Rocky Mountain
By Scott Walter
Bob Coté is a one-man alternative to the welfare state. Take one part Florence Nightingale, add three parts John Wayne, and one part cowboy poet, and you’ve got a 6-foot-3 former Golden Gloves boxer who crashed into an alcoholic gutter in 1983, had an epiphany about his wasted life on Denver’s Skid Row, poured out his vodka bottle, and spent the two decades since running a shelter that turns homeless drunks and junkies into productive citizens—with no help from the federal nanny state he loudly accuses of killing addicts “on the installment plan.”
His shelter or, better put, rehabilitation center has a chapel, a medical clinic, a weight room, cooking facilities, a GED classroom, a computer lab, and three businesses that provide jobs for the men and a large chunk of his budget. Its name is Step 13. “Everybody thinks it’s named after the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, but it’s actually because of Jesus and the 12 apostles and the original 13 colonies—God and country.” After all, Coté adds, “only in America” could a recovering alcoholic “have this vision in his mind, and do it.”
The alternative to God and country, as Coté sees it, is the welfare state, an enemy on whom he’s landed some telling blows. His tireless attacks on Social Security disability payments to addicts were instrumental in moving Congress to change the law in 1996, so that merely being a drunk or junkie no longer qualifies you for hundreds of monthly tax dollars until your untimely demise. At the showdown on Capitol Hill, Sheriff Coté didn’t flinch when the black hats tried to run him out of town.
“Congressman Joe Kennedy said, ‘Mr. Coté, don’t tell me about drugs and alcohol. I know all about the harms. I lost a brother to a heroin overdose.’”
Coté answered, “Look, Congressman, I’ll agree the Kennedys know a lot about drugs and alcohol, but I’m here to tell ya that this government plan is killing people, and you need to put a stop to it.”
“His face got real red, and he just went behind the curtain and took off. Then Maxine Waters picked up his anthem, said she was raised in the projects and was on welfare, then she started talking about the ‘triage of the modality.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what “triage of the modality” is. All I know is, the taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing addicts!’”
Bob Coté also helped change the Food Stamp system. He discovered that members of his clientele were selling their stamps for 50 cents on the dollar to bars and restaurants. The eateries used the stamps to procure cheap food supplies; the addicts used the cash to buy dope or booze. Coté worked with undercover reporters to expose the scam, and now the stamps are gone, replaced by an individual ATM-like card.
Coté challenges the welfare state the same way he challenges winos: First, he states the truth bluntly without concern about being “judgmental.” Then he demands change. “I know what ‘status quo’ stands for in Latin: ‘The mess we’re in.’” For two decades, Coté has given out cards that read, “This coupon good for one free meal. Need a job? A safe place to stay? Come to 2029 Larimer.” He’s offering, in other words, everything that a homeless person needs—if he wants to be a productive citizen and not an addict. But of the tens of thousands of coupons Coté has handed out, only 27 have ever been redeemed. These men are deeply attached to their own status quo, he warns, and they know that with the spare change of passersby, government checks, and coddling shelters, they can avoid any real change in their lives.
“Every guy who comes in here tells me, ‘She divorced me, he fired me, they beat me up, I was potty-trained backwards, I got an F in the fifth grade’—they got every excuse in the world except ‘I drank.’ I know why I drank: ’cuz I liked it, and so do they. We all make choices.” His shelter has “never been full,” he says, “because the word has got around, and they know I’m not gonna play pattycake with them.”
Coté’s bywords are “responsibility” and “competition.” He demands the former and welcomes the latter, contrasting his 35 percent success rate to government-supported programs that score only a fraction as well. And he would like to see the same principles applied throughout American life: “I believe in free market principles from the bottom of my being—competition! But people in the poverty pentagon, they don’t want any part of competition. The goal of the poverty industry is people standing in line: Figures equal funding.” Step 13 has never taken a penny from Uncle Sam, or Colorado, or Denver, “nor ever will we.” And Coté warns peers that even private programs can “get addicted to government funding, just like these street guys get addicted to booze and drugs.”
Coté charges that America is “in denial” about the “outrageous cost of the problems drugs and alcohol are causing.” He urges dramatic countermeasures. “If they catch someone within 100 yards of a school sellin’ drugs, I don’t care if it’s pot or what, give ’em 100 years at hard labor—and I don’t mean playin’ Putt-Putt golf and watching color TV somewhere. I mean bustin’ rocks. And if they catch ’em within 50 yards, hang ’em! And if they need someone to pull the rope, I will.”
