3. Black Identity Extremism

in the backseat of an FBI car. Two federal agents are with him, and one of them, FBI Special Agent Scott Dolshroom, has just handed Mickey a small hidden camera. Mickey turns the camera to his face, shooting from an unflattering angle below his chin. You can see Mickey's thin red mustach and scraggly goatee that's turning gray. He's propped his large sunglasses on his forehead and he's looking straight down into the tiny camera lens. Mickey is not ready

for us close up video. Look good, yea, yeah, look canceled. Not as handsome as that kid. Mickey points to someone outside walking past the car, and then he opens the car door to leave. All right, so you guys. The FBI agents tell him to remember his instructions, which were given to him before the camera started recording. Yep, I

got it, Thanks Mom, Thanks Dad. Mickey then walks to his car, the Silver Hearse, and places the FBI's camera on the pass in your seat, Mickey looks down toward the camera and addresses the FBI agents who are watching the live feed remotely. I got a song for you, guys. Mickey has good reason to feel patriotic in this moment.

The FBI has signed him up as an informant or in the FBI's term of art, a confidential human source, and Mickey's getting paid thousands of dollars every few weeks cash and Mickey He's got a very specific assignment from his employers at the FBI, go after his new friend, the young black activist zeb Hall, and find a way to bring federal charges against him. As the song ends, Mickey again looks down toward the FBI camera. America. I'm

Trevor Aaronson from Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. This is Alphabet Voice, Episode three, Black Identity Extremism, So to Come right out and say it. Mickey Windecker wasn't a badass ANTIFA warrior after all, as activists like Zeb Hall had thought. He was an informant, a snitch working for the FBI, which seems to go against everything Mickey claims to be right. Remember his little life rule. I have an old biker saying which is called fuck the three piece, the politicians,

the press, and the lease. It's just the way it is. Fuck the three peas. Yeah, turns out that's bullshit, Fuck the two peas. Maybe because this Mickey guy, he's in bed with the police, and the cops are not only helping him, they're paying him. Today, the FBI has more than fifteen thousand registered informants, and in the summer of

twenty twenty, Mickey is one of them. That conversation you heard in the last episode when Mickey and Zeb we're talking about training at Zeb's apartment, Mickey, on his own initiative, had secretly recorded the whole thing and delivered it to the FBI, apparently in the hopes of getting hired on as an informant. I need your help in doing this,

but obsously you're riding alone on fire. Well, here's the day you have and that's work from a route to is you have to decide where what you're going to do. You know, I can't see her and tell you, oh, yeah, you should totally like blow up rich neighborhoods to shoot the white people in the neighborhoods, you know, and burned the Federal courthouse down, and she like that that's something I can't tell you to do it. This recording ended

up being Mickey's audition tape for the FBI. The official explanation for how Mickey Windecker became an informant can be found in FBI reports internal investigation reports focused on racial justice demonstrators in Denver. These reports aren't public, and the FBI didn't intend to have them out there. Maybe not. Ever, they were provided to me, along with Mickey's undercover recordings, by someone who was deeply concerned about the FBI surveillance

and infiltration of black activist groups. According to the FBI's reports, Mickey had returned to Denver after being a volunteer fighter with the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military force in Iraq that was fighting the Islamic State or ISIS. Mickey told the FBI and I'm quoting here from the port that he found a sense of purpose and honor there and made an oath to always fight against threats, both foreign and domestic.

War with ISIS Kurdish troops in a frontline battle with an enemy that took their land, Mickey was among dozens of Americans who volunteered to fight for the Peshmerga. With them, a half dozen Americans veterans of the war in Iraq back his volunteers. Once back in Denver, Mickey started participating in the protests following George Floyd's death, and he saw what was, in his view, a new domestic threat. Mickey

said he witnessed protesters damaging property and threatening violence. So Mickey started providing information to police in the Denver area. Local police there then introduced him to the FBI as part of something known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is a partnership between local cops and the FBI. Every major metropolitan region United States has a Joint Terrorism

