How Many FBI Agents Does It Take to Terrorize an Unarmed 66-Year-Old?
George Parry
January 28, 2019, 12:05 am
La Cosa Nostra never had it so good.
“I am Oz, the Great and Terrible!â€
— The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
Long ago, as a Special Attorney with the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, I participated in planning and — in a handful of instances — executing arrests of members of La Cosa Nostra and their associates. From personal observation, I early on concluded that, in apprehending mobsters, one of the primary threats to agent safety was the risk of fratricide, i.e., one amped-up, anxious and heavily armed agent accidentally shooting some other amped-up, anxious and heavily armed agent. The FBI, ATF, and other federal agents with whom I was privileged to work shared that concern. For that reason, they planned operations meticulously and kept the number of arresting agents to the absolute minimum in order to reduce the risk of injury or error.
To that end, I opted whenever possible to avoid arrests altogether by having defense counsel surrender their clients at the marshal’s lock up during regular business hours. From the media’s standpoint, the visuals must have been underwhelming. But then, we didn’t much care about meeting the needs of the news media. Having targets surrender was simple, held down down costs, and reduced the risk of harm to one and all.
This is not to say that we never made arrests. Sometimes, we had no choice.
I recall one early morning arrest of a violence-prone mobster. The assigned agents were aware that the target was at a bar with his girlfriend. Since we wanted to take him at his home so that the premises could be searched incident to arrest, the agents parked outside his residence and waited for him to show up.
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