The Chase

"One of the biggest challenges was convincing people there was an issue," Hermann says. "I think in some cases, it's just convenient to think the Northland doesn't have a problem. It's just a whole new world. They [residents] wouldn't know meth if it hit him in the head."

What those residents might not have known was that by the late 1990s, a string of motels off Parvin Road and Chouteau Trafficway — with their easy access to highways — had become a hub for meth trafficking. The Metropolitan Meth Unit, made up of investigators from state police and federal agencies, busted dozens of meth dealers inside the motels, along with the cooks who manufacture meth. Most of the criminals have fled to rural corners, where they continue to cook junk for personal use. But there's a new phenomenon in the meth trade. In the past three years, cartel drug runners have brought hundreds of pounds of Mexican meth to town.

Capt. Kevin O'Sullivan of the Metropolitan Meth Unit says the work of Graves' squad is invaluable. As detectives metrowide track the new wave of smugglers, Graves and his officers are charting the Northland's demand side. "You need to get those users and the small-time dealers and the little people, because they're the ones who are on the bottom of that [Mexican meth] pipeline that are getting it out on the street," O'Sullivan says.

After spending a year on Northland patrol, this past November Graves took over a special team of officers. They had a simple strategy.

"We don't want to take everybody to jail," Graves says. "We want to gain intelligence. We want to make friends."

The strategy worked from the beginning — partly because Graves could empathize with his new "friends."

In sixth grade, Graves says, he ran away from home to escape an abusive, alcoholic stepfather who hated having him around. After he left home, Graves bounced around Gladstone and its surrounding neighborhoods, living with friends, uncertain of where he'd sleep week to week.

"My dad thought I was living at my mom's," Graves says. "My mom told my stepdad that I was at my dad's. I lived elsewhere. I was just very fortunate that there were people who helped me. I had a lot of people who gave me chances."

He returned the favor by becoming a cop.

People like Tami Montague, 34, say Graves always catches up with them. "It's Danny Graves, he's the man, he took down the Northland," Montague sings with a cackle. "That's my little cheer for him."

One reason she cheers for Graves is because she knew him back in the day. When Montague was 12, she ran away from home and for a short time lived at a friend's house where Graves was also staying. (Graves says he doesn't remember staying with Montague but knows they had mutual friends in the same family.)

Montague says she got hooked on meth years later, after Darrell Stallings killed her husband. (Stallings was convicted in November 2004 of murdering five people in Kansas City, Kansas, in June 2002.) Last summer, Montague ran into Graves for the first time since they were kids. She says she was at rock bottom, shooting a dwindling supply of meth in a room at the Super Inn motel off Parvin Road.

"I was sick," Montague recalls. "I was literally on my last leg, suicidal, no food, no place to stay, coming up with 30 bucks a night to stay in a motel."

When cops raided the place, she says, "Danny was the first one I see. I didn't know he was a cop. I said, 'Danny?' And he cared."

Montague and her boyfriend had already shot the last of their dope, so there was only paraphernalia in the room.

"Danny gave me a break that day," she says. "He threw it all away. He said, 'Get your life together.' That saved my life, in my opinion. From that point on, suicide wasn't an option.... All the other cops, all they wanted to do was arrest me and put me in jail. Danny treated me like a person, was understanding, and gave me a fucking chance. He didn't have to do that."

Graves tells the Pitch that after he saw Montague at the motel last summer, he got her and her boyfriend on a waiting list for a drug treatment program at North Kansas City Hospital. But Montague never checked in, and when the Pitch spoke with her in January, she was running from her boyfriend, who she says has repeatedly threatened to kill her. She says she got clean on her own, but without a home, it hasn't been easy. Living with addicts who took her in, she'd stay clean for a couple of days, then go on a binge. It was impossible to get away, she says.

"It started out all great and good, and everybody had lots of money and lots of stuff and nice things and everybody was happy about three years ago," she says. "Then, slowly, everybody is losing their vehicles, their homes, their children, their jobs. Everybody I know is down and out now. The whole north of the river is ate up. I've never seen anything like this."