Ratsnakes

The original rat snake is just that, a snake. It squeezes its prey to death, easily can be tamed, and eats vermin and other targets of opportunity. In the Wild West days, rat snakes were kept in jars, and, when circumstances dictated, these starving predators were released indoors. They would find and kill the enemy—in other words, eliminate rodents that had infested frontier homes. Once their purpose was served, they were recaptured and put out of sight in jars—until the next infestation.

This is much the same way ATF covert operatives are used. They are dispatched to infiltrate a sordid, blood-spattered, degraded world, dominated by characters accustomed to vulgarity and violence. Only those mentally resilient and clever enough can navigate their way inside this dangerously clandestine setting, and then survive in its confines while doing their jobs.

I should know. I spent twenty-eight years as an ATF undercover operative. During that period, I was formally assigned to field offices in San Francisco, Sacramento, Stockton, and Atlanta. However, assignments took me to cities large and small across the country. I would wake up one day in Las Vegas and the next in Tulsa. I might be asked to work an armed career criminal in New York, a gun trafficker in Miami, or a biker gang in Biloxi. To be completely honest, there were so many gigs I can’t remember them all.

In this book, I deliver an eyewitness and transparent view of the organization and the operatives with whom I regularly risked my life. For decades, we were a dirty little secret within ATF, hidden from public view while various empty suits took credit for our work. Now it’s time to recognize a team of heroes who’ve rarely been introduced to the public for whom they’ve given years of their lives to protect and serve.

Forming an elite brother- and sisterhood, our mission, and sometimes our daily existence, was very much like that of the nineteenth-century housecleaning snakes. We were (and many of us still are) the quintessential human rodent hunters, released from our jars when an unsavory task needed attention. Within the deadly world of covert crime investigation, we are called “Undercovers,” “UCs,” or “Operators.” Within our own circles, we call ourselves the “Core” or “RatSnakes.”

Allow me to introduce the RatSnakes.

VINCE (YOURS TRULY)

I was running hard through a dry creek bed that I had traversed a thousand times—only this time it was pitch-dark. My heart felt like it was pounding up into my throat. We’d done it! My buddy and I had just pulled off our first real heist. We’d busted into cars and gone on shoplifting sprees, but this time we’d broken into the local junior high school, pilfered anything that looked valuable, and then scrammed. We would have immediate street cred. The tough kids would idolize us.

We were both thirteen years old.

“Freeze, motherfucker, or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

The voice shouting at us in a thick Italian accent was one I would later come to know all too well. The creek bed lit up like a stadium, and I stared down the barrel of a shotgun wielded by Novato, California, police officer Yugo Innocenti.

I thought to myself, “I am so fucked. My parents are gonna kill me.”

Note to self: Schools have alarms.

I was the only child of a bartender and a nurse. Both of my parents worked evenings and nights, making a normal nine-to-five schedule impossible, and they ultimately divorced. But even without that disruption, I was a naturally high-strung kid, mostly unsupervised. My personality, combined with too much freedom, resulted in a whole host of bad decisions by me. These included but were not limited to alcohol and drug consumption, stealing, burglarizing, and a multitude of run-ins with police departments throughout Marin County, California.

Another friend—I’ll call him Mike—and I were best buddies in junior high school. He was the quiet one and I was the loud one. We spent a lot of time smoking weed and doing generally not good stuff. We cut school together. Shoplifted together. In fact, our parents forbade us from hanging out together. Our close friendship found us locked up together at Marin County Juvenile Hall on several occasions. Although we were repeat customers, it was always for nonviolent, less serious stuff. Because of our age and low-end violations, we were not placed in the senior unit with the big boys in two-men lockdown rooms. That would change based on one really stupid but very cool idea.

Because we were in a dorm atmosphere, at night, at lights out, there was only one counselor, a.k.a. guard, on duty. Mike had the idea to stash a set of clothes and a pair of shoes so we could go over the fence. I didn’t think it was a very good idea, but at that time in my life, I had a hard time saying no. The fences were about twenty feet tall, and the upper eight or so feet had very coarse, tightly woven wire—so you couldn’t get your fingers through the mesh—with razor wire along the top.

