Fingering the Feds

...Soon after, Connell took a degree in English at Kansas, where he studied fiction writing under Ray B. West...

...the DEA often does, but only by instigating the offense, persuading a drug dealer to make a sale to an undercover agent, with other undercover agents as witnesses...

...But the fact is that though his books have been widely reviewed and highly praised, he has yet to be accorded the renown of some of his contemporaries—some of them unfit to punctuate his prose...

...There is much sense in the axioms about setting a thief to catch a thief, and about the lack of honor among thieves...

...Corruption has never been a problem in the FBI since Hoover took over in 1924...

...The tale may be apocryphal, but it could easily be true...

...Neither a gifted charlatan, nor an exotic, nor an obscurantist, nor a black humorist, Connell is nonetheless, as one critic remarked, "a writer whose high professionalism has not kept him from a series of increasingly William H. Nolte is professor of English literature at the University of South Carolina and author of Rock and Hawk: Robinson Jeffers and the Romantic Agony (forthcoming from University of Georgia Press...

...Aside from the surface parallels (Isaacs is also from Kansas City), there is little resemblance between author and fictional character...

...ambitious and valuable experiments...

...He took a very permissive view of such "consensual" or "victimless" crimes as gambling and prostitution (drugs were not much of a problem in his day), so long as he got his cut...

...The FBI's job is probably easier than the DEA's, for many of its informants are honest citizens, willing to testify if necessary...

...Connell drew heavily on his experience as a pilot to write The Patriot (1960), in which the central protagonist is a bumbling cadet named Melvin Isaacs, who washes out of flight school a week before he is to graduate...

...The Bureau's agents, though their functions were always primarily investigative, withthe main emphasis on prosaic interviewing and on collection and collation of evidence, even acquired a reputation as super Dick Tracys, shooting it out with the likes of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis...

...Fingering the Feds While DEA agents spend most of their time undercover—buying drugs, 'flipping" dealers, and kicking in doors—FBI agents usually keep regular hours and never wear disguises...

...The core problem is the weight to be given to the quality of arrests and convictions, i.e., the size and seriousness of the crime and the criminal, the amount of stolen 12 The American Spectator November 1978 property recovered or of drugs seized, as distinct from the mere numbers, which can be very deceptive...

...The problem is pretty accurately summed up in the late Thurman Arnold's Corollary to Parkinson's Law: "No new government activity can possibly be effectively carried out by any established government organization...

...FBI agents rarely engage in hot pursuit, usually keep regular working hours, and almost never operate in disguise...

...the main job of the DEA agent is to instigate crimes, which requires that he pass as an addict or dealer himself...

...there ought to be a glossary...

...headquarters has not always agreed...

...the DEA's management has to watch out for it, for obvious reasons...

...The DEA is highly decentralized, despite recurrent efforts by its directors and headquarters staff to impose such control...

...Basic Books...

...the statistics, although scarce and unreliable (the FBI does not even calculate rates of solution or conviction), suggest that the FBI's rate ranges between 7 and 15 percent, depending on the type of case, and that the DEA' s batting average is even lower...

...The cop-on-the-beat variety of law enforcement is very different from that practiced by the federal investigative agencies, exemplified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency, which are the focus of James Q. Wilson's new book, The Investigators...

...For the DEA, does one heroin dealer equal four marijuana smugglers, or maybe six or eight...

...Despite these handicaps, Hoover's mastery of public relations was such that no other bureaucrat was treated with such deference on Capitol Hill, and no President, much less any Attorney General, ever thought of firing him, or asking him to retire after he had long passed the usual age, or even trying to encroach on his absolute control of the Bureau...

...Neither agency has an impressive percentage of convictions in the cases they investigate...

...As Professor Wilson rightly remarks, it is better to have law enforcers who must respect the liberties of the citizen and public opinion...

...Despite all the differences, the two agencies have some fundamental problems in common...

...The FBI is highly centralized, with strict control from the top, though less so than in Hoover's day...

...Both of them share jurisdiction with local police (and, in the case of the DEA, also with the Treasury's Customs Service), and this means that there is often rivalry, friction, and lack of cooperation—the feds are not anxious to let the locals grab credit for arrests and convictions, and vice versa...

