On my first solo undercover meet, I was wearing so much electronics, I was afraid I was going to shut down the city’s electrical grid. It was 1987 in San Francisco, and my job was to be introduced by a confidential informant (CI) to a violator. I was going to meet the bad guy at his house to buy a small amount of cocaine and a stolen pistol—a quick in-and-out deal. I had a one-watt transmitter with a range of about two city blocks, on a good day, and if there weren’t too many structures between me and the agents monitoring the wire. I had the transmitter taped to my inner thigh. I had a repeater in place to boost the signal. I was wearing a Nagra recorder taped to the small of my back.
This was before the days of microrecorders and computer chips, and we had limited equipment options. The Nagra recorder was our best solution in the day. These reel-to-reel tape machines dated back to the 1950s and were revered for their stereo-quality recording. When I first saw this thing, I couldn’t believe it was the best the feds had, but it was. You didn’t just slap a tape in it and hit Record. Nor could you play it back without a playback unit. It was large and bulky—roughly the size of a big handheld calculator—with two microphones at the end of two eighteen-inch wires. There were several preferred ways to carry this device. You could place the recorder on your back and wrap surgical tape around and around to hold it in place. You then ran the wires up your back and over your shoulders and taped the microphones to your chest. This made it impossible to wear the Nagra with just a T-shirt or light clothing. The other way to carry the device was to wear a medical wrap around your ribs that was specially designed to hold it. Neither scenario was easy for me because I only weighed about 175 pounds.
I was also carrying a panic—a.k.a. “oh, shit”—button. This was a simple battery-operated pressure switch that would send a unique squelch over our police radios, signaling distress by the UC, i.e., my rookie ass. The panic button was about half the size of a pack of cigarettes and really couldn’t be concealed too carefully or it would be hard to use. Most UCs who did carry it just stuck it in their pocket, which ran the risk of accidentally depressing the button due to the device’s rudimentary design.
With the electronics loaded on, the next dilemma was to figure out where to carry my handgun. A bad guy carrying a gun to a meet isn’t too worried about who sees it. But our duty weapons back then had serial numbers—starting with the letters US—and some even had a Treasury badge on the side of the pistol. In other words, you couldn’t let the violator see or handle your pistol. That first time, I had my gun stuck in my belt on my hip toward the back. Nothing says cop like a leather holster, so I never used one. For those who have seen the 1992 Tarantino movie Reservoir Dogs, where the undercover cop practices his role in front of a mirror before the meet, that was me on my first deal.
The average civilian has seen shows where the cool undercover cop walks in, buys the dope or guns, and busts the bad guy. We wish it were that simple. In reality, a simple fifteen-minute undercover meeting can be the most stressful time in a man or woman’s life. There are no rules. Anything can happen. On more than one occasion, agents have gotten ripped off. It’s not like you can break out a test kit for a twenty-dollar crack rock buy. Those test kits cost money, plus when you are buying only a small amount of drugs, it would look silly to be wasting some of the crack to test it. It was not uncommon on larger-scale buys to test the drugs before exchanging money.
Agents are often “flexed” (sold fake dope). It looks like dope, but it isn’t. Although most states and the federal government have laws prohibiting the sale of counterfeit substances, most jurisdictions won’t prosecute these cases. They lack jury appeal and, after all, it’s not even dope. Some of the larger rip-off cases would be prosecuted. It also depended on who the violator was and the extent of their criminal history.
Now, when it comes to agents purchasing guns on the street, you might think that is an easy one. It’s not so easy in a dark alley with your heart threatening to pound out of your chest. Not to mention that street thugs call practically every firearm an Uzi. In fact, an Uzi is an Israeli-made submachine gun first designed in the late 1940s. It’s known as one of the first weapons to employ a telescoping bolt design, meaning the magazine or clip is in the pistol grip, allowing for a shorter weapon, which is an obvious advantage. But most street thugs don’t have a clue about the firearms they sell. Sometimes the guns don’t work, or they are broken. Sometimes they are purported to be “machine guns,” and they are not. There are field test procedures to determine if a firearm is fully automatic, but sometimes it’s impossible to tell until the gun is actually fired at a range. It’s the agent’s job to examine the product closely. Unfortunately, some UCs have been duped into purchasing toy guns. It looks like a gun, acts like a gun, but when you get back to the office, you realize you have spent five hundred dollars on an air pistol. This never happened to me, but it could have. Try living that one down in your group.
