G-Men: Day Of The FBI
Brett
Dr.
English M01A
12 February 2013
G-Men: A Detailed Look into the Day of the FBI
“Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.” (J. Edgar Hoover). These famous words from the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were a symbol of the start of America’s war on crime. This quote stood as a direct reference to armed and unarmed bank robberies in the United States. At the front of this ongoing crime war is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI for short.
There are nearly fifteen-thousand robberies in the Los Angeles metropolitan area each year, but despite that debatably high number, crime rates are actually dropping at a rapid rate. Los Angeles Crime …show more content…
statistics report that overall crime incidents have gone down by virtually twenty-thousand. A lot of this deterred crime is attributed to the FBI, as well as the efforts of local law enforcement.
It was a searing day in Los Angeles.
The sun hung from the middle of the sky and seemed to almost liquefy the city below. The street reflected the heat like a tanning mirror placed beneath you. A car alarm echoed throughout the wide block before Bank of the West – an average looking bank painted tan with horizontal architecture that swept up the front of the structure. Two bullet holes plastered the echoing car like stickers placed meticulously on a movie set. Steam seeped from the engine block through the cracks of the hood and out into the blistering air, evaporating almost instantly in the blaze. A group of firemen detached the battery and doused the engine of the car with water, sending even more steam once again into the heated air. News reporters stood in front of bulky white vans, ducking the heat under sidewalk trees and overhangs from neighboring buildings. A bulky group of local citizens crowded behind police barriers surrounding the bank in an extensive ring. The barriers held back the murmuring crowd as chatter about what had happened drifted between their ears. An abundance of police officers stood around silently like mutes with sweat dripping from their brows, waiting for the detectives to finish and vacate the scene so they could do the …show more content…
same.
Inside the bank, amongst a crowd of more police detectives and officers, you would find two men. The first man, whom we’ll call Mike, was a tall, slim man wearing a dark grey suit and tan leather dress shoes. He kept his hands spread in his pockets and looked like a gentle man who spoke easy. He turned and beneath his grey blazer was a black holster in which a forty-five caliber Colt pistol lay dormant. A shiny, gold tinted badge was also seen on the adjacent side of his waist belt. It read Federal Bureau of Investigation – Department of Justice. Mike was a detective for the FBI, stationed here in Los Angeles. Beside him stood a similar looking man, whose name was Patrick. He was shorter and wore a lighter-colored suit. He seemed thicker and broader than the taller agent beside him. He too wore a black holster in which a Colt pistol lay dormant, and he too wore the same shiny badge his fellow G-Man carried. Both men were partners, first on scene at an armed robbery in central Los Angeles. They had been chasing a serial bank robber termed the Big Bills Bandit, who earned the name after he had only stolen hundred-dollar bills from the four previous banks he had held up. He had been committing similar robberies in the Los Angeles County area for the past six months. The bandit’s shot up car that sat outside had been fired upon by an undercover officer who was entering the bank as the criminal was vacating. The criminal was hit twice by the officer’s rounds and was later shipped to a hospital for non-life-threatening wounds. This was the scene of a bank robbery as described to me by a friend and mentor, named Patrick. He had been in the FBI for nearly twenty years.
Patrick stood at an average height. He was muscular, fit, and bolstered huge calve muscles. His skin was tan and red around the neck from where he had stood in the sun for too long. His face was always slightly greasy after a spurt of sunscreen was smeared around his stubble and sweaty face. A set of bright, white teeth shone brightly from behind his lips as they curled into a warming smile – he was always smiling. Patrick would wear cargo pants that sat just above the knee cap, giving way to more thigh muscle. His shoes were white and blue cross-trainers that seemed much too old and worn. A simple, solid-colored t-shirt and plain sweater would accommodate his shorts. One would instantly think of this man as a well-exercised athlete. He grew up in a farm in Iowa, raised by loving farm parents. Patrick spent most of his childhood learning from the same asceticism of his own father; he learned that discipline and hard work would always persevere, and that through first helping others, you could then help yourself. When he was nearly twenty, he moved to Boston and fell in love. He married soon after and had two sons that I would later befriend.
