Trey Quinn, the black nationalist who is among the organizers of Denver's racial justice protests, is the first to suspect that Mickey Windecker isn't a badass ANTIFA warrior. Trey doesn't have any concrete evidence, always got as a hunch there's just something off about Mickey. And so I am told by a couple of friends that Mickey's got some suspicious connections and ties that they're unsure of. They don't know if we should be doing any actions with them specifically.
So Trey comes up with a test for Mickey. I'm gonna call Mickey and I'm gonna propose something, and then I'm gonna see what happens. Trey meets up with Mickey at one of the demonstrations and tells him that he has concerns the protesters aren't being radical enough. This peaceful protest stuff, it ain't working. What if we did more? And so I start speaking in hypothetical and like, hypothetically, what if this happened? What if an enclave was lit
on fire in the middle of the night. And he was like, oh, yeah, I got some guys who could probably do that. You know what, I'm saying, who were probably down? And so at this point I recognize my vague language in his specific language, and so he's trying to lead me to say specific things, and so I just still keep in a vague I'm like, well, hypothetically, if you were down to do something like that, you know what I'm saying, like, could we get it done?
And he was like, oh yeah, you know what I'm saying. I got the right guy for the job. This is how he's talking. So once we're done, I'm like, I think he's I think he's fucking suspicious. I knew during that in the middle of that conversation. I knew because he was he was trying to get it to happen. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time that meeting spot. And then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. I'm Trevor Aaronson
from Western Sound and I Heart Podcasts. This is Alphabet Boys, episode five. Give him hell. If you're willing to accept the FBI's internal reports as accurate. Then Mickey didn't appear to realize that he'd failed tray Quinn's test. In fact,
Mickey and the FBI seemed to take Tray seriously. In an internal FBI report, Scott Dahlstrom, the agent who was Mickey's handler, describes Tray's hypothetical question to Mickey, what if an enclave was lit on fire in the middle of the night as and I quote a fire bomb plan as if it were an actual plan. So Mickey's primary goal as an FBI informant is to gather evidence that demonstrators are about to or are willing to commit violence, and a way to push people in that direction is
by subtly encouraging violence while sewing distrust. This stuff with Trey and the fire bomb plot is happening. In late August twenty twenty, about three months after Mickey first arrived on the scene in Denver, Mickey had by now sidled up to activists with the Young Democratic Socialists of America or y DSA. Mickey's association with the y DSA activists
was critical to his ability to infiltrate the protesters. His new y DSA friends had given him credibility, which he badly needed in order to maintain his cover as an ANTIFA warrior. Because let's be clear, this Mickey dude, he was suspicious Mickey dressed like a biker. He often used crude language that isn't tolerated within the activist groups, including racist, homophobic, and transphobic splurs. Plus, Mickey was old, a guy approaching fifty in a crowd of protesters who were mostly teens
and twenty somethings. But Mickey's association with his y DSA friends acted as a kind of shield against suspicion. The other activist would see Micky hanging around with these young allies, and so the thinking went, if they trusted him, then Mickey must be legit right. As a part of Mickey's ploy to entrap protesters, he participates in a group on an encrypted messaging app that includes his new y DSA friends.
Mickey tells everyone in the chat about how Trey is planning some sort of fire bomb plot, and Mickey suggests that they all meet for dinner to talk it out. I think it was at a Chili's or Applebee's. This is zeb Hal and for the record, it's a Chili's according to the FBI's internal files. So zeb drives the chilies.
Then you know, I meet him at this restaurant, and you know, they say, hey, just talked to Trey and he said he wanted to go blow up a white supremacist bar and he wanted us to help him out. And you know, I was like, holy fucking shit. Just to be crystal clear about this, Trey didn't mention the fire bomb plot to any of the y DSA kids, as far as I could corroborate, only to Mickey as part of the test. Mickey then, and I'm connecting dots here, but I believe this is the accurate course of events.