Task Force or JTTF. Mickey's motivation for being an informant was, and again I'm quoting from an internal FBI report, to fight terrorists, and Mickey believed that quote people who participate in violent civil unrest are terrorists. So Mickey the big bad isis Hunter just back from Iraq now has a new target, racial justice protesters, whom he considers terrorists. You want to know something, It wasn't just Mickey, Almost the

entire FBI thought this way too. More after the break, FBI reports about Mickey's work as an informant referred to racial justice demonstrators as anti government extremists, which is one of the ideologies the FBI classifies as domestic terrorism. During the Trump administration, the FBI and the Justice Department came up with a new catch all category to define a type of domestic terrorism from black Americans. They called it black identity extremism, a new and rising form in the

FBI's view of anti government extremism. It's a great question, what is a black identity extremist? I think we're all trying to figure that out. Nobody knows, in part because it doesn't exist. This is racial justice activist Malkia Devitch Surrill, speaking on the radio and television program Democracy Now during

the first year of the Trump administration. It's a term fabricated by the FBI, constructed, and it has a history, I mean for a very long time, for many decades in this country, probably centuries, the FBI has criminalized black descent. In twenty seventeen, the FBI's counter Terrorism Division released a twelve page intelligence report that claimed black identity extremists we're motivated by police brutality to target law enforcement officers with

violence and even murder. The FBI's theory was that racial justice activists had become radicalized following a police officer's fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in twenty fourteen, which sparked weeks of violent clashes between protesters and police and brought international attention to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Using the same tactical get up and the same weapon, where we've come to expect an urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, police and Ferguson, Missouri once again had to

put down and head off violence in the street. The twenty seventeen FBI report, inspired by the events in Ferguson, says quote black identity extremist perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification

for such violence. The FBI's evidence for this theory of rising black political violence it was pretty thin, resting on a series of a half dozen crimes committed by black Americans over a three year period that had no apparent connection with one another and no unifying political ideology. It talks about black activism against police violence and police racism, even though it says purported violence as if they somehow it isn't clear that that's a real thing, was a

sign of somebody being a black identity extremist. This is Michael German, a former FBI undercover agent. German regularly testifies before Congress. But FBI policies and practices, and what you saw in that report was six incidents of crimes that were unrelated to one another over a three year period. These six people didn't know each other, the crimes weren't related. There was nothing similar about them but their black identity. And that's why they called it a black identity movement.

That it was assuming that any black activist who was protesting police violence and police racism was part of a violent movement to overthrow the government or to kill police again. This report was released just a few years before the

George Floyd protests in twenty twenty. The revelation that the FBI had come up with a black identity extremism category for domestic terrorism was met with widespread criticism and the news media and on Capitol Hill, particularly given that Americans at the time were seeing increasing violence from white supremacists

and other far right groups. Many have also noted the FBI memo was dated August third, only a few days before the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacist Ku Klux Klan members and neo Nazis killed an anti racist protester, Heather Higher and injured dozens more. In response to the controversy that they had created, the FBI came up with the term racially motivated violent extremism, bundling to into a single category violence from both white

supremacists and so called black identity extremists. This new category combines incidents involving white supremacists with a new category that we've discussed before, called black identity extremists, and so that's really problematic to me. In twenty nineteen, Senator Corey Booker of New Jersey question the FBI Director Christopher Ray about this, When did the FBI eliminate the white supremacist category in

favor of that racially motivated violent extremism category. One of the points that we've tried to emphasize to our folks across all of these vectors is that we only investigate violence. We don't investigate extremism. We don't investigate ideology, we don't investigate rhetoric. It doesn't matter how repugnant, how abhorrent, or whatever it is. And so what we have tried to do by our recategorization is make clear that it's about

the violence, not about the igloogy. Director Ray then disclosed for the first time that the FBI had abandoned the term black identity extremism. Forgive me, this is news to me. So you do you no longer use the black identity extremism. That's no more. That's great, that's great news. So nobody is being surveiled or investigated on the black at any extremism.

We don't use We don't use that terminology anymore. We don't use that terminology anymore, Ray said, But he didn't answer the other part of Senator Booker's question, were people still being surveiled and investigated is suspected of being black identity extremists? And the answer to that question was and is yes. The work of Mickey Windecker is perhaps the clearest example of this type of investigation by the FBI.