During head count and bed check, the counselor found the shoes we’d stashed, but we still had a set of uniform clothes and socks. We had no idea where we would go, how we would eat, or what would happen if we got caught. As with most of our bad decisions, we said, “Fuck it,” and headed for the yard. The nearest fence was twenty feet away. Lucky for us, it butted up to the cafeteria roof. I boosted Mike, he grabbed onto the gutter to pull himself up and around the fence wire, and then he reached down and helped me up. It was dark and cold, and we were about ten miles from the closest town.

We ran like hell and dodged every pair of headlights that came our way. My girlfriend at the time was the only one we knew to reach out to. She got us cigarettes, food, and street clothes. For a few hours, we felt like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The very next morning, as I met my girlfriend on her way to school, boom, I was grabbed by the cops. In all honesty, I was so relieved. I was cold, hungry, and knew my parents were probably freaking out.

Mike stayed on the run for another week. I was sent back to juvenile hall, straight to the senior unit, and placed on three days Temporary Removal from Group (TRG), which meant twenty-three hours a day in lockdown, with meals in the cell. If there was anything funny about this, and there wasn’t, it was that Mike ended up with my girlfriend.

I tell this story not to glorify or boast about my behavior. I was and am truly ashamed of how I conducted myself in those days. I am merely attempting to explain how and why I may have migrated to a gritty agency like ATF, and then became a fairly successful undercover agent. My experience as a juvenile lawbreaker helped me to think like a criminal when it became my job to chase them.

The net result of my unlawfulness was that at age seventeen—after I was involved in an auto theft wherein a police chase concluded with my buddy and me dumping a stolen convertible into the San Francisco Bay—a judge gave me a choice. It was the same damn judge I’d appeared before numerous times, and this time my luck had run out.

“Mr. Cefalu,” he said, as I stood before him in the courtroom. “I have had enough of your foolish behavior and have spent enough of the court’s time and resources over the years trying to get you on track.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Here’s your choice. If you provide the court with proof you have enlisted in the US military within the next thirty days, I’ll suspend your sentence.”

“Shit.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“If not,” he continued, “bring your suitcase, because you’re going to jail for a year.”

Upon hearing this, my mom gasped and my dad smiled. Later that day, the last words I heard from my father’s mouth were, “I never thought my son would be a pussy.” Then he hit me upside my head with a three-pack of frozen pork chops.

When I came to, my mother was sobbing and my father was gone.

“I’ll show that son of a bitch,” I said as I stomped out the door. Thirty days later, I stepped off a bus at the US Marine Corps recruit depot and onto the yellow footprints (painted on the asphalt to show new recruits where to stand, assuming we were too stupid to get into formation otherwise).

While a pain in my ass at the time, that judge and my six years in the military built the foundation for what would become a lifelong career in law enforcement and probably saved my sorry butt from a long stint in some penitentiary.

JAY (A.K.A. BIRD)

Jay Dobyns grew up in the quintessential middle-class family: mom, dad, brother, sister. Jay’s parents lived in the same house and stayed married their entire lives. His dad was a veteran and hard as nails, but also a soft-spoken construction contractor. His mom was salt of the earth and what bound the family together. While I was in and out of juvenile detention, the most diabolical event in Jay’s high school years was accidentally egging a police car, which landed him and his buddy a stint washing the police car with toothbrushes. Wow, total gangsta.

At the University of Arizona, Tucson, Jay was a standout wide receiver. He was tall, clean-cut, handsome, and tough.

So, how did a shitbag like me and a pretty boy like Jaybird end up best friends and UC partners for over twenty years? It began around 1988, when I had been with ATF for about a year. I was a teaching a class, and Jay was attending a different one at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Brunswick, Georgia. While there, most of us frequented a local watering hole named Brogan’s, just over the causeway on St. Simons Island.

Brogan’s was an understated workingman’s bar where the blue-collar element of ATF felt at home. From blocks away, you could hear shuffleboard players shouting and jukebox music blasting. On many occasions, I used that auditory signal to vector in on Brogan’s while whiskey-blind from some other island tavern. My favorite table at Brogan’s was just inside the second-story balcony. It provided a beautiful view of the beach and the beach bunnies sporting the latest Victoria’s Secret–style bikinis. More important to me was the handy X factor that no other island bar offered: you could take a piss right off the deck into the needles and cones of two-hundred-foot-tall Georgia pines.

