‘Old-school’ Engele retires
When Jerome Engele first started busting down crack house doors, he carried a pistol and a billy club. In those days, he didn’t use them very much.
“You used these,” he recalls, holding up his fists. “And your mouth.”
Policing has changed since then.
After 35 years of busting drug dealers and biker gangs, Engele is handing in his shield. The world he is leaving bears little resemblance to the one he started policing in the summer of 1980.
“If I got in a fight on the street, no one would pull a knife on me. It was a good old fight, a knock ’em down, sock ’em fight,” he says, sitting in the fourth floor office at Saskatoon police headquarters, where he oversees large-scale drug busts and other organized crime investigations.
Engele is the definition of an old-school police officer. He hates computers, preferring instead the days of hand-written statements. Although he has been in charge of large-scale surveillance and wire tap operations, he seems to long for a simpler time in policing.
He fondly remembers the days when a tentative but mutual respect existed between criminals and the people who pursued them.
“In the old days, it was ‘I do the crime, I do the time,’ It’s altogether different (today),” he says.
The former NHL defenceman, who played two seasons with the Minnesota North Stars, is a large, commanding presence. At nearly 65 year old, with his grey hair and moustache, he still looks formidable and fierce. He is also not afraid to speak plainly.
“I don’t put up with bullshit,” he says.
Engele began his career on the streets, but he didn’t stay there too long. He says drugs are the root of most crime, and he earned his stripes — and the respect of commanding officers — through drug investigations.
“He tells it how it is,” says police Chief Clive Weighill.
Engele was involved in every kind of drug bust imaginable — from low-level street busts to undercover operations to yearlong wiretap investigations.
“He excelled in his drug investigations. He had a long history in the city of Saskatoon doing those investigations, intimate knowledge of what is going on in Saskatoon,” Weighill says.
Engele worked his way up through the ranks in the drug unit, and over the years was involved in some of the city’s highest profile drug busts. The most recent was Project Forseti, a massive investigation into guns and drugs involving two biker gangs.
Eventually, he became one of the drug unit’s highest ranking officers — and now is the detective inspector who oversees all integrated units that investigate everything from drugs and gangs to child pornography.
As he moved his way up, both police work and criminals changed.
He often sees people he arrested over the years, and it’s easy for them to share a few laughs and memories about the old days, he says. It’s not something he thinks would happen in today’s criminal underworld.
He was in two shootouts during his long career, but says he worries more these days about the young officers out on the street then he ever did while making busts himself.
“I worry about my constables now more than I did when I was out on the street. Guys are coming back at us with weapons,” he says.
It will be hard to leave policing and the decades worth of honed instincts that tell him when someone is up to no good. Engele spent years looking at the inside of a world few people in the city actually see.
He says his one regret is that he won’t get to see the Forseti case all the way through.
The massive investigation into the Hells Angels and Fallen Saints motorcycle clubs, which resulted in charges against 14 people, is still making its way through the courts.
“I like to have my desk cleaned when I leave here. It just kind of bothers me that that one isn’t cleaned up totally,” he says.
After leaving the force, he plans to focus more on his position as an assistant coach with the Saskatoon Blades hockey team — but policing will always be at his core.