A woman loses her son. He was abducted. kidnapped. stolen.
For several days, she has no idea of his location. Imagine her despair. then imagine her relief when Nevada Child Seekers tells her that they found her boy - in good health, in protective custody, in Washington State.
The non-profit organization then calls Jerry Airola, President and founder of Silver State Helicopters, to ask if they can use a plane to Take this anxious mother to her son 1,200 hundred miles north. Never one to turn down an opportunity to help, Airola quickly schedules a Lear 55 jet to assist.
Donating a private aircraft in dire circumstances is not uncommon for Airola. "Non-profit organizations call for our help very often," Airola says. "We are committed to helping anyone we can. it's the right thing to
do."
The next day, the mother and a representative from Nevada Child Seekers are on a runway at the North Las Vegas Airport in Airola's Lear jet, prepared for take off. As the plane is taxiing, the representative from Nevada Child Seekers gets a call on his cell phone. It's his boss. Puzzled by the request, the representative tells the pilot the plane must turn around and return to the terminal. The mother panics. Why can't they take off? Why can't they go to Washington? What happened to her son?
Airola is now involved. He's asking the representative why they can't fly the woman to Washington. The only answer Airola receives is, "Not gonna happen." So Airola calls a representative at the Las Vegas Metro Police Department.
"I was just told by Nevada Child Seekers that they have to leave the airport," Airola said to the department.
As it turned out, the Metro administration ordered Airola's plane not to leave and assist a desperate mother from seeing her missing son in Washington. Instead, Nevada Child Seekers had to find someone else to donate a plane, anyone but Airola. Airola suspected some power playing and bullying.
The story gets worse.
The Metro Police Department orchestrated a political interference, and at a citizen's expense - a child's expense - because its leaders worried Airola's charity would look good for the sheriff-hopeful.
It's a story that Airola likes to share when discussing his plans to become the next sheriff of Clark County. "It is a misuse of their authority, a misuse of the county's assets. If I want to donate a jet to someone to save them trouble, I should be able to do it."
Sure, why would Metro care? Because Undersheriff Doug Gillespie is running against Airola? If so, well, that's just politics.
Who is Jerry Airola?
Put simply, Airola is a businessman, one who has carried a badge. He is the father of eight, expecting his ninth child and his first grandchild. He comes from a long family tradition of law enforcers - especially sheriffs. His grandfather, Claud Ballard, worked in the sheriff's department for Calaveras County, Calif., for more than 30 years. He was elected to sheriff for two terms. His great-grandfather was also an elected sheriff and his great-great-grandfather was a U.S. Marshall. Airola has always wanted to follow the same path.
His first foray into business was while in high school. He took cutting lawns for candy money to a much larger scale, as he started a landscaping business and even hired three other high schoolers to work for him until he graduated in 1983. Airola left his home, the rancher's paradise of Calaveras County, and moved to southern California to work for an environmental company. He took advantage of its continuing education and training classes, and within a year he was promoted to the position of National Sales Manager. At one of the fastest growing companies in the nation at the time, Airola was responsible for training and overseeing 12 different managers.
At that time, his parents moved to Ventura, where the three of them opened and operated three different companies. Sadly, in 1987, the family took a blow when three of his grandparents died. Airola and his parents decided to sell the businesses so they could go back to tend to the ranch, giving Airola the opportunity to get into law enforcement.
Three years later, Airola was a Los Banos police officer. He was a patrol officer also investigating crimes like homicide, child molestation and auto theft. He served as the president of the Los Banos Police Officers Association and as a member of the Morale Committee - a task which Airola intends to implement with Clark County.
To lessen the hardships of a budding family, Airola took a second job as a mortgage broker for a national bank.
In 1995, he accepted the opportunity to move to Las Vegas and open a water purification company. By this time, he was the father of five and had to provide for his family. It's no secret, and perhaps it's unfortunate, that a cop's salary is not always the best way to provide. He relied on his management skills to keep food on the table and allow a more comfortable life.
Rather than uproot himself, he was sworn in as a reserve deputy sheriff with the Tuolumne County Sheriff's Office. (Tuolumne County sits as the northern gateway to Yosemite National Park.) His original plan was to move to Vegas, make a killing in the business world, then get back to his home in Calaveras County and become sheriff.
