Perhaps you’ve heard the terms of endearment: rat squad, cheese eaters, headhunters, management hammer, et cetera. Having been a cop for several years before joining ATF, I’ll just say I was somewhat versed in dealing with Internal Affairs.* Early in my career with ATF, I heard horror stories, mostly urban legends, about the bureau’s IA agents. In fact, several of my early contacts with IA were fair and professional. The division was staffed with seasoned agents who understood the job of being an agent and were able to discern between an innocent mistake and a flagrant policy violation.
That changed over the years. After experiencing some fairly large sexual harassment and discrimination cases/lawsuits as well as internal corruption, the bureau expanded its IA division. Management created a path for IA investigators to be promoted to Grade-14 agents without having to be a supervisor or doing HQ time. From what I saw, that was all that the “slug” agents in the field needed to hear. Agents who couldn’t or wouldn’t produce in the field found their dream job with IA: normal hours, a promotion, and no expectation to make cases. Working IA was a voluntary assignment, and the agents were accountable only to HQ. That structure further empowered HQ, and the standards for initiating an Internal Affairs investigation changed. There always was a gray area between what was a management issue and what rose to the level of a true integrity issue warranting an IA investigation. That gray area got grayer.
Those of us in the field felt the climate change. IA could be called in for any reason an SAC desired. Make a complaint about a supervisor, you would be investigated by IA. Piss off your supervisor, IA would come. Make a discrimination or sexual harassment allegation, your ass was going to be a target. We UC agents were wary of IA and their true mission. More often than not, it appeared they reveled in jamming an agent up as opposed to reporting the facts. If you were going to survive a career of UC, you learned how to sidestep management’s BS. My boss Ron Mitchell bragged about being 19–1, meaning he had been investigated by IA nineteen times but disciplined only once. That was unbelievable if you knew Uncle Ron.
Right before my Atlanta SRT team deployed to Waco, after the initial shoot-out, a new supervisor transferred in from Miami. I did not know anything about the supervisor except that all my guys in Miami vouched for him. There had been a story about a hard-drinking supervisor in that town who would take his guys out after every operation. One time, after drinking, all the agents left together. Since they all lived north of Miami, they would caravan up the only road leading north. One car, the supervisor’s, exited south, but nobody noticed. It was said the supervisor crossed nine bridges and got all the way to Key West before realizing he had gone the wrong way. The funny story made the rounds, and I never thought about it again.
After returning from Waco, after the compound burned down, I reported to my new supervisor: Ron Mitchell. He ultimately took over our SRT team. After one of our first training missions with Ron, he asked, “Do any of you girls drink?” All of our hands went up. We moved to Manuel’s Tavern, a favorite cop watering hole in Atlanta. After closing Manuel’s, we all went our separate ways.
The next morning, Ron came straggling in around noon. He waved me into his office, shut the door, and filled me in on his evening. He’d left Manuel’s and got turned around. He kept driving and driving and didn’t realize he was going the wrong way until he crossed Lake Hartwell, about ninety miles from his residence. I lost it. Between gasping and laughing, I said, “It’s true.” He asked, “What’s true?” I said, “You drove all the way to Key West before figuring it out.” He said, “Oh, you heard about that.”
Everybody loved Ron after that one. Well, except maybe the bosses.
Ron had been an agent in North Florida back during the cocaine wars. There was a bunch of police corruption in those days, and IA was on high alert. One of the favorite tricks used by the bad guys was to make bogus allegations against a cop or an agent. They knew it would bring down a world of hurt on whoever they pointed the finger at. It was sort of payback.
On one such occasion, Ron and several others had been accused of stealing millions of dollars or some shit like that. Hell, it was hard enough to get Ron to pick up a bar tab. A bunch of agents were out drinking and found an IA tracking device on Ron’s government vehicle. Apparently, the investigators were dicks, even though months and months of investigation hadn’t turned up a hint of corruption by any of the agents or cops in this group. The agents were sick of IA busting their balls. They removed the tracking device from Ron’s car and placed it on a southbound eighteen-wheeler. IA didn’t see the humor.
Needless to say, Ron became a dear friend of mine, and he was my son’s sponsor for his Confirmation ceremony.
There were undeniable perks that came with being a RatSnake—such as the right kind of attention from the opposite sex. What was the point of being a super-secret agent if you couldn’t tell anyone?
One of our single guys was in a bar in Miami, chatting up a young lady and getting nowhere. Well, Casanova—his real name, no shit—decided to play his trump card and tell her who he was and the dangerous shit he did for a living. We all played that card at one time or another. Hell, how do you think I got such a beautiful wife?
