Woman recruited by Roger Golubski at age 12: ‘The system still goes on’
A Kansas City, Kansas, woman I’ve been talking to for months — someone I know the FBI wants to interview, too — says she went to work for former KCK police detective Roger Golubski when she was only 12 years old. And she remained in his employ — under his control, really — for decades.
Golubski’s lawyer, Morgan Roach, did not respond to a request to respond to this woman’s many serious allegations.
She and Golubski met right after her mother had died, when he answered a call that a bunch of kids had broken into a building. He let her go, she says, in that he didn’t bring her down to the police station that day, or ever. But he never let her go in a larger sense, and in return for that “favor” drew her into the drug business.
A few years later, in what sounds like a particularly sordid Ponzi scheme, she began to be rewarded for bringing in other girls her age, who were paid for dancing and for sex at parties for important people, where one prominent KCK official liked to put out his cigar on girls’ skin.
One day, she took me on a tour of drug and trafficking houses, and pointed out Golubski’s late mother’s former home on Ella Avenue. That’s where, before high school started most mornings, she and those she’d recruited to work for Golubski would go for breakfast.
Instead of seeing the detective as their tormentor, she said, they saw him as someone who was helping them out by giving them money they could then bring home to their own mothers.
When I told her I thought that sounded like Hamas handing out social services while drafting innocents into a terror organization, she said I would never understand. “I saw it as feeding my brothers and sisters. I brought girls to him,” yes, but as a result, some of them “are people who own their own businesses today.”
‘That man is on the bottom of the totem pole’
Did any of her friends ever complain that she had drawn them into a life of pain and degradation? “No, they were helping their mamas.”
Over the years, though, it’s also true that “a lot of these women” who worked for Golubski “came up missing.”
Did Golubski himself kill them? “Some,” she said. “He was told to,” because “you can’t keep them too long” or “they want to get off drugs and have more of a life. When they threatened to leave, or talk, that’s what happened.”
Meanwhile, “you make sure you have enough on them to be able to run them.” They were made to do as they were told, she said, because “if it’s my mama or your mama, it’s going to be your mama.”
Some of those who went missing, however, had nothing to do with Golubski themselves, but were killed to send a message to a brother or father or boyfriend who wasn’t doing as he was told. “You don’t break the horse; you break everyone around the horse.”
When she finally left this life, four years ago, because of something one of her children had said, she didn’t exactly give two weeks’ notice. “I just stopped answering the phone, and you don’t do that.” Right after that, she was shot, not by him, but in a hit that obviously did not succeed.
Yet when I first met her, she was still defending Golubski, who has been accused of raping and extorting dozens of mostly Black women. The FBI believes him directly responsible for at least one murder.
‘He wanted to be a priest, but he had sinned’
“A lot of people are looking at one person, but that man is on the bottom of the totem pole,” she told me back then. He “wanted out a long time ago. He did a lot wrong, but he never wanted to be in police” in the first place. “He wanted to be a priest, but he had sinned.”
In a deposition just over a year ago, one of the few things Golubski said other than that he was invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination was that he had wanted to become a priest, and had spent four years in a Catholic seminary.
Golubski does feel guilty about the life he’s led, she said, and over the years would sometimes dress as a priest, light candles and pray at a makeshift altar. To punish himself, “he still lays in the basement on a twin bed.”
But no, at least until lately, she said, he did not worry about being arrested. Why would he, she asked, when “so many people who’ve said something have been ignored” and disbelieved.
“He said multiple times that if I go down, you all go down.”
In the time I’ve known her, she’s begun to come to terms with what he is, and what he dragged her into when she was still a kid. Sometimes, she’s overcome with remorse, at one point asking me, “Am I any better than he is?”
Answer: There is no comparison between a child who was preyed upon when she had no options and the grown man who preyed on her because he could.
She does not believe there will ever be justice for any of the survivors of the system he was only part of.
And no, she said, he’s not out of the business, even now: “The system still goes on.”
Since she stopped working for him and the cartel that still controls so much and so many in Wyandotte County, she said, there has been more than one attempt on her life.
To talk to the FBI, whose agents have been looking at Golubski and corruption in the KCKPD on and off since the 1980s, she’d need to feel they’re serious, rather than on the wrong side of this themselves, just as she used to be.
Nothing that’s happened so far has convinced her that’s the case.
This story was originally published April 24, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
