Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was an FBI Agent — Then I Became a Whistleblower | Greg Dillon

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Greg Dillon grew up in Connecticut, studied criminal justice at the University of New Haven under renowned forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee, became a Branford police officer, and later joined the FBI as a special agent. After five years with the Bureau, he left to become a supervising investigator at the Connecticut Chief State's Attorney's Office — where he uncovered something he never expected. Greg discovered that FBI agents were falsifying information in federal arrest warrant affidavits and attributing those statements to him and his investigators without their knowledge. When he reported what was happening up the chain of command, instead of being protected, he says his supervisor helped cover it up. _____________________________________________ #corruption #cops #fbi _____________________________________________ Thank you to CASH APP for sponsoring this episode: Download Cash App Today: https://click.cash.app/ui6m/6pao71et #CashAppPod Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. _____________________________________________ Connect with Greg Dillon: https://thinblueliebook.com/bonus-content/ _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 00:43 Growing Up in New Haven 08:31 Life as a Police Officer in the 70s 15:00 Applying to the FBI 26:27 First Assignment and Transfer Hurdles 37:02 Working as an FBI Agent 40:35 Bank Robbery Stories 51:11 Leaving the FBI for a State Job 01:00:00 The Police Corruption Investigation 01:27:20 Falsified Affidavits Uncovered 01:33:36 The Cover-Up Begins 01:41:13 Retaliation and the Lawsuit 01:56:00 The Lawsuit and Its Aftermath 02:06:00 Second Lawsuit and Career End 02:15:09 Book and Final Thoughts _____________________________________________ To advertise on the show, contact [e-mail] or visit https://advertising.libsyn.com/LockedInWithIanBicka

And I'm repulsed by the idea that an agent would be so cavalier as to announce it, you know, amongst other police officers that he has no qualms about submitting, you know, a fictitious or falsified affidavit, you know, to a federal prosecutor and ultimately a judge. That's Greg Dillon. He went from local police officer to FBI special agent before discovering something that would put him at odds with the very institutions. he'd spent his career serving. Today, he's revealing what he says the FBI was doing, how he exposed it, and the retaliation that followed.

I grew up in New Haven. I spent the first 24 years of my life living in New Haven. And went to grammar school nearby, and then eventually went to high school in West Haven. What was your upbringing, like your family, parents? Yeah, so I... it was, I never think of ourselves as, is low income. But when I think back, we lived in a converted attic of a two-family home, but it was the third floor.

So every room had like a slanted ceiling. And it was just, fortunately, it was just me and my parents. But it was close quarters. No air conditioning, oppressively. hot in the summer. And when I look back now, I'm thinking that was almost like borderline low income, but not quite. My mom was a stay-home mom, so it was a single income source. I didn't lack for anything, but compared to today's standards, it was kind of harsh. Eventually, I went to the University of New Haven, lived at home and commuted just to save money,

and was hired by the Bramford Police Department after I graduated from college, and then I moved to Bramford at that point. And again, oddly enough, to a two-story home and lived in a converted addict there. So it was quite not that much of a transition for me to make the jump.

What was your dad's line of work? He worked in a post office. Okay. Yeah. And he always worked there. He retired from there, so that was steady. Where'd you get the idea

to become a police officer yourself? You know, I thought about it when I was writing the book. And for whatever reason, it was in my head at an early age, like as far as grammar school, I had decided that the FBI was going to be like my career choice, probably based in part on TV. And also, I think I was influenced by the fact that my dad was sort of a fan of the police. and he had bought a scanner at Radio Shack. And this was the old style scanner where you had to physically dial

to try to find the different frequencies, you know? I mean, this is, you know, you're talking to 60s. So when he'd be home, he'd have it on. And so it was like always in the background. So I became like so used to hearing police calls and he had the sheet with all the codes on. And of course, he knew New Haven inside and I'll be working to the post office.

So, you know, he would say, where the neighborhood was and what the call was. And I don't know, kind of, I guess, got in my blood just from that early exposure, you know, over time. So when I went to high school and I got to meet my guidance counselor, I said, this is what I would like to do. And he did the research on it and recommended I go to college for a criminal justice degree back then. And this is like circa 173, there were only a couple of schools in the country that had a four-year accredited criminal justice program. And by coincidence, the University of New Haven was one of them. And you can almost see the campus from my high school. It was that close. So that was kind of

a no-brainer for me. How were you as a kid? How would you have described yourself? I enjoyed athletics. You know, I was probably average. I played on a basketball team. We play, you know, intramural football in college, intramural basketball in college. But never a standout. I did well academically, but I was a grinder. I took my studies very seriously. I don't think I necessarily was of above-average intelligence, but I was above-average work ethic. So I was always on top of my assignments, and I was always trying to prepare for tests.

and I was an achiever, but I think I was only because of hard work, not necessarily because I had some sort of an intellectual advantage over my classmates. But it worked out because over time, I just got better at being a student, and my grades reflected that. What was the curriculum like for criminal justice back then? It was a good, varied background. You were exposed to, well, forensic science introduction to and Dr. Henry Lee, unfortunately, he just passed recently. His first year of teaching as a professor at the University of New Haven was my freshman year. So I ended up actually having him my first and second semester.

And you were exposed to constitutional law, different law enforcement-related subjects. So some would deal with corrections. Like I said, forensic science, criminal investigation, constitutional law, criminal law, psychology, sociology. So it was sort of a mishmash, I guess, to get you exposed to a variety of different topics within the criminal justice program. And then I think people would gravitate, you know, one way or another. One of my classmates decided to go into probation. My other classmate and I ended up on the Bramford Police Department together, and then we end up both going to the FBI, not together, but at different times. So everyone kind of found their

their niche or their specialty and then went off in that direction. Was a degree required to join a police department back then? Police department, no. It was encouraged, but not required. But the FBIS, so that was why I wanted to get that done first. My guidance counselor had told me that in addition to that, I would also need three years of work experience in my chosen field. So, which is why I, as soon as I was getting ready to graduate from college,

I applied to the Bramford Police Department and was hired basically that summer. Now, why Brantford at all the towns? Well, not every department was hiring. Back then, as opposed to today, the recruitment process was very competitive. I mean, maybe like 100 to 1. There'd be a job posting, 100 people would apply. Now, today, you know, there's a job posting and maybe 10 people apply. And this is what I'm hearing from colleagues of mine that are still in training academies

and recruitment process. So when an opportunity came up to take a test, even if you were on the fence about that particular department, oftentimes you would take it, number one, just to get the experience of taking a test, and number two, if you were lucky enough to be offered a position, then you made a decision like, is this what I want to do or not?

So when I was getting ready to graduate, Brantford was putting out a test, and I was like, okay, well, you know, jump in. and if nothing else, at least you get the experience of what the testing process is like. But I was just fortunate enough that it worked out and I was offered a position. What was it like to be a Brantford police officer in the 70s? Brantford was a unique town. It was a shoreline community.

So there was some affluence there in certain areas. But what made it a little unusual was unlike most of the towns, Bramford had a really large number of alcohol establishments. And, I mean, between package stores, taverns, bars, restaurants, dockside restaurants, everything. I mean, and it attracted a lot of out-of-towners. I mean, I would say clearly two-thirds of all of our arrests were people that did not even live in Bramford. They just came in to party. I mean, it was sort of a party town.

Three of the bars in Bramford had back then what was called a cabaret license. So you paid an extra amount of money to stay open an extra hour. And, of course, the trade-off was these places were mobbed every night after all the other places closed. So when the traditional bars and restaurants had a shut down at 2 o'clock, they were open until 3, and the traffic coming off of the highway off of 95 was nonstop. because the word was, we can still drink for another hour if we can get into a place in Brantford. So it created a real issue

because the amount of activity that was generated between the drunk driving arrests and the brawls and the disputes in the parking lot and all kinds of mayhem. So it got very, very busy there, especially when the weather was warmer. It must have been fun for you, though. Oh, it was a ball.

Yeah, you just went from call to call. And we, I mean, back then, it's so funny. Today, they don't run a paddy wagon in Brantford. Back then, we ran a paddy wagon every Friday and Saturday night and all through the holiday weekends and holidays. You know, New Year's Eve or, you know, even, you know, Christmas Eve because there was a lot of drunk drivers over the Christmas holiday. So we were busy all the time. I mean, now they haven't run a prisoner van in years. And it's because they just don't make the number of arrests that we used to have to make.

So what does it mean to have a paddy wagon just have it on standby? Oh, no. It would be on the road. And then it would go to any call where it sounded like there could be an arrestmate. So any, you know, domestic with violence, any dispute that involved several people. And then obviously the brawls, you know, those were the patty wagon routinely went to those. And if somebody pulled over a car on a suspected DUI, the paddy wagon would, would pull up and wait and see if the person passed the test or not.

Why'd they call it a paddy wagon? That's a good question. I mean, I could come up with a crazy guest like maybe you had padding in it, and that's why they call it that. It might have been because of Patty was sort of a derogatory Irish term, and maybe there was a lot of Irish getting arrested back when they first started using. I'm curious not because you got me thinking about it, but that's what we were, You know, they call it, you know, it's a prisoner conveyance van, but they used to just say, you know, get the wagon or patty wagon, yeah.

How did the public in Connecticut treat cops in the 70s? With much more respect, you know, of course, with exception. But, you know, the fear was never really firearms in where that is today is a very sad state of affairs. mostly it was resisting arrest seldom with a weapon involved but you know drunks are you know notoriously combative and especially if there's there's many of them so that was usually what you had to deal with it was just the physical confrontation or some type of a of a struggle but even though we did have a SWAT team, it wasn't a major concern at the time. How would you call for backup back then?

Oh, I mean, you know, depending on the call, they would send two cars if they could, and even more, if the call sounded like it justified it. If it was a routine call, normally you went by yourself. Sometimes we would run a two-man car, depending on how many people were on the shift. But if you suspected on a car stop that, you know, something didn't seem right or you were just suspicious, you would either call or when we just automatically show up. And did they have radios in the cars at that point? Radios in the cars and we had portable radios too. Unlike the state police at the time that didn't even have portable radios.

We were a little bit ahead of them, oddly enough. How is the city ahead of the state? Well, I think it had more to do with the logistics of, you know, we put repeaters up throughout town so that there was complete coverage. When you're covering the entire state and now you have to have repeaters everywhere, I guess at that time it was just impossible, you know, physically or financially to have that kind of coverage. The radios in the state police cars would work because it was working off the car. battery, a much stronger signal with, you know, the big whip antennas back then. But they didn't have the capability to have portable radios until years later. What kind of cars were you guys driving?

We had a mishmash of cars. They were always muscle cars. They were always big engine cars. We had satellites of Brings. We had Crown Vicks. We had Plymouth Furies. So they tended to go with like 350 or higher. horsepower engines.

