On report date to Lamar’s football camp in August of 1965, Bill Lucas took one look around and figured he might be in a tad over his head. A freshman from Navasota, Lucas stood 5 feet 8 and weighed 136 pounds.
Lucas’ first question to Bobby Gunn centered on whether Lamar’s athletic trainer could suggest any weight-inducing or strength-enhancing supplements he might take to enable him to catch up—so to speak—with his new and larger teammates.
“Mother Goose, as everyone called Bobby because he took care of all of us like we were his own children, glared back at me with those squinty eyes of his, and his face started getting redder than I could imagine,” said Lucas while recalling that scene from more than 40 years ago. “He told me that if I would just eat like a madman and work like a madman, I would be able to do whatever I wanted to do.”
Gunn shot straight with his advice. Not only did Lucas adopt a madman attitude in excelling in football and track and field at Lamar during the next four years, but he also went on to a successful professional career much more magnified by his diverse talents.
While he spent more than 30 years in law-enforcement, Lucas has also dabbled in such madman roles as rodeo clown and movie stuntman. Today, he is helping devise Texas’ homeland security plans. His favorite hobby these days is one of the state’s more dangerous sports—javelina-hunting.
So, it should be no surprise that the now-59-year-old Lucas spent much of his law enforcement career staring danger in the face as an undercover narcotics agent, once surviving hours of intense questioning from suspicious drug dealers while a pistol was held to his head. In somewhat less intense times, he put in stints as a Department of Public Safety patrolman, bodyguard to Texas Govs. Bill Clements and Mark White and chief of police back home in Navasota.
Lucas, who eventually completed his degree in criminal justice at Sam Houston State, got his first stab at undercover work while still a Lamar student in 1970.
“A football player told me that a man had approached him about working for him in the summertime growing marijuana in the Brazos River bottom,” recalled Lucas. “The man told the player that he could make lots of money.
“I immediately told the player that he could waste his athletic career and maybe even his life by doing something stupid like that. I also called people within the Beaumont PoliceDepartment and informed them.”
Within days, Lucas was re-contacted by the Beaumont Police Department, and the wheels were put into motion to give him speed-up training on becoming an undercover operative.
“Going undercover is nothing like having an eight-hour-a-day job,” said Lucas. “You don’t have weekends off; you can’t go home; you can’t be with your friends; you can’t tell a soul what you’re involved in. Once, I spent almost three days while getting only about three hours of sleep. I had to arrange late-night meetings in remote areas such as oilfields to deliver evidence and give reports to my supervisors, and I had to make dead certain that I was not being followed.
“When you go undercover pretending to be a user to get closer to your targets, you have to simulate taking drugs, but you can’t let yourself get under the affect of those drugs. One slipup and you could get killed.”
Such a slipup occurred after Lucas got deeply undercover on his first assignment.
“One of the dealers I was getting close to found out from a secretary friend of his that she thought I had some connection to the Beaumont Police Department,” said Lucas. “That dealer and another one had me in a chair for about four or five hours that night, questioning me with a gun stuck to the side of my head.
“I finally convinced them that I was a user and not a cop, and I bought more drugs from them that night. Later, I sent all of them to the penitentiary for a long, long time.”
No one outside of law enforcement, Lucas says, can fathom what it takes and what it’s like to be an undercover agent.
“Being a narcotics agent and going deep, deep undercover are two totally different games,” said Lucas. “People can’t imagine the pressure and the stress. Sometimes it takes months and months down there to get your work done and get enough goods to lead to successful prosecutions and convictions.
“The reward comes in being able to get the bad guys off the streets, but the downside is the toll it takes on an individual. First, you have to be single. No one married would put a family through what I had to go through in those days.
“Your life depends on your ability to act. If you don’t get it right, you may be dead. It’s not like you’re going to get a second chance to read your lines. You have to stay 10 steps ahead of those guys, or one day you may step out of your house and one of them may blow you down, or you may crank up your car and it’ll blow up on you. You’re looking over your shoulder every waking minute.
“The guys who are serious drug dealers know they’re going to get 15 (years) or 20-to-life if they get caught, so if they get paranoid about me, they won’t think twice about killing me. I may be the only man who can testify against them, and they know dead men can’t tell tales.”
