Most UCs work under minimal oversight. Usually, a daily check-in with your group supervisor is sufficient. Drop by the office once a week and do your reports of investigation (ROIs), make your court appearances,* fill out your time sheet on time, and you’re golden. But as a result, UCs don’t experience the grounding effect of cop morals and values that are reiterated by regularly comingling with fellow cops. More of the UC’s time is spent living among the bad guys than the good guys, and it gets easier to be consumed by an investigation. Picture it this way: An undercover operator has a gun, a badge, a fake ID, a non-government-looking car or bike, some sort of backstopping, and quite often a covert bank account or credit card. His boss only knows what the agent wants him to know, and likewise with a spouse or significant other.
Such freedom can be a blessing or the kiss of death.
I remember my dad sitting me down over cocktails one night. He told me he was so very proud of what I had become. Then he caught me off guard by saying, “If you’re going to be a cop, be the best, most honest cop you can be.” He followed that with, “If you’re going to be a crook, be the best you can be, but please don’t be both.” I thought his comments were directed at me because of my youthful bullshit. Then I realized he wasn’t necessarily talking about me but more likely referring to his days growing up, when police corruption was almost expected. It was easy to put my dad’s concerns to rest. I had become the cop who picked up a dollar bill while on patrol and turned it in as found property. I didn’t even feel comfortable accepting free coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, although I did. When we hit the Hells Angels in 1987, via a joint ATF and FBI investigation dubbed Operation CACUS, we seized three million dollars from a club member’s residence. I was alone in a room with all of the cash before it had been documented. That kind of shit never crossed my mind. Breaking the law was no longer part of my behavior. For the first time in my life I didn’t have to look over my shoulder, and I liked it.
Although, there always was a line for a UC to walk. Early on, while refining my UC skills and traveling within our small circle, I befriended several local police department special squads. They often called on me to provide UC services outside of ATF jurisdiction and with no ATF involvement. According to policy, UC operations could be conducted only within strict reporting parameters. Following this protocol would have required me to refuse the special squads or significantly delay their operations to get the necessary ATF approvals. Therefore, I did what we all did. I did the undercover work and prayed like hell nobody got shot and nothing bad happened. While working the Black Biscuit Hells Angels case (a high-stakes infiltration of the gang in Mesa, Arizona, in 2001 that resulted in numerous convictions), Bird crossed the US border into Mexico to make a meeting to advance his credibility with the club. Crossing an international border for a law enforcement action without approval is as big a policy violation as you can make. We were experts at hanging our asses out to get the job done.
When I came on with ATF, as mentioned, agents had a slew of collateral duties. Some were evidence custodians, some were interstate nexus experts, some were in charge of office-assigned equipment. Some had to do collateral investigations (the term used for a request from one field division to another to conduct a follow-up investigation) or relief from disability investigations. Luckily for me, I had pretty darn good bosses in the early days, and they made me do all of those duties at one time or another.
To begin with, my training officer, Joyce Seymour, gave me every shit deal on the planet, and I love her for that today. I learned the job from the bottom up. Joyce had more than fifteen years with the ATF and had been heavily involved in the 1977 Golden Dragon investigation in San Francisco’s Chinatown after a bunch of local gangbangers shot up the restaurant, leaving five bystanders dead and eleven wounded. My next boss, Lou Bristol, immediately made me the evidence vault custodian. That one pissed me off. I’d moved over to the task force right after the takedown of the 1987 Hells Angels case. We had a huge vault at the drug task force, now filled top to bottom with evidentiary guns and ammo. Every time a gun had to come in or go out for the lab or court, I had to be there and document its movements.
Meanwhile, as the trials got underway, the hallways of the courthouses were filled with Hells Angels—for months. As various law enforcement personnel passed daily through those same hallways, the palpable animosity in the air was directed mainly toward ATF.
At the end of the Hells Angels trials, there was evidence that needed to be returned to its rightful owners. I was extremely uncomfortable with returning any gun to any Hells Angel for any reason. I bitched to Lou, but his answer was, “That’s part of the job.” The then vice president of the Hells Angels Oakland chapter was a guy known as Cisco Valderrama. He had a shitty reputation as a menacing individual, could afford a high-dollar attorney, and he had never been convicted of a felony and therefore was not prohibited from owning a firearm. So I had to make arrangements to return a trunkload of firearms to the VP of an organized crime group.