And then, you know, over time, they sort of gotten away from that and gone to more conventional vehicles now and a lot of SUVs now. But back then, there were always four-door cars except for the patty wagon, yeah. What were some of the lessons you learned on the job in the early days of policing? Well, eventually I figured out always try to start off as polite as you possibly can. If you start off as a hard ass, it can only kind of get worse. It's hard to go backwards from that. But if you start off trying to show some respect and some courtesy and some calmness,

hopefully it's reciprocated. But then you can always escalate if need be. But if you come out, you know, out of the gate with attitude, then it's kind of hard to dial it back. It brings out the worse than the other person. and then a lot of times it just gets ugly. So once I had a little time on the job, I realized, try to start off as nice as you can under the circumstances,

and then you can ratchet it up if need be. Do you feel like school prepared you to become a police officer? No, no. The academy a little bit more so. College is definitely not. It was more of an academic environment. But the academy was better at it. But really, once you started to really work, then you started to finally develop

feel for the job. Did becoming a police officer change your mind about your longer goals of becoming an FBI agent? No, no, it only encouraged me to see if I could go a little bit further into the field, yeah. Why didn't you want to move up as a police officer? I didn't really have the chance because I applied for the FBI after I had three years of experience. So I was still considered, I wouldn't necessarily say a rookie patrolman, but certainly not someone that's going to be eligible for a detective's position until I had at least probably five or eight years. And it wasn't a really big department, so the advancement process was slow. And my goal was the FBI, so I was comfortable.

I was doing some plainclothes work at the time, but not at a detective pay. What did you know about the FBI at that point in time? Not a lot because this was pre-internet. So I would go to the library and basically check out books, the most current books that I could find on the FBI. I was introduced to a fellow that worked at ATF, that was friends with one of the Bramford police officers. And I met with him for lunch to try to get a sense of what to expect.

But it wasn't the same. Obviously, he was in a different federal agency. But I was trying to do my homework as best I could to prepare myself for, for, you know, what was the come. So it was basically self-education to try to put myself in a position of knowing what I was going to be walking into. What was the application process like? It's multi-stage, you know, and I just read recently, the FBI won't share what the attrition rate is on the recruiting process, but they did say that 70% of all the applicants do not get

past the written test. So you can see there's a pretty high failure rate of people that apply versus the number of people that are eventually accepted. So my understanding is it starts off with a written application. And that might knock you out right off the bat if you have to acknowledge narcotic use or a felony arrest or something really troubling. So you may not even really get past that stage. After you submit your written application and it's reviewed, oftentimes you're invited in for a written test. And again, that's where I said that the 70% failure rate comes in. From then, it is a physical agility exam, a complete medical review, you know, another physical.

Then there's a polygraph exam. There's an oral interview before a board of three agents. And then you are on a list depending on how you score of going to. to the National Academy at Quantico. When you applied, do you just physically go into their office because the internet didn't exist? Yeah. So you filled out the application.

Well, you walked in and you asked for a copy of the application. And then you left and you filled it out. And then I guess you can mail it back in or hand deliver it. And then you waited to be notified by mail of the written test now. How long did that take? A long time. You know, everything was a little slower back then. You know, snail mail.

And so it could. take, I mean, when I was in the academy and we were sharing our experiences, it seemed like it was at least a year and a half and probably closer to three from the day you asked for an application until the day you actually walked into the academy. And are you applying blindly? Like, you don't know where you're going to get stationed or what? I'll tell you, we're not going to, you know, we can't promise you any location. You walk into it knowing that the only thing they do tell you is you're not going to go back to your original office. Now, this is back then. My understanding is today that has changed and you do stand a good chance of returning to the office that you applied

through back then they told you right out you won't be back here you'll be you'll be you'll be sent to another office somewhere but it definitely won't be in your home state so would they have a new haven office back then or yeah they still do okay and so now once you got into the academy how old were you that would have been uh 1985 so 69 i think and was that that a common age? It was a little bit under. I think the average age is about 31 or 32, I believe. So I was probably just a little bit under the average for the age, yeah.

What was the academy like? You know, Ian, it's sort of, it was like a weird combination of a college campus, a police academy, and like the Marriott. I mean, it had elements. of all of those things. Like it was, the food was catered by Marriott. You know, the rooms look more like a college dorm. And it didn't have the structure of a police academy.

It wasn't that level of discipline or chain of command. It was a little looser than that. But, you know, at the same time, you know, there was firearms training. There was, there was, you know, defensive tactics training. There were, you know, tactics on conducting an arrest or making a motor vehicle stop or defensive driving. And then a lot of, though, was academic because I believe the FBI is responsible for like 5,000 different federal violations. So you were, I mean, it was like drinking out of a fire host because the information was like nonstop. And there was constantly classes on, you know, the laws of evidence and search and seizure and federal law and constitutional law.

Yeah, it could be a little overwhelming. I was okay. I went in there in very good shape physically, so I didn't have to sweat the PT part of it. I was on the SWAT team, so I knew my firearm skills were going to be fine. having gone to a police academy, I felt pretty comfortable with the law. So I didn't feel that intimidated other than the fact that you're in with, you know, another 39 students that are all very competitive and very ambitious and fairly well educated for the most part.

So it's a competitive environment, but I never felt like I was, you know, in the wrong place. Did you have to unlearn certain tactics or skills you learn? with the police department? Not really. No, I thought it was a nice transition. There was nothing really different that they were showing us. They had their own style of on the firearms range, but nothing that was contradictory to what I'd already learned.

So I was fine with it, yeah. Now, at that period of time, was there a priority goal for the FBI, like maybe a certain crime they were after? Well, the priority was, to be in the recruiting process. They were trying to bring in more minorities and more females, and that became very apparent in my class. Every class, several classes usually go through at a time, but they stagger them. So, you know, my class was 8512. So we were the 12th class to go through

in the year of 1985. So while we were there, the class of 8511 was still in session, and 8510 was still in session. But I noticed looking in on the classrooms, it seemed to usually be, five to eight minorities, another five to eight females, and then the rest were white males as a rule. The focus then, I don't really remember if there was any one thing that was being prioritized. This is prior to 9-11. So obviously, terrorism was always something that that was addressed, but I wouldn't say it became a priority. Violent crime, I guess, was probably at the top of the list.

So, yeah, I would say that was still the traditional goal was addressing violent crime and traditional crime, organized crime, and cartels, that type of thing. Had there been a lot of domestic terrorism issues yet, like with school shootings or even bombing? No, not really. You know, they happened, but they were aberration-type things, you know. They would monitor the more obvious groups, the more obvious hate groups. But this was sort of post the civil rights movements and, you know, the pre-9-11. The KKK had basically been addressed and dismantled down south already. So, yeah, there was nothing that really stood out at that time.

Now, where do you go after you graduate the academy? Wherever they decided to put you. And this is interesting because they pretended to give you what they called a wish list. You were given a choice. You can make three choices, but they would tell you, don't waste it on the office you came through because that's not going to happen. So don't even bother putting that down. And they would tell you, don't put it.

down any of the top 12 offices because that was usually going to be your second assignment. So a top 12 office were the 12 largest offices in the country. I knew the list at one time. I've forgotten it since. I remember New York was always number one. That was the largest office by far. Washington, D.C. field office was the second largest office. I think New York had like 1,200 agents.

D.C. had 600 agents, and then it went down from there. And I know Los Angeles was in there, Miami was in there, Newark was in there. But they said, again, don't bother even putting one of those down because you're going to waste your wish. So what we would try to do is we would check out the directory and look for offices that were near, usually where you originated from. Not always. Some of the military guys that were used to bouncing around the country, you know, they would choose. maybe the West Coast because they wanted to be out somewhere warm or they would choose Florida or something like that. But by and large, I would say almost everybody in the class was trying to get back to their home state with terrible success.

When we finally got our orders just before graduating, I think I might have been one of the closest, and I was 300 miles away in Alexandria, Virginia. And to show you the lunacy of the whole process, my classmate applied through the Alexandria Field Office, and he received New Haven. So they went out of their way to thwart you in being where you wanted to be. I had a classmate,

Lisa, that was a New York State Trooper, and she had applied to the Albany office, and she got San Diego. Wow. So, I mean, somebody may say, well, San Diego is a beautiful office, and it's like, it's a beautiful office, but not if you ever plan on seeing your family

once in a while, you know. I mean, because that's an expensive and long trip to make. So, I mean, how many times are you going to get home a year? Twice, you know? So it was very unforgiving cold environment. And the reason that I know it's changed is because, ironically, when I resigned in 1990 to take a position with the state of Connecticut, within maybe two months, they sent me, my new office sent me back to Quantico, Virginia, to take a one-week computer course. And I'm at the academy, and I get on the elevator with one of the classes that's going through,

and just making small talk. I said, hey, did you get your orders yet? And they said, yeah, we just got them last week. And now I'm curious now because I knew no one in my class got anywhere near where they wanted to be. So I said, oh, how did you do? And somebody said, great. Everyone got their first choice of their home office, except for three people, and they got their second choice. And I'm thinking, I was in the academy here like five years ago, five and a half years ago.

I'm like, I don't even know if I believe that. So I left the elevator and I went to an office of one of my friends. I'm still friends with. He was assigned to the academy now as a unit chief. And I said, Al, I said, am I getting played here? I said, I just had a conversation. And it would seem like everyone in this new class is actually going back to their home office. I said, with the exception of three people.

He's like, yeah, that's how it's going now. And I'm like, wait a second. I said, like, how is that? He goes, the year you left, he goes, you left, I said, I only left a couple of months ago. He said, right. He goes, so last year, he said, there were more resignations than retirements. He said, in the answer given almost by everyone when they resigned was the transfer policy. The transfer policy is so onerous and so harsh that,

I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you know, tolerate it. And I'm just resigning. And finally somebody at headquarters says, you know, we are bleeding people. You know, we're going through this expensive vetting process and training process. And now we're losing people like within the first two or three years because they're also unhappy with their assignments. So he said they completely, you know, rewrote the policy. He says, and now they're going out of their way to accommodate people to put them in the office they want to be in. Why do you think they're so against it?

You know, the explanation I was given what? Jay Edgar Hoover, you know, the father of the FBI, had this concept that if you went back to your home office, you were liable to be compromised in some way. There was the chance that you being with familiar people and they would ask you for favors or it would influence your judgment. And so he was dead set against the idea of anybody being even close to their home state. And, you know, in time, it was like, that's just such an antiquated, you know, prehistoric position to take. But so what happened was my first assignment, like I said, was 300 miles away, Alexandria, Virginia. It was relatively small office like every one in my class was sent to. You weren't going to go to a large major office.

So it was like a 60-agent office. It was in a beautiful touristy, historic area of Old Town, Virginia. but the unusual thing was the Washington field office, like I said, the second largest office in the country, was almost in eyesight of the office. It was just across the Potomac River. And most, a lot of the work that we were doing, you know, ended up going into the Washington, D.C. area because of the proximity. and apparently a lot of the D.C. work was in the Northern Virginia area. But with the rules of the FBI, you were supposed to send the lead to that office to cover because it was outside of your territory, you know, your territory.

Even though you could drive 10 minutes and cover the lead, you would have to send this package of paper over to that Washington Field office that it would get assigned to an agent that would now have to review your investigation to go out and maybe conduct a five-minute interview. you. It was time consuming. It was redundant. It was just so inefficient. Somebody in headquarters decided, this is ridiculous the way it's set up. We're going to just consolidate the offices. And when I say consolidate, we were basically absorbed. I mean, we're a small office being absorbed by a large office. When I was, you know, recruited to join,

my concern was, you know, I'm a single guy. All of my family and friends are in Connecticut, and probably all in New Haven County at this point. So what are my chances of getting back to the New England area? I understand I'm not going back to New Haven, but, you know, like say New York, Boston, Newark. Oh, well, that's easy because you're going to get a new assignment like within three years. And then if that's one of your choices, you know, you'll certainly be in one of those three offices.

