Public Servants Studied in Image and Essay

A Fanfare for the Common Bureaucrat

Charles T. Goodsell

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781483382883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentlichsarbeit & Verwaltung

This latest work by highly regarded scholar of bureaucracy Charles T. Goodsell uses narrative essays and accompanying video profiles to bring to life the work and careers of individuals working for the common good in 12 essential jobs at all three levels of American government. The first book to explicitly encourage undergraduates to consider the public service as a career, Public Servants Studied in Image and Essay offers an on-the-ground look at some of the careers available to them after graduation. It showcases the hard work and dedication of ordinary bureaucrats—rather than administrative leaders—to help students appreciate the nature and achievements of American bureaucracy. The book’s narratives are framed by an introduction and conclusion by Goodsell to provide context and to place them within the research on bureaucracy and public administration.

Part One Public Safety

Essay 1 ADAM R. PRICE, ATF Special Agent: A Firearms Agency under Fire

Charles T. Goodsell

Photo by Charles T. Goodsell

Almost all Americans know that the initials “FBI” stand for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but not everyone knows what “ATF” stands for. Literally, this acronym stands for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a shortened form for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. This Bureau is a much smaller federal law enforcement agency than the FBI, acting alongside it in the Department of Justice and just as competently. However, unlike the FBI, it is surrounded by chronic political controversy—it is much admired by law enforcement professionals but hated by the National Rifle Association.

The formation of ATF can be traced to the beginnings of the republic when, in January 1791, Congress passed the first national internal revenue excise tax, called the Distilled Spirits Tax Act. This tax was levied after the newly formed federal government agreed to assume the Revolutionary War debts of the original thirteen states. Congress imposed taxes on both domestic and imported distilled spirits, and fourteen revenue districts were established, with a revenue supervisor, inspector of the survey, and revenue collectors assigned to each. The tax proved so unpopular with the citizenry that in 1794 the Whiskey Rebellion broke out. As the government moved in to arrest the rioting mobs, a revenue officer was killed, perhaps the first on-duty death of a federal agent in the new republic.

After the Volstead Act was passed in 1919, a Prohibition Unit was established within the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the second precursor to the ATF. Bootleggers, gangs, and corrupt politicians formed an underground alliance to oppose this unit’s mission and gained great power, most notably in Chicago. A special agent by the name of Eliot Ness took on the task of confronting the Chicago mob, and eventually his team sent the famous criminal Al Capone to jail. Ness’s exploits inspired the creation of the comic strip figure Dick Tracy and, much later, the film The Untouchables.

When the Prohibition Unit’s mission evaporated with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the organization was converted into the Alcohol Tax Unit within the Internal Revenue Service, tasked with collecting federal excise taxes on the newly legal sale of liquor. Then, in 1951, collection of federal taxes was extended to tobacco as well.

In 1968, a sea change occurred when Congress passed the Gun Control Act in the wake of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy. This act remains the organic federal firearm statute on the books. The early revenue function meant that the agency was to remain with the Treasury Department until 1972—considered the birth year of the modern ATF—when a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was created with independent agency status.

Meanwhile, another relevant new law had become effective, the Explosives Control Act of 1970. It defined possession of an unregistered explosive device as a firearm crime, thereby falling under ATF jurisdiction. Two decades later, the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City Federal Building, followed nearly a decade later by the attacks of 9/11, augmented the importance of explosives as weapons of domestic terrorism. The overall importance of ATF’s mission was elevated, and Congress added the word “Explosives” to the agency’s name after passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This same legislation transferred ATF from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice, where it now resides.¹

Our study subject, Adam R. Price, was born into the family of a Kentucky state trooper named Philip Price. At the time, the Prices lived in the small town of Prestonsburg along the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Because Adam’s father was frequently transferred from one state police post to another around eastern Kentucky, the young man experienced the state’s entire Appalachian mountain territory. Given the area’s ubiquitous moonshine stills, Philip Price became actively engaged with combating them. By the time son Adam began school, his father had resigned from the state police to join the U.S. Treasury’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Unit as a special investigator. In this job, Philip had his hands full pursuing untaxed liquor violations and breaking up bootleg gangs, exploits that made a deep impression on his son. For the next two decades, the first Special Agent Price remained steadfastly committed to a full career of public service and remained in what became ATF until his retirement in 1988.

