An under cover cop or federal agent, is not going to be the guy at the end of the bar who looks like he wants to be left alone, and says nothing.
They will be a talkative person, and a listener, over hearing conversations and pretending to be drunk. Eventually you give up information without realizing. Watch out for pretend, talkative, drunks.
And people who never just wear a T-shirt, even when it is very hot.
It is true. Casinos are patrolled by state police. And on the reservations, tribal police.
They typically wear suits. We actually call them “The Suits”. Other times they might wear jeans, t-shirts, and puffy vests. They gotta wear layers to conceal their weapons.
There was a club back in my hometown that was famous for hard house and ecstasy. People who didn’t do anything more than drinking, like myself, still went there occasionally. There was a guy, always the same guy, who would go around to people and loudly ask them if they know where he can get some “drugs”. He always used that exact word. It was so obvious that he didn’t want any drugs and he didn’t persist in questioning after being told no. He simply moved on to the next guy.
He seemed to go out of his way to make it obvious. I always wondered what the point was. Was he working for the police to make it look like they were trying to clamp down, but the police were in on it? I should note that this town, Durban, is not exactly corruption free.
Are they undercover?
I’ve mentioned before that, when I was waiting for my job interview to start, the security guard explained to me — on his own initiative, not because I’d asked — that, if you wanted to steal stuff from the building, you could defeat the locks and scanners and so on with the simple method he quickly spelled out.
So, okay, he wasn’t undercover; he was, quite openly, working security there. But: was he part of a test for the interviewees? Like, if I’m dumb enough to then partner up with him, I don’t get the job? Or: if I don’t report him to the interviewer, I don’t get the job? Or: is he just some guy who says things for his own reasons?
I never did find out.
I happened to know a police officer who worked undercover for a while and he was nothing like that at all. He was kind of guy who looked like he wanted to be left alone, but he would talk to people if they started the conversation. We never talked about his work, so I have no idea how successful he was or wasn’t.
I was a Burning Man attendee for 10 years with a camp that ran a bar and music stage. Every year we would get approached by undercover LEOs asking for drugs and booze without an ID. I’d just answer, “Yes, you need an ID for beer” and “No, I don’t know where you can get drugs.” Emphatic answers shut them down pretty quickly and they’d move on.
I visit the offshoot of Burning Man, Afrika Burn occasionally. We usually run a bar and music stage, though my friends and I have a new theme every year.
Due to social dynamics in this country, I’d not divulge any information to a Black person ask8ng about drugs, even knowing full well that my colleagues are drying out liquid ketamine backstage to make it snortable.
I have been arrested on drug charges by plainsclothes officers in a totally different context, but as the Flying Burrito Brothers suggest: “never carry more than you can eat”. I ate.
ETA, as I can’t actually edit… I realise that that may come across as racist, but it was not intended as such. Afrika Burn is multicultural, but seriously dominated by rich white people, over 90% - which in no way reflects the actual demographics of our country.
Same here. I worked in Budapest in the late 90s/early 00s at an English language business paper and would hang out with other journos, so we’d get invited to parties at the Ambassador’s place, and our editor-in-chief would host parties with journalists, diplomats, business people, artists, etc. There were interesting folks in the crowd. Very strange and a bit like the movies. Heck, I had someone ask me if I was a spook at my local hangout, which, if you knew me in person, seems rather unlikely (though at the time my travel resume was odd, with trips to Kosovo, Moscow, Uzbekistan and being based in Budapest.) Obviously, I never confirmed whether any of these people were spies, because how could I? But I’m willing to bet there were at least a couple in that crowd.
Whenever I hear the term “narc” I think of this song.
I was once in a pub after work and the pair of sisters at the next table started chatting to us. They were celebrating as one had just been promoted to Sergeant and was leaving the Vice Squad. She’d spent the previous 2 years hanging around on street corners in Manchester to entrap kerb crawlers. (a kerb crawler is a person driving around looking for sex with prostitutes. The police here often try to crack down on them rather than the girls) She had a few tales to tell. But so did her sister who had moved to London to be a model. And a NSFW model at that. She showed us a few pics on her agency website via her phone and her sister showed us her new warrant card (police ID) so I know they weren’t winding us up. I just thought it was odd that they both worked at opposite ends and opposite sides of the sex worker industry.
A couple of years later I discovered that my next door neighbour also worked for the Vice Squad doing much the same in London. I’d known her for about 5 years and she’d always been cagey about what she did for a living. Another friend who was police told me, I didn’t bump into her while she was working before you ask!
Back in the 1960s my neighbor worked for the BATF. He had lots of fun tales. Like when they busted a bar for having a topless dancer. He said they watched for quite a while to make sure they had enough evidence. Another time I was walking outside and he asked me if I like Coors Beer. You could not buy it east of the Mississippi at the time. He walked over to an old van (undercover unit) filled with cases of Coors and gave me one. He said they busted a huge distribution center and miscounted by 50 cases.I’m thinking, gee, some guys are rotting in jail and I’m drinking their illegal beer!
just a remarkable fact: … In LatAm, a “narco” (narc) … is a drug dealer/pusher … so it seems there are completely different meanings for the same word …
Was the distribution center in Texarkana?
The root of both is narcotics. They are abbreviating related but similar things.
Back in the 1970’s I went to a Halloween party dressed as a hippie and my shtick was that I was a drug dealer. I had a small chunk of fudge wrapped in tinfoil and would slice off small gram-sized chunks when asked. There was one guy, not in a costume but dressed casually, who took a worrying interest, asking me what else I could get and trying to get me to go outside and talk business. Eventually I had to tell him to fuck off and stop bothering me, it was just a Halloween party.
It was about a year later that I learned that the guy was a cop, a relative of the couple hosting the party, but he wasn’t a narc because the town didn’t have a narcotics department. He was just looking to make a bust.
Sort of the opposite – I read a newspaper article once about two guys who were arrested on Halloween. They had conducted a drug deal right in front of a uniformed police officer. They apparently believed he was just a guy in a costume.
I am unable to find a copy, but there was an early Doonesbury strip in which Zonker is sitting in a bar. A guy sporting a crewcut and a headband walks up to him and says something like “Hey man, what’s it like being a drugged out hippie in this town?” Zonker replies, “Not bad; what’s it like being an undercover cop?”
A couple of anecdotes where a narc got away with it.
In the mid-80s my ex-wife, before we met, worked as wait staff at a brew pub. That place was wild and the staff liked to party on the beer but also a fair amount of coke. It was also suspected that money we being embezzled. The ex wasn’t stealing but was definitely guilty of the coke part. The owner hired a new employee who was really an investigator. My ex got fired along with half of the staff and they never suspected.
In 1981 my high school had a couple of Mod Squad/21 Jump Street cops pretending to be students. They didn’t bother with the braniac kids in my classes but there ended up being a couple of arrests. My history teacher had one of them in one of his other classes and he claimed after the fact to have been suspicious.
My family was convinced that I was CIA. Whenever the feds do a serious background check for a TS clearance, they visit your family and ask all manner of questions. Two guys in black suits showed up at my sister’s house and interviewed her, and from then on she could not be convinced that I was just a support flunky at U.S. embassies. Or. . .was I? ::waggles eyebrows::