This story appears in the Sept. 26, 2016, issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. To subscribe, click here.
The first thing Robert Swift remembers is the police loudspeaker. Though, in his haze, he wondered if he’d dreamed it. Then it blared again, and he envisioned the bomb squad and the rifles and he knew what awaited.
Swift wasn’t the target at 6 a.m. that Saturday, in October 2014, when a SWAT team descended on a one-story house in Kirkland, a suburb northeast of Seattle. No, Trygve (Trigg) Bjorkstam was the one dealing the heroin and meth, the one who’d attracted the junkies and whores to the four-bedroom house on a leafy street, less than a block from an elementary school.