...No one would argue, for example, that his name is as readily recognizable as that of Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal or Truman Capote, men who have parlayed playing the fool for gossip columnists and writing pornography for the masses into gate receipts that would have pleased a Caligula, or a P.T...

...Perhaps the two agencies should be merged...

...it is no less obvious that such a talent is essentially that of circus performers and voodoo dancers...

...William H. Nolte Evan Connell the Ironist Novelist Evan Connell has yet to be accorded the renown of some of his contemporaries, because unlike Gore Vidal or Truman Capote he is neither a charlatan nor a voodoo-dancer...

...He later explained to the Lexow Committee, which was investigating police corruption in the nineties, that he had accumulated his enormous fortune by speculating in building lots in Japan...

...A minority, well exemplified by a rather silly book, Freedom Spent, by the New Yorker's Richard Harris, see the Bureau as engaged in a sinister conspiracy against the constitutional rights of people with left-wing opinions...

...Thus, when the FBI arrested three robbers who had stolen $4 million in cash and jewels from the Hotel Pierre in New York, two could be convicted only on lesser charges and one got off scot-free, because the Bureau would not throw away its valuable informer, a fence to whom the thieves had taken the gems...

...It is no particular advantage to an FBI agent to be black or Hispanic, but a street-wise black agent is likely to do well in the DEA...

...This does not in itself prove that the agencies are inefficient...

...The DEA in particular has to be careful about the illdefined line between entrapment and persuading a suspect to commit a crime, which he is only too glad to commit, in the presence of undercover agents...

...Thebasic difference is summed up by Professor Wilson: The main job of the FBI agent is to investigate crimes by interviewing people who may know something about them...

...Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...

...What about the undercover informer—e.g., one in the KKK—who must, if he is not to blow his cover, participate in crimes himself...

...After receiving his wings, on VE Day, he served as a flight instructor until being discharged...

...In fact, as Professor Wilson demonstrates in a lengthy chapter, the FBI depends largely, and the DEA almost entirely, on informers...

...The decision to prosecute is up to the United States Attorney and his assistants, and the investigators often resent his refusal to prosecute a case that they think important and on which they have worked hard...

...Evaluating the efficiency of the FBI and DEA is at best even more difficult than assessing the results achieved by other bureaucracies...

...There is more emphasis on quantity than quality of arrests in the DEA...

...The current rage for black humor among the sophomores of both the student body and faculty has put wind in the sails of more fourth-raters than any fad since the halcyon days of the Freudian frauds and the proletarian poseurs...

...Government organization charts and policy directives were never my favorite subjects, even in the days when I had to read and sometimes write them myself, although Wilson probably interprets them as well as anyone could...

...The FBI rarely catches a criminal in flagrante delicto...

...In fact, only a couple of dozen FBI agents have been killed by criminals since the Bureau was founded in 1924, whereas in a normal year about 100 local policemen are murdered in the line of duty...

...To this day if you mention the name "Hoover" to an average American, he is more likely to think of J. Edgar than Herbert C. The Investigators puts Hoover's memory, his virtues and his faults, in proper perspective...

...When they aren't, the Bureau has problems, for its policy, generally backed up by the courts, is never to "burn" an undercover informer by using him as a witness or otherwise revealing his identity...

...It was he who christened the sinful midtown area between Fifth and Seventh Avenues "the Tenderloin," when he said of his transfer there that "I've had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I'm going to get a little of the tenderloin...

...I can stand criminals at large more easily than I could stand the KGB...

...The executives of the agencies are aware of the need for at least some reforms...

...the paucity of convictions is in large part attributable to legal and constitutional restraints on law enforcement...

...The majority, largely on the basis of the Bureau's own propaganda, think of it as working miracles of scientific detection with computers, blood samples, fingerprints, and ballistic laboratories...

...Within each agency there is the usual friction between line and staff...

...Both have to worry about the lawfulness of search and seizure, including wiretaps and other types of electronic surveillance, and the admissibility of self-incriminating statements...

...It is hard to keep straight the superabundance of acronymns like COINTELPRO and G-DEP and ODALE...

...I suspect that Professor Wilson found himself, like many professors, including me, with a stack of material accumulated in his consulting work, which he hated to waste...

...Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1924, Connell attended Southwest High School before going to Dartmouth College...

...In his day G-men were perceived by the public and the politicians as fearless, indefatigable, and efficient crime-busters...