I have known Patrick for most of my life. We’ve shared lots of memories – those of baseball games, fishing trips, excursions across the country; our family was close. He always seemed to know more about me than I knew about him. Patrick could have a short conversation with a man and within minutes unwind the intricacies of his personality. This special skill of intense social scrutiny was one he had developed in his career as an FBI agent. This special talent would help Patrick and his partner determine lies from truths in the interrogation rooms. It was a necessary requirement for his job, which needed to be performed successfully.
“Getting into the FBI was hell. I almost gave up in the first few attempts. It was physically, and more-so mentally, challenging,” Patrick explained to me. He was forced to endure a series of rigorous tests and exams to finally enter the FBI. The process started with him obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from the University of California – Irvine. He explained to me, with a smile on his face, “School was the hardest part for me. I’m not really into school. I liked the parties more.” Patrick then went on to serve for the Special Weapons and Tactics force of the FBI, or SWAT for short. He worked as a field agent for SWAT for nearly three years before he tired of the danger and infantryman-like duty he held. He would often have to breach houses and destroy doors to uphold search warrants. “I hated the fact that we had to break so many doors. I always felt bad for the homeowners, and I don’t really know why,” said Patrick. What he surely wanted was to be a detective. It would mean a bigger salary, more days off to spend with his family, and less time in immediate danger. But becoming one was not a simple task, and Patrick explained that it was the hardest he had trained in his life. He worked just as hard mentally as he did physically. Patrick would study vigorously, discipline his mind, listen to what retirees and mentors had to say, and most importantly, he would spend time with his wife and child when he could. Detectives would often be forced to relocate to anywhere the FBI was stationed and needed personnel.
Patrick had finally made the cut on his second application at the age of twenty-six.
He was located now in Los Angeles. Patrick and his family had found a home in Newbury Park, about an hour out of Los Angeles where he was located. The Federal Building of Los Angeles was a large, rectangular structure that stood about fifteen stories tall. It was tan, not much different than the bank robbery scene before. It’s floors house all types of government justice department mediums: law figures, language specialists, accountants, and many more diversified duties, including detective and field agents. Patrick’s office was on the twelfth-floor. It was an archetypal looking office space – no special gadgets and gizmos, no tinkering lights and large computer monitors with thousands of numbers and text – just a flat, open office floor with five foot rectangular cubicles and lots of papers and folders – it was nothing like some Hollywood films portrayed. Filing cabinets surrounded the entire enclosure like guards. They held thousands upon thousands of documents containing God knows what. At what seemed like the front of the room was a mural plastered with a dozen black and white mug shots. Many of the faces were grizzled, evil looking men with dead looks in their eyes and sharp pointed brows etching down to a slight grim or maybe frown. There were also some women – benign looking women, some of them. Other’s looked like stereotypical trailer-trash junkies that were without a doubt,
criminals. Next to these figures was a gory photograph of a man with most of his face and upper body shredded and torn to pieces. Patrick told me the man had blown himself up with a hand grenade right before he was caught for armed robbery and kidnapping. The gruesome photograph had the words “It’s your lucky day!” written in sharpie at the bottom. What this meant I did not know.
His floor was particularly quiet – there were no loud phones and raised voices like the previous floors. You could only hear the light shuffle of feet or the occasional single phone ringing, but then instantly being picked up by an office member whom was afraid the ring would disturb the sereneness of the room. It was somewhat dark in the room. A gentle amber glow entered the area from the west as the sun lowered. A few desk lights and lamps added to the orangey lighting, bright enough only to read casually. Patrick said the dimness was common as the day grew later. “The people who work on this floor prefers to enjoy as much peace and quiet as they can. I agree with them,” remarked Patrick as we finally left the tour of the office.
I had asked Patrick what typical days would look like when he worked.