That's not a problem. Perfect. So my mind, you know, in my mind, I'm like, okay, so I'm doing like, you know, three years, then I'm eligible for my transfer. So after three years, I'm contacting, you know, classmates of mine, and they're calling me, and they're like, hey, you know, I just got my orders. I'm going to Miami. Oh, great.

Oh, yeah. Hey, did you hear so-and-so? They're going to the Baltimore office. Oh, cool. Yeah, I'm not that far from Baltimore. So-and-so is going to San Francisco, so-and-so, and I'm like, hey, you know, like, what happened to me? Like, I think everybody in my class at this point has gotten their orders.

And I think there's been a mistake made. So I go see my supervisor and I said, John, I said, just out of curiosity, I said, how would I go about, you know, finding out if I've been forgotten? And he says, oh, he goes, I can call headquarters. He goes, a friend of mine works over at the transfer unit. He says, and he can see what you are on the list. So he calls me in his office later. He's like, you're in your second office. And I'm like, well, hang on a second.

And I said, I was told that I get to move, you know, on my next office to New England, you know, to New York or Boston or Newark. I said, it was not in writing. I said, but this is what I was told during my interview process. Well, he goes, yeah, but technically he goes, once you got transferred to the Washington Field office, he goes, that became your second office. So I'm like, okay. So my next question is, what is the wait time for me to get transferred like again? and he says, I'll find out. I'll make a call and find out.

And next day he says, okay, right now he goes another 10 or 15 years. What? I said, John, I'm coming up on my five-year anniversary. I said, 10 years puts me 15 years in. I said, and then I'm not too far away from retirement, I said at that point. I said, if I have to do another 15 years, I said, I am starting to be. become eligible for retirement. I said, I don't understand like what happened here. And he says, the way things worked out. And I was like, all right. He goes, you're going to leave, aren't you?

I said, not today, but that's the plan. Yeah. I said, that was a bait and switch. I said, you know, I said, I didn't plan on living in the D.C. area for my entire career. Why would it go from three years all the way to 10 to 15 at the next? Well, because that was going to be my next turn to to get a transfer. Usually your second office is a longer assignment. And then when you get more seniority, then you can request another office. There's no guarantee, but you go on a wait list.

Now, some offices, the waitlist isn't long because they're not a popular office. But New Haven was a very popular office because most of the agents that worked in New York didn't want to be in New York. And a lot of their families, you know, they lived a lot of times in Connecticut. And then they would commute to New York to work, but they wanted their families to, you know, grow up in Connecticut, go to schools in Connecticut.

And so that was a very popular office. So the wait list was very long for New Haven. But anyway, so that's just the way it worked out. I got one of the funniest scam texts the other day. The guy texts me pretending to be from some government agency and tells me I have an outstanding warrant that needs to be handled immediately. Which, considering my history, is probably the one scam that has. a chance of getting my attention. So I'm reading it like, wait, what did I do now?

Then he tells me that if I don't take care of it immediately, the police are coming to arrest me. And I'm thinking, buddy, I've actually been arrested by the federal government before. I could promise you they do not send you a courtesy text first, although I wish they did. That's the thing with scams though. They're trying to get you to panic before you have time to think.

Somebody you don't know suddenly needs money. There's some huge emergency. and you have to act right now. That's why I use Cash App, because having security built into the financial tools I use actually matters to me. Keeping your money safe from fraud deserves to be a priority,

and Cash App treats it that way. With security lock, Cash App requires a successful face ID or biometric authentication to access your account. It's like your money is protected by your own personal bodyguard, even if your phone is lost or stolen. Plus, if you're about to send money to someone new and Cash App notices something looks a bit off

or that you might be falling for a scam, it will send you a warning before the money is sent to confirm that everything looks right. Download Cash App and spend with peace of mind today. New Cash App customers can earn $10 if they use code Secure 10 in their profile at sign up and send $5 to a friend within 14 days. Terms apply, download Cash App today and make your money work for you. Visit our link in bio. Cash app is a financial services platform, not a bank, banking services provided by Cashaps bank partners. Visit cash.app slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. When you first become an agent, especially in that era, is there anything you want to find out, like when you first get on the job?

Well, I mean, I think oftentimes people are trying to find out how long before I can get to the office that I really want to be in and not this office, you know. But after that, I think everyone is trying to find, you know, their comfort spot. Because like I said, with that many 5,000 different criminal violations, you know, the FBI, you know, every office, it has what they used to call an FCI squad, a foreign counterintelligence. Now I think it's been renamed where it could be a terrorism squad, a homeland security squad. there's the traditional, you know, violent crime squad. There could be an organized crime squad. There could be a white collar crime squad.

There's a variety of specialized units. And especially if you get into an office of size in New York, then they have like the fine art theft squad and some like very unique and, you know, esoteric sort of, assignments there. And then, of course, then there's the SWAT team. So you find usually your your level of comfort. Like what kind of work are you well suited for? What is your background? What is your interest? What are you comfortable doing? Some people, you know, they want to become recruiters. They like going out to schools or college campuses and recruiting new agents, you know.

Other people is like, that's the last thing I want to do. I want to do hands-on investigation. or I like the rough and tumble unpredictability of the SWAT team, or I like narcotics work, money laundering investigations. So everyone tries to find their sweet spot and get into that area because that's where your satisfaction is going to come from eventually. What kind of cases did you work on? Criminal reactive when I was in Alexandria, which was primarily bank robberies, the occasional oddball kidnapping, armored car robbery, and then any federal crimes that took

place on federal properties. When I say federal crimes, I mean a murder, an attempted murder, a sexual assault. So we were responsible for several military bases and government buildings, but it was by and large bank robberies day to day. When I was transferred to the Washington Field Office, it was a violent crime squad. which was some of the same work with additional responsibilities. I was on the SWAT team in the Alexandria Field Office. I think it was a 12-man team. The Washington Field Office was a 65-man team.

So it was like going from, you know, like the AAA baseball to the majors. We had, you know, the best equipment and, you know, very, very good training. And it ranged from doing dynamic takeovers of commercial aircraft to you know, metro cars, helicopter repel work, a whole wide range, a wide range in variety of type of assignments, yeah. Do you have any good bank robbery stories? Yeah, a couple of good bank robbery stories. There were, it wasn't my case.

My partner had this case, but there were two guys that were doing bank takeovers. So bank robberies, you know, a lot of times they fall sort of into a category. There's the very sort of discrete single-teller bank robber that uses usually a demand note and will sort of try to subtly rob a single-teller, get the money, and then quietly leave. And then you may get the occasional person that is going to announce the robbery and go from, you know, teller station to teller station. The most rare would be the takeover where they're going to actually. breach the counter, you know, get into the teller area, try to access the safe, if they can, or the

vault. So those are the most dangerous, fortunately the rarest of them all. But because the amount of time they're spending in the bank, it becomes more dangerous because there's a greater chance that the police will arrive in time to stop their leaving. And usually they're armed because they want compliance. So they're going to display weapons to get everyone, you know, either into a corner or on the floor, that type of a thing. So there were these two guys that appeared out of nowhere and started doing takeover bank robberies. And we were watching them sort of progress where initially it looked like they were using replica guns,

like maybe water pistols that were painted. They were using winter gloves. They were using like a ski mask with like eye holes cut out. And they were in and out relatively quickly. But as they continued to do these bank robberies, they now were wearing like racquetball gloves. And there's no question they were using actual firearms. They were wearing, you know, the ski mask with the sewn eye holes. So you can just see them stepping up their game.

They looked a little ametric in the beginning, and now all of a sudden they're wearing identical gloves, identical masks. They definitely have operational firearms. They're spending longer in the bank. They're now forcing the manager to access the vault. And the halls were getting bigger, but they're also increasing the risk of a violent encounter, because where they were in there before, like, maybe 90 seconds, now they're spending two and three and four minutes in the bank. increasing the chances of a police response and a deadly encounter. And ultimately, that's what ends up happening.

In fact, they were getting so bold that they committed a bank robbery in Virginia weren't able to access the vault, got a meager amount of money from the tellers, and drove like 10 minutes away and did a second bank robbery. So we were at the original bank robbery interviewing witnesses, and then one of the detectives says, hey, I think we have a bank robbery going on over in the next town. And so everybody bails into their car

and heads over to the next one. And, of course, you know, we're always right behind, but never there. So now we're conducting yet a second investigation, you know, at an additional bank. And finally, they went into a bank and, like I said, you know, spent a little too much time in the bank.

And someone in the parking lot saw them leaving with the pillowcase, of loot and the masks still on. And this is, again, before cell phones. So, you know, the disadvantage is everything is landline. But this person starts following them in their stolen car. And while Fairfax County police officers are heading to the bank, this person sees the police cars coming in the opposite direction.

And he starts flashing his high beams and weaving back and forth to draw their attention. So one of the cars does a U-turn and peels off to follow him, and he's pointing up ahead, like, you know, this is who you're looking for. The description fits the car. They pulled down a dead-end street where they had positioned their real getaway car, their own car. And the officer cleverly blocks off the road with his car and basically steals them in. And now a gunfight takes place between them and the...

and the one officer, reinforcements arrive and they commit suicide. Wow. And so we pull up as they're pulling them out of the cars. And technically, I think one shot the other first and then he shot himself. But yeah, so, you know, by and large, most of the bank robberies were nonviolent and ended less dramatically than that. But that was an instance where these guys had met in prison. and they got out relatively at the same time

and had decided, you know, we are never going to go back alive and we're just going to rob banks until either we have enough money that we can retire, which never happens, or, you know, we're captured or killed. Did the banks have security measures in place to say with die packs or anything in the 80s?

Yep, they did. Yeah, not giving money any secrets. Almost all the banks would keep bait bills, which meant that they recorded all the serial numbers and also the die pack. And they had cameras at the time, but they were 35 millimeter, black and white. Poor quality, I mean, at best. I mean, you'd be very lucky if you were able to make an identification based off the footage.

Sometimes you could. Most of the times it was tough. But, yeah, that was pretty much all they had. I remember, though, when I transferred from the Alexandria office to the district office to the DC office, D.C. had so many bank robberies that the banks began installing bandit barriers were basically six-foot-tall plexiglass windows that ran the length of the telecounter because they had so many counter-vaultors in D.C. that they had to go to that level. Back then in Alexandria, it was a counter, nothing different from this table, basically. So all they had to do was

like step across basically to get into the teller area and access the teller draws. But DC had a different approach because they just had too many people doing that. So they put up the six foot barriers. Oddly enough, one of the first bank robberies that I went to, the bank robber jumped up and vaulted the six foot high plexiglass shield and dropped out to the other side of the tell the counter and went through all the drawers and then let himself hauled through the door. Now, back then when banks kept more money inside the actual bank, what would be a typical haul for a robbery? Would it be good? It wasn't great. I remember we had statistics that we kept,

and I think the average was just over $2,000, I think, at the time. Yeah, yeah. And I'm saying that's the average. Some guys, if they hit a single teller, might walk away with less than $1,000. If they ran the teller line and it was a busy bank and there were five tellers operating, they could have gotten away with $10,000. I mean, it was possible. If they got into the vault, put a zero after it. I mean, because now you're talking, you know, bundles and bundles of 50s and 20s. So if you were lucky enough to get into the vault, you could end up with, you know, $50,000 to $100,000.