The morning I had arranged to transfer the firearms to Valderrama’s attorney, Lou came over to my desk and handed me a stack of Mylar stickers used by ATF.
“I thought you might like some of these,” he said, and then just walked away.
I met with the attorney in the sub-basement of the federal building to turn over the firearms—nice firearms, expensive firearms. After completing the mounds of paperwork to effect the change of custody, I rolled out a big cart with all of the guns on it.
“Are you kidding me?” was the attorney’s response.
Each and every gun was adorned with a shiny ATF badge–shaped sticker that would take considerable time and effort to remove. Sometimes it was the small victories.
Needless to say, I never liked returning firearms to criminals. It went against every fiber of my cop being. And every time I had to meet a Hells Angel or any scumbag, they would see my face. The one that caused me damn near ulcer-level stomach cramps was returning a firearm to Chucky Diaz.*
Chucky, being a no-shit degenerate criminal, was convinced I had a warrant for his arrest and was nowhere to be found. I finally called Valderrama and told him if that fucking asshole Diaz wanted his pistol back, he’d better call me. Valderrama offered to take receipt, but I declined just because I could. Finally, Chucky called. We made arrangements to meet on the side of the road in Richmond, California. I made him sign the paperwork and then handed him the gun. He said “Fuck you,” and I returned the sentiment.
When you are finally cut loose from training and free to operate independently, the first thing you want to do is produce. You stop asking permission for everything you do, and just do it. It’s a liberating feeling to no longer be the “rookie.” The tendency is to run out, find a violator, and make your first UC buy on your own. Darren Gil and I were no different.
Before we taught the class from hell, Darren was one of my first partners and friends in ATF. While we both were still FNGs, Darren and I met a violator trying to sell a machine gun. This guy was a felon, just out of prison, and a huge narcotics user. We scrambled to get our story together, which seemed simple enough to concoct: we were security and hit men for major marijuana grows in Northern California. We would learn after this caper that maybe we should put more thought into our cover stories.
We met the guy at a local fleabag motel to talk prices and negotiate for a later meeting when he would bring the weapon and we would bring the money. He never showed up and wouldn’t return our pages. It looked like our first UC together was a bust. No biggie, these things happen. However, when you open a formal investigation, you enter the subject’s profile in the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) so law enforcement will be aware that the individual was a target at some point in his life. This protocol allows other law enforcement to call and get the background on the violator.
After the Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989, one of our ATF squads was kicked out of their office across town because the building was so badly damaged. For the short-term, the Metro squad was co-located in our office. No big deal, except for two things. First, we were two squads in an office barely big enough to house one. Number two, and probably the biggest rub, was that the SF Metro group supervisor did not like me or Darren. He actually directed his group not to discuss their ongoing investigations with us. To our surprise, the Metro group opened a case on the same guy Darren and I had met for the machine gun. The guy’s profile was right there in TECS, but out of competitive bullshit, the Metro team refused to confer with us.
As we later found out, Metro’s undercover agent was not aware of this guy’s previous lack of credibility. ATF frowned on letting a violator take money on a promise to return later with the product. In this case, the violator had promised two silenced pistols. The Metro UC let the violator walk with the money and, of course, got ripped off. The ballbusting that followed courtesy of Darren and me was unrelenting.
Fast-forward a couple of weeks. The call came into our office that the Napa County narcotics team had found the guy and were set to do a dope deal with him (probably with our money). Darren and I decided to race up there and hook this asshole up. The problem was, Metro had the warrant, and their boss would be none too happy to know Darren and I were going to arrest him. We walked into our supervisor’s office (he was aware of the rip-off and the nature of the infighting) and asked him if we could go get this guy. His response was, “What are you waiting for?” As we were hauling ass out the door, he added, “You may want to turn off your radios and pagers.” After we left, the Metro supervisor stomped into our boss’s office and demanded he order us back. Our supervisor made several attempts but could not reach us . . . bahahaha.
Darren and I met with the Napa narcs, who agreed that once they had the dope, they would signal us and we could apprehend the guy. The signal came, and we walked up the block and then up the walkway, staring straight at the violator, not expecting what happened next. He recognized us—as the two buyers/hit men he’d ditched in his machine gun scam. He jumped behind one of the narcs and started screaming, “Call the cops,” “Help me,” “They are gonna kill me!”
