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GREENSBORO - "It's amazing what I get paid for," the deputy chief of police said. "Isn't it?"

The comment, included in two hours of audio the City Council released Tuesday, came at the end of a conversation about how a detective was to handle a problem that then Chief David Wray had with a neighbor.

The detective, Scott Sanders, is at the center of a scandal over how Wray and his top commander used Special Intelligence. The unit, which reported directly to then Deputy Chief Randall Brady, was accused of trying to entrap fellow officers.

After the unit was shut down in 2006, investigators found "hundreds and hundreds of hours" of secretly recorded conversations on Sanders' computer drive, city officials said.

So far, the public has heard only seven minutes of Sanders' tape, with the State Bureau of Investigation blocking further releases pending its criminal investigation, a special prosecutor said in an affidavit last week.

But that seven-minute conversation, about a seemingly obscure incident between Wray and a neighbor at his condo, gave city investigators an unsettling view of the chain of command under the former chief, who resigned a year ago.

"As one investigative officer told me," City Manager Mitchell Johnson said last week, "this is almost like a blueprint of how these guys did business."

In hindsight, city officials think that "blueprint" - an alleged pattern of using deception and unsound methods to solve problems - was the key to what went wrong in the department under Wray.

In the case of Wray's next-door neighbor on Banking Street , the problem was personal. The woman, who has a history of psychological problems, had called the FBI to make an outlandish accusation against Wray.

On the recording, Brady tells the detective to ride out to the neighborhood and seek to have the woman evicted, even if, Brady says, "we have to do something to make it look like she's done something."

"I mean, I hate to say that, but she needs to be moved on," Brady tells Sanders. "He (Wray) don't need this crap."

Throughout the conversation, Brady reminds Sanders, "The chief has nothing to do with this." That much remains unclear, because at one point in the conversation, Brady walks away from the hidden microphone, opens the door and asks someone in the next room:

"Give me that address. What's your address?"

But as with a series of other revelations of questionable tactics Sanders used on Brady's orders, city officials contend that Wray either knew what was being planned or turned a blind eye.

"He either knew about it and condoned it, or he didn't know about it and didn't want to look," said Johnson, Wray's former boss. "Those are the two possibilities."

That question hovers over the allegations that precipitated Wray's resignation under pressure last year:

* That numerous defendants facing jail time were shown photos of black officers and asked to provide any incriminating information in exchange for more lenient treatment;

* That a known con artist was pressured by Sanders into repeatedly contacting select black officers and trying to entice them to take bribes or, in one instance, buy stolen TVs.

* That Sanders spent between 18 months and two years investigating Lt. James Hinson's 1997 bachelor party and suspected connections to strippers and drug dealers, even after Internal Affairs had investigated the same allegations and determined they were without merit.

Because of the covert nature of the Special Intelligence investigations, Sanders' assignments from Brady were outside the chain of command and apparently not documented in written reports.

But with the discovery of the audio recordings, the unit's own undercover methods became the very device that brought its activities to light - and into the living rooms of Channel 13 viewers who watched Tuesday night's City Council meeting.

Why Sanders recorded his conversations is unclear. The lawyer who represents both Sanders and Brady would not comment on the idea last week, and Wray's lawyer wrote in the News & Record that the chief was not aware Sanders was recording his superiors.

But internal investigators hired by the city suggested, in questioning Brady, that Sanders taped conversations in order to protect himself from being "a scapegoat."

One investigator, Michael Longmire, tells Brady in a taped interrogation released Tuesday that members of the department were so concerned about Sanders' activities that they warned him to be careful.

" ‘Scooter, this is so unusual,' " Longmire quoted the officers as telling Sanders, " ‘you know, so unusual for a detective to have the authority of the deputy chief, that you need to be careful and dot all your i's and cross all your t's, because if something goes wrong, you're going to be the fall guy. ' "

What first went wrong for Special Intelligence would be Hinson's discovery of a "bird-dog" tracker on his cruiser when he was on duty in early June 2005.

The series of events following that miscue - including the allegation that a Special Intelligence operative then put Hinson's wife under surveillance - were likened by outside investigators to a comedy of errors, according to a transcript released last week.

"If this was in Lizard Lick, North Carolina, as a three-man police department with a couple of inexperienced folks, it'd make sense or you'd understand," Longmire said to Brady.

But even after the bird-dog story went public, it would be months before city leaders heeded multiple warnings from within and outside the force about looming problems in the department.

City officials now await a decision by a special prosecutor on whether to pursue a criminal case against any of the officers caught up in the scandal. SBI agents spent more than 1,500 hours on the investigation, Johnson said, and any decision on the part of the special prosecutor is not expected until April at the earliest.

In the days after Wray's resignation, city leaders stated they would wait to hire a new chief until the investigations of the former administration were concluded. That decision changed in the fall as the SBI showed no signs of bringing the investigation to a close. It now appears to Johnson that the police department will have its new chief before the matter sees a courtroom, if at all.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lahearn@news-record.com

Contact Eric J.S. Townsend at 373-7008 or etownsend@news-record.com