“I spend most of the day in my office doing paperwork, filing reports, or just searching the web and letting time run – most of the time spent on cases was spent waiting around; we had to wait for court orders and search warrants before we could do much of any field work,” he explained.
But occasionally Patrick would get the call to head out into the field (another name for leaving the office.) He was sometimes summoned from his house via pager to attend a vital location for evidence, to interrogate a suspect, to search a house, or to even rush to a fresh crime scene. But field work was, again, mostly spent waiting and collecting. His best hope was to wait for a pulled fingerprint or quality footage from a security camera that might have caught the criminal’s face. Most of his cases, the criminals were not identified on the scene. Patrick told me his average case time frame was about two months, but he moreover said some criminals took him years to catch. The hardest part was collecting convincing evidence – Patrick would need material objects, solid footage, or a confession to convict most suspects. It was a long, laborious process that was, in the end, much fulfilling. “At the end of the day, when you finally do convict a suspect and you know you caught the bad guy, you gain a feeling of pride.” He explained that putting these sometimes violent and murderous criminals behind bars is somewhat comforting. Patrick then told me, “These kinds of people need to adhere to the rules that everyone else in this country follows, and that if they think they can bend the rules or try and steal to earn their money, then they must learn from their mistakes and face the consequences.” One thing I noticed of Patrick was that he always carried his firearm. I remember once being with him and his son in New York City. Before we hit the streets at night, Patrick let us watch him attach his holster and pistol to his waist. He asked if it was noticeable, and it wasn’t.
The FBI must exhibit excellence at all times, and attending the shooting range to practice weapons handling and firing was required to maintain that excellence. He had once invited my family to join him at a training facility and shooting range in Los Angeles. There, they demonstrated what a SWAT team would do in order to breach a house. The radio frequency they all coordinated on was projected on a speaker system so the audience could hear the radio chatter. They first lined up in two positions around the door. The operator, a high pitched woman’s voice, counted down from five. On four, two snipers, hidden in the brush amongst the surrounding hills and completely hidden from the audience’s sight, fired two loud, thundering rounds. Both watermelons exploded simultaneously, representing a bad guy’s head maybe. On three, the two teams lined up on the door and tossed flash bangs into the building via the windows. On one, the flash bangs went off in a fury of concussing sound. The two ground teams broke in the doors and stomped into the house. They fired at three or four paper targets painted to look like criminals or terrorists with AK-47s and handguns. One target even had a depiction of an enemy head-locking a hostage as a shield, but the delicate SWAT force prevailed and put two rounds in between the cardboard terrorist’s eyes. The audience clapped and applauded their victory. But in a real-world operation like this, a true victory only meant no casualties, even for the bad guys.
Patrick is now retired at the age of fifty. He still looks as excellent as before, with not a muscle weaker. He explained that he now made even more money working as private security for celebrity figures and persons of interest, or at large sports games like the Rose Bowl. He did not disclose his exact annual income. Patrick has been enjoying retirement comfortably at home in Newbury Park, where his two sons no longer live. Patrick hopes for at least one of his two sons to take interest in the occupational path he had once endured and loved for so long. Patrick would now enjoy fishing, camping, drinking beer to Bronco football games, and visiting his children when he could a lot more. He had worked hard his whole life for retirement, and for now, he could enjoy some peace in his life.
Behind the faces of these G-Men are the faces of real people – there’s no makeup or special effects, nor any script or stuntmen. Agents like Patrick are real, emotional people with families, goals, dreams, and even hobbies. The unbreakable work that goes on behind the scenes of these law agencies is what helps citizens of this country sleep quieter at night. I feel we should all learn to appreciate the jobs that some of us would not be willing to work in, and more importantly to appreciate the men and women whose jobs help the communities and provide protection to our nation. But maybe Patrick held out on me – maybe there is a secret entrance to a state of the art underground facility where intrigue operations go down. But for now, I’ll keep it a secret and let these men work in amity.
