Hello and welcome to the homicide inc podcast. In this podcast we're gonna talk about an undercover FBI agent who lived an incredibly dangerous and storied life. He put his ass on the line in a big and frieghtening way infiltrating motorcycle gangs and other criminal syndicates and domestic terrorism cells all while being a husband and father. This is his unbelievable story.
When Morpheus (not his real name for the safety of his family) retired from the FBI last summer at 50, he left the FBI as one of the most notorious agents since Joe Pistone, the real life Donnie Brasco. For more than two decades, he cracked groundbreaking cases and won every laurel bestowed on undercovers. He foiled domestic terrorists and the race war they tried to foment. He saved journalists from assassination and a synagogue marked for carnage in Myrtle Beach. He marched undercover with gun rights activists on the steps of a state Capitol where they planned to kill police officers and rally attendees. He uncovered, while undercover, a far-right death squad and dismantled their national terror cell network.
He's been out of the game for months, but he can not stop brooding about the threat he left behind. He knows better than anyone that it's later than we think, and that every day brings us closer to the next 9/11 - this time triggered by our own children.
First, we need to talk about the ram. Because that ram — actually, a mortified goat with a bad case of the runs — died for all our sins of the past four centuries.
It’s Halloween night 2019, and Morpheus — undercover coordinator for the FBI and special agent dispatched to its Joint Terrorism Task Force — is shivering in three layers, including tactical gear, in the pitch-black woods of northern Georgia. He has infiltrated a domestic-terror group called the Base, posing as a former skinhead called PaleHorse and is an expert in hand-to-hand combat. Morpheus and 11 members of the Base walk an unmarked trail to a clearing above a creek bed. He doesn’t know most of his companions. They have come from far away to this camp on a farm for a four-day training block on guerrilla warfare. Five of them have traveled from the northeastern states, with assault rifles and armor in their car trunks. Another, a young psychopath who calls himself ZoomGnat, has been on Adderall and Red Bull for two days and drove in from Texas without stopping. They all use a nom de guerre: Pestilence, PunishSnake, BigSiege, etc. Some of them are ex-military with munitions training and the wherewithal to take out power plants. Others are self-taught tactical geeks who shoot and move as nimbly as paratroopers. You can learn anything on the Internet these days, including how to start a race war in three steps.
The day had begun mildly, but then turned ball-shriveling cold and was now, after many hours of pouring rain, a misery of mud and wind. When they reached the clearing, the members lit torches and formed a circle around the fire. One of the men spoke incantations quoting the Wild Hunt and other gross misinterpretations of pre-Christian and Norse mythology. And then - because it was not a sacrament to the gods, but to the massacre of Jews, blacks and gays - it was time to sacrifice the trembling animal they had kidnapped from a neighbor's farm. A helpless and terrified goat.
The goat, weighing more than 80 pounds and soaking wet, shits and bleats in fear of the men in death masks and camouflage clothing. The man leading the ritual - code name: Iron - brandished the machete above his head. He hesitated a moment, then dropped the blade to the ground; it bounced off the animal with a "whomp." Goats are not actually made for ritual killing: Their necks are reinforced with a double backstrap of cartilage and fur. After further attempts at sacred slaughter, someone came up with the bright idea of simply shooting the animal. But that too quickly turned into a fiasco. - With the members standing in a circle, a guy named Eisen looked away as he pointed the gun One of them could have died if he had fired incorrectly.
And so Morpheus, who in real life is a marksman and teaches his colleagues how to shoot, stepped in to teach the young neo-Nazis the basics of gun safety. But the goat still was alive and kicking after a single shot to the head, continuing to flail its legs. Finally, Eisen put a second bullet into him.
Now the dark sacrament could begin.