Undercover work is scary—every time. But nothing is as scary as your first significant UC assignment. Everything is on the line: the respect of your fellow UCs, the confidence of your bosses, and ultimately your life. Will you choke? Will you be compromised? Will you remember the bust signal? Will you talk too much? The goal of undercover work is to develop evidence and capture a recording of the violator talking, not a recording of the undercover talking.
That first time for me was not all that stellar. The deal went fine, but I learned a lot from the debriefing with the cover agents. Apparently, the wire was cutting in and out after I left the vehicle and entered the residence. When the wire did work, the only person the cover team could hear talking was me. After I had seen the dope and guns, I just handed the violator the money and left. I never counted the cash for the recording or described the merchandise for the recorder. Live and learn.
You might be wondering why anybody would want to be an undercover operator. Few normal jobs result in death if you are not good at them, and undercover work entails tiptoeing on the edge of a cliff in a storm every minute of every day. Frankly, not everybody possesses the skill set, the personality, or the balls to be an undercover agent. Although ATF is one of the premier agencies when it comes to undercover investigations, not all agents are expected to do undercover work, despite the fact they all have received the necessary training. Within ATF, undercover work is voluntary, and no agent can be forced to do undercover.
There are many reasons—some good, some not so good—for crossing into the undercover world. The textbook answers, which are all true, are to protect our communities, make a difference, stand up for the law. However, hidden within those reasons is the juice, a.k.a. adrenaline rush, the recognition/fame/glory, personal challenge, and—full disclosure—pussy. Some girls love Good Bad Boys and Bad Good Boys.
You know from meeting Bambi that, of course, there are female undercover agents. They are some of the finest operators this bureau has ever produced. I initially thought about dedicating a chapter to our female UCs and calling it “SheSnakes,” but that would suggest they were different, and that their contributions were less heroic or somehow different. In short, we can be country girls or boys, kids from wealthy families, inner-city youths, or the girl next door. We come from New York, California, Texas farms, Detroit suburbs, and the beaches of South Florida. Some are model gorgeous and many of us are just stone-cold ugly. Some are physically huge, others are small and nondescript looking. Some barely graduated from college, others possess advanced degrees from Ivy League schools. But the dynamic we all have in common is the need for speed.
For me, that need for speed started in my youth and ultimately led me to ATF, although after getting an honorable discharge from the military at age twenty-three, I initially envisioned my career would be as a detective or some kind of agent with the US Customs Service. When I attended basic investigators’ school, in the class of forty-eight students there were approximately thirty US Customs agents, a couple ATF agents, a Secret Service agent or two, and the rest were recruits from the Office of Inspector General, or OIG agents, who investigated fraud and other crime for the US Department of Commerce. The Criminal Investigator Training Program (CITP), as it was called in the 1980s, was a generic investigators’ academy that most federal agents had to attend before moving on to another academy for agency-specific training. Suffice to say, I didn’t leave that school knowing much of anything about ATF. Although I had applied to almost every federal law enforcement agency out there, Customs was the first to offer me a job. My foot was in the door.
Once I finished my advanced training and boat school, I was supposed to report to Key Largo, but at the last minute my assignment was switched to Key West. It didn’t matter to me because I didn’t know where either one was. When I arrived in Key West and got settled, it was interesting to find out that my supervisor was a former ATF agent, as were four of the senior agents in my office. Eight of the nine drug task force Customs agents in Key West were former ATF agents. I remember thinking: “I sure am glad I didn’t go to that apparently fucking train wreck of an agency”—especially the Philly office, which had the worst reputation. As time went on, I learned why ATF had such a bad rep.