Dr.
English M01A
12 February 2013
G-Men: A Detailed Look into the Day of the FBI
“Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.” (J. Edgar Hoover). These famous words from the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation were a symbol of the start of America’s war on crime. This quote stood as a direct reference to armed and unarmed bank robberies in the United States. At the front of this ongoing crime war is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or the FBI for short.
There are nearly fifteen-thousand robberies in the Los Angeles metropolitan area each year, but despite that debatably high number, crime rates are actually dropping at a rapid rate. Los Angeles Crime …show more content…
statistics report that overall crime incidents have gone down by virtually twenty-thousand. A lot of this deterred crime is attributed to the FBI, as well as the efforts of local law enforcement.
It was a searing day in Los Angeles.
The sun hung from the middle of the sky and seemed to almost liquefy the city below. The street reflected the heat like a tanning mirror placed beneath you. A car alarm echoed throughout the wide block before Bank of the West – an average looking bank painted tan with horizontal architecture that swept up the front of the structure. Two bullet holes plastered the echoing car like stickers placed meticulously on a movie set. Steam seeped from the engine block through the cracks of the hood and out into the blistering air, evaporating almost instantly in the blaze. A group of firemen detached the battery and doused the engine of the car with water, sending even more steam once again into the heated air. News reporters stood in front of bulky white vans, ducking the heat under sidewalk trees and overhangs from neighboring buildings. A bulky group of local citizens crowded behind police barriers surrounding the bank in an extensive ring. The barriers held back the murmuring crowd as chatter about what had happened drifted between their ears. An abundance of police officers stood around silently like mutes with sweat dripping from their brows, waiting for the detectives to finish and vacate the scene so they could do the …show more content…
same.
Inside the bank, amongst a crowd of more police detectives and officers, you would find two men. The first man, whom we’ll call Mike, was a tall, slim man wearing a dark grey suit and tan leather dress shoes. He kept his hands spread in his pockets and looked like a gentle man who spoke easy. He turned and beneath his grey blazer was a black holster in which a forty-five caliber Colt pistol lay dormant. A shiny, gold tinted badge was also seen on the adjacent side of his waist belt. It read Federal Bureau of Investigation – Department of Justice. Mike was a detective for the FBI, stationed here in Los Angeles. Beside him stood a similar looking man, whose name was Patrick. He was shorter and wore a lighter-colored suit. He seemed thicker and broader than the taller agent beside him. He too wore a black holster in which a Colt pistol lay dormant, and he too wore the same shiny badge his fellow G-Man carried. Both men were partners, first on scene at an armed robbery in central Los Angeles. They had been chasing a serial bank robber termed the Big Bills Bandit, who earned the name after he had only stolen hundred-dollar bills from the four previous banks he had held up. He had been committing similar robberies in the Los Angeles County area for the past six months. The bandit’s shot up car that sat outside had been fired upon by an undercover officer who was entering the bank as the criminal was vacating. The criminal was hit twice by the officer’s rounds and was later shipped to a hospital for non-life-threatening wounds. This was the scene of a bank robbery as described to me by a friend and mentor, named Patrick. He had been in the FBI for nearly twenty years.
Patrick stood at an average height. He was muscular, fit, and bolstered huge calve muscles. His skin was tan and red around the neck from where he had stood in the sun for too long. His face was always slightly greasy after a spurt of sunscreen was smeared around his stubble and sweaty face. A set of bright, white teeth shone brightly from behind his lips as they curled into a warming smile – he was always smiling. Patrick would wear cargo pants that sat just above the knee cap, giving way to more thigh muscle. His shoes were white and blue cross-trainers that seemed much too old and worn. A simple, solid-colored t-shirt and plain sweater would accommodate his shorts. One would instantly think of this man as a well-exercised athlete. He grew up in a farm in Iowa, raised by loving farm parents. Patrick spent most of his childhood learning from the same asceticism of his own father; he learned that discipline and hard work would always persevere, and that through first helping others, you could then help yourself. When he was nearly twenty, he moved to Boston and fell in love. He married soon after and had two sons that I would later befriend.
