After the disaster of Waco, Congress wanted heads on a platter. Hell, even President Bill Clinton made wisecracks that basically equated to calling us the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Bubbas.* ATF was still a Treasury Department agency in the early 1990s, and its director was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury. In fact, all four Treasury law enforcement agencies—ATF, IRS, USSS, and Customs—were budgeted by the Treasury/Postal Committee chaired at the time by Congressman James Lightfoot of Iowa, who did me the great honor of writing the foreword for this book. The congressman knew what ATF was capable of, and he was our strongest cheerleader when calls to abolish ATF got loud.
It didn’t hurt ATF’s cause that the Republican congressman was an ex-cop who’d worked in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But he alone couldn’t save ATF, and he enlisted Dennis DeConcini, then Democratic senator from Arizona, to help keep ATF alive and undertake a massive restructuring. It was clear that the top ATF guys were gonna get axed after Waco. Lightfoot and DeConcini backed John Magaw for the role of ATF’s new director.* Magaw was a hard-nosed Secret Service deputy director and, in his last couple of years with USSS, its director, with close ties to the administration; he was highly respected. ATF’s top leadership was purged, and Magaw immediately began centralizing power and accountability. There would no longer be twenty-six SACs running their field divisions twenty-six different ways. Magaw wasn’t perfect, but everybody knew who the boss was and what the rules were. With his credibility came administrative support, which brought funding. Our equipment was updated; we got newer and more suitable vehicles. Hell, we even got brand-new office furniture. Those were some good times. However, they wouldn’t last long.
Magaw had no choice but to move up existing bosses. After the restructuring, there wasn’t a deep bench when it came to experienced leadership. We now had SACs with maybe fifteen years on the job, translating to relatively light experience in this highly specialized, tactical field. In the old days, you had a hard time getting a first-line supervisor job with only fifteen years on. Director Magaw had started out as a state trooper for the Ohio State Highway Patrol before joining the Secret Service in 1967. He was seasoned but nonetheless new to ATF, and he had to listen to people inside ATF on how to implement his restructuring. Since there already was a contingency of former Miami bosses at the DC headquarters, this led to the “Miami mafia,” as we referred to it. One after another after another, the Miami bosses moved higher up the food chain.
The way I saw it, the executive staff created a circle of loyalty that extended to each other more so than to the bureau and its mission. I was particularly not fond of the tactics of Edgar Domenech, who had positioned himself as assistant director of ATF, shooting for the big prize. Edgar was a good field agent, but as an executive, he created an us/them mentality between the field and HQ. Instead of HQ being there to support the agents who were risking their lives in the field, it felt like the other way around.
Admittedly, Director Magaw sort of set that tone early in his tenure with his response to the highly publicized “Good Ol’ Boys” roundup. The annual gathering was started in southern Tennessee in 1980 by a small group of ATF and other Treasury agents. The week-long campout and barbeque originally was intended just as an informal RatSnakes reunion, but this thing grew to over three hundred attendees, including state and local cops and other federal agents. In 1995, the roundup was castigated in the media after at least one non–law enforcement person attended. The get-together was described as a highly drunken stripper fest, and there were allegations of racism characterizing the event. After an investigation, the Inspector General’s report found the opposite. There were one or two racially motivated signs and/or a short comedic skit. No ATF agents were directly involved in those incidents, which were conducted in privately rented campsites. When the ATF organizers had found out about this fuckery, they’d immediately shut it down. The troublemakers had been confronted and told to knock that shit off.
However, the microscopes were on ATF after Waco and Ruby Ridge and would be for a while. Magaw, still relatively new as director, brought down the hammer and vowed to fire every agent in attendance at the roundup. No one from ATF was fired for participating in the gathering that year, but by pandering to the media rather than showing trust in and publicly supporting his agents, Magaw drove a wedge between HQ and the field.
