‘The best job in the world’: J.C. Raffety joins Buckhannon’s Wall of Blue

“I got to work on organized crime, which is what I wanted to work on — political corruption. I was damn good at it. I put away a cabinet officer, state senator, House representative, two mafia members — the first convictions of La Cosa Nostra in the Western District of Pennsylvania.”

Those were the words of J.C. Raffety — former FBI special agent, U.S. Marshal and Buckhannon police chief — recounting his career at the annual Webb Grubb Police Officer Recognition Day last month, when city officials gathered to honor the decorated law enforcement officer.

Raffety’s badge is the ninth affixed to the Buckhannon Police Department’s “Wall of Blue” inside the Public Safety Complex, joining eight predecessors, including the two Buckhannon officers who died in the line of duty — Officer Wilbert H. “Webb” Grubb in 1940 and Chief Chesley Mearns in 1921. The annual ceremony, held each Wednesday of Strawberry Festival week to coincide with National Police Week, recognizes officers who have made significant contributions to the department.

Raffety said he had prepared ‘profound words’ to deliver during the induction ceremony. But that all changed when, the day before the event, a woman who knew his family greeted him and told him that he seemed happy in everything he did.

“That caused me to reflect on my happiness,” Raffety said.

Raffety said he had wanted to be an FBI agent since he was 12 or 13. The problem, he realized as a high school senior, was math.

“I hated math, so I wasn’t going to be an accountant, which the bureau required, and I sure as hell couldn’t go to law school,” Raffety said.

So he set his sights on a different path. He took the civil service exam for the Rockford, Illinois, police department — the second-largest city in the state, with about 200 officers — and scored first. They offered him a spot as a police cadet in the spring of his senior year.

Then, one day in March, an announcement came over the school intercom. An FBI agent named Jerry Nolan was visiting to talk about careers as clerks, secretaries and stenographers. About 25 students gathered to listen.

“He said something that changed my life,” Raffety said. “He said, ‘For you boys’ — and I emphasize ‘boys’ — he said, ‘You can become FBI agents, because we have a program where you don’t have to be an accountant, you don’t have to be an attorney. You can work for the bureau for two years as a clerk and have a four-year degree in almost any area that can apply to your job.’ Well, I liked history and political science. That’s all I had to hear.”

Raffety started with the FBI as a clerk straight out of high school, earned his associate degree, returned to Illinois to finish his bachelor’s, then joined the bureau as a special agent in 1970, the start of a 30-year FBI career.

His first office was in Philadelphia. On his second day, his supervisor — a man Raffety said had joined the bureau in 1934, in the gangster era — introduced him to a senior agent named Max Brown, who was supposed to teach him the ropes over the next three months.

In actuality, Raffety rarely saw Brown. But the agent gave him some advice that Raffety said he kept for his entire career.

“He told me as a young agent that the bureau was the best job in the world,” Raffety said. “He said, ‘They give you a badge, they give you a gun, and they tell you to go out and play with your friends.’ And that is the essence of what I was able to enjoy in my 40-plus years in law enforcement.”

Over the years working in organized crime and political corruption, Raffety called out one stop in his career he wished he had skipped.

“I made a mistake of becoming a supervisor in D.C. prior to coming to West Virginia,” Raffety said. “After three years there behind a desk, I realized I didn’t like it.”

He asked to return to the field and joined a three-man office in Clarksburg, where one of his colleagues was soon replaced by an agent named William Chesley Mearns — a relative of the Chief Chesley Mearns whose badge already hangs on the Buckhannon wall. The two worked together until Mearns’s retirement.

Raffety retired from the FBI in 2000. Later that year, he was named chief of the Buckhannon Police Department. Current BPD Chief Matt Gregory, who was a patrolman at the time, said Raffety arrived in the wake of a wrenching loss for the department.

“It was a very distressing time with the City of Buckhannon Police Department,” Gregory said. “We had just lost our police chief a few months prior; [Fred Gaudet] died while in office — a sudden heart attack — and was taken from us at a very early age. He was only 50 years old when he passed. And J.C. came to us to fill the role as chief in Fred’s absence, and did so quite admirably. He brought his experience from the FBI, his leadership, and led us through some pretty trying times.”

Gregory said the standard Raffety set has lasted.

“Through his leadership, he brought a level of professionalism that we still practice to this day,” Gregory said.

After his year as chief, Raffety was appointed by President George W. Bush as U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of West Virginia, serving from 2002 to 2010. He was an Upshur County Commissioner from 2011 to 2016, interim police chief in Elkins in 2017 and U.S. Marshal again from 2018 to 2021. He retired at age 73.

Through all of it, he said, his late wife, Cindy, was at his side. The Raffetys were married for 54 years.

“I tell people she gave me the freedom to do what I loved,” Raffety said. “She gave me the freedom to spend hours on the job, to make those cases. Sometimes she’d say to me, ‘I’m proud of you. I’m proud of you.’”

Cindy Raffety, a longtime math teacher, died May 15, 2024.

Mayor Robbie Skinner said the Raffetys are woven into the fabric of Buckhannon.

“J.C. and Cindy Raffety watched a lot of kids grow up in Buckhannon,” Skinner said. “Cindy had them in school, and J.C. tried to keep them out of trouble and off the streets here in Buckhannon.”

Skinner described Raffety as a fixture across the community at both the city and county levels.

“J.C., we owe you a tremendous debt of gratitude for everything you’ve done for our community over the course of the last 30 or 40 years that you’ve served it with the utmost honor and respect,” Skinner said.

Magistrate Mark Davis, who opened the ceremony with the invocation, said he had watched Raffety from the start of his own law enforcement career and learned much from him. He told a story he said captured the kind of man Raffety is.

Davis said he had been trying for some time to get into a specific FBI training school. When he finally called, the class was full, and no others were coming up soon. He was on his way out of the courthouse to head out on patrol when he crossed paths with Raffety in the hallway. Raffety was a county commissioner at the time.

“He said, ‘How’s your day going?’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve been better,’” Davis said. “I said, ‘I just can’t get into the FBI school that I’ve been trying to get into.’ And he said, ‘You really want this?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, I do. I’ve wanted this for some time.’ And he said, ‘Well, don’t give up.’”

A day or two later, Davis said, the phone rang.

“He called me, and he said, ‘You’re in,’” Davis said. “I got into that FBI class and successfully completed that, which allowed me to become an expert in a particular field of investigation in my career. That opened up doors for me to be a presenter and a speaker in that field of expertise on a state and national level. Sir, I’m grateful to you for that. That phone call made the whole difference.”

Accepting the plaque from Gregory, Raffety said the honor belonged to more than just him.

“There are far more significant individuals in this department, past and present, who far more deserve this honor,” he said. “But I accept it on behalf of all of the officers and agents and marshals who strive to make our lives better.”

The thin blue line, mentioned in the mayor’s proclamation, is often invoked by politicians and others, he said, but it is something law enforcement carries with it every day on the job.

“No amount of salary, no amount of recognition will change that we are, as they say in Shakespeare, a band of brothers — and sisters now, because we have female agents, and I was blessed to work with one of the best,” Raffety said.

Pressed, in his own mind, on why he had been so happy, Raffety kept returning to the work and the people in it. The cases in organized crime and political corruption he had chased since he was a boy. The badge and the gun that Max Brown had promised would feel like going out to play with friends. The wife who, for 54 years, gave him the freedom to do it. And, after her death, a second Cindy, whom he met through Chapel Hill United Methodist Church.

“I’ve been blessed,” Raffety said. “Doubly blessed.”