Mafia Miami: FBI Politics and How an Investigation Was Nearly Sabotaged

Get the inside look at an FBI undercover operation that exposed an Italian mafioso?s global crime network.
This remarkable and entertaining story takes readers through the challenges, twists and turns, and inevitable administrative roadblocks one encounters while running a high-profile and complex FBI investigation. Interwoven throughout the story are highlights of key bureaucratic changes driven by culture and policy that took place within the FBI at the time. Jerry Hester explains how those changes had a negative impact on not only the Paesan Blues investigation but also the entire future of the FBI?s effectiveness and reputation.

Given the size and complexity of modern American law enforcement, with hundreds of thousands of employees working literally thousands of cases simultaneously, it is inevitable that things will periodically go wrong. In Mafia Miami, former FBI agent Hester recounts how internal agency politics and conflicting agendas nearly let things go awry. Hester lays his story out with all the detail and context of an investigator pulling together his case. He tells how he ended up posted in Miami investigating a major Mafia drug operation, accruing evidence and developing reliable sources, building his case step by painstaking step. He goes on to recount how internal politics and poor human judgment at first provided obstacles then threatened to derail the entire operation. While it’s not Hester’s intent to malign the (mostly) good work of the FBI, his story does illustrate how, even with the best intentions and the highest character, human agencies are subject to human foibles. For devotees of the true-crime genre, this makes for an illuminating study.