Speaker 1: All right, okay. It is August August twenty eight, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty apart from only four o two pm. A special
Speaker 1: agent Scott Dolphroom with a special agent Byron Mitchell chs
Speaker 1: for meat with Zebidias Hall. Thank you. You can hear
Speaker 1: the show I put in my front pocket, right, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I got it. It's late afternoon on a warm day
Speaker 1: in Denver, Colorado. It's drizzling outside, and Michael Adam Windeck
Speaker 1: or the Second or Mickey as he prefers, is sitting
Speaker 1: in the backseat of an FBI car. Two federal agents
Speaker 1: are with him, and one of them, FBI Special Agent
Speaker 1: Scott Dolshroom, has just handed Mickey a small hidden camera.
Speaker 1: Mickey turns the camera to his face, shooting from an
Speaker 1: unflattering angle below his chin. You can see Mickey's thin
Speaker 1: red mustach and scraggly goatee that's turning gray. He's propped
Speaker 1: his large sunglasses on his forehead and he's looking straight
Speaker 1: down into the tiny camera lens. Mickey is not ready
Speaker 1: for us close up video. Look good, yea, yeah, look canceled.
Speaker 1: Not as handsome as that kid. Mickey points to someone
Speaker 1: outside walking past the car, and then he opens the
Speaker 1: car door to leave. All right, so you guys. The
Speaker 1: FBI agents tell him to remember his instructions, which were
Speaker 1: given to him before the camera started recording. Yep, I
Speaker 1: got it, Thanks Mom, Thanks Dad. Mickey then walks to
Speaker 1: his car, the Silver Hearse, and places the FBI's camera
Speaker 1: on the pass in your seat, Mickey looks down toward
Speaker 1: the camera and addresses the FBI agents who are watching
Speaker 1: the live feed remotely. I got a song for you, guys.
Speaker 1: Mickey has good reason to feel patriotic in this moment.
Speaker 1: The FBI has signed him up as an informant or
Speaker 1: in the FBI's term of art, a confidential human source,
Speaker 1: and Mickey's getting paid thousands of dollars every few weeks
Speaker 1: cash and Mickey He's got a very specific assignment from
Speaker 1: his employers at the FBI, go after his new friend,
Speaker 1: the young black activist zeb Hall, and find a way
Speaker 1: to bring federal charges against him. As the song ends,
Speaker 1: Mickey again looks down toward the FBI camera. America. I'm
Speaker 1: Trevor Aaronson from Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. This is
Speaker 1: Alphabet Voice, Episode three, Black Identity Extremism, So to Come
Speaker 1: right out and say it. Mickey Windecker wasn't a badass
Speaker 1: ANTIFA warrior after all, as activists like Zeb Hall had thought.
Speaker 1: He was an informant, a snitch working for the FBI,
Speaker 1: which seems to go against everything Mickey claims to be right.
Speaker 1: Remember his little life rule. I have an old biker
Speaker 1: saying which is called fuck the three piece, the politicians,
Speaker 1: the press, and the lease. It's just the way it is.
Speaker 1: Fuck the three peas. Yeah, turns out that's bullshit, Fuck
Speaker 1: the two peas. Maybe because this Mickey guy, he's in
Speaker 1: bed with the police, and the cops are not only
Speaker 1: helping him, they're paying him. Today, the FBI has more
Speaker 1: than fifteen thousand registered informants, and in the summer of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, Mickey is one of them. That conversation you
Speaker 1: heard in the last episode when Mickey and Zeb we're
Speaker 1: talking about training at Zeb's apartment, Mickey, on his own initiative,
Speaker 1: had secretly recorded the whole thing and delivered it to
Speaker 1: the FBI, apparently in the hopes of getting hired on
Speaker 1: as an informant. I need your help in doing this,
Speaker 1: but obsously you're riding alone on fire. Well, here's the
Speaker 1: day you have and that's work from a route to
Speaker 1: is you have to decide where what you're going to do.
