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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 19, 1985)
-4- Bob Wiatt is director of the University Police Department Wiatt is the enforcer forUPD By GIGI SHAMSY Reporter Only one man at Texas A<SpM is affectionately called “Der Fuhrer” by Frank Vandiver. This man is not at Texas A&=M on a special government assignment. Instead, Bob Wiatt serves as the director of the Uni versity Police Department. Wiatt has had a history of ex periences that the average indi vidual could only see on reruns of “Mission Impossible.” The image of the police de partment has changed ever since Wiatt remodeled his own cramped and disorganized office two years ago. Wiatt left behind his life with the Federal Bureau of Investiga tion to create a level of re spected professionalism for the University Police Department. “The University has thought of the University Police Depart ment as a bunch of grouchy old people who do nothing but give tickets,” Wiatt says. “We per form the same functions as state police do — including making arrests.” Wiatt initiated improve ments — including expanding the number of traffic patrollers and cracking down on faculty parking violations and bicycle offenses. “I believe in strict parity be tween faculty and student traf fic offenders,” Wiatt says. “The faculty are not above the rules and regulations. They are held accountable for their actions.” Peering through his glasses with a serious stare, Wiatt still has the physique of a college football player. For his strength and dedication, he has earned the title of “Mr. FBI” from the press and from his colleagues. Wiatt’s duties, like cleaning up the department’s image and tightening up penalties for re peat offenders, are a far ciy from his duties a few years ago. Wiatt still remembers that day in 1974 when a routine visit to Huntsville prison led to over 11 days of horror. “I was knocked uncon scious,” he says, “and all I re member is seeing in slow mo tion two pinpricks of light like the sun was exploding.” Wiatt says he could not move for a few minutes after he was hit. He heard officers yelling, “Wiatt is dead!” until they even tually pulled him out of the doorway. The comicts had set up two partitions and stacked library books against the boards as shields against the gunfire. Wiatt says the convicts hand cuffed a female hostage and a he eventually saw his experi ence made into a movie called “The Sugarland Express.” Wiatt traded his high school cap and gown for United States Navy fatigues six weeks after graduation at age 17. “My experiences in Okinawa were traumatic,” he says, “yet they gave me considerable in sight which I could not have gaind in any other way.” Wiatt saw friends killed in World War II. Witnessing these tragic experiences caused him to develop an outer shell which kept him from being shocked at “I believe in strict parity between faculty and student traffic offenders. The faculty are not above the rules and regulations,” Wiatt says. “They are held accountable for their actions.” While Wiatt talked to a pris oner in a Huntsville cell, he says a guard yelled that a prisoner had taken hostages at gunpoint in the prison’s exercise yard. A convict working as a house- boy smuggled three guns and several rounds of ammunition, wrapped in plastic and stashed in a can of peaches, to three other prisoners. Wiatt called for FBI assist ance and then proceeded to the prison library. Before a detailed plan to foil the criminals and save the hos tages was executed, Wiatt says he was caught in two showers of bullets from the convicts’ 357-magnum. priest to them inside the “trojan horse” barricade as they shot at the FBI agents. Thirteen officers dodged the convicts’ bullets and pulled the hostages from the barricade be fore killing the criminals with gunfire. Another criminal confronta tion that Wiatt recalls was in 1969. A convicted drug felon and his girlfriend tried to dodge Wiatt’s car in a 300-mile, 13-car high-speed chase across East Texas. The officers finally stopped the suspect’s car and struggled with the armed suspect and his girlfriend. Wiatt says he laughed when violent situations, he says. After earning his undergra duate and law degrees at the University of Cincinatti, Wiatt decided not to become a lawyer but rather talked with a recrui ter from the Federal Bureau of Investigations during a career day program at the university. After this discussion, he chose his career. Ending up in New York after training, he was invovlved in breaking Mafia circles in the New York city docks. Wiatt and his wife then moved to Sanjuan, Puerto Rico, where they lived for almost four years. There Wiatt investigated the criminal acts of the danger ous nationalist party of Puerto Rico. After Wiatt returned to the United Sates, he continued his career with the FBI in Houston. He was instrumental in slowing down the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the Southwest. In 1980, Wiatt retired from nearly three decades of sendee as an FBI special agent. Today, Wiatt blends his ex periences from the FBI and from three years at the Biyan District Attorney’s office in leading the University police. “In my life, I’ve come to the realization that society must have laws,” he says, “or else we wall have a catastrophic world without order. “I also take great satisfaction in getting rid of the people who are preying on the victims of society. “My goal is to make the Uni versity community aware that everyone is affected by Universi ty policy.” This encompasses faculty as important as deans of colleges and university administrators. Wiatt says he has received telephone calls from outraged faculty members who insist they have special parking pri vileges over the students. 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