“I’d be in some deal somewhere and I’d be like,
‘Oh there’s so-and-so that I know. I hope they
don’t see me.’ I was involved in the community,
I had kids who played sports so I was constantly
seeing people I knew. You do a lot of deals in
parking lots. It does happen.”
As do close calls, like the time he decided to
work one last case for the sheriff’s office, just
10 days before he was to be sworn in by ATF.
He and a team went to a hotel outside Augusta,
where they’d arranged a buy for 150 pounds of
marijuana. “I should have known something
was going to go wrong when the bad guy wanted
to watch wrestling. Ultimately it was a rip,” he
said. He was paid $40,000 and found six guys
waiting for him as soon as he walked out the door.
When he bolted, throwing the money in his car
and locking it, the guns came out. “We ended up
shooting two guys in the head that night. Forty-
three rounds were fired in total. I don’t know how
I didn’t get hit,” he said.
Beach plays it a little more straight these days,
as chief of police for Twin City, Georgia. For a guy
who used to track gun smugglers, drug kingpins
and murderers, it’s a nice change of pace.
“About 10 o’clock last night I arrested these
guys for a misdemeanor. My last case with ATF
I got 100 pounds of cocaine,” said Beach. “I was
laughing. It’s all the lord’s work.”
“SLICK”RICK REGISTER
As a member of the elite Special
Response Team, Rick Register was
tasked with helping to lower the boom,
executing the arrest of dangerous
criminals following ATF undercover
investigations.
"They killed my sponsor to
get into the club, they blew up
the [explicit] president of the
Rockford chapter for the Hell’s
Henchmen, killed another
henchman in Chicago, they
detonated the third largest car
bomb in the country…It was
very surreal." - Chris Bayless
94
SOUTH
June | July 2019
The thing about every undercover case is that it
has to end. And when it does, someone needs to be
there to actually slap the cuffs on a criminal and
perform the physical act of getting them off the
streets.
The thing about ATF undercover cases is that
those criminals are usually much more violent
than the typical street-level hoodlum, and well-
armed, making the act of arresting them infinitely
more dangerous.
“If (undercover agents) are working a proper
case, then by default the nature of the targets
requires a higher level of skill than a normal
police department or even federal department can
handle. Therefore, SRT gets called in,” said Rick
Register, a veteran of ATF’s Strategic Response
Team.
Comprised of around 130 elite operators, SRTs
are based regionally around the country, ready to
deploy at a moment’s notice when an ATF agent
has gathered enough evidence to lower the boom.
And ATF keeps them busy. At one point, Register
was working three home invasion takedowns a
week, and SRT nationwide has averaged as high as
300 in a year. “That is mind-blowing at the federal
level.”
Register was there when Operation Pulaski
wrapped, a long-term undercover storefront
operation on Savannah’s riverfront that saw
ATF agents posing as workers in a warehouse
who specialized in buying up guns and drugs.
The resulting arrests were considerable, with 45
defendants charged with gun and drug trafficking.
That made SRT’s task of sweeping them all
up even more difficult, since they all had to be
arrested at once so as not to alert other criminals.