As undercover operators, we early on mastered the study of our surroundings. It was imperative to become experts at examining and identifying escape routes, to know who was with whom, and to recognize potential threats. Over time it became instinct—a skill necessary to stay alive in our world. Missing any signal and not being ready to adapt got you dead.

Enter Jay Dobyns. This is where Jay’s and my recollections differ. My version is the truth.

I first saw him from my balcony perch as he approached the bar through the parking lot. I thought, “That fucker is huge. Look at the guns on him.” I made a mental note to track his location and then went back to my boys. We were drinking and planning training scenarios for first-time undercover prospects. A short time later, I was distracted—no doubt by one of the many hard beach bodies prancing in and out of the bar—when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Jay offering my weapon of choice: Jack Daniels on the rocks. I was caught off guard. He was not only massive and daunting, but he was that guy you knew all the women were going flock to. I already hated him.

As Jay handed me the whiskey, he said, “Nothin’ from nothin’. I’ve heard you do some serious street work, and I just wanted to buy you a cocktail.”

My strongest suit always has been my weakest suit: my big mouth. Out of instinct and because he had entered without an invite what I perceived to be my world and personal space, I blurted out, “And who the fuck are you?”

“ATF agent Jay Dobyns. Have a good night.”

I turned my back to him and faced my buddies.

“Who is that fag? I thought he was going to groupie-grab my dick,” I said.

Jay disappeared inside the bar, taking my insult in what I would later learn was his normal, casual stride. One of the boys said, “That’s the dude who got shot in Arizona, first day on the job. Motherfucker got taken hostage, shot, and came right back to work.”

I thought to myself, “Ain’t I the fuckin’ asshole.”

Another buddy chimed in that they had heard good shit about Jay, and he was some kind of college football star. Every time I looked over, he was laughing and so were the people around him, most of them hot chicks.

A few hours went by, and Jay meandered out onto the balcony to get some air. I called the waitress over and ordered two shots of JD. I didn’t know if he drank and didn’t care. He was gonna drink my drink, or that would be the end of our friendship before it started.

I joined him on the balcony, handed him the shot, and said, “So you’re the dumb fuck that walks into bullets.”

He graciously took the cocktail and said, “That’s me. Thanks for the drink.”

We slammed back the shots and laughed as the booze trickled down our throats. Then, as if channeling the same wavelength, we both whipped out our junk and pissed off the balcony.

MICHELLE (A.K.A. BAMBI)

The product of a “normal” East Coast family, Michelle was anything but stereotypically normal. She drank most of the boys under the table a time or two and could take a lot of ribbing, but if a line got crossed, and you never knew exactly where that line was, you would find yourself being challenged to a fistfight. Michelle was not tiny, nor was she shy. She was known for her signature greeting, “Waaasssuup?” She had an infectious laugh and a smile made for movies. She was tall and, to put it gently, STACKED. Our female UCs had to fight the predictable stigma of being thought of as just arm candy. And what were they going to do if it broke bad?

The guys who thought that or said that hadn’t met Bambi.

First of all, Bambi would beat a motherfucker with another motherfucker. Yes, female UCs can create some issues, such as having to deal with sexual advances by a criminal. But they solve way more challenges than their presence creates. A female partner can more easily conceal electronics. Violators who are planning harm or a rip-off may not view the female of the team as a threat, which means that female may very well be the one to save your ass. Don’t get me wrong, many females do solo UC work and do it as well as any male. But if a violator says, “Come alone,” you probably can get away with bringing your “ol’ lady” to a deal. Bring another guy and things can go to shit rapidly, whereas you almost always can explain away your girlfriend.

It’s much easier for cover teams to recognize a female voice in a room of men talking on a wire. A female can excuse herself to the ladies’ room and call the cover team without anybody following her into the bathroom. And, juries tend to love female cops.

All that aside, Bambi melded seamlessly into the UC cop world and did not consider herself too good for any task. She was smart and a total team player. I’d go through any door with her any day.