Back in Denver, the FBI had no reason to suspect that racial justice activists were ready to step over the line toward political violence and terrorism, but the FBI, using Mickey, started infiltrating these groups anyway, answered up dropping not so subtle hints to anyone willing to listen. Hey, do you want to get involved in violence? Let me know. I'm your guy, Like this from Mickey in Denver. I don't want it to be worried. I'm pressure you, like, oh yeah,

you should totally. You know, blow up the fucking governor's house. It's it's it's if it's what you want to do, then you know, I have to make sure that's what you want to do. It sounds absurd, right, one of these racial justice protesters is going to blow up the governor's mansion. But to the FBI, this wasn't absurd. It seemed possible. It seemed real. That's because inside the FBI, agents all the way to the top saw the racial justice protests as an other nine eleven waiting to happen. Yeah,

another nine eleven. In the summer of twenty twenty, as racial justice demonstrations broke out around the country, top officials at the FBI in Washington, DC saw the seeds of terrorism. David Bowditch, the FBI's deputy director, the second in command, sent an internal memo to his top aids that compared these demonstrations to the nine eleven terrorist attacks. When nine eleven occurred, our folks did not quibble, but whether there was danger or ahead for them, Bautis wrote, they ran

head on into peril. In the memo, Bowditch described the racial justice demonstrations throughout the country as a national crisis whose violent protesters were highly organized. That the FBI would see the world and these protests through a prism of terrorism is perhaps understandable. In context. The nine eleven attacks transformed the FBI, and counter terrorism became the agency's top priority.

There's a concept of cognitive bias known as the law of the instrument or Maslow's hammer, after the famous American psychologist Abraham Maslow. He wrote in nineteen sixty six, I suppose it is tempting if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. So you have this agency full of hammers, and you have the guy at the very top, President Trump, almost every day in speeches and on Fox News, saying that there are nails all over the country just waiting

to be hammered. The violence and vandalism is being led by Antifa and other radical left wing groups. And it was also frustrating for me to see, how ably, usually that's not a term that you use when you're referencing former President Trump. This is former FBI agent Michael German again. But how ably he was able to make this boogeyman out of Antifa, you know, this concept, and how clever

it was that he wasn't using the full term anti fascists. Right, If you're saying that your enemy is anti fascism, that says a lot about you, right. But by using this handle Antifa when really what he was focused on was the Black Lives Matter rallies, right that it was like, okay, I can't say black lives matter as a problem but I think it was very clever the way they were able to use that term to justify a much more

violent law enforcement response amid this Antifa scare. Even what we knew publicly at the time about the federal government's response to the Black Lives Matter movement was shocking. The Justice Department charged hundreds of people with felonies and misdemeanors for their roles in First Amendment protected demonstrations. CBS News has confirmed Attorney General Bill Barr is encouraging US attorney's nationwide to seek federal charges against violent protesters, even when

state charges could apply. The Department of Homeland Security deployed agents dressed in military style uniforms and even abducted some demonstrators off the streets. Since their arrival, Federal agents wearing military style gear and sometimes driving unmarked bands of unleashed tear gas into crowds, rounded up and detained protesters, and even shot one man in the head with a non

lethal round, causing serious injury. There is no information tonight on how National Guard plans were used to monitor Black Lives Matter protests, and military spy planes were deployed above cities nationwide to monitor protesters, including one over a suburb just outside of Sacramento. But throughout this period it was unclear how exactly the FBI, the nation's most powerful and influential law enforcement agency, was responding to the racial justice demonstrations.

By the time the racial justice demonstrations broke out nationwide in twenty twenty, the FBI, thanks to the War on Terror, had recruited an army of informants and a warrantless mass surveillance apparatus that could monitor phone calls and digital communications and footprints. The FBI also created a new type of investigation called an assessment, that did not require what's known as a criminal predicate, which basically just means a reasonable

suspicion that a crime is occurring. With an assessment, an FBI agent can open an investigation on just about anyone for just about any reason. As long as the agent asserts their own impression that what they're doing is designed to protect the national security or solve crime, they're good

to go again. Michael German, the former FBI agent, And with these investigations, a lot of very intrusive tools are authorized, including physical surveillance and use of grand jury subpoenas to get subscribe or information, but most alarm to me recruiting and tasking informants. And so here's the FBI in the summer of twenty twenty, seeing racial justice demonstrations nationwide inside