He fell down trying to get away, and when Darren and I laid hands on him, we intentionally waited a few seconds and then showed our badges and told him he was under arrest. He let out a loud moan and said, “Thank God.”
Still pretty early in my RatSnake career, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) intelligence unit was on the trail of a convicted bank robber who later would elevate his status to cop killer. Long story short: ATF initially was called in because the suspect had acquired many of his firearms under a fake ID. Although I was new to the agency, the boss figured it would be a good way for me to learn our firearms tracing system and do a little legwork. Nothing too fancy for the new kid. It just goes to show—you never know what lies out there when you open a case.
Ted Jeffery Otsuki, a.k.a. Mark Taira, was a very, very bad man. In fact, he was the most dangerous violator I ever dealt with. After determining his true identity, the case approach changed drastically. Otsuki/Taira was a former federal convict whose specialty was takeover bank robberies. Shortly after being released from Leavenworth, he was identified as the subject who had been casing the Brownsville, Texas, DEA office. His plan was to rob the office of all its stored drugs. After being confronted by law enforcement regarding malicious intent toward the DEA office, Otsuki fled to San Francisco, where he joined up with a former inmate from Leavenworth. Our investigation ultimately revealed that he planned to take a bank executive hostage, strap a bomb to his body, and demand ransom. We knew this because his roommate told us of his plans, and we recovered the bombs from a rented storage locker. Locating that evidence shed light on his intentions and prompted Otsuki to flee again, this time to Boston, where a bizarre set of events led to him murdering one Boston police officer and wounding another.
While Otsuki was still in San Francisco, I got a 3 AM phone call asking if I could meet the SFPD gang unit in the Mission District. This is where I first met Lt. Dan Foley, commander of SFPD’s intelligence and gang unit, and otherwise known as “the Toad.” Dan had risen through the ranks as a detective after helping to solve the Golden Dragon restaurant murders. While working that case, he had gained respect for ATF.
Dan’s team needed a UC guy to hang out in an X-rated peep show theater and follow a designated subject to his apartment. I had no time to call my bosses, so I just did as the SFPD asked. The subject was the roommate of Otsuki. Tailing the roommate led to his arrest, and he sang his heart out. He was visibly shaken and clearly terrified of Otsuki. The items seized from the apartment included bulletproof vests, pipe bombs, and machine guns—evidence that ultimately led to the arrest and conviction of an FBI Top Ten Most Wanted cop killer. Because Massachusetts didn’t have the death penalty at the time, and because everybody agreed that this son of a bitch should never see daylight, ATF prosecuted him as well under the Armed Career Criminal Act. This is rarely done, but in Otsuki’s case, after he serves his life sentence in Massachusetts, he owes another life sentence to the feds.
My bosses were very happy with my work on the case, and I never had to testify, so they also were none the wiser about my off-the-books UC that night. I did get a letter of commendation from the Boston police commissioner. And whenever I needed something from the SFPD guys, they were Johnny-on-the-spot.
My nighttime UC for the SFPD was something of an exception in that prepping for an undercover assignment most often is a highly methodical process. Deciding how you will dress. What you will drive. What you will say. You need to have abort, distress, and bust plans all in place. The smallest detail can tank an operation and sometimes has. Imagine meeting a guy you’ve previously done some business with and have established some sort of relationship with. Maybe on previous meets you introduced a female agent as your girlfriend or fiancée, but you show up on this particular occasion sporting a wedding band. This after you spent the first few deals telling him how you never would get married again or how your ex-wife was such a bitch. These types of self-inflicted operational security (OPSEC) issues can make the job a lot harder.
That’s why agents always have a partner or a case agent double-check their physical persons before they go out the door. When I graduated from college, one of the first in my family to do so, I ran out and bought the nicest class ring I could buy. It was gold with a diamond and the scales of justice on it. It sat in my jewelry box for the remainder of my career.
Undercover agents come in all sizes and shapes. There are no set-in-stone traits, skills, or characteristics that guarantee you will be a good or a great undercover operator. Probably one of the most glaring and best-known comparisons would be the differences between Bird and me. Bird is a big man, extremely calm, soft-spoken, and affable. I am of average build, loud, brash, and high-strung. Not because we planned or practiced it, but our natural good cop/bad cop looks and demeanors may very well explain our relative success on joint operations.