GUNDO

Gundo was a strange cat. It was like he made it to the 1970s and got stuck. He was a hyperintelligent investigator and always seemed to see that one angle the rest of us didn’t see or had missed. Gundo came to ATF by way of local law enforcement, and to say he was a likeable guy would be a massive understatement. If someone didn’t like Gundo, they were an asshole. Gundo only spoke when he had something to say, so consequently everybody listened when he did. He had the love and respect of both the agents and the bosses. He was the clear head when the rest of us were in chaos. He did a few years as a boss and decided it was not his flavor, so he returned to fieldwork. Whether appearing as a neat and clean-cut boss type or the grizzled, white-bearded, hair-down-to-his-ass street agent most of us came to recognize, Gundo always brought his A game.

Gundo was a tall, good-looking, wiry, Midwestern guy—and the consummate chameleon. You got a sense he didn’t like the big city but endured it to put bad guys in jail. In the 1980s, he had been the old man of his academy class. Much like the other cops ATF had hired, Gundo got in under the wire. In those days, you had to be employed by your thirty-fifth birthday in order to be able to accumulate twenty years of service to retire by the then mandatory age-fifty-five retirement date. Gundo just made it. I asked why he waited so long to get on with the feds, and he just said he wasn’t sure a law enforcement career was for him. He’d finished college, done an internship with the Missoula, Montana, sheriff’s department, and had been “intrigued but not sold.” He looked around at probation department jobs and juvenile probation jobs, and accepted an offer from the Missoula County Sheriff’s Office before ultimately joining ATF.

Gundo told me he knew exactly when he had found a home at ATF. Sitting in his academy classroom, the instructor put on a prerecorded video of then ATF assistant director Phil McGuire. After doing the whole welcome-aboard speech, McGuire simply said if you’re going to be an ATF agent, remember first and foremost “we work harder than the others, and we play harder than the others.” Gundo said he looked around the classroom, and everybody was smiling. Mr. McGuire got that part right.

BOX

Now here was an operator’s operator. Having fled Cuba as a child with his parents, Carlos Baixauli, a.k.a. Box, grew up with a hard-fought work ethic. He loved this country and wanted to be part of its security. He graduated college—no minor task since his family had been dispossessed of all personal wealth before fleeing Castro’s Cuba—and joined law enforcement at the state level in Miami, Florida, working with the Division of Alcoholic Beverages & Tobacco. This made him a natural selection for ATF. That and being fluent in Spanish during the height of what would become known as the Miami drug/cocaine wars, an intensive series of conflicts between the US government and multiple drug cartels during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Box easily melded into ATF undercover culture, and after a decade or more of undercover work (and with a beautiful wife and children), he migrated to the ATF National Academy where he ultimately ran the entire undercover training program.

JIMM

Which brings us to Jimm Langley, one of my oldest friends in ATF. Jimm joined from the US Customs Service, where he operated fast boats and chased bad guys (and girls) all over the Atlantic. I know this because on more than one occasion I was right there next to him. Jimm hailed from Kentucky and was assigned to the Marathon, Florida, customs office. We were “bunkies” on an international cooperative smuggling interdiction operation in the Bahamas. After that detail, Jimm, Bernie, who was our US Customs boat captain on that trip, and I all hired on with ATF.

DINO

Short, round, and Puerto Rican, Dino was a former US Army paratrooper and a commissioned officer. He ultimately would partner up with Bambi. Dino was the opposite of Gundo in terms of having a calming effect on the team. There wasn’t a damn thing about Dino that could have been described as calming. You didn’t even have to try to wind him up for him to be ready to explode. And once wound up, there was no shutting him down. Who knows why he was this way. Maybe because he was short and had to be loud to be heard—sorry, Dino.

He came to us by way of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. After surviving the Atlanta Cuban prison riots of 1987, he was looking for higher ground. When I was transferred to Atlanta in the early 1990s, Dino was one of the first to call and welcome me aboard. When I finally met him in person, he was hyper and motivated, and I knew we would end up doing some good things together.

PAT

Wow, where to begin? Pat Kelly (RIP, our brother) is affectionately referred to as the Godfather of undercover. After serving his time as a frogman for the US Navy Underwater Demolition Teams (the genesis of the modern Navy SEAL teams), Pat entered local law enforcement in the Midwest. He eventually gravitated to the Treasury Department and got pulled into ATF during the moonshine hiring push. He didn’t have a college degree, but that would prove to be a nonissue.

