A DETROIT COMPUTER BULLETIN board lists the names of local agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and offers helpful advice on how to harass them. A licensed gun dealer, required to surrender his business records to ATF's national tracing center, coated them first with rat excrement. A flyer found posted in Pennsylvania reads WANTED: ATF AGENT. DEAD.
The ATF may be the most hated federal agency in America today, surpassing even the IRS in its notoriety. Gun-rights advocates have demonized the agency as a dark legion of storm troopers who trample the rights of ordinary citizens. Critics have gone so far as to compare its treatment of gun owners to Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II. In a best-selling book published last year, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association described ATF's disastrous raid at Waco, which began the 51-day siege that ended in conflagration, as "reminiscent of the standoff at the Warsaw ghetto." Opposition to ATF has become so intense in gun-toting quarters as to resemble a religion, says Gerald Nunziato, who heads the ATF tracing center. He distills its creed: "The gun is God; the N.R.A. is the congregation; and ATF is the devil."
The bureau is not the jackbooted monolith of N.R.A. lore, however. Far from it: court documents and internal reports uncovered in a two-month TIME investigation reveal ATF as a divided and troubled agency far more likely to abuse the rights of its own employees than those of law-abiding citizens. If anything, its internal troubles have impaired its law-enforcement abilities by embroiling agents and managers in a web of in-house scandals and divisive controversies. The agency faces a class action by black agents who claim widespread discrimination and intimidation, including the posting at one office of a "State of Oklahoma Nigger Hunting License." Last week charges resurfaced that ATF agents attended a racist gathering in Tennessee, the annual "Good O' Boys Roundup." Agents complain too of a management culture that doles harsh discipline to agents but goes to great lengths to protect its managers. In one case, a former head of its Dallas office who sexually harassed an employee received a demotion and transfer -- to the Virgin Islands. "Any agent who's honest with you will tell you this agency has to be gutted," says Diane Klipfel, a supervisory agent in ATF's Chicago division who is mired in a battle with the bureau that began when she accused her commanders of corruption.
Two decades of outside scrutiny and persistent threats to its survival have so cowed the bureau that it now shies from certain categories of investigations, including probes of licensed gun dealers. Instead the ATF focuses more on such politically safe targets as crack gangs, outlaw bikers and ordinary killers. One indicator: the number of firearms ATF has taken into custody dropped 27%, to 12,965, from 1992 to 1994. Of those guns, 6,261 were handguns, or about three for each of the bureau's 2,000 agents. An ATF spokesman says such fluctuations are meaningless, but Kay Kubicki, a former ATF agent who is now counsel for the National Association of Treasury Agents, disagrees. "The only reason the total of guns [seized] would go down is morale," she says. "There's a direct correlation between the turmoil in the agency and the decline."