You’re sitting in a room with some of the
most ruthless gangsters of your era. You’re undercover, and your mission is to
infiltrate this gang and one-by-one bring them all down. This is a secret not even your own family
knows. If these guys even get a whiff that you might
not be a legitimate hardened criminal they won’t just kill you, they’ll torture you
first. And so when you’re offered hard drugs, you
hoover up that stuff like you’ve been doing it for years. When you witness beatings or even murder,
you act unfazed, maybe even glad. Your performance is worthy of an Oscar. But living this double life starts to transform
you. You become addicted to the very drugs you’re
trying to take off the streets. You feel like you’re almost becoming like
them. This has been the reality for some undercover
cops. The scene we’ve just described isn’t too
different from something that happened to perhaps one of the better known undercover
cops who infiltrated a gang in the USA in the 1970s. Her name is Kim Wozencraft, and she ended
up writing a book about her ordeal which later became a hit movie called, “Rush.” When she was 21-years old she wanted a new
direction in life, telling her friends she was bored of her job as a restaurant manager. She wanted some excitement, and so she decided
to apply for a job working as a police officer. This was at a time when the USA’s War on
Drugs had just been set in motion, and after landing the job Wozencraft found herself working
as an undercover narcotics officer. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune she
said she’d only been on the force a few weeks when she started doing this. If you never read her book or saw the movie,
you won’t know that to go undercover and buy drugs she actually did her best to look
the part. She and her partner, who was also undercover,
started to take drugs so as not to look suspicious. She said in that interview, “That`s the
way you prove you`re not a cop.” So she was method acting, but taking hard
drugs takes a toll on someone. Both she and the other cop, who became her
lover, soon got addicted. He actually almost died of an overdose while
on the job. Things got so crazy they even faked a drug
case and swore an oath in court to get a conviction. Their lives were spiraling out of control. Whose side were they on? They were embedded in the drug scene, but
were now in the same position as some of the people they were trying to lock-up. The FBI soon figured out that these two cops
had lost the plot and it was discovered that they had lied in court to get a conviction. That conviction was overturned and the pair
of drug addicts were both convicted of perjury. She ended up doing 18 months in prison and
he got three years. She got straight in prison and after her release
she wrote that book. She has always admitted that she did wrong,
but she feels she shouldn’t have been put in that position in the first place. This is what she told the Chicago Tribune:
“I was used. I was a pawn in someone else's larger plan.” During our research for this show we watched
a podcast in which a British man named Shaun Attwood was interviewed. You might have seen the show we did on him
which details his life, from being a wealthy stockbroker to becoming a drug kingpin after
he moved to the United States. In the interview, Attwood talks about a man
he met in prison who had worked in the U.S. military and then he became an undercover
cop. Unfortunately, Attwood doesn’t give his
full name in that interview, but he says this guy got addicted to crystal meth while on
the job, and worse, he ended up killing someone. We just can’t find any more information
about this story, but if you believe Attwood, that’s another person that went undercover
and was enveloped by criminality and addiction. We found another case and this time the undercover
cop was working in the UK. His name is Robert Carrol and in 2009 he started
pretending to be a drug user so he might take some gangsters down. He’d been given the job of posing as a drug
user and told to identify drug dealers in one of Manchester’s areas notorious for
drugs and crime. Except he too got addicted to the drugs he
was trying to take off the streets, but this time the drug was heroin. The thing was, in order to buy the drugs and
look like he was the real deal, at times he had to test the drugs. This likely isn’t always the case when buying
stuff on the streets, but there might come a time that it happens and if you don’t
look the part, well, you are messing with very dangerous people. The cop in this case later sued Manchester
police for negligence related to making him do that job and what happened to him after. Prior to that, the cop had been taken off
undercover duties but by this time he was already a heroin addict- which was discovered
after he tried to exchange some of his police equipment for drugs. This is what the judge said about his case:
“There was a written basis of plea, which stated that, while he was dependent on heroin,
he swapped his baton and his CS gas for drugs, and also while on duty he absented himself
from his work when he went to his co-defendant’s house in an attempt to secure heroin.” You might wonder how many bags of “brown”
you get for some pepper spray and a bat. He was subsequently imprisoned. Then there’s the story of a British cop
who went undercover but didn’t become a drug addict while he was buying drugs from
some of the UK’s most dangerous gangs. His name is Neil Woods. We saw an interview with him, and he said
he now suffers from PTSD. Some of the things he went through sound harrowing. This man lived a double life for over a decade,
with one life at home in a quiet town and the other dealing with extremely violent gangs. Woods left the force and now speaks openly
about why he believes the war on drugs doesn’t work. He said that while he helped to bring some
big criminals down, after all his efforts there were more drugs on the streets and the
gangs just evolved. He said that partly thanks to him, gangs became
very suspicious of undercover cops. They started to use more extreme violence
to urge others not to dare to get on their wrong side. They also started employing children, because
there was no way kids were working with the police. This is how Woods described a day on the job
to the Independent newspaper. That day he went to buy some heroin from a
