i was once, BRIEFLY, a DUSM and the marshal's opinion of batf's "cowboys" is NOT good.
FRee dixie,sw
You should have heard what their fellow treasury agents, my uncle in the Secret Service among them, had to say about them. He regarded them as little better than the lone wolf crazies hoping to kill a presidential family member for fame and glory, and less honorable than many of the counterfeiters he had dealt with. Neither was he real impressed with Mr. Hoover's G-men, whose legacy was built on lethal bumbling from the agency's start at the Kansas City massacre where one of their agents shotgunned his federal partner and the local sheriff when they came under fire, and to their gangbuster reputation built on public relations lies and execution of unarmed or helpless wounded prisoners.
Neither was the Treasury Prohibition Agents' record of some 2000 shootings of unarmed suspects or innocent bystanders/witnesses in their day much of an example for the ATTU/BATF/BATFE agents to claim, and the presence of a half-dozen or so of the ATTU agents at the Dallas Schoolbook Depository on 22 November 1963 has yet to be explained away.
Uncle Dennis had a grudging respect for the Postal Inspectors and the Border Patrol, many of whose inspectors were sometimes sworn in as Deputy US Marshalls, as you were.
-archy-/-