House of corruption: KCK police brought women to this place, former neighbor says

Bryan Rainey grew up on Alden Street in Kansas City, Kansas, next door to a house where he says that three local police officers, in uniform and driving patrol cars, brought women “you could tell they weren’t dating” during daylight hours.

The ethic of the time — and actually, of this time, too — was to keep your head down and notice as little as possible. But at night, Rainey and his young buddies sometimes broke into the place, where they put bikes together from spare parts. “That made you a Huckleberry Finn back in the day,” he said.

What he’ll never forget about those incursions, though, is that, inside the house, there was nothing but a sofa and a bed with no sheets.

And even at a young age, the boys knew what that meant.

“My guess was these guys taking a girl into that environment” had to have been coercing them, he said. “I thought they might have been arrested. Like, ‘Do me this favor and I won’t give you a ticket.’ ’’

This was in the 1970s but started before Roger Golubski joined the force in 1975. This was the KCKPD that he walked into.

One of the biggest questions about the much-accused former detective has always been why the department would put up with him for 35 years, seeing and knowing nothing, supposedly.

Because, says Rainey, a 59-year-old career military man who just moved back to this area, “everybody had some dirt,” in their own house, and so had a reason to be quiet.

“When everybody’s doing a little bit of everything,” he said, no one ever says a thing. “Everything looks normal, but it’s not.”

The house, next door to 2543 Alden St., isn’t there anymore, and neither is Rainey’s. The 1975 Kansas City Directory shows that, at that time, 2543 Alden belonged to Rainey’s mother, Freda Rainey, while the adjacent property was listed as vacant.

It’s long been alleged that Golubski stole and doled out drugs during his time on the force: In a 2016 affidavit taken for Lamonte McIntyre’s innocence case, convicted drug trafficker Cecil Brooks said that “On at least two occasions, I personally witnessed Detective Golubski confiscate drugs from someone and not arrest that person. … We all knew that Golubski would take drugs and then give them to drug-addicted Black hookers in exchange for sexual favors.”

Drug dealers say detective took cut of profits

But Golubski wasn’t the only dirty cop. In separate interviews, two former KCK drug dealers told me that while Golubski took a share of their profits every week, he was far from the only officer who extorted money from them. There were competing criminal elements within the department, both said.

In the ’90s, Golubski “used to raid the dope house every week and keep the money,” said one, who has long since left Kansas and gone legit. I interviewed him at his home in another state. “I remember him driving up and down Quindaro, shaking down all the dealers,” he said.

“Nobody questioned him, because he was running everything, and everybody in town knew it. It was pure frickin’ chaos — you could look out the courthouse window and see it — so how could you not know? Golubski was the biggest gangster out there.”

When Stacey Quinn, who according to her family had been exploited by Golubski since her teen years, was murdered in 2000, he said, the assumption on the street was that he had killed her himself or had it done, though someone else was convicted for that crime. Why was that the assumption? “Because she was his,” he said, and no one else would have dared.

The other former dealer I talked to is still here — back here, I should say, after a stint in prison — and also now works a 9-to-5 job that, as he tells young people, “means I don’t have to sleep with my gun.”

He did not see Golubski as “the biggest gangster out there,” or even the greediest, but only one of many corrupt officers.

Golubski stopped him on the street one day when “I was doing things I shouldn’t have been doing. He said, ‘I’ve got your boy, and I need $1,000 to let him go.’ I gave him the $1,000” to release his drug runner, and then “he charged me $500 to get the cocaine back.”

Ex-agent: FBI probe just ‘going through the motions’

Another officer, who’s dead now, soon approached him and said, “You’ve got to start paying me $9,000 a month.” That was OK, he said, because in exchange, that officer “let me know when the drug house is going to get popped.”

Then two other officers told him they, too, needed a cut, “so I had to pay an extra $9,000. In that era, everybody was on the take.”

When he was finally arrested anyway, because the feds eventually got involved, “I kept the street code” and never implicated anyone in the KCKPD. “I kept my mouth solid.”

This second dealer did not see Golubski, distracted as he was by women he could take advantage of, as in charge of anything.

“The big guys are still there,” he said.

Maybe that’s why former FBI agent Alan Jennerich told me months ago that his successors in this assignment are only “going through the motions” of an investigation. He says that because he tried and failed to interest his superiors in bringing Golubski and other officers to justice decades ago.

He wants to be proven wrong, of course. But no one can say that his pessimism isn’t hard-earned.

“Golubski knows everything,” he said, “so no one’s ever going to get him.”

And if that changes, no one will be immune.