FBI headquarters in Washington. Higher ups believe some of these demonstrators could be linked to a domestic extremist ideology they've termed black identity extremism, or as federal agents now prefer to say, publicly racially motivated violent extremism. All these things seem to create a situation where the FBI could see the protests not as First Amendment protected activity, but as

threats to national security. And that's when I heard about Mickey Windecker, his silver hearse, his mountain of guns, and its hidden camera more after the break. So the FBI reports concerning Mickey Windecker's work as an informant raise a lot of questions and concerns. It's clear from these reports that FBI agents did not have a predicate or a reasonable suspicion that any crime was occurring, nothing to justify

opening an investigation of any particular person in the Denver area. Instead, all the FBI had from Mickey's information was that there were protests in Denver and some of these had become violent and destructive. This wasn't exactly proprietary information, of course. The local news in Denver was reporting on this nearly every day during the summer of twenty twenty. But each of the last four days has turned into this. Tear gas, pepper rounce, rocks and bottles in the air, smashed glass fires.

But that information that there were protests and some were violent seemed to be enough for the FBI to justify signing up Mickey as an informant and secretly placing him inside Denver's racial justice movement. The FBI didn't have any evidence to suggest someone specific was committing violence or even was about to. Really, the only thing they had was ideology. The FBI was concerned that racial justice protesters were using heated rhetoric. Some of this talk suggesting violence, sure, but

nonetheless protected by the First Amendment. Among the speakers at the Denver protests was Zebedias Hall or zeb, who Mickey told agents had made statements such as we need to burn this motherfucker down and we need to get explosives. According to the FBI's internal reports. But this wasn't secret

squirrel information either. Zeb was known to say such things in front of large crowds, and many of his acid tongue speeches were publicly live streamed for anyone to watch, like this one, which you can go watch on YouTube right now if you want. I don't give a fuck about the cops, zep says, standing on the steps of

the Colorado State Capital, because fuck them. That's why. By signing up Mickey as an informant and opening up an investigation of Denver's racial justice protests without a clear purpose, the FBI creates a perverse incentive structure for Mickey. Here's

Michael German, the former FBI agent. My way of looking at it is I would rather have an FBI undercover agent in there who at least knows what the law is, and not that agents don't violate the law, but rather than an informant whose reliability is much lower, whose incentives are very different. Right, if Mickey wants to keep getting paid by the FBI, he needs to build a criminal case, no matter what it takes. They're trying to get paid,

and they get paid you by proving a case. And if they don't prove if they come in and say, hey, I was part of this protest movement and I didn't see any crime, they don't stay on the payroll, all right, So their incentive is to manufacture crime. This is a systemic problem for the FBI. Informants who are working for money or for leniency on criminal charges often create or encourage criminal conduct. They have every incentive to do so.

I've asked a lot of FBI agents about this issue in the past, and most have offered to me the same defense. There's no other way to catch the bad guys. The FBI needs these informants. In fact, there's an FBI expression about informants. If you want to catch the devil, you have to go to hell. In other words, informants can't be choir boys. If you're going to infiltrate a group of criminals, you need your own criminal, someone who can play the part and fit seamlessly into the organization.

That's the business that the FBI is in, employing bad guys to catch other bad guys. As a result, many, if not most, of the FBI's fifteen thousand informants are people with criminal records, sketchy pass and plenty of reasons not to be viewed is credible. The FBI knows this, of course, and as a result, informants are often subjected to lie detector tests to make sure they are not

deceiving federal agents. The FBI also has informants secretly record conversations so that the government's criminal prosecution won't rest entirely on the unreliable words of an unscrupulous informant. But while informants are assets for the FBI, they're also ongoing liabilities. Informants, incentivized by thousands of dollars in cash payments, have been known to spend months with targets before any recordings begin, essentially grooming them and resulting in questions of entrapment much

later at trial. In addition, the FBI has to allow these informants to commit crimes while in the FBI payroll. Remember, a criminal's got to do criminal things right. During a single four year period from twenty eleven to twenty fourteen, the FBI permitted informants to violate the law more than twenty thousand times. And that's just the number of times the FBI has explicitly permitted informants to commit crimes presumably in order to maintain their covers or further an investigation.