Did the criminals realize back then you got less time for just past? a note without weapons or does that evolve later? Yeah, no, the word got around that if you get caught with a firearm doing a bank robbery, you're going to probably triple your time. I learned that in prison because all the guys would talk amongst each other. You got the guy that did it with a weapon, 15 years, guy that did it with a note, five years and probably got more money with the note. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, there's a lot of truth to that.

A lot of them would write on the note, I have a gun, you know, or, you know, I don't want to kill you or something very menacing. But oftentimes and not, if we were able to apprehend them within a short amount of time, they had nothing. Now, when you're on the FBI SWAT team, was there a story that you'll always remember that you responded to? Nothing outrageous. The funny thing is, everyone always has this concept like that, you know, the SWAT team is a dangerous assignment. And potentially it is. But I thought being a police officer, the road was far more dangerous because most of the times you're by yourself initially and you don't know what you're walking into. More than likely if you're on a SWAT team, first of all, you have

the equipment that you need. You know, you have ballistic armor that is that is rated up to, you know, rifle fire, you know, the ballistic helmet and sometimes, you know, a shield depending on the circumstances. And we had, um, I don't know if I want to call it a machine gun, technically. He was a, um, yeah, I mean, it was a functional machine gun, uh, it was a submachine gun or shotgun. Um, and so you, you were well prepared and you were well armed. And we had the advantage of usually time was on our side and preparation was on our side. So we'd have a floor plan in advance. We knew the history of the person. Um, we'd, um, we'd, dictated, you know, the time that we were going to make entry. So these are all things that go

in your favor that you don't have the luxury of when you're a police officer responding in real time to events. So while it sounded like a much more dangerous assignment, I thought the threat level was far greater as a uniformed police officer than it was when you were with, you know, another dozen guys that are all equipped and well trained and prepared for what's about to happen. When did you start looking for other jobs? Well, I started looking for other jobs as soon as I found out that I was going to be in D.C. for the next 10 or 15 years.

I was familiar, having worked in the court system when I was in college, I worked as a special deputy sheriff in New Haven Superior Court. So I had an exposure early on, even at the age of 18, of the criminal justice system. And I became aware that all of the state's attorney's offices had their own investigators, were called inspectors. State police authorities, state police power, state police radios, but no uniforms, unmarked cars. And it looked to be, you know, it looked to be a very attractive job if you were in police work. Because routinely, you work straight days, weekends and holidays off, for the most part,

unless you were serving subpoenas, but that was, you know, that was unusual. And I knew the pay was good, but there weren't a lot of. of openings because I think at the time there might have been 75 inspectors in the entire state of Connecticut. So a very, very small agency. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking that's a great job. So when I decided that I was going to resign to find another job, I thought it's sort of like almost FBI light. The benefit is if I'm in Connecticut, they can't transfer anywhere else, even if they sent me to a different state attorney's office, I'm in Connecticut. So that was a big upside. And I knew they had a take-home car. I knew that the pay was commensurate

with an agent's pay. And I said, gee, if I can get that job, that would be about as good as I'm going to get. I certainly didn't want to go back into patrol in the uniform and start over again. So in November, I applied for the position, and I think I started in January. So it was a very, very quick application process. I drove up for an interview. And then they offered me a job the following month. And I just had to move my stuff out of Virginia and find a place in Connecticut and start. And you did about five and a half years with the FBI?

Just short of just about five, about five on the nose. Yeah. What was it like to leave after you worked so hard to get into the F-I? It was better sweet. You know, I made some good friends. I enjoyed the work for the most part. I mean, it was a grinding pace because, you know, on the violent crime squad, you know, you could get a bank robbery on a Saturday.

You could get a homicide at the prison, you know, at midnight on a Sunday. I mean, something would happen at the airport. And, you know, it could be any hour, any day of the week. and you were expected to show up. So that could be a little bit of a grind because the unpredictability of the schedule made it difficult to socialize and that type of thing. But by and large, I did enjoy the nature of the work

because the cases we worked were all major cases. So that I struggled with a little bit, but realizing that I would be back with family and friends doing similar type work, hopefully, that made it worth, worth the switch. Now, for the state's job, is there training for that or no? No, because the requirements are seven years of law enforcement experience, three, as a dedicated investigator. So, not patrol, but in criminal investigation. So with that, they do provide in-service training

when you're hired, but that's more like in addition to. They expect you to be able to come in and do the work on day one because of your seven years of law enforcement experience background. And how does that work? Is there one investigator per prosecutor? Are you helping multiple? Yeah, no. So right now, at the time when I came back, there were 12 state's attorney's offices. Several years after that, they added one more state's attorney's office. So now there's 13 in Connecticut. And then there's the chief state's attorney's office. So they are like the headquarters, I guess, for lack of a better word, and oversee the administration of the other 13 state's attorney's offices. So each state's attorney's office, again, depending on the size of the state's

attorney's office, has at least two inspectors assigned to it. Some of the bigger offices like Hartford or New Haven may have a half dozen. And then the chief state's attorney's office, being the largest, probably has 25 inspectors, I'm going to guess, at this point. So at that point, you're now trying to figure out where you're going to get assigned. I had applied to the New Haven office, and I applied to the Chief State Attorney's Office. And as luck would have it, the Chief State Attorney's Office hired me first. So that's where I went. How do you acclimate or fit in right away when you first get on the job there?

Well, it was a little awkward because because of the requirements of having that seven years of experience and three as an investigator, most of the inspectors, were either already retired from their first police department, so they had at least 20 years on already, or they had made the jump, but they tended to be in their 50s and 60s. A couple of them were here in their 70s, which I found hard to get my head wrapped around. I was like, really?

I'm like, I'm like 35 or 34, and this guy's like twice my age, and he's still working here. But that was the exception. But I was by far, I mean, like by probably 15 years, the youngest inspector in the office. But for the most part, with the exception of one or two curmudgeons, they were a pretty welcoming group. And I got my footing relatively quick. Do you remember the first case you had?

You know, I was assigned to an economic crime unit as my first assignment. And I was like a guy that couldn't always balance a checkbook. And I was thinking, I don't know. sure, this is a great fit for me. You know, I don't have an accounting background. But the supervisor was very good, like mentoring me. And he said, Greg, he goes, it's no different than any other crime. He says, you know, look at what the elements of the complaint are, look at the evidence you have,

figure out if it actually is a crime. And then if it is a crime, how do you go about proving it? He says, and basically, in our work, he goes, it's just follow the money. He says, it's all financially based. He said, so just establish, you know, where the money was and where it ended up and if it's criminal in nature. And that was a great advice. So I was exposed to, I mean, you know, everything from fraud to embezzlement to identity theft, Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, upfront loan payment schemes.

So it was eye-opening. for me because I didn't have any experience in that area and then I was getting quite a lot of experience in a short amount of time. Fortunately, I wasn't there very long, but it was an interesting initial assignment. Now, did the police investigate it first and then it get kicked to you guys and then you... Usually it did. Yeah, usually it did. The reason when it would come to our office was because it either involved multiple police departments, you know, multiple jurisdictions and there was now some confusion as to what police department was going to conduct the investigation. Sometimes it would be a conflict of interest case, not very often, or there'd be out-of-state aspects to it,

and the police departments felt like they just weren't, especially some of the smaller departments, and the bigger departments were fine with it. But the medium-sized, the smaller-sized departments were sometimes overwhelmed with the nature of of the scope of the investigation. So they would oftentimes come into our office and either look for some guidance or to partner up with us, you know, because we would then start to, you know, issue subpoenas or draft search warrants for them, which they weren't really comfortable with because they just didn't have much experience doing that type of work.

So a smaller case might not ever even make it across your desk. No, I mean, we had a threshold. I forget what the dollar amount was, but it had to usually reach a certain dollar amount before we would even look at it. And so they tended to be the larger larcenies that we would look at. Now, why weren't you with the economic department for that long? Because I was fortunate enough to get transferred to a different assignment. There was a investigation taking place in Hartford on police corruption.

Specifically, there were two officers assigned to a statewide narcotics task. force that were suspected of robbing drug dealers. And because of the nature of the complaint, in the seriousness of the complaint, one of the rare times that a one-man grand jury was convened to look into it. A lot of states have grand juries that take place all the time. The feds do it routinely. Other states, it's just a regular process. Connecticut, has a weird take on it where they only grant, I forget what the number is, like six grand juries a year. You have to apply for it and then be approved for it. And so it's very rare that it's used because they don't want to run out of grand jury opportunities too early in the year.

And so by the time the end of the year comes around, a lot of times, there's never been a grand jury for that whole year. It's an antiquated system. I wish they would get away from it because it doesn't really make any sense. Like you only get so many bites of an apple and then you have to wait until the following year to apply. But because of the circumstances of how unique this case was, they did decide to open up a grand jury investigation. And it was a task force concept. We had Hartford detectives assigned to it, state police detectives assigned to it, inspectors assigned to it, inspectors assigned to it. And it was a very good case. I mean, it took maybe a year and a half, two years from start to finish. And a number of police officers were arrested, some with the

prison. It sort of spread out into other areas that we didn't expect. But it was a great opportunity for me to experience what it was like to be on a Connecticut grand jury. And At the end of it, everyone was quite pleased with the results and the outcome of it, yeah. How does a grand jury work for those that don't know? They can convene a grand jury, which looks like a jury. But in this instance, it was a grand juror. So there was a judge that was specifically assigned to oversee the investigation. And we would be in a room no bigger than this with the judge, and we would bring in witnesses that were put under oath.

in secret, obviously, because it's a secret one-man grand jury, and they would be deposed. And that was how we were able to elicit the cooperation and the testimony of drug dealers, you know, drug addicts, and police officers to finally unravel what was taking place. And what was taking place was there was a state trooper and a Hartford detective that sort of partnered up on a statewide narcotics task force. And one of the officers, his mistress, was the daughter of an organized crime figure in Hartford, an actual mafia member. And I'm not sure who came up with the idea,

but they started to identify higher-level drug dealers. and rob them, rob them of their money, rob them of their jewelry, and rob them of their product. And the product was then given to the girlfriend, the organized crime figure's daughter, and she had contacts that would buy the narcotics back, and then they'd have that money. And then they would sell the jewelry through the daughter, and they would have that money. and they were making quite a career out of just targeting different drug dealers and robbing them. Kidnapping him and robbing them. How are you able to investigate cops without them finding out?

It wasn't easy. You know, initially, eventually the words started to get out, but initially it was kept in secret and nobody was aware of it. It was a very, very small circle of people that were involved in this. But, you know, people were instructed, you know, when they came in and testified, you want to discuss this. And if you, you know, if you do discuss your testimony or alert somebody, we'll be seeing you another time. And I think that clamped down on the gossip. So now with the grand jury, that evidence interviews you're conducting and the evidence you're finding along the way goes to the grand juror who decides whether you're going to indict them or not. Then we prepared search warrants and arrest warrants.