It is not surprising, then, that Adam Price inherited an ethos of public service in law enforcement. Not only was his father a model in this regard, but family stories spoke of his grandfather’s career as a policeman. Not surprisingly, when Adam went off to college at Michigan State University, he majored in criminal justice. Upon graduating, he headed from the campus fifty miles east to Detroit, where he became a uniformed sworn police officer in the urban community of Clawson, Michigan. Located near major arteries to and from Detroit, the job provided the newly minted policeman with plenty of assault, drug, and robbery cases. He became, in his own words, a “24/7/365” cop who could not wait for his shift to begin, loved being at the center of action, and who, along with his fellow police officers, ran toward gunfire rather than from it. Even though he realized that, with his badge and gun, he was looked upon by many residents with suspicion, fear, and even hatred, he could also in this circumstance help young people in trouble, protect the innocent from criminals, and prevent crime where possible. Looking back, Adam says this was “the best job I ever had.”

After three years in the Clawson department, Adam accepted a patrolman job in Arlington County, Virginia. This position put him in the Washington, D.C., area, not far from the ATF national headquarters building at 650 Massachusetts Avenue N.W. At the time, his father was still employed by that agency, and as it turned out, only a year from retirement. The lure of following in his father’s footsteps by doing law enforcement on a national level was irresistible. ATF was, after all, tops in the field of violent crime enforcement in that it pursued the worst types of armed felons, bombers, and arsonists. Following one year with the Arlington force, Adam applied for and obtained a slot at ATF, and the second-generation Special Agent Price began a 28-year career in the ATF.

Agent Price’s first assignment was to the Miami field office as a criminal investigator, a role similar to that of a detective in a big city police department. As such, he wore civilian clothes but carried the ATF badge and handgun. Prior to being placed on duty, he was sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, to undergo 16 weeks of rigorous preparation, a period longer than that required of most state and local officers at that time. Upon completion of a training program covering criminal/constitutional law, criminal investigative procedures, ethics, nonlethal force, and techniques of firearm, bomb, and arson investigations, he was admitted to the special-agent cadre of the ATF. These officers constitute ATF’s arm for locating and apprehending violent breakers of the law. They are distinct from a force of ATF Industry Operations Investigators (IOIs), who monitor legitimate alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosive activities. As such, they do things such as inspect manufacturing plants and regulate dealer sales. Even though unarmed and without law enforcement powers, IOIs serve a vital function in criminal investigations and weapons trafficking.

Special Agent Price’s work at the Miami field office was multifaceted in both geographic and operational terms. In addition to Miami-Dade County, his jurisdiction ranged in practice over much of South Florida, including down to Key West. Because Miami is a hub of international shipping and air travel to the Caribbean and Latin America, his job required him to become active in national and transnational task forces responsible for investigating arms and narcotics trafficking in those regions. An example of his work is his successful investigation and prosecution of a South Florida man who had illegally acquired and trafficked hundreds of assault weapons to Trinidad and Tobago, where they were used in a coup d’état that devastated the island nation for years afterward.

Although Adam often worked with other agents on IOI teams, ATF also encouraged its agents to independently conduct investigations, giving him the professional latitude and discretion he had enjoyed as a police officer. He personally conducted surveillance operations, tapped phones, staffed stakeouts, recruited informants, went undercover, and chased and arrested suspects, often at gunpoint. At the culmination of every investigation, he was expected to take sufficiently convincing evidence to a prosecutor for a federal criminal trial, conviction, and sentencing.

To help with the latter, Adam developed personal ties with several prosecutors who specialized in firearms cases in the South Florida U.S. attorney’s office. He also cultivated acquaintanceships in the local police departments in that part of the state, in the region’s state police posts, and in other federal field offices in the area, such as the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). A lesson he never forgot is how critical it is for a successful cop at any level to build and maintain a personal network of key people and resources across all jurisdictions and occupations.

Putting dangerous criminals behind bars requires not merely street smarts but a ready command of criminal law. When I talked with Adam about the legal tools essential for an ATF agent, he recited chapter and verse from the Gun Control Act of 1968, particularly the Armed Career Criminal Act of 1984 amendments. A significant part of Adam’s investigative time in South Florida was spent enforcing this law. Title 18 USC Section 924e contains a “three strikes you’re out” provision whereby persons previously convicted of three or more crimes of violence, and who are subsequently arrested while in possession of a firearm, must be automatically sentenced to at least 15 years in prison with no opportunity for early release. This statute targeted the “worst of the worst” most violent and active criminals, removing them from the community with lengthy federal prison sentences. Section 924c, a separate sentencing enhancement tool, states that, if a firearm is carried during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime or a crime of violence, varied sentence extensions can be imposed depending on the seriousness of gun use (i.e., 5 years for possession, 7 for brandishing, 10 for discharging, and 30 for machine gun or silencer deployment). No less than 78 percent of all ATF cases involve firearms.

