in which a full-patch member, having been thrown out of the club, became an informant for the federal government. When the gang learned of this betrayal, the informant was murdered in his home in front of his girlfriend.
Ciccone knew that by agreeing to go undercover, I would be giving up much of my regular life, but precisely how much and for how long, we didn’t know. We would need massive assistance from other law-enforcement agencies, especially the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And the more outside people who knew about the case, the greater the risk, as even a routine breach in security could prove fatal. As for our ATF bosses, we knew that we’d be fighting an uphill battle to get them to approve all the expenses we’d be incurring while running a long-term undercover investigation, paying bills for an apartment, phone, car, and bike in my undercover alias. Then there was the issue of my personal safety. If we pulled off a successful prosecution of the Mongols, everyone in the ATF hierarchy would happily take the credit, but if things went south—if I got wounded in the line of duty, or worse—I knew that they’d be only too quick to say that the high-risk operation was all Ciccone’s and my doing.
But this was the kind of case that was tailor-made for John Ciccone. John loved a good fight with ATF administration even more than I did, and almost as much as he loved putting bad guys in jail.
4
By this point in my law-enforcement career, I’d served seventeen years with ATF, two as a federal border patrol agent, and six as a city cop in North Carolina. I had also been a Special Forces soldier and was lucky to come home from Vietnam, where I had served throughout I Corps from Da Nang to the DMZ. In my adult life I’d never been anything other than a cop or a soldier, and in that sense I was following in my father’s footsteps. My dad was a Treasury officer who chased down moonshiners and worked undercover in the hills of North Carolina and Virginia during the fifties and sixties.
Within ATF, I was known as a “street” agent—everyone knew that I hated paperwork with a passion and had no time for administrative fools, whom I saw as a hindrance to the business of law enforcement. Ciccone had seen me work undercover, buying cocaine from the Crips and the Bloods in South Central Los Angeles and machine guns from neo-Nazis in rural West Virginia as if it was second nature.
The skills of an undercover agent are largely self-taught. Federal agents going deep “UC” get very little training. There’s a basic course offered at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, and after some time on the job, agents who are interested and motivated can request to go to the advanced undercover school. In my experience, the instructors teach the things you should already know, like how to build a believable background and what you can legally do within your role on the street and what you can’t. They teach psychological techniques to help you recognize when a situation may be turning bad and how to best use and conceal electronic surveillance equipment. They cover the legal concept of entrapment. An undercover agent can always defend himself but should never instigate violence. Criminal activities need to be initiated by the bad guys themselves.
The ATF rule book explicitly states that there can be no drug use by the agent, with one exception: if he perceives his life to be in grave danger. Having been forced to smoke, ingest, or inject narcotics, the undercover is then treated like any federal agent injured in the line of duty and must be taken to a hospital or doctor at the first possible moment. After recovering, he’s responsible for completing an enormous amount of follow-up paperwork to explain and justify the incident. Then, at the discretion of his superior, he may return to his undercover role.
In reality, undercover work can’t be taught in a classroom. It’s like learning the
Ciccone knew that by agreeing to go undercover, I would be giving up much of my regular life, but precisely how much and for how long, we didn’t know. We would need massive assistance from other law-enforcement agencies, especially the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And the more outside people who knew about the case, the greater the risk, as even a routine breach in security could prove fatal. As for our ATF bosses, we knew that we’d be fighting an uphill battle to get them to approve all the expenses we’d be incurring while running a long-term undercover investigation, paying bills for an apartment, phone, car, and bike in my undercover alias. Then there was the issue of my personal safety. If we pulled off a successful prosecution of the Mongols, everyone in the ATF hierarchy would happily take the credit, but if things went south—if I got wounded in the line of duty, or worse—I knew that they’d be only too quick to say that the high-risk operation was all Ciccone’s and my doing.
But this was the kind of case that was tailor-made for John Ciccone. John loved a good fight with ATF administration even more than I did, and almost as much as he loved putting bad guys in jail.
4
By this point in my law-enforcement career, I’d served seventeen years with ATF, two as a federal border patrol agent, and six as a city cop in North Carolina. I had also been a Special Forces soldier and was lucky to come home from Vietnam, where I had served throughout I Corps from Da Nang to the DMZ. In my adult life I’d never been anything other than a cop or a soldier, and in that sense I was following in my father’s footsteps. My dad was a Treasury officer who chased down moonshiners and worked undercover in the hills of North Carolina and Virginia during the fifties and sixties.
Within ATF, I was known as a “street” agent—everyone knew that I hated paperwork with a passion and had no time for administrative fools, whom I saw as a hindrance to the business of law enforcement. Ciccone had seen me work undercover, buying cocaine from the Crips and the Bloods in South Central Los Angeles and machine guns from neo-Nazis in rural West Virginia as if it was second nature.
The skills of an undercover agent are largely self-taught. Federal agents going deep “UC” get very little training. There’s a basic course offered at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, and after some time on the job, agents who are interested and motivated can request to go to the advanced undercover school. In my experience, the instructors teach the things you should already know, like how to build a believable background and what you can legally do within your role on the street and what you can’t. They teach psychological techniques to help you recognize when a situation may be turning bad and how to best use and conceal electronic surveillance equipment. They cover the legal concept of entrapment. An undercover agent can always defend himself but should never instigate violence. Criminal activities need to be initiated by the bad guys themselves.
The ATF rule book explicitly states that there can be no drug use by the agent, with one exception: if he perceives his life to be in grave danger. Having been forced to smoke, ingest, or inject narcotics, the undercover is then treated like any federal agent injured in the line of duty and must be taken to a hospital or doctor at the first possible moment. After recovering, he’s responsible for completing an enormous amount of follow-up paperwork to explain and justify the incident. Then, at the discretion of his superior, he may return to his undercover role.
In reality, undercover work can’t be taught in a classroom. It’s like learning the
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