Bridgeport’s ‘Undercover Angel’ tells her story

By Michael Comstock

Lisa Lockwood was born into poverty but overcame the odds stacked against her to live the extraordinary life that she writes about in Undercover Angel: From Beauty Queen to SWAT Team…a True Story, which came out this past spring.

Now a motivational speaker, Lockwood fuels her talks with tales of her days as a beauty pageant contestant, member of the United States Air Force, and police SWAT team officer and undercover narcotics detective.

Lockwood was born in 1969 at Cook County Hospital into a Bridgeport family with seven children. “What made it difficult was that we were on welfare,” she said. “Our neighbors knew, and the other school children were aware of it. We used food stamps.” Her father, a strict disciplinarian and advocate of corporal punishment, made life even harder.

“Every week we would be disciplined at his hand,” she explained. “He felt that that was the way he needed to raise us, because he was raised similarly. As children, you kind of accept what is doled out to you as far as discipline goes, not really realizing that that’s not what is happening in other households.

“My father was an extremely hard worker,” Lockwood added. “He did what he could to provide for us. Later on, my mom gave us an opportunity. She was able to save some money to put us in a Catholic school [but] it got more and more challenging for her to do that. So I did have several siblings who ended up dropping out because the option of going to a public school was a little bit difficult. In the public school jurisdiction we lived in, there were gangs, drive-bys.”

Despite her tough upbringing, Lockwood was outgoing. According to her older sister, Michelle DiCola, the only other sibling to complete high school, Lockwood was loving and playful. “She always liked to play practical jokes on people,” DiCola recalled.

Lockwood earned her diploma at St. Barbara High School. “My last year of high school, I worked almost a full time job at a mini-mart at a gas station to help pay for my high school tuition,” she said. Entering a beauty pageant Afterward, Lockwood enrolled at Daley College with ideas of going on to a four-year state college. Her family could not afford the tuition, however, so her mother entered Lockwood in the Miss Illinois USA pageant without her daughter’s knowledge in hopes she might earn scholarship money from the pageant.

“So one day I received a phone call,” Lockwood recalled. “Basically a woman said, ‘You’ve been accepted to compete.’ I was really floored.”

As a little girl, Lockwood had watched all the televised beauty pageants with her family and dreamed of becoming an actress and model. Now, her mother had given her “a chance that I would have never otherwise had. I went into the pageant and did the best that I could.” With no prior experience, Lockwood placed 25th out of 205 contestants for the 1988 title. Although impressive, the results brought her no college money.

Also, modeling seemed out of reach because “at five-foot-five, I really didn’t have the height to be a model or work in fashion,” she said.

Instead, she got married and looked to the military for college funding. “I figured on the Air Force after I met with the recruiter,” Lockwood said. “That branch would be the least likely that I would be out in the field getting my nails dirty, because I’m still pretty much a girly-girl.”

Joining the USAF Lockwood passed the Air Force exam, thanks to help from her father, who showed her how a car works and taught her about electricity.

“Lo and behold, in the mechanical field I scored very high,” she said. “So my recruiter told me, ‘We don’t have many women in the military, and if you go into the mechanical field, there’s a great chance you’ll be promoted.’ I was naive and I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to listen to him and do exactly what he tells me.’”

After basic training in San Antonio, she was assigned to the logistics squad. “I had no idea what that was, so I asked one of the drill instructors and he said, ‘You’re going to be a truck driver.’ I thought, ‘Oh, no!’” she said with a laugh.

Although she served most of her time near Boston, she spent 90 days in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Storm. “That was considered ‘Desert Cleanup’ because we had started to pull out the troops,” she said. “I was just there to support the mission, and my job was to drive tractor trailers and get supplies to the troops in order to still have some safety in the area, just in case anything occurred.”

After four years in the Air Force, Lockwood returned home to her husband, Tony, an alcoholic who was often drunk and destructive. “I thought I could help him and fix him and make him understand that he was the way he was because he had an incredible temper,” she explained. “He was very volatile as far as destroying things around the house. He didn’t touch me,  though, so I always thought ‘that’s a plus.’ He wasn’t hurting me physically, but he was psychologically.”

