'I Was a Teenage DEA Informant' – An Excerpt From My Upcoming Memoir
- 20 hours ago
- 12 min read
For nearly 14 years, I've helped individuals navigate the complex landscape of addiction in order to achieve recovery. Nicknamed "The Casual Counselor", my approach is unconventional but undeniably effective.
As fate would have it, three separate incidents would occur within a few weeks that would ultimately turn me into a willing teenage Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant. A confidential informant to the federal organization, doing work for them that would occupy the better part of three months of my young life.
The first incident was a phone call. The Widow, we’ll call her, called the restaurant. I was one of two servers that evening, and I answered the phone when it rang. I heard her voice.
"Josh. I need to know what’s going on with my money,” after I greeted her in the way I had been trained to answer customer calls.
"I am so sorry, but Josh isn’t working tonight. This happens to me all the time,” I replied, dropping my tone an octave.
"Josh, I know it’s you. I know your voice,” she replied. "Uh, this is John,” I said, getting supremely nervous. “I’m not sure what else to tell you. I’m not sure when Josh is working next. Maybe I can find out. Can I help you with anything? Would you like to place an order?”
There was a long beat of silence, then she spoke into the receiver. "Tell him that Widow called, and to call me back immediately,” as I pretended to scribble down the message and her phone number, my heart racing.
When I hung up the phone, I went and sat at one of the front tables, shakily lighting up a cigarette, feeling like my body was full of acrid poison, coursing through me. It took some time and some deep hauls of smoke to come back to my senses. Luckily, the restaurant was mostly empty.
After I had shaken off the rust, and without any additional phone inquiries in the next week or two, one weekend morning, some of the rough-looking characters who I’d seen from time to time hanging out at her place came into the restaurant for brunch.
Incident two: My heart clenched when I saw them in the line waiting to be seated. They ended up with another server. “Surely a coincidence,” I was telling myself, and they didn’t seem to be paying me any notice or attention. When they got up to leave, though, something shifted. One of them, kinda scrawny, heavily tattooed, and with a weathered face, walked up to me, smiling.
“You’re Josh, right?” he asked amiably. “Yeah! I remember you! How’s it going, man?” "Hey,” I said quietly. “Good. Busy.”
"Gimme two seconds,” he said to me, not really asking. “I want to show you something. Come into the doorway.”
Autopilot. I followed him into the little glass foyer. The weather was warm, and he wore a black tee and a denim vest, sliding an unlit cigarette into the side of his mouth.
“I wanna show you something,” he said. “Check this out,” he said as he turned, rolling up his left sleeve. He showed me three ugly, deep scars on his arm. One up on the inside of his arm, by the pit, another at the elbow, and one on his forearm.
“I got these from Widow, like, I dunno, three or four years ago.” He waited for my reaction. I said nothing.
“Yeah. Broke my arm in like three different places. Well, not her, but you get it. Surgery. Plates, pins, all that. I didn’t even owe her half of what you did,” he told me.
He gave me a soft pat on the side of my arm, said nothing else, and got in the waiting truck with one of his group as they drove away from the parking lot.
Not very subtle, but certainly enough to compel a panic attack in the middle of the breakfast rush as I walked briskly back to the bathroom to smoke and what? Think? What the hell was I going to do about this? Who could I tell? Loose lips sink ships. I thought of my bodybuilder friend. I knew where Widow stashed all of her wares, all the little hiding places throughout her house. I’d spent plenty of time with her by then. Maybe he and some big goons could rob her?
I was 17. She was 37. Incident three: That very same week, I was working alone. A Sunday evening shift. We always had one server on for Sunday evenings. We barely saw any patrons on Sunday nights, the occasional takeout call or a single person asking for a table for one. As fate would have it, a takeout order was called in, and when the gentleman arrived to get it, his car still running in our small front parking lot, we met eyes and recognized each other immediately.
He was older. Ruddy red Irish face. A massive beer belly on his wide frame. Smiling eyes. He knew my first name, and I, his. He was a city detective. He had worked in the juvenile division for decades, along with his not-so-nice partner. Despite my issues with local law enforcement, the two of us had always shared a pleasant rapport. He was a “protect and serve” cop, a guy who really believed in helping his community. Making it a better place for everyone. Not a bully. He’d never shied away from a conversation with me in all of our encounters, and he’d always hear me out, no matter what dumb situation I’d gotten into that necessitated police intervention. He always seemed to actually care about me.
The moment he saw me, he could feel it. Energetically. He knew something was off. My vibe. My demeanor. Still, he smiled and greeted me, “Hey, Josh! Good to see you! How goes it?” I could see that his eyes had a little twinge of concern behind his jolly presentation.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” I asked him. “Maybe in the back of the restaurant? Somewhere private?”
