You’re sitting in a room with some of the most ruthless gangsters of your era.
You’re undercover, and your mission is to infiltrate this gang and one-by-one bring
them all down.
This is a secret not even your own family knows.
If these guys even get a whiff that you might not be a legitimate hardened criminal they
won’t just kill you, they’ll torture you first.
And so when you’re offered hard drugs, you hoover up that stuff like you’ve been doing
it for years.
When you witness beatings or even murder, you act unfazed, maybe even glad.
Your performance is worthy of an Oscar.
But living this double life starts to transform you.
You become addicted to the very drugs you’re trying to take off the streets.
You feel like you’re almost becoming like them.
This has been the reality for some undercover cops.
The scene we’ve just described isn’t too different from something that happened to
perhaps one of the better known undercover cops who infiltrated a gang in the USA in
the 1970s.
Her name is Kim Wozencraft, and she ended up writing a book about her ordeal which later
became a hit movie called, “Rush.”
When she was 21-years old she wanted a new direction in life, telling her friends she
was bored of her job as a restaurant manager.
She wanted some excitement, and so she decided to apply for a job working as a police officer.
This was at a time when the USA’s War on Drugs had just been set in motion, and after
landing the job Wozencraft found herself working as an undercover narcotics officer.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune she said she’d only been on the force a few
weeks when she started doing this.
If you never read her book or saw the movie, you won’t know that to go undercover and
buy drugs she actually did her best to look the part.
She and her partner, who was also undercover, started to take drugs so as not to look suspicious.
She said in that interview, “That`s the way you prove you`re not a cop.”
So she was method acting, but taking hard drugs takes a toll on someone.
Both she and the other cop, who became her lover, soon got addicted.
He actually almost died of an overdose while on the job.
Things got so crazy they even faked a drug case and swore an oath in court to get a conviction.
Their lives were spiraling out of control.
Whose side were they on?
They were embedded in the drug scene, but were now in the same position as some of the
people they were trying to lock-up.
The FBI soon figured out that these two cops had lost the plot and it was discovered that
they had lied in court to get a conviction.
That conviction was overturned and the pair of drug addicts were both convicted of perjury.
She ended up doing 18 months in prison and he got three years.
She got straight in prison and after her release she wrote that book.
She has always admitted that she did wrong, but she feels she shouldn’t have been put
in that position in the first place.
This is what she told the Chicago Tribune: “I was used.
I was a pawn in someone else's larger plan.”
During our research for this show we watched a podcast in which a British man named Shaun
Attwood was interviewed.
You might have seen the show we did on him which details his life, from being a wealthy
stockbroker to becoming a drug kingpin after he moved to the United States.
In the interview, Attwood talks about a man he met in prison who had worked in the U.S.
military and then he became an undercover cop.
Unfortunately, Attwood doesn’t give his full name in that interview, but he says this
guy got addicted to crystal meth while on the job, and worse, he ended up killing someone.
We just can’t find any more information about this story, but if you believe Attwood,
that’s another person that went undercover and was enveloped by criminality and addiction.
We found another case and this time the undercover cop was working in the UK.
His name is Robert Carrol and in 2009 he started pretending to be a drug user so he might take
some gangsters down.
He’d been given the job of posing as a drug user and told to identify drug dealers in
one of Manchester’s areas notorious for drugs and crime.
Except he too got addicted to the drugs he was trying to take off the streets, but this
time the drug was heroin.
The thing was, in order to buy the drugs and look like he was the real deal, at times he
had to test the drugs.
This likely isn’t always the case when buying stuff on the streets, but there might come
a time that it happens and if you don’t look the part, well, you are messing with
very dangerous people.
The cop in this case later sued Manchester police for negligence related to making him
do that job and what happened to him after.
Prior to that, the cop had been taken off undercover duties but by this time he was
already a heroin addict- which was discovered after he tried to exchange some of his police
equipment for drugs.
This is what the judge said about his case: “There was a written basis of plea, which
stated that, while he was dependent on heroin, he swapped his baton and his CS gas for drugs,
and also while on duty he absented himself from his work when he went to his co-defendant’s
house in an attempt to secure heroin.”
You might wonder how many bags of “brown” you get for some pepper spray and a bat.
He was subsequently imprisoned.
Then there’s the story of a British cop who went undercover but didn’t become a
drug addict while he was buying drugs from some of the UK’s most dangerous gangs.
His name is Neil Woods.
We saw an interview with him, and he said he now suffers from PTSD.
Some of the things he went through sound harrowing.
This man lived a double life for over a decade, with one life at home in a quiet town and
the other dealing with extremely violent gangs.
Woods left the force and now speaks openly about why he believes the war on drugs doesn’t
work.
He said that while he helped to bring some big criminals down, after all his efforts
there were more drugs on the streets and the gangs just evolved.
He said that partly thanks to him, gangs became very suspicious of undercover cops.
They started to use more extreme violence to urge others not to dare to get on their
wrong side.
They also started employing children, because there was no way kids were working with the
police.
This is how Woods described a day on the job to the Independent newspaper.
That day he went to buy some heroin from a well-known dealer:
“He answered the door and held a samurai sword to my throat and accused me of being
part of the DS (drug squad).