Aside from issues created by restructuring that haunted ATF for a good decade going forward, if likewise looking backward, it’s also true that many at the SAC level and above had come over from the fairly quiet corridors of the Treasury Department’s Alcohol Tobacco Tax Unit. If they hadn’t come directly from the old ATTU, they were trained by those who did. Most of that set were just as happy when they were wearing the old green uniform, and they didn’t like ATF’s dope or gun jurisdictions. Their history and training often colored their vision of what ATF should be. It was typical to blame the bosses and the senior executive leadership at HQ for all that was wrong in the field during those years. That sentiment was misplaced in some cases. But there is no disputing that ATF leadership made it easy to blame them. They hadn’t grown at the same pace as the agency. Frankly, the horror stories of decisions made by some in senior leadership would fill another book. My intent is simply to illuminate some of the avoidable obstacles that field agents, specifically UCs, were confronted with over the years while merely trying to do their jobs.
I was involved in one tragic example of my bosses’ unwillingness to enter the drug world as it related to our investigations in the twentieth damn century. ATF’s narcotic-purchase budget back in the 1980s was laughable, and DEA normally wouldn’t come out to play for small-level deals. My bosses had a mind-set that had been ingrained in them for a decade or more. The HQ point of view was very clear: “You wanna buy dope, go work for DEA.”
I am going to be intentionally vague when describing what occurred. I was asked to meet an inner-city gangster who had a sawed-off shotgun for sale. Sawed-off shotguns are covered under the National Firearms Act and carry stiff penalties for possessing an unregistered one. The altered weapon is particularly deadly because it has a much wider shot pattern and the ammunition is launched faster than it would be if the barrel were full length. The informant said I needed to buy some crack cocaine to establish my credibility with the violator. He felt it would be too suspicious if I showed up to buy the sawed-off first time out.
My SAC at the time was a rigid old-school revenuer who wished we were still working moonshine. I asked for three hundred dollars to make a crack purchase and additional funds to secure the shotgun. The informant was not reliable enough to trust with that kind of money, so my SAC insisted I do the deal. Then he authorized me to buy only ten dollars worth of crack. I was going to meet a no-shit gangster and ask to buy a single hit of crack, but then I had five hundred to eight hundred dollars to buy the shotgun. Can you say COP?!!! The long and short of it was that there was no immediate way to bridge the huge gap the boss’s directive would drop me into. So, I walked away from the deal for the time being. For various reasons, walking away was a fairly common occurrence, and in this case I was fine with it. I was busy with other shit.
I wish I had fought harder for the money. Two weeks later, the same violator committed a murder for hire of a woman in front of her children on Thanksgiving Day—with a sawed-off shotgun. I was crushed. Had I gone through with the purchase, the violator would have faced ten or more years in a federal penitentiary. From what I knew, that violator would have sold out his mother and might have given up the murder-for-hire scheme for a deal on his charges. I/we will never know.
It wasn’t just my bad damn luck at getting ignorant SACs and ASACs, because it was happening all over the country. ATF was promoting so fast that they couldn’t groom new bosses quickly enough. Definitely not all but many of those who rose through the ranks in those days didn’t like working as street agents, and they weren’t good at it. I had one ASAC in Atlanta who tried to micromanage even the most basic of agents’ investigative activities. One time he called me while I was standing outside a grand jury room and told me not to testify. He didn’t think I had satisfied the elements of the crime, meaning I hadn’t proven all of the facts needed for a conviction. Yet he’d already signed off on the case as ready for prosecution. While I was arguing with him on the phone, I got called into the grand jury room. I hung up and went in and testified. The defendant pleaded guilty and went to prison for ten years. I got your elements hangin’, Mark.
Magaw left ATF in 1999, and a disturbing and ultimately destructive trend started. The next appointed director was an ATF attorney, Bradley Buckles.* I’m sure he is a smart guy, but he knew dick about fieldwork. It came down that supervisors now would be required to attend a two-week, first-time supervisors’ school. That was fine, but the school included almost no mission-related training. Nearly the entire two weeks was devoted to procedures for disciplinary actions against agents and how to handle discrimination and retaliation complaints. Again, this set a tone and the priorities.
I’ve talked a lot about leadership needing to understand what it’s like to work in the field in order to effectively manage active agents. Let me reiterate that police work and certainly UC work requires those in the field to navigate a gray area laced with danger. The type of individual who can survive and operate in such an environment does not respond well to nor does he or she respect a too-rigid management style. A UC has zero respect for a boss tucked away in an office somewhere who puts both an investigation and lives at risk by making ill-advised calls during an operation.
