His takedown of the senior FBI officials who dismantled the national undercover squad McGowan had created and trained is particularly vicious. He doesn’t pull any punches when he calls out the people who have, in his view, gotten in the way of the job through the politics they play. McGowan gets seriously sideways with the FBI’s hierarchy several times during his time with the Bureau, including once when he was under investigation for stealing drugs from evidence. I couldn’t help it, I felt like a heel.Īs I mentioned at the beginning, this is the dark-chocolate version of the career memoir. With tears in their eyes, they thanked me for coming. Then, with my body recorder running, I approached Guglielmetti and his family and expressed my condolences. By now, he’s ingratiated himself into the family. Later in the same case, McGowan attends the funeral of his target’s father. It was for the first couple weeks but after that it became a headache-a real headache, in fact, because I have a severe allergic reaction to cigarette smoke… Most red-blooded heterosexual males would probably consider getting paid to spend time in a club in the company of attractive naked women a dream job. For instance, we get this at the start of an investigation into La Cosa Nostra in Rhode Island: Some of the more engaging parts of this narrative are when McGowan injects some of the less hair-raising, more personal aspects of being, essentially, an actor for whom bad reviews can be life-ending as well as career-ending. McGowan was involved, in one way or another, in over 50 undercover operations. “Unprecedented” because only 10 percent of FBI agents are trained for undercover work, only 25 percent of those ever work more than one case, and only 10 percent of those finish more than five cases. Rinse, repeat, and suddenly an unprecedented career has gone by at great speed. We’re introduced to the targeted bad guys, get an outline of how the investigation is supposed to go down, read episodes in which McGowan does especially edgy things-often at great risk-then watch the takedown and wrap-up. What it’s like is a series of undercover investigations into all manner of bad actors: mafias of various stripes, drug dealers and smugglers, corrupt politicians, union bosses and businessmen, and even bank robbers. Ghost is a collection of his war stories, the kind he might tell at the local pub to a rookie agent who asks after a drink or two, “What’s it really like out there?” McGowan put on a blue uniform himself in turn, graduated to the FBI in 1987, then to FBI SWAT (back then, not the separate unit it is today), then in 1990 ended up undercover working drug cases during the Colombian cocaine wars. Michael McGowan had a hardscrabble upbringing in the household of an alcoholic second-generation cop. Ghost: My Thirty Years as an FBI Undercover Agent is definitely a bowl of rocky-road ice cream. The chocolate variety is written by the person who believes wholeheartedly in the work but isn’t so wild about the organization. The vanilla version is from the person who truly, intensely believes in the organization to which they have given the last 30-odd years of their life. The career-end autobiography seems to come in two flavors. Ghost: My Thirty Years as an FBI Undercover Agent by Michael McGowan & Ralph Pezzullo is the explosive memoir of an FBI field operative who has worked more undercover cases than anyone in history.
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