“Are federal brokers and their informants catching unhealthy guys, or creating them?” That is the query on the coronary heart of Alphabet Boys, a brand new Western Sound/iHeartMedia podcast hosted by investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson, writer of The Terror Manufacturing facility: Contained in the FBI’s Manufactured Struggle on Terrorism.
Its first season, “Trojan Hearse,” centered on FBI efforts to infiltrate racial justice protests and monitor so-called black identification extremism in 2020. Its story is informed by the prism of informants and their marks in Colorado. Its important character is Mickey Windecker, a Punisher-obsessed self-styled robust man who drove round in a hearse and claimed to have fought with the Kurdish Peshmerga in opposition to the Islamic State.
Windecker turned a central determine in summer season 2020 activism round Denver whereas additionally serving as a paid informant for the FBI. He egged on activists to escalate violence and plot excessive acts, however the largest crime Windecker helped create/catch was convincing somebody to buy a gun for a felon—him.
The present’s second season, “Up In Arms,” began airing in June. It tells the story of Flaviu Georgescu, a Romanian-American man despatched to federal jail for brokering a $17 million arms take care of members of a Colombian rebel group on the U.S. terror checklist. One of many males Georgescu handled was a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, and the “deal” was really an entrapment scheme. However Georgescu himself had informed the CIA in regards to the deal and believed himself to be working for the intelligence company.
Whereas telling these particular tales nicely, the podcast highlights longstanding ugly practices in federal legislation enforcement, together with investigations involved largely with political exercise (of the kind allegedly confined to historical past books) and the way ways honed within the battle on terror are being utilized extra broadly.