Casanova threw his best stuff at her, but she left without giving him her number. What she did do was look up another telephone number: the number to ATF headquarters in Washington, DC. This presumably innocuous socialite was highly offended that this young UC would tell all of our nation’s secrets to someone he had just met in a bar. In fact, he hadn’t given up any secrets beyond his identity and maybe embellishing a few war stories. Nonetheless, he got his ass chapped and a formal reprimand.
Nic, on the other hand, and that is not his real name, did pretty much the opposite: he blamed the game. Alone one night, he ordered up an escort, a.k.a. a hooker. The problem, from his perspective, was that he ordered a redhead, and when there was a knock at the door, they had sent a brunette. He felt that entitled him not to pay the lady—and not to pay her by showing her a badge and a gun. The next knock at the door was from the local PD, who summarily arrested him for theft of services. Nic hadn’t been with the bureau long enough to be traumatized, but he got enough doctors to say he was, and he kept his job. Although he never was allowed in the field again.
Dino narrowly avoided a career-ending IA investigation. I say “career-ending” not because it warranted a termination but because his supervisor at the time was a huge pussy who gave him no support. As if it couldn’t get any worse, the first-line supervisor disliked UC types and made it his mission to fuck with them at every turn. Dino gave him the opportunity, and the boss took it.
Dino left a post-operation celebration at a local tavern and made a wrong turn on the way home. He strayed into another lane, which caught a Georgia state trooper’s attention. These situations could go either way. The trooper could have used his discretion and afforded Dino professional courtesy—which none of us ever expected but surely appreciated—or he could go by the book.
The trooper decided to go by the book due to Dino’s level of intoxication. If there is humor to be found in this scenario, it is what did not go in the trooper’s report. When the trooper advised Dino that he was going to arrest him, Dino had the brilliant idea to try and haul ass.
FACT #1: Dino already had identified himself.
FACT #2: Dino is like five foot nothing and was drunk, and the trooper was around six foot five and sober.
The way Dino described it made me laugh so hard I cried. Apparently, when Dino turned and took one step toward his escape, the trooper grabbed him by the collar. Dino remembers trying to run with both feet off the ground like in a Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner cartoon.
Dino dealt with the consequences of his mistake, and I’m happy to say that he eventually rose from the ashes in a big way.
I knew when agreeing to write this book that I eventually would have to get around to Casper. Ah, Casper. The biggest fucking asshole career criminal I ever met. Casper was a snitch who apparently had performed well for Jay Bird over a year’s time in Arizona. He supposedly had made a bunch of introductions for Bird as well as some buys. In my earliest days as a cop, the detectives at Athens PD always told me never to use a forger as a snitch, because a forger’s sole purpose in life is to lie. That stuck with me throughout my years at ATF, and Casper was a convicted forger extraordinaire. However, he also came endorsed by my best friend, and I needed a snitch for a motorcycle gang case, and Casper needed work.
Casper was a problem from the perspective that he wasn’t working off a beef. He was a hired gun, doing it for money and excitement, so we couldn’t hold going back to jail over his head. Strike one was when he arrived in Georgia with some trailer-trash chick in tow, purportedly his girlfriend. When a UC is working with a snitch, there is enough risk of compromise without the extra baggage of another party. We decided we’d try it. We could always cut him and her out and put ’em back on a bus if they got unmanageable.
Strike two followed closely. Another chick from back home showed up, this one purportedly Casper’s ex-girlfriend. We made it clear that we were paying him and him only, but we were none too happy about this shit. As the case progressed, it became clear that Casper and his road whores were fucking around on the side. First, I caught him with pot. I documented it, read him the riot act, and moved on.
I was on loan to Macon for this case, and as it expanded, I needed help. I thought who better than the guy who sent this shitbird to me. When I ran it by Uncle Ron, he put his head in his hands and said, “Fuck me, no wonder I drink.” But Ron was an agents’ boss, and he greased the wheels to get Jay out there. The day I took Jay to pick up his UC motorcycle, we rolled into the ATF parking lot in Atlanta so Bird could check in with the bosses. Ron was walking out to his car, and we both gunned our bikes and came sliding up to him sideways. He stared at us for a few seconds, and then said, “I knew this was a bad idea.”
By the time Bird got on the ground in Macon, most of us—the case agent, Dave Brown; the supervisor, Bart McIntyre; and the cops we were working with—had had enough of Casper’s bullshit and were ready to send him and girlfriends number one and number two packing. But we hoped that Jay could reign them in. Well, he couldn’t, and we found out that Casper had been stealing welfare and government checks and cashing them. He was done.