Speaker 1: You know, I can't see her and tell you, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you should totally like blow up rich neighborhoods to shoot
Speaker 1: the white people in the neighborhoods, you know, and burned
Speaker 1: the Federal courthouse down, and she like that that's something
Speaker 1: I can't tell you to do it. This recording ended
Speaker 1: up being Mickey's audition tape for the FBI. The official
Speaker 1: explanation for how Mickey Windecker became an informant can be
Speaker 1: found in FBI reports internal investigation reports focused on racial
Speaker 1: justice demonstrators in Denver. These reports aren't public, and the
Speaker 1: FBI didn't intend to have them out there. Maybe not. Ever,
Speaker 1: they were provided to me, along with Mickey's undercover recordings,
Speaker 1: by someone who was deeply concerned about the FBI surveillance
Speaker 1: and infiltration of black activist groups. According to the FBI's reports,
Speaker 1: Mickey had returned to Denver after being a volunteer fighter
Speaker 1: with the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military force in Iraq that
Speaker 1: was fighting the Islamic State or ISIS. Mickey told the
Speaker 1: FBI and I'm quoting here from the port that he
Speaker 1: found a sense of purpose and honor there and made
Speaker 1: an oath to always fight against threats, both foreign and domestic.
Speaker 1: War with ISIS Kurdish troops in a frontline battle with
Speaker 1: an enemy that took their land, Mickey was among dozens
Speaker 1: of Americans who volunteered to fight for the Peshmerga. With them,
Speaker 1: a half dozen Americans veterans of the war in Iraq
Speaker 1: back his volunteers. Once back in Denver, Mickey started participating
Speaker 1: in the protests following George Floyd's death, and he saw
Speaker 1: what was, in his view, a new domestic threat. Mickey
Speaker 1: said he witnessed protesters damaging property and threatening violence. So
Speaker 1: Mickey started providing information to police in the Denver area.
Speaker 1: Local police there then introduced him to the FBI as
Speaker 1: part of something known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force,
Speaker 1: which is a partnership between local cops and the FBI.
Speaker 1: Every major metropolitan region United States has a Joint Terrorism
Speaker 1: Task Force or JTTF. Mickey's motivation for being an informant was,
Speaker 1: and again I'm quoting from an internal FBI report, to
Speaker 1: fight terrorists, and Mickey believed that quote people who participate
Speaker 1: in violent civil unrest are terrorists. So Mickey the big
Speaker 1: bad isis Hunter just back from Iraq now has a
Speaker 1: new target, racial justice protesters, whom he considers terrorists. You
Speaker 1: want to know something, It wasn't just Mickey, Almost the
Speaker 1: entire FBI thought this way too. More after the break,
Speaker 1: FBI reports about Mickey's work as an informant referred to
Speaker 1: racial justice demonstrators as anti government extremists, which is one
Speaker 1: of the ideologies the FBI classifies as domestic terrorism. During
Speaker 1: the Trump administration, the FBI and the Justice Department came
Speaker 1: up with a new catch all category to define a
Speaker 1: type of domestic terrorism from black Americans. They called it
Speaker 1: black identity extremism, a new and rising form in the
Speaker 1: FBI's view of anti government extremism. It's a great question,
Speaker 1: what is a black identity extremist? I think we're all
Speaker 1: trying to figure that out. Nobody knows, in part because
Speaker 1: it doesn't exist. This is racial justice activist Malkia Devitch Surrill,
Speaker 1: speaking on the radio and television program Democracy Now during
Speaker 1: the first year of the Trump administration. It's a term
Speaker 1: fabricated by the FBI, constructed, and it has a history,
Speaker 1: I mean for a very long time, for many decades
Speaker 1: in this country, probably centuries, the FBI has criminalized black descent.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, the FBI's counter Terrorism Division released a
Speaker 1: twelve page intelligence report that claimed black identity extremists we're
Speaker 1: motivated by police brutality to target law enforcement officers with
Speaker 1: violence and even murder. The FBI's theory was that racial
Speaker 1: justice activists had become radicalized following a police officer's fatal
Speaker 1: shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: which sparked weeks of violent clashes between protesters and police
Speaker 1: and brought international attention to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Speaker 1: Using the same tactical get up and the same weapon,
Speaker 1: where we've come to expect an urban warfare in Iraq
Speaker 1: and Afghanistan, police and Ferguson, Missouri once again had to
Speaker 1: put down and head off violence in the street. The
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen FBI report, inspired by the events in Ferguson,
Speaker 1: says quote black identity extremist perceptions of police brutality against
Speaker 1: African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated retaliatory lethal violence
Speaker 1: against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification
Speaker 1: for such violence. The FBI's evidence for this theory of
Speaker 1: rising black political violence it was pretty thin, resting on
Speaker 1: a series of a half dozen crimes committed by black
Speaker 1: Americans over a three year period that had no apparent
Speaker 1: connection with one another and no unifying political ideology. It
Speaker 1: talks about black activism against police violence and police racism,
Speaker 1: even though it says purported violence as if they somehow
Speaker 1: it isn't clear that that's a real thing, was a
Speaker 1: sign of somebody being a black identity extremist. This is
Speaker 1: Michael German, a former FBI undercover agent. German regularly testifies
Speaker 1: before Congress. But FBI policies and practices, and what you
Speaker 1: saw in that report was six incidents of crimes that
Speaker 1: were unrelated to one another over a three year period.