Mickey tells the y DSA activists about what Trey is supposedly planning, the white supremacist bar as a target that appears to be Mickey's invention. The FBI claims in its internal report that Mickey tells zeb and the y DSA activists to stay away from Trey. Although it's not stated specifically in the report, the way it's written suggest that Mickey did this out of concern that Trey is violent, that the fire bomb plot is real, and so stay
away kids, that kind of thing. But that's not the way Mickey frames is warning about trade to this group he's gathered at Chili's. Instead, Mickey invent something out of thin air. He tells them that they thinks Trey might be working for the FBI. Mickey seemed like super concerned, like Trey was an informant. Mickey reminds everyone that Trey is a felon, and as a felon, Mickey claims he's gotten incentive to be an informant. And just look here he is talking about a fire bomb plot. The gagulet
Chili's seems to agree. Trey this leader of the demonstrations in Denver, The guy must be a snitch. Then I started getting concerns about it. Mickey is trying to discredit Trey. Trey had always been upfront with activists that he had a criminal record. He had even told Mickey about it. Here's Tray again, home a felon, so I don't keep my identity secret. Back when Trey was a college student,
he was into the rave scene and into drugs. He sold drugs too, and participated in some robberies, but by twenty ten he'd stopped using and he was trying to go straight. That's about when a friend of his was short on cash and face eviction. Trey wanted to help, so we called one of his old contacts and so I called up my homie and I was like, hey, you know, we're short on some money. If you can spot us some then I'll get you back. And he was like, hold on, let me call my homie. He's like,
this dude got me. If you can get him for me, you just keep whatever whatever he gets. I just want to get backs, and so I was like, all right, I'll do it. So basically, Tray's friend gives him the name of a guy who had ripped him off. Trey's friend just wants revenge. Rob that guy, he tells Trey, and you can keep all the money. We didn't have any guns, and so I brought my axes. I had two axes, and so my friend had one and I
had one like a wood chopping axe. We get into this to this dorm room and I end up breaking through this kid's door and I hit him in the head with the flat side of the axe. It still cuts them, still fucking gashes open his head and there's blood everywhere. I get in a fight with his roommate, end up breaking his eye socket in the fight, and his friend had a big old gash in his head and we didn't get anything, and he was calling for
people who weren't in the dorm. I stayed in that donor before, so I know the walls are paper thing he's calling down the hallway, and so this is a whole mass. Trey ended up getting fourteen years in prison, but he was granted parole after serving five and a half. Yeah, it was it was a trying time, but it definitely needed to happen. Tray says the felony conviction in the prison time helped him straighten out his life. He's married now with a young child, and he's running a painting business.
The criminal life it's in the past for Trey, but it's Tray passed that allows Mickey to construct his lie. Mickey tells his allies among the activists, the trade must be an informant. Why else would a former felon be talking about a fire bomb plot. The rumor about Trey starts circulating online, then in person among the demonstrators, you see people accusing me of being an aide, and you start seeing people saying, well, this is what Mickey said, or this is what X said. Who also would hear
from either this person or that person? Who would hear from Mickey? Right? And so I was like, I think Mickey's called I think Mickey's trying to set me up here as a FED. It's a classic move for an informant to pull. Trey has been snitch jacketed more after the break. I can't say this with absolute certainty since Mickey won't talk to me, but I don't think Mickey really thought Trey was interested in any sort of fire
bomb plot. I think Mickey realized that he'd fallen for Trey's trap By so eagerly suggesting he could make Trey's hypothetical fire bomb plot happen. Mickey had revealed himself as an informant, or at least had given Tray plenty of reason to be suspicious, and that's why Mickey says Tray is an informant. Mickey has a lot to lose if Trey outs him as a snitch, specifically the thousands of dollars in cash the FBI is paying him regularly about
every two or three weeks. If too many activists in Denver think Mickey is cooperating with the cops, then he's no longer useful to the FBI. The FBI, of course, only pays informants when they're useful By raising suspicions that Trey is an informant, Mickey can protect his cover and his income. If everyone suspects Treys a snitch, this thinking goes, then they'll be focused on him and no one will
be suspecting Mickey's the real informant. This is a time tested tactic called snitch jacketing, and snitch jacketing has a long troubling history in the FBI. From his office, j Edgar Hoover has placed on the entire organization's own rigid code of service, integrity, and morality in a way that is true a few organizations. J Edgar Hoover is the FBI, and that is our story. The practice of snitch jacketing goes way back to the infamous days of the first
