ALACHUA, FLORIDA
APRIL 1, 2015
“This is our guy,” the FBI SWAT team commander said, indicating me to the hundred officers dressed in camo fatigues before him. “He’s one of us. Don’t shoot him.”
We were assembled at 4:00 a.m. in the Alachua Police Department parking lot, the early-morning darkness broken only by the pole-mounted floodlights shining down upon us. A large oak tree spread shadows over the scene that seemed to swallow pockets of the troops assembled, shifting with the whims of the wind. A natural earth berm blocked any view of the group by cars cruising past on State Road 441.
The SWAT commander turned my way. “Show us how you naturally hold your hands.”
I let them dangle by my sides.
“Okay, cross your hands, left over right, just over your belt.”
I put my hands in the low-compressed position, as instructed.
“That’s the signal for the takedown. We’ll move in once we see it and brace for the assault,” the commander said.
When I’d arrived at 3:30 a.m., he’d told me they had almost deployed the FBI’s elite HRT, the Hostage and Rescue Team, to take down Charles Newcomb, given his proven propensity toward violence.
Newcomb was a former patrol cop and prison guard currently working as a recovery agent, or repossession specialist, fancy terms for a repo man. He was stout and very muscular, with a wide build and piercing blue eyes. He claimed he had killed four people, supposedly in the line of duty, when he was a cop in Tennessee. Most recently, he had helped orchestrate the murder by the Ku Klux Klan of a former inmate who had run afoul of prison guards who were members of the klavern in which Newcomb served as Exulted Cyclops, effectively the chapter’s mayor.
“What stopped you?” I asked the SWAT commander.
“We decided to use you instead,” he told me, with a slight smile.
Five hours after the meeting’s conclusion, at 9:00 am, I was sitting in my Kia Sportage almost directly across the street from the police station in a Home Depot parking lot. I was there to meet Charles Newcomb on the pretext that the national leadership of the KKK wanted me to build a bomb, and we needed to purchase the ingredients.
As Grand Knighthawk for all Klan chapters throughout Florida and Georgia, and with my background as an army sniper, such a task was well within my purview, and Newcomb had no reason to suspect I was telling him anything but the truth.
“Subject is leaving his home,” a voice from the surveillance plane flying twenty thousand feet over Newcomb’s neighborhood announced though my earpiece. “Stand by.”
That plane was outfitted with cameras that could read a license plate from four miles in the sky. It would now be trailing Newcomb in his pickup truck the whole way to our planned meeting.
“Subject is turning onto Highway 20 West,” the same voice reported.
At this point, FBI agents were already stationed inside the Home Depot, preparing to lock the site down for safety. Once Newcomb approached the parking lot, no one would be permitted to leave the store or enter the lot on the chance that Newcomb would resist arrest and it went to guns.
I had infiltrated this particular chapter of the Ku Klux Klan two years ago as a confidential human source for the FBI in an operation being run alongside the Joint Terrorism Task Force. This was the second time I had infiltrated a klavern, and the first time, which had ended six years before, had almost cost me my life.
The best I could hope for today was to walk away alive. “Subject turning onto State Road 441,” the voice in my earpiece crackled. “Stand by.”
Charles Newcomb wasn’t the only target of this operation. I had provided firm evidence on four Klan members, including the designated leader for both Florida and Georgia, Jamie Ward, and two members of the law enforcement community, Thomas Driver and David Moran. The charge lodged against Newcomb, Driver, and Moran was conspiracy to commit first-degree murder. For Ward, it was a federal firearms charge. The four-pronged plan was to arrest all of them simultaneously, so none of the four could provide advance warning to the others.
As I sat in my car waiting for Charles Newcomb to arrive, I knew a group of SWAT team members culled from both the FBI and numerous local police departments were closing in on the Florida State Prison commonly known as Raiford, located in Lake Butler thirty minutes from my position, where two of the targets, Thomas Driver and David Moran, worked as guards. Their plan was to execute the arrests there during a shift change, when Driver would be coming out and Moran would be coming in, the perfect moment to snatch them up without gunplay. Another team would be converging in full force on Jamie Ward’s house, while the largest detachment of all was already deployed unseen in the Home Depot parking lot, since Newcomb was considered to be the most dangerous of the bunch
“Subject still proceeding north on State Road 441,” the voice in my ear reported from the sky. “Approaching parking lot.”
“Secure the building,” the voice of the FBI SWAT team commander followed. “Secure the building.”
I checked my watch. It was 9:25 a.m. Newcomb should be here any minute.
“Subject has turned onto surface road,” the crackling voice reported.
“Approaching target site.”
I used those final moments to settle myself. I took a deep breath and then slipped into the 4-7-8 breathing ratio I had learned in my training to become an army sniper. It was the regimen I’d practiced before taking a shot in the field, an experience comparable to the one I was facing now. As I breathed, I focused on my wife and two children. Do everything by the numbers and I’d be home with them soon. Do anything that deviated from my norm and aroused suspicion in Newcomb and I might not be coming home at all.
“Subject is entering parking lot. Repeat, subject’s truck is entering site parking lot. Begin lockdown now.”
In that moment, the surface road accessing the Home Depot would be shut down in both directions to prevent any potential customers from entering the parking lot. With gunplay considered a very realistic, if not likely, possibility, the FBI needed to minimize risk to civilians at all costs.
I recognized Newcomb’s truck pulling in, then making a long, lazy circle of the lot to make sure there were no surprises waiting—though in this case all the surprises were tucked out of sight, namely in staging vehicles and around the side of the building. A few moments later,
Newcomb pulled his pickup truck alongside my Sportage. I climbed out in the same moment he did.
“Kigy, Brother,” he greeted. “KIGY” is the acronym for Klansman I greet you.
“Kigy, Brother,” I said back.
We shook hands and half hugged, with me ready to act in the event Newcomb felt the wire I was wearing. I noticed he was wearing latex patches on the tips of his fingers to avoid leaving fingerprints on any of the bomb-making materials we were supposedly there to buy. After we separated, I watched Newcomb casually remove his firearm and tuck it under his driver’s seat. I still had to assume he had a backup weapon on his person and act with that distinct possibility in mind. That wasn’t just protocol, it was common sense. We started toward the Home Depot entrance a hundred and fifty feet away. The FBI step van was parked half that distance away, the juncture where the takedown of Newcomb would take place.
“This is a big assignment, Brother Joe,” he said, when we were almost there.
“I’m up for it, sir. I’m prepared to serve the brotherhood with the calling I was taught.”
He smiled. “Just so long as it doesn’t take you away from us.”
Halfway to the entrance, just short of the step van, I put my hands in the low-compressed position I’d demonstrated at the staging session hours before, the signal we were a go. An instant later, a loud explosion rocked the air, coming from a spot well to our left, just beyond the outskirts of the parking lot, where a natural land depression utilized for drainage sat.
“What the hell was that, Charles?” I said, feigning shock.
The distraction achieved its desired effect of making Newcomb swing round in the direction I was already facing.
“There’s a cloud of smoke coming up,” he noted, pointing toward the heavy black smoke rising from the depression.
Our attention was still firmly rooted in that direction when we heard, “LET ME SEE YOUR HANDS!”
I raised my hands in the air, while Newcomb left his by his side. We turned together, and I found myself facing an M4 assault rifle six inches from my face, the finger of the FBI SWAT team member in full body armor starting to curl over the trigger.
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