Compare the Ragin’ Cajun Milton and/or Bambi to me, and most would agree we are contenders for the “aggravating son of a bitch hall of fame.” As RatSnakes, we all adopted personas that made us feel safer when moving within a criminal environment. For Jay, it was an over-the-top appearance, with tattoos, braided goatee, and a shitload of rings and bracelets. For me, it was long hair, earrings, tattoos, and occasionally a black eye patch. I found that when I wore the eye patch, violators were more distracted wondering whether or not I had an empty socket under there than worrying about me being a cop. For Milton, well, it was just being a scraggly bastard. Gundo vacillated between ’60s hippie and rode-hard biker. Some of the black agents went with street bling, sports jerseys, and earrings. Our Hispanic brothers and sisters sometimes favored buttoned-to-the-collar (Soreno gang-style) flannel shirts and dungarees. We all wanted to blend in, but we also knew it had less to do with appearance and much more to do with attitude and game, in other words, our ability to sound and act like criminals without actually being criminals.
The exact street lingo you employ is critical. It’s the little things that can get you, like talking to a violator and answering his question with “10-4.” Or instead of referring to a pistol or rifle as a gat, or some steel, you instead accidentally say sidearm or Roscoe. That’s cop talk, not bad-guy talk. When I was in Atlanta, I spent a lot of time working in the inner city, mostly in the projects, buying dope and guns. I happen to be Caucasian, but the common greeting of “What’s up, my nigga?” was accepted street slang and didn’t raise any eyebrows. In that context, the phrase wasn’t viewed as a racial remark and was used interchangeably between blacks and whites. Then I walked into a first meet with an Aryan Brotherhood member who recently had been paroled, and the familiar phrase slipped out. Time seemed to stop as this white supremacist motherfucker stood up, took a step toward me, and said, “What the fuck did you just call me?” On that occasion, pretending humility was the best option. I said, “My bad, brother. I was just fuckin’ around.” He said, “Don’t ever call me a nigger again, or we are going to have problems.”
My fake humility paid off, and he ultimately spent ten years in a federal penitentiary being called way worse, I’m sure.
It is situations like this that make UC such a stressful endeavor. You can never stop thinking and yet have to appear as if you don’t have a care in the world. Again, it’s all about having game. Case in point, in the mid-1980s I had not yet been to the ATF Academy and as such my undercover contact with violators was prohibited, or at least extremely limited. I was working to build a case against an armed methamphetamine “cooker” in Sonoma County. My informant advised that he could make a direct introduction for a purchase of some meth and a couple stolen guns. I hadn’t been in San Francisco long and did not know the other agents very well or who to approach. Back in those days, new agents were to be seen and not heard. I was treated a bit differently because I had a fair amount of prior experience. My training agent, Joyce Seymour, guided me through the process and paperwork of setting up a UC meet. She said that since Joe Stafford and another agent, Jim Smith (Smitty), worked up north a lot, she would ask them to help out.
I wrote up the plan and met with Joe and Smitty and the narcs from Sonoma who would be covering the deal. We were good to go, and I was looking forward to getting my first UC case under my belt. We showed up at the briefing, and my undercover, Agent Smitty, walked in and I almost seized up right there. He was wearing a button-down oxford shirt, polyester-blend slacks, and hard-soled polished dress shoes. It was a rainy night, so he also was wearing a two-hundred-dollar London Fog raincoat, with an umbrella tucked under his arm. He was tall, a bit overweight, and had short salt-and-pepper-colored hair and a beard. I was speechless. He was going to roll on down into the white ghetto part of town, waltz into a meth cook’s house looking like Lord Fauntleroy, and buy guns and dope? We finished the briefing, and Smitty threw a wire (transmitter) into one pocket and a Nagra recorder in the other and set my plan in motion. I was still in shock. This wasn’t what I thought undercover work looked like.
Smitty was very close to retirement, which put him around fifty years old. Well, I watched a badass do badass stuff that night. Hell, I’m not even sure if he brought his firearm. He walked in, made small talk, told the guy he didn’t have all night to fuck around, and walked out fifteen minutes later with an ounce of meth and two stolen pistols.
