Otis N. LaBree has the goods on every gambling operation in “Wrinkle City,” which is what he calls the Florida retirement community that has been his home for the last 12 years.

The former Maine cop has been scoping out one card game in particular. It’s a friendly little affair held almost every day at the clubhouse across the street from his house. LaBree has been infiltrating the game for some time now, nestling in among the other regulars and swapping war stories. One of his card cronies used to be an officer in the Yugoslavian army. Another is an old-timer from Brooklyn, N.Y., who LaBree suspects was a mobster before slipping into the sun-drenched quiet of Wrinkle City.

“A nice bunch of guys,” says LaBree, who gets a kick out of relieving his fellow retirees of their money every chance he gets. “Sometimes we have to put the game off for a while and wait for the Social Security checks to come in.”

Maine’s legendary lawman, who forged his top-cop reputation in 45 years as a Maine State Police detective, Old Town police chief, and five-term sheriff of Penobscot County, is a mellowed man who stays close to home these days.

At 82, his legs don’t work well, and cataracts have nearly robbed the sight from one eye. When one of his buddies starts complaining of a measly toothache, LaBree lifts up his shirt and shows them his operation scars — gallbladder, heart, kidney, you name it.

LaBree, who retired as sheriff in 1980, now spends his days caring for his wife, Beatrice, corresponding with friends by computer, painting Maine landscapes, and writing down his memories of a colorful life in law enforcement.

When TV newsman Charles Kuralt interviewed LaBree a few years ago for an “On the Road” segment about a famous Maine double murder of the 1960s, one of the show’s producers was so impressed with the old cop’s bulging scrapbook that he encouraged him to write a book. LaBree, who has a prodigious memory for the minutiae of bygone crimes, got busy.

Nearly 800 pages into his autobiography, he reports that he still hasn’t exhausted all the material in that scrapbook.

“I like to take my time looking over the stuff, the old cases,” LaBree says by phone from Florida. “Sometimes it makes me laugh when I remember those guys who always said that I was just a poor little kid from Old Town who would never amount to anything. Well, I got up off my ass and showed them. Thinking back on my life, it makes me proud.”

LaBree was born in 1915, on French Island in Old Town. His father, who managed the local hardware store, died three years later during an influenza epidemic. LaBree’s mother, an Irish orphan named Annie Flynn, had been shipped to Old Town at age 12 to work as a maid and became a wife at 16. When her husband died, she took in washing and worked at several domestic jobs to support her three children. As a boy, LaBree helped the struggling family by mowing lawns, shoveling sidewalks, and cleaning spittoons at the local bars and the Fransway Hotel.

After high school, with no hope for a job and the Depression in full swing, LaBree went to Portland to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps for a while. When he returned to Old Town, where he operated a jackhammer for the water company, LaBree became fascinated with fingerprints and how they were used to catch criminals. He began studying fingerprinting and handwriting analysis through a correspondence course in Chicago, and at 21 years of age received a diploma as an expert in the field. After helping to classify the fingerprint files at the local police station — and bugging the chief relentlessly for a job — he was rewarded with a commission as special police officer.

“They dressed me up in a fancy uniform, and stuffed newspapers in my hat because it was too big,” LaBree recalls with a chuckle. “I looked like General Custer. If I fell down, I wouldn’t have been able to get up.”

Like most mill towns of the time, Old Town could be a rough place when the sun went down and the bars filled up. Police Chief Guy Moores offered his new officer some staightforward advice about walking a beat: “You’re a big fella, so go down the street and don’t let anybody push you around.”

LaBree, a tall, muscular young man who boxed and played semiprofessional football, took his chief’s words to heart. For the next six years, the big redhead in the long overcoat with the billy club swinging at his side often had to maintain peace the hard way — brawling with belligerent drunks who didn’t care much for the sound of last call.

“I got the hell kicked out of me more than once,” says LaBree, who worked 10-hour days for 25 cents an hour. “I had no car, either, so when I arrested someone I had to walk him to jail.”

