“I don’t know (why), that was just my requirement.” “If there were no children, then I wouldn’t do the DUI sting,” Butler said. It was a scam that Butler orchestrated, or at least attempted, about a dozen times starting in 2007, he said, for women who wanted the father of their children arrested for leverage in divorce and child custody proceedings.
Tanabe, 50, of Alamo, is on trial in federal court on seven extortion and conspiracy charges for allegedly taking the cocaine and a Glock pistol from Butler as a bribe for participating in three “dirty DUI” arrests in late 2010 and early 2011, including Bauldry’s. Using his police laptop, Tanabe pulled up the preliminary result of Bauldry’s breath test a few days earlier: a 0.13 blood-alcohol level, over the legal limit, Butler said. “He was working as a deputy sheriff, and I thought he was no longer ingesting cocaine,” Butler said before describing passing the drugs off to Tanabe as he sat in his Danville police patrol car parked in the Lunardi’s market lot.
On the witness stand wearing red prison scrubs, Christopher Butler said he was surprised when Tanabe asked for 3.5 grams of cocaine, colloquially called an 8-Ball, instead of the $200 he originally wanted in exchange for facilitating the arrest of Oakland software executive David Lane Bauldry in November 2010. SAN FRANCISCO - An incarcerated Concord private investigator at the center of a 2011 police-corruption scandal testified Monday that former Contra Costa County Sheriff’s deputy Stephen Tanabe was on patrol for the town of Danville the night he paid him in cocaine to help set up men for drunken-driving arrests. Concord PI testifies to paying Danville officer with cocaine in ‘dirty DUI’ scam – East Bay Times