But instead, he fell in love with helicopters. And in 1999, he and three other partners bought their first helicopter, which would become the beginning of the Silver State Helicopter fleet. Two years later, he bought full ownership of the company and purchased a McDonnell Douglas 500 helicopter before working with small county sheriffs' departments. He contracted the choppers to assist in drug busts and any other police activity they may need assistance with.
When Airola came to Las Vegas, he was broke. Without much to his name, he was forced to call the credit card companies and ask for extended limits, but they turned him away. What he did have was a good business prospect. He parlayed that into something bigger.
Airola's business of giving back
In 2002, Airola thought it best to expand Silver State Helicopters' abilities, so he diversified. From that one bird he bought in 1999, Silver State Helicopters now boasts a fleet of more than 200. The company can handle most any situation and often does.
In 2003, he flew five helicopters to Utah to look for Elizabeth Smart. Since then, he created Sheriff's Airborne Law Enforcement (S.A.B.L.E.) This program was one of the first responders to the destruction of the South when Hurricane Katrina hit exactly one year ago. In 2005, S.A.B.L.E. showed that, flying 400 feet above the ground at a speed of 45 mph, it was able to detect a dirty bomb, lending its hand to the War on Terror and Homeland Security.
Airola is quick to give abatement for firefighting, agricultural spraying and movie-making. In fact, he is a card carrying member of the Screen Actors Guild. Silver State Helicopters gives aerial tours, charters and can even be used for external load lifting and utility work. Airola is also proud of the training school. It's where he finds some amazing pilots and mechanics who he eventually hires.
Airola has been extremely successful in the private sector - and in such a short period of time.
"There comes a point, if I made another $10 million this year, I'd ask, 'What I would do with it?'" he explains. "I'd put it back into the company; I always have. I grow things; I create jobs. There are a lot of people who are paid well, not because I couldn't find someone to do it for less, but because they deserve to be part of the success. They deserve part of the spoils because they were here."
So it's about giving back?
"I don't want to sound corny, but when you do something for somebody, you accomplish something. It's about the way you feel. When you hold the door for your wife; you do it because of the way you feel inside.
"It's the same thing with the sheriff's position. It'd be the ultimate compliment to be elected into the sheriff's office. And then the ultimate achievement is to over-deliver on what I promised."
He built Silver State Helicopters, an Inc. 500 Company, from scratch. He did so understanding the value of people and the value of putting the right people in the right positions. And everyday, he expects those people to show him results. No one running for sheriff has more business experience than he does. And he's coming to the position with a sharp business mind.
"Well, the helicopter business and law enforcement really aren't that different. I run the business like a law enforcement agency," Airola says. "You have ranks. And we deal with the FAA - a federal agency."
Obviously, taking passengers up in a helicopter is a liability, just like sending pilots up in a search effort.
"The difference in law enforcement is that you deal with a different liability: people and guns. The way you manage your assets is very, very similar. Right now, Metro does not have a real budget."
Airola calls Metro's budget a "Christmas list" of things they want. He wants to go to the legislation and have a stand-alone budget, which would mean, as Airola put it, "We would answer to the people." If Metro is going to spend the money, there has to be a need. If there's a need, he'll find a way to get the money.
One suggestion he has: charge a booking fee when someone is thrown in jail and convicted. Why should the innocent public pay for a criminal's stay in an air-conditioned cell?
Sheriff Jerry Airola, upon election
Of course, police work is more than budgets and administration. Preventing crime is a big part of it too. Technology is Airola's key. On average, a car is stolen every 25 minutes in the valley. As Sheriff of Clark County, Airola would bring in low jacks and other vehicle location tools. Each time someone is caught stealing a car, Metro would appear on TV and make the crime public. He found it ridiculous that the media slathered the airwaves and front pages with news that Vegas was an easy target for car theft. He likened it to one of the most sacred of secrets: "When you find a good fishing-hole, you don't tell everyone about it. Don't think that these criminals don't have the conversation about how easy it is to get a ride in Vegas. We need to change that conversation to say, 'You better not.' Perception will lower the crime rate."
With his war on gangs, he is going to give new meaning to the slogan, "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas."
