Law and lawlessness

Tommy Adams, who was the sheriff of Carter County, Missouri, for the past two years,

…rarely met with community leaders or showed up at the office, where paperwork piled high on his desk. He delegated to his chief deputy, who worried about his strange behavior. Mr. Adams began spending conspicuously, buying cars, building a cabin and paying for the in vitro fertilization that led to the birth, eight months ago, of his son. Like many people around here, he had grown up poor. He declared bankruptcy in 2005, with just $5 in cash and $300 in the bank. And even though his new $37,000 salary, on top of his wife’s pay as a nurse, represented good money in an area where the median household income is $27,000, his spending raised eyebrows.

Turns out that — according to prosecutors and witnesses — Mr. Adams was distributing crystal meth, as well as burglarizing homes and selling guns from the evidence room.

“A sheriff don’t have to answer to nobody,” claims a local resident, almost sympathetically.

We’ll see about that.