Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The sheriff of Davidson County, N.C., is a big-screen lawman for a TV nation.
Mar 20, 2000 | The jail in Davidson County, N.C., is pink.
That's the first thing anyone will ever tell you about Sheriff Gerald K. Hege (pronounced hayg-ee). They will tell you that, after winning the 1994 sheriff's election by 261 votes, the 6-foot-3, 190-pound Hege strode laconically through the dark Davidson County jail hallways in his soon-to-be-trademark fashion, with his right hand loosely gripping his soon-to-be-trademark mirrored sunglasses, answering each "How are you, sheriff?" with his soon-to-be-trademark, "Wide open," critiquing each dirty cell, surveying each cobwebbed corner.
Imagining what it would all look like in bright pink.
Despite the color most associated with him, Gerald Hege is known worldwide as "the toughest sheriff in America." As self-imposed as this moniker may be, it has caught on fast. Last month in a ratings stunt, Deborah Norville from TV's "Inside Edition" spent a week inside Hege's famous jail.
"I think she was sent down here a little bit to slam me and my style and approach. But she stated in the show, 'Hey, he's a tough guy, but he's a fair shooter.' And she hung in there, she's tough, she wasn't given no slack at all," says Hege. Barely grinning, he adds, "I don't think she took a bath for five days."
If you missed Norville's dramatic impoundment, you might have caught Hege on "Larry King Live," "Today," "America's Most Wanted," Comedy Central or countless European stations, inevitably uttering incredible sound bites illustrating his very, very tough-on-crime stance. "Look, lady, you're a scum bag," said a typically casual Hege to an ex-con on the Court TV program "Pros and Cons." "You're a beauty queen little rich girl who feels like you shouldn't have gone to prison."
Last year, Court TV gave frequent guest Hege his own weekly show. You can catch this small-town sheriff interviewing his toughest inmates from inside his pink vault every Thursday night on "Live From Cell Block F."
"They bring in a full Hollywood film crew, five cameras, robotic cameras, 50 lights, 17 people," says Hege in his slow, Southern drawl, as he reclines in his small cluttered office. An impressive number of Court TV videotapes are stacked to his right and, to his left, the robes of the eight men he convinced to retire from the local Ku Klux Klan hang from hooks along with a sign reading: "We Quit! 8/14/98 The Ex-Boys in the Hood." Several permanent movie lights aim down at Hege from his ceiling, prepared to add a bright key light or soft backlight to any interview.
"They try to treat me like a TV guy, directors and producers in my ear telling me all this Hollywood crap. But I don't let them put make-up on me. Hey -- I'm a man."
Proving exactly how much of a man seems to be Hege's main mission in life. In pursuit of this mission, he has entertained and infuriated people all across America. His extreme personality and exhilarating anecdotes -- whether or not 100 percent true -- are throwbacks to a bygone masculine ideal that is somehow both absurd and appealing. Born in rural Davidson County in 1948, Hege grew up beneath the hot Carolina sun pulling tobacco leaves under the strict guidance of male kinfolk. "I was raised you do something wrong, you get a whippin' for it," Hege says.
After high school, he married Amy, whom he had been dating since the age of 12. It's a day he's not likely to forget. "I got married, I got a speeding ticket, two flat tires and my draft notice all in one day -- August 31, 1968."
In Vietnam, his nickname of "Local" -- as in "local boy" -- soon changed to "Loco." When things "got heavy," as Hege puts it, he was a leader. "I figured that if I was going to go down, I was going to go down blazin'."
"Not a day goes by that I don't think about Vietnam," he adds. "You had to kill people, women, children, watch people get blown away, find people who had been mutilated, sleepin' with snakes and leeches eatin' on your body, 18- to 19-pound rats, the thought of dying every second. It made me appreciate the human being as a person."
So, when his tour of duty ended, Hege came back to Davidson County. That was on a Wednesday. On Thursday, he was a sheriff's deputy.
It didn't last long. "I got into a fight with some prisoners who were trying to smuggle drugs into the jail. I took on four and kicked a couple of 'em's butt, and the sheriff didn't like it. I just said, 'I'll leave, but I'll come back one day. And when I come back, I'll be sheriff.'" Hege left, and became a railroad worker. That was in 1974.
Exactly 20 years later, literally within minutes of taking the oath of office, Hege -- Sheriff Hege, thank you very much -- began his personal crusade to bring moral order back to Davidson County. And he planned on doing things the old way.
The "old way," for anyone not familiar with it, involves lots of rules, lots of consequences, lots of change and the occasional serious butt-kicking.
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