One of the better acts of douchebaggery happened while I was riding with my group supervisor in his car during an operation in Atlanta. The ASAC had insisted that the supervisor call him and place the cell phone on the car seat so the ASAC could monitor activities in real time. Of course the ASAC had every right to come out and monitor or even oversee any operation he wanted to. What he didn’t have a right to do was expect the supervisor to effectively oversee the operation while talking back and forth to him. Instead of being laser focused on the UC operation and directing the agents’ actions on the ground, the supervisor was busy giving the play-by-play over an open mic. I don’t know who was the biggest douchebag boss that day, the ASAC or the supervisor for giving in to such a shit order.
Police officers throughout time have been given discretion in the field so that good judgment can prevail when a gray-area decision has to be made, often on the spot. In other words, an officer needs to wisely balance the letter of the law with the intended spirit of the law. For example, one of the greatest challenges for an undercover agent is to know when to walk away. That choice might be made because the violator is full of shit or for the simple fact that the crime does not rise to a level that will merit federal prosecution. It also could be just a gut instinct that something is wrong.
As a young undercover, I was asked to infiltrate a particular violator’s circle. The information was that he had a fully automatic machine gun for sale.
Should have been a no-brainer, right?
Wrong.
Further investigation revealed that the violator was a twenty-year-old returning veteran from the first Iraq war. The soldier had an honorable military record, including being a Bronze Star Medal recipient. The gun was a war trophy he’d taken and brought home. Against the law? Yes, of course. (It was previously overlooked when returning World War II heroes brought war trophies home.)
It became obvious to me and others that the military is very good at dealing with and disciplining their own. The US attorney agreed. But my ATF bosses at the time saw the case as a slam-dunk prosecution. So, without advising the bosses, those of us working the case quietly teamed up with the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) and confronted the soldier. The machine gun was taken into custody without incident, and the case was closed. My bosses blew a gasket, but justice prevailed.
On another occasion, I was tasked with helping to execute a search warrant on a former Vietnam veteran and Green Beret. His wife had gotten pissed at him and turned him in for having—you guessed it—a war trophy hanging over his mantle. Rather than kicking his door in, we introduced ourselves and explained the gravity of the situation. The ex-soldier readily abandoned the machine gun. Case closed, and we were able to preserve the dignity of another war hero.
We got our asses reamed for that one too.
Whereas my first boss, Bill McNulty, was one of the best. Mac, as we all called him, had come to the San Francisco office right after the MOVE bombing in West Philadelphia in 1985. Rumors abounded that Mac had a hand in the police raid on MOVE’s compound, which resulted in the deaths of eleven people, including children. He never said, and I didn’t ask.
Mac loved the job. He would go on every operation with us. He wasn’t there to watch us but to participate. I was still on newbie probation, and there was one senior agent who was fucking with me unmercifully. He had a chip on his shoulder, and everybody knew it. One day I’d had enough, and I told the other agent if he fucked with me one more time, he and I were going to the parking garage to work it out.
Mac came over to us in the middle of the office. I figured I was in deep shit. The senior agent immediately said, “Did you hear him threaten me, boss?” Mac said, “Yes, I did, and I heard how you were talking to him as well.” The agent asked, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Mac said, “I guess I’ll take both of your phone messages since you two are heading for the parking garage, right?”
Needless to say, I would have followed Mac to hell and back.
Bradley Buckles’s directorship lasted far longer than I had expected. Then Edgar Domenech was named acting director for a brief time in 2004, and his boys ran wild under his leadership or lack of. From my vantage point, all of our growth and progress under Magaw had stalled. Fallout from the 9/11 attacks had also highlighted US interagency disputes and lack of cooperation. Additionally, several high-profile domestic bombings had produced OIG reports that ATF and the FBI weren’t playing well together. The following year, in fall of 2002, President George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security and moved ATF out of Treasury and under main Justice. Our director would now be appointed by the Attorney General. We were done for at that point, in my opinion.