Coté is candid about his own failures. He didn’t pay enough attention to his two children from his first marriage. The daughter ended up a cocaine addict. When her grandmother called Coté for help, he jumped on the next plane to his native Detroit, tracked her down, and took her home with him. But he couldn’t be as tough with her as with his regular charges. When he gave her a credit card, she promptly used it to buy $200 worth of booze. Eventually, she sobered up and now works full time at Step 13.
Coté’s soft heart often shines through his leathery exterior. Such as when he speaks of Billy Palmer, “the nicest guy who ever lived.” Palmer was a close pal of Coté in his Skid Row years, and after Coté opened Step 13 he eventually persuaded Palmer to become a resident. Months later a withdrawal seizure killed Palmer in his room. To this day, Coté keeps Room 16 just as it was.
Coté doesn’t brag that he “fixes” people: “I can’t fix ’em; I can try to show them the way.” “I care about them,” he insists, “and I’ll help anybody who wants to help themselves. I’ll go to any length to help them get where they want to go, but if they just want to dabble along, they can do it somewhere else.” By contrast, the “compassionate” conventional shelters that warehouse the homeless while demanding nothing of them do have one strict condition: Their charges must usually leave after 30 days. Coté imposes no time limit, and many of his residents, bereft of ties to kith and kin, have never known the kind of home Step 13 provides. The average stay is a year and a half while residents shake off their destructive addictions.
Gil Ribelin, an alcoholic of 24 years, dropped out of Step 13 several times to return to booze, landing right back in the local detox center. Without Coté, he tells reporters, he “might’ve ended up in jail for a long time, or dead.” Step 13 “gave me a glimpse of what life could be like.” Now sober for a decade and happily married, Ribelin explains that “Bob’s a regular drunk from the streets. He’s not some therapist with a degree…. He’s rough, tough, and gruff, but he’s got a heart of gold.”
The Step 13 program is based on “three simple rules.” First, no drinking or drugs, a rule enforced by countless urine and breath tests—enough to cost Coté thousands in supplies every year. Also, every resident must take Antabuse, a medicine that makes you physically ill if you drink any alcohol. Second rule: Get a job. Step 13 has placed hundreds of residents in 26 local businesses, as well as its own three in-house enterprises. Third rule: Your bunk is your property. Residents are held responsible for their living quarters at Step 13, which means they must pay for their stay—around $50 a week—and they must keep their living area clean, cook their meals, do their dishes, and otherwise live up to the standards of civilization.
Residents who follow the rules will change from tramps to productive members of society, and will move up both in the world and at Step 13: They’ll go from a bunk in the basement to a room with a door, then to the upstairs studio apartments with locking doors. Often those apartments feature the men’s new computers and big-screen TVs. Coté calls the system “constructive envy,” which means, he says, that his staff is not just the half-dozen people on the official payroll, but more like 56, “because I’ve got 50 guys who’ve been here a little over a year,” and they tell their peers, “‘We don’t put cigarette butts on the floor. We don’t leave dirty dishes.’ This is their home as opposed to some place they’re passing through to see what they can hustle.”
Then there are the rule-breakers. Don’t make your bed, and you sleep on the couch. Don’t cook your own meals, and you won’t eat. Don’t clean your room, and you lose it. Fail your drug test, and you answer to Coté. “I’ll make them do 20 hours of community service like picking up glass in the alley, or they can leave,” he explains.
Coté doesn’t claim this system is the answer to every homeless person’s needs. He concurs with the general social science figure that addicts make up roughly 60 percent of the homeless population, while another chunk of the population suffer mental or emotional disability, and yet another chunk consists of families, often single-moms with kids, in financial straits. “God knows let’s help ’em,” he says, with the specific services they need, but when shelters “just lump them all together under one roof, it’s a zoo” that can’t help anyone.
As welfare historian and Coté admirer Marvin Olasky puts it, “The major flaw of the welfare state is not that it’s extravagant with money but that it’s stingy with the help that only a person can give: love, time, care, and hope.” That’s where faith-based practitioners like Coté come in—they can affect someone’s heart and soul. Unfortunately, a large majority of Step 13’s many press clips over the years never even bother to mention Coté’s faith or his shelter’s mandatory chapel service.
