Back in 1987 at the DEA Denver Field Division, there was a great mix of both young agents with a lot of spunk and senior agents who had been around the block enough to keep the younger guys out of trouble. Some of the guys were former state and local law enforcement, while others were straight out of college. We all came from diverse backgrounds, but we all shared one trait in common – we all had Type-A personalities, which was to be expected. You could not hope to arrest an armed drug trafficker with a meek and mild personality.
I learned a lot during my initial year on the job. One of the first things that I learned was to never leave your business cards out and in reach of the other agents. Nobody told me this – it was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way.
When I received my first box of business cards, I proudly displayed a stack of them in a cardholder on the corner of my desk. Had I thought to look around, I would have noticed that all of the cardholders on the other agents’ desks sat empty. But not mine – at least, not initially.
About a week into the job, I started getting calls, first on my pager, and then on my office number from women who claimed to have met me or hooked up with me at a bar the night before. When I told them that they had the wrong number, they came back at me with my full name and contact numbers, stating that I had given them one of my business cards the night before. When I still claimed innocence, they became irate and usually insulted me or disconnected the call.
Apparently, it was a common practice for agents to hook up with a woman and then hand out another agent’s business card to avoid having to deal with the woman again.
I can’t tell you the number of calls that I received or the number of times that I was called an asshole during my first few weeks on the job. And while it was a nuisance, at least I was single at the time. But other agents who suffered similar fates were married and would have to do some fast explaining after returning a call on their pager at 10:00 PM to a woman who was claiming that it was really great to meet him the evening before. And the kicker was that new agents usually got stuck on the shit shifts for surveillance and other activities, which means that it was very likely that the agent could have been out the previous evening working. Obviously, this was pre-cellphones, so conversations went something like “sure, you can return that slut’s page when she calls you at 10:00 PM but you didn’t answer any of my pages last night!”
I quickly removed the remainder of my cards from my desk, but have to admit that I was an accomplice in the removal of some business cards from a few younger agents that started after me and who made the same mistake. There are some things that need to be passed along from agent to agent, and others that need to be learned.
Another thing that I learned was that there are agents who make cases, and then there are agents who spend their entire career supporting those that make the cases. Both are valuable and are assets to any group.
We had one agent named who was the most tenacious agent that I had met at the time, and was up there with the top five that I have met during my life. Once he was on the scent of someone, his whole focus in life became getting that person. There were times when his wife would call the office and ask if we knew where he was because he hadn’t been home in several days and was not returning calls. There was never any question of cheating – he was not that type of guy – it was just that, once he got his teeth into a case, he would not stop until there was an arrest.
We had a few other agents that were just the opposite – they had no desire to build a case against anyone, but absolutely loved the action part of the job – conducting surveillance, doing undercover work, interviewing suspects, going on raids, etc. These were the guys that you could always count on to gear-up at a moment’s notice, but were seldom the ones to set strategies and stumbled when forced to write reports.
Another thing that I learned was that you had good undercover agents and bad undercover agents. While some agents struggle to make a small buy on a street corner, others can negotiate multi-ton deals with the ease and confidence of a Fortune 500 CEO.
I learned a lot from these agents that first year about what I should and what I should not do. Every day was a learning experience that would set the stage for my future in the agency, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my life after DEA.
I also saw a lot during that first year.
I saw an 18-year-old girl crawl out of the dog house in the back yard of a crack den that we raided. The girl couldn’t have weighed more that 80 lbs, was filthy and stunk. Apparently, she had been staying in doghouse for the past several weeks as she had no place to go and was hooked on crack. She exchanged sexual favors with the dealer for drugs and had the “dead eyes” of the crack addict.
I saw my fellow agents arrest a 70-year-old couple and seize the diamond business that they had owned their entire life because their son was selling amphetamines out of their store. The son claimed to be selling to help his parents whose jewelry business had decreased over the years and were now in considerable debt. Interestingly, the son, who was an overweight, unemployed classical composer, had gotten the crap beaten out of him the evening before by his 98 lb girlfriend and had the black eye to prove it when he was arrested.
I saw one of the girls that I went to college with on the stage at a strip club when we were arresting her boss for selling drugs. As it turns out, life didn’t go her way after graduation. She started messing with drugs and was hooked on pills and working at the strip club to finance her habit.
I saw a school bus driver stop early one afternoon to buy heroin from a dealer we were watching. I then saw him pull into an alley to shoot-up prior to heading off to school to pick up the kids for their ride home. Obviously, he was placed under arrest before any of the kids got near the bus.
I saw children neglected and spouses beaten.
I saw a side of life that I had never seen before. But from where I am standing right now, many years later, I hadn’t seen anything yet.