When expressing worries about lawlessness and violence, people often will reference “the wild West” era as an example of unchecked criminal gunplay.
Frankly, such a characterization is unfair to cowboy gunslinger movies. After all, in the era of Wyatt Earp, the real-life Gunfight at the O.K. Corral lasted just 30 seconds, and the good guys won against a gang of bad guys with only five members – two of whom ran from the firefight.
These days, the bad guys form vast criminal networks that operate locally and internationally, connected by the Internet, the Dark Web and cell phones. They don’t rob stagecoaches anymore; instead, they make money trafficking in methamphetamine and fentanyl, or by enslaving reusable and disposable people for sex or labor. And instead of the Clanton brothers and their Cowboys gang that briefly faced down the Earp brothers and Doc Holiday, these criminal networks go by names like the Gangster Disciples, or the Ghost Face Gangsters, or MS-13.
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Law enforcement, likewise, has evolved into sophisticated networks of federal, state and local professionals whose collaboration relentlessly attacks the criminal conspiracies that threaten the safety of our communities. They do so not in quick shootouts in feedlots, but with intelligence and patience, they build cases that, instead of bringing down just one or two outlaws at a time, seek to rip out the roots of interconnected criminal enterprises.
Witness, for example, a flurry of recent law enforcement operations in the Southern District of Georgia.
In Operation Krack Down I and II, Operation Stranded Bandit, Operation Deadlier Catch, and Operation Sandy Bottom, law enforcement agencies working together under the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, or OCDETF, surveilled, infiltrated and ultimately shut down massive criminal organizations – many of them gang-affiliated – that are alleged to be responsible for building pipelines of illegal drugs into the Southern District and beyond.
Court documents and testimony lay out allegations that these groups used their networks – some of them directed from within Georgia prisons, by inmates using contraband cell phones – to distribute wholesale amounts of methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and other deadly drugs throughout our communities. The vast sums of money from such operations fuels the cultural corruption that frequently enables such criminal conspiracies to operate, grow and even thrive.
And then, we shut them down. All of them.
Nearly 150 defendants rounded up in these operations now are taking their turns in court after being charged with a multitude of felonies by law enforcement professionals who meticulously built criminal cases and moved in. Dozens of agencies worked together to bring down these operations, ranging from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Georgia Department of Community Supervision, all the way to sheriff’s offices and small-town police departments in places like Nicholls and Douglas and Alma.
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The role of the U.S. Attorney’s Office is to coordinate the hard work of these agencies, taking the handoff and putting together ironclad cases that lead to convictions and sentences that take criminals off the streets. This collaborative effort results in such victories as the Southern District’s Operation Vanilla Gorilla, the largest-ever takedown of the Ghost Face Gangsters that dismantled a major faction of the violent, white supremacist street gang and sent all 43 defendants to federal prison after every single one of them pled guilty in court. Every single one.
And remember: There is no parole in the federal system.
Make no mistake: The wild West era is tame by comparison to the dangerous world in which our valiant law enforcement professionals work day and night. The six-gun-toting outlaws of the old West have metastasized into a violent, cancerous plague whose malignant threads reach from coast to coast. But by saddling up and working together, our law enforcement agencies are taking the fight to the bad guys, disrupting and dismantling the connections that bind these criminal organizations – and getting their participants off of our streets.
We know that society itself must confront the cultural pathologies that fuel the seemingly insatiable demand for illegal drugs, weapons, and enslaved humans. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors will continue to build and refine our techniques and technologies to attack the illicit supply lines of the criminal trade, to bring its lawless participants to justice, and to discourage those who might consider attempting to profit from misery.
With continued support from law-abiding citizens, our gangs of good guys will prevail. Bobby L. Christine is the U.S. Attorney, Southern District of Georgia.
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