We gave them each traveling money and put all three of their asses on a bus back to Arizona. We managed their exit as gingerly as we could and blamed it on the bosses no longer wanting to pay for an informant. By this point, Bird and I were deeply embedded in this motorcycle gang, and the last thing we needed was for Casper to fuck us up.
Within a day or two of Casper leaving town, Uncle Ron called and said, “Find a way to step away from the violators for a couple days. I need to see both of you in Atlanta, ASAP.” When we asked why, Ron uncharacteristically said, “I mean yesterfuckingday.”
This could not be good. We laid down a temporary story about going to protect a dope shipment and hauled ass to Atlanta, where Ron called us into his office and said, “Fellas, get ready to get butt fucked.”
We were shocked, wondering what we supposedly did. The short answer was that—according to Casper and his bitch girlfriends—Bird and I allegedly had committed more heinous acts than Bonnie and Clyde and Al Capone combined. Casper had never left town. Instead, he walked into the local FBI office with a laundry list of shit we supposedly perpetrated.
Before we could even begin to respond, Ron said, “Calm the fuck down. I know you guys didn’t do any of that shit, but because they went to the FBI we are going to have to bend over backwards to make sure no one can say we ever covered shit up. You know the drill, boys. Go smoke a cigarette and let’s take a ride over to Internal Affairs.”
The IA boss in Atlanta apprised us in the most general terms of some of the allegations made by Casper. Then he ordered us not to go back to Macon or to engage the bad guys even telephonically. We said, “You ain’t our boss, and you ain’t the SAC.” But Ron said, “That’s coming from the boss.”
We were fuming. Being yanked away from the case in this manner presented a slew of issues. Time, man-hours, and money would be wasted. Our biggest concern was having our cover blown for no good reason. We begged the SAC to let us put an exit strategy together. “Give us two days,” we said. The bikers were expecting us back, and we wanted to create an emergency that would justify us leaving town for a while. If we left and never showed up again, they might just forget about us. Best-case scenario, the FBI and IA would clear us quickly, knowing it was all bullshit anyway, and we could show up again and continue the case. Although that wasn’t all that realistic, because we now had to assume that Casper had compromised us.
I am embarrassed to say that what followed was nothing more than a witch hunt. The FBI conducted their part professionally, but ATF IA was headhunting from the get-go. They wired up one of the whores and had her call me. She was asking me what she should do or say, pretending like she was in Arizona and not with Casper. IA got a great recording of me saying, “The only thing you can do, tell the truth.” (Click, the line went dead.) They did the same thing to Bird. We didn’t know at the time that IA was trying to use Casper and his girls to set us up. Since we’d been ordered not to be in contact with these assholes, we both reported the calls to IA and were kind of surprised when they just blew it off.
IA verbally said: “We have statements from some of the agents suggesting you guys did some of that shit.”
I knew they didn’t have any statements, because we didn’t fucking do it. Most of the allegations could have been proven or disproven by a rookie cop. But apparently the goal wasn’t the truth; it was to finally fry me and/or Jay. There was an element in ATF leadership that would have been totally happy never doing another UC operation and basically held the attitude that all UC operators were dirty. Sad to say, but true.
After conducting what could only be described as an attempt to railroad Bird and me, it finally came down to our individual interviews with IA. This was their chance to catch us lying after they had built their case against us. It didn’t matter if we were innocent of all of the allegations. If they could prove one lie was told by us, that was it. Do not pass Go. You’re fired. And rightfully so in an investigation conducted with integrity.
My interview was with Fred Drew, whom I consider the absolute lowest-life IA agent, hell, the lowest-life agent ever. I knew as soon as I walked into his office that it was not going to go well. He was there alone. IA, and in fact most field agents, never conduct a serious interview by themselves. You never want to get into a “he said, she said” scenario with a suspect.
The second flag went up when I asked him if, at the end, I could have a copy of the taped interview and he replied something to the effect of, “Oh, I don’t need to record this.” I knew then that I’d better go slow and pay close attention, because this was going to be an attempted lynching.
He went through the allegations, and I just said, “Good God, nothing about sex with animals in that folder?” Casper and team had alleged everything else. The part that seriously changed me forever was that Drew asked me to disprove certain allegations that, as I later learned, IA/FBI already had proven to be false. The interview went on for four or five hours. Somewhere in the middle of my answering a question, he blurted out, “Will you take a polygraph?”
I stopped talking, shocked that he had cut me off with that. He turned and gazed out the window, not looking me in the eyes, and asked again. “Will you take a polygraph?”