And they were approved by yet another judge in prosecuting. and then we executed those search warrants and arrest warrants and sort of brought it to a close, yeah. Now, doesn't in most cases the grand jury kind of always agrees to move forward? Well, see, but this is unique, though, because this is a one-man grand juror. So he was hearing firsthand all of the evidence, and he was asking a lot of his own questions. We had a prosecutor that would ask questions, but the judge was also free if he was either confused or wanted clarification to ask his own questions. So he understood, you know, the case as well as any of us did at that point.

So, yeah, he was definitely on board because all the allegations were corroborated, you know, many times over by people we were bringing in who said, yeah, I was pulled over on a motor vehicle stop. And the next thing you know, I got back in my car and all my money was gone and my product was gone. I was allowed to leave. And then, you know, somebody else would say they came into my house. They removed the safe. I was put on the floor and zip ties. And then they left. And it was out, but I was never arrested.

And so, you know, once you hear that story repeated more than once by different people that don't know each other, you know, it becomes apparent that this is a thing. When those cops were arrested, was their hatred towards your office at all for investigating? No, I think there was a tremendous amount of relief because, you know, this is a cancer that. had to be cut out. And I think everyone was pretty happy that we were able to, you know, identify them and remove them from the departments. How often were you getting investigations into your office where the evidence wasn't there, but they were already charged? And you might have had to kick it back or? Oh, rarely, I would say. Yeah, most of the time, If it got to our level, there was more than sufficient probable cause to justify the investigation.

And I'm not saying that every one of them was a successful prosecution, but there was certainly plenty of independent evidence that would show that there's a crime that was committed. What about cases you come across that you guys decide to kick it to the federal level? How does that work? It's on a case-by-case basis. if there's an obvious federal crime taking place, if it seems to be beyond the scope like where it's going to be a multi-state investigation that's going to put us at a disadvantage,

we can make a referral. Sometimes it was taken. Sometimes it was kicked back. You know, they have their threshold standards. And so it wasn't a slam dunk, but we would give them the option to take it over if they wanted. wanted to. Sometimes we would, on occasion, we'd work it jointly because we already had a lot of the legwork done and now they not wanted to come in and make a federal prosecution out of it. So it'd be

more of a joint approach. So it's really dependent on a case-by-case basis. How often are the prosecutors switching out because of election? Are there elections in Connecticut? So this is interesting. Connecticut's unique in many ways. And one of the ways that they're unique is states like New Jersey and New York, and a lot of the other states, they have an attorney general's office, and they conduct criminal and civil investigation. Connecticut is unique in the way that it's a bifurcated system. The attorney general's office, which is an elected position, handles only civil, even though Attorney General Blumenthal used to give the impression during his press conferences that it was a criminal investigation being conducted by his office.

It was always civil. And I think he intentionally would mislead reporters sometimes into believing that there was a crime involved that they were looking into. But he only had civil authority. The state's attorneys, the chief state's attorney and the state's attorneys, have criminal authority. But the chief state attorney and the deputy chief state's attorney, those are appointed positions. So Attorney General elected Chief State's Attorney and Deputy Chief State's Attorney appointed. So big difference between our state and many of the other states. And they're appointed by the governor?

They're appointed by the commission, the criminal justice commission, which I think is like a half dozen or nine commissioners that are appointed by the governor. So he sort of removes himself directly from the process, but, you know, actually it's just like that one degree of separation. He appoints the commissioners himself, and then they decide who they're going to bring in. Do you think it's a fair system? There's no perfect system. I mean, it's better than the governor making the appointment. So I guess what I'm getting at, you know, in my book, the Chief State Attorney, who I eventually sue in federal court, is named Jack Bailey.

He was a political hack, for lack of a better word, politically connected family. Legally, he was a lightweight. Politically, he was a heavyweight. In Governor John Rowland, who's a twice convicted felon now, he and Jack Bailey enjoyed a very social relationship, a friendship, which is unseemly, it's really unethical. There should be at least an artificial wall there because the Chief State Attorney is ultimately the overall law enforcement authority for the state of Connecticut.

it. And the governor, you know, enjoyed flaunting, you know, this friendship. And Mr. Bailey loved being in his company. So he would go with him to social events and, you know, the Yukon basketball parade, you know, the welcoming championship parade. And if there was a major snow event, he would show up with the governor. And everyone used to say, like, what is he doing at these events? He's the chief state's attorney, but he's walking around like he's the lieutenant governor, you know, with this guy. That was unsettling because, you know, on occasion, you know, there could be allegations

of corruption within the governor's office or misconduct. And that would go to our office. And I'm thinking, well, this is a built-in conflict of interest there because you're cozy with this guy, you have a personal relationship with him, you and your wife are out, you know, in public going out to dinner, you know, with the governor and his wife. And yet, ultimately, our office would be responsible if there were allegations of corruption or misconduct by the governor or one of his staff. So that was a little disconcerting. And ultimately, it proved true. Governor Roland was eventually investigated by the FBI and arrested by the FBI,

and our office had absolutely no knowledge of it. So you were working there at the time of his investigation? Yeah. So when was that 2004 or three or something? Yeah, right around there, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Good memory, yeah.

Yeah, I mean. You had no idea that they were being investigated by the FBI. No, no. The FBI was very smart not to include our office because it would have been immediately leaked back to him. And that's the reason why we were. in the dark, and I completely get it. We shouldn't have been involved in it because we were already compromised with that friendship.

When Mr. Bailey lost the federal lawsuit against him, many of the newspapers in Connecticut, the New Haven Register, the Hartford Current, I think it's the Waterbury Republican, came out with scathing editorials saying that Mr. Bailey should either be removed or resigned from his position, because based on the trial, the evidence that came out, the testimony that came out and the outcome of the trial, that all the editorial staffs were saying he's not fit for that position. He's been compromised. His ethical code is wrong.

His moral compass is off. And this is not the person that should be leading this agency. Within a year, his term ended, and Governor Roland immediately turned around and reappearned, and reappointed him for another six-year term. He had no qualms about reappointing the guy who just was at the losing end of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit because of the fact that he wanted him right there

protecting his flank. It became obvious because within a year or two after that, Governor Rowland was under arrest. So now when does a lawsuit come along? On the on the tail end of that criminal, I'm sorry, the grand jury that I was involved in, as that was winding down, Mr. Bailey, who at this point was the third chief state attorney since I had been hired, he had the bright idea that he was going to create a fugitive squad. And just to use some background, Mr. Bailey was enamored with the FBI. He held him in very high regard. And when he came into his position, I think he tried to duplicate the way the FBI operates. So like I said before, the FBI investigates a wide range of federal violations and have all these different squads within an office. And so Mr. Bailey comes in and the office had, I think, an economic economic crime unit, a statewide prosecution unit.

and maybe a Medicaid fraud unit. And he comes in and now he's going to create a workers' compensation fraud unit and a welfare fraud unit and an elder abuse unit and a gang unit and a witness protection unit. So I can see, you know, he's sort of trying to emulate or imitate, you know, the FBI, way of addressing crime by forming different units to address specific crimes. And he comes up with this idea that now he's going to focus on fugitives because at that time, there were a huge backlog of failure to appear cases in the court system. Many arrests were being made. People were getting out on bonds, and they just weren't coming back into court. And the bondsmen were up in arms because

their clients weren't showing up for court. The police departments claimed that they were too busy to go out looking for anybody or serving warrants. And Mr. Bailey seized upon this as an opportunity to create yet another boutique unit and he decided he was going to create a fugitive squad. So that's how I was able to transition off the grand jury and there's a new assignment. He posted an opening within the division for two inspectors. and, you know, it's funny.

It's funny. I made reference to the fact that we had a sort of a mature senior workforce there. And here I am naively thinking like, gee, I would love to get this job. It's sort of like right in, you know, my sweet spot here. And I don't want to go back to economic crime. But I'm the youngest guy in the office. And, you know, they're probably going to hire based off seniority. So I apply for the job.

and two weeks later the posting comes down, and I'm informed that I got both jobs because not one person applied for the position. Nobody in that office had any inkling of working weekends, working nights, working in projects, you know, that kind of thing. So now the dilemma was, okay, we have one guy for the squad. Now what?

So Mr. Bailey posted it publicly, and one of the detectors from Hartford that I worked with on the grand jury was about to retire, and he applied for the job. And I was like, that would be a solid pick. He was the next homicide detective. I said, so here's a good guy for the job. So Steve Komenick was hired, and Steve and I became the original fugitive squad.

Of course, the immediate concern is, how do you surround the house with two guys? It's not going to work very well. And so I posed that to Mr. Bailey, and I said, you know, I'm glad that I have a partner. I said, but, you know, we're at a little bit of a disadvantage here, manpower-wise. The New Haven FBI office had a fugitive task force, and that was comprised of obviously some FBI agents, a couple of state troopers, and some local detectives. They reached out and said, why don't you join up with us? And now instead of having a two-man squad, you'll have a 12-man squad.

And I was like, yeah, that's a great idea. And Mr. Bailey loved the idea of us being, you know, officially a war. working with the FBI because that was his, you know, that was his, his idol sort of speak, was the FBI office. So we ended up starting with them. And that, that was the start of our fugitive work. And it was a tremendous success initially. We had brought in a lot of cases because we were getting referrals from all 12 state attorneys of offices and probation departments. So we had a lot of material to work with. And Mr. Bailey, love the fact that with the number of arrests we were making, he was constantly either giving press

conferences or putting out press releases, and he loved the positive press that it generated. And it was a good concept, and it started out very, very good, very positive, and we were all working well. So the dark secret in the FBI is that they financially incentivize their personnel, which is unusual for law enforcement. You know, I've worked on, you know, on police departments. I've worked with sheriff's offices down south. And, you know, none of them will financially incentivize their officers or their deputies. for the obvious reason, you don't want to influence someone to try to make more arrests or give out more tickets or make more drunk driving arrests in hopes of getting some sort of a financial reward.

Now, I'm fine with the idea of a letter of commendation, you know, a certificate of recognition, a plaque, a metal accommodation. That's all well and good. That will motivate people, and it recognizes them for their extra effort. But in the FBI, if your statistics are impressive, you can distinguish yourself from your colleagues, and you qualify for a financial incentive award, which at the time, I'm sure it's changed since then, was a $1,500 check and a letter signed by the director saying, you know, great job. It was, you know, very prestigious sort of thing to get and also, you know, give you another $1,500 in your paycheck for that pay period.

Another way they would go about this incentivizing financially was called the QSI. So the FBI loves the acronyms. QSI was quality step increase. So if you were at a certain pay scale, you'll be at a grade, you know, whatever, grade five, level four. If you got one of these QSIs, you went to a level five. And that raise stayed with you for the rest of your career. So, Ian, if you and I started on the same day, and we were both grade threes, and then I get a QSI and now I'm a grade four, I'll be making a little more money than you for the rest of our careers. So over time, you know, it certainly does, it certainly does

pay off. Another way that they incentivized their employees was if your statistics were, historically impressive enough, you may qualify for an early transfer to another office of your choosing or supervisor's position, which would be about, at that time, about a $30,000 a year pay jump. So those three different things were all attractive to people that were ambitious and were motivated financially to improve themselves. And I have a problem with that, you know, in retrospect, because if it's the Ian you know, Ford dealership and you want to give a $1,500 check to the salesman of the month for selling the most Ford Broncos, that's fine, you know? If the guy's a stellar salesman, yeah, okay,

you can give them a bonus. That's fine. But you don't want to give a bonus to somebody because they are getting the most arrest warrants for people or, you know, anything along those lines, because that person is, there are people, even at that level, that will, that it will influence their better judgment in an effort to distinguish themselves from the pack. So what ended up happening was initially where the focus was, you know, arrest, arrest, can we find, where's this guy, where's that guy, where's this woman? Now all of a sudden it was, hey, can we make this a federal case? can we get a federal warrant for this person?