...The liberals, of course, never had any harsh words for Hoover's surveillance and harassment of the Ku Klux Klan, which dated from the beginning of his tenure, a time when the Klan had plenty of political clout and many friends in Congress...

...Both agencies grumble about lenient federal judges, especially (as might be expected) in the hyper-liberal District of Massachusetts...

...In practice the big fish are not often caught, among other reasons because there is great pressure on the agents to produce arrest statistics by busting the small retailers who are the most numerous and most easily caught...

...many have a background in the regular military services...

...If critical reception were the sole criterion for determining the reputation of a writer, Evan S. Connell, Jr., would certainly be better known than he is...

...Nor for that matter has Connell been so lovingly embraced by academics as have the likes of Thomas Pynchon and John Hawkes...

...The book is too long and sometimes a trifle repetitious...

...The citizen wishes there were more such guardians of law and order, especially on his block...

...That such sleight-of-hand performers possess a talent of sorts is undeniable...

...Aside from the frustration any cop feels when he sees a criminal back on the street immediately or after a few months, it is harder to turn a criminal into an informer if he has reason to believe that, even if he is convicted, the judge will take a tolerant view of his crime...

...its agents, as Professor Wilson points out, gave Miranda warnings to suspects being interviewed long before they were required by the Supreme Court...

...He is one of the very few novelists whose books I purchase as a matter of course...

...During that apprentice period he also spent two years in Europe...

...In theory this process can lead all the way up to the Class II violators, wholesalers, and even to the Class I's, the top executives of smuggling operations and illegal laboratories...

...The American Spectator November 1978 11 There is some truth in this too, but not as much as you might think after taking your kids on one of the Bureau's guided tours...

...Instead he joined the Navy as an aviation cadet...

...Barnum...

...His unique eminence is summed up in the story of the guard at the Department of Justice who told an Attorney General, trying to get into his office on Sunday afternoon without the proper identification, "I don't care if you're J. Edgar Hoover himself, you can't get in without a pass...

...Years later he noted, "While at Dartmouth I was planning to become a doctor, as my father is, and as his father was...

...An agent's most important skill, to whose improvement neither agency pays enough attention, is to use and recruit informers...

...he once remarked that, given different circumstances earlier in his life, he probably would have become a sculptor...

...FBI agents still look as square, honest, and trustworthy as so many junior bank executives...

...The FBI, particularly in the glory days of J. Edgar Hoover, has been the more successful of the two, though its image and autonomy under Hoover's successors are not what they were...

...If any character in The Patriot resembles Connell, it is Patrick Cole, an extremely skeptical and aloof young The American Spectator November 1978 13...

...Williams did in fact keep the old Gas House district, as tough as America has ever known, fairly free of violent crime by the simple expedient of using his formidable brawn and matchless skill with the nightstick on any known thugs who had the temerity to appear on the street and by occasionally raiding the dives in which they hung out...

...They have tasks and problems—for example, making a case against unidentified perpetrators of crimes whose victims and witnesses may be highly reluctant to complain or testify—which do not much resemble those of local police departmencs...

...10.95...

...The commonest technique of the drug agents is to get the goods on a street peddler (known as a Class IV offender or, if he deals in quantities over an ounce of heroin or cocaine, as a Class III) by an undercover buy, and then persuade him to "work off the beef" by "duking in" the agents to his suppliers, who can then be "flipped" in a similar way...

...In rare cases, when the crime and criminal are very important, and the informer's testimony is essential for conviction, it may go to the extreme and extremely expensive length of protecting him from retaliation by furnishing him with a new identity and a new residence...

...He makes some modest and cautious suggestions for administrative reforms—more selection and training of agents skilled in the development and use of informers, less emphasis onnumbers, less paperwork, and so forth...

...Perhaps the DEA should make street peddlers its prime target, on the theory that the big boys are too hard to catch (cut off the French Connection, and the hydra grows a dozen Mexican and Hong Kong heads) and that if the retail distributors are put out of business the manufacturers and wholesalers will go hungry...

...Nevertheless, The Investigators is a sane and useful essay on law enforcement, of which there are far too few...

...Above all, both agencies must be sensitive to public and political opinion, concentrating on those violations that the public thinks serious, forgetting about such things as sales of small quantities of marijuana, and avoiding techniques of investigation which, even if within the letter of the law, seem like dirty pool...