Law enforcement
 

Lockwood coped by taking a night job as a security officer in Oak Brook while attending Governor’s State University. She took a criminal justice class “just on a whim, since I was doing private security,” Lockwood said. The class required her to intern with a police department.

“I did a ride-along with the Chicago Police Department, with the tactical unit in one of the worst areas of town,” she said. The unit was called to a drive-by shooting, and “I remember jumping out of the car…actually seeing a man lying on the ground, bleeding to death from the gunshot wound.

“In that moment, I thought to myself that I did want to do that job and I did want to make a difference. I felt that I had it in me to do it and also saw an opportunity to give something back to the community,” Lockwood said.

While waiting 18 months for the next police exam, she became a 911 dispatcher. “It was a little difficult initially because some of the women were envious of me,” said the former beauty pageant contestant. “Some of them were married to the police officers, or they dated them, or they were interested in police officers. They looked at me as a potential threat.”

Eventually, however, Lockwood earned her colleagues’ respect. Meanwhile, her home life spiraled downward. One day, Tony came home drunk, got angry, and poured scalding Chinese food on Lockwood’s back.

“Here I am working as a nightshift dispatcher, sending help to women who need help from domestic violence, and here I was a victim,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell anybody, and I wasn’t going to call the police. I was just going to deal with it and try to be strong for myself.”

She finished at the police academy as class commander and a month later filed for divorce after eight years of marriage. In 1996, she became a far south suburban police officer and two years later became the first woman on the department’s Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team, where she and her partner executed 25 search warrants in narcotics cases.

After four and a half years on the force, the woman who as a little girl dreamed of acting saw her dream come true in an unexpected way when she was promoted to narcotics detective. “That is where I started to do all my undercover work,” she said.

“I infiltrated a Chicago mafia operation,” Lockwood said. “I was able to catch pedophile offenders by posing as a 14-year- old girl. Also, I [played] all different roles, from a Hooters waitress to a crack addict to a stripper to an exotic dancer. I really just made a name for myself as the go-to-girl for undercover work.”

Along the way, she earned a master’s degree from Lewis University, and in 2003, after seven years on the police force, Lockwood felt it was time for a change. “I was nearing the end of my undercover, on which I spent close to three years,” she said. “At that time, you basically move on and transition to something else. I felt I had done everything I wanted to in police work, so I had to find something else to do.

“I felt that I had a calling to share my message with people, to show people that no matter what background you come from, no matter what the circumstances, you can succeed in life,” she said.  Book author So she began writing her book. She also started studying neurolinguistic programming, time line therapy, and hypnosis and became certified in all three disciplines.

In that period, she met her current husband, Rock Thomas, an entrepreneur and motivational  speaker from Montreal who has three children. They married in  July 2006 and split their time between Montreal and Chicago.

Undercover Angel: From Beauty Queen to SWAT Team…a True Story came out this past April. Lockwood has been promoting the book on television and radio shows and features it on her website, www.lisalockwood.com.

“It’s remarkable what she is trying to do,” DiCola said. “Her life is to go out and empower women, help women, and show them with determination that you can come out of something that isn’t so  great, something that’s negative, and make positive things happen out of it.”

Lockwood and Thomas now run a Relationship Secrets class.

“My husband and I have attended many seminars, and both of us subscribe to the belief that in order to have great success in life you need to have a cheerleader,” Lockwood said. “We support one another. We cheer one another as far as all the great successes. “We understand the dynamics of male and female energy and what causes that to rise in a relationship, because men and women both possess a certain feminine side and masculine side.

Sometimes one comes out stronger than another. So we teach people how to embrace it and how to accept it in one another so as to not cause conflict.”

DiCola has only praise for her sister. “She’s an incredible woman. She’s on her way to bigger and better things.”

To order Lockwood’s book, call (888) 519-5121.