Every weekend, Airola says gang members come from southern California to settle beefs with some of Las Vegas' 7,700 known gang members. "That's going to stop," he says.
"If you come here for trouble, I'll keep your car, your gun and you'll go home on a Greyhound bus. Once we get the reputation, it won't be fun for them to come here anymore."
Last spring, Sgt. Henry Prendes was killed in the line of duty by a wanna-be gangsta rapper. Airola doesn't want to outlaw rap concerts like current Sheriff Bill Young is often accused of, following the officer's death. Airola sees a larger problem. For any situation, there are a thousand mistakes that officers can make to put themselves in danger. They need to be the smartest and most flawless people on the streets.
"I look at crimes like that and I think, 'What did I not do for him? How did I contribute to his death?' We need to get into a true-scenario based training program," Airola says.
Scenario-based training is done to keep the cops fresh and deter routine thinking. It is ideally supposed to keep officers sharp and alert. When they come into work, they would not know if they were going to be on the street or in a training scenario. That day would be a real-life situation, one that an officer somewhere in the United States was involved in less than 20 years ago. And most likely, it's a situation that went horribly wrong. But, in Airola's eyes, officers can learn best from mistakes.
Officers go into these scenarios with a video crew and their superiors as judges. Mistakes are expected, but the goal is to run them through scenes until their culture has changed - their thinking has changed. Airola says these types of pop quizzes keep them paying attention, and often they go back to the books and study - never quite sure when they'll either have another test, or worse, a real-life occurrence where their life, or a civilian's life, is in danger.
A solid example where this training could have proved effective was during the Fourth of July weekend recently. You may recall a traffic stop just off the Strip where a young man was playing his car stereo too loud. One officer reached into the driver's window to turn the car off and the man, in a panic, backed up toward another officer. The driver was subsequently shot and killed.
Airola feels that the situation escalated to the point that it became justified for the officer to shoot the driver. He feels that this incident should be played out in a scenario-based training to give officers that chance to see how quickly a situation can escalate to the point of taking a life and the options that may be available to officers other than the actions taken.
"Public perception is everything. And now we live with the scrutiny that Metro cops are a bunch of cowboys," he says.
Because he thinks public perception is everything, he believes that the most pressing issue facing the current Metro administration is customer service - starting on the roads, where the majority of the people come into contact with the police.
It seems the stretch of Swenson Avenue from Tropicana Avenue into the airport is backed up during the late afternoon. Often, bike cops will swarm the area looking for anyone speeding - should there be enough room to do so - or not using a turn signal or committing any other violation. They zip up and down the sidewalks and pull cars over in the travel lanes, causing even more congestion. They add to the problem, and that is not the kind of arrogant picture Airola wants his police force to paint.
"If there's not an injury accident, get the cars out of the travel lanes. There's no need to cause a back up and inconvenience everyone else," he says.
Is there even such a thing as better roads? With an endless array of orange construction cones and blinking construction horses, streets are like a slalom course rather than a thoroughfare. Many of the lanes blocked off rarely get any work accomplished on them. A construction company needs a permit to set up those cones. Guess who issues those permits: Metro. Airola will not issue a permit unless the work will be done in a timely manner and that includes getting those barricades up and out of the streets.
Creating a general idea that the police are helping the community, rather than punishing it, is what Airola is shooting for. "This starts by recruiting police officers from the area they live and letting them patrol there."
Airola's plans to up department morale
Assigning officers to the area's they live is a solution to having a task force enter neighborhoods they're not familiar with. It also encourages accountability on part of the captain of each area command. And for the officers working a beat in their neck of the woods, it creates a sense of pride and ownership. It harkens back to the nostalgic days of yesteryear, the images of children walking on the sidewalk with a ball and bat alongside the officer working his beat.
"These cops need to have an environment that is fun to work in and a place they look forward to going everyday," he says.
Airola believes that modern technology will go a long way to make the police officers' job more efficient and save time. A police officer starts his day by driving to an area command to get his briefing and pick up a vehicle. Airola believes that each officer could easily save 30 minutes per day if he took his vehicle home at night and was able to start his day with a "virtual briefing" that was played out to him in his police car via an on-board computer system. Airola says that 30 minutes saved becomes 30 minutes of additional work that each officer can give to the community.