Someone slit the animal’s throat and filled a chalice with the blood that came flowing out. The men passed the chalice around the fire, each taking sips from the cup. By the time it got to Morpheus, though, the blood had somehow congealed into lumps and — oh, hell no, he wasn’t having any of that hot mess. He dipped a finger into the chalice and touched it to his lips as one of the men began to hurl Linda Blair style, the contents of his dinner spraying the trees. Sweet Jesus, Morpheus thought as he looked around the campfire at these misfits in training for mayhem. He was the only Christian at this devil’s mass, and the only functional adult on hand. While some of the others took hits of acid and spooked themselves by talking to the severed goat’s head, Morpheus stood as close to the fire as he could. It was cold as fuck cold, and he couldn’t warm up in his truck: that’s where he was taping the whole encounter on an audio recorder. Even ballsier was the hidden camera he was wearing during the whole event.
Morpheus recounts this story in the study of his farmhouse high in the Appalachian Mountains. It huddles like a fortress, with assault rifles and armor in a linen closet and a line of fire on the unmarked road that runs past his driveway. It was extremely risky work, filming terrorists with long guns in woods miles away from his support team. It is no less risky to show this film and reveal these details for mass consumption. Morpheus has never been named publicly, even in criminal trials. The evidence he secretly gathered was so thorough that every defendant he ever arrested pleaded guilty.
But now he's breaking his pact for the reason he took the footage: He is haunted by what these fanatics will do if their movement - and their moment - is not thwarted. Through months of interviews with Morpheus and his former colleagues, hours of conversations with domestic terrorism experts, and wormholes in fascist portals on apps like Gab and Discord, the picture of a nation threatened by a thousand hate points emerged. "Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and counterterrorism expert says, "We have seen a massive increase in plots and acts committed by domestic terrorists. Rita Katz, founder and director of the SITE Intelligence Group and author of the upcoming book Saints and Soldiers, which traces the rise of far-right terror in the age of Trump, says she and her team lie awake at night kicking the walls because there are a million and a half people on the web plotting assassinations.
Morpheus is built to the hilt. At six feet four and 260 pounds, he fills up a room without meaning to, and he never wastes time trying to merge with his surroundings. Being a giant with full tattoo sleeves is part of his disguise: No one sees him and thinks “plainclothes cop” hiding cameras in biker leathers. That’s the trademark of a crack undercover: a genius for playing himself and darker shades of himself. Among his targets — homicidal bikers who beat their victims with hammers and racist gangsters who pimp out their women.
Playing Klansmen and hired killers, he has the chops to infiltrate homegrown terror. For 28 years in law enforcement - first as an investigator a year out of college in a county sheriff's office in the Carolinas, then as a shining star for the FBI - he's worked his way in and out of some really tight spaces.
By his count, there are 600 FBI agents certified as UCEs (undercover agents). But some of them are doing the work of "backstopping" agents: creating false IDs and social media profiles for UCEs working in the field. Of the several hundred who work face-to-face, most have only worked a few cases as primary undercover agents. Morpheus has done dozens, though they tend to be of a similar fabric. Remember his size and tats. Corporate crimes probably aren’t in his wheelhouse.
And so he made a name for himself doing the dirty jobs, often juggling multiple assignments at once. He infiltrated the Outlaws - a biker gang that rivals the Hells Angels in size - and sent 16 shitbags to prison for gun, drug, extortion and other violent crimes. Hours before they pulled off a major drug deal one night, they called Morpheus to their clubhouse in Taunton, Massachusetts. Morpheus was equipped with his standard gear: a tiny camera and a recording chip he wore on his body (it would go against protocol to say exactly where). The gang ordered him - at gunpoint - to strip.
Son of a bitch! Morpheus was in deep; he had been undercover for 18 months and had already committed six crimes with them. (Or so they thought.) They searched Morpheus and his clothes, but missed the microcamera - a providence he attributes to his God. Later, at one of the strip joints they called home, his adrenaline output turned to anger. "Fuck you, guys," "Tomorrow, before the drop, I am going to make all you bitches strip!”