I have known Patrick for most of my life. We’ve shared lots of memories – those of baseball games, fishing trips, excursions across the country; our family was close. He always seemed to know more about me than I knew about him. Patrick could have a short conversation with a man and within minutes unwind the intricacies of his personality. This special skill of intense social scrutiny was one he had developed in his career as an FBI agent. This special talent would help Patrick and his partner determine lies from truths in the interrogation rooms. It was a necessary requirement for his job, which needed to be performed successfully.
“Getting into the FBI was hell. I almost gave up in the first few attempts. It was physically, and more-so mentally, challenging,” Patrick explained to me. He was forced to endure a series of rigorous tests and exams to finally enter the FBI. The process started with him obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree in Criminal Justice from the University of California – Irvine. He explained to me, with a smile on his face, “School was the hardest part for me. I’m not really into school. I liked the parties more.” Patrick then went on to serve for the Special Weapons and Tactics force of the FBI, or SWAT for short. He worked as a field agent for SWAT for nearly three years before he tired of the danger and infantryman-like duty he held. He would often have to breach houses and destroy doors to uphold search warrants. “I hated the fact that we had to break so many doors. I always felt bad for the homeowners, and I don’t really know why,” said Patrick. What he surely wanted was to be a detective. It would mean a bigger salary, more days off to spend with his family, and less time in immediate danger. But becoming one was not a simple task, and Patrick explained that it was the hardest he had trained in his life. He worked just as hard mentally as he did physically. Patrick would study vigorously, discipline his mind, listen to what retirees and mentors had to say, and most importantly, he would spend time with his wife and child when he could. Detectives would often be forced to relocate to anywhere the FBI was stationed and needed personnel.
Patrick had finally made the cut on his second application at the age of twenty-six.
He was located now in Los Angeles. Patrick and his family had found a home in Newbury Park, about an hour out of Los Angeles where he was located. The Federal Building of Los Angeles was a large, rectangular structure that stood about fifteen stories tall. It was tan, not much different than the bank robbery scene before. It’s floors house all types of government justice department mediums: law figures, language specialists, accountants, and many more diversified duties, including detective and field agents. Patrick’s office was on the twelfth-floor. It was an archetypal looking office space – no special gadgets and gizmos, no tinkering lights and large computer monitors with thousands of numbers and text – just a flat, open office floor with five foot rectangular cubicles and lots of papers and folders – it was nothing like some Hollywood films portrayed. Filing cabinets surrounded the entire enclosure like guards. They held thousands upon thousands of documents containing God knows what. At what seemed like the front of the room was a mural plastered with a dozen black and white mug shots. Many of the faces were grizzled, evil looking men with dead looks in their eyes and sharp pointed brows etching down to a slight grim or maybe frown. There were also some women – benign looking women, some of them. Other’s looked like stereotypical trailer-trash junkies that were without a doubt,
criminals. Next to these figures was a gory photograph of a man with most of his face and upper body shredded and torn to pieces. Patrick told me the man had blown himself up with a hand grenade right before he was caught for armed robbery and kidnapping. The gruesome photograph had the words “It’s your lucky day!” written in sharpie at the bottom. What this meant I did not know.
His floor was particularly quiet – there were no loud phones and raised voices like the previous floors. You could only hear the light shuffle of feet or the occasional single phone ringing, but then instantly being picked up by an office member whom was afraid the ring would disturb the sereneness of the room. It was somewhat dark in the room. A gentle amber glow entered the area from the west as the sun lowered. A few desk lights and lamps added to the orangey lighting, bright enough only to read casually. Patrick said the dimness was common as the day grew later. “The people who work on this floor prefers to enjoy as much peace and quiet as they can. I agree with them,” remarked Patrick as we finally left the tour of the office.
I had asked Patrick what typical days would look like when he worked.