Now his smile had all but vanished, his forehead furrowed with obvious concern at whatever he was feeling. ”Of course,” he told me, his hand resting gently on my arm. “Josh, are you okay?”
We walked to the back area of the empty dining room. I hesitated for a moment, eyes down, then I met his gaze and asked him a question. ”Have you ever heard anything about anything going on up on Pleasant Ave?” I asked him.
His usual reddish, glowing complexion turned a whiter shade of pale as he slowly answered, “Yeah, I might have heard some things about something going on up there.” He continued, “Josh, what’s going on, kid? What is it you need to tell me? How can I help?”
I went on to give him an overview of the goings-on and even my own criminal behavior in all of it, the tremendous debt, the threatening messenger who had dined here just days before. All of it. He sat at the table, silent, not unlocking his concerned eyes from my panicked and desperate stare. I was pleading with my eyes. Silently. Then he broke the silence.
"What time do you close tonight?” he asked. "In about an hour,” I told him. "Okay. I’m gonna bring my food home. I’m going to call someone. Don’t leave,” he told me. “Someone is going to call you.”
I think I just nodded at him, silently. I swiped his card and handed him the bag of food. He signed it, reached out and squeezed me gently on the arm again, and told me in a voice that was one part compassionate and one part stone cold:
“Don’t worry, Joshua. You’re going to be alright.”
I sat down at the front table again, trembling and jumpy and sweaty now, and I lit another cigarette as he exited the parking lot. Something was definitely happening now. But what? To add to it, this cop I had just spilled the beans to wasn’t just one of the nicer cops in the city, he also was a resident of The Highlands, probably for two or three generations. This felt like something personal, and my friends and I had known that Widow’s house was “hot” for the past several months.
Patrol and detective vehicles had been creeping through the small neighborhoods up there in the late evening hours. They had been driving around at strange times looking for signs of activity in a way that none of us had seen before, and we’d spent our entire young lives playing in those streets and keeping our eyes peeled for any unusual activity. This was our neighborhood. Our home.
About an hour later, I got a phone call. I was to finish closing up the restaurant and then walk over to the adjacent McDonald’s parking lot, where “they” would be waiting for me, I was told by a faceless, nameless voice on the other end. The night was dark, overcast, and warm. I walked around to the backside of the building, and a big, black tinted SUV flashed a quick high beam at me. Summoning me over. A window rolled down halfway on the passenger side. ”Josh, right?” he said. “Hop in the backseat.”
In the passenger seat sat a squat, solid-built, cropped-hair stereotype of an obvious police officer. You would know just by looking at him. In the driver’s seat sat a curly-haired guy with a bushy mustache who looked just a couple of years away from a pension. He did not fit the profile of a police officer. He looked more like an uncle or a grandpa. He had kind eyes. His partner did not. His were narrow and beady, with a palpable ripple of intensity. He seemed the type who probably enjoyed tackling a perp or taking down a door. His partner looked more the type to call you over for a chat about life wisdom and feelings.
Still, they were both accommodating, and undeniably incredulous when they confirmed with me, in a few instances, that I was doing this voluntarily. They seemed stunned. I answered in the affirmative as I went on to tell them nearly a year’s worth of stories of all of the business that had been circulating in the quiet neighborhood, in the small white home up on Pleasant Ave. The Highlands.
One of the safest and most desirable neighborhoods in our fair city. They kept swapping looks that told me they were both flabbergasted, giddy, and excited like little kids on Christmas Eve. A huge case had just been dropped in the backseat of the SUV, and they were dying to untie the ribbon and open the prize.
I was no longer Josh, now. I was fingerprinted. I was assigned a number. Confidential Informant #. It was a long number. I guess there had been many more before me who’d undergone this arduous process of intake and protocol and waiting and signing forms, and thinking that there would be many more to follow in my footsteps. I was interviewed by three different suits, always a variety of the same questions, and told many times to sit and wait. It was a huge office area. Ringing phones, clerical types filing files. It smelled like coffee, cheap cologne, perspiration, and ink.
I’d be brought into an interrogation room, though never cuffed or treated like some kind of hard case. These people had, no doubt, worked on this end of the criminal spectrum with some pretty wild characters in their day at the DEA, but each person who interacted with me that day had my number before even greeting me. They saw right through me. They saw the scared kid. The seventeen-year-old. They let me smoke in the little private rooms as I recounted all of the intel I had on The Widow.
Then, I was brought back downstairs again, and this time, the aggressive little guy who I’d been saddled with was the only one in the SUV with me, driving me back to the place where they had retrieved me earlier that day. It was a bit past dusk. No conversation on the ride back. I walked back inside Elliot’s house. It wasn’t the house where Josh had to knock before entering. My bud was sitting on his couch, playing his guitar. When he saw me walk in, I could feel the anxious energy vibrating off of him.