Next up was Operation Poetic Justice: a sheriff’s office in the hillbilly South where all the baddies were related and the corruption seeped easily into government. They were dealing drugs, untaxed cigarettes, and taking bribes. Before Morpheus and his team took down 50 people, including cops and their family members, he was sitting with a deputy's relative one evening when the hick pulled out a shotgun, and cocked the hammers. "If I find out you are the law, you are a dead man," the relative said, sneering and baring his toothless gums in a snarl. Months later, after the arrests, Morpheus sat with the hick again and introduced himself as FBI. "Oh, damn, I knew you were a lawman all along," the relative said. “Yeah?" "Then why did you sell me coke for a year?" "Oh, because I like you,.
Combine this criminal delusion with fanaticism and you get the pretzeled logic of white power. In the hate groups he penetrated, Morpheus encountered beliefs that only crackpot satirists could dream up. One evening, over bourbon, he sat with a Klansman who expounded to him the theory of the double seed. In the Garden of Eden it was Adam, Eve and Abel, and Abel, born of Adam, spawned the white race. Then came the serpent with the forbidden fruit - except that the "fruit" was Eve, who slept with the serpent. The serpent, who was Satan, spawned Cain and the mud people, starting with the Jews. Then came the blacks, gays, communists, and Asians: they are all the seed of Satan as well. Christians can kill them and it is not a sin to do so, for they are spawns of hell who have no souls. Ugh. Really? This is some just plain scary and disgusting malarkey. So glad these dudes are putting their asses on the line, undercover and clearing the streets, farms, and backwoods of these individuals.
The names of the demons changed as Morpheus roved the racist circuit: lizard people, beasts of the field, short-faced bears. The rules changed, too, even under the same flag. Aryan Nation disciples in the state of Tennessee trafficked dope and guns and pimped their girls on Backpage, often to Black and brown johns.
This upset the Reverend Richard Butler, who founded the Aryan Nations in the 1970s. From his property in Idaho, he sent cease-and-desist letters to these crystal-head heathens in the South who were piggybacking on his teachings and namesake. For months, he badgered them to change their name; they told him to go screw himself. Finally, Butler capitulated: they could call themselves Aryan Nation IF they studied the Scriptures with him. And they did! The Tennessee renegades found Jesus and continued to sell speed to all who came. Morpheus busted the gang in 2018, sending 44 members to the state pokey. All their Christian BS, and they were selling tons of product, using the criminal proceeds to grow their base.
If Morpheus had done nothing but focus on drug gangs, corrupt cops, and human-trafficking cases, he’d have blazed a big trail at the bureau. But he wanted something more. So in 2015, he arranged his own transfer to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Tennessee. JTTFs were created by the FBI in 1980 and are regional task forces in which FBI agents, police officers and linguists work together to track terror threats at home. At the time, no one in Washington considered far-right groups a priority target. That changed in a flash with Morpheus . He built the case against the Aryan Nations, which lasted 18 months. Success in the form of arrests and seizures showed DTOS - the Domestic Terrorism Command in Washington - that you can make big cases against white supremacists and that we need more people to do it.
The Bureau soon doubled the size of its team; Morpheus expanded his reach to other states. Posing as an outlaw biker, he infiltrated a Klan cell suspected of manufacturing ghost guns for sale. One night in a remote field in Scottsboro, Alabama, they blindfolded him and forced him to his knees: he was "naturalized" or inducted by a green-clad wizard. For months he attended their Klan power trainings and played Lynyrd Skynyrd at their rallies. Morpheus, shredding like a poor man's Kirk Hammet, belted out Southern standards while they doused their 30-foot torch with diesel fuel.
At those Klan meetings, Morpheus caught wind of a baddie who had some evil intentions. He had posted pictures of synagogues on his Facebook page along with statements like, 'I am going to do something big.' Morpheus arranged a meeting with the man, posing as a closer. (The closer is the one who supplies the "iron," a gun or a bomb for an attack.) On Jan. 12, 2017, he picked up Benji McDowell at his home in Conway, South Carolina; they drove to Myrtle Beach to discuss targets. This was right around the time Dylann Roof, the church shooter was on trial. Benji told Morpheus he wanted to do something Roof-style, only on a much grander scale.