The almost certain possibility of that happening precipitated Lucas’ sudden exit from undercover work.
“One day, an informant called the DPS narcotics office in Houston and told them some drug dealers were getting ready to kill Bill Lucas,” said Lucas. “This was before cell-phone times, but as soon as the Houston office could get word to me, my instructions were to get out and get out now.
“That’s exactly what I did.”
Lucas’ forced leave of absence from the TDPS in the mid-1970s led him to Hawaii, where he worked first for an old Navasota friend as an assistant manager at a steak-and-lobster restaurant and later for a delivery service. Eventually, Lucas caught on as a stuntman for Universal Studios, which had a crew in Hawaii to film The Castaway Cowboy, starring James Garner, Vera Miles and Robert Culp.
“I was mainly diving off waterfalls and falling off horses,” laughed Lucas. “I remember writing home once telling my parents it was the first time I ever got paid for falling off a horse instead of staying on one.
“The main thing, though, was that I got to see how a Hollywood studio worked from the inside out, and it was a wonderful experience. I also met Spencer Tracy’s personal stuntman — Ervin Neal — and later spent time with him in Los Angeles. The Hollywood scene was beautiful and wonderful, and so, too, were the people. He (Neal) encouraged me to stay involved in movies, but I decided it was about time to get back to Texas.”
Long before Lucas earned a few bucks for falling off horses, he picked up even fewer by fighting off horses and bulls while working as a rodeo clown.
“I started clowning at small rodeos when I was about 15 and continued doing it into my mid-20s,” said Lucas. “It was a way to get a little spending money.”
While making as little as $30 per performance and never more than $150, it was also a way for Lucas to get a few broken ribs, to get trampled, to get a broken sternum, to get slammed into a fence and to get several concussions.
“I loved every minute of it,” grinned Lucas with a mischievous glint in his eyes. “I would’ve done it forever if I could’ve made some decent money doing it. I finally came to the realization, though, that what was a broken-down, 45-year-old rodeo clown going to do for money?”
Not long after Lucas rejoined the DPS as a patrolman, he applied for a position as bodyguard for the Texas governor.
“In my interview, I told them I figured it would be right down my alley since I had fought bulls off people for a living,” said Lucas. “All I would be doing as a bodyguard was the same thing – protecting people.”
In 1979, the DPS reassigned Lucas to a governor’s bodyguard position, and he served in it for 12 years during Clements’ two terms and White’s one.
“I got to know the Clements family and the White family very well, and the entire experience was wonderful,” said Lucas.
“Just like in undercover work, you have to constantly be prepared and be on your toes, but there are also many upsides to the job. I got to meet so many of the nation’s top political leaders. I spent an hour with Henry Kissinger one day while the governor was detained in an important meeting.”
After Ann Richards was inaugurated as Texas governor in 1991, Lucas was reassigned by the DPS to its warrants division in the Houston region, and he eventually returned to his Grimes County home as a patrolman in 1996. A little more than a year later, however, Lucas’ career took another turn when he became Navasota’s chief of police.
“When I met with the townspeople about possibly coming to work for them, I told them the town meant more to me than a stepping stone to a bigger place,” said Lucas. “I loved my hometown, and I wanted to work hard to help make it a better place for people to live.
“I loved the police work, but the downside to it was the politics that are a part of it. The saddest part was that I knew more people in the cemeteries than I knew in the town. That’s a part of growing older in a small town that is forever changing.”
In the five years since he left the Navasota Police Department, Lucas has concentrated on helping protect all of the state’s citizens in his position with the National Response and Rescue Training Center for Texas.
“We do everything from firefighting training to disaster training, to disaster-emergency training, to helping communities set up plans for hurricane evacuations, terrorist oriented attacks or things like that,” said Lucas. “I love it because I get to work with so many intelligent and interesting people throughout the state. At the same time, I get to visit with some of my old law enforcement friends.
“My primary focus is on the law enforcement measures that will need to be enacted in the event of any of these disasters or emergencies. We are there to help the people of Texas in any way we can.
“When I first went into law enforcement, I did so with the attitude that if I wasn’t in it to help people, I was in the wrong business. That’s still my attitude today.”