This concentration on gun-related crimes has led the Bureau to specialize in the science and art of what is called gun tracing. This term refers to the identification of the history of a particular firearm from manufacture to the point of first retail sale and beyond. Obviously, this matter is of seminal importance in apprehending and convicting shooters; hence, it is not illogical that ATF is the only organization in the country that does it. In Martinsburg, West Virginia, the agency maintains the National Tracing Center (NTC). In its building are stacked thousands of boxes stuffed with millions of yellow 4473 forms filled out by gun dealers and gun purchasers at the original point of sale. This antiquated system of paper purchase records has not been computerized because the National Rifle Association has convinced Congress it would represent an ominous step toward government registration and eventual seizure of all private firearms.

The tracing process begins when a police department or similar agency submits to the NTC the make, model, and serial number of a firearm found at the scene of a crime. Next, calls are made to the gun’s manufacturer and wholesale distributor in order to run down the selling retailer. Once the original buyer has been ascertained, that person is contacted to determine whether the weapon has been passed on to others. If so, investigations are conducted to locate and interview the current owner/possessor. Because of the paper-record requirement, the process may take as little as a few hours in an urgent case; however, on average, it takes some 10 days—a delay that can easily jeopardize solving a crime.

After 10 years as an ATF special agent in Miami, Adam was promoted from street-level criminal investigation to a series of supervisory and middle-management positions. His first assignment was at the Louisville Field Division, whose jurisdiction covered his home state of Kentucky as well as Indiana, West Virginia, and Ohio. The new job was that of senior operations officer, whose responsibility is to monitor the quality and adequacy of investigations conducted by currently practicing agents. After digesting case files and investigative reports, Adam would make a point of personally contacting agents whose case files suggested that errors or other shortcomings had occurred and arrange for corrections to be made before the reports were finalized at the division level. He said he did this most often without notifying his division leadership; having been there himself, he was well aware of the difficulties faced by a cop making fast decisions under the most trying circumstances. He did not want to see the efforts of hard-working street agents slowed by administrative paperwork issues.

Three years later, Special Agent Price was transferred to agency headquarters in Washington, bringing him back to the physical environs of his year in Arlington. Initially attached as staff aide to a Bureau deputy assistant director, he drafted policy memoranda, rewrote outdated directives, and prepared letters to members of Congress in response to constituent complaints. This experience deepened his understanding of the agency’s policymaking processes and its many political challenges.

Following this assignment, our subject was moved to the headquarters branch of Advanced Investigations, where as a program manager, and later branch chief, he designed and delivered training programs to enhance the professional competence of new and existing agents. Topics included domestic and international firearms trafficking, undercover operations, cognitive interviewing, money laundering, alcohol and tobacco tax diversion, and crime intelligence analysis. On the basis of his experience in Miami and elsewhere, Adam became recognized as an expert in international firearms trafficking and spoke on that subject to law enforcement audiences from Canada, Mexico, and Europe, as well as around the United States.

The next four years of Adam’s career were spent once again in the field, this time at the ATF division office in Phoenix, whose jurisdiction covered Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah. Initially, he directed the division’s Intelligence Operations Group, a unit that supervised information-gathering activities, analysis, and assets in the five states of the Phoenix division’s area of responsibility. Later, when he was serving as acting assistant special-agent-in-charge, a group of Tucson-based agents conceived of an enforcement operation they named Wide Receiver. According to the plan, gun shop owners in the area were to be asked to contact the Phoenix division whenever a large and likely illegal gun buy was in progress, especially if it included the AK-47s popular with Mexican drug cartels. The plan was to instruct the shop owner to go ahead with the sale after a surveillance team was put in place to physically follow the buyer’s subsequent movements. Special Agent Price approved trying out the scheme only under the strict provision that Mexican authorities and ATF personnel assigned to Mexico City were informed and involved in advance. Also, the Mexican officials had to agree in writing to assume responsibility for the weapons once they had crossed the border and to follow them to their destination. His reasoning was that public safety was more important than making a case and that this chain of surveillance allowed for maximum control of the firearms at all times while still permitting the agents and their Mexican counterparts to develop their investigation. Wide Receiver netted some convictions, but they were of relatively small fish since major cartel figures never crossed the border. Thus, the operation was soon discontinued.

After Adam left the Phoenix division, an agent there proposed a more sweeping illegal weapon sales operation, patterned in a general way after Wide Receiver but that would presumably catch big fish as well as small ones. However, the plan left the earlier campaign’s restrictions behind in two respects: (1) the guns would be allowed to migrate across the border without physical surveillance and (2) the operation would be carried out without informing the Mexican police or the ATF Mexico City office. Called Fast and Furious, the proposal was sent up the ATF hierarchy, discussed at length, and approved by top law enforcement leaders a...