Later during that same period of time, Smitty’s partner, Joe Stafford, was tagged for another UC deal. It wasn’t mine, but I got to help with the surveillance. There had been a significant hijacking of brand-new in-the-box Beretta pistols, and one of Joe’s snitches had a line on maybe purchasing them. Based on our intel, these violator(s) were probably mobbed up, meaning they were likely Mafia-connected guys. I’d hardly gotten my mind around the Smitty deal, half deciding it was a fluke, so imagine my surprise when Joe showed up to the briefing wearing a polo shirt, corduroy sport coat, faded jeans, and penny loafers—no socks. He might have been the most handsome man any of us had ever seen and was a damn scratch golfer. I remember thinking that with my bell-bottom jeans and long hair, maybe I wasn’t cut out for this UC stuff after all.
Equally bizarre to me was that the plan called for Joe simply to meet the violators for drinks and go from there. Joe was driving an undercover Cadillac borrowed from the local narcs, and he proceeded to a high-end bar on Fisherman’s Wharf where we easily could surveil him and monitor the wire. After shooting the breeze for a bit, the two violators and Joe strolled out and went across the street to A. Sabella’s, one of the finest seafood houses in San Francisco at the time. They commenced to have dinner for so long that Joe had to excuse himself and go to the restroom to change the battery in the wire. To top this all off, he paid for dinner with ATF funds. I was immediately back on the undercover train. I could do this.
Joe met the violators again the next day to purchase the pistols. We executed a buy bust and recovered all but two of the stolen guns. To say I was in awe of Joe’s skills would not be nearly strong enough.
Of course, undercover operations didn’t always go so smoothly, even for greats like Smitty and Stafford, but sometimes it was good enough that they went at all. I’m reminded of a friend and former cop who came to ATF. She was smart and aggressive. Her very first undercover buy went anything but well. Kelly was supposed to meet the violator to pick up a pistol for her “boyfriend.” The deal had been set up by said boyfriend, who actually was an informant.
The details are sketchy to this day, but there was a breakdown in relaying GPS directions to the violator’s location. The cover team ended up surveilling an address on South Main Street while Kelly was headed to the same house number on North Main Street. By the time Kelly realized that she was at a different location than the cover team, the violator already was approaching her vehicle to invite her inside. She didn’t know if the cover team could hear the wire, and she couldn’t call them to say where she was. So, she did what any good UC would do. She walked in, made the deal, recorded it, and walked the hell out, knowing she was in for some shit talking when she finally got back with the team. By any standard, it was a bush league operation and really bad things could have happened, but they didn’t and that is how we learn. For her troubles, Kelly earned the nickname Special Agent Magellan.
As Kelly did in setting up her buy, a UC invariably will rely on the use of informants. Working with CIs does not create the best-case scenario, but these individuals oftentimes are vital to an investigation. They can give introductions or vouch for an agent’s criminal credibility. Working informants and working the street gives UCs a definitive edge over most traditional investigators. You pick up street talk and intel that you file away for later use. The pitfalls of using an informant are obvious. You now have a criminal who knows who you are. The best UCs in the business are pretty much experts in informant control. They know exactly the right blend of the stick and the carrot. Those who don’t understand how to work an informant are placing lives at even greater risk.
The Outlaws Motorcycle Club had its roots in McCook, Illinois, and by the 1990s the gang had chapters nationwide, including in Atlanta, Georgia. At the time, I was assigned to the Atlanta gang group, and during the Outlaws takedown by ATF, DEA, and Atlanta PD, street intel proved helpful. You won’t find this kind of intel in any ATF or police manual.
While a search of the Outlaws’ clubhouse and compound in Atlanta was being conducted, one of the Outlaws who was handcuffed behind his back, consistent with policy, was in obvious agony. He wasn’t complaining, but I knew from street intel that he had suffered a severe injury from a gunshot in the past. He was being guarded by DEA agents. As the case agent and senior agent on the scene, I walked over and told him to stand up.
“If you fuck with me, I will shoot you where you stand. Now turn around,” I told him.
He did as told, and I moved the cuffs to the front.
This pissed off the DEA agents, and they raised hell and called their boss over, but I told them, “This is my prisoner, so fuck off.”
At that time, we were temporarily housing federal prisoners at Douglas County Jail, a nonsmoking facility. When the Outlaw asked where he and his buddies were going to be processed and I told him Douglas County, he sighed.
“I guess you wouldn’t let me have a smoke, right?” he asked me.
Over the further objections of my DEA counterparts, I gave him a cigarette and lit it.