Spit was flying out of his mouth as he was growling and I could feel the cold steel on
my throat and I thought that was it.
I thought he would murder me.”
It turned out that this man was actually just joking with Woods, and he didn’t really
think he was undercover.
Woods also explained how he managed to evade detection for so many years:
He said: “For behavior you have to know your commodity.
You have to be a real geek with knowing how people behave and you have to know it even
more than the people on the ground.
Then it’s just the art of deception and staying attuned to the body language of other
people and detecting the moment someone is lying.”
He was once nearly found out, though, and that’s because during one meeting a member
of a gang accused him of having a video camera hidden in his clothing.
That gang member was very much correct, but Woods said he just started getting really
angry at the guy for saying such a thing.
He said you don’t turn your back at wolves when they snarl at you; you look them in the
eye and growl yourself.
It worked for Woods that time, but in an interview he said he was well aware that he was close
to possibly losing his life.
That time he managed to get away from the guys, but it seems they then realized he really
did have a camera on him.
Woods heard the car screech as he was walking away.
He then ran and he got away.
Intelligence reports later revealed that there was a gun in that car.
Woods told the Independent, “I was lucky.
Lots of times I was lucky.”
Another story he told is kind of darkly humorous.
It involved one big dealer that Woods described as a “maniac”.
As the story goes, Woods had been pretending to this dealer that he was a connoisseur of
amphetamines, aka “speed” in the UK.
He pretended that he had been taking that stuff all his life and knew good from bad.
As a gift one day the maniac brought a big bag of amphetamines to a meeting with Woods.
He said to him, “I bet you've never had anything like this before.”
Woods had never even done amphetamines, but of course he had to pretend he was an expert
and so he indulged.
Woods later discovered that this stuff was almost ten times purer than most “speed”
found on the streets of the UK.
This is what he had to say about his experience after taking that hit:
“It was horrific.
I felt this warmth in my stomach and I was out of it.
I had the most horrendous intense anxious feeling.
I didn't sleep for three nights.
Mind you, my house has never been so clean.”
He said all the time he was doing this he couldn’t even tell his colleagues.
Very few people knew what he was up to, because any leak could get him killed.
He had a wife and three kids, but when he worked he worked far from the town where his
family lived.
Still, he was always conscious of the fact he might get seen while living his family
life.
This is what he has to say about the war on drugs now:
“It was because of me that organized crime was getting nasty.
I was developing the tactics.
I put dealers in prison for over 1000 years and I only disrupted the heroin supply for
two hours.
Policing can’t affect the demand so policing drugs is completely futile.”
What’s surprising is that these remarks almost exactly echo what a former U.S. undercover
cop said.
His name is Neill Franklin and he worked on the tough streets of Baltimore for almost
two decades posing as a drug user.
Franklin now heads something called “Law Enforcement Against Prohibition”, which
consists of former cops in the U.S. who are against the war on drugs.
For all those years Franklin would pretend to be an out-of-work junky, but he was actually
collecting intelligence about dealers in Baltimore.
He told Vice magazine that he got so immersed in the job he kind of forgot who he was.
He said: “I felt myself getting lost at times between the two worlds.
This is one of the reasons for establishing rigid limitations on how long someone remains
undercover.
We've left some investigators ‘under’ way too long.”
He reiterated what Woods had said that the better the cops got at busting people the
more violent the gangs became.
He also said there were more overdoses when a trusted dealer got busted and addicts had
to go to a supply which was of an unknown quality.
Part of his job was just to hang out in bars and get to know folks.
At some point he would find out where the drugs were.
He’d befriend the addicts and then they’d make an arrest.
After that, the police would turn the addict into an informant.
After a guy he knew who was undercover got shot in the head while doing a deal his whole
stance changed.
He started to believe that the war on drugs caused more violence and pain that was necessary,
and so now he’s against it.
And lastly we’ll get away from drugs and talk about something different.
This is the case of an undercover cops that posed as a hitman.
His name was given as Lenny in the media.
It was written in 2014 that Lenny was hired to pose as a hitman inside prison.
This was because a drug dealer in that prison had a vendetta against an ATF agent whom he
blamed for him getting arrested.
So, Lenny went inside prison walls and offered his services.
Lenny said it wasn’t an easy job, and he had to pretend to be some really tough dude.
He even had to kick a guy out of a bunk.
It was just him and the other prisoners.
If anyone suspected anything he might end up dead or seriously injured.
Lenny said he arranged to eliminate this agent, and said that while it was scary at times,
it got worse when the lights went out one day and so the surveillance cameras showed
nothing.
Then he was very much alone.
He told ABC news, “So I'm in here without cover, without any backup.
The evacuation plan that we had is totally gone at that point.”
Lenny got out and then the guy he was meant to kill was killed, except it wasn’t real.
It was just a fake video that would be sent back to the guy in prison.
That guy said thanks for doing the hit.
He even said, “I love you man.”
He ended up getting a lot of years added to his sentence.
What kind of situation would you like to go undercover in?
Tell us in the comments.
Now go watch “Crazy True Stories From a Bodyguard”.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.