INSIDER

Tim Stover won’t let us show you his face. If he did, he might get killed the next time he meets a heroin dealer at the Las Vegas airport or puts together a drug buy in a West Northwest Highway nightclub.

Stover is a narc-a Dallas Police Department narcotics undercover investigator-who has been extremely successful in the often deadly world of drug dealing. In March, a committee of Dallas police officers singled him out as the “best of the best” among Dallas cops, naming him DPD “Officer of the Year.”

You won’t see his name in the newspaper, but Stover, thirty-one, has been the man behind many of the drug bust headlines in the papers recently. Last year, for instance. Stover was credited with arrests or seizures in seventeen major narcotics investigations. That year he also set local narcotics records of sorts on two separate occasions when he received the largest heroin delivery (one kilo) and cocaine delivery (three and a half pounds) ever made to a Dallas law enforcement officer. Stover set a similar record for the state of Nevada last December when he traveled to Las Vegas to buy nine pounds of 98 percent pure white Asian heroin prior to busting a group of Thailand nationals. Last July, Stover was the first police officer in the nation to make a buy of illegal Ecstasy tablets. Last March, an investigation took Stover and another officer to Denton County, where the two made fourteen drug buys and broke a major narcotics trafficking ring operating in the area. Last year Stover also initiated six drug search warrants that led to six felony arrests, made seventeen more drug buys from an array of narcotics dealers, and seized nine vehicles and $30,000 in cash.

“Tim is willing to spend those extremely long hours, take those phone calls and pages in the night. and jump up and go” says Lt. David Davis, who heads the Dallas Police Department’s drug abuse section. “Our narcotics investigations don’t take place in an hour, like they do on ’Miami Vice.’ It often takes weeks, even months, to negotiate an undercover narcotics buy.”

In fact, you might call Stover a police department version of the Yankees” Iron Horse. Lou Gehrig: he hasn’t taken a sick day in five years.

More importantly. Davis says, Stover is an excellent actor. During his three and a half years as an undercover narcotics officer. Stover has made large drug buys from businessmen, college students, and even amateurs, “He can be a tough guy or a yuppie,” Davis says. “He’s constantly changing gears and changing roles, performing a multitude of roles simultaneously.”

What does Stover think it takes to be a good narc? “You need a good imagination,” he says. “You have to stay a step ahead of the situation. You also have to be able to assume a role, because you want that drug dealer to believe in you. From what I’ve seen, those types want to believe you.”