In 2004, John Ashcroft appointed Carl Truscott, another trusted Secret Service executive, to head ATF. Hey, at least Truscott wasn’t a lawyer. Edgar was pissed. With his Miami mafia entrenched in all the top positions, Edgar had assumed he would be appointed director.
Truscott started spending on a new headquarters building at such a rate that it took the project way over budget. He had stereos and TVs put in the executive washroom. He ordered a custom-made conference table at the price of tens of thousands of dollars. The spending abuse went on and on, and Edgar, once again in the role of deputy director, saw the opportunity to seize control. He started documenting the abuse of power and resources and then anonymously leaked information to the media that led to an OIG investigation. Everybody in the field knew that Edgar ratted out his boss. My issues with Edgar are many, but, as he was quick to say, if ATF doesn’t retaliate, then why did he need to hide behind anonymity?*
Truscott resigned in 2006, and Edgar was made acting director for the second time. He again didn’t get the full promotion. Instead, in that same year, US Attorney Michael Sullivan was appointed as the next ATF director and served in the role until 2009. This was the first time we had a director who would fill dual roles. Mr. Sullivan remained the US attorney in Massachusetts and served as our director, commuting between the two jobs. It was insane. Edgar was removed from his deputy director role and alleged that Sullivan had retaliated against him. Some call it karma. I just say: you reap what you sow. The director has every right to pick his second in command; in Sullivan’s case it was Ronnie Carter. ATF paid Edgar off and he went away, so some good came out of it.
Steve M.—of the agent foursome who had infiltrated the Warlocks biker gang—rode the Edgar Domenech gravy train while it lasted, and ATF just kept promoting him. For a time, Steve was my boss, and he tried to have me fired. I ultimately prevailed, while he eventually retired in obscurity. I have no problem pointing out that his ego got in the way of his tactical judgment. One of the worst decisions by Steve that I personally watched unfold was the 2007 Laotian undercover case known as Operation Tarnished Eagle. Steve was the San Francisco field division SAC at that point, and he sanctioned and took personal interest in the case.
The case being developed involved Harrison Jack, a retired Army Ranger and lieutenant colonel who had served in the Vietnam War, and former Royal Lao Army Major General Vang Pao, who were believed to be conspiring to overthrow the communist government in Laos. Vang Pao had emigrated from Laos to the United States in 1975, after communists seized power of his homeland and vowed to annihilate indigenous Hmongs who sided with US forces during the Vietnam conflict. Many Hmongs had fled to the Laos jungles for decades after the war. An ATF undercover posed as an arms dealer, claiming he could deliver millions of dollars’ worth of weapons—including automatic rifles, antitank missiles, rockets, and explosives—to a US-based Hmong group led by Vang Pao and Jack. The group allegedly then planned to smuggle the arms to Laos, where the Lao government had increased its campaign against the Hmong.
The host of charges that would be brought included weapons violations, conspiracy to kill and kidnap foreign nationals, and violation of the US Neutrality Acts. The Neutrality Acts make it illegal for an American to wage war or attempt to overthrow a country at peace with the United States. To my knowledge, Operation Tarnished Eagle was the first and only Neutrality Acts case involving ATF.
The problem with the case from the get-go, and I told Steve so over the course of several weeks, was that it stunk of entrapment. The main defendant was a Laotian war hero in his seventies. We had a completely inexperienced UC agent and a cadre of new hires, also inexperienced, pursuing the case that ran on for months. The only guns involved in the investigation were the props provided by ATF, and, in fact, when search warrants were executed against members of the Hmong group in California’s Central Valley, there were no firearms seized. Just one black rhino horn.*
Arrests had been made, and Steve did what Steve always did. He called the media and invited Director Sullivan out for the press conference. In the end, the case was dismissed with extreme prejudice, and the judge was none too happy with us. Public sentiment lay with the Lao Hmongs, whose plight was highlighted after the case went public.