In 1940, LaBree married Beatrice Rice of Hermon. Two years later, he joined the Maine State Police and moved his wife and 2-month-old son, Wayne, to French-speaking Van Buren. LaBree grew up speaking French — not just “Old Town French,” as he calls it, but other dialects such as Haitian, Cajun and the St. John Valley variety.

“It was like a Wild West town in those days,” says LaBree. “Everyone was poor, there were no street lights that worked. I had Fort Kent to Limestone — 11 towns with only two or three local police. I had a motorcycle and a car with no lights but the words `State Police’ written on it.”

Wayne LaBree, who worked for his father as an Old Town police officer and later as a sheriff’s deputy, says LaBree wasted no time in building his reputation among the citizenry as a tough cop worthy of respect.

“One time he was coming out of a hardware store, and my mother was pulling me up the street on a sled towards my father,” Wayne says, recalling the story he heard early in life. “Then these drunks come spilling out of a bar and one of them kicks the sled and I go tumbling out. My father fought three or four of them and hauled them off to jail.”

When an onlooker asked, “Who the hell was that?” another responded with awe, “That’s the new trooper in town.”

For the next 11 years, LaBree roamed a vast territory on his Harley-Davidson, serving as local policeman, traffic cop, and highway patrolman. Among the rowdies, many of them Canadians who surged across the border to raise hell in the Maine bars, Saturday night became known as “Lick LaBree Night.”

“Closing time was wild,” he says. “The locals helped me a lot, though. I went to just about every stag party they had up there, so they all knew me. They would jump in when they thought I was getting beaten up. I broke four fingers on one hand and several teeth. When people ask me about my crooked fingers, I tell them I didn’t get them from playing bridge.”

LaBree attended a series of medical-legal seminars at Harvard in 1952 to learn how to investigate murders and preserve evidence at crime scenes. A year later, shortly after the loss of his 2-year-old son, David, to tuberculo-meningitis, LaBree went to work at the Bureau of Identification in Augusta. As an expert in fingerprints, handwriting and ballistics, he testified in courts around the state, and worked with the FBI and the Secret Service on occasion.

In 1954, LaBree became the first detective of the Maine State Police. Over the next eight years he was in charge of 38 murder investigations and — as he recalls proudly to this day — got a conviction in each. One of them was John Jacob Vollmann Jr., a part-time reporter for the St. John Valley Times who broke down during an intensive grilling by LaBree and admitted stabbing to death a Canadian teen-ager and leaving her body in a gravel pit in Edmundston, New Brunswick.

Vollman was found guilty in 1958 and spent 19 years in a Canadian prison, where he earned two college degrees. The last time LaBree heard about Vollmann, the ex-con was somewhere in Florida, teaching a college course in criminal justice.

LaBree retired from the Maine State Police in 1962, and returned to his hometown of Old Town as chief of police.

“Otis was a real cop with all the right instincts of an investigator,” says Carl “Bucky” Buchanan, who retired as a state police detective in 1975 and remains LaBree’s good friend. “He also had enough ego to see a job through and do it right. Otis was a tough guy, sure, but he was brought up to be able to handle himself. He could give the impression of being caustic at times, and certainly was when he wanted to be, but that was the nature of the job back then.”

In 1965, LaBree was called back to Aroostook County to investigate two Fort Fairfield murders that would haunt him for nearly 20 years. Cyrus Everett, a 14-year-old Bangor Daily News paperboy, disappeared the day after Christmas in 1964. Before his body was recovered the following spring, Donna Mauch, a local cocktail waitress, was found murdered in her apartment in town.

The townspeople were convinced that there was a connection between the boy’s disappearance and the woman’s murder. The most popular rumor — completely unfounded like the others that circulated through the area — had E. Perrin Edmunds, then president of the Maine Senate, drunkenly running over the paperboy while on a date with Mauch. Later, so the rumor went, Mauch was said to have been killed to protect Edmunds’ political career.

In the winter of 1965, psychic Shirley Harrison told a convention of Portland undertakers that Everett met a “violent death near the Chaney Place” and that his body was “caught under a heavy log.” Three months later, authorities found Everett’s body wedged beside a 675-pound log in a marsh called “Chaney’s Grove.”

