Name: Undercover FBI Agent Fact Checks Mob Movies & TV | Vanity Fair
Uploaded: 2020-03-13T09:50:03.000Z
Duration: 20 min 48 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is Mike Macallan, a retired FBI special agent who spent most of his 31 year career undercover.

I worked undercover against some of the more sophisticated, complex criminal organizations such as La Cosa Nostra, which is the mob Russian organized crime and also the Sinaloa cartel, led by Chopper Guzman.

Mike is going to tell us what movies have gotten right and wrong about organized crime and FBI procedures.

I want to be clear that I will not discuss, know, disclose any undercover tradecraft or techniques that I believe will aid the criminal element nor jeopardize the safety of current law enforcement Undercover personnel.

Look, man, undercover cops gotta be Marlon Brando to do this job.

In undercover work is a five step training process.

It's preparation, preparation, preparation, preparation and go do it.

When I trained young undercovers, I will send them into an actual bar.

I will point out an individual until him or her that they need to contact that individual and come back with that person's mother's maiden name.

You gotta sit down, look him in the eye and convince them that they want to do a deal with you.

This particular story takes place in a man's room.

You gotta know all the details about the men's room.

You gotta know if they got paper towels or a blower to dry.

Those are things that if someone has been there and you have not, and you don't describe it accurately, you've already screwed up the investigation.

I had a connection with this hippie chick up in Santa Cruz, and all my friends knew it.

So what happens in real life is we have what's called a legend.

A legend is who you are as an undercover, your identity, your story, your history, et cetera.

You can get help from senior agents or more experienced people, but the story has to be realistic and things that you know.

So, at the height of my undercover activity.

I had approximately six different identifications, and people think, How could you remember six different identifications?

But of all six, the core elements, the things that you understand all with the same.

You don't lie until you have to lie to gather evidence.

So I had six identities, and probably 80% of it was all the same.

So walking a man who stands four Los Angeles County sheriffs and a German shepherd that's hard.

You need to get the bad guys like you before you can make a deal with them.

So when you tell a story like this young officer did, he's building report.

He's just talking a bunch of guys in a bar.

Tell a funny story, and that's what he did.

The only guarantee is nothing will go as planned.

One time that I was dealing with the mob and I had on a very expensive suit, probably $1500 suit, and I also had on a pair of J.

Penney socks, which cost about eight bucks.

And the informant, the person I was working with to introduce me in this group pointed out that they would recognize I was wearing a cheap pair of socks with a very expensive suit on.

So the only thing I really didn't like in this scene is when the older cop tells him that he's acting.

You're not acting because you don't get take two.

If you make a mistake, it literally could be fatal.

You could be killed or at a minimum, you screw up the investigation.

Next up departed In this scene, Jack Nicholson plays a mob boss selling microprocessors to the Chinese, while Leonardo DiCaprio serves as a young undercover police officer.

While the transaction is being monitored back at police headquarters, we have a blind spot.

If you got a camera in the back, what back?

What they got right, for the most part, was the interaction within the command center or the monitoring room.

The technical equipment doesn't function properly.

Those are very common occurrences that, unfortunately, is pretty much the main realistic part.

I want to tell you, these two, these gents have machine Two dozen people show up for a major meeting.

Every person in that room is a potential informant down the road.

If they're gonna hear and see everything you have done, you have to be prepared that they're going to compromise you.

In this case here, you had the mob boss and underlings, while only he and the main negotiator for the Chinese should have been there.

You always see these meetings taking place in desolate warehouses.

If I have important meeting, I'll have it in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel.

I've never seen a fight in a room, but I've seen you get pretty close, so I don't know if we want to go there, but the frustration level is very accurate.

In this next clip, you have Donnie Brasco, posing as a jewel thief undercover in order to attend his first meeting with Lefty Ridge Ario, played by Al Pacino.

This is the first time Brass Ko's meeting with Cheerio, but what's done earlier is part of his legend building in his back stopping.

He spent time in this eye room and became friends with the bartender who's led him to the mob guys.

He let it be known that he was a jewel thief.

When you have the legend, the legend is who you are, where you're from, what you do, etcetera, backstopping is the filling of that.

It's filling in your story to appear real when Rogelio first comes in and tries to talkto Brass Co looks at the bartender to get confirmation.

He's a riel mobster, so that was very effective in that part of the preparation process of disgust.

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Undercover FBI Agent Fact Checks Mob Movies & TV | Vanity Fair

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