Here’s a flashback. I’ve told about the night years ago at Pam’s #1, when I was first welcomed into the snake pit and there was an agent who spent the evening talking about how great he was at UC work. Fathom a guess who that was. Years later, when ATF created an undercover pool, who of all people was sitting on my interview panel? Right again. This was in the 1990s, and I was working in Atlanta at the time. Factor in that I had openly called this particular agent out for his self-serving, back-stabbing, self-promoting ways, and you know how my interview went. Of course, all three bosses on that panel had significant UC exposure—ten or more fucking years ago.
I was not accepted into the program, needless to say. Far less experienced junior agents were selected. The irony was that being snubbed by the pool panel didn’t impact my life or case work even a little. I continued to work more UC around the country than anybody else in my field division. I made the same money as those who made the cut. All in all, I had bought more guns, more explosives, more dope, and (off the job) likely gotten way more pussy than all three of the bosses on my panel put together. That made me smile, but I laughed my ass off when they denied Bird’s assignment as well. Who were they shitting? Bird didn’t make the A team? He laughed, too, because we were both up to our asses in UC work.
Around that time, there was an FBI task force supervisor who had asked for my UC participation. That in and of itself was a miracle because the FBI bosses tended to hate my ass. But then this knucklehead shut down an operation because—wait for it—the violator was known to be armed and was bringing a gun to sell to me. That may have been one of the dumbest things I ever heard come out of a cop’s mouth. I truly thought I had fallen down the rabbit hole.
Part of my frustration with some bosses stemmed from the simple fact that taking on the UC persona and accompanying duties was hard, especially for young agents. While UCs were respected—but not always loved and admired—by the hard-charging, ass-kicking field agents, the same couldn’t always be said when it came to the bosses. The RACs could view UCs as a liability and even a stumbling block in their climb up the management ladder. For too long, an outdated mind-set prevailed: big cases, big problems; little cases, little problems; no cases, no problems. This was never clearer to me than when I first reported to Atlanta in 1991. I was a fast-tracker in the agency. I attributed that mostly to a good work ethic and the influence of the senior agents and my San Francisco boss, Lou Bristol, who had demanded that I learn how to do the job right—the first time. At any rate, in record time, I was promoted to the highest level a street agent could achieve. I literally was promoted thirty days before I was even eligible, which caused some ruckus at HQ because they had never encountered that.
To make matters more complicated, I was simultaneously promoted in two cities, twenty-five hundred miles apart. I was promoted to GS-13 in Oakland and Atlanta with the exact same report date. I opted for Atlanta, and the agency honored my decision. I was a new agent with a new wife and two new babies. California was getting too damn expensive, and my wife was bitching about being too far from her home in Georgia. After the folks at HQ figured out how to delay my Atlanta promotion for thirty days, and meanwhile un-promote me in Oakland, I said goodbye to my folks in the San Francisco Bay Area and headed east.
The Atlanta SAC had a reputation for being a micromanaging, old-timer moonshine cop from the early days. Oh, boy, I thought, but I’d survived Ron Wolters, my micromanaging ASAC in San Francisco, so I could survive this guy. As was customary when traveling to your new office during your government-sponsored house-hunting trip, I went in to introduce myself (to kiss the ring) to my new SAC, a guy named Tommy Stokes.
I put on my best suit, the only one I had, and walked into the division headquarters office, where I was greeted by several of the administrative staff ladies. Their response was all I needed to know: This wasn’t Kansas, Dorothy. One of the ladies said “He’s in the last office on the left. Good luck!”
Stokes was on the phone with his back to me, and when I reached his door, he swiveled around in his chair, drawing on a cigarette while talking on the phone. He flashed me a look of disdain and then left me standing there for ten minutes while he clearly was just shootin’ the shit with somebody. Finally, he hung up and loudly said, “Come in.” I walked in, hand outstretched. He briefly stood to shake my hand. As he sat back down, he said, “Get a haircut and lose the fucking earring. This ain’t California.”
I would go on to be the bane of his existence and he mine for the next four or five years that he remained my SAC.