FBI Director, j. Gar Hoover. Remember always at the spy and the Sabbata all the destroyer carrignal badge he hides behind a hundred fronts, he pretends innocence. In nineteen fifty six, Hoover secretly launched a program too. And these are the words Hoover used in its directive quote expose, disrupts, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize political groups that Hoover and his FBI
agents considered quote subversive to American society. Hoover secret operation was called the counter Intelligence Program or co intel Pro. For fifteen years, FBI agents and informants infiltrated political movement
and disrupted them from within. Well. The targets of co intel Pro did include some far right groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, Hoover's FBI focus its efforts primarily on left wing political and civil rights movements, including communist groups, anti war advocates, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party,
and even doctor Martin Luther King Junior's organization. Snitch Jacketing was a common tactic of co intel Pro, particularly in the bureau's infiltration of black political groups such as the Panthers, whose leaders were very aware that they were being spied on by government informants. I'm the depth chairman of the State of Illinois Blackcap Party. Him and a lot of people are on the fan Black Panther Party relationship with
white Muther Country Rata. Here's Fred Hampton, a senior Black Panther official, speaking eight months before he was shot and killed in his bed during a pre dawn raid in nineteen sixty nine. Informants and agents would accuse other members, even leaders, of being informants. This would so mistrust, create interpersonal suspicion, lead to dysfunction, and in some cases, wholesale
collapse of these political and civil rights groups. Some informants even took on leadership roles in the very organizations the FBI was infiltrated. In nineteen seventy five, the US Senate formed a committee to investigate and reveal the extent of the FBI's abuses during co Intel pro. Today, we are here to review the major findings of our full investigation of FBI domestic intelligence, including the Cointel program and other
programs aimed at domestic targets. The committee is commonly known as the Church Committee after its chairman, the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho. As one example of the FBI's egregious, politically motivated actions during Hoover's co Intel pro Frederick Shores, the Chief Council of the Church Committee, described how agents
sent letters to America's most prominent civil rights activist. The bureau went so far as to male anonymous letters to doctor King and his wife, which finishes with this suggestion, King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just thirty four days in which to do it. You were done. You
are done. The FBI under Hoover, sent an anonymous letter to King strongly suggesting that he kill himself before accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, because the US government was concerned that the award would lend global legitimacy to King's civil rights movement. That was the pretext for all of this was, you know, threat of external and internal subversion. This is Mark Peiskia, an investigative reporter who has spent most of his career in Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated
in nineteen sixty eight. And of course, you know, at that time there was a great paranoia still in this country the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties of the communists, the Soviets had infiltrated all of our institutions, and that there was this massive conspiracy. That's certainly what j Edgar Hoover
was selling that to the public. And there was a lot of people believed that Hoover believed that black America was particularly susceptible to subversion because of the history of oppression in this country and disadvantage, so they were constantly under watch. While the Church Committee revealed many of co intel pros abuses, it's taken journalists and researchers up until more recently to reveal who was spying on black civil
rights groups for Hoover's FBI. In twenty ten, Mark Pereskia brought to light that Ernest Withers, a celebrated Civil rights era photographer who was particularly close to Martin Luther King, had been a paid FBI informant for eighteen years. He was an informant. There's no question that records are mean several feet thick of everything they did. But it might be even more helpful to think of him as an asset, because it wasn't. When you think of an informant, you
think of somebody undercover playing a role. Ernest wasn't playing any role. He didn't have to. He was who he was, and he could go any place he wanted. And so if it's helpful to think of him more as an asset, I guess you could. But it's the same thing. He was getting paid for information, and he was supplying it, and it was harmful. We've come to view this era of FBI infiltration as a dark chapter in American history,
as something that's over, never to be repeated. But while co intel pro no longer exists, its methods and tactics have survived in various ways inside the FBI and then Denver. In the summer of twenty twenty, Mickey started snitch jacketing, just as FBI agents and informants had done during the sixties and seventies, and just as happened back then, snitch jacketing undermined political organizers like Trey Quinn. He goes back and tells his group, He's like, oh, he's a fit.
