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back to Baltimore. He sent Marshall and me up to the area around Orlando to scout.
    We found two satisfactory Caddies again. Marshall brought along two of the younger guys. Marshall was the spotter outside the lot; the other two guys and I cut the chain and went in.
    The sheriff’s patrol car comes by. Apparently he notices the chain down over the entrance, because he turns into the lot and starts flashing his spotlight around.
    I and the other guys dive under cars. I don’t know what’s going to happen if the cop finds us. Maybe these guys are carrying guns. Maybe this cop will be trigger-happy. I have this vision that I am going to die right here under this car, shot as a damn car thief.
    The cop drove around for about five minutes, then went out. We hooked the two Caddies and got the hell out of there.
    Becker had stolen a bulldozer in Baltimore and wanted us to deliver it to the customer in Lakeland, so we drove up and put the bulldozer on a flatbed trailer to haul it back. Becker said he was filling contracts for airplanes. He had already had a twin-engine job flown out to Caracas, Venezuela, and now he had another customer for a single-engine Cessna.
    When we got the bulldozer back to Lakeland, Marshall and I scouted small airports and found the plane at a strip where nobody was on duty at night. Another guy was going to fly it out, so we took that guy out there that night. Marshall got in and wired the plane up and got it started, and the pilot took off. We didn’t want this plane to get out of the country, so I had tipped off our guys ahead of time and they had made arrangements with the FAA to divert the plane to Miami. So when this guy took off, I called in, and they ordered him to land in Miami. So as not to blow our operation, they used as a reason that they suspected it was a drug plane.
    A couple of the car thieves lived in Daytona, and one Sunday afternoon we went over there. They lived with their girlfriends in this dumpy little house, and there were two little kids running around in diapers. The place was a mess, and there was nothing in the house to eat except junk food and beer.
    Marshall and I went out and bought a load of groceries, including baby food. They served the baby food to the kids while I cooked up pots of spaghetti sauce and pasta and sausage and peppers for the adults. So we had a big meal with the thieves and their girlfriends and kids that Sunday afternoon.
    Because we had things going all the time, I got home only twice in five months. In addition to the separation, the operation was putting a financial strain on my family.
    At that time all an undercover agent got was a per diem for expenses. Out of that you had to pay for hotel and meals. It was never enough. Often when I was with badguys, I picked up a check, and often it came out of my own money. I called home a lot, and for security reasons I didn’t want any phone numbers on my hotel bill, so I always called collect. I didn’t get reimbursed for my home phone bill, so I ended up eating that, which was a big sum over the long haul. Sometimes I had to ask my wife to wire me money because I had run out of cash. Naturally, my wife wasn’t happy about seeing our money used this way. In the end I used a total of about $3,000 of my own money in this operation. But I couldn’t stop the operation to argue with the office about expenses.
    The office had a strict policy about having receipts for everything. I got into a flap over the time when the guys were buying the White Freightliner and they asked us to switch hotels. I had two hotel bills for one day. The auditors at the Bureau rejected my reimbursement claim because the rule was one hotel room per day. I drew the line, flat out refused to eat that expense. I explained about how it was operating undercover, how expenses didn’t always fit the normal routine. Eventually that was straightened out. I was given a larger weekly amount, to use how I saw fit.
    The problem was, this kind of