Via Grits for Breakfast, it looks like Tulsa, Oklahoma has some problems.

Brandon McFadden, 34, detailed for prosecutors his criminal activity, mostly involving Officer Jeff Henderson but including Officers Frank Khalil and Sean Larkin. He also said that Henderson made up information to obtain search warrants.

McFadden stole drugs, money, used a straw “informant” to lie on search warrant applications.  He was, in short, a criminal with the power of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms behind him.  ATF has always held a special please in my heart, as I’ve never had a defendant arrested by ATF who didn’t appear for arraignment beaten.  And I never had a magistrate who didn’t accept the agents excuse that they were just protecting themselves when the defendant’s face attacked their guns, or the asphalt, or some similarly hard surface.

But McFadden, working with the Tulsa Police, had an “excuse.”

“It cost me everything,” he said of his criminal activity. “It didn’t happen overnight. I can tell you that. It was a gradual thing. One bad decision led to another, and I ended up in a situation completely over my head.

“At first, it was peer pressure in accepting the money the first time. From there, it turned into greed. And for a time, that’s the thing to do because that is what all these officers were doing, and I didn’t see a way out,” McFadden said.

He said he had tried to tell his supervisors about corrupt police activity but was “shut down pretty quickly.”

No, it’s not much of an excuse, and in small respects, doesn’t differ from the way many slide down into a life of crime, but they don’t teach agents how to make up excuses for crime at the academy, just how to justify a search and beating.  Of course, McFadden is completely full of it.  His supervisors “shut down” his stories of police corruption?  Did he not know how to find the number for the FBI?  Or DOJ inspector general in Washington?  Or any one of a dozen other places he could have gone to purge himself of his guilt and loathing?  Or maybe he’s just making it up.  Maybe he’s still just making up stories, this time to make himself seem less of a turd.

It cost him everything?  How sad.  What did it cost the people he hurt or falsely imprisoned. What about the people he beat when they wouldn’t give up the money he wanted to steal?

It was peer pressure? Ah, yes.  The bain of teenagers everywhere.  All the other cops are corrupt, so what else could I do?

There is a fundamental difference between some ordinary joe on the street engaging in crime and a law enforcement agent do something similar.  So much faith is placed in the hands of these human being that we hand them a gun and shield, and create a legal sphere around them that allows them to engage in a huge realm of conduct that would put any mere mortal in prison for life.  More than this, their word is beyond reproach, the system trusting them, defaulting to accepting their integrity unless we have a videotape and a few eyewitness priests saying otherwise.  The harm done by a beating is to one man.  The harm done by a lie renders the system a farce.

While working with Henderson, McFadden said he was told about informant Rochelle Martin, known as “O-girl” or “Shell.” Prosecutors have said that Henderson obtained search warrants with bogus information attributed to Martin.

“I learned (Henderson) was using her to sell drugs he obtained from search warrants,” he testified. “He would use her as a throw-down name for search warrants. … I knew they were close friends and allies. It was a loyalty deal. If needed, he could get her to do what was needed.”

McFadden testified that Henderson talked about using dead informants on search warrant affidavits so that if questions arose about the validity of the information, the informant could not be produced.

How crazy would it be if it turned out that federal agents, knowing that whatever they claims would be blindly accepted by an issuing magistrate, just made up wild stories, complete lies, and everybody from the U.S. Attorney to the District Court judge just ate it up.  Not a soul in the government’s employ could even imagine that the story was a wholesale fabrication, and certainly there was no argument to be offered against what this honored and trusted federal agent had to say. 

And if we can believe anything this mutt says, corruption is pervasive in Tulsa.  And if it’s pervasive in Tulsa, what makes you think it doesn’t exist anywhere else? 

But federal agents are above corruption.  They’re above greed.  They would never lie because they are all honorable men who would never dirty their shield and betray their trusted brothers.  Except McFadden, the only agents who isn’t special.