March 9 Update: Rogue Informants; Britain's Creeping Authoritarianism; Aryan Brotherhood On Trial; Hacktivism Retrospective; Instagram & Sex Trafficking

After two months of nose-to-the-grindstone reporting, a major project of mine is set for release this coming week. I won't tip too much of the hand here about the general content. The wait will be well worthwhile, but there is a secondary background theme I'll tease to here: rogue informants. Law enforcement gives cover to criminals in exchange for intelligence is an extremely fraught field, where written policies and regulations to keep CIs in line are frequently blurred for expediency, access and for lack of a better term, institutional ass-covering. Blowback from these operations is not a bug, it's a feature.

Think Whitey Bulger, the Boston mobster who kept up his murderous rackets for decades while passing information on to the local FBI office. Think Freddy Scappaticci, the head of the Provisional Irish Republican Army's assassination squad who, according to a recently published (and heavily criticized) report, took more lives than he saved while serving as British Intelligence's key asset during the Troubles and Britain's Dirty War against Irish militants. Think Stephen Robeson, an FBI informant so deeply enmeshed in the 2020 far right militia plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Meghan Whitmer that five of the thirteen defendants have actually beat their cases at trial with entrapment defenses.

I've written about this world before: a feature a little more than a decade ago for SF Weekly and Type Investigations about homicidal snitches given a pass by SFPD, but not the feds, and this Rolling Stone investigation into Joshua Caleb Sutter, a Neo-Nazi occultist who spread murderous Satanist ideology while working as a paid FBI confidential source to infiltrate skinhead gangs and the guerilla militants the Atomwaffen Division. A loooong time ago, the reporting project I helped run at 91.7 FMKALW in San Francisco was called 'The Informant' (RIP).

More to come mid-week, but in the meantime, let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Going off the theme above, The Intercept's Trevor Aaronson and Eric VanDussen published a hell of an investigation into the FBI's Wolverine Watchmen investigation, using thousands of documents and confidential recordings to chart out the Bureau's efforts to cover up crimes committed by informant Stephen Robeson.

-British police have been increasingly taking a hard line with protest movements as social unrest swells under more than a decade of Conservative rule. They've also been emboldened by a scad of draconian new public order laws, as my friend and colleague Jake Hanrahan so thoroughly explored in a Popular Front episode last Fall. The Guardian's Bristol correspondent Tom Wall took a long dive into a 2021 crackdown on a demonstration against those very same laws that resulted in the most people imprisoned for protest-related offenses for recent British history. It's a ground-level view of creeping authoritarianism in practice.

-Nate Gartrell at the East Bay Times in Northern California has followed federal prosecutors' attempts to break down the notorious Aryan Brotherhood prison gang for almost a decade at this point. His coverage has been phenomenal, and I've browbeaten Nate about turning his reporting into a book. The latest chapter in this saga involves a co-founder of Public Enemy Number One, currently top dog in Southern California's white power gang world, turning state's evidence and testifying against his former brothers in arms. A wild tale that ties in the 2011 Pelican Bay hunger strike and several prison killings of non-white rivals (Yogi Pinell, for one) and AB insiders.

-For those enmeshed in the hacktivist world, who loathe Jonathan Franzen (I'm a fully paid-up member of his haters club), or simply those with long memories, the name Barrett Brown might be familiar. The Texan journalist was deeply involved with Anonymous during the group's late 2000s and early 2010s heyday before ending up in federal prison after falling afoul of the FBI and the private intelligence world. Barrett, now living in England, has a new memoir coming out later this year, which is ostensibly the peg to Jacob Silverman's terrific New York magazine feature. However, the article serves as a much-needed retrospective on a chapter of the recent past where accountability and transparency for the public and private sectors came "from below," as historians are fond of saying.

-Tech platforms are rotten with criminal activity, which they enable and directly profit from. In the case of Instagram, the wildly popular, addictive, and shitty social media platform that I do not use, that includes pimping and sex trafficking. Kate McQue at The Guardian published a much-needed investigation into the practice, using American court cases to lay out the practice and getting immediate results from Meta, which is scrambling to remove such activity from the platform. Oh, and that investigation of mine I mentioned up top? It involves similar practices.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

I recently started rereading my copy of Charles Bowden's 2002 drug war masterpiece, Down by The River (2002). One of Anarchist scribe Edward Abbey's friends and longtime drinking partners, Bowden's peripatetic career as an academic manque, naturalist, and newspaper reporter informed the development of his particular writing style, which blends investigation with long explorations into the psyches of his subject and the environment they live in.

Down by the River focuses on the 1995 murder of Lionel Jordan in the Texas border city of El Paso and the efforts of his brother, Drug Enforcement Administration agent Phil Jordan, to bring his killers to justice. Written a decade after the North American Free Trade Agreement supercharged the Mexican drug trafficking trade, Bowden uses the narc's lens to expose the complicity of governments and financial institutions on both sides of La Linea in perpetuating this lethal commerce at the cost of countless lives in both countries. Bowden would continue to explore the drug war's human toll in 2004's A Shadow in the City (the story of an undercover fed), 2010's Murder City: Juarez and the New Global Economy's Killing Fields, and 2011's El Sicario: Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin. While these books are impressive in their own right, particularly the grueling Murder City, Down by the River is Bowden's masterpiece.

FILM

With the arrest earlier this month in Berlin of a 60-something fugitive member of the Red Army Fraktione's 'third generation' (with the dubious assistance of a reporter running facial recognition software and possibly turning that information over to authorities...), this is as good a time as any to revisit the conditions that spawned one of Europe's longest-running guerilla organizations.

Though it's difficult to find on streaming platforms, Uli Edel's 2008 film The Baader Meinhoff Complex is a fast-paced, gritty thriller that does a good job laying out not only the cultural environment that spawned the RAF, but also the personalities of Ulrike Meinhoff, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, the group's violent exploits, and the intense prison conditions that led all three to take their lives and fed the group's recruitment for decades. Depending on where you are, Vudu, Tubi or Amazon Prime (shudder) are the best ways to stream it.

MUSIC

Orchestre Baobab. Enough said.