Without hesitation, I said, “Absolutely, as soon as you poly those three fucking convicts and any one of them passes.”
Unknown to Jay and me at the time was that IA already had polygraphed Casper and the two criminal chicks, and all three failed. Throw in the fact that all three were felons and drug addicts, and you’d think IA would have been a little more neutral.
After an interview is completed, it is customary for IA to ask that you reduce your answers to written form. They want to lock you in to your statements. In my case, I was insistent that I write a statement. There was no way I was going to let this guy portray my answers however he wanted. It took me three hours to type my statement. It was stressful, and Drew’s demeanor was hostile. He stood behind me the whole time I was writing. He tossed out suggestions for how to phrase some of my answers. In the middle of my typing, he said, “Make sure you say that you refused to take a polygraph.” I spun around in my chair, and he meandered away. He said my failure to take a polygraph would be seen as a sign of guilt. That is not only untrue, but it’s highly unethical to intimidate a witness like that.
After I finished writing my statement, which included pointing out the abusive nature of this IA agent, he refused to accept it. I was thinking to myself: “I bet you do.” I simply said, “Take it, or don’t. I am going to have your secretary date and time stamp it, and it will be available for the reviewers if they want it.”
I will let you in on a little secret. If he had refused to include my statement in the report, he would have been fired.
At the conclusion of the IA investigation, Jay and I were issued clearance letters. Our records were clean. Normally, that would have been a good day. In my case, I was told to report to the ASAC’s office. Ralph was a do-nothing agent and a scared-of-his-own-shadow supervisor and a kissass headquarters ladder climber. He apparently detested undercover agents and everyone like us. From what I saw, the main accomplishment of his career was streamlining our paperwork flow. So I reported to his office as ordered, where he sat behind his desk in his usual monogrammed dress shirt and cuff links. He didn’t bother to stand up or shake my hand. He just said, “Sit down.”
I could see the red IA file on his desk. Every agent is entitled to a copy of the investigative file when it is complete. Ralph slid the receipt for the file across the desk to me. After I signed the receipt, he slid the file over to me. He was holding my clearance letter in his hand.
“If even one of these allegations were true, I was going to bury your ass,” he told me, and then he sort of flung the letter at me.
I have never wanted to reach across a desk and throat punch anybody’s ass so bad in my entire life.
The day before, another agent I knew, Bruce, had warned me what to expect. Bruce said, “Look, when you go in there, just tune him out. If he pisses you off, just think to yourself: ‘You may have all the power over me, but if I wanted to, I could kick your fucking ass right now.’”
There in his office, I looked at Ralph for a long minute, and Bruce’s words came to mind. All of a sudden, Ralph was irrelevant. I calmly said, “I knew we had your support all the way, boss.”*
In the end, the case was scrapped. Because we were not allowed a few days to lay down an exit story to the bad guys, it would have been impossible to reintegrate and explain our absence. Like an agent named Bill Eastman always told me, “Sometimes the dragon wins.”
I have seen a lot of IA dodges in my day, but Jimm Langley has to hold the record. There have been FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitives who went underground for shorter periods than Jimm. To appreciate the sheer cunning involved, we have to go back to the beginning of this story.
Jimm and Cisco had been working like dogs in Florida, and they decided to take a night off. They knew of a tiny bar with good music, cheap drinks, and redneck girls. Admittedly, it was sort of a biker hangout, but even ATF agents are allowed to go out socially. They were off duty and not in government vehicles. As the night went on, the lady bartender took a shine to Jimm, and there was mutual flirting. What Jimm didn’t know was that the huge, nasty-looking biker sitting at the end of the bar was the bartender’s boyfriend.
At some point, the biker got tired of Jimm’s advances on his girlfriend and decided to make an issue of it. He approached Jimm, and they squared off, chest to chest. Jimm had every intention of backing down and offering to buy the guy a beer. Just then, not knowing exactly what was happening, Cisco stepped in and badged the guy, hoping he would stand down. Instead, the biker knocked the badge out of Cisco’s hand.
There are very few things in this life that can’t be negotiated, and physically disrespecting a cop’s badge is one of them. No cop on this planet would ever let a non-cop touch or handle his badge, and Jimm unloaded on the guy.
Jimm is a pretty big boy, and shit got broken, and the cops got called. The biker hauled ass, and Jimm and Cisco sat and drank their beers, waiting for the cops. The cops came and met with the manager and the two agents. There was about one hundred dollars’ worth of damage, and Jimm and Cisco paid it on the spot. The manager was happy, and the cops were happy. But since the police were now officially involved, they followed policy and called Jimm and Cisco’s boss. The boss thought nothing of it, but to be on the safe side, he told the agents to report the incident to IA the next day. That turned out to be a bad decision that nobody could see coming.
