By the time I came on, ATF was moving away from investigating the illegal liquor business and focusing more on the illegal firearms trade and other violent crime. I did, however, have one occasion to be present in court as a uniformed police officer sitting in on a magistrate’s hearing regarding bootlegged liquor. All officers who had issued citations or made misdemeanor arrests would sit in the jury box and wait for their case to be called. This was in Georgia around 1983, and one of the longtime barbers in Athens had a nice shop in the town square. He was an old African American guy, and many of us would have him cut our hair. His shop was a meeting place right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. So, I was surprised to see him in court that morning.
When they called his case, he was charged with selling moonshine out of his shop. As he was answering the magistrate’s questions regarding the violation, he stated his defense, something along these lines: “Judge, I didn’t know it was illegal to sell shine, because I’ve been selling gallons of it over the years to those fellas over there.”
I had a good chuckle watching several of the old-timers in our group awkwardly avert their eyes as the barber pointed straight to the jury box where we police officers sat.
To be honest, I came to ATF with exactly zero experience or knowledge about moonshine. I didn’t understand the bootleg liquor trade or its culture. From my perspective, it was old news. And yet, as I learned to respect and appreciate, long before modern-day ATF agents arrived on the scene, or, for that matter, before we were born, a group of brave agents established a tradition of heroism that serves as a model and reminder of what an ATF agent should strive to achieve. These law enforcement agents of days gone by were the ones who ran toward the sound of gunfire. They repeatedly answered the nation’s call to service in the most dangerous and unfavorable law enforcement operations in the history of the United States. They did so because that’s what dedicated agents do. “They” were the special agents working under the auspices of the US Treasury Department, charged with enforcing US Prohibition laws in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Viewed as progressive in its time, the temperance movement already had gained widespread traction when the US government, via the Eighteenth Amendment of the Constitution, put a nationwide ban on alcohol production, transportation, and sales. The actions of those who saw a profit to be made through illicit alcohol sales, coupled with the violence that protected their activities, put them on a collision course with the US Treasury Department and those who enforced its laws, the Alcohol Tax Unit of the IRS.
I had been a US Treasury agent for almost a year before I heard the term “T-man.” On my first visit home after completing training, I was at the house of my childhood best friend’s parents. We were having cocktails, and her dad, Jack, called me a T-man. Jack was my idol. Jack was the man everybody wanted to be. He was a no-shit World War II hero, gravely injured months before Germany surrendered. He had a history degree from UC Berkeley and was a wealth of knowledge. That being said, I still felt I had to correct him. He went on to explain how, back in the day, Treasury agents were called T-men. He was right, of course.
The T-men chose to set any personal feelings aside and enforce the most unpopular laws in our land. They fanned out across the country—sometimes working solo and enlisting the help and support of local law enforcement agencies—and brought the battle to the gangsters and moonshiners. Since most of the glory and public attention was directed at the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover’s media machine, the T-men were able to do their jobs without undue congressional or governmental oversight (or interference). The practice of recruiting local help would ultimately carry over decades and become the greatest tool in ATF’s arsenal.
Unfortunately, when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, violence and illegal untaxed liquor sales did not stop. In fact, bootleg sales and moonshine wars continued, and what resulted was death. As more moonshine stills popped up across the country, the duties of the Prohibition agents took them to the streets of Chicago, the sunny beaches of Florida, and the mountains of Kentucky in pursuit of the daring and Wild West–like moonshiners. While other federal agents were conducting conventional investigations, ATF agents were lying in tick-infested woods waiting for the operators of a still to arrive. Agents also could be found dressing and acting in a manner that allowed them to mingle unnoticed with their quarry, the illegal liquor purchasers, and entering the bowels of the inner city or rural brothels and smoke-filled shot houses to make undercover purchases of liquor.
The stories of the FBI’s diligent pursuit of bank robbers and dissident political groups are legend. Many of us can rattle off names like Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, and the like as linked to famous FBI chase-and-capture stories. But unless you chose to distill illegal liquor—in other words, “run moonshine”—or in other ways participate in the shady side of Prohibition, you likely would not have encountered those shadowy figures known as T-men or “revenuers.” While Chicago-based Prohibition agent Eliot Ness and his team of Untouchables gained well-deserved fame, there are countless other agents who carried out their duties without thanks or recognition. We all have heard about high-speed, backroad pursuits to make the arrests of major tax-evading criminals back in the day. These weren’t sexy headlines. And, sadly, many good men and women lost their lives battling these criminals, most of the time receiving only a mention in the local newspaper when struck down in the line of duty. At the time of this writing, 188 ATF/Alcohol Tax Unit agents have lost their lives in the line of duty.
The 1960s changed everything. Little did I know at four years old, sitting in front of the television watching the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, that I would one day be on a presidential protection detail. The Vietnam War, and even more specifically, US entry into combat after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, marked a time of social unrest, criminal chaos, and a divided country. One glaring sign of our country’s troubled times was the emergence of fanatical and sometimes violent quasi-political radical groups, such as the left-wing revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the Weather Underground that sought to overthrow “US imperialism,” and the controversial Black Panther Party (BPP). Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had a front-row seat to the craziness. The one common thread among these groups was that they all were out for self-interest, and many relied on violence and criminal activity to support their “cause.” They were known to possess and use exotic and extremely powerful firearms and explosives.