He's fit for Tray. The effects of this FBI subversion are subtle at first. The hy dsa activist who'd gotten close to Mickey, they stopped communicating with Tray and now I'm like, what's going on here? And so that kind of clues me, and it's like, all right, they were obviously scared of me for some reason. Later, Zeb Hall, who's fully enamored with Mickey, confirms tray suspicions. Zeb confides in his old friend Mickey and the wy DSA activists, they think you're a FED, and so that's kind of
when my ears started to perk up. But remember Mickey failed Tray's test. Tray is pretty sure that Mickey is a FED, but Trey chooses not to respond in kind and snitch jacket Mickey to the Denver activists. Instead, Trey actively tries not to let Mickey know about his suspicions. When you suspect someone of being a cop in your group, you don't kick him out of the group. That's the last thing you do, because now you don't know what they're going to do. You keep them around. So Trey
plays his own game of deception. He continues to exchange messages and coordinate with Mickey and to invite him to meetings and events. So he shows up to those and
acts quote unquote friendly. But then there's a couple he does a couple of suspicious things even then, and that's when the like, the narrative just progresses even more and more and more afterwards, because yeah, like one night we were supposed to meet up for an assembly, he was supposed to be there, he didn't show up, and so as we're doing our group meeting, it's a small general assembly,
and it just everything seems strange. And then he calls and he's like, the cops are the cops are circling around, there's some suspicious activity. He calls in. He doesn't show up, but he calls in. Cops around. There's some suspicious activity around there. You guys are got to get out of there. I got a guy who's down there, just give me a call. And so we're all like, well, who is he? Because he's not with us, So you just got a guy watching us. And so at that point, you know,
it became super wild. Tray is onto Mickey. He doesn't trust him. Dude's are fed, but keep your enemies close. That's Trade strategy. On the other hand, there's Zeb. Then I started getting concerns about it because I didn't talk to Trade myself, and I got to own that, you know, and I was just too afraid of it after everything I had been through. His will. Zeb doesn't know what to think. Mickey says, Trades an informant, and maybe he's right. Besides,
Zeb's naive. He doesn't think there's any way Mickey could be an informant. He's trying to dial up the violence, which to zeb at the time. Doesn't seem like something a government agent would do. Why would you, as a law enforcement informant, want people and push people to go to a potentially violent protest? And once again Mickey is about to take things up a notch, a full on assault against the police station. That's after the break. So Mickey arrived on the protest scene in May twenty twenty.
By late August, he's become a legitimate leader. The snitch jacketing has played no small part as Mickey and as loyalists spread rumors that Trey Quinn is an informant turning people against Trey, Mickey is ascendant among the protesters, and Denver activists have even given him a nickname, the drill Sergeant can I J. S. Jackin here Yo, Mickey keeps telling the protesters that they need to do more, they need to get more aggressive, they need to get militant.
In late August twenty twenty, Mickey is with his two allies on the y DSA Honor and Aiden. Honor and Aiden were the pair I'd mentioned before, young activists whom Mickey had turned into soldiers. They fan out during demonstrations and report back to him what was happening. Acting as a kind of surveillance network for Mickey. ZEB goes to meet Mickey and his two unwitting allies at an apartment.
The apartment is decked out with flags for the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, a socialist political party that the U State Department has designated a foreign terrorist organization. With his claims of fighting for the Peshmerga, Mickey had said he was aligned with the PKK, which had given him additional credibility. With the activists brothers and sisters and socialism or something. They had like a lot of that PKK stuff with their house. I didn't know what the fuck
that was until I met Mickey. Zeb looks over at a table in the apartment. It's covered with guns and other weapons, and holy fuck, so yeah, they had guns. Another activist there sees what Zeb sees, Mickey and a table full of guns. I walk in, mix guns, weapon like medical supplies, literally king like they're preparing for a genuine battle. But this activist is fearful of Mickey, so she agrees to let me record an interview with her as long as I agree not to use her name.
We're sitting on her front porch in Denver, and I just it was insane. What kind of we're like handguns rifles and everything military. Yeah, I don't even remember, like I can, like I have this like vague mental image of what that apartment looked like, but it feels like a dream. But she reluctantly takes on a role in
what Mickey and the group are planning. She agrees to tag along because she's worried about what her friends are about to do, because I was like, this is going to go really badly, Like I don't feel comfortable with them doing this alone, because I was like, the fuck am I going to do? Let these like teenagers who I have cared about for like multiple years, just get into these situations and not look out for them. Okay,
So here's some context as to what's happening here. Starting in late August twenty twenty, the Denver protesters begin to get more aggressive. According to about a dozen people I spoke to, Mickey is the one responsible for organizing and encouraging, at least in part, what morphed into coordinated attacks against Denver police stations. We are following some breaking news in
downtown Denver right now. A protest calling for the end of the Denver Police Department has led to violence and property damage, with fireworks shot at police, trees set on fire, and a standoff with officers growing more tense by the minute before Mickey's arrival on the scene. The demonstrations in the Denver area were mostly peaceful, organizing events like the
violinvigil for Elijah McClean and Aurora. The police response to the peaceful protests had been brutal, riot gear, bullhorns, pepper spray, and lines of cops coming in like stormtroopers. The heavy handed police response had inspired something of an arms race. The protesters were becoming increasingly aggressive and they were arriving at events ready for violence. They were wearing makeshift body armor and holding homemade shields. And it wasn't just the
cops who were potential targets of aggression. Anyone seen as part of the establishment. They appeared to be fair game. A dangerous mob mentality had developed. Zeb starts to see this transformation, and it concerns him. I mean, he was having people go out there and do surveillance. He was talking about people getting fucked up. It's like one night at the police station, I had to save this fucking rapport. I think her name is Addie something I can't remember.