Pat was gruff, no bullshit, and had no tolerance for laziness or whining. He was an old-school man’s man. When it was business, it was all business. When it was time to play, well, that’s when he took the gloves off for real. He sported his thick, slightly graying, bushy mustache for as long as I knew him.

Pat took over the undercover program pre-Box, pre-Jimm, and pre-Charlie. His classes were long, sometimes all day and into the night, because you didn’t go home until the work was done. Everybody has a Pat Kelly story to tell.

CHARLIE

Charlie Fuller was another byproduct of the Miami cocaine wars of the 1970s and ’80s, and he was just a damned natural when it came to undercover work. This guy had more hustle in him than baseballer Pete Rose, except Charlie’s hustle was of the street variety. He talked more shit than Wolfman Jack and two wartime radio stations. Charlie had worked a long-term undercover early in his career that admittedly “fucked him up.” This would be the catalyst for his transfer to the ATF Academy, where he worked with Pat Kelly and eventually took over the undercover program at FLETC. Charlie took a liking to me, and, unexpectedly, we later became partners for the final year of his career in Atlanta.

MILTON (A.K.A. THE RAGIN’ CAJUN)

No one ever asked Milton, “Where are you from?” With his exceedingly thick southern Louisiana accent, you just knew. His crawfish low-country boil was legendary during the course of an undercover school or RatSnakes reunion. He was what we called a big ol’ boy, and he had a hard side, probably from his days as a criminal investigator for the Louisiana Department of Justice or from wrestling alligators in the bayous (pure speculation). He was big, he was strong, and he had a bullshit tolerance level of zero. When the shit broke bad, he was the guy you wanted on your six.

This is how he and I met. I was invited to help teach a three-week undercover block of instruction for a new-agent class. At this point, I knew only a few of the players, but my name was out there in the field as a worker. I arrived at the academy a couple days early, per instructions, and checked into my rented townhouse on St. Simons Island, where the instructors stayed as a perk. Not knowing anybody yet, and having nowhere to be, I decided to stop in at Pam’s #1 cop bar, a staple of anyone passing through the training center. Since my trainee days, Pam’s had been our home away from home.

As always, Bob, the co-owner, was stationed at the front door like a sentry, not for security but to greet old friends. Behind the bar was Bob’s wife, Pam, and both immediately greeted me with a handshake and a hug.

It was early in the day, and everybody was still in class, so I meandered over to the bar. I sat a couple stools down from a guy I thought was some local greasy, unkempt fisherman. We were the only two at the bar, and there was an elderly couple having lunch at one of the tables. Without a word, Pam slid over a JD on the rocks. I thought to myself, “I have spent way too much time in here.”

The dude sitting two stools down reached over with his drink to toast. We tapped glasses, and he said, “Right on, JD.”

I remember thinking, “Fuck, I am such a shit magnet.”

Bob walked over and asked, “You two degenerates know each other?”

We both stared straight ahead into the bar mirror and simultaneously said, “Nope.”

“Vince Cefalu, ATF–San Francisco,” said Bob, “meet Milton Bonaventure, ATF–Baton Rouge.”

Both our heads snapped around.

“That’s funny as shit,” I said. “I figured you’d just been released on parole.”

“I thought the same about you, too, motherfucker,” he said.

We slid our stools together and started what would become one of my most cherished friendships for the rest of my career.

In these pages, I will tell you the famous, not so famous, and infamous stories of life within the world’s greatest undercover agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. If you are shocked, I am sorry. If you laugh, you are welcome. If it makes you sad, it’s the truth.

My sole purpose in writing this book is to identify and glorify the heroes I was privileged to serve with. This book represents my crew of “Untouchables.” It is not my intent to suggest that it is all-inclusive or even begins to represent all of the talented, hard-working agents in the bureau. I believe that ATF has the most dedicated and focused employees in the country. There are ATF special agents who have never done one undercover operation and yet have solved some of the most heinous crimes and incarcerated some of the most violent offenders in the nation. There are support staff, compliance investigators, analysts, and ATF National Laboratory folks who help to make this all work. Without them, there would be no RatSnakes. There are many who have sacrificed much to protect the United States. They did it without regret, and with a smile on their faces. I wasn’t the best UC operator ATF ever had, and I wasn’t the worst. But I knew and loved the best, and on occasion they would let me in their circles.