”Get over here,” Elliot quipped, even though we were the only two people there. “Dude, she’s a fucking Angel!” He very nearly snapped at me. “Do you hear me?!? A fucking Angel, dude.”
He was stiff and tense. Always the sarcastic clown, I replied to him, “Widow? Oh. Yeah. Sure. She’s a real fucking peach.”
”No, you fucking dumb fuck. Her family. Her dad. He’s like a ranking member of the Hells Angels. Do you have any fucking idea what you’re all mixed up in now?”
His eyes showed sadness, anger, and worry. I told him, “Yeah. I think I’m pretty sure I do. But it’s begun.”
I told him about the events of that day. He didn’t say a word. I told him I was heading back to my place, and asked him if he’d drive me to the train station for the ride back to Cambridge. He drove me straight home instead, in his early 70s muscle car, and we rode in complete silence. When we got to my house, before I could climb out the passenger door, he took my face in his hands, gently.
"Don’t say a fucking word to anyone.” Of course, I did. Slowly at first, but you tell one person too many, and word has a way of getting around. The Game of Telephone. Somehow, thankfully, it never seemed to get back to Widow, even though many people had heard the sordid tale and were still frequenting her house when the gang was all there.
But I could tell, when I was around certain friends in my group, that they were receiving me, my presence, strangely. They say if you tell one person a deep secret, rest assured that at least 10 people will know within a short window. “You have to promise you won’t tell anyone, but guess what I heard about Josh.”
People talk. They say a lot. The drill was always the same, though in different locations. I’d make a phone call to Widow, arrange a meet of her choosing. I’d contact my new coworkers. They’d come to pick me up in a jiffy and bring me to the local department. There, they would talk amongst themselves out of my earshot, allowing me to sit in an open interrogation room with a Styrofoam cup of water for my ashes.
I’d then be prepped: a small microphone taped to the center of my sternum, a small wire connected to a battery tucked into my back waistband. Someone on the receiving end would go outside of the building, a few hundred yards from where I was, and they would check the sound levels.
Then, I’d ride shotgun in the beat-up undercover pickup truck, and we’d go to the prearranged waiting spot, a large, public parking lot usually, and we’d sit. Wait. He wasn’t much for small talk, and he insisted on using a ridiculous name to refer to himself by. See, their goal was ultimately for me to pass him off to her after my incurred debt was all squared away, but like anyone who plays in the dirt, they get dirty.
See, Widow was much too cautious to ever be interested in meeting someone new with whom she hadn’t had an opportunity to commune before. He was unknown to her. It was me, and me only, that she felt comfortable with when doing business. Still, though, strange that the woman who never left her house never delegated any of these deals to any of her other mules. She always insisted on meeting me face to face.
I think she knew, on some intuitive level, that something was off. She asked me on several occasions if I was certain that this guy was on the level. With thanks to my high school drama department director, I was always able to smoothly convince her that he was just a big shot at a university out in western Mass, UMass, to be specific, a notorious party school, and that I’d been dealing with him for years. She had known I had lived out there for a year or so in the earlier times we’d sat in her living room passing around a joint.
It’s a good thing she wasn’t a “hugger”, by nature. She surely would’ve felt the surveillance equipment beneath my shirt.
Part of me was experiencing a modicum of guilt, probably absorbed from all the criminal capers and rap anthems and music videos and television I was conditioned by, about being a snitch. A rat. If I’m being honest, part of me was also feeling a kind of preternatural satisfaction at the idea of putting her away. I learned within the months of doing the controlled buys that she had approached the younger brothers of some of my peers about doing business with her, and she had directly approached, introduced, and successfully gotten another one of our group heavily involved in using heroin. He was only snorting it back then. He would graduate to injecting it. He died just about five years ago. He was a talented chef for years before he stopped breathing after suffering a heroin overdose.
I was also in a permanent state of dread. When would the mask start to crack and erode on this caper? The G men hadn’t been true to their initial word to me that “They would file charges against her as soon as my debt had been resolved,” and with the intel I’d given them about her hiding spots for mass quantities of every controlled substance under the sun, it seemed enough for a big bust. Fish in a barrel.
But they wanted me to keep going. More evidence, discovery, months, and years? More dope on the table at the news conference? Were there promotions on the horizon for any of these agents? All I could ruminate on was that they were putting me in harm’s way on a weekly, sometimes biweekly basis. They gave not a shit about the frightened 17-year-old boy.
Read more from Joshua Bennett-Johnson
Joshua Bennett-Johnson, Licensed Counselor & Owner of JBJ Counseling
After working for 7 years in an amazing clinic, I launched into private practice in 2018. I love my job. I can say that without reservation. Watching people rebuild their lives is worth more than any dollar amount.