And the reason was that was a statistical accomplishment that you could take credit for was that you had X number of federal warrants that you submitted and were approved. Now, if the person ends up getting arrested, that's yet another statistical accomplishment that you can take credit for. So the focus in the office started transition to not just arresting people, but can we make this a federal case? Can we get a UFAP warrant? So UFAP is another acronym, UFAP, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. And all that means was someone who was arrested on state charges decided to leave the state for the purpose of avoiding being arrested and taken back to court.

So it wasn't a high threshold, but you had to say, number one, we do have an outstanding state warrant for a felony for this person. Number two, the state's attorney has authorized nationwide extradition for this person. So anywhere that they're found, they'll be brought back by the state. And then number three, we have probable cause to believe that they are currently at this address, which is outside of Connecticut. So it wasn't a high threshold, but you did have to jump through a couple of hoops. Now, the first two were easy. The second, I mean, the third one was maybe the trickier part where you had to say, this is where I think the person is right now based upon this information.

Now, the coordinator of the task force was not a supervisory special agent. He was just a senior agent, which just means he had more time on than most people. And he began to actively solicit, let's make this a federal case, let's make this a federal case, get a UFAP file for, you know, an application for a UFAP. So what he wanted was the, the, either the inspector or the detective or the, or the trooper, to prepare an affidavit that said, you know, this is all the information I have. And in addition to, I've developed information that this person is currently living in the Bronx.

And the reason I believe that is because, and then, you know, fill in the blank, whatever information that he would have. Sometimes the information was weak. I have an informant that spoke to him on the phone, and he claims he's hiding out in the Bronx. So they'd write up an affidavit. A prosecutor would either look at it and say, you know, insufficient probable cause,

or the judge, it may go through the prosecutor, and the judge would look at it and say, that's weak. Just the person getting a phone call from an informant saying, I'm living out of state, it doesn't meet the threshold. So this would happen on occasion, and finally one day sort of hit a breaking point where several warrants were returned unapproved. And the coordinator, and I'll name by name, Ralph DeFonzo Jr., because I name him in the book, and he was named in court, he announced this to the office, this is bullshit.

They never even prosecute these cases federally. Give me the warrant. I'll write it so they have to sign it. My motto is, if you don't have it, lie. So I hear that, and I look over at Steve Cognick, and Steve Cumbnick looks at me and we're like, what is this all about, you know? How do you unhear something after you've heard it?

And I'm repulsed by the idea that an agent would be so cavalier as to announce it, you know, amongst, other police officers that he has no qualms about submitting, you know, a fictitious or falsified affidavit, you know, to a federal prosecutor and ultimately a judge. So afterwards, Steve and I meet in the parking lot, and he's like, what do you make of that? And I'm like, Steve, I said, that's a red flag. I said, you know, I don't know what to think. But Ian, just to give you some background. So whoever had the case, knew the case inside and out, obviously, it's assigned to you. It's not assigned to a group of people. It's assigned to you. Everyone carries their own case load.

And you do your investigation and you and you paper the file accordingly with updated information, you know, that you get or, you know, fax copies or photo copies of it, more information. So you're trying to get as much information about the person you're looking for to give you a better idea where they could possibly be. And then you, you know, you're, you're trying to get as much information. would prepare an affidavit and one of the newer agents in the office, one of the new FBI agents, you know, they wanted the statistics to show that they were productive agents, you know, that they were, even though they were newer, that they could hold their own. So the coordinator would say, you know, give it to agent so-and-so and he'll get it signed. And so you would write a draft

affidavit and you would write it basically for that person. the agent would then say, I special agent, you know, John Smith, have been informed by Inspector Dillon that he holds an active arrest warrant for this subject and for these charges and blah blah. And then the information he has developed is that this person is living currently at this address based upon the following facts. And then would relay those facts. Now, he doesn't know these facts.

He's saying, I've had this conversation with this inspector, and this is what his investigation has determined. and then he would bring that affidavit to the court. Now, the right way it should have been done was I should have brought my affidavit to the prosecutor and then to the judge because I was cross-designated as a federal law enforcement officer on that task force. So I had the authority to do it, but the coordinator wanted the agents to get the credits for these so they could check these boxes.

And then next thing, you know, the following month, hey, so-and-so just got a QSI. Oh, congratulations. so and so just got a financial incentive award hey drinks are on him he just got an extra $1,500 check so he was like the you know the the the the patriarch sort of you know I'm going to favor you with with you know a couple of these UFAP warrants and now you can claim these statistics on your on your record now so that's how how it was being played but again once I had heard him make that statement I I'm thinking that This is going off the rails.

Something is not going to be good here. So normally, when you would hand off the warrant, it would be approved by a prosecutor, signed by a judge, and then would go into the file, and you wouldn't see it again. But they would come back to the office initially. There was no sense to look at it because you already knew what you submitted, and there was no reason to look at something that you already had written. But now, based upon that announcement that was made, I decide I want to look at my warrant. And I look at it and I see a new paragraph of information that's in there, right in the middle of the warrant.

And it is information that, number one, I know, is false because it is attributed to me. And I'm unaware of it. But now it's now a federal arrest warrant. that's been signed by a judge. So I find one, like right out of the gate, like the first week, and now I am at a crossroads. I have a dilemma here because, yes, I have evidence of a crime, but I also know that if I make an allegation as serious as I'm making,

I'm not comfortable making it based off of one example. because it's going to be explained away as some sort of a miscommunication, you know, inadvertent error. And, you know, why would you accuse me of doing something like that based off of this one affidavit? So I call a couple of the inspectors aside in private,

and I said, when your warrants come back like this next week or two, review them. And you're like, okay. I'm like, based on what we just heard, I said, take another look at them make sure they're the same warrant that you wrote. Steve Coney comes back to me almost immediately and says,

this has been changed. He says, and the information in it is false and it's attributed to me. I said, all right. Steve Fredo and one of the other inspectors, he comes back with three and says, these all have been doctored. He says, and all the information that's false is attributed to me. I said, okay, I find two more.

So at this point, within like a two-week span, I have seven examples of falsified affidavits. I have photocopies of the originals that were written, and I have copies of the new ones that don't quite resemble the original ones. Based on that and being the supervisor, I felt an obligation, ethically and legally, to bring to the attention to the chief state attorney and say, this is a problem that has to be addressed at your level because of the obvious ramifications. I bring them to the chief state attorney and he meets me the next day after he's had a chance to review the notebook at this point. And he feigns outrage and anger and like, how could the FBI be so reckless to put us in this kind

of a position and what were they thinking of and we're going to get to the bottom of this and I'm going to pull you guys out of the task force. But I don't want you speaking about this with anyone at this point. This is going to be in confidence. I'm like, okay, so sure enough, we are evicted from the task force. We are told to go in there and remove all of our files and our property. And we go to the office, we reestablish ourselves and continue to work fugitive cases, and we continue to do a very good job because now we have a total of six inspectors. We've bumped the numbers up based upon our productivity, and so I'm supervising five inspectors, and we are all over the state and even sending leads out to different states to our counterparts in the state police or local police departments,

and they're picking up fugitives for us. The FBI is furious that we're still working fugitives. They're furious that we accuse them of falsifying the affidavits. And they start now telling everyone that they deal with that we're no longer working fugitive cases and that we've been kicked out because that we were incompetent and not producing any numbers. And ironically, when I went back and reviewed the statistics, which I had copies of, we were six of 14 people there, and we were making 85% of the arrests in that office. office. So we were doing the bulk of the of the of the statistics and we made up a minority of the office. But that didn't stop them from telling everyone that we were no longer doing

fugitive work and that we were just too inept to stay on. Didn't sit well with any of the guys. I get contacted several weeks later by a newsman. paper reporter that says, I've heard this rumor that you were kicked out of the task force because you found agents were falsifying affidavits. And I knew who the reporter was. I had met him before. And I said, I cannot comment. I said, I've been ordered not to talk about this. The reporter contacts Steve Fredo, and Steve Fredo gives him the same line. The reporter contact Steve Comick, and Steve Comick basically says, pull up a chair, I got a great story for you. And proceeds to lay the entire thing out for the reporter. It's on the front page Sunday edition

the following week. And Mr. Bailey now decides to go on the record and defend the FBI and says that this was not intentional. It was nothing. but miscommunications and typographical errors. And I'm thinking, why would you defend them when you have documentary proof and you've been told by all three of us this is what was taking place? So this doesn't sit well with any of the guys.

Not me, not Cometick, not Fredo, or the other three inspectors. Because he's chosen sides in this. and he's sided with the other side. So that created hard feelings, a lot of hard feelings. He brings us in, reads us the riot act that this made it to the press, informs me, Cumbach and Fredo that we're all under investigation now, and that we are not to talk about it again,

or else we risk losing our jobs. Of course, I'm confused. is I'm thinking, how am I being investigated by internal affairs when I'm quoted as saying no comment and Steve Cunnic is quoted in the paper 22 different times? Like that was like lost on me. Like why I under suspicion for for this, but in any event, fast forward a couple of weeks, Mr. Bailey calls us in yet again for a meeting and announces that we've run out of funding for the fugitive squad and we're being disbanded.

but it has nothing to do with what happened with the FBI. Of course, everyone sees right through it. I knew for a fact that we had been funded for the rest of that fiscal year and the following fiscal year. So to say that all of a sudden overnight, we somehow ran out of funding, when no other unit in the office was being affected by this budget crisis, it was nonsense. I mean, we all knew it on its face. And the tell was, as soon as he said, and this has nothing to do with what just happened with the FBI.

So now where Steve Komenick had been transferred to Litchfield during the Internal Affairs investigation, he's brought back and Mr. Bailey now announces that I'm being sent to Litchfield for 120 days, which is like only an hour and a half from my house in the dead of winters, effective January 1. So now I'm in Litchfield with another inspector who has nothing to do. And I said, I'm going to find an attorney and see what I can do here because this seems to be completely unfair, if not illegal, is to what's now happened. I'm gagged from defending myself publicly because of his memo saying we can't talk about anything. he's defending the FBI in the press and I'm no longer a supervisor and I'm sitting out in Litchfield with nothing to do for the next 120 days.

So I did find an attorney Karen Littory that had a solo practice in New Haven and met with her and presented my situation to her and she came up with the idea that my first amendment right to free speech had been violated by the gag order. and that we could challenge it in federal court with a civil suit. And you had copies of all the evidence for yourself or no? I did. So you photocopied everything and kept records of everything? You know, I made seven notebooks.

I gave one to Steve Kumnik. I gave one to Steve Fredo. I gave one to my attorney. I gave one to a friend of mine, and I told him to hide it and never tell me where he hit it. And I had one myself. And I said, if they're going to come and try to, you know, retrieve these documents so they can make this disappear, they're going to have an Easter egg hunt on their hands because now there's not the one copy that Mr. Bailey has.