Speaker 1: These six people didn't know each other, the crimes weren't related.
Speaker 1: There was nothing similar about them but their black identity.
Speaker 1: And that's why they called it a black identity movement.
Speaker 1: That it was assuming that any black activist who was
Speaker 1: protesting police violence and police racism was part of a
Speaker 1: violent movement to overthrow the government or to kill police again.
Speaker 1: This report was released just a few years before the
Speaker 1: George Floyd protests in twenty twenty. The revelation that the
Speaker 1: FBI had come up with a black identity extremism category
Speaker 1: for domestic terrorism was met with widespread criticism and the
Speaker 1: news media and on Capitol Hill, particularly given that Americans
Speaker 1: at the time were seeing increasing violence from white supremacists
Speaker 1: and other far right groups. Many have also noted the
Speaker 1: FBI memo was dated August third, only a few days
Speaker 1: before the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where
Speaker 1: white supremacist Ku Klux Klan members and neo Nazis killed
Speaker 1: an anti racist protester, Heather Higher and injured dozens more.
Speaker 1: In response to the controversy that they had created, the
Speaker 1: FBI came up with the term racially motivated violent extremism,
Speaker 1: bundling to into a single category violence from both white
Speaker 1: supremacists and so called black identity extremists. This new category
Speaker 1: combines incidents involving white supremacists with a new category that
Speaker 1: we've discussed before, called black identity extremists, and so that's
Speaker 1: really problematic to me. In twenty nineteen, Senator Corey Booker
Speaker 1: of New Jersey question the FBI Director Christopher Ray about this,
Speaker 1: When did the FBI eliminate the white supremacist category in
Speaker 1: favor of that racially motivated violent extremism category. One of
Speaker 1: the points that we've tried to emphasize to our folks
Speaker 1: across all of these vectors is that we only investigate violence.
Speaker 1: We don't investigate extremism. We don't investigate ideology, we don't
Speaker 1: investigate rhetoric. It doesn't matter how repugnant, how abhorrent, or
Speaker 1: whatever it is. And so what we have tried to
Speaker 1: do by our recategorization is make clear that it's about
Speaker 1: the violence, not about the igloogy. Director Ray then disclosed
Speaker 1: for the first time that the FBI had abandoned the
Speaker 1: term black identity extremism. Forgive me, this is news to me.
Speaker 1: So you do you no longer use the black identity extremism.
Speaker 1: That's no more. That's great, that's great news. So nobody
Speaker 1: is being surveiled or investigated on the black at any extremism.
Speaker 1: We don't use We don't use that terminology anymore. We
Speaker 1: don't use that terminology anymore, Ray said, But he didn't
Speaker 1: answer the other part of Senator Booker's question, were people
Speaker 1: still being surveiled and investigated is suspected of being black
Speaker 1: identity extremists? And the answer to that question was and
Speaker 1: is yes. The work of Mickey Windecker is perhaps the
Speaker 1: clearest example of this type of investigation by the FBI.
Speaker 1: Back in Denver, the FBI had no reason to suspect
Speaker 1: that racial justice activists were ready to step over the
Speaker 1: line toward political violence and terrorism, but the FBI, using Mickey,
Speaker 1: started infiltrating these groups anyway, answered up dropping not so
Speaker 1: subtle hints to anyone willing to listen. Hey, do you
Speaker 1: want to get involved in violence? Let me know. I'm
Speaker 1: your guy, Like this from Mickey in Denver. I don't
Speaker 1: want it to be worried. I'm pressure you, like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you should totally. You know, blow up the fucking governor's house.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's if it's what you want to do,
Speaker 1: then you know, I have to make sure that's what
Speaker 1: you want to do. It sounds absurd, right, one of
Speaker 1: these racial justice protesters is going to blow up the
Speaker 1: governor's mansion. But to the FBI, this wasn't absurd. It
Speaker 1: seemed possible. It seemed real. That's because inside the FBI,
Speaker 1: agents all the way to the top saw the racial
Speaker 1: justice protests as an other nine eleven waiting to happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another nine eleven. In the summer of twenty twenty, as
Speaker 1: racial justice demonstrations broke out around the country, top officials
Speaker 1: at the FBI in Washington, DC saw the seeds of terrorism.
