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Phoenix Division Management Team

William D. Newell Special Agent In Charge (SAC)

Jim Needles Assistant Special Agent In Charge (ASAC)

George Gillette Assistant Special Agent In Charge (ASAC)

Nancy F. Cook Director of Industry Operations (DIO)

Thomas G. Mangan Public Information Officer (PIO

That's pretty much the names of the folks the field agents are talking about ~ although there's a suggestion this runs up to headquarters in DC.

I looked over their management structure and these guys don't have the old classic Federal Reserve cities in the mix as Regional Headquarters sites. Insteads there are Divisions and Field Divisions with varying numbers of personnel, and to a degree doing different things (guess crime varies by region).

Names are given for the major divisions but not the field divisions ~ and you can't get the names of the various field agents.

This is pretty typical of any federal police agency ~ and the answer is No, no one wants you to know the guys at the bottom of the totem pole unless you meet one of them.

If you want to know why ATF sometimes seems to engage in willful, arbitrary and capricious conduct in its relations with licensed firearms dealers check out the Borchardt Rifle case.

Notice that ATF uses the sort of document checks found more appropriately in QUALITY AUDITING ~ and that these do not represent any sort of statistically valid result ~ beyond saying "Hey, look, a document error".

This was the same sort of thing the Arizona federal prosecutor was using to bust Campeon and Ramos so famously.

As a practical matter, outside the dream worlds of federal cops, these "errors" constitute correctible or remediable clerical errors of substantially less than criminal conduct.

I'm not sure what's up with these guys, but it looks like someone has imported QC auditing techniques as something useful for police work.

Those techniques ARE NOT useful for prosecuting people.

This sort of nonsense also served to delay investigation into the ANTHRAX attack a good 7 years!

I don't expect improvement in any of this nonsense until we get a Federal Attorney General on duty who has had some serious instruction in the use of statistics to establish probable cause. QC Audits ain't it!