During the drug wars of the 1970s and ’80s, the United States built up its drug interdiction capabilities using the US Customs Service. They were hiring busloads of agents, buying airplanes, blimps, fast boats, helicopters. It looked like they would take over the world. Around the same time, in the early 1980s, rumors began circulating that the Bureau of ATF might be abolished. WTF? The ATF had only been a bureau for approximately ten years. Hell, it hadn’t had enough time to fuck shit up good, and they already wanted to abolish it. When I say “they,” I mean then US president Ronald Reagan (and some others). Case in point, ATF agent Ariel Rios, a member of the presidential anti-drug task force in South Florida, was allegedly in possession of a reduction in force (RIF) notice at the time of his tragic murder during an undercover deal in 1982.
The word was out—you’d better start looking for somewhere to go in another agency, because there wasn’t going to be an ATF in the near future. That was why agents were jumping ship en masse and heading to Customs. Plus the fact that, due to regulations and the small size of ATF back in those days, the bureau was promoting at a much slower rate than at Customs. The ATF agents who came over to Customs were superstars and rose through the ranks at lightning speed. I didn’t give a fuck about climbing that ladder. After working a big smuggling case with one token ATF agent sent down from Miami, I realized these ATF guys could investigate circles around the other agencies. Besides, I didn’t like bobbing around in a boat on the ocean all that much.
By the time I considered going to ATF, the bureau had fought off attempts to abolish the agency—with the incidental help of the insurance industry, which benefited from ATF’s expertise in arson investigations, as well as the National Rifle Association (NRA), which hated us but also was horrified at the thought of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a.k.a. Big Brother, taking over the enforcement of gun laws.
After they heard I was going to ATF, the guys in the Key West office took every opportunity to bust my balls. One agent, whom I later found out had been a no-shit ATF legend, handed me a knife one day when we all were at lunch. I asked him: What’s this for? He replied, “If I was going to ATF, I’d slit my wrists.” However, to a man, one by one they came up to me at my going-away party and whispered, “You’re going to love ATF. It was the best job I ever had.”
They were right, although another one of my early undercover experiences was a study in what not to do. Generally speaking, the UC designates a distress or bust signal he or she will use. That signal will determine the actions of the cover team—the group of agents monitoring the operation, who are ready to move in when it’s time to make arrests or extract the UC from an operation gone bad. The bust signal should be something the UC would not generally say by mistake but easy enough to remember. My youth and inexperience, and maybe a little too much bravado, caused me to pick the absolute worst verbal signal I ever could have come up with.
I chose “motherfucker” or something like that as my signal. I recall the senior agents questioning my choice, but they let me make my own mistakes. The problem with using that particular term as my bust signal was that after six years in the US Marine Corps, I was very familiar and loose with that little epithet.
With the cover team in place, I called the violator, in this case a street methamphetamine dealer in Sonoma County, California. I was going to buy a small amount of meth, and the deal was set to happen at his house in a shitty, white-trash neighborhood. He said, “Come on, let’s do this.” I proceeded to the house and shook hands with the dealer, and he invited me inside. Literally, within thirty seconds of entering the residence, you guessed it, the first of many “motherfuckers” passed my lips—well before the dope had exchanged hands. I heard engines rev and doors slam down the block—shit, I just gave the bust signal. As luck would have it, the violator was in another room, and I was able to call off the dogs by telling them over the wire it was a mistake.
Not two minutes later, I motherfucked somebody again. This time the violator was standing right next to me. I said, “I’m going to step out and get a smoke.” I went out on the front porch and waved off the vehicles slowly rolling my way. I made my way back into the house and closed that deal as fast as I could. Then I used the bust signal—on purpose—and the cavalry came. Needless to say, I never used that bust signal again.