Now we'll do the math. If you have 700 officers working each shift and they all waste only 30 minutes, you really only have one-third of that shift working at a time.
"So how much time will this give back to the community?" Airola asks. "A lot when you're talking about 250 or more guys working a half hour extra. That's 125 hours. How many more calls could we answer with 125 extra hours to work with?"
Part of the encouragement to motivate a cop is to give him or her resources to do their job. If you tell Airola that you can head his gang-task force, rest assured he's going to demand that within three months you fulfill his gang-related needs. And he'll give that cop whatever he or she needs to accomplish that mission.
"But I need results from you in those three months," Airola said. "I don't want an idea for a solution in three months; I want to see a marked difference, week after week after week.
"And if you find out that you're lacking something, come to me. All I care about is that you get the job done in those three months."
By trusting his officers to accomplish the tasks they take ownership of, Airola instills morale in his department. Some of that countenance may have been picked up when he was on the Morale Committee back in Los Banos, Calif.
"If we just made our department more efficient," Airola wished.
One way he intends to is by pulling in the old dogs. It's not uncommon to create an auxiliary police force. With a few thousand retired police officers in Clark County, Airola wants to create a fully sworn-in position to help alleviate some of the demands on Metro. These retired cops would have a badge and a gun and would work on cold case files, identity theft and other low impact investigations.
Airola's got his work cut out for him. As an outsider who wants to rally the troops, Airola wants to create an entirely new image for police officers in southern Nevada.
But one has to ask - why would he take on this challenge and not stay in the private sector, running a successful business?
"I absolutely know in my heart that I would be good at this," Airola says with an assuring tone. "I mean, I would really be an out-of-the-box sheriff. I would create a better environment for the officers. Better than they've ever had."
He's looking out for the people and the police. The public and the bureaucrats know that when an outsider comes into an organization, he will look for accountability. Airola is certain that's what this department needs.
Airola is indeed a cop
Airola worked as a full-time police officer in California in the early '90s. He was a DRE (Drug Recognition Expert), investigating stolen-vehicle crimes, sex crimes and homicide. Airola was the President of the Police Officers Association and "Advisor of the Year" for the police explorer post. When Airola moved to Las Vegas in 1995, he gave up his full--time police officer position and became a Reserve Deputy Sheriff.
After starting Silver State Helicopters, Airola went back to a refresher police academy in Napa, Calif., so that he could bring his police certification current. He was then was sworn in as a Deputy Sheriff in Merced County in 2004.
It is true that he has not worked for that department in 10 months. Airola was a full-time cop until moving to Vegas in 1995, where he became a reserve police officer. After going back to the academy in 2004, he became the Deputy Sheriff for Merced County.
As it turned out, many of San Bernardino's deputies were living in Nevada as well. An obscure law from the 1800s recently surfaced, stating that California deputies and marshals have to live in the state of California.
When Airola heard about this, he called his sheriff, who informed Airola that the law was an issue they had to address and that it was going in front of the state legislation to be appealed. He assured Airola it wouldn't take long.
"He suggested I take a leave of absence until things blow over," Airola said.
That was in February of this year.
"A couple of months later, I called the sheriff and said, 'Hey, I'm running for sheriff of Clark County.' He asked if he could help with anything. And I asked him about the leave of absence issue. He was sure the legislature was just a few weeks away from settling it."
To avoid the confusion, conflict of interest and any trouble, Airola extended his leave of absence.
While he may not have been walking a beat everyday since first graduating from the academy in 1990, Jerry Airola has been a part of the law-enforcement community, as a sworn deputy sheriff and as a volunteer with Silver State Helicopters.
He has experience as a real cop and he is one hell of a model citizen, willing to donate and help with his services in any way possible. Where was any other businessman or cop from Clark County when Elizabeth Smart went missing? How did the current Metro administration really add a helping hand during the national crisis of Hurricane Katrina? It's not their jurisdiction, sure. But Jerry Airola was there, above the flood waters. And he was there to help a woman reconnect with her son.
He's been outside looking in. But he has the training and the knowledge and the right mind to empower the police agency to become the most respected in the world. LW