...The two agencies are thus dissimilar in many respects, for reasons that The Investigators thoroughly expounds...

...Its agents tend to think that only heroin is really important, though cocaine has had a certain vogue...

...Although he had decided to become a writer by the time he left the Navy at the age of twenty-one, he also studied painting and sculpture...

...He thinks nostalgically of such legendary scourges of the criminal class as Inspector Alexander S. ("Clubber") Williams, who made his mark in and on the New York Police Department a century ago and is still remembered for his observation that "there is more law in the end of a policeman's nightstick than in a decision of the Supreme Court...

...But by and large, although the public is concerned about bank robbery, organized and white-collar crime, thefts from shipments in interstate commerce, drug peddling, and the other violations the two federal agencies investigate, it worries more about crime in the street, which is usually handled by local law enforcers...

...He should have turned it into a longish article, not a book...

...The latter agency has never been quite sure about the relative importance of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and hashish, and dangerous drugs like barbiturates, LSD, and amphetamines...

...For example, when local police found a stolen car that had been transported across a state line, the FBI used to chalk it up as an "FBI recovery," though the agency had done little or nothing...

...FBI is less likely to invest its resources in small cases, though it too is under some pressure to produce statistics, however meaningless or misleading...

...Later he studied under such well-known teachers of writing as Wallace Stegner at Stanford, Helen Hull at Columbia, and finally Walter Van Tilburg Clark in San Francisco (where he lived until recently moving across the bay to Sausalito...

...Many of them regard the others as "kiddie dope" and resent having to spend time on them...

...DEA agents, most of whom operate undercover, must look and act like petty criminals or at least street people...

...Federal offenses don't affect many people directly, they are not commonly violent, and they do not instill personal fear in ordinary citizens...

...I think that if there had not been a second World War, I might have continued that direction for at least another year or so...

...Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., is Richard Ely Professor of Law at Yale *The Investigators: Managing FBI and Narcotics Agents...

...Sophisticated terrorist organizations do not trust a recruit until he has himself engaged in an assassination or bombing...

...The KGB could probably produce really dramatic and accurate statistics, if it had any need to make a favorable impression on public opinion...

...Professor Wilson acutely analyzes their goals (including the very important ones of establishing and maintaining their autonomy and getting maximum appropriations out of Congress), their methods, and the constraints, political and legal, under which they must operate...

...Professor Wilson has a lucid style, but The Investigators is not easy reading...

...The DEA's informers are almost always criminals themselves, usually petty, and correspondingly unreliable and hard to handle...

...The FBI, though it may occasionally shift its resources from one kind of crime to another, as when Hoover was finally persuaded that public and congressional opinion wanted more attention paid to the Mafia (always known in the Bureau as LCN, for La Cosa Nostra) or white-collar crime (bribery, fraud on the government, corruption of public officials, and so forth), is generally clearer about its priorities than the DEA...

...The two agencies characteristic modi operandi and administrative organizations are equally different...

...But even the more sophisticated members of the public are likely to have a somewhat inaccurate perception of the FBI and its investigative techniques...

...A lot of them are in fact lawyers and accountants, though fewer than formerly...

...The trouble is that, as many cabinet officers and even Presidents have learned, the ways and habits of bureaucracy are nearly immovable objects...

...I was probably wrong a few years ago when I concluded that at least half the delegates to a New Politics convention held at Yale Law School must be FBI men, on the ground that no real radical could possibly look so radical...

...But Professor Wilson puts his finger on some genuine inefficiencies—e.g., too many reports, too much paper-shuffling, too many inspections of the troops in the line, too much weight attached to making statistics...

...DEA agents love the excitement and sometimes danger of the chase, making buys and kicking in doors...

...Although it is true that Hoover's views on domestic security, especially in his crotchety old age, failed, like those of a lot of liberals, to distinguish sufficiently between violent radicals and those who were tiresome but innocuous, the FBI has usually shown a decent respect for the Constitution...

...Both agencies, however, suffer from such inefficiencies as papershuffling and lenient federal judges...

...For the ordinary citizen law enforcement is symbolized by the uniformed cop, patrolling his beat, twirling a nightstick, festooned with handcuffs, revolver, and ammunition, and ready and able to pursue and drag off burglars, purse-snatchers, and muggers...

...unlike private enterprises, they cannot be judged by earnings per share...

...University...