Former Anne Arundel sheriff teams up with an ex-drug dealer for tell-all book

Billy Joe Nichols. The name alone made the hair on Ron Bateman’s neck stand up.

The same Billy Joe Nichols he’d sent to prison decades ago as an undercover drug cop? The hulking former boxer who put fear in those who crossed him?

What did he want now, after all these years?

Nichols, it turned out, wanted to write a book about the case with Bateman, who had gone on to become Anne Arundel County’s sheriff.

The unlikely duo this month published “Covert Underworlds,” which features cross-cutting narratives describing their parallel lives growing up in northern Anne Arundel County.

“Two men. Two worlds. One explosive truth,” the book’s cover blares.

Their stories intersected when Bateman, as a young narcotics detective, busted fledgling kingpin Nichols in what the DEA called “the largest cocaine and cash seizure in Maryland’s history.”

They’re billing it as the first book written by a criminal and the cop who busted them.

“It was never on my radar to do this,” Bateman said in an interview.

The cover features shirtless photos of both men in their younger years. Bateman said it’s a metaphor for them “baring all,” but it also seems to fit the tenor of the times in which the story is set. The book operates as a time capsule from the 1980s and a behind-the-scenes account of law enforcement and drug culture in working-class Pasadena.

Bateman went on to serve 23 years in the Anne Arundel County Police Department before becoming the county’s elected sheriff from 2006 to 2018. Nichols stopped dealing and now works at the Port of Baltimore.

Sitting at the Double T Diner on Mountain Road in Pasadena, the two men now consider each other good friends. Bateman, 65, who took up writing as a post-law enforcement career, said he interviewed Nichols, 67, for hours at a time.

“I knew my side, but I didn’t know his side, and so the process was a lot of interviews,” Bateman said.

The son of a Maryland state trooper, Bateman became an Anne Arundel County Police cadet as a teenager and quickly found himself doing undercover work, first working high schools while posing as a student, and later hanging out in jeans and an AC/DC shirt while shooting pool at Pasadena’s since-closed Desert Lounge, trying to infiltrate networks.

Yearning for his father’s attention, Nichols, with his powerful 6-foot-4, 300-pound frame, was drawn to boxing and martial arts.

He was also motivated to earn money, and showed an entrepreneurial knack by studying up on the best marijuana-growing methods at the University of Maryland library and getting tips from botany students. His popular strains of marijuana and hash oil took the local drug market by storm, piling up so much cash that he had to hide it in PVC pipes in the backyard.

Soon enough, cocaine, the signature drug of the ’80s that he calls “butter,” exploded.

“The word was out that I had killer butter, better than any other,” Nichols writes in the book. He branched out into Baltimore’s Cherry Hill and most of the city’s West Side while helping to supply the city’s red-light district, known as The Block, and “many big name politicians and many of the celebrities who came into Baltimore.”

Nichols said he has a million stories to tell — “Billy Joe stories,” as his friends call them — but Bateman keeps the characters and tales tight.

Bateman writes of his first encounter with Nichols, who intimidated him.

“Billy Joe deliberately stood too close to me. ... I could sense he was looking me over, trying to get a read on me.” Nichols recalled asking Bateman “a ton of questions.”

“I controlled all the butter in there and I knew most everyone, except for the new guy.”

Some of the book’s anecdotes strain credulity. Bateman writes that while in hot pursuit of a suspect, he commandeered a nearby car from underage drinkers and chugged one of their beers. It’s all true, Bateman says, and he also admits to lying in a police report, leaving out how he let go a drunk driver who was later involved in a crash.

Adopting an undercover persona of “Ronnie Michaels” in a community where he grew up brought extreme stress. But when he and his fellow officers executed search warrants and found drugs and cash, it all felt worth it.

“It was the mother lode we worked so hard for, prayed for, and dreamed of,” Bateman writes. During Nichols’ arrest, Bateman almost shot the kingpin, who was armed and believed he was being robbed. Nichols expressed relief that it turned out to be the cops.

Through the book-writing process, Nichols said Bateman’s career-defining case only scratched the surface of the drug operation, which Nichols said had ties to the Medellín cartel.

“He would have got 25 years because of the amount of coke that he was getting weekly,” Bateman said.

Nichols’ criminal activity ended when he was sentenced to five years in federal prison in 1984. The time since — Nichols starting over and Bateman rising through the law enforcement ranks — is unaddressed in the book, raising the possibility that the cop-and-convict duo might publish a sequel.

They hope the story gets the Hollywood treatment. Nichols said he’d use part of any proceeds to fund a community center in Pasadena.

“I started going really kind of wild probably about sixth and seventh grade, and by eighth grade I was long gone,” he said.

“So I want people, I want parents and friends and whomever to realize the signs when they see it that this can happen. ... I didn’t wake up one day and decide I want to be a gangster.”