What's not calculated and reported by the FBI is a number of times they turn a blind eye to informants who break the law without permission. At this point, you might be asking, is there a limit? Are some informants crimes so awful they shouldn't be enlisted as FBI informants? Or maybe you're asking, do some informants have such a long history of deception that they just can't be trusted not to lie to FBI agents. Judging by Mickey Windecker's FBI file, the answer is no, there are no limits.

When they signed up Mickey as an informant, FBI agents in Denver knew he had a rap sheet arrest in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Florida. He'd been arrested for assault, sexual assault, failing to register as a sex offender, menacing, an unlawful possession of a weapon, among other charges. The FBI knew about these charges from doing a background check, a background check that FBI agents included in their files related to Mickey's

work as an informant. I don't know if the FBI pulled and reviewed the actual police and court files to get the gory details about Mickey's arrest. But I did, and I also found some recordings of Mickey talking about some of these incidents. In the sexual assault case, Mickey had a sexual relationship with a minor. Mickey actually talks about this in one of the videos I found. And while I was nineteen years old, I decided that there was a place called Roll of Rama. I think that's

the name of the place. I met this girl. She kind of seem mature at the time, So I went to the Roll of rink and I met her and she was talking. She's like, hey, here's my numbers, like you should co hang out and all that. I was like, all right, cool. Mickey said he didn't know the girl was under age when they had sex, and for the record, well, Mickey claimed he was nineteen years old when this incident occurred.

Court record show he was twenty and my dad had a friend who was an investigator and pulled up her name and it turned out that she was fourteen actually get a right term fifteen. And when my dad let me know, can not come front of me, but was like, hey, this is really what's going on. I was like, oh, okay, we're done. So I called her up on my house phone. I was like, hey, I can't up with you no more. I don't want to be around you because you're not

a aage so I cut her off. Mickey was able to plead the case down to third degree sexual assault, a misdemeanor. Several people have filed restraining orders against Mickey, including a man I found through my reporting. He contacted me and said that he was hired by Vicky to break into my home. This guy asked me not to use his name at a fear of retribution from Mickey.

He described how he was going through a child custody battle with a woman named VICKI and to do some some level of surveillance and tap my phones and put cameras in my house. Just a tremendous amount of craziness. So we did a quick Google search and obviously find out that you know, this person had this background, and I immediately contacted the police and the judge. But what's also troubling in Mickey's court files is this history of allegedly breaking the law while also pretending to be a

police officer. In one example, he allegedly showed someone a fake police badge while asking questions. In another Mickey stuck a gun in someone's face and claimed to be a police officer looking for a suspect. That incident resulted in a felony conviction, and Mickey served two years in a Colorado prison as a result in two thousand and two and two thousand and three. And I think that's where

Mickey learned the value of being a snitch. While in prison, he was approached about killing someone, but instead of committing the murder for hire, Mickey went to the cops became a prison informant, helping to win convictions against the people who tried to hire him. That's the earliest example I could find in records of Mickey working as an informant. Generally speaking, criminals work as informants primarily for two reasons,

either to make money or to receive leniency falling an arrest. Undoubtedly, Mickey was motivated at various times by both those reasons, but for him, there appears to be an even deeper psychological impulse. Mickey saw himself as an anti hero, someone who operates in the gray areas of the law, delivering

his own brand of justice. Mickey wore a chain around his neck, and hanging from that chain was a medallion of the logo for the Punisher, a vigilante from the Marvel Comics universe who fights crime with an obscene level of violence. He literally thought he was the Punisher. Anything you see the punish row who was on it, and he would always wear the punish or necklace. Even when he took a shower or a bath. Never came off, just like a big kid in the worst way, in

the worst way. It's awful. That's in the next episode. This is Trojan Hearse, Season one of Alphabet Boys. Alphabet Boys is a production of Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. The show is reported, written and hosted by me, Trevor Aaronson. For more information about the series or to drop us a tip, head to our website Alphabet Boys dot xyc. You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram at Trevor Aaronson. We believe this story is important and could result in

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