Has the FBI Finally Found Its Footing?
While they're saying goodbye to Ruby Ridge, Fred Hampton, and Waco, and hello to Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy, might we also suggest Anthony Kiedis, Jack Black and Elon Musk?
Her father would show up, sometimes dressed like a farmer. Sometimes a rancher. Sometimes a businessman. He sported a dizzying variety of wigs, accents and different cars. Her understanding, as a child, was that her father was like an actor. Even if he carried a gun. He was like a “cop actor.”
He was also in Dallas in 1963. At the same time that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
She didn’t think anything of it until he died and she found boxes and boxes of recordings. She was older then and then it was understood that he had worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI. The recordings were from their house as her father had bugged his own family during his long absences and colorful returns.
But she didn’t want to think of Kennedy or Dallas and after nonjudicial killings of the Black Panthers and J. Edgar Hoover’s selective reign of terror most of us had forgotten about the FBI right up until 1992 and the criminal wrongdoing they got pegged with at Ruby Ridge. Followed in short order by the murder of religious cultists at a compound in Waco, Texas.
So imagine my surprise when I got the following text: “Hey Eugene. The FBI is here and want to talk to you. Should I send them by?”
Flying over on vacation to Puerto Rico, I could see the lights in Waco from 35,000 feet. By the time it was all over the whole world could see that 76 Branch Davidians had died, 28 of whom were children, along with four federal agents. Admittedly a low point in a history that had had a lot of them.
So imagine my surprise when I got the following text.
“Hey Eugene. The FBI is here and wants to talk to you. Should I send them by?”
That depended. All on what they wanted to “talk” about. As a former Federal Firearms License holder it really could have been anything.
“They want to talk about OZY.”
“Send them by!”
Then a comedy of errors as she told them I’d talk and they should go on by.
“Where does he live?” They asked and she laughed and snorted, “C’mon…you’re the FBI!”
They claimed ignorance and in her wisdom she just passed along my phone number and they called. Only to have the skit repeat itself.
“Can we come by to talk to you now?” Just a voice on the phone to me, but convivial, in general.
“Sure. Come on by. I just finished training, so come by the gym. It’s called the Serao Academy.”
“Where is that?”
“C’mon…you’re the FBI!” I laughed and I could hear him sigh so I gave in. I mean he’d heard that at least twice that day and I empathized. I mean I had been stuck in a job I had hated at OZY, and that’s what they wanted to talk about and after finding lawyers in the bushes around my house who also wanted to talk about OZY I was glad to have some cover, no matter how scant.
…I am in no way, shape or form a snitch. Having now gotten that firmly established, I should say, in the interest of justice, I then told them everything.
It speaks volumes though that I thought of the Feds as cover, me of the no-snitch generation. But my boss, financial fraudster Carlos Watson, to paraphrase Chairman Mao who, when speaking about his own father, described him as a man suitably born to be tortured, would have made the devil snitch.
“Hello Eugene,” they said as they came walking in. Two agents, about my height, about 185 pounds, fit and completely and totally vibing no fucking around. Suits, lapel pins, I ushered them both into the now-empty jiu jitsu academy, offered them seats on the hard, wooden benches there while I posted up on a balance ball and waited for them to explain.
“We want to talk to you about your time at OZY and, as I’m guessing you’re well aware, about Carlos Watson.”
I nodded. And now would be as good a time as any to state that I am in no way, shape or form a snitch. Having now gotten that firmly established, I should say, in the interest of justice, I then told them everything.
That is, an interview that was supposed to last 30 minutes started stretching the tape at two hours. Which made sense since it took them about 30 minutes to lose what I like to call “cop face”, the face and distance in the eyes that says they are not likely to believe a single thing you say.
It broke when I told them a particularly trenchant tale of my time with Watson, and their response was like anyone else’s I had told the story to that wasn’t Watson, or well-ensconced as a member of the managerial class: they were shocked and appalled in yet one of the many ways Watson the liar had inflicted monstrous damage on his underlings, this one being me in this case.
“You know they take classes on how to fake empathy,” said a friend, a borderline prepper, apocalypse today kind of cat I knew. “They bend their heads like this,” he said tilting his head and knitting his brows together, “and voila: they’re your ‘friends’.”
But he hadn’t been in the room and he hadn’t watched them thaw and I am convinced beyond measure, that if I, and the other numbers of staffers that they interviewed, had made claims that the subject of the inquiry was the salt of the earth, a GREAT guy, I’d say that they might have considered walking on by this one.
I, and we, didn’t. We told the truth and on July 16th, Watson was convicted, on a multitude of charges, and remanded into custody in the same facility that’s presently holding Diddy, and Sam Bankman-Fried.
Which is when it hit me: the FBI is killing it. And I’m sure the modus operandi is the same. Someone drops a dime. The Feds start asking questions. They then run into a coterie of crap and uncover people sorely in need of correction that have no one backing their play and BOOM.
No one gave a shit about Randy Weaver or David Koresh until they were dead. But Diddy, Watson, New York Mayor Eric Adams….? Quite easy to imagine that, yeah, even the jungle wanted them dead.
That they’re famous (or semi), well-schooled and well-heeled helps. Also not killing them — a la Randy Weaver and David Koresh — was also a value add.
But still, a niggling sense of, dare I say, guilt on my part?
Right up until I start to think of the so-called famous snitches: Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, with his super popular podcast, on the long-tailed limb of his autobiography, is living his best life. Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger’s right hand man Kevin Weeks, who I interviewed in my Fight book, had been glossed Kevin “Two” Weeks for the street side take that that would be how long it would take for street justice to level his karma for snitching on well-known snitch Bulger. Seventeen years later Weeks is doing just fine, even choking Leonardo DiCaprio as a technical adviser on the Scorsese flick The Departed.
Which is right when it started to make sense to me a la Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now when talking about the marked for death Col. Kurtz: “even the jungle wanted him dead.”
No one gave a shit about Randy Weaver or David Koresh until they were dead. But Diddy, Watson, New York Mayor Eric Adams, Sam Bankman-Fried, Jeffrey Epstein, Elizabeth Holmes? Quite easy to imagine that, yeah, even the jungle wanted them dead.
And, in this instance, I was the jungle’s red right hand.
So when the phone this last week rang and it was the FBI, again, I, who had been in the shower, answered right away. Their ask was easy. Watson gets sentenced November 18th. Would I be willing to send them a letter detailing my feelings about the man?
Oh. Well, you know I’m no snitch, I tell him, our voices crackling uneasily on a shaky cellphone connection, but in the interest of justice, “I’m glad to give you whatever you need. How many pages?”
“However many you feel like…”, it felt like he was smiling when he said this.
“You’ll have it by the end of business today,” I said, fighting the urge to turn in other asshole bosses, as well as people who had ripped me off, guys who tapped me at jiu jitsu, ex’s who had dumped me, the guy at the Chevron who wouldn’t let me pay for a 5-Hour Energy with a credit card et al.
But he did. Have it by the end of the business day, that is. Like I had promised. All in the interest of justice. And shit.
Yeah, man…to paraphrase another known snitch, only in America.
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