Lifestyle Check

A gay ex-cop buys a ranch in Gold Country and finds his own version of Brokeback Mountain

A A A Comments (0) By Ron Russell Wednesday, May 3 2006

Another time, Cantamout, who was a fire department paramedic before joining SFPD, was credited with saving the life of a stabbing victim in a McDonald's restaurant in the Haight by staunching the man's bleeding until paramedics could get there.

He made a name for himself early in his SFPD career by requesting to be assigned to violence-prone Bayview-Hunters Point, an assignment that other officers preferred to skip. He credits his mustache with helping to build bridges with Bayview gang members. In five years there, he says, he never shot anyone and there was never an excessive use of force complaint filed against him.

Not wanted in Calaveras County: Retired SFPD officer Ken Cantamout.

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Ironically, the mustache later got him in hot water with the police brass and he went to court to contest a departmental order that he shave it off. But shortly afterward he went on disability leave after being injured in a car accident while chasing a felon. When he returned, he was assigned to the narcotics squad, whose plainclothes officers are subject to the same dress and grooming requirements of uniform personnel, and the mustache issue became moot.

"I told the investigator basically that Ken was an exemplary cop," says a former San Francisco police colleague, who asked not to be identified. "In my opinion, there's nothing else a person could conclude about him."

Vicky Chew, the background investigator, is a former Calaveras County sheriff's employee turned private investigator with whom the sheriff's department subcontracts to do its background investigations. Her husband, Jack Chew, another sheriff's department alum, heads the reserve force to which Cantamout applied. Vickie Chew declined to discuss the Cantamout case, citing the lawsuit. Jack Chew did not respond to an interview request.

One person who shares Cantamout's suspicions about the way the sheriff's department handled the matter is Jerry Cadot, from Out of the Motherlode, a gay outreach group in Calaveras County. "On the surface, his allegations don't surprise me," Cadot says, adding that there are no openly gay officers in the Calaveras County sheriff's department. "If you're gay over here, you learn to stay invisible unless you like being harassed and ostracized."