Riverside Elementary first-grade teacher Jeri Scheve brought a Secret Service agent to the Emporia school district this morning for a special, grown-up version of show-and-tell.
Scott Redpath, assistant to the special agent in charge for the Kansas City field office, presented programs and answered questions for Emporia High School government students and Riverside Elementary School third- and fourth-graders.
Redpath, who is Scheve’s stepbrother, spent about seven years accompanying candidates or vice presidents, with Al Gore, Barack Obama, Hillary and Bill Clinton and Vice President Dick Cheney among the leaders he watched over.
“I was on the campaign trail,” Redpath said in a telephone interview Thursday afternoon. “I was on the detail with Al Gore through the 2000 campaign and when that was over, I went over to Vice President Cheney’s detail.”
The relationships he formed with those leaders primarily were professional ones, he said, with Redpath staying quiet unless they or someone in their entourage spoke to him specifically.
In his position, he often had opportunities to watch history unfold.
“I was with Gore the night of the election in Nashville, Tenn., which was a strange place to be in,” Redpath told P.J. Marstall’s government class this morning.
Gore was being told to concede the election by some advisors, while others said to fight what seemed to be a vote-counting problem becoming evident in Florida.
Redpath was driving Gore to the site where he planned to give a concession speech when the plan changed.
“We stopped and drove back to the hotel,” he said.
After Bush became president, Redpath spent several years accompanying Cheney, before returning to Kansas City in 2003. In 2007, he was back on the campaign trail, driving Obama as he campaigned for votes in the Iowa caucus before being transferred later to Clinton’s campaign.
The Secret Service did not protect presidential candidates until their job responsibilities changed after Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968. Obama’s coverage, starting in April 2007, was the earliest ever begun for a presidential candidate, Redpath said.
The politicians’ schedules were demanding. They would load up their staffs in Chevrolet Suburbans, stopping at towns on the itinerary and at impromptu stops for coffee and other needs.
“The last 30 days I was literally working 7 (a.m.) to midnight, driving around,” Redpath said. “I’m driving, trying to figure out how I’m going to stay awake in the car, because you don’t want to be responsible for hurting possibly the president of the United States, possibly the first woman president of the United States.”
He and the other Secret Service agents also wanted to make sure that no one else hurt the candidates.
Teams would go out three or four days in advance to secure the cities and towns along the route. The details were not something Redpath could discuss.
“I don’t want to tell you our numbers,” he said. “Yes, we are in suits, and we are everywhere, let me just tell you that. We are prepared.
“It’s a rewarding job, I’ll put it that way. You hire into this job kind of knowing what it’s about. But I work with a lot of great people, so it’s not just me. It’s the whole combined effort.”
The Secret Service relies heavily on local departments, from city and county law enforcement officers to state investigations-bureau agents.
Redpath was a police officer himself in Overland Park before he hired on with the Secret Service about 19 years ago.
It was a career path that he’d planned for when he accepted a scholarship to play football at Emporia State University, where he was an outside linebacker under former coach Larry Kramer. Redpath graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology with emphasis in criminal justice and had an eye on a federal law enforcement career long before he was hired for the Secret Service office in Kansas City, where he was an investigative agent and a polygraph examiner before transferring to Washington, D.C.
Now, he is back in Kansas City, running the criminal investigations for that field office.
The scope of the work done now far exceeds the Secret Service’s original purpose. The agency now comes under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security in the judicial branch of government, rather than under the Treasury Department, where it began.
“We were first formed back in 1865 to combat counterfeit money,” Redpath said. “That was one of the last acts that Abraham Lincoln did before he went to the play. So, that is our forte.”
Redpath described counterfeiting as a long-standing war tactic that others use to try to bring down another country’s economy. The Confederacy counterfeited money during the Civil War; the Germans did the same during World War II, and the North Koreans now have an excellent counterfeit of U.S. money circulating in Europe.
Although counterfeiting remains on the menu of specialties of the Secret Service, other crimes also are attracting agents’ scrutiny.
“We have a lot of mortgage fraud cases,” Redpath said.
Identity theft is another high priority for his office.
“What I tell everybody is they have to protect themselves. They have to be vigilant. They have to check their credit report once a year, check their bank accounts on a daily basis to make sure that things aren’t out of the ordinary.
“They can’t put their mail out in the mailbox when they go to work in the morning, put the flag up, because that’s a sure sign for the crooks that they can steal your bills,” he said.
Congress also mandates that the Secret Service investigate computer fraud, with computer examiners in-house that specialize in looking into computers and other specialists who are trained to be “first responders” in computer fraud.
Diversity of assignments is one of the most attractive aspects of the job for Redpath.
“There’s so much to it, the places I get to go, the things that I experience. There’s nothing like seeing a president of the United States,” he said. “That is the leader of the free world, so you know that always is something.
“I’ve traveled all over the world. … It’s an adventure.”
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April 8, 2009 at 1:50 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )