Special Agent

Federal gun agents in Arizona -- convinced that "someone was going to die" when their agency allowed weapons sales to suspected Mexican drug traffickers -- made anguished pleas to be permitted to make arrests but were rebuffed, according to a new congressional report on the controversial law enforcement probe. Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told congressional investigators that there was "a state of panic" that the guns used in the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in January and two U.S. agents in Mexico a month later might have been sold under the U.S. surveillance operation.

An Orange County pharmacist who admitted to wiring $2,050 to Pakistan to be used to fund terrorist activities was sentenced Friday to five years in federal prison. Oytun Ayse Mihalik, 40, a Turkish national and permanent U.S. resident, pleaded guilty in August to one count of providing material support to terrorists after sending three money orders over a month in late 2010 and early 2011. Mihalik used a false name, “Cindy Palmer,” to send the funds, according to authorities.

Floyd B. Barrus, a retired special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, died March 8 at Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks. He was 83. Barrus was born March 7, 1916, in Fairview, Wyo., where he was raised on a ranch. Barrus worked as a page in the U. S. Senate and also served as a special agent for the FBI for more than 30 years. His work took him to Boston, San Francisco, Sacramento and elsewhere. He also served in the Marines.

A reputed Mexican drug cartel leader was charged in the ambush slaying this year of a U.S. immigration officer in Mexico — a killing that set off a massive search for the assailants on both sides of the border. Julian Zapata Espinoza, an alleged chief with the Zetas cartel, pleaded not guilty in a brief court appearance Wednesday in the killing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Jaime Zapata on Feb. 15. He and another agent, who was wounded, were ambushed in their car by a convoy of vehicles in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi.

A supervisory special agent for the Los Angeles office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service has been indicted on charges of perjury, the first INS special agent in memory to be charged with a crime. The federal grand jury indictment of Alvaro A. Bracamonte, 56, of Huntington Beach was released Thursday. No decision has been made on Bracamonte's job status, pending the outcome of the criminal charge, according to William Carroll, deputy director of the INS Los Angeles district.

William Gore, FBI special agent in charge of the San Diego office, will retire at the end of January and become chief of investigations for the San Diego County district attorney's office.

Special Agent Barry Lee Bush loved his job. He reveled in the challenges crime scenes presented and took pride in what he managed to extricate from them, fellow FBI Agent Jeff Lanza said. Nearly a decade after the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, Bush still told Lanza stories about his work scavenging the Nairobi offices of the Mercy International Relief Agency, a Saudi Arabian charity with strong ties to Al Qaeda.

When Larry Lawler arrived from Minneapolis in April, 1988, to take over the FBI's Los Angeles office, he found the nation's third largest bureau battered by an espionage scandal, discrimination allegations and agents despondent over low pay. "Morale was pretty low," Lawler said in an interview last week in his office in the Federal Building in Westwood. What's more, things got worse.

The FBI has launched a preliminary civil rights investigation into the death of a Bakersfield man who was shot and killed by an off-duty IRS agent after a traffic dispute on the Golden State Freeway in Arleta in July. A spokesman for the Department of Justice confirmed this week that his agency requested the investigation into the shooting of Mickey Jay Smith after a complaint filed with the department. FBI spokesman John Hoos said the investigation was opened Sept.

A Los Angeles Secret Service official has been named special agent in charge of the Spokane, Wash., office of the U.S. Secret Service, the agency announced Monday. Neil J. Goodman, 45, who was assistant to the special agent of the agency's Los Angeles office, succeeds Tim Trombly, who has headed the Spokane office for nine years and has been named special agent in charge of the agency's office in Grand Rapids, Mich.

John Wood Award-winning British actor John Wood, 81, a British actor who won a Tony Award in 1976 for his role in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's "Travesties," died Saturday in his sleep inEngland, his agent announced. Best known for his theater work in London and on Broadway, Wood was nominated for two more Tonys, as Guildenstern in Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," which opened on Broadway in 1967, and as the title character in "Sherlock Holmes," a long-running revival of the 1899 drama that came to Broadway in 1974.

Federal gun agents in Arizona -- convinced that "someone was going to die" when their agency allowed weapons sales to suspected Mexican drug traffickers -- made anguished pleas to be permitted to make arrests but were rebuffed, according to a new congressional report on the controversial law enforcement probe. Agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told congressional investigators that there was "a state of panic" that the guns used in the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson in January and two U.S. agents in Mexico a month later might have been sold under the U.S. surveillance operation.

California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, saying that years of unscrupulous lending still haunts the state, is creating a 25-person task force to target mortgage fraud of any size — from small operations that preyed on troubled borrowers to corporations that sold risky loans as safe investments. The team of 17 lawyers and eight special agents from the state Department of Justice will pursue three major areas, Harris said in an interview: •Corporate fraud, including instances in which bundled mortgages were sold as securities to the state or its pension funds under false pretenses.

A U.S. immigration agent who was killed Tuesday in a part of central Mexico increasingly under the influence of drug traffickers has been identified as Jaime J. Zapata. Zapata was shot to death and another special agent was wounded when they were apparently ambushed by gunmen at a fake roadblock, the type often used by traffickers and their henchmen. U.S. Immigration and Customs officials said Wednesday that Zapata was a native of Brownsville, Texas, and four-year veteran of the department on loan from the Laredo, Texas, ICE office.

In August, the FBI says, 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud told two men who claimed to be Al Qaeda operatives that he had considered violent jihad since he was 15, and that he now was ready to commit mass slaughter. Mohamud, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia, said he wanted to set off a bomb during the lighting of a giant Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving in an outdoor plaza in downtown Portland, Ore. The festive ceremony on the busiest shopping day of the year normally draws thousands of people.

The 66-year-old disgruntled retiree who killed one person and wounded another at a federal courthouse in Las Vegas on Monday had an extensive criminal history, including a conviction for the murder of his brother in the 1970s, authorities said Tuesday. These and other details emerging about the life of the gunman, Johnny L. Wicks, paint a portrait of