There's six additional copies floating out there. Did he not realize that there could be other copies when he decided to cover it up? I don't know what he was thinking. He wasn't a good thinker. Thinking wasn't one of his strong suits. We used to joke that wisdom chased him for many years, but he was always faster. Now, why did it benefit him to cover it up and not side with you guys? Because, which we didn't realize at the time.

Now, bear in mind, his father had been the Democratic National Chairman at one point. Big, big job, big time job, national Democratic chairman. His sister, Barbara Canelli, was a U.S. representative. in Congress, and then became a Secretary of State for Connecticut, and then ran unsuccessfully for governor against John Rowland. So kind of a full circle sort of a thing. Probably because of his family connections, Mr. Bailey was being considered to head the criminal division in the U.S. Department of Justice under Janet Reno, which no one knew at the time. It only came out during court under oath. But he knew that the FBI in New Haven would have to do his

background investigation and then recommend him for the job. And he knew the U.S. Attorney's Office in Connecticut would have to endorse him for the position. He did not want to alienate either one of those agencies. So he decided he was going to clamp down on us, silence us, and make sure this thing never saw the latter day. Now, the guy that was lying on the document, documents, what happened to him? Was he a part of the lawsuit or just... No, because I was suing my employer because of the fact my employer gagged me from defending myself. So really the FBI, even though they were part and parcel of this whole thing legally didn't have any involvement. What about criminal charges?

Well, that's something the FBI was supposed to investigate on their own. But they didn't. They did. kind of pretend um because of the nature of the allegations and in the severity of the of the conduct um an agent that i knew that was that was getting ready to retire um so he had a lot of experience and he was actually the agent that had uh recruited me through the new haven office i contacted him and explained to him what was going on so opr uh is is another acronym for the Office of Professional Responsibility.

That is the FBI's Internal Affairs Division. And he said to me, he goes, when did you make this complaint? And I said, in June, and he said, when did OPR investigate you? I said, they haven't. He said, Greg, it's been like three months. He says, what do you mean OPR hasn't interviewed you?

I was like, no one's interviewed me. He said, something's wrong. He says, once you made that complaint, he goes, and it got into the papers, he said, they should have been interviewing you the following week. So I haven't heard a word. Took him six months, half a year before they finally showed up to speak to us. And that agent that I spoke to said, this is ridiculous. He says, there's no way this should have ever taken this long. He says, this should have been immediate.

To emphasize my theory that the FBI is just too. small of an organization to investigate themselves properly. You know, I don't want to say it's a big bed because that doesn't sound right. But you know that six degrees of separation thing with, you know, Kevin Bacon kind of a thing. Well, in the FBI, it's more like one degree of separation or maybe two degrees of separation, meaning that you and I are both in the FBI in different offices. I've never met you, you've never met me. but I guarantee I know somebody in the FBI that knows you.

To put it in perspective, in Connecticut, there are one million, I'm sorry, my mistake, I want to get this right, there's this crazy number of Amazon employees just in the state of Connecticut. I think there's one million Amazon employees in the country. That's what it is. And I think there are 35,000 Amazon employees in Connecticut. The New York City Police Department has approximately 34,000 officers. New York City, 34,000 officers. How many agents, now the, in the FBI, there are 56 field offices.

There are 400 satellite offices. There are 180 foreign postings. There's headquarters, which is a separate office. there's the academy, which is a separate office. How many agents do you think there are? Way less than New York City. Yeah, like 14,000 agents. So half the size of the New York City Police Department,

and they cover the entire world. So it is not, you know, I'll go out sometimes when I give talks on the book. You know, I'll say how many agencies do you think there are? People will be like, oh, no, 80,000. No, 100,000. No, it's got to be more than that.

120,000, you know. I'm like 14,000. I said, it's not a big community. I said, and the point that I make is, it's naive to think that you're going to do an internal affairs investigation and not have somebody contact you and say, hey, Ian's a good guy. I'm not sure what he got caught up in, but, you know,

he's a good guy. Go easy with this, you know. the head of the New Haven FBI office that had publicly exonerated his agents after he says he conducted his own investigation, used to brag how he was friends with the director of the FBI, that they had worked in the New York office together. So now you have two inspectors, the FBI also has inspectors, flying up from Washington, D.C. to conduct their investigation into this. Probably already hearing several times

how the New Haven FBI SAC, the special agent in charge, is personal friends with the director. And, you know, that job that they have is a stepping stone job. They take that job in OPR only to advance themselves to the next level. Almost everyone who wants to move up in the ranks is going to hold that position for a couple of years at headquarters before they're eligible to be promoted to an ASAC, which is an assistant special agent in charge, or an SEC, which is a special agent in charge.

And those are basically the equivalent of a chief and a deputy chief in an FBI office of their head. So these are stepping stone jobs, and they don't necessarily want to step on toes of people that are in a position to advance their career. So two agents, inspectors, um, show up to interview me and I sit down and one of them says, didn't you used to work bank robberies in Alexandria? And I'm like, yeah. He goes, I remember you.

He goes, that was my first office. He says, and you were on the, uh, on the criminal reactive squad. And I'm like, yeah, I said, I'm sorry, I don't remember you. He goes, well, I was a new agent. He goes, you probably wouldn't remember me. But I'm thinking, okay, that confirms, my theory that this is a very closed loop community. That, you know, if I've been out of the FBI now for five years

and somebody walks in and knows me, it recognizes me, you know, it confirms my suspicion that maybe this isn't the independent, neutral investigation that I was hoping for, you know. Now, foolishly, I'm thinking, well, this adds to my credibility because this guy, you know, knows now. I mean, I knows he has the paperwork that shows I was an agent, but now he knows it with his own eyes that I was an agent. But so Ian, it's funny, what happens is, you know,

we all went through the same training academy. So, you know, we took the courses on psychology and interview and interrogation and, you know, these type of things. Yet they're trying to play the same, like, game on me that I've already been taught, you know. So initially it starts off traditional. and then it's like, well, you know, these are very serious allegations you're making. You understand, right?

I'm like, yeah, I do. We're looking at potential criminal conduct here. I'm like, yeah. Are you comfortable with that? Like, no, I said, but everything I'm saying is true. No, I understand, but you realize, like, you know, people could lose their jobs over this? I'm just the complainant. I said, I'm not doing the investigation.

I'm not on the disciplinary board. No, I understand. But, you know, what if somebody got arrested on this? You know, you want to pursue this, I guess. And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, I'm not a prosecutor, you know. Well, what if you had to testify, you know, in court? and, you know, a judge decides to make an example of somebody and send them to prison. I was like, guys, I'm not sure where this is going.

I said, I'm not on a jury. I am not a prosecutor. I'm not a judge. I said, so why are you asking me those types of questions? I said, that's outside of what I'm here for. He said, I'm only here to tell you what I experienced and what I witnessed. And that's it. All right.

Well, are you comfortable giving us a written statement? Yeah? Under oath. Sure. All right. And they're looking at each other like, and I'm thinking, I know you're trying to kill this thing. You know, you're trying to abort this complaint. And I'm not playing along with it.

I know how this game works, you know. I'm not going to be coaxed into like, hey, let's forget the whole thing and have a nice flight back to DC. So then it came to, are you willing to submit to a polygraph exam with an FBI polygraph examiner? And I'm like, yes. And I was like, I said, guys, look, I said, you have seven examples of this. I said, I think between me, Steve and the other Steve, there's probably another 40, 50 UFAP affidavits that we never saw, if you went back and retrieved those, right?

Our name's going to be on them. We'll look at them and tell you if there's more examples of this taking place. I said, I mean, you have seven here. I said, but I have to believe that this has been going on for some time and there's probably numerous examples that would confirm what we're saying. All right.

all right thank you for your time I'm like that's it yeah I'm thinking when we're taking the statement you know all right so afterwards you know Steve and Steve and I I was like what they ask you know if you're willing to give a statement if you're willing to give a polygram what'd you say yeah we would yeah I'm like yeah me too

I said they didn't take any statement no I didn't take any statements I'm like okay so I'm like this thing is this is gonna be a whitewash they have no investigative curiosity here You know, normally, you know, Ian, let me put it this way. If this was happening on a police department and the FBI was called in to investigate, the first thing they would say is, I need somebody to pull every affidavit that any of these guys authored. So we can review them to see if they're legitimate, to see if they've been altered. I mean, this was done so poorly that back then, you know, we used manual typewriters.

I mean, they were probably electric, but the font, was different on the affidavits. Meaning, here's the affidavit that was, that I gave you, and now here's another affidavit with a new paragraph of different font face on the bottom, where it's been added to the original and then photocopied. So that's how glaring the falsification of these warrants were.

I mean, think about what they do to the average person that lies to an FBI agent. Not even on paper, just lies verbally. Right. Without even that physical proof, you could get five years of prison. 1008 federal code lying to an FBI agent during the course of an investigation. Martha Stewart went to jail for it. It's insane.

That's what she actually ended up having a plea to. And nothing to do with the insider training. Yeah. It was lying during the course of an investigation. Yeah. So, I mean, the irony is, you know, you have. documentary proof that these warrants have been falsified. And somehow you're still, you know,

unsure how to proceed. So ultimately, and here's the thing is, you know, the FBI loves to play Sherlock Holmes until it comes to investigating one of their own. Then they become Mr. Magoo. And a reporter filed the freedom of information years afterwards. to inquire, like, what was the outcome of their investigation?

And they came right out and said, we couldn't figure out whoever changed the affidavit. I'm thinking, there's three possible people here, right? Me, which I think we can rule out, because you've offered me a polygraph and I've agreed to take it. And then the two agents. DeFonzo, who bragged in public,

that he would lie to get it signed. and then the newer agent that he that was given the affidavit to go get signed so now you're down to two possible suspects and you can't figure out which one of these people would have changed it the coordinator handled all seven of them and distributed them to three different agents all three agents said we'd never change anything and the coordinator says I don't know how they were changed. I don't know. I don't think that was one of their toughest cases. So what happened with the lawsuit you won? After a two-week trial in front of a jury, I did, yeah.

How long to take for the whole thing to play out from the time you got the lawyer? A couple of years. And were you still employed by the state? Yeah, they couldn't fire me. I hadn't done anything wrong. When you won, did you retire or leave? You know, Ian, it's, I did not. And my position was, you know, I have no allegiance or loyalty to the Chief State's Attorney. It's not his organization. He's merely a temporary steward of this place.

I was hired by Jack Kelly. Then I worked under Richard Palmer. Now I'm working for Jack Bailey. And in time, I'll be working for some other prosecutor. So, no. If it was the Jack Bailey, you know, motor company where, you know, he created the company and he owned the company and, you know, he had total authority over the company, then I'd say, well, you know what, maybe I shouldn't be working for this company. But him being the temporary steward of an agency, absolutely not. When I took my oath of office, it was to the chief state's attorney's office, not to the chief state's attorney.

So I had no intention of walking away from a job that now I had put in six years maybe. And I said to myself, you know, you are deserving of a pension and you should stay long enough to be able to claim that pension. So I said, I'm just going to grind it out, you know, and I did. And the state didn't retaliate against you at all or anything? They did. I ended up back in federal court six years later. For another lawsuit? Yep.

