

But the days rolled by and he heard nothing.

“These [events] were both professionally and emotionally, very difficult for me,” says Russo. “The internal investigation was conducted by our staff, but never concluded, as Mr. Babka immediately resigned.”

But Babka says he didn’t resign until several days after he was arrested, and that no one asked for his side of the story. Russo, he says, referred the case to the DA’s Office, “but they just screened it. Russo already had his mind made up.

“I don’t want to diminish what happened, but I really believe they found, they created an opportunity to get rid of someone who had so much value prior,” Babka says. “I guess the totality of the circumstances was not bought into play.”

While Babka awaited his fate, he walked, ran, hiked—anything to take his mind off of the sword above his head.

Several months after his plea deal, the 12-person board at Peace Officers Training and Standards removed his police certification for four years.

Those weeks were tough on the Babka family, eldest son Duke says. “I’d be driving home at night curious if I’d come back to my father dead or alive. He was at such a low, so broken.”

“THIS IS HOME”
The first 18 months after his plea deal, Babka sold scooters. After that job ended, he spent six months waiting for a six-figure security consultant position that never materialized.

Through connections at his local wardhouse, Babka got the jobs at Nabisco and Walmart. He also made pizzas and washed dishes at The Canyon Inn, whose owner, Jim Stojack, has said many times that CHPD has a vendetta against his establishment and targets his customers for DUIs. Russo has repeatedly rejected Stojack’s assertion.

In November 2013, Babka’s divorce became final. He found work at a friend’s manufacturing business, the owner also lending him a truck to drive. Another friend provided Babka with a small trailer to sleep in.

“This is home,” he says, as he opens the door to the trailer, parked across from an irrigation canal where he runs in the early morning. The trailer has two small seats, a gas stove and a raised platform for a bed, but has no running water. “I try not to stay here a lot,” preferring to sleep in the truck, he says.

In the years since Babka lost his career, the inter-agency strife and politicking between the county and the cities has continued unabated. During an attempt to incorporate Millcreek as a city a couple of years ago, there was much behind-the-scenes discussion of whether CHPD intended to provide the township with police services.

In early 2014, rumors swirled that Russo planned to run against Winder—March 15 is the deadline for candidates to file for the 2014 county sheriff election. Cottonwood Heights Mayor Cullimore says that’s not going to happen. An internal candidate has emerged for the sheriff’s position in the form of Lt. Jake Petersen of Unified Police Department.

Such developments are little more than white noise for Babka. His sights are set elsewhere. He’s training to compete in the summer Huntsman World Senior Games in St. George, focusing on field events such as the discus. Whereas once he ran for office as a way to compete, now his ambitions are more athletic. “I compete with myself now.”

While his political campaigns, he says, were the best experiences of his life, after three unsuccessful races, “Dude, somebody’s telling me something.” He’s silent for a moment. “I wanted to change the world,” he says. “And I know I can’t.”