At the time, I thought to myself, well, at least my group supervisor probably will be better. Nope. My new supervisor was dead in the middle of a class-action discrimination lawsuit against the ATF. The lawsuit, brought on behalf of two hundred and forty black ATF agents, was finally settled in 1996, with a large award, payment of the class’s attorneys’ fees, and a promise that the ATF would overhaul its procedures for hiring, training, discipline, and performance reviews. Ironically, he seemed to favor the black agents in his group over the white ones by his words and deeds. I knew something was different when I showed up to the office before we were open for business one morning and found my supervisor and every black agent in our group behind closed doors in the conference room. Later that day, he mentioned to me in passing that they were conducting a Bible study. I didn’t believe that, but I told him I didn’t care.
This same supervisor later complained to the ASAC that I had Klan literature on my desk, and he was offended. Coming from San Francisco and having worked alongside black agents that I considered brothers in arms, I was offended. What I actually had on my desk was a Time magazine with an article highlighted about the KKK. The article mentioned the case I’d worked on and applauded ATF’s enforcement efforts against the Klan. The ASAC agreed the supervisor’s claim was crybaby bullshit, but ATF was under the gun and acted scared of anything to do with black agents. The ASAC asked me to put the magazine in a drawer, and I did. I was frustrated at the lack of possibility for the two-way trust that is so critical in UC work, let alone my supervisor actually having my back.
In contrast, here’s how it’s supposed to be done.
Bird and I had gone to Las Vegas to start a long-term undercover operation. We were both in the doghouse for various and sundry minor violations back at our home offices. This Vegas case might just get us back in the bureau’s good graces. We got our feet on the ground and began making UC contacts. One night, Bird didn’t feel like going out, so I went to a casino to play poker. Back then, many of us carried our firearms and credentials in those hideous fanny packs. Bird called them “hey, shoot me first, I’m a cop” bags. It was kind of true. It seemed like every cop on the planet was using them.
Knowing I’d be at the poker table for hours and this big ol’ fanny pack wasn’t comfortable, I took it off and strapped it to my chair. I won’t belabor the stupidity of that. Yep, got up, went back to the UC apartment several hours later without my gun and badge. By the time I realized what I had done, I blew every red light to get back to my seat at the poker table. My fanny pack was gone. I had fucked up huge. A cop losing his gun is bad; an ATF agent losing his gun is horrific. By policy, you must report this to IA within two hours.
This is exactly when you need a skilled and level-headed boss. In this case, it was the Las Vegas supervisor, Ed Verkin. I called him about 1 AM and woke him up. When I told him what had happened, his response was to say calmly: “Let’s sleep on it, see what happens.”
Sleep? Was he fucking kidding me? He said he’d call me in the morning and we’d figure it out, and meanwhile “don’t do anything stupid like calling IA until you talk to me in the AM.”
Ed called me in the morning to see if I’d heard anything. Nope. He was heading into the office in about an hour and said for me to meet him there to start getting our story together. I was done. I saw my career going out the window.
In reality, it was probably just going to be days off, but I didn’t need any more screwups right then. We have always said among ourselves, “God loves ATF agents and drunks.” Well, that day it was true. No sooner had I hung up the phone at the undercover apartment when the phone rang. To this day, I do not know how the local police got our UC number, and I don’t care. The caller said, “This is Carol from Las Vegas Metro, and we have an Agent Cefalu’s badge and gun down here. May I speak to him, please?”
My mind was racing, but out of instinct I didn’t confirm or deny and merely asked if I could have a callback number to confirm this was Metro PD. After all, the apartment was supposed to be a UC location. She gave me her extension, and sure enough it was Metro. I only confirmed who and where she was, and the next thing you heard was me and Bird burning rubber out of the parking lot.
Bird said, “You better call Verkin.” As it turns out, Ed was about ten minutes away from notifying IA. Many bosses would have been speed dialing IA to cover their own ass the minute I told them what had happened. Ed called me in after I had retrieved my property and simply said, “I don’t want to ever hear this discussed. Do you understand me?” I said, “Yes, sir,” and it was forgotten, until now. Sorry, Ed.
You probably can imagine that the bosses in my day rarely asked RatSnakes to fill in for supervisors. When they did, it usually was short-lived. In my case, it only took the bosses a few tries before they realized they should never make me the boss for more than a day or two. Not because I was bad at it, but because I was really good at it. It’s hard to explain the general mentality back in those days, but I would describe it as often a very draconian environment—and I wasn’t known for being a yes man.
