‘I smell cash’: How the ATF spent millions unchecked
BRISTOL, Va. — For seven years, agents at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives followed an unwritten policy: If you needed to buy something for one of your cases, do not bother asking Washington. Talk to agents in Bristol who controlled a multimillion-dollar account unrestricted by Congress or the bureaucracy.
Need a flashy BMW for an undercover operation? Call Bristol.
A vending machine with a hidden camera? Bristol.
Travel expenses? Take this credit card. It’s on Bristol.
When the New York Times revealed the existence of the secret account in February, publicly available documents made it seem like the work of a few agents run amok. But thousands of pages of newly unsealed records reveal a widespread scheme — a highly unorthodox merger of an undercover law enforcement operation and a legitimate business. What began as a way to catch black-market cigarette dealers quickly transformed into a nearly untraceable ATF slush fund that agents from around the country could tap.
The spending was not limited to investigative expenses. Two informants made $6 million each. One agent steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate, electronics and money to his church and his children’s sports teams, records show.
Federal law prohibits mixing government and private money. The ATF now acknowledges it can point to no legal justification for the scheme. But far from reining in the spending, records show, supervisors at headquarters encouraged it by steering agents from around the country to Bristol.
Yet no one was ever prosecuted, Congress was only recently notified, and the Justice Department tried for years to keep the records secret. The Times intervened in an ongoing fraud lawsuit over the activity and successfully argued that a judge should unseal them. The documents tell a bizarre story of how federal agents set up shop inside a southern Virginia tobacco business and treated its bank account as their own.
At least tens of millions of dollars moved through the account before it was shut down in 2013, but no one can say for sure how much. The government never tracked it.
Thomas Lesnak, a veteran agent, operated out of a government office building tucked behind a Burger King in Bristol, a small city near the intersection of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Colleagues regarded him as fast-talking and likable. When he met suspects, he always came off as the good cop.
Lesnak specialized in inves-