By Rebecca Wakefield

The police photo-op was impressive: More than a hundred guns, ranging from AK-47s to .38 caliber pistols, were stacked on tables in a long and frightening row, the haul from a budding high school arms dealer. The story was that a 17-year-old North Miami girl had started secretly selling her father’s extensive gun collection to pay off a friend’s debt.

She and a couple of other teens were hawking the guns at fire sale prices to other high school kids at different schools, including Miami Beach Senior High. They, plus a couple of buyers, were arrested by Miami Beach and North Miami police in December 2002. A Beach High night school student who had bought two guns on his own tipped off police.

The student was actually working with the MBPD and set up the buy that allowed police to catch the perps with six rifles hidden under blankets in a red Mustang. A subsequent search of the girl’s home turned up 112 more guns. Four of the teens were Beach High students. Case solved. Teacher Ed Cobin breathed the proverbial sigh of relief. His nightmare scenario of a Columbine-like incident at Beach High had been averted.

Then his personal nightmare began. Cobin, whose initial work with the student informant led to the arrests, found himself in the crosshairs of a petty school police investigation that seems to have originated in the bruised egos of some school cops who felt left out of the action. Three years later, Cobin is still trying to wake up.

Cobin, 56, has been at Beach High for about 25 of his 32 years in the system, as a debate coach and social studies teacher and, for the last decade, as the administrative assistant for discipline. He is a compact fellow with a fondness for gold jewelry, motorcycles and American eagles. He bears a passing resemblance to George Carlin. He deals with the problem kids. The best way he has found is to talk to them and listen to them. Some of the kids repay this interest with the occasional heads-up on a fight that’s about to happen, someone who is talking about suicide, or a student on campus with drugs or weapons.

Back in 2002 a night school student named Anthony (I’ll leave his last name out of this) tipped Cobin and head of school security George Thompson off to a doozy. Anthony confided that he knew some girls who were selling guns in the Miami Beach area. Thompson and Cobin took the information seriously because Anthony had told them about other incidents in the past, involving guns and drugs on campus. Cobin notified Sgt. Mark Causey, a Beach police officer who specialized in gangs and was familiar with Anthony. They also told assistant principal George Pollack.

Pollack, a rangy, sarcastic New Yorker with a seen-everything look in his eye, figured that since the guns weren’t in school, it wasn’t a school problem. He says his advice was to let the Beach cops handle it, rather than bringing in the school police. Cobin says he followed up with Causey and was told that Anthony was definitely on to something. “‘Let me put it this way,’” Cobin recalls Causey telling him. “‘I’ve got two AK-47s Anthony just brought in and I got someone from ATF in my office.’ I hung up and the hair on my arms [stood up]. I’m freaking out. I’m thinking Columbine.”

Shortly thereafter, Cobin saw TV reports about the two cars full of teens and guns. He talked to Anthony on the phone and found out that he set up the buy for the police. According to Cobin, Anthony was worried about his younger brother, who was hanging around with the gun dealers. He had wanted to stop the situation, which is why he came forward, but he also wanted to protect his brother. Unfortunately, his 17-year-old brother attempted to run when police tried to pull him over and ended up crashing into a police vehicle. He was arrested.

The next day, Anthony called to tell Cobin there was a gun in the boy’s locker room. Cobin told Pollack and the school resource officer, James Pierce. Thompson called a Beach police lieutenant he knew, who sent K-9 units. Everybody headed down to the locker room with a bolt cutter.

As the search for the alleged gun commenced, Cobin got a call on his walkie-talkie that a student wanted to see him. It was Anthony. He met him near an entranceway and took him into his office. He says that he walked in, stood behind his desk and faced Anthony. Anthony lifted up his shirt to reveal the butts of two handguns, a .32 caliber and a .38 caliber, stuck in his waistband. “I don’t want to touch the guns,” Cobin recounts. “I open my drawer and say, ‘Put them in there.’ I’m shaking. I pick up the radio and call Thompson, Pollack and Pierce to my office.”

Cobin says Anthony told him he brought one gun (plus an ammo clip) from home and one from the locker room, although Cobin wasn’t sure what to believe. Pierce cuffed Anthony. Cobin says Pierce seemed angry that he hadn’t known about the Beach police investigation and the guns before then. Pollack recalls entering the room and asking where the boy got the guns. “I turned to the student and said, ‘What would possess you to bring guns to school?’ He said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve got all this pressure with my brother. I’m not thinking.’”