He wasn’t sure what to make of McDowell, a 30-year-old stoner who seemed like a malleable-brained teen. There are countless idiots who make heinous threats but lack the will or wherewithal to follow through. Morpheus considered McDowell one of those losers, a feeling that was reinforced when he lit a joint in the back seat of Morpheus’s sedan. "Put that out!" "You don’t know what’s in the trunk!” McDowell was so startled that he swallowed the joint. Later, he barfed in a parking lot.
That night, Morpheus got a call from Benji asking for a 40 caliber and hollow point bullets. Morpheus returned in February to deliver the gun - without firing pins, naturally. McDowell had information about an event at a temple [in Myrtle Beach] where there would be a lot of kids and families. The exchange took place at a motel. Officers subdued McDowell in the parking lot. Later, at the station, he made a remorseful confession saying he was glad they stopped me in time, ‘cause he was planning to do something bad. McDowell only got a slap on the wrist - 33 months in prison for an illegal weapon.
No time to ponder sentencing guidelines, however, ’cause another plot was afoot at an industrial plant. A white man, angry at his black superiors, wanted to plant a bomb to blow up the joint. Morpheus contacted him through a source and again posed as a closer. However, unwilling to leave a voice trail, the man refused to speak. Instead, he sent Morpheus what he wanted: an emoji of a bomb exploding. After pinging off his personal phone for months, the perp shifted his target to his boss's house, who happened to be a married couple. Travis Dale Brady was caught when he took possession of a dummy bomb supplied by federal law enforcement. He was no genius, but stupid people kill people all the time. Like the other guy [McDowell], he had the heart and the drive to do it. And let’s face it, dead equals dead.
Morpheus didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the first tremors of a wave of white terror. That spring, there were horrific hate killings in New York and Portland, Oregon. Then, in the summer, the flood: Charlottesville, Virginia. For two days, men with long guns carrying Nazi flags paraded through the streets of this quaint town. Police watched as dozens of people were injured in a festival of hate and horror. But even the footage of James Fields Jr. speeding his Dodge into a crowd, then backing up and ramming more passersby after killing Heather Heyer, still din’t bring domestic terror to the forefront.
He and his colleagues were miffed. At that rally there were groups planning mass destruction, the worst of them the Atomwaffen Division, a global gang of white boys in their teens and early twenties who had been baptized by fire through the teachings of James Mason, whose banned book Siege is a curriculum for racists. Mason, a graying neo-Nazi who lives in seclusion in northern Colorado, has been training sociopaths since the early eighties. He is one of the founding fathers of the "accelerationist" movement: a motley bunch of far-right rage-mongers who believe society is on the verge of total collapse. The accelerationists' mission is to accelerate the plow by launching attacks on people and institutions that set the stage for a race war in the streets.
Three Atomwaffen members - all Marines in a cell at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville - planned to destroy power plants with homemade thermite bombs. They had already formed a "death squad" and were selling ghost rifles to conspirators around the state. One member in ‘Vegas targeted a local temple; he planned to detonate an explosive device and then pick off the panicked parishioners as they fled. These kids were such violent posters on social networking app Gab that the feds finally acted in 2018. They sent Morpheus as part of an undercover team to the Destroying Texas Fest that summer.
Black metal bands with names like Satanic Goat Ritual were playing at a Houston club; several Atomwaffen members would be performing there. One of the plans called for Morpheus and company to stage a "Cold Bump." One of them would pick a fight with leader John Cameron Denton, and Morpheus would step in to "save" him. As it turned out, they didn’t have to fake the brawl. Other agents infiltrated Denton's cell and arrested him and five others for conspiracies against reporters, blacks, and Jews. That freed Morpheus for his biggest case: the seven-month operation to dismantle the ultra far right home-grown terror group in the making: the Base. This would be his final mission with the FBI: infiltrate and pose as a member of the Base.