Gunning for some fun, skills and insight

Roving through the halls of the Glendale Galleria one night earlier this year were about a dozen wannabe cops trying, with varying degrees of ridiculousness, to be covert.

I know, because I was one of them.

I was there as a student in an eight-week Citizens' Academy held by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, better known as the ATF.

Our mission that night was to covertly observe a gun transaction involving real ATF agents posing as bad guys and to discreetly tail them to their cars. My fellow students and I had been told at our "pre-operational briefing" that it would go down in or around a cafe on the ground floor of the mall.

My partner and I were supposed to call our "team leader" on his cellphone and give him a detailed description of the suspects once they arrived.

Suddenly, there they were: a long-haired dude in a Hawaiian shirt and couple of other guys in their 20s, looking nervously about.

Even though it was just an exercise, the adrenaline began to kick in. My partner, a paralegal in the Los Angeles city attorney's office, scribbled down the suspects' descriptions.

Eager to deliver the intel, I tried our team leader on his cell. No answer. Again and again I tried, but the result was the same.

I thought of putting out a call on the brick-size Motorola radio we'd been issued earlier that evening for use in the exercise. But I'd inadvertently changed the channel and couldn't remember which one we were supposed to be using.

Police work, it seemed, was harder than it looked.

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As a reporter covering federal law enforcement in Los Angeles, I enrolled in the class to learn more about the ATF and what its agents do. (OK, I'd also heard there might be some automatic weapons involved -- there were, it turned out -- but more on that later).

Though I've been writing about law enforcement for years, I knew far less about the agency than I did its better-known cousins, the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration. My education began on a Wednesday night in January with a lengthy lecture by ATF historian Barbara Osteika. She started with Eliot Ness, the hard-charging Prohibition agent whose battles with bootleggers and the mob in Chicago 80 years ago inspired the book, movie and television series "The Untouchables."

Back then, it was all about booze. Over the years, though, Congress expanded the role of the bureau. The National Firearms Act of 1934 placed restrictions on so-called gangster guns and charged the ATF with enforcing the law.