Jose Luis Bedoy is sort of like the Richard Gere character in Pretty Woman. He, too, became smitten by a woman of the night, despite his better judgment, and he, too, risked his career to keep the relationship alive.
There are, however, some key differences, which are described in detail in an indictment handed down Friday by a federal grand jury. Bedoy is a Dallas cop working as a detective in the vice unit. And while Gere extricated his lover from the flesh trade, Bedoy did everything he could to ensure that his own Julia Roberts could stay in it.
According to the indictment, Bedoy met the woman during a 2009 raid of an unnamed "adult entertainment establishment," where she was working as a prostitute. Later, when she was trying to reclaim property that had been seized during the raid, Bedoy helped her navigate the Dallas PD bureaucracy.
Afterwards, Bedoy began a regular correspondence with the woman and requested a "massage" that quickly blossomed into what the feds term "an intimate relationship" that lasted four years.
The relationship proved mutually beneficial. Bedoy, from all indications, got what he wanted, while prosecutors say he supplied the woman with a steady stream of tips on avoiding prostitution arrests.
At first, the advice was general. During that first massage, Bedoy explained how to screen her clients to avoid an inadvertent encounter with an undercover cop. Before long, however, Bedoy was feeding her specific details about DPD's vice operations.
In January 2013, he showed her DPD's investigative case file on Wet, which police raided two days later. A few months later, he briefed her on using Backpage.com, the online classified site. Weekends -- all day Sunday and before 8 p.m. on Saturdays -- were the best time to post prostitution ads. Weekdays from 12:30 to 4 were the worst. She should change her number every two weeks, and she should stay off the site completely during the week of June 25, when DPD and the FBI were conducting a joint sweep.
By that point, the department already suspected it had a mole and that it was probably Bedoy. That March, a joint raid with Coppell PD had been postponed after their target, Studio Serene, abruptly closed for several days. When Coppell police visited after it reopened, several workers said they'd been tipped off by a Dallas vice cop named Jose, whose phone number happened to match the one in Bedoy's personnel file.
In July, a couple of weeks after the Backpage.com operation, the FBI told members of DPD's vice squad they had initiated an investigation. According to the indictment, Bedoy panicked, telling his lover variously to ditch her cell phone, refuse to allow any FBI agents into her apartment and to get out of Dallas.
The indictment doesn't say whether the woman complied with any of these requests. Suffice to say that she has not been charged with obstruction of justice or obstruction of an official proceeding while Bedoy has. He faces one count of the former, three of the latter, which carry a combined maximum prison sentence of 70 years.
Bedoy has pleaded not guilty.
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