BELFAST, Maine — Jeff Trafton had just graduated from the Maine State Police Academy when he had his first Waldo County assignment: to be part of a surveillance team monitoring an apartment in Belfast in preparation for a massive cocaine sting operation.
Trafton, who had yet to make an arrest on his own, was sent up the back staircase of an older building on Congress Street on Jan. 10, 1985. In an upstairs room, he and the other police officers were briefed by Harry Bailey, a state police drug investigator, about what was happening below. The downstairs apartment had hidden cameras, and the police watched what was happening on television monitors.
It was a hive of activity because Bailey told his informant, Billy Christensen, to set up as many cocaine buys as possible that day. Police were getting spooked the word was out about their 6-month-old undercover operation. A local drug dealer had just been gunned down, and Bailey wanted to round up all the purchasers he could before pulling the plug.
Someone pointed at a man on the screen and told Trafton to arrest him — Scott Lacombe, 22, of Lincolnville — when they raced downstairs to drop the net.
“If my heart could’ve jumped out of my chest. It would have, it was pounding so hard,” said the longtime law enforcement officer, who this month was sworn in as the new Waldo County sheriff. “We burst in. We had our guns drawn. It was the first time I had my weapon drawn, outside a shooting range.”
The men downstairs were stunned when police officers burst in.
“The man I arrested — I watched the color drain out of his face,” Trafton said, adding he saw a paper grocery bag stuffed with $40,000 in cash. “I was excited. I don’t think I was smart enough at that time to be scared. I was only 22.”
A few months later, Lacombe was killed, shot to death by a paid assassin outside his home in Northport. In the mid-’80s, being involved in the cocaine business in Belfast could have a very high price — all for a valuable white powder Trafton said he had never seen before.
“I was very naive to illegal drugs,” the sheriff said. “I had heard of cocaine, but I hardly knew what it was.”
‘I just couldn’t believe it’
The Belfast cocaine bust that day and the others that followed soon after led to more than 40 people being arrested and charged with drug trafficking. Many were convicted, including several major out-of-state drug traffickers and a man running a million-dollar-a-year cocaine ring inside the former Champion International paper mill in Bucksport, according to BDN archives. The massive operation had far-reaching, even deadly, consequences. An article about the anniversary of the bust in this month’s issue of Down East Magazine indicated it was the first time Maine drug enforcement agents realized cocaine had become a problem outside the urban parts of the state. Before the Belfast bust, Maine’s Federal-State Anti-Drug Smuggling Task Force, with Bailey as supervisor, mostly was concerned with trying to foil marijuana smugglers.
But then Christensen came to talk to Bailey one night in 1984. The logger had gotten into drugs, hard, introducing the idea of freebasing cocaine to a lot of his friends in midcoast Maine. He became a middleman for a cocaine ring, with Colombian connections based out of Rhode Island. But by the time he was 35, the balancing act was unraveling.
“He and his family were living in a tent,” Bailey told the BDN in 1988. “He had lost his business and his home. Fall was coming on. He didn’t know what the hell to do.”
Christensen told the drug agent he owed several Colombian dealers $90,000. He said they had beaten him senseless and threatened to pop out one of his eyeballs and take it back to Central Falls, Rhode Island. He was scared. The story he told shocked Bailey, who in 2006 was named a Legendary Trooper by the Maine State Police and died last June at the age of 73.
“I had been working around drugs for nine years. I had known this guy for 20 years,” Bailey said. “The things he said were going on all around me. … I just couldn’t believe it.”
Christensen agreed to work with police, and he was set up in the house on Congress Street in Belfast. The operation was the most sophisticated undertaking by state authorities up until that time, Bailey said.
“It was a long-range undercover operation,” he said, adding that police wanted to corral the entire drug ring.
Bob Keating, a longtime Waldo County law enforcement officer who was Belfast police chief at the time, said that just before the 6-month-long undercover operation began, local officers were doing an investigation of their own, which turned out to be related. A maid at the Yankee Clipper motel called authorities to report that several repeat guests might be abusing children, because she found crumbs and animal crackers on the closet floor. She thought the guests, who periodically came up from Rhode Island, might be locking kids in the closet. Police eventually learned the guests were involved in cocaine trafficking.