“I spend most of the day in my office doing paperwork, filing reports, or just searching the web and letting time run – most of the time spent on cases was spent waiting around; we had to wait for court orders and search warrants before we could do much of any field work,” he explained.
But occasionally Patrick would get the call to head out into the field (another name for leaving the office.) He was sometimes summoned from his house via pager to attend a vital location for evidence, to interrogate a suspect, to search a house, or to even rush to a fresh crime scene. But field work was, again, mostly spent waiting and collecting. His best hope was to wait for a pulled fingerprint or quality footage from a security camera that might have caught the criminal’s face. Most of his cases, the criminals were not identified on the scene. Patrick told me his average case time frame was about two months, but he moreover said some criminals took him years to catch. The hardest part was collecting convincing evidence – Patrick would need material objects, solid footage, or a confession to convict most suspects. It was a long, laborious process that was, in the end, much fulfilling. “At the end of the day, when you finally do convict a suspect and you know you caught the bad guy, you gain a feeling of pride.” He explained that putting these sometimes violent and murderous criminals behind bars is somewhat comforting. Patrick then told me, “These kinds of people need to adhere to the rules that everyone else in this country follows, and that if they think they can bend the rules or try and steal to earn their money, then they must learn from their mistakes and face the consequences.” One thing I noticed of Patrick was that he always carried his firearm. I remember once being with him and his son in New York City. Before we hit the streets at night, Patrick let us watch him attach his holster and pistol to his waist. He asked if it was noticeable, and it wasn’t.
The FBI must exhibit excellence at all times, and attending the shooting range to practice weapons handling and firing was required to maintain that excellence. He had once invited my family to join him at a training facility and shooting range in Los Angeles. There, they demonstrated what a SWAT team would do in order to breach a house. The radio frequency they all coordinated on was projected on a speaker system so the audience could hear the radio chatter. They first lined up in two positions around the door. The operator, a high pitched woman’s voice, counted down from five. On four, two snipers, hidden in the brush amongst the surrounding hills and completely hidden from the audience’s sight, fired two loud, thundering rounds. Both watermelons exploded simultaneously, representing a bad guy’s head maybe. On three, the two teams lined up on the door and tossed flash bangs into the building via the windows. On one, the flash bangs went off in a fury of concussing sound. The two ground teams broke in the doors and stomped into the house. They fired at three or four paper targets painted to look like criminals or terrorists with AK-47s and handguns. One target even had a depiction of an enemy head-locking a hostage as a shield, but the delicate SWAT force prevailed and put two rounds in between the cardboard terrorist’s eyes. The audience clapped and applauded their victory. But in a real-world operation like this, a true victory only meant no casualties, even for the bad guys.
Patrick is now retired at the age of fifty. He still looks as excellent as before, with not a muscle weaker. He explained that he now made even more money working as private security for celebrity figures and persons of interest, or at large sports games like the Rose Bowl. He did not disclose his exact annual income. Patrick has been enjoying retirement comfortably at home in Newbury Park, where his two sons no longer live. Patrick hopes for at least one of his two sons to take interest in the occupational path he had once endured and loved for so long. Patrick would now enjoy fishing, camping, drinking beer to Bronco football games, and visiting his children when he could a lot more. He had worked hard his whole life for retirement, and for now, he could enjoy some peace in his life.
Behind the faces of these G-Men are the faces of real people – there’s no makeup or special effects, nor any script or stuntmen. Agents like Patrick are real, emotional people with families, goals, dreams, and even hobbies. The unbreakable work that goes on behind the scenes of these law agencies is what helps citizens of this country sleep quieter at night. I feel we should all learn to appreciate the jobs that some of us would not be willing to work in, and more importantly to appreciate the men and women whose jobs help the communities and provide protection to our nation. But maybe Patrick held out on me – maybe there is a secret entrance to a state of the art underground facility where intrigue operations go down. But for now, I’ll keep it a secret and let these men work in amity.