Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All

by Dan Bongino

  The new apartment in Queens was located on Myrtle Avenue, above the bar my grandfather owned. My mother had little money and the bitter divorce proceedings dragged on, so her salary from working in the supermarket across the street was our only means of support. The bar attracted few customers since my grandfather’s passing years earlier. My mother and her three sisters attempted to manage it with little success, and living above it was a stressful experience. In addition to the noise from the jukebox every night, the apartment was small, cramped, and infested with rats. Myrtle Avenue was always crowded with cars and people in no rush to contribute to the night’s silence.

  My mother started seeing a man she knew from her childhood not long after moving back to the old neighborhood. Mike, or as she had us refer to him, “Big Mike,” was a grizzled dockworker and a former boxer. He was a physically imposing figure at six feet, five inches and nearly 280 pounds. His demeanor was very different from than of the father we left behind in Smithtown, and growing accustomed to his increasing presence at the small apartment was a difficult adjustment for my brothers and me.

  Mike was generally a decent man, but he became an entirely different person when he drank. He grew up in the hard city streets where fighting was the rule rather than the exception. Having known nothing but peace in my childhood to this point, constantly hearing about violence and fighting was beginning to affect me. After our first year in the apartment, Mike moved in with us and became a permanent fixture in our lives. I was unaware, at this point, of the consequences of crossing Mike, but I quickly learned the boundaries of our relationship. Sitting in the kitchen one night, Big Mike asked me in front of my mother if I would like to join him and his son Mike at the Ridgewood Grove Arena to watch WWF wrestling. Having no interest, I replied, half-jokingly, “I have other things to do.” These words would come back to haunt me the next morning when he furiously screamed at me about my rudeness while I was lying in bed. I was stunned and scared, and I learned never to speak to him again in any way that could even be perceived as rude. This was just a small hint of what was to come.

  I awoke in the middle of the night a couple of weeks later and heard muffled screams, the kind of screams that have to be muffled. Thinking I was having a nightmare I closed my eyes, but the sound would not relent. My brother Joseph, six at the time, made the mistake of crossing Mike earlier that day for a reason most rational adults would attribute to childhood immaturity. Mike had been drinking and decided that Joseph was going to be the release valve for his rage. This was the moment our lives changed, never to be changed back. Once children trade the innocence of childhood for the brutal reality and hard edge of life, there are no buybacks. The abuse became a familiar routine for me. Joseph and I never discussed it. No one did. We all just pretended it didn’t happen and the world was happy to acquiesce. With no money, torn clothes, an empty refrigerator, and a prison of an apartment, I turned to the world of comic books to escape. I read every one I could get my hands on and had dreams only a child could have, dreams of the super strength to be able to stand up to Mike and not be afraid. The super strength never materialized, and the damage to my childhood was irreparable.

  After years of this painful monotony, my grandmother loaned my mother some money to buy a small house just up the road in Liberty Park, Queens. Although it was a short walk from the apartment over the bar, it was miles away in terms of an environment for raising a child. Now on and off with her relationship with Mike, my mother began to work for Con Edison, a New York electricity provider, and earned a better salary. Some of the hardest edges to our lives began to soften, but Mike’s edge was as sharp as ever. After a night of drinking he managed to get to our house and began banging on the windows. The relentless banging terrified me and my brothers and we braced for the repercussions if the window gave and he got ahold of us. The only thing Mike ever appeared to fear was the police, so I quickly dialed 911 and counted the seconds until they arrived. I remember watching them at our front door after they ordered Mike to leave and knowing, at that moment, that I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to be able to pay back the favor and bring peace to a young child’s life.

  2

  NYPD BLUE

  EARLY CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES instilled in me a deep desire to never be physically intimidated again, and to do everything in my limited power to ensure it did not happen to others. Law enforcement became a dream of mine, and after two years of college I began to research careers in federal, state, and local law enforcement. After making a number of calls to the FBI, DEA, US Marshals, and Secret Service, I realized that I was up against steep competition for the limited number of entry-level positions available and that moving from college directly into a law-enforcement position with one of these agencies was going to be difficult if not impossible. I began to consider different paths and after careful consideration settled on the New York City Police Department as the best organization to acquire both the experience and the contacts necessary to move into federal law enforcement. I decided on the NYPD cadet program as the most logical choice, and my father was eager to help.

  My father had always dreamed of a career in law enforcement, but a severe case of scoliosis of the spine had prevented him from following through on those dreams. The cadet program was, in essence, a paid internship program. It allowed me to attend college full time while working part time for the department in a support capacity, with a contract that obligated me to two years of service as a police officer upon graduation. The program was an initiative by the NYPD to recruit more college graduates into their ranks and in a short time it attracted a number of well-qualified applicants.

