By Marty Toohey
Austin American-Statesman
Killeen SWAT team and the new Peacekeeper vehicle. (Photo: Killeen Police Department) |
AUSTIN, Texas — This summer, the police department in Maine’s largest city loaded an aging assault vehicle onto the back of a flatbed truck and hauled it 2,100 miles to Central Texas. Police officials in Portland had heard about a guy who might be able to get the vehicle working again.
His name is Wayne Brown , and over two-plus decades working in an East Austin garage, he had established a national reputation for turning the Jeeps and BMWs of the wealthy and the worried into armored vehicles. But when the FBI began asking Brown to stop after Sept. 11, 2001 - he says he can understand the government’s concern - he started a new type of work, one that caught Portland’s attention. Brown is rehabilitating a type of police assault vehicle called a Peacekeeper.
“I’d rather be working for the police,” Brown said.
The Peacekeeper was created by the Cadillac-Gage Corp. in the early 1980s for the Air Force, which bought almost 600 of the vehicles. The company basically made the Peacekeeper by cutting away the body of a Dodge Charger truck and replacing it with an armored cab. In the late 1980s, the Air Force gave away almost all of them to law enforcement agencies across the country, including the police departments in Austin and Round Rock and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
By the early 2000s, one given to the Killeen Police Department was worn out.
Around this time, Brown was looking for a career change.
Trained by his father as a welder in San Antonio, Brown moved to Austin after graduating from high school. In a 1991 demonstration that made local news, Brown arranged for an Austin police officer to shoot up a Jeep that he had modified for a New York client. Neither a .308 sniper rifle nor an AK-47 fired at close range could penetrate the doors or windows. Later, Brown’s work was featured on the Discovery Channel.
“Nothing is bulletproof,” Brown said recently, pointing to that Jeep door, which he kept, “but this will stop most things.”
Brown says that after 9/11, the FBI told him to stop armoring civilian vehicles because of concerns that they could fall into the hands of people who threatened national security.
“I don’t think I’ve ever done one for a questionable” customer, Brown said, “but you just don’t know for certain.”
In early 2003, the Killeen Police Department offered an intriguing change: Take a brand-new, heavy-duty Charger, cut away the body, graft the body of the old Peacekeeper onto the truck chassis and make the contraption work.
“To the best of our knowledge, this type of conversion has never been attempted or done,” Killeen police officials wrote in a 2004 letter to Brown.
Killeen picked it up in September 2003. The department’s SWAT team uses it.
In 2006 , Brown did a nearly identical job for the Rochester, Minn., police department.
The U.S. Defense Department lists the replacement cost of a Peacekeeper at about $230,000 , but Brown says he can rebuild one for between $125,000 and $175,000 .
Now living on a scrubby plot outside New Braunfels, working on a makeshift outdoor pad near his house, Brown is almost done grinding, measuring, cutting, welding and painting Portland’s Peacekeeper. It’s scheduled to head north this month.
Copyright 2009 Austin American-Statesman