When the attorney general and the Aroostook County prosecutor ruled that Everett’s death was accidental — he had a fractured skull — the angry Fort Fairfield town manager called in LaBree to do his own investigation. The veteran detective had always believed that the Everett-Mauch deaths were connected murders. His prime suspect was Philip Adams, whom LaBree had arrested years before in Fort Fairfield for attempted sodomy of a child.

In November 1965, on vacation from his duties in Old Town, LaBree walked the paperboy’s route in Fort Fairfield. He was not surpised to learn that Everett’s last delivery was at Adams’ house, which is where Mauch was found with her skull crushed. LaBree’s eight-page report, which listed his suspect as Mr. X, led authorities to exhume Everett’s body. An autopsy by one of the country’s top pathologists at the time revealed that the boy had indeed been beaten to death.

LaBree had been right all along. In his typically outspoken fashion, he wasted no time in publicly denouncing the earlier investigations as “badly bungled” by the county prosecutor.

“I don’t mean to put a goddamned Perry Mason thing on it, but there were obvious connections at the time,” says LaBree, who had to wait 20 years to be proved correct.

LaBree retired as Old Town’s police chief in 1968 and opened a private investigation firm in Bangor called LaBree Associates. In 1970, at the urging of Sen. Edmund Muskie, Gov. Kenneth Curtis and other leading Democrats, LaBree ran for Penobscot County sheriff and beat Republican Arthur Chandler by more than 4,000 votes.

“The previous sheriff had left Otis with only a station wagon, a cruiser with a flat tire and a deputy with a bunch of keys that he didn’t know opened what doors,” recalls Wayne LaBree, who joined the department as deputy in 1971 after leaving the family private eye business. “It was a primitive place in a lot of ways.”

Otis LaBree quickly launched a full-scale improvement program that eventually made the Penobscot County Jail a model for others in the state. He began by immediately closing the infamous “dog hole,” a 3-by-7-foot cell with little air and no toilet where troublesome prisoners slept in their own waste and lived on two pieces of bread a day and a half-cup of water.

In that first year on the job, LaBree also instituted a work-release program so prisoners could earn money for their release, and got the jail designated as a federal holding center. He opened rural substations and increased coverage to 17 patrols and 26 deputies.

“There was nothing to keep the prisoners occupied, and there were all kinds of fights with guards getting hurt,” recalls LaBree. “So I organized committees so prisoners could have a say in the food they got and the TV shows they watched. I got the services of a doctor, built part of the jail for females alone, and expanded visiting hours.”

The improvements not only made life better for prisoners, they made LaBree into a high-profile sheriff whose strong political connections and public popularity kept him in office for 10 years.

“Otis was more an autocratic leader than a democratic one, and he certainly had his own way of doing things,” says Chuck Shuman, who retired from the Brewer Police Department in 1990. “When he said something, he meant it. But he was good-hearted and very knowledgeable. He turned the Sheriff’s Department around and recognized its connections with local police departments.”

Yet throughout his iron-handed reign, which ended in 1980 when he chose not run again, LaBree never forgot the unsolved Everett-Mauch murders up in Fort Fairfield. As he said of his suspect, Mr. X, in an interview shortly before retiring as sheriff, “I know who he is. He’s alive today and in jail. I know that he did it.”

In 1985, a year after settling into a life of sunshine and card games down in “Wrinkle City,” LaBree finally heard that he had gotten his man after all. While serving time in a Connecticut prison for a assaulting a child, Adams blabbed to his relatives about killing Mauch 20 years earlier. The relatives repeated the confession to authorities, and the case was reopened. Adams was indicted for the murder and extradited to Maine, where a jury in Aroostook County found him guilty.

Adams died not long ago of a heart attack in the Maine State Prison at Thomaston. Although he never was charged with Everett’s murder, LaBree has no doubts that he killed the boy. Case closed, says the veteran cop.

“It feels good to me now, knowing I was right all along when no one would believe me,” says Maine’s legendary lawman. “Nowadays, I only care about what my friends think of me. I’m a humanitarian. I like to help people, and I don’t care who they are as long as they don’t step on my toes.”