Dirty clothes and month-old pizza boxes littered the floor. Walking across the floor without stepping on anything was nearly impossible. For the first time in months, I could finally rest. Being an FBI agent surely takes a toll on your body. Each day was something new. I had to be on call 24 hours of the day, ready to go at the ring of my phone. This was 40 years ago, when I was just learning the ropes of becoming an FBI agent at the age of 27. My team and I had just captured one of America’s most notorious gang criminal, Tommy Jones. Weeks on end we were out in the field, listening to phone conversation after phone conversation and staking out Tommy and other members of his gang, lying in wait for a deal to go down so that we could catch him …show more content…
We all jumped off the couch at once, put on our vests, grabbed our gear, and were off to hopefully put Tommy Jones away for good. Upon arriving at an undisclosed location where Jones was rumored to be (I cannot give specific details as to where the arrest and takedown of Jones occurred), our team leader gave us the game plan. I hardly remember the details of what he told us- I was too excited. It was my first real case in the FBI, and I had a chance at taking down of the most notorious gang bosses in the country! I kicked down the front door of the building, and we burst in with guns drawn as if we were expecting a confrontation. The building had three floors, so we had to search them all. As we swiftly finished searching the first and second floor with no sign of Tommy, we heard a noise on the third floor stairwell. My partners and I rushed up towards to noise in hopes of finding our suspect, and to our luck, we did. He barged through a thick steel door leading to the exit and slammed the door shut behind him, hoping to lock us out. To my good fortune, the door wasn’t locked, so I was able to push it open with my shoulder and continue running after him without missing a beat. Up on the roof, I finally caught up to him. I brought him down like a lion brings down a zebra in the great plains of Africa. He didn’t put up a struggle. He knew his battle was over. Slapping the metal cuffs on his wrist and hearing the unmistakable “click” of the cuffs locking around his wrist gave me the feeling that all of the hard work that I put into this case had finally paid