well-known dealer: “He answered the door and held a samurai
sword to my throat and accused me of being part of the DS (drug squad). Spit was flying out of his mouth as he was
growling and I could feel the cold steel on my throat and I thought that was it. I thought he would murder me.” It turned out that this man was actually just
joking with Woods, and he didn’t really think he was undercover. Woods also explained how he managed to evade
detection for so many years: He said: “For behavior you have to know
your commodity. You have to be a real geek with knowing how
people behave and you have to know it even more than the people on the ground. Then it’s just the art of deception and
staying attuned to the body language of other people and detecting the moment someone is
lying.” He was once nearly found out, though, and
that’s because during one meeting a member of a gang accused him of having a video camera
hidden in his clothing. That gang member was very much correct, but
Woods said he just started getting really angry at the guy for saying such a thing. He said you don’t turn your back at wolves
when they snarl at you; you look them in the eye and growl yourself. It worked for Woods that time, but in an interview
he said he was well aware that he was close to possibly losing his life. That time he managed to get away from the
guys, but it seems they then realized he really did have a camera on him. Woods heard the car screech as he was walking
away. He then ran and he got away. Intelligence reports later revealed that there
was a gun in that car. Woods told the Independent, “I was lucky. Lots of times I was lucky.” Another story he told is kind of darkly humorous. It involved one big dealer that Woods described
as a “maniac”. As the story goes, Woods had been pretending
to this dealer that he was a connoisseur of amphetamines, aka “speed” in the UK. He pretended that he had been taking that
stuff all his life and knew good from bad. As a gift one day the maniac brought a big
bag of amphetamines to a meeting with Woods. He said to him, “I bet you've never had
anything like this before.” Woods had never even done amphetamines, but
of course he had to pretend he was an expert and so he indulged. Woods later discovered that this stuff was
almost ten times purer than most “speed” found on the streets of the UK. This is what he had to say about his experience
after taking that hit: “It was horrific. I felt this warmth in my stomach and I was
out of it. I had the most horrendous intense anxious
feeling. I didn't sleep for three nights. Mind you, my house has never been so clean.” He said all the time he was doing this he
couldn’t even tell his colleagues. Very few people knew what he was up to, because
any leak could get him killed. He had a wife and three kids, but when he
worked he worked far from the town where his family lived. Still, he was always conscious of the fact
he might get seen while living his family life. This is what he has to say about the war on
drugs now: “It was because of me that organized crime
was getting nasty. I was developing the tactics. I put dealers in prison for over 1000 years
and I only disrupted the heroin supply for two hours. Policing can’t affect the demand so policing
drugs is completely futile.” What’s surprising is that these remarks
almost exactly echo what a former U.S. undercover cop said. His name is Neill Franklin and he worked on
the tough streets of Baltimore for almost two decades posing as a drug user. Franklin now heads something called “Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition”, which consists of former cops in the U.S. who are
against the war on drugs. For all those years Franklin would pretend
to be an out-of-work junky, but he was actually collecting intelligence about dealers in Baltimore. He told Vice magazine that he got so immersed
in the job he kind of forgot who he was. He said: “I felt myself getting lost at
times between the two worlds. This is one of the reasons for establishing
rigid limitations on how long someone remains undercover. We've left some investigators ‘under’
way too long.” He reiterated what Woods had said that the
better the cops got at busting people the more violent the gangs became. He also said there were more overdoses when
a trusted dealer got busted and addicts had to go to a supply which was of an unknown
quality. Part of his job was just to hang out in bars
and get to know folks. At some point he would find out where the
drugs were. He’d befriend the addicts and then they’d
make an arrest. After that, the police would turn the addict
into an informant. After a guy he knew who was undercover got
shot in the head while doing a deal his whole stance changed. He started to believe that the war on drugs
caused more violence and pain that was necessary, and so now he’s against it. And lastly we’ll get away from drugs and
talk about something different. This is the case of an undercover cops that
posed as a hitman. His name was given as Lenny in the media. It was written in 2014 that Lenny was hired
to pose as a hitman inside prison. This was because a drug dealer in that prison
had a vendetta against an ATF agent whom he blamed for him getting arrested. So, Lenny went inside prison walls and offered
his services. Lenny said it wasn’t an easy job, and he
had to pretend to be some really tough dude. He even had to kick a guy out of a bunk. It was just him and the other prisoners. If anyone suspected anything he might end
up dead or seriously injured. Lenny said he arranged to eliminate this agent,
and said that while it was scary at times, it got worse when the lights went out one
day and so the surveillance cameras showed nothing. Then he was very much alone. He told ABC news, “So I'm in here without
cover, without any backup. The evacuation plan that we had is totally
gone at that point.” Lenny got out and then the guy he was meant
to kill was killed, except it wasn’t real. It was just a fake video that would be sent
back to the guy in prison. That guy said thanks for doing the hit. He even said, “I love you man.” He ended up getting a lot of years added to
his sentence. What kind of situation would you like to go
undercover in? Tell us in the comments. Now go watch “Crazy True Stories From a
Bodyguard”. Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t
forget to like, share and subscribe. See you next time.
