Private eye used booze, beautiful women to set men up for DUI arrests
WHAT A HEEL: Private detective Christopher Butler wasn’t the sort of guy to sit outside a motel room all night sipping cold coffee and waiting for an errant spouse to emerge so that he could snap an incriminating photo. He “arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers” and operated a brothel in Contra Costa County on the side with officers from the San Ramon and Danville police departments, Los Angeles Times reports:
Stunned prosecutors combed through pending criminal cases and eventually dismissed charges in at least 20 DUI and vice crimes, tainted by the involvement of the accused officers. Two of them had once worked with Butler on the police force of the East Bay city of Antioch.
In what prosecutors now call "dirty DUIs," Butler paid his decoys $25 an hour for four-hour minimums. The women worked in pairs. One drank heavily with the target and the other drove.
Butler videotaped the encounters from a nearby table. When the man got into his vehicle, Butler tipped off police. The last DUI setup occurred in January.
Butler and two officers have been indicted on charges that include drug dealing, running a prostitution business and illegal possession of a weapon. A third officer faces state charges of accepting bribes to make arrests.
Of course, the set-ups couldn’t be possible if victims like 49-year old avionics engineer David Dutcher – described by the LA Times as “tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair”; see photo above – weren’t vain enough to think that a “tall, slender, blond and beautiful” woman who claimed not to have had sex “in a long time” and her brunet friend who “unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage” were really, really hot for him and wanted to frolic with him in another friend’s hot tub.
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