Speaker 1: David Bowditch, the FBI's deputy director, the second in command,
Speaker 1: sent an internal memo to his top aids that compared
Speaker 1: these demonstrations to the nine eleven terrorist attacks. When nine
Speaker 1: eleven occurred, our folks did not quibble, but whether there
Speaker 1: was danger or ahead for them, Bautis wrote, they ran
Speaker 1: head on into peril. In the memo, Bowditch described the
Speaker 1: racial justice demonstrations throughout the country as a national crisis
Speaker 1: whose violent protesters were highly organized. That the FBI would
Speaker 1: see the world and these protests through a prism of
Speaker 1: terrorism is perhaps understandable. In context. The nine eleven attacks
Speaker 1: transformed the FBI, and counter terrorism became the agency's top priority.
Speaker 1: There's a concept of cognitive bias known as the law
Speaker 1: of the instrument or Maslow's hammer, after the famous American
Speaker 1: psychologist Abraham Maslow. He wrote in nineteen sixty six, I
Speaker 1: suppose it is tempting if the only tool you have
Speaker 1: is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were
Speaker 1: a nail. So you have this agency full of hammers,
Speaker 1: and you have the guy at the very top, President Trump,
Speaker 1: almost every day in speeches and on Fox News, saying
Speaker 1: that there are nails all over the country just waiting
Speaker 1: to be hammered. The violence and vandalism is being led
Speaker 1: by Antifa and other radical left wing groups. And it
Speaker 1: was also frustrating for me to see, how ably, usually
Speaker 1: that's not a term that you use when you're referencing
Speaker 1: former President Trump. This is former FBI agent Michael German again.
Speaker 1: But how ably he was able to make this boogeyman
Speaker 1: out of Antifa, you know, this concept, and how clever
Speaker 1: it was that he wasn't using the full term anti fascists. Right,
Speaker 1: If you're saying that your enemy is anti fascism, that
Speaker 1: says a lot about you, right. But by using this
Speaker 1: handle Antifa when really what he was focused on was
Speaker 1: the Black Lives Matter rallies, right that it was like, okay,
Speaker 1: I can't say black lives matter as a problem but
Speaker 1: I think it was very clever the way they were
Speaker 1: able to use that term to justify a much more
Speaker 1: violent law enforcement response amid this Antifa scare. Even what
Speaker 1: we knew publicly at the time about the federal government's
Speaker 1: response to the Black Lives Matter movement was shocking. The
Speaker 1: Justice Department charged hundreds of people with felonies and misdemeanors
Speaker 1: for their roles in First Amendment protected demonstrations. CBS News
Speaker 1: has confirmed Attorney General Bill Barr is encouraging US attorney's
Speaker 1: nationwide to seek federal charges against violent protesters, even when
Speaker 1: state charges could apply. The Department of Homeland Security deployed
Speaker 1: agents dressed in military style uniforms and even abducted some
Speaker 1: demonstrators off the streets. Since their arrival, Federal agents wearing
Speaker 1: military style gear and sometimes driving unmarked bands of unleashed
Speaker 1: tear gas into crowds, rounded up and detained protesters, and
Speaker 1: even shot one man in the head with a non
Speaker 1: lethal round, causing serious injury. There is no information tonight
Speaker 1: on how National Guard plans were used to monitor Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter protests, and military spy planes were deployed above
Speaker 1: cities nationwide to monitor protesters, including one over a suburb
Speaker 1: just outside of Sacramento. But throughout this period it was
Speaker 1: unclear how exactly the FBI, the nation's most powerful and
Speaker 1: influential law enforcement agency, was responding to the racial justice demonstrations.
