February 14, 2023 • 32 mins
Today, the FBI has more than 15,000 registered informants, and in the summer of 2020, Mickey is one of them. He’s getting paid a lot of money to expose crimes committed by activists. But his official motivation? “To fight terrorists.” The FBI thinks the same way — that racial justice activists are “anti-government extremists.”
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
All right, okay. It is August August twenty eight, twenty
twenty apart from only four o two pm. A special
agent Scott Dolphroom with a special agent Byron Mitchell chs
for meat with Zebidias Hall. Thank you. You can hear
(00:27):
the show I put in my front pocket, right, yeah, okay,
I got it. It's late afternoon on a warm day
in Denver, Colorado. It's drizzling outside, and Michael Adam Windeck
or the Second or Mickey as he prefers, is sitting
in the backseat of an FBI car. Two federal agents
are with him, and one of them, FBI Special Agent
(00:48):
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
(01:10):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:55):
the camera and addresses the FBI agents who are watching
the live feed remotely. I got a song for you, guys.
(02:20):
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,
(02:42):
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
(03:03):
Alphabet Voice, Episode three, Black Identity Extremism, So to Come
(03:35):
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,
(03:58):
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
(04:21):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:02):
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
(05:25):
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,
(05:48):
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.
(06:10):
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
(06:30):
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
(06:52):
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
(07:16):
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,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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,
(08:32):
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
(08:55):
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,
(09:16):
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,
(09:39):
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
(10:01):
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
(10:23):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:29):
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.
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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
(12:34):
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
(12:57):
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.
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
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,
(14:05):
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.
(14:29):
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,
(14:56):
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.
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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.
(16:01):
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,
(16:22):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:05):
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,
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:11):
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
(18:32):
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.
(18:53):
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
(19:17):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:45):
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
(21:07):
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.
(21:28):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:12):
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.
(22:32):
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
(22:58):
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
(23:21):
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,
(23:42):
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
(24:03):
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.
(24:24):
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.
(24:45):
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
(25:06):
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,
(25:27):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:53):
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,
(27:17):
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
(27:39):
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,
(28:00):
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,
(28:21):
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
(28:43):
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.
(29:04):
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
(29:24):
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
(29:47):
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.
(30:09):
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
(30:32):
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
(30:55):
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.
(31:19):
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.
(31:41):
You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram at Trevor Aaronson.
We believe this story is important and could result in
changes to FBI oversight and public policy. But to have
an impact, people need to hear the story, so we
need your help. First, tell your friends about the show.
Personal recommendations are the best recommendations. Second, spread the word
(32:02):
on social media. At alphabet boys dot xyz, you'll find
FBI undercover recordings and secret documents. You can share stuff
the government never wanted public. Third help us ride the
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for listening.
All right, okay. It is August August twenty eight, twenty
twenty apart from only four o two pm. A special
agent Scott Dolphroom with a special agent Byron Mitchell chs
for meat with Zebidias Hall. Thank you. You can hear
(00:27):
the show I put in my front pocket, right, yeah, okay,
I got it. It's late afternoon on a warm day
in Denver, Colorado. It's drizzling outside, and Michael Adam Windeck
or the Second or Mickey as he prefers, is sitting
in the backseat of an FBI car. Two federal agents
are with him, and one of them, FBI Special Agent
(00:48):
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
(01:10):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:55):
the camera and addresses the FBI agents who are watching
the live feed remotely. I got a song for you, guys.
(02:20):
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,
(02:42):
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
(03:03):
Alphabet Voice, Episode three, Black Identity Extremism, So to Come
(03:35):
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,
(03:58):
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
(04:21):
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
(04:42):
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
(05:02):
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
(05:25):
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,
(05:48):
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.
(06:10):
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
(06:30):
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
(06:52):
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
(07:16):
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,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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,
(08:32):
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
(08:55):
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,
(09:16):
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,
(09:39):
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
(10:01):
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
(10:23):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:29):
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.
(11:52):
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
(12:13):
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
(12:34):
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
(12:57):
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.
(13:20):
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
(13:42):
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,
(14:05):
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.
(14:29):
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,
(14:56):
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.
(15:16):
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
(15:37):
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.
(16:01):
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,
(16:22):
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
(16:45):
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
(17:05):
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,
(17:26):
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
(17:48):
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
(18:11):
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
(18:32):
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.
(18:53):
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
(19:17):
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
(19:40):
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
(20:01):
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
(20:23):
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
(20:45):
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
(21:07):
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.
(21:28):
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
(21:49):
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
(22:12):
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.
(22:32):
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
(22:58):
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
(23:21):
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,
(23:42):
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
(24:03):
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.
(24:24):
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.
(24:45):
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
(25:06):
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,
(25:27):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:53):
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,
(27:17):
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
(27:39):
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,
(28:00):
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,
(28:21):
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
(28:43):
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.
(29:04):
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
(29:24):
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
(29:47):
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.
(30:09):
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
(30:32):
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
(30:55):
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.
(31:19):
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.
(31:41):
You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram at Trevor Aaronson.
We believe this story is important and could result in
changes to FBI oversight and public policy. But to have
an impact, people need to hear the story, so we
need your help. First, tell your friends about the show.
Personal recommendations are the best recommendations. Second, spread the word
(32:02):
on social media. At alphabet boys dot xyz, you'll find
FBI undercover recordings and secret documents. You can share stuff
the government never wanted public. Third help us ride the
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podcast app that helps other people find us, and thanks
for listening.
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