In downtown Denver, near the police headquarters, zeb observes a young local TV news reporter named Addie Guahardo trying to do a live shot during a protest that demonstrators have been calling give 'em Hell. Diverson's Addie Guahardo has been following those protests all night. Addie, you seeing right now? As the TV anchor throws it to Addie, she's backing up as the camera follows her. She's visibly frightened. Her eyes are darting around as if she's waiting for someone
to attack her little bit. Right now, we're going to try to get away from these protesters getting a little too close for comfort, and they were going to fuck this lady h and a few other other reporters, and I had to keep them away from her. Zeb is also on camera. He's dressed in jeans, wearing a flack jacket and a military style helmet. He pushes back several demonstrators who seem to be trying to intimidate the reporter and possibly even assaulter. They're right here on thirteenth and Cherokee.
There is a business owner right across the street they just started an argument with. Right now, they're right outside the police department where there is CPD and full of riot gear. One sorry. As the reporter is doing her live shot, you can hear zeb yell get back, get away. He's trying to protect her from a mob that is
growing increasingly violent and unpredictable. We're gonna, we're gonna send back to you because we don't feel comfortable right now, Jason and Jacqueline, So we're gonna we're gonna get back out of this right now. Ze begins to realize that with his rhetoric and Mickey's organizing, it's all having a real effect. Things are changing, but it's also getting out of control. It's getting scary. Zeb wanted to move things to the next level, that's true, but Mickey, he's beginning
to realize, is a blunt instrument. He's taken things too far. It's like, you don't send the fucking line to go get any one of flowers, you know, you don't send the serial killer and to go fucking hang out with your mom. You know, yeah, you don't do that. And then things get really bad, and not just in Denver,
the whole nation is reeling from political violence. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August twenty five, twenty a demonstration over the police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, results in a street brawl in which a seventeen year old white kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, shoots and kills two men and wounds a third. Two people were killed during another night of Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Investigators say it may have been a vigilante attempt carried out by a young white man.
Three days later, in Denver, demonstrators gather at a police building in the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Mickey had helped organize and hype up the protest. He was really promoting the CV. This is ZEB. He was trying to say, Hey, get as many people as you can to go to the CV, Get as many people as you can to go. It was to get more people to go there and Kyle's having That's what I truly believe. But Mickey's event
isn't a demonstration. It's an all out assault and the fighting begins to rage before ZEB can even get there. The DSA kids and I were supposed to go out take photos and everything. I was going to take photos and be a medic if need be. We had just recently got a CPR certified, you know, and that's what we're supposed to do. But we never really really really made it. By that police station or about the crowd.
The protesters, ducking behind homemade shields, throw rocks and shoot fireworks at a line of police officers standing in riot gear. A metal fence separates the protesters from the line of cops. A few of the protesters take hold of a dumpster on wheels and together push it as hard as they can until the police fence like a battering ram against the castle gate. The fence bows but stays up. The
police then start firing gas canisters at the rioters. The cops storm into the streets in riot gear and gas masks and holding rifles that fire pepperballs. The police are aggressive, like a riot squad unleashed. It was like they had been preparing for this moment. A local cop had posted a photo on social media of himself and other officers dressed in tactical gear. Let's start a riot, he wrote. Dozens of protesters are injured in the police response. The
cops fire pepperballs, they break bones. Protesters are rushed to the hospital. One man is hit in the head by a kevlar bag filled with lead fired from a police shotgun. A stingball grenade explodes next to one woman that knocks out her teeth, but the violence works. The cops effectively dispersed the protesters. Mickey played a large part in the attack on the police building. He helped organize and promote the event, but he wasn't a lone actor. The violence
broke out spontaneously. Dozens, if not hundreds of people were her rocks and other objects of police officers, and it wasn't just protesters who were injured. Denver police reported injuries among more than seventy officers during that week of violence. Mickey wasn't responsible for the fire, but he and the FBI helped create the initial spark, and in Denver, the FBI's just getting started. Okay, so nobody can hear us. So here I'll talk. Okay, So I talked to my dude.
He's on board. What he's gonna do. He's coming in tuesday. So what Fairwell met at nowhere like this on Tuesday. He'll walk to through what the game plan is that's in the next episode. This is Trojan Hearse, Season one of Alphabet Boys. Alphabet Boys is a production of Western Sound and I Podcasts. The show is reported, written, and hosted by me, Trevor Aaronson. For more information about the series or to drop us a tip, enter our website alphabet Boys dot xyz. You can contact me on Twitter
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