When I was in Atlanta, I worked under a particularly self-consumed ASAC. It was said he’d made his management bones by driving the director around. Anyway, my supervisor was going out of town for a month, and this ASAC made me the acting supervisor. I think he thought he could keep closer tabs on me and maybe slow me down a bit. Wrong, Two Dogs.
My second day in the seat, the ASAC called me, agitated, and asked, “Who approved that operation last night?” I said that I had. He went on to scold me, saying I didn’t have the authority, blah blah blah. While he was rambling on, I pulled out the ATF directive that said I did have the authority. He stammered something about the Atlanta field division having additional internal policies. I told him I had a binder with the Atlanta field division policies in it, and asked if could he direct me to the policy. He said it was verbal and common knowledge to the regular supervisors. I replied that I wasn’t aware of that policy, and we hung up.
Day three in the boss seat. I hadn’t had my first cup of coffee, and the ASAC had called and was yelling on the other end of the line. Who had authorized this gun buy expenditure? Agents couldn’t be allowed to just spend funds as they saw fit, he said. I told him I had authorized the buy, and might I pass along his “job well done” to the field agents? He got louder and said: “Don’t get smart with me, Cefalu.” I asked if he needed anything else. He commenced to chew my ass and advise me of yet another verbal policy I was not aware of.
Day four. Yep, the ASAC called again, this time to say he was assigning a junior agent to serve as acting boss for the remaining twenty-six days. He thanked me for doing a good job. Everybody thought that was funny as shit and believed it was a new Atlanta record. I was off the hook, but what always had me shaking my head when shit like that happened was that I’d been replaced for doing my job.
JT was another one of those overly interfering boss types. Back when he’d been an agent in Las Vegas, he’d regularly jumped other agents’ cases, and that trend continued after he was promoted. As the SAC, he was and always would be within his right to review and sign off on any undercover operation. What he clearly should not have done was try to direct and make discretionary judgments from a thousand miles away while the operation was live, which is exactly what he did.
I had just been transferred back to the San Francisco field division after thirteen years. As one of the senior agents in the division and the most experienced UC, I immediately was sent to Reno to work with and oversee a gun show undercover operation that had commenced months earlier. The case was being worked by a couple of brand-new agents. They seemed to be making some good contacts, even if they were slightly overaggressive and lacked focus. Their networking concept was sort of the shotgun approach, which doesn’t generally work all that well. But, hey, not my circus, not my clowns. I just tried to support them as best I could.
At any rate, they had made contact with a gun dealer at the show who had agreed to sell them a converted machine gun. Upon my arrival on the case, the meeting and purchase price had already been set. All that needed to be done was for the two young case agents to brief the cover teams regarding the buy and takedown.
Just prior to the briefing, the supervisor called me and the two UCs aside and said, “The SAC says Cefalu goes in with you guys, or you don’t go.” My head damn near spun off. Before the new guys could say anything, I screamed at the supervisor, “Did the SAC hit his fucking head?” We all lodged our complaint with the supervisor, who wasn’t known for standing up for his guys. Just as those before me had done, I felt it was my job to take the heat for the new guys. I told the supervisor: “I ain’t doin’ shit until I talk to the SAC,” and he said, “Go ahead.”
The reason this was such a shocking development is that No. 1: I had never heard of such a thing. No. 2: It presented so many possible bad outcomes it bordered on moronic. No. 3: JT already had signed off on the previous plan. I had never met the violator, we had no rapport, and introducing a new face into a deal that’s already been set up runs everybody’s anxiety level way up. Especially the bad guy’s.
When I got JT on the phone, it was a short call. I screamed, he screamed, and it ended with him saying: “This is nonnegotiable. You go in or call off the deal. You guys choose.” I took our SAC’s position back to the two young UCs and told them my opinion was to call off the deal. But being a couple hours away from what I think was going to be their first-ever UC machine gun buy, they were willing to take the chance. So, we modified the plan, briefed, and went for it. You can only die once, right?