“It turned out that whenever they did drug deals, they would put the kids in the closet to keep them out of harm’s way,” Keating said.
‘It was a crazy time’
Christensen began buying cocaine for the state police, and the transactions were recorded. One of the dealers lured into the sting operation was Linwood Jackson, a maintenance worker at the Champion mill. Bailey said police learned Jackson was the head of a massive cocaine operation inside the mill, with individual transactions in the range of $60,000 and $70,000.
Keating said he and Bailey sped to Augusta one day so they could back up undercover agents who were doing a drug deal with Christensen. They pulled into the parking lot of Whipper’s Pizza in Augusta, across the street from the where the transaction was happening, with recording equipment on their laps. Keating heard the cocaine dealer say that, because he wasn’t sure whether he could trust Christensen, he brought backup — two men in a black pickup truck, waiting across the street at the pizza joint.
The guys were parked right next to the undercover police officers.
“Those were some of the comical things going on,” Keating said. “But it was serious business.”
Another dealer who surfaced was Norman Grenier, a Rhode Island man who was living with his girlfriend, Susan Pierce, in Swanville. On the night of Dec. 12, 1984, four men who bought drugs from Christensen stopped at the Congress Street apartment to try to talk him into robbing Grenier, who was known to keep large amounts of cash at his secluded Swanville home. Christensen declined. As soon as they left, he tried to call and warn Grenier but found the Swanville phone was out of service, according to BDN archives.
Grenier was killed that night by a blast of buckshot from a 12-gauge shotgun while he was watching television with Pierce. The murder prompted police to start wrapping up their undercover operation. Legendary Waldo County badman Joel Fuller and three other men were charged with the killing a few days later, but Fuller went on the run and eluded police for months before he eventually turned himself in. He was convicted of the murder by a jury and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
“That was quite a time,” said John Ford, a retired Waldo County sheriff and game warden who tracked Fuller while he was a fugitive. “It was just something you always thought you’d read about in other places. It was highly volatile for a while.”
Ford said Fuller was released on bail after being charged with Grenier’s killing.
“I think it was the only time a murderer was released on bail in the state of Maine. I don’t understand why that happened,” Ford said.
After the January raid in Belfast, Lacombe cooperated with the state in return for a reduced sentence. He was scheduled to plead guilty to a drug trafficking charge at federal court in Bangor on July 3, 1985.
But on the night of July 2, he was watching a movie at his Beech Hill Road home in Northport with his fiancee and another housemate when an unfamiliar car pulled into the driveway. The man identified himself to Lacombe’s fiancee as a Liberty man, who also was scheduled to plead to the drug charges the next day. The man asked if Lacombe would come outside to talk to him.
Tracy Drinkwater, the fiancee, testified years later in court that she saw Lacombe approach the car then start to turn away. She heard a shotgun blast and saw him fall to the ground. She sobbed during her testimony, according to BDN archives.
“Scott was face down on the ground,” she told the court. “I told him it would be OK, that we’d be married and have children. Then he died.”
After the 1993 trial, Fuller was convicted of Lacombe’s murder. Sheriff Ford said it took place because the drug kingpin at the Champion mill hired Fuller to “take out any of them at any time.”
Fuller was implicated, though not convicted, in another infamous Belfast killing — the 1983 murder-for-hire of Mervin “Sonny” Grotton, a Navy petty officer whose wife wanted him dead. Norma Small was convicted of the homicide in 2002 and sentenced to life in prison for the crime. State prosecutors and police officers alleged Small paid Fuller to kill Grotton outside the family’s Wight Street house, but a Lincoln County Superior Court jury in 2003 acquitted Fuller of the crime.
“It’s pretty bizarre,” Ford said of the sustained mayhem that consumed the midcoast during the 1980s. “It was a crazy time. There was a lot going on and a lot of things happening.”
Keating said Maine law enforcement agents and his department ended up winning state and regional awards for good police work in the undercover cocaine operation.
“A lot of officers did some awful good police work. Took some serious risks,” Keating said. “Those were rough times back then. It was troubled times in Waldo County.”