Not the usual sort of book I review, but the memoirs of former FBI Special Agent  Jack Owens, Don’t Shoot, We’re Republicans, struck me as the sort of book that might hold some special insight for criminal defense lawyers.  Indeed it does.

Like almost every law enforcement officer, state or federal, I’ve ever known, Jack Owens seems like a guy with whom you want to hang out and have a beer.  He started with the Bureau back when J. Edgar Hoover ruled with his iron fist inside the white lace glove, though he never saw him in high heel shoes and refuses to accept that Hoover and Clyde Tolson were more than good friends.

Owens tells the stories of the tensions of law enforcement from the perspective within the Bureau, bucking the petty rules and being “mavericky” in a place where wearing a blue shirt rather than white was deemed pretty radical.  The book is a series of anecdotes of Owens’ life in the FBI, and what is clear is that the FBI was his life, quickly supplanting his first marriage and two children with barely an explanation.  His dedication toward his fellow agents, his pals, never goes unmentioned, while his children are barely given a thought.

The vignettes are humorous, not in a laugh-out-loud sort of way but in more subtle, more SNAFU approach.  For those raised on the myth of the FBI from Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., this will put an end to any belief that they were the supermen of law enforcement, above and beyond mistake or miscalculation.  Much of the time was spent circumventing their own rules and procedures, and tripping over the criminals they were sent out to capture.  It seems that the Bureau’s success was more a matter of dumb luck than skill.  Yet Owens never doubts that he was on the right team, and that anyone he collared was both guilty and deserving.

While it’s never expressed in the stories, what clearly emerges from Owens’ anecdotes is the belief that the rules, whether imposed by armchair bureaucrats within the FBI or the law, were anything more than a minor stumbling block to circumvent whenever they stood in the way.  There’s never any sign of malice or venal intent at all; If anything, you’re rooting for Jack all along and find yourself enjoying his charming efforts at doing the right thing.

In one story, where Owens is out to capture notorious Vietnam war era Army deserter, Jerry Dale Watkins, he tells of his ride in the wee hours of the morning to a rural house where Watkins is believed to be hiding.  Driving his personal 1964 Volkswagon Beetle with one headlight out, all alone, he’s already skirted enough rules to get him in a serious jam, but he manages to do what no one else could, get to the house undetected.

I drive into Jerry Dale’s yard and kill the engine.  It’s eerily quiet.  The Watkins clan is not stirring. I ease out of the Bug and walk up to the house. There’s a screen door to receive what little breeze the hollows offer in summer. I look inside the house through the screen.  Three bare-armed adults lie asleep on a mattress just inside the front door, a man between two women, a sheet loosely covering them, comfortable as hell.  Clothes and shoes are strewn about the wooden floor.  I try the screen door.  It opens and I quietly step into the house.  There’s a wonderful smell of collard greens.  Standing over the mattress, I get a good look at the guy. It’s Jerry Dale Watkins.

The description is well-written, interesting and detailed, but for the absence of one word: warrant.  Considering that he entered into a house where he was told Watkins could be found, one might suspect that would be a concern to an FBI agents.  Nope.  It’s not to say that he lacked a warrant, but merely that the book reveals no concern, at any point, about the legal niceties that might concern others. 

The book is a very quick and easy read, enjoyable and interesting in both the true crime-type genre as well as from the perspective of those of us wondering what life is really like on the other side of the courtroom.  There’s no suggestion that Jack Owens harbored any question that what he was doing was both right and good, that maybe someone he went after wasn’t a bad guy or that the FBI wasn’t on the side of truth and justice.  Yet there’s similarly no question that “justice” was in the results, not the process.

For anyone who has ever tried to break a special agent on cross, the book provides tacit insight into the certainty of an agent’s world.  One gets the sense that Jack could never be caught lying on the stand, not because his testimony was necessarily above reproach as because he believed that he was right, and that if he didn’t, he wouldn’t have done it.  There is absolutely no sense that Owens has sanitized his stories to make himself or the Bureau look better. 

If anything, he shows no reluctance in telling tales out of school about the FBI’s foibles, disdain for other agencies and local police and bristling at the inane demand of Washington.  But at its heart, the book is a love story of the agents of the FBI, Jack and his buddies who did what they had to do to protect us from the bad guys.

This is a great read for criminal defense lawyers, offering both a change of pace from the heavy, brutally sad stories of innocence and injustice that make up the bulk of our fodder.  It was really a pleasure to find humor and charm in Jack’s stories, while also seeing how good, well-intended agents could go through a career in law enforcement without ever having a doubt that what they did was right and justified.  There’s much to learn from Jack Owens stories, and it was a pleasure to be able to smile at his shenanigans in the process.