As we all fully expected, not knowing who the fuck I was, the violator was none too happy to see me, and he said so. I made a couple attempts to smooth things over, and he wasn’t having any of it. The two undercovers were staring at me as if to say, “What the fuck do we do now?” I made the command decision to extract myself from the deal and told the UCs I’d meet them at the bar later. I exited, and upon clearing the immediate area, got on the radio and updated the supervisor and cover teams. I remained out of sight but very close in case a distress signal was given. A few minutes later, the two UCs exited the building with the machine gun, the violator following behind them. One of the UCs gave the bust signal, and a clean arrest was made without incident.
I knew what was forthcoming was not going to be a “good job” or an “attaboy.” It was going to be a major ass chewing from JT for deviating from his plan. Ah, the joys of being a UC. Sure enough, JT told me to get my ass back to San Francisco and be in his office the next morning. I was so pissed and was getting no backing from the supervisor, and I told JT, “I’m two hours away. I can be in your office tonight, motherfucker,” and hung up. After the debriefing, the supervisor called me aside and said, “You really shouldn’t have called the SAC a motherfucker.” I told him I didn’t give a fuck. He said, “Now we both have to be in his office in the morning.”
I know the title and much of what I’ve said in this chapter will piss off some of my bosses who read it. But hey, fellas, if the shoe fits.
On the other hand, I’ve mentioned Lou Bristol. He was one of the old guard and a peacemaker who treated all his people well. I worked under Lou in the 1980s when I was with the OCDETF group in San Francisco. He always asked a little more of me, but in exchange I was treated more like a veteran than an FNG. He also took the time to teach me the job of being an investigator and not just a cop. He taught me the most valuable lesson of all: Learn the policies and learn the paperwork. Those two things repeatedly saved me for the rest of my career.
Because Lou knew the job of being an ATF agent better than anyone, he would sometimes piss his bosses off. I heard him tell an ASAC and a SAC more than once, “You can’t do that. It’s against policy,” and he always was right. Shortly after I left San Francisco, Lou was transferred to the field division headquarters in a bullshit admin position. Apparently, some bosses didn’t want people in the field who knew more than they did. That transfer would ultimately prompt Lou to retire. I was angry at the bureau for letting that happen to him. Little did I know that sixteen years later I would meet with a similar demise.
* At the 1995 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association Dinner, President Bill Clinton riffed on meeting with Vice President Al Gore and other White House staff to reinvent and consolidate the government. Clinton quipped: “We decided to do something for that group of constituents that’s supposed to be so alienated from the Democratic Party. We want to combine the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms with both the Bureau of Fisheries and the Interstate Trucking Commission.” Fist pump. “We’re gonna call it the Department of Guys.” “1995 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.” C-SPAN video (Program ID: 63940-1), 46:02. Aired March 15, 1995.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?63940-1/1995-radio-television-correspondents-dinner
* John William Magaw served as the fourth director of ATF from 1993–1999. Since becoming a bureau in July 1972, ATF has had twelve directors or acting directors, including Edgar A. Domenech, who twice served as acting director.
* Bradley A. Buckles joined ATF’s Office of Chief Counsel in 1974 and became chief counsel for the agency in 1995. He was deputy director under Magaw from 1996–1999 and director of ATF from 1999–2004.
* As alluded to earlier, in 2005, I spoke out publicly against corruption and illegal wiretapping sanctioned by senior personnel within ATF. Sadly, blowing the whistle resulted in a lengthy dispute with the agency for which I’d worked for twenty-seven years. Edgar Domenech and HQ vigorously fought my contention that retaliation against me had occurred when I exposed corrupt practices by some individuals.
Those familiar with an ATF operation dubbed “Fast and Furious” know that the gunwalking scandal ran deeper than a few individuals and was linked to the fatal shooting of US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010. I don’t intend this book as a tell-all, nor do I wish to dwell on my argument with ATF, but I will say more about the failed operation and my legal case in chapter 17, “The Cost of Doing America’s Business.”
* The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) entered into force in 1975 and became the only treaty to ensure that international trade in plants and animals does not threaten their survival in the wild. Of course, ATF had no way to prove the rhino horn was taken after 1975. The whole thing was embarrassing.