There was a method to my madness in showing the biker some street respect. The cops had won. The bikers all were going to prison. I didn’t need to show this Outlaw how tough I was.
I had to get to court to get ready to process the prisoner. I called my partner Steve Kosch over and told him to stay with this prisoner and that if he acted a fool, to shoot him. Kosch nodded. I had a pack of smokes with three or four in it; I tossed them to the prisoner, he nodded at me, and I left.
The reason I haven’t named this particular biker is because I was called to the US Attorney’s office early the next morning under a shroud of secrecy. When I got there, my DEA counterparts were already there, and so was the same biker, in handcuffs, sitting next to his attorney.
The US attorney said to me, “He wants to cooperate, and he wants to work with you.”
The biker looked over at the DEA guys and said, “I ain’t working with those fucking assholes.”
It may sound great, but let me say that some of the hardest and most challenging ops to be involved in are those that are coed. Aside from being tactical, cover identities add another layer of security to keep agents’ families away from the ugly world UCs travel in. But to work closely in a UC role with a member of the opposite sex inherently creates issues at home. Nobody wants to think about their spouse working in a highly charged environment, oftentimes acting in their undercover roles as boyfriend or girlfriend. Then you have to explain that you’re taking off your wedding ring because “it doesn’t fit my role.” This is not to say that UCs couldn’t and shouldn’t be trusted as faithful spouses. However, perception gets pretty close to reality when the spouses are at home bathing children while the agents are at a bar schmoozing violators.
Just as those before me had done, I took it upon myself to help up-and-coming UCs through support and encouragement. Lori was one such agent and a competent one, although she didn’t have much UC exposure when we worked together the first time. We had been invited to a biker party in Macon, Georgia. It was supposed to be an in-and-out, get our faces known, and just talk some shit for future contacts.
The weather got shitty, and we had been drinking. Neither of us wanted to ride two hours back to Atlanta in the rain on a motorcycle. The president of the club had taken a liking to us and offered to let us stay in his motor home. Our other choice was to run around in the middle of the night, in the rain, to find a hotel. We took his offer, and he didn’t mention that there would be another biker couple sharing the motor home. There we were in the roles of boyfriend and girlfriend with no real option but to suck it up and sleep (yes, sleep) in the same bed. We preserved our cover and agreed never to speak of it again.
Maybe there should be a rule that only single guys and gals can do UC work. It’s really not fair to the families. The vast majority of my UC meets were at night, when other moms and dads were going home to their families. I really don’t know why so much nefarious shit happens at night. Maybe it’s written somewhere in the gangster handbook.
“Dad, are you gonna be at my football game tonight?” my sons would ask me. My answer was the same every time: “I am planning on it.” They soon learned what that meant. Even though she knew the answer, and knew how much it aggravated the shit out of me, my wife would always ask, “What time are you going to be home tonight, honey?”
Across the state, a similar scenario would be playing out with Bambi and her boyfriend. “Ya wanna go out tonight, baby?” the boyfriend might say. “Sounds good. I’ll call you later,” Bambi would reply, knowing a machine guns deal she’d been working for months might go down tonight, but it’s easier not to get into details with the boyfriend. Hell, the deal might not happen anyway. At the same time, Bird’s cell phone would be blowing up. It was a violator he’d been trying to meet with for days. But he couldn’t answer the phone at the moment because he had two crying babies in the background, and such an error would surely compromise his cover.
It was the same drill every day: Make sure the pistol was loaded, gather badge and credentials, kiss the wife, kiss the kids, and roll toward the office to tackle the mound of paperwork from last night’s deal. Cops whined about paperwork, but all that paperwork meant we did good. It meant the deal went. It meant somebody was going to jail.
I’d walk in the office late because we’d been out late the night before.
“Hey, Boss, morning.”
The boss would say, “Don’t sit down. The SAC wants to see you.”
The SAC would be pissed because we’d spent so much cash buying guns last night and he wanted to know why we didn’t buy bust the guy.
“Tell him he would know if he’d read my fucking reports,” would be my answer.
After repeating all the details to the SAC, ASAC, and operations officer, I’d be allowed to go back to work—now that a particular boss had shown me how much he knew about undercover, even though I was certain he never did a UC case worth mentioning in his whole career.
The other UCs would start rolling in. High fives would go around over coffee and a debriefing.
