Very special agents : the inside story of America's most controversial law enforcement agency--the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms / James Moore.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Moore, Jim, 1935-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms--Officials and employees.

United States.

United States. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Law enforcement--United States.

Law enforcement.

Moore, Jim, 1935-.

Moore, Jim.

Genre:

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xv, 384 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Illinois edition.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Summary:

From Chicago's Al Capone to Waco's David Koresh, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has taken on America's most ruthless criminals and single-minded fanatics. In Very Special Agents, a longtime ATF veteran delivers the first full disclosure of the bureau's controversial exploits.

When James Moore joined the ATF at Newark, New Jersey, in 1960, it was an arm of the Internal Revenue Service with one job: to catch the Mafia bootleggers whose Prohibition-style distilleries each cheated Uncle Sam of $20,000 a day in tax revenue. During his twenty-five years of service, Moore saw the ATF shift into the enforcement of gun laws, be reborn as a separate bureau, and take on the bombings and arson cases that most officers of the law wrote off as impossible to solve.

From heartstopping undercover sting operations to explosive face-to-face confrontations with mobsters, murderers, bombers, gang members, and terrorists, Very Special Agents takes the reader to the heart of the action. Moore's personal, from-the-hip history of the ATF spans the long-running war against Mafia dons and drug dealers and agents' daring infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan, Hell's Angels, and other groups that advocate violence and bloodshed. He covers the cutting edge forensics work that helped crack the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings, and he provides an insider account of the raid on the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas. Moore also discusses the ATF's rivalry with the FBI and the bureaucratic hairsplitting and political power games that, in his view, impede the government's ability to short-circuit crime.

Contents:

1 It Was in the Bleak December 1

2 Three Detectives 16

3 Gentlemen Don't Boast 31

4 End of a Hundred-Year War 51

5 New Battlefields 65

6 New Ammunition for the Government Gun 79

7 Attacking Terrorism 93

8 Underworld Armorers 108

9 "Unsolvable Crimes" 122

10 Ladies and Gentlemen in White Coats 134

11 The Birth of a Bureau 142

12 Strike Force 154

13 Significant Criminals 177

14 Fire 193

15 The Circus 208

16 The Spring of '81 218

17 A Wonderful Plan to Kill ATF 234

18 The Un-Terrorists 244

19 Deja Vu 278

20 Waco 285

21 Fallout 308

B ATF Mission Statement 351

C Job Description, ATF Special Agent 352

D Sample Page: ATF Explosive Incident Report 356

E Special Material re FBI 359

F Facts/History re Proposed Merger of Treasury Investigative Bureaus 366

G History of ATF Name Changes 372

H Federal Firearms Licensed Dealers 374

I Miscellaneous Studies and Statistics 376

J Value of the Gun Control Act of 1968 380.

Notes:

Originally published: New York : Pocket Books, 1997.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0252027116

0252070259

OCLC:

123148330