  At this same period in my life I was considering military service as well and was in touch with a recruiter for the US Marine Corps. Staff Sergeant Williams and I engaged in a number of conversations and my desire to serve our country was strong. My uncle, Gregory Ambrose, was killed in action in Vietnam and my mother never recovered from this tragedy. I knew she would be traumatized by my decision if I entered into military service, but the calling was loud and strong. I vividly recall my high school’s job fair and attending the Marine Corps presentation and being magnetically drawn to the heroism the presiding Marine appeared to exude from every pore.

  Despite the gravitational pull of military service on me, unfortunately, I would never fulfill my desire to serve, a decision I would question for many years afterward. I received a phone call months after submitting my application to the NYPD telling me I had successfully completed the rigorous application process for the cadet program and had to report for duty in the spring of 1995. At the time, I was living on my own and struggling financially. I moved out of my house after a physical altercation with Mike shortly after my eighteenth birthday and was working and attending college while trying to figure out my future. Financial pressures weighed on me daily and I knew if I took the cadet position military service would not be an option, but it would give me some financial stability and a path forward. My law-enforcement dreams and my desire to escape perpetual financial pressure led me to accept the position. My mother cried with relief when I told her the news and the thought of losing another member of her family subsided.

  I was excited to join the NYPD cadet program. It was my first real job that involved mature responsibilities and I was honored to be a part of the program. Although the job required maturity, I was still just a city kid with a rough edge and was unfamiliar with the formality of a paramilitary environment. The cadet training program was a mini police academy run by officers with strong military backgrounds. The paramilitary atmosphere began on the first day—when I reported for duty at a local college auditorium, I had barely made it to the line to access the facility when a grizzled NYPD veteran screamed, “Get in line, and shut your mouths!” That was all I needed to hear to fully comprehend that my life was about to change.

  Upon graduating from the cadet training program and becoming well-versed in military marching, the law, and most importantly the law-en
forcement culture, I was assigned to the 114th Precinct in Astoria, Queens. After an awkward few days wandering around the precinct aimlessly waiting for my shift to end, I was asked by precinct supervisors to see if I could help “upstairs.” The second floor of the 114th Precinct was known as “the borough,” or the command center for the entire borough of Queens. The top NYPD brass from Queens worked upstairs along with the staff they imported from precincts around the city. It was no place for a cadet, the lowest-ranking uniformed member in the department, and I didn’t exactly get off on the right foot. On my first full day at the borough I was assigned to an afternoon shift after my college classes ended. When I arrived, I dutifully signed in the log that I was beginning my shift. Ten minutes later I found out that I had committed the mortal sin of signing in at the actual time I had arrived and “blocked out” a chief who arrived late and was now obligated to sign in at her actual (late) arrival time. I was not off to the best start, but after serving a penance of performing menial tasks and a period of public humiliation by the borough staff, I was forgiven.

  Given my young appearance, it was not long before an affable sergeant who had taken a liking to me asked me if I would be interested in doing undercover work. Sergeant Schwach asked me if I could report to the 111th Precinct in Bayside, Queens, to accompany a team on alcohol enforcement operations. I was not a police officer yet and did not carry a weapon but the assignment appeared benign enough. Bayside was a popular middle-class Queens neighborhood with a vibrant bar section (coincidentally where I would later meet my wife). The bars brought economic activity to the area but also significant crime and trouble from underage drinkers and irresponsible patrons. Some of the local delis and convenience stores contributed to the problem by selling alcohol to underage customers. My task was to accompany a small unit of police officers and a sergeant and attempt to purchase alcohol from the stores and bars. The brief ride to the first bar on the Long Island Expressway service road was an experiment in emotional suppression. I did not want the officers to realize how nervous I was, so I engaged in small talk to cover my anxiety as we drove over to the Pull-Box.

  The Pull-Box was a local bar owned by a former New York fireman (a fact, I was to discover later, that played into the decision to include it in the undercover operation). I walked into the bar feigning bravery and sat down among a crowd of fewer than five patrons, which only drew more attention to my awkward entry, and asked for a beer. When the bartender asked me for an ID, I responded that I didn’t have one and he asked me to leave. I was relieved that he did the right thing since I was completely unprepared as to what to do if he actually served me the beer. When I reappeared, the look of disappointment on the officers’ faces was clear. I found out later that one of them had a grudge against the bar owner. It was my first exposure to the rough underbelly of law enforcement.

  After a number of weeks acting as an undercover and making underage alcohol purchases, I became comfortable with the process and the undercover work became second nature. It was a skill I would use later as a Secret Service agent. The process was clean and efficient: walk in, grab a beer, pay for it, pretend I forgot something, and walk out. The officers would then rush in and write the owner a criminal court summons. I performed my role well enough to be considered for reassignment to a new unit in the borough that was to focus on serial criminals, a line of work I found incredibly interesting given my academic background in psychology The unit was called the Pattern Identification Module and its mission was to analyze data on major crimes and attempt to uncover patterns that could be relayed to detective teams for use in their investigations. My job was to input and analyze data, often for hours at a time. In one case, I began to notice a series of serial home-invasion–type robberies where the criminal would say the same thing each time he would knock on a door of a home he intended to break into.