Speaker 1: By the time the racial justice demonstrations broke out nationwide
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, the FBI, thanks to the War on Terror,
Speaker 1: had recruited an army of informants and a warrantless mass
Speaker 1: surveillance apparatus that could monitor phone calls and digital communications
Speaker 1: and footprints. The FBI also created a new type of
Speaker 1: investigation called an assessment, that did not require what's known
Speaker 1: as a criminal predicate, which basically just means a reasonable
Speaker 1: suspicion that a crime is occurring. With an assessment, an
Speaker 1: FBI agent can open an investigation on just about anyone
Speaker 1: for just about any reason. As long as the agent
Speaker 1: asserts their own impression that what they're doing is designed
Speaker 1: to protect the national security or solve crime, they're good
Speaker 1: to go again. Michael German, the former FBI agent, And
Speaker 1: with these investigations, a lot of very intrusive tools are authorized,
Speaker 1: including physical surveillance and use of grand jury subpoenas to
Speaker 1: get subscribe or information, but most alarm to me recruiting
Speaker 1: and tasking informants. And so here's the FBI in the
Speaker 1: summer of twenty twenty, seeing racial justice demonstrations nationwide inside
Speaker 1: FBI headquarters in Washington. Higher ups believe some of these
Speaker 1: demonstrators could be linked to a domestic extremist ideology they've
Speaker 1: termed black identity extremism, or as federal agents now prefer
Speaker 1: to say, publicly racially motivated violent extremism. All these things
Speaker 1: seem to create a situation where the FBI could see
Speaker 1: the protests not as First Amendment protected activity, but as
Speaker 1: threats to national security. And that's when I heard about
Speaker 1: Mickey Windecker, his silver hearse, his mountain of guns, and
Speaker 1: its hidden camera more after the break. So the FBI
Speaker 1: reports concerning Mickey Windecker's work as an informant raise a
Speaker 1: lot of questions and concerns. It's clear from these reports
Speaker 1: that FBI agents did not have a predicate or a
Speaker 1: reasonable suspicion that any crime was occurring, nothing to justify
Speaker 1: opening an investigation of any particular person in the Denver area. Instead,
Speaker 1: all the FBI had from Mickey's information was that there
Speaker 1: were protests in Denver and some of these had become
Speaker 1: violent and destructive. This wasn't exactly proprietary information, of course.
Speaker 1: The local news in Denver was reporting on this nearly
Speaker 1: every day during the summer of twenty twenty. But each
Speaker 1: of the last four days has turned into this. Tear gas,
Speaker 1: pepper rounce, rocks and bottles in the air, smashed glass fires.
Speaker 1: But that information that there were protests and some were
Speaker 1: violent seemed to be enough for the FBI to justify
Speaker 1: signing up Mickey as an informant and secretly placing him
Speaker 1: inside Denver's racial justice movement. The FBI didn't have any
Speaker 1: evidence to suggest someone specific was committing violence or even
Speaker 1: was about to. Really, the only thing they had was ideology.
Speaker 1: The FBI was concerned that racial justice protesters were using
Speaker 1: heated rhetoric. Some of this talk suggesting violence, sure, but
Speaker 1: nonetheless protected by the First Amendment. Among the speakers at
Speaker 1: the Denver protests was Zebedias Hall or zeb, who Mickey
Speaker 1: told agents had made statements such as we need to
Speaker 1: burn this motherfucker down and we need to get explosives.
Speaker 1: According to the FBI's internal reports. But this wasn't secret
Speaker 1: squirrel information either. Zeb was known to say such things
Speaker 1: in front of large crowds, and many of his acid
Speaker 1: tongue speeches were publicly live streamed for anyone to watch,
Speaker 1: like this one, which you can go watch on YouTube
Speaker 1: right now if you want. I don't give a fuck
Speaker 1: about the cops, zep says, standing on the steps of
Speaker 1: the Colorado State Capital, because fuck them. That's why. By
Speaker 1: signing up Mickey as an informant and opening up an
Speaker 1: investigation of Denver's racial justice protests without a clear purpose,
Speaker 1: the FBI creates a perverse incentive structure for Mickey. Here's
Speaker 1: Michael German, the former FBI agent. My way of looking
Speaker 1: at it is I would rather have an FBI undercover
Speaker 1: agent in there who at least knows what the law is,
Speaker 1: and not that agents don't violate the law, but rather
Speaker 1: than an informant whose reliability is much lower, whose incentives
Speaker 1: are very different. Right, if Mickey wants to keep getting
Speaker 1: paid by the FBI, he needs to build a criminal case,
Speaker 1: no matter what it takes. They're trying to get paid,
Speaker 1: and they get paid you by proving a case. And
Speaker 1: if they don't prove if they come in and say, hey,
Speaker 1: I was part of this protest movement and I didn't
Speaker 1: see any crime, they don't stay on the payroll, all right,
Speaker 1: So their incentive is to manufacture crime. This is a
Speaker 1: systemic problem for the FBI. Informants who are working for
Speaker 1: money or for leniency on criminal charges often create or
Speaker 1: encourage criminal conduct. They have every incentive to do so.