I always looked at debriefing as a constructive way of identifying how everybody on the deal fucked up. We could all too easily say, “Hey, the deal went down, and we all went home. Damn, we are good.” The problem was that we might not be so lucky next time. So we aired out every aspect of the operation: planning, execution, the undercover, the cover team, the equipment. Then it was on to somebody else’s deal, and so it went.
Invariably, some agent would set a deal for Friday afternoon, during rush hour. You haven’t had your patience fully tested until you’ve had to do a rolling surveillance during rush hour in a metropolitan area.
Some operations never got the go-ahead. There were many reasons for this, with safety usually at the forefront. Unfortunately, sometimes it was just inexperience and fear on the part of management. My supervisor shut down one operation because the sun was setting and he didn’t want me to be doing undercover after dark. I was so pissed. The only response I could come up with was, “Are you shitting me? That’s your fucking reason?” He didn’t appreciate my response, and certainly it was disrespectful and I apologized. But these kinds of decisions can have broader impact. In this case, I had another agency’s Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team acting as my UC cover team. I’d called on agents to come in from out of town. I used up a lot of resources and lost credibility based on my representations.
The supervisor’s decision to pull out also created an exit dilemma for me. It’s always a gut call about how long to wait for the bad guy. Don’t wait long enough, and said bad guy won’t agree to meet you next time. Wait around all day without a good reason from the bad guy, and you brand yourself as either a punk or a cop. Bad guys don’t keep schedules. They slither in the dark and in the shadows. They are always late and always undependable. Picture yourself being a bad guy, running around doing bad-guy stuff. You’ve agreed to meet me to sell me a fully automatic machine gun. You call and say you got shit goin’ on and will meet me two hours later, which I resist, but playing the role of another bad guy, I ultimately agree. You are going to expect a good reason if I call you back and try to reset the deal for tomorrow at daylight.
After a long day such as this, it was back home to the family, by now having missed the kids’ birthday parties/football games/bedtime. The wife/husband/boyfriend/girlfriend would be understandably tired and pissed off at having to deal with things on their own—again. Of course, I realize that many people in various professions work long hours and juggle work and home life. There are, however, only a select few professions that include the pressure of morphing into a different identity and entering/exiting a dangerous, criminal world each day before heading back home to the spouse and kids.
One common character flaw of UCs who lived this lifestyle was their inability to say no. There were many reasons for this tendency; the most pressing was that we lived for the rush. It’s what kept us going and, to a certain degree, defined us. When you had established a name for yourself as a good operator, more and more people requested you to do their UCs. If you said no too many times or in a critical situation, it might be the last time they asked. Finally, it had to do with ego. The more successes you had working undercover, the more you started to believe you could do it better than anybody else.
Whatever the reason, saying no can save your life. I don’t know that for sure because I don’t ever remember saying no. When all of us were early in our careers, we took every gig that came down the pike. It wasn’t a competition, but it sure looked like one. I was calling Gundo; he was calling Bambi; and Dino was being called by everybody. The outcome we risked was a destructive type of burnout.
Undercover agents act out their lives in little bit parts. RatSnakes describe the corollary effect as “personality fragmentation.” Although it has not been specifically identified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (the recognized bible of mood disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association), personality fragmentation is a real thing. Not to be confused with a diagnosed multiple personality disorder, personality fragmentation can be a net result of too much UC exposure, swiftly moving in and out of acted roles without sufficient recovery time. Who am I today? What am I buying from this guy? Where did I tell that guy I am from? When those lines begin to blur, bad things can happen.
The mental and emotional agility required to do UC work also means the agents experience prolonged and heightened stress. One might say that the type of freedom intrinsic to doing UC work comes with a cost. The law enforcement community has worked to develop supportive programs, sometimes even leading to interventions. ATF provided an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and peer-support resources. In my time, most of us leaned on our families, friends, and other RatSnakes. Drinking was one coping method. Mostly, though, we just ignored it. See, everybody around us may have perceived the impacts of long-term exposure, but often we agents were the last to recognize it in ourselves.
* UCs often do not have to appear in court until the case is over, when it matters less who sees them. The case agent and others make the regular court appearances to secure warrants or tracking devices, et cetera. If a UC has to appear in court for an interim matter, they sometimes enter the building clandestinely or through secure access areas to avoid burning their cover.
* We didn’t yet know that he was one of the Angels responsible for the Grondalski murders, but let’s just say that Chucky and I had a history.