Word: atf
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...strategy is working. ATF agents often quote a maxim: "Big cases, big problems; no cases, no problems." The intense and well-orchestrated opposition has succeeded in discouraging ATF from aggressively pursuing investigations of gun shows, flea markets and licensed gun dealers, even though these often prove to be major conduits for the diversion of guns to criminals. The bureau's reluctance to investigate dealers has long driven agents to jokingly describe a dealer's license as "the $10 immunity." (Until two years ago, the annual licensing fee was $10.) A series of standing ATF orders closely choreographs all such investigations...
...FROM CRACKING DOWN, ATF allowed the number of licensed gun dealers to swell to nearly 300,000 by 1993. Often it failed to conduct thorough background checks for prior criminal offenses. In a survey it found that 72% of its licensed dealers never even bothered to open a bona fide store, but operated instead from their homes. Under Magaw, however, the bureau has lately got much tougher on applicants, requiring for the first time that they submit fingerprints and a photograph. Now the number of dealers is falling at a rate of 150 dealers a day, an ATF spokesman says...
...outside attack also helped create a culture in which senior managers and agents face each other across a vast reservoir of distrust and hostility, according to hundreds of pages of internal reports and court documents reviewed by Time. Rank-and-file agents have long protested how managers use ATF's internal-affairs unit, which routinely conducts three to five times as many internal probes as the Secret Service's apparatus, even though each agency has roughly 4,000 employees. Magaw explains the differential as partly because of the fact that ATF agents conduct far more gritty street investigations and thus...
...tempest that has wracked ATF's Chicago field division gives a flavor for the forces long at play within the bureau. The division, one of ATF's largest, has been riven with charges of corruption, sexual harassment, racial discrimination and management retaliation. Two veteran agents, Diane Klipfel and her husband Mike Casali, now face imminent discharge; they claim in a federal lawsuit that the bureau took the action in reprisal for their having reported corruption and sexual harassment, including allegations that police officers assigned to ATF had stolen money from a drug dealer. Prompted by their disclosures, investigators from Treasury...
...ATF officials say Klipfel and Casali will be fired because the bureau believes they too had engaged in past misconduct. For example, it charges that Casali conducted evidence searches without federal warrants and that Klipfel maintained an inappropriate relationship with the target of an investigation. Raymond Risley, assistant deputy superintendent of internal affairs for the Chicago police, says his unit conducted a thorough investigation and found no evidence of theft. He says, however, that ATF would not let his investigators interview Casali or Klipfel and that the drug dealer's lawyer would not allow the dealer to be questioned...