Speaker 1: I've asked a lot of FBI agents about this issue
Speaker 1: in the past, and most have offered to me the
Speaker 1: same defense. There's no other way to catch the bad guys.
Speaker 1: The FBI needs these informants. In fact, there's an FBI
Speaker 1: expression about informants. If you want to catch the devil,
Speaker 1: you have to go to hell. In other words, informants
Speaker 1: can't be choir boys. If you're going to infiltrate a
Speaker 1: group of criminals, you need your own criminal, someone who
Speaker 1: can play the part and fit seamlessly into the organization.
Speaker 1: That's the business that the FBI is in, employing bad
Speaker 1: guys to catch other bad guys. As a result, many,
Speaker 1: if not most, of the FBI's fifteen thousand informants are
Speaker 1: people with criminal records, sketchy pass and plenty of reasons
Speaker 1: not to be viewed is credible. The FBI knows this,
Speaker 1: of course, and as a result, informants are often subjected
Speaker 1: to lie detector tests to make sure they are not
Speaker 1: deceiving federal agents. The FBI also has informants secretly record
Speaker 1: conversations so that the government's criminal prosecution won't rest entirely
Speaker 1: on the unreliable words of an unscrupulous informant. But while
Speaker 1: informants are assets for the FBI, they're also ongoing liabilities. Informants,
Speaker 1: incentivized by thousands of dollars in cash payments, have been
Speaker 1: known to spend months with targets before any recordings begin,
Speaker 1: essentially grooming them and resulting in questions of entrapment much
Speaker 1: later at trial. In addition, the FBI has to allow
Speaker 1: these informants to commit crimes while in the FBI payroll. Remember,
Speaker 1: a criminal's got to do criminal things right. During a
Speaker 1: single four year period from twenty eleven to twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: the FBI permitted informants to violate the law more than
Speaker 1: twenty thousand times. And that's just the number of times
Speaker 1: the FBI has explicitly permitted informants to commit crimes presumably
Speaker 1: in order to maintain their covers or further an investigation.
Speaker 1: What's not calculated and reported by the FBI is a
Speaker 1: number of times they turn a blind eye to informants
Speaker 1: who break the law without permission. At this point, you
Speaker 1: might be asking, is there a limit? Are some informants
Speaker 1: crimes so awful they shouldn't be enlisted as FBI informants?
Speaker 1: Or maybe you're asking, do some informants have such a
Speaker 1: long history of deception that they just can't be trusted
Speaker 1: not to lie to FBI agents. Judging by Mickey Windecker's
Speaker 1: FBI file, the answer is no, there are no limits.
Speaker 1: When they signed up Mickey as an informant, FBI agents
Speaker 1: in Denver knew he had a rap sheet arrest in Colorado, Nevada, Texas,
Speaker 1: and Florida. He'd been arrested for assault, sexual assault, failing
Speaker 1: to register as a sex offender, menacing, an unlawful possession
Speaker 1: of a weapon, among other charges. The FBI knew about
Speaker 1: these charges from doing a background check, a background check
Speaker 1: that FBI agents included in their files related to Mickey's
Speaker 1: work as an informant. I don't know if the FBI
Speaker 1: pulled and reviewed the actual police and court files to
Speaker 1: get the gory details about Mickey's arrest. But I did,
Speaker 1: and I also found some recordings of Mickey talking about
Speaker 1: some of these incidents. In the sexual assault case, Mickey
Speaker 1: had a sexual relationship with a minor. Mickey actually talks
Speaker 1: about this in one of the videos I found. And
Speaker 1: while I was nineteen years old, I decided that there
Speaker 1: was a place called Roll of Rama. I think that's
Speaker 1: the name of the place. I met this girl. She
Speaker 1: kind of seem mature at the time, So I went
Speaker 1: to the Roll of rink and I met her and
Speaker 1: she was talking. She's like, hey, here's my numbers, like
Speaker 1: you should co hang out and all that. I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, cool. Mickey said he didn't know the girl
Speaker 1: was under age when they had sex, and for the record, well,
Speaker 1: Mickey claimed he was nineteen years old when this incident occurred.
