RatSnakes by Vincent A. Cefalu

Author:Vincent A. Cefalu
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948836258
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2019-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

For a good twenty years, between the 1970s and 1990s, times were lean for ATF. Despite its numerous successes, the agency didn’t grow much and resources remained slim. We didn’t have fancy SWAT trucks like are used today. Our mobile command centers were small RV-type motor homes, and we didn’t have huge vans to load up with agents to go on a large raid. It wasn’t really practical to come screaming into a neighborhood in ten or twelve police-type unmarked cars. But we had to be able to flood an area quickly with enough agents to safely conduct a raid, so sometimes the conga line of police cars was the only way we could get enough manpower on the scene. It was really hard to sneak up on a search warrant location with a dozen Crown Vics, the standard unmarked police vehicle of many PDs. So we often used a rented panel moving van. As alluded to above, that worked well for a lot of years, until the ghetto dwellers started to figure it out. We used to laugh that there was no way of knowing how much dope got flushed down the toilets in the projects just because somebody was legitimately moving out using a U-Haul truck.

During the late 1990s, I was assigned back to where my law enforcement career started, in Athens, Georgia. There had been an increase in narcotics trafficking and firearms-related violence in the Classic City, and ATF offered to help. I was the logical choice for this assignment. It was old-home week, except that all my former patrol partners were now big-shot bosses, but that was a good thing because I had instant credibility. We put together yet another ad hoc task force and married up with the Athens-Clarke County PD narcs. This marriage turned out to be extremely successful. After a year or so of taking down some of the worst gangsters in Athens, we started hearing chatter on the streets that ATF had sent about twenty agents to Athens and the dealers should not carry guns because fed time was no joke. Truth be known, I was the only ATF agent there with any regularity, and I was partnered up with about ten highly skilled and motivated local cops. But all the street thugs knew was that their buddies were not going to local lockup and instead were taken to Macon and charged by ATF. We had to take them to Macon simply because that was the federal judicial district governing Athens.

I had befriended some of the newer narcs—one in particular, a hard-charging former Marine named Billy Stotts. He was fairly new to the business but would work night and day, and he loved working dope cases. There was a particularly elusive horrible bad guy in Athens we wanted. This man, Boris, had evaded charges and arrest for years. Mostly because everyone was afraid to testify against him but also because of where he lived. Boris’s house sat up on a hill, where he could see cops coming from every direction.

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