And you won that? That was against his successor. His number two, Chris Morano, was his deputy chief state attorney, and he testified in Mr. Bailey's defense during the course of the trial. Of course, the jury didn't believe him either, obviously. Which is kind of sad. When you have a chief state attorney and a deputy chief state's attorney, and an assistant chief state's attorney, and a state's attorney all take the witness stand under oath,

and the jury decides, I don't believe, the four of you. That's kind of a harsh rebuke on our system. So anyway, Mr. Morano inherits Mr. Bailey's term and proceeds to pick up that axe and start grinding it as soon as he becomes the head guy. But he did it in a more subtle way, where Mr. Bailey disbanded the unit in one fell swoop. Morano thought he'd be more clever

and chip away at us over a short period of time. So while it wasn't done overnight, it was done over the course of a year. When I came back to work, Mr. Bailey graciously asked me where I would like to work. work as a supervisor. And because the fugitive squad was now defunct and dead, I said the gang squad. So the gang squad, it was called the Gang and Continuing Criminal Activity Bureau.

We had several violations that we were responsible for. Street gangs, Los Alitos, Latin Kings, outlaw motorcycle gangs, the Hells Angels, the pagans, the outlaws, the usual crew. gambling operations organized traditional crime like you know coesanestra so there was a lot of good work there and I said that that's I'm fine with that I'll transition from fugitives to that and quite comfortably so I ended up inheriting a squad of five inspectors four prosecutors two secretaries and a paralegal like you know what maybe that was a step up you know to the is a step up you know it's even bigger unit within months of me getting this position and Mr. Morano getting his new position.

I'm going to transfer an inspector. We have a shortage in Bridgeport temporarily. Okay. Hey, I'm taking a prosecutor out and putting them over in New Haven for now. They have a grand jury going on. All right. Hey, we're going to form a witness protection unit. I'm going to need a secretary of prosecutor or paralegal. I'm like, okay, now we're down to like half already. And, Ian, this continues on until, like within a year, I am down to one prosecutor, one inspector and a part-time secretary covering the entire state. We're working with the Gun Task Force.

We're working with state-war narcotics. We're working with the organized crime unit. We're working all with the state police. And we're working with the statewide narcotics. and the Safe Streets unit. So we're working with like five different task forces, New London, Waterbury, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven. And I'm like, it's me and one guy.

I said, I submitted a memo. I said, you've created a hazardous working environment. I said, we can't do this kind of work. I said, between when the other inspector is at training or on vacation or testifying, I'm by myself. And when I'm doing any of those things, he's by himself. I said, this is not a squad.

He's like, you're right. I'm going to disband it. Even though it was required by state statute to have it. So he brought me in one day and just said, I read that memo and I agree. Maybe it's a little bit too much. So you're now assigned to the elder abuse unit. And I'm like, that's,

squad is mandated by state statute, you realize. Yeah, I do. I'm like, all right. Now, see, I knew this was coming. Somebody had tipped me off in his inner circle and said he's going to do this. So it didn't catch me completely off guard, which is what he was looking for. So he said, any feedback? I'm like, did you already make the decision? He said, yeah, I said, then there's no feedback necessary. Well, I mean, What are your thoughts about it? I have no thoughts about it, okay? I said, if you already made the decision, I have no thoughts.

All right. I said, we done? I get up, I leave. Ten seconds later, he's behind me. Hey, hey, I'm not done with you yet. I said, what is it? You're in charge of the evidence room. I said, in addition to or instead of, both.

I say, any more assignments before I leave? Nope. What do you think of that? Turned around. I walked away. Went to my office, closed the door. Picked up the phone, called Karen Tori, and I said, Karen, I think we're going to go back to court. Round two.

And she said, what happened? I told her, she goes, oh, we are going back to court. I said, all right. So that was that. And did you win that case? Sort of. Because Mr. Morano inherited the rest of Mr. Bailey's term, it was only maybe two years or so.

The way it works is you don't get a new six-year term. You take over the remaining term of your predecessor if he doesn't complete his six years. And then you finish out that term, and then if you're reappointed, then you start a new six-year term. This way they know exactly when each term ends and begins. So it's not subject to change

depending on somebody leaves or resign. or whatever. So he finished, as he's coming up on the end of his term, his short term, he reapplies for the position. He was such a terrible chief state attorney that, of the 13 other states' attorneys, 11 of them submit a letter to the governor, who's now no longer rolling because he's in jail, and they submit a letter saying, we cannot work with this guy. Please put in somebody else beside him.

and he did not get reappointed. That was the good news. The bad news is, I am now suing someone as my employer who's no longer my employer. So based upon that, my attorney said, if we can come to some sort of a settlement, I would suggest you take it

because it's going to be a gamble how a jury is going to look at this case if you're no longer working for him. And based upon the judge that we had for the second trial, I decided that might be the better course of action. So it was settled out of court. Did you end up retiring from this job? No.

Well, eventually, yeah. Yeah. But I stayed until... You made it in your full tenure, yeah. I waited until he was replaced by the next chief safety attorney, who came in and pretty much made it clear that I wasn't going anywhere. The only position above me at that point was a chief inspector's position. and twice I applied for the position and both times I was never given an interview.

Now, there were people that weren't that were just inspectors that were given interviews. They weren't even supervisors. They had no supervisory experience. They had less time in on the job. I was senior to them by many years. I had been a supervisor now for 12 years, I think, and I could not even get an interview for the position. So I realized that I'm just killing time here. So I resign myself to the fact that I'll put in whatever time I need to put in.

2009, the state offered a three-year buyout. So basically, you were given three more years to your service if you agreed to leave that year. and I did the math. I was going to be 50. I was 52. I thought I would always retire at 55. The three years put me at 55. You know what?

Go early and enjoy life and stop killing time here. You ever wish you stayed with the FBI? Well, I wish I could have stayed with the FBI, but I don't regret that I left because my partner, who was from the Boston area, end up retiring from the D.C. office. So he never got back to Boston. So thinking back, I'm like, that was actually the better move.

I mean, it would have been nice to have done my full career with the FBI and retired as an agent, but not on those circumstances. It wasn't worth it. You know, when you hear stories like this, it makes you wonder what else is out there on a corrupt level, just not even in the FBI, but in other agencies in the state, because if it could happen on this level, it could have. happen. Yeah. Well, I mean, just to show you the level, it's funny, Ian, my, my, as disappointed as I was that an agent would brag that he was going to rewrite warrants with false information just to get them

signed, as disappointed I was that agents would, would do this hoping to get a bonus check, you know, attached to their paycheck or, or to get a bump in their pay, you know, I was, I think I was more disappointed and disgusted by the way the FBI addressed it, you know, defended it publicly, criticized us for making the complaint, did a pretend investigation without any interest in actually finding out what the extent of the misconduct was. And during the OPR investigation, the Fonzo was actually promoted to a supervisory position, which is in violation of FBI policy

because any time an agent is under investigation by OPR, they are ineligible for any transfers or promotions. And despite the fact that he was, he was made a supervisor. At the end of the OPR investigation, if you want to call it that, when the reporter did the Freedom of Information request, he was able to discover that four agents were disciplined. One agent who signed the warrant was given a written reprimand. One agent who signed a false warrant was given a oral reprimand.

One agent who signed a warrant was given counseling, which I'm still not quite sure what that equates to. and Defonzo was given a six, I'm sorry, a two-week suspension with six months of probation, which he contested, challenged it, and had it overturned. So the end result for him, when all the dust settled, was a promotion to a supervisor. What do you think your career has taught you and going through this experience? as you look back on it now. Yeah, well, I don't, I don't want to consider myself a cynic,

but I'm more suspicious now than ever, because I saw the levels of duplicity and, and fabrication and cover-up. And, you know, it troubled me that, There were, there's, there's so many sort of like checks and balances in place, and yet none of them worked, you know, on multiple levels. Within the state, the chief state's attorney should have immediately recognized that we had done absolutely nothing wrong in this and that it was our duty and obligation to bring it to his attention. and yet he capitulated to the FBI at every turn and went so far as to publicly defend them. The FBI claimed that they did their preliminary investigation

and cleared all the agents, which was ludicrous based on the evidence that I presented to them. And then when they came in and did their OPR investigation, had no investigative curiosity as to how far this went, did not want to find out who actually changed the information, and walked away with the most minor discipline, if you can even refer to it as that. Now, bear in mind, in the FBI, Ian, if you had a government car to take home based on your assignments, like so, like anyone on a SWAT team had a take home car because all their equipment was in the car, or if you were on a

Criminal Reactive Squad where you could get called out in the middle of the night, you had a take-home car. If you had that take-home car and decided on your way home to stop by your kid's little league game and you got an offender bender in the parking lot, automatic 30-day suspension without pay, no questions asked. That's how they discipline, right? 30-day without pay. that's a 12th of your annual income that you've just forfeited for diverting from your way home to go stop by your kid's baseball game and getting into a fender bender. Not even your fault, Fender Bender. Somebody backs into you, right?

30 days, no pay. The recommended discipline for Defonzo was two weeks of no pay, which they rescinded. So when I look back on the way it was. handled the way it was addressed, the way it was adjudicated, I'm disgusted because it's hypocrisy at the highest level. You put more weight on somebody showing poor judgment with a vehicle than you do with affidavits that were submitted to the U.S. Attorney's Office and then signed before a federal judge. It's crazy. It's disgusting. You ever try reaching out to the judge, too, that signed it? No, absolutely not. It didn't come up in court or anything.

then. No, I think ultimately all of those seven cases that people were arrested. And then, of course, because they never prosecuted those cases, as soon as the people were arrested, they just would go into court and drop the federal charges. And I mean, that was the other irony was, why are we even pretending to get these federal warrants when you never prosecute the federal warrant anyway? You just drop the charges. But it was to get that coveted statistic. Tell everyone about your book. Sure. Yeah. So everything that we discussed, but in detail is in the book. Am I holding it up for something? Yeah, you get right here. Okay, good. All right. And we'll have a pop up on screen too. Perfect. Okay. And the link will be in the

bio. So the book is an e-book. It's an audio book. It's carried on Amazon. It's carried on Barnes & Noble. But selfishly, I'm going to make a pitch that you go to my website, which is thin blue liebook.com. Thin-blue lie, L-I-E book.com. That way, I am selling you the book. And if you want, I can dedicate it to someone or sign it or not. You just tell me when you order it through the website if that's something you would like. And I will personally put it into a box and bring it to my post office and mail it to you. So that's my pitch as far as that goes. Amazon does very well with their book sales and I get almost zero royalties from them.

So I would much prefer you go right through my website. It won't be any more expensive and you can get it signed and or dedicated. Yeah, we'll put your website link. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, we appreciate you coming out here today. Thank you. One of the thing I want to mention about the website, for those that have any curiosity about it, there are lots of photographs on the website of all the characters that I've mentioned, some additional bonus photographs of people that are part of the book or part of the story. And I also have put PDF files of all the affidavits. oftentimes people at a book talk will say, well, were these like exaggerations? Was it like a white lie or was it a real whopper?

And I'll say, you know what? You be the judge. You make the determination. You can look at the PDFs of the original affidavits and you can look at the ones that have been changed. And I've highlighted in yellow all the false information so you don't have to really study them. And then you can decide, yeah, I think these were like really aggrimed.

egregious falsifications, and now I understand why you were upset. Awesome. Well, thank you again. Thank you very much, Ian. I enjoyed this. Yeah, me too. Okay.