Life in Hogan's Alley (pop. 200) is exceedingly slow -- so slow, in fact, that there is no need for a stoplight on Main Street. On one recent morning, a Gomer Pyle look-alike loafed on a sidewalk outside the post office. Another resident slogged his way to the Pastime Bar for a morning pick-me-up.
Suddenly the silence was broken by the boom of a shotgun. Three police cruisers, their tires squealing, encircled an old faded green station wagon idling at a curb. A pack of fresh-faced young men and women in navy blue polyester jackets dashed around the corner of the Dogwood Inn motel. Each brandished a drawn revolver and a look that said, One false move, and you're dead.
As the earnest gang of gun-wielding do-gooders closed in on the station wagon, its driver -- scruffy and overweight, with a menacing air -- lunged out the door. The lawmen forced him to the pavement, pointing their weapons at his head. Two young men shouted in unison, "Freeze! This is the FBI!"
Another case closed at Hogan's Alley, training academy for would-be G-men and G-women who dream of becoming agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This year about 500 trainees will attend classes in frisking, lectures on handcuffing, armed-arrest laboratories and seminars on interrogating witnesses at the 20-acre academy site, nestled amid the pine and birch trees of rural Virginia, 40 miles south of Washington.
The $1.5 million mock-up of small-town America opened in 1987, after the FBI decided its fledgling agents needed more true-to-life experience before they % dealt with dangerous criminals. Says the make-believe town's make-believe mayor, Jim Pledger, a 24-year FBI veteran: "Crime doesn't unfold in a classroom. We realized we could no longer limit ourselves to a square brick building."
So the FBI built itself a Potemkin village, complete with a bank, drugstore, barbershop, pool hall, Greyhound bus station, coin-operated Laundromat and quiet residential streets. Several double-wide trailers and late-model automobiles, all seized from real-life crime scenes, sprawl around the town. Even the movie theater, the Biograph, is a monument to real-life crime. Its main attraction, Manhattan Melodrama (starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy), was showing at the Biograph in Chicago when the bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead outside the theater by FBI agents in 1934.
A huge billboard at the town limit warns that DISPLAY OF WEAPONS, FIRING OF BLANK AMMUNITION AND ARRESTS MAY OCCUR. IF CHALLENGED, PLEASE FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. HAVE A NICE DAY! And true to its admonition, mock bank robberies, kidnapings and drug busts take place like clockwork. Mayor Pledger brags that Hogan's Alley is the most crime-ridden town in the world. Says Pledger: "The next crime wave is usually just around the corner. Fortunately for us, though, we've got a 100% success rate at catching criminals."
The felons who menace the streets of Hogan's Alley are more polite than the hardened crack dealers, pimps and prostitutes that lawmen face in real life. Hired from a role-playing company called Day By Day Associates, these make- believe meanies are paid $8 an hour. The company's roster of 60 role players includes part-time students, the wives of Leathernecks stationed at the neighboring Marine Corps base at Quantico, retirees and off-duty firemen and policemen.