These and other groups—such as the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, which notoriously became part of the decade’s counterculture movement in San Francisco and beyond—relied on crime to finance their operations. They used firearms to violently protect themselves and advance their agendas. ATF was a major source of aggravation to these groups, evidenced by several bombings and attempted bombings directed at ATF’s San Francisco office. Unlike other federal agencies, ATF’s success gauge (litmus test, if you will) was often the level of violence the agency incurred.
In the era of the shooting assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963 in Dallas, Texas), civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1968 in Memphis, Tennessee), and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1968 in Los Angeles), Congress again turned its attention to addressing firearms violence in America. The Gun Control Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in October of 1968. Congress had therein armed the federal government with a set of laws and regulatory guidelines that finally would make it possible to significantly impact armed criminals in this country. However, in doing so, they initially left out one important feature: Who would enforce these laws?
With such dynamic and unpopular laws, there was a need for an agency with a history of taking on monumental initiatives, and it had to be placed within the Treasury Department, because so many aspects of the new laws were tied to taxation as well as regulation. Once again, Congress turned to the revenuers, with their unique and aggressive well-documented can-do approaches and previous successes. On July 1, 1972, the US government created the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
ATF was initially staffed with former IRS agents. Many migrated over from the ATTU, the Alcohol Tobacco Tax Unit of the IRS, and the rest came from Treasury Department sister agencies, such as the US Secret Service (USSS), US Customs Service, and other IRS divisions. Slowly, new hires were brought into the ranks. The infrastructure for training new agents was already in place through the Treasury Law Enforcement Officers Training facility in Washington, DC. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC), where I ultimately would do all of my training, had not yet opened its doors in Brunswick.
The old Treasury guys brought a wealth of investigative experience to the fledgling agency, but the gun laws were new, and they incorporated the nation’s explosives laws as well as federal arson statutes. In other words, the arson and explosive statutes were tied to the gun laws. Federal fucking arson laws? Hell, even when I came on with ATF fifteen years later, I didn’t know there were such laws or that I would be expected to enforce them.
Those hired in ATF’s early days still were primarily concerned with the illegal liquor trade. The majority of the original six to eight hundred agents were assigned throughout the southeastern United States, where the bulk of moonshining occurred. In those days, the first “modern” ATF agents still wore a green uniform like their T-men predecessors, and they spent most of their days and nights surveilling stills and shot houses. The newly formed ATF had to reach out to fire science and military explosive experts to develop training in those areas for its agents, and it had to do that quickly. The inherited laws made ATF responsible for investigating any arson, or destruction by explosive, of any federal property or building that affected interstate commerce. Simply stated, if it blew up or was intentionally set ablaze, ATF had jurisdiction. That fact alone set the tone for the now decades-long confrontations over control between ATF and the FBI.
While all this was going on, gun violence had gone even crazier in America. Drug sales and use were on the rise, and violence was breaking out everywhere. But ATF’s agents were basically confined to six or eight states. The bureau reacted and scattered agents across the country, gradually pulling away from illegal liquor cases and putting manpower toward halting the sale and use of illegal firearms and related violent crime.
As they jumped into the fray, it didn’t take the field agents or management long to realize that if agents were to be effective, they would need to find a way to get close to the bad guys. The logical approach was to utilize undercover operatives. In the legal world, the best evidence is an eyewitness who is party to a crime. So, if our guys (in those early days, there weren’t very many female agents) were present when the crime was committed, it was considered a slam-dunk case.
Lucky for us, several of the old IRS guys who came over had some undercover experience. The undercover tactic had been around since the cowboy days in some form or fashion, but in the early 1970s, there was no formal training beyond a couple short classes at the academy. Traditional investigation just didn’t require that level of direct contact with the criminals. ATF had no other choice than to create an undercover program. There was no known formalized and comprehensive training offered by other agencies. ATF needed training suited to its new and uncharted jurisdictions. Because of the aggressiveness of its agents, the bureau already had compiled many case studies on what to do and, more importantly, what not to do.
Meanwhile, to complicate these processes, the US Supreme Court was handing down decisions in favor of the accused like Halloween candy. The landmark Miranda decision (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966) resulted in the well-known “Miranda warning,” allowing a detainee not to make self-incriminating statements; the Escobedo ruling (Escobedo v. Illinois, 1964) assured criminal suspects a right to counsel during police interrogations; the Mapp case (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961) deemed that evidence obtained during “unreasonable searches and seizures” could not be used in criminal prosecutions. In our favor, the John W. Terry decision (Terry v. Ohio, 1968) allowed law enforcement officers to frisk a suspect if there was reasonable suspicion of the individual committing a crime—hence, the term “Terry frisk.” These and a whole other slew of court decisions would directly impact the way we could and would do undercover work going forward.