Because this was viewed by everybody involved as a nothing deal, Jimm called Carlos S., who at this time was in IA. He told Carlos, “Hey, there’s nothing to this. Why don’t you take the case and come down on a road trip.” Unfortunately, the case got assigned to none other than Fred Drew—yes, the same IA agent who had interviewed me in the Casper debacle. While all of this was going on, Jimm suffered a severe back injury when a steel filing cabinet fell on him. He was placed on temporary disability.
Drew’s investigation didn’t prove anything beyond a bar fight. That should have maybe gotten Jimm a week or two on the beach. Instead, the head of IA, Richard Hankinson, decided that Jimm and Cisco should be terminated. Jimm was close with the SAC in Miami, who had been keeping him in the loop. Since Jimm was on disability, he wasn’t required to come to the office or report anything beyond his medical condition. Facing a possible termination fight, Jimm hauled ass. He moved out of town and never answered his phone. The bureau cannot begin a disciplinary action until the agent has been served. They couldn’t serve him if they couldn’t find him.
This went on for almost four years, during which time Box was the only one who had direct contact with Jimm. A few other RatSnakes may or may not have had contact, but IA would never know if we had. As the action moved forward against Cisco, Jimm contacted the SAC and took all the blame. He even offered to resign to save Cisco’s job.
With so much time having passed, and the central bosses having been moved or transferred out of their positions, the SAC broke the news to Jimm that he’d been able to get the termination proposal dropped. “They have decided to recommend a two-week suspension,” he told Jimm.
Two weeks on the beach was doable, and Jimm came home. After returning to his duties, he remained in Miami until he was transferred to the ATF Academy. If there was an IA Hall of Fame, Jimm Langley’s RatSnake jersey would be retired.
One more Jimm story.
When Charlie Fuller took over the UC program at the academy, he began taking the show on the road. At the request of any specific local jurisdiction, ATF would take the training to them. It was more cost-effective for the sponsoring agency, because more of their officers could attend locally instead of going all the way to Brunswick. After Charlie retired, Jimm and Box expanded the road shows.
I only made it to one or maybe two of those traveling academies, mostly because every time they planned one, I was in the middle of a case and couldn’t break away. Later, there was a change in ATF leadership at the academy, and let’s just say they weren’t Vince friendly.*
One particular school was held in the Carolinas, and God was looking out for me, because it was one of the ones I missed. It was not uncommon for the locals at the training to show the instructors the area nightlife and/or hold a big barbeque or some other event to thank them. On this particular trip, the students scheduled an excursion to a high-end gentleman’s club, a.k.a. titty bar. The club required patrons to sign in as a guest. Jimm and Box, who were practically always in role, signed in as Billy Hoover and Ronnie Carter.
FACT #1: You are taking a chance when you sign the names of the bureau’s fucking director and deputy director.
FACT #2: It wasn’t likely that anyone but Jimm and Box would ever know.
FACT #3: Uh, wrong, Two Dogs.
A dispute erupted in the club, not of Box or Jimm’s initiation, but it spilled out into the parking lot. The patron on the other end of the dispute swung on one of the agents. In response, one of them leveled the dude. Security and the cops came. The cops got the story and ran the guy off. Simple bar fight, no big deal. Disaster narrowly avoided. Or so they thought.
Sadly, the patron had a preexisting medical anomaly, and he went home and died a day or two later. As you can imagine, there was a huge investigation. The fight and subsequent death comprised tragic but unrelated events, and Box and Jimm were cleared of any wrongdoing regarding the death.
During the death investigation, IA swarmed all over the case. When they pulled the sign-in sheet at the club and saw Ronny and Billy’s names, the shit hit the fan. Not that either of these two knuckleheads, meaning Jimm and Box, were ever on track to get a Gallatin Award,* but that caper ensured they never would receive it.
* I take some pride in the fact that most of my IA investigations related to my off-duty silliness and not serious integrity issues. The same held true for most of the RatSnakes.
* I’ll just say there was poetic justice for Ralph in the end.
* Some of the new bosses came into the academy with the mentality that they were going to clean up the place. They didn’t want to continue with the old cadre, who weren’t coat-and-tie guys. I guess they preferred to ignore the fact or had no clue about how many lives we collectively saved over the years.
* The Gallatin is awarded by the US Treasury Department to agents who serve their entire career without any suspensions.