  This early success in detecting patterns in the serial robbery cases allowed me a degree of workplace freedom I was not used to in my short time with the NYPD. This gave me credibility with the officers and the sergeant I worked for, and they subsequently allowed me to make my own hours. With the new, flexible work schedule and the companionship of a good team, I enjoyed this assignment immensely and spent the next two years working with the team.

  After a few months working in the program, I became friends with a fellow cadet in the program named Marty (who, ironically, I later reconnected with after he saw one of my appearances on Wilkow on TheBlaze TV). During our commutes back to the police academy in Manhattan for ongoing training, Marty liked to talk about politics and was the first person to introduce me to the ideological principles of conservatism. Although I was always passionate about economics and politics, my understanding at the time was limited and my larger perspective was lacking. Our long, sometimes confrontational conversations triggered my interest into why the big questions never seemed to be answered. Why were there pockets of poverty despite decades of antipoverty programs? Why did universal health care really equate to excellent health care for some and universal mediocrity for others? Why did some schools excel yet others fail miserably despite access being guaranteed? Marty did not know it at the time but he sparked an interest that would alter my life permanently.

  As my graduation from college approached and my time as a police cadet came to a close, I began to prepare for the next stage of my career with the NYPD. My contractual obligation to serve for two years as a police officer upon graduation from college was about to start, and I looked forward to the opportunity. The cadet program was an interesting experience because I learned about the organizational structures and psychology of law enforcement from the inside. The culture of law enforcement is unique in its clear divide between those who carry the guns and those who do not, regardless of their background or qualifications. Entering the police academy in the summer of 1997, now for the second time, was an easier transition compared to the cultural shift I experienced entering the cadet program as a teenager. I found the training to be somewhat redundant and spent the majority of my time building relationships with other classmates.

  After nearly nine months of academy training, we were ready to pick our “wish list” of precinct assignments before being assigned to an FTU, or “Field Training Unit.” My FTU, where I would spend one month, was the 32nd Precinct in Harlem, a challenging assignment for a new officer. However, I selected the most difficult precinct within the NYPD borders for my first permanent assignment, the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn. I chose this notoriously dangerous precinct for two reasons, the primary reason being that I knew the assignment would be difficult and I relished the challenge, the secondary reason being that I knew I would be granted my wish, since no one actually requested the 75th.

  Field training was the pinnacle of the police academy experience and a welcome break from the monotony of the classroom and regimented nature of the academy environment. The standard-issue NYPD uniform was dark blue, but while in field training we were permitted to wear only our gray police academy uniform. We were “rookies” to the police officers and residents of the precinct. Standing at my first roll call hearing the chant of “rookies, rookies” was slightly humiliating, yet funny. It was not funny later on when nearly everyone who passed me on my foot post made similar comments. I quickly learned that no matter the outside temperature, it was always wise to bring your standard-issue NYPD jacket, the same one worn by every other police officer, and cover up your gray shirt.

  The gray shirts acted as a “scarlet letter” and forced the recruit class to bond together. I found companionship in the other recruits assigned to the 32nd Precinct with me, many of whom I had never met before. A fellow recruit named Brian was assigned to partner with me on our nightly foot patrols and we became fast friends. New York is a large city by population but is made relatively small by networks of friends and families, and, Brian’s cousin was a friend of my brother’s and we knew some of the same people. We spent hours talking while walking our assigned foo
t post, and, as I would learn throughout my law-enforcement career, things could change in an instant. We would move from a conversation about baseball and the neighborhood to a foot pursuit through upper Manhattan and back to a conversation about a neighborhood friend. Brian and I would remain lifelong friends as a result of these foot patrol conversations, and our children would later grow up together.

  Most of the police officers treated us as a precinct sideshow and largely ignored us, but after a few days some of them warmed to us. This would change rapidly for me one weekday afternoon.

  I was walking my assigned foot post and as I turned a corner I saw a man seated on a store railing smoking what appeared to be marijuana. I was excited yet apprehensive, as this was the first police action I was about to engage in. As I slowly approached him he jumped down and began to run. I screamed into my radio “10-85,” which was the nonemergency call for assistance, and immediately heard the cacophony of sirens as seemingly every police car in the precinct activated them at the same time. I chased him for a long city block until he was cut off by an assisting officer in a car and placed in handcuffs. Feeling relieved, I transported the man back to the precinct with the assisting officers who, rather than congratulating me, proceeded to lecture me on wasting police assets on “weed.” The stern lecture from the sergeant on duty at the precinct was even more emotionally devastating, but it did teach me a lesson that would become a staple of my political philosophy. It taught me that there are real consequences to having an unreasonably idealistic view of the world.