The Beach police later intervened and convinced the school police not to arrest Anthony because he was working with them. With the guns rounded up and arrests made, Cobin went on Christmas vacation feeling like a lucky man. When he got back in January, he learned that school police were investigating him. It took them almost a year to do it, but school police tagged Cobin with lying to Pierce about Anthony, using “student informants,” and also threw in something irrelevant about giving rides to a kid he used as an informant. It all looks ominous, until you parse the details.

George Thompson says that when he was called down to answer questions, a school police investigator told him he was a “co-conspirator with Ed Cobin,” because he hadn’t told Pierce what was going on beforehand. He says that he was pushed into making a statement he didn’t entirely agree with, the key issue being whether or not he and Cobin had conspired to lie to Pierce about where the guns were found, in order to protect Anthony.

“I thought I was being called down to be thanked,” Thompson relates. “Here’s a black man, never been to jail and I was intimidated. It scared the hell out of me. They wrote the statement. I signed it.”

I read through the school police investigation and was struck by a couple of things. The report, written by Det. Steven Hadley, accuses Cobin of asking Anthony to bring a gun to school to show him. The report further alleges that Cobin and Thompson both told Anthony to tell Pierce he found the guns on campus, rather than bringing them, which suggests a cover-up. There is also a statement by student Carlos Gomez, who said that he watched Cobin patting Anthony down in front of the school, as if expecting to find a weapon.

Cobin sweated it for year. In February 2004, the school administration recommended firing him.

Cobin didn’t sit still. He got five Miami Beach Police officers to write letters commending him for helping them in numerous instances over the years. Pollack wrote a statement that he made the decision not to notify Pierce when the original tip came in. He also said that Pierce wasn’t on campus at the time. Principal Jeanne Friedman wrote a letter of support. Carlos Gomez typed and signed a letter saying essentially that his original statement to police had been altered and that he hadn’t seen Cobin searching Anthony.

Pierce himself wrote a letter in support of Cobin. In the letter, he explained that his intent in starting the investigation was to teach Cobin a lesson about respecting the school police’s jurisdiction, not to get him fired. “I find Mr. Cobin to be a man of strong integrity and great idealism,” Pierce wrote. “The kind of man you rarely find these days.”

By May 2004, Cobin’s campaign and an unusually supportive teacher’s union had changed the district administration’s position. They offered him a reprimand instead of a firing. Cobin was incensed. He felt he’d done nothing wrong and that by accepting the reprimand, he was giving them the out they needed. He decided to file a complaint with the school police’s internal affairs department, to the effect that Hadley and Pierce had conspired to falsify information in Hadley’s report, specifically by forging Gomez’s statement.

The school police found no evidence of this. I read the State Attorney’s report closing out the case. They interviewed Gomez and he said in a deposition that he was mistaken about his allegation that his statement had been altered or forged, although he had felt pressured to give it. He said Cobin asked him to write the letter and went over it with him. Was Gomez correct the first time or the second time? That one I’m not going to untangle. It is worth noting, however, that when a local TV station did a piece on Cobin’s case earlier this year, Gomez went on air to say that his statement to police had been altered.

I’ll tell you what I think. I think Ed Cobin and James Pierce didn’t like each other much, for whatever petty reasons routinely occur between co-workers. It doesn’t matter why. I think that Pierce was pissed off at being caught short during the biggest case to hit the school in years and wanted to pin his frustration on Cobin. Pierce’s own police report from the day of the gun incident indicates his feelings. “I also informed Mr. Cobin that the way he conducts these ‘investigations’ is borderline and he is skirting the area of interfering with police investigations and could be overstepping his authority.”

Was Cobin a bit overzealous? Maybe. His boss, George Pollack, describes him as proactive. “If there ever was a straight-up guy, he’s it,” he says. “The story with the kid, I smelled a rat. I felt there was a conspiracy against Cobin that just got out of hand. It was territorial.” Pollack adds that he tried many times to tell district officials that Cobin wasn’t at fault because he always told his boss what was going on. But he says he was told, “You know, Mr. Pollock, what side you’re supposed to be on.” Pollock replied, probably with irony, “The side of truth and justice.”

Ultimately, if Cobin was the bad guy here, the school board would not have backed down. He’s a low man on the totem pole. I’ve seen them fry bigger people for lesser things. The real lesson here is that once a process like this gets started, it takes a hell of a lot to stop it. The system is set up to protect the system, not its people – and certainly not truth or justice.

Earlier this year, Cobin filed a lawsuit against the district. “I’m the one who builds a relationship with the kid that takes a hundred guns off the street and they’re investigating me?” he asks. “I couldn’t believe it. After what happened to me, who is going to speak up the next time a kid comes to them with something like this?”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.