Speaker 1: Court record show he was twenty and my dad had
Speaker 1: a friend who was an investigator and pulled up her
Speaker 1: name and it turned out that she was fourteen actually
Speaker 1: get a right term fifteen. And when my dad let
Speaker 1: me know, can not come front of me, but was like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is really what's going on. I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: we're done. So I called her up on my house phone.
Speaker 1: I was like, hey, I can't up with you no more.
Speaker 1: I don't want to be around you because you're not
Speaker 1: a aage so I cut her off. Mickey was able
Speaker 1: to plead the case down to third degree sexual assault,
Speaker 1: a misdemeanor. Several people have filed restraining orders against Mickey,
Speaker 1: including a man I found through my reporting. He contacted
Speaker 1: me and said that he was hired by Vicky to
Speaker 1: break into my home. This guy asked me not to
Speaker 1: use his name at a fear of retribution from Mickey.
Speaker 1: He described how he was going through a child custody
Speaker 1: battle with a woman named VICKI and to do some
Speaker 1: some level of surveillance and tap my phones and put
Speaker 1: cameras in my house. Just a tremendous amount of craziness.
Speaker 1: So we did a quick Google search and obviously find
Speaker 1: out that you know, this person had this background, and
Speaker 1: I immediately contacted the police and the judge. But what's
Speaker 1: also troubling in Mickey's court files is this history of
Speaker 1: allegedly breaking the law while also pretending to be a
Speaker 1: police officer. In one example, he allegedly showed someone a
Speaker 1: fake police badge while asking questions. In another Mickey stuck
Speaker 1: a gun in someone's face and claimed to be a
Speaker 1: police officer looking for a suspect. That incident resulted in
Speaker 1: a felony conviction, and Mickey served two years in a
Speaker 1: Colorado prison as a result in two thousand and two
Speaker 1: and two thousand and three. And I think that's where
Speaker 1: Mickey learned the value of being a snitch. While in prison,
Speaker 1: he was approached about killing someone, but instead of committing
Speaker 1: the murder for hire, Mickey went to the cops became
Speaker 1: a prison informant, helping to win convictions against the people
Speaker 1: who tried to hire him. That's the earliest example I
Speaker 1: could find in records of Mickey working as an informant.
Speaker 1: Generally speaking, criminals work as informants primarily for two reasons,
Speaker 1: either to make money or to receive leniency falling an arrest. Undoubtedly,
Speaker 1: Mickey was motivated at various times by both those reasons,
Speaker 1: but for him, there appears to be an even deeper
Speaker 1: psychological impulse. Mickey saw himself as an anti hero, someone
Speaker 1: who operates in the gray areas of the law, delivering
Speaker 1: his own brand of justice. Mickey wore a chain around
Speaker 1: his neck, and hanging from that chain was a medallion
Speaker 1: of the logo for the Punisher, a vigilante from the
Speaker 1: Marvel Comics universe who fights crime with an obscene level
Speaker 1: of violence. He literally thought he was the Punisher. Anything
Speaker 1: you see the punish row who was on it, and
Speaker 1: he would always wear the punish or necklace. Even when
Speaker 1: he took a shower or a bath. Never came off,
Speaker 1: just like a big kid in the worst way, in
Speaker 1: the worst way. It's awful. That's in the next episode.
Speaker 1: This is Trojan Hearse, Season one of Alphabet Boys. Alphabet
Speaker 1: Boys is a production of Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 1: The show is reported, written and hosted by me, Trevor Aaronson.
Speaker 1: For more information about the series or to drop us
Speaker 1: a tip, head to our website Alphabet Boys dot xyc.
Speaker 1: You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram at Trevor Aaronson.
Speaker 1: We believe this story is important and could result in
Speaker 1: changes to FBI oversight and public policy. But to have
Speaker 1: an impact, people need to hear the story, so we
Speaker 1: need your help. First, tell your friends about the show.
Speaker 1: Personal recommendations are the best recommendations. Second, spread the word
Speaker 1: on social media. At alphabet boys dot xyz, you'll find
Speaker 1: FBI undercover recordings and secret documents. You can share stuff
Speaker 1: the government never wanted public. Third help us ride the
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Speaker 1: podcast app that helps other people find us, and thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.