Not that Coté is doctrinaire. He belies the caricature of the narrow-minded conservative Christian, and is so ecumenical his chapel has hosted “rabbis, Mormons, Baptists, Methodists—all of ’em.” At the center of Coté’s faith is a belief in Providence: “God creates miracles to let us know we’re not alone.” The miracle that most surprises him is his own shelter’s success. He sees all of his life, the good and the bad, as contributing to that success. His training as a boxer taught him to “handle himself” and deal “one on one” with others. His drinking taught him “streetology” so he can meet addicts “where they are.” His work as a salesman—more compatible with drinking than a 9-to-5 job—taught him how to “talk people into donating vans,” how to persuade donors to give, and how to conserve money.
One of Coté’s miracles came the morning a billionaire stranger, Phil Anschutz, visited Step 13 early in the shelter’s history and wrote a check so the chapel could be built. (Over a decade later, without any intervening solicitations, he donated a few hundred thousand dollars to help Coté buy his property after he lost his lease.) Then there’s cancer surgeon Larry Schafer, whom Coté asked for volunteer medical help. “He said, ‘I’ll do it for three months.’ That was in 1987.” Schafer offers his services to this day.
But Coté doesn’t sit around waiting for Providence. “I scratched and clawed—all of us here did—to make this place go.” He pawned his donated van countless times to pay bills, and his in-house businesses reveal an entrepreneurial eye. When the Colorado Rockies baseball team set up shop a few blocks away at Coors Field, Coté opened a parking lot that offers car washes and detailing during the game (net income last year: about $50,000). After his rehabilitated daughter worked at a T-shirt company for a while, Coté asked her to set up his logo printing business (net income: roughly $10,000). Between the businesses and the residents’ fees, Coté is over half self-supporting, with a goal to reach 100 percent.
Though Anschutz appeared at his door providentially, Coté set his sights on Colorado developer and philanthropist Steve Schuck, who shares his philosophy: “I am convinced,” Schuck says, “that when we take away responsibility from a capable person, we dehumanize that person.”
“I maneuvered my way into his office,” Coté recalls, “he just did it to pacify me. He had a board table that must’ve been 30 feet long, one piece of walnut. He’s at one end, I’m at the other, and he has a cooking timer and says, ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’ So I got up, walked all the way down, and said, ‘I only need five.’ I stayed in there about 45 minutes. He tried to give me a check for $25,000. I said, ‘You’re a smart guy; why would you give me a check for $25,000?’ He said, ‘To help you with what you’re doing.’ You don’t even know what I’m doing. You come down and see me, and then if you wanna give me $25,000 O.K. He said, ‘I’ll do that.’” Coté insisted that Schuck schedule an appointment then and there. “He came down here two weeks later, and he’s been with me ever since and is on our board. Now if I’d have took the $25,000, where would I be? He’d have said, ‘I’ve already helped him.’ But I showed him what I was doing and explained it to him point by point. Once I get people in here and explain what I’m doing and they can see it, I have ’em.”
The day Bob Coté poured out his vodka, he was looking across the street at Billy Palmer and two other pals passed out drunk in a gutter, urine staining their trousers. Up to that time, he later realized, he had hung out with these street drunks to reassure himself that he, who still had some money in the bank, was better than they were, and that his life was fine. His epiphany came in the recognition that he was beholding himself as he gazed upon those wretches. Identifying himself with the lost and sinful, as Jesus had, Coté was inspired to give up boozy pleasure and spend the rest of his life helping save fellow addicts.
He knows he doesn’t do it alone. “Without the chapel, my success rate would drop in half. Even once you get a job and a home, you still need a purpose in life,” he has said. Coté’s own deep purpose explains why he is still on fire for the good fight, despite the gruesomeness of so much of his life. He finds men he knew dead in the streets and flophouses, sometimes with a heroin needle still jabbed in a vein, or a bottle gripped in their cold hand. “Rockmonster,” a street predator, stumbled in one night gushing blood from a near-fatal machete wound. A photo of another man who died in front of Step 13 from four screwdriver stabbings to the head sits on Coté’s desk.
“No man’s cross is laid upon him for himself alone, but for the healing of the whole world,” wrote English mystic Caryll Houselander. Of this, Bob Coté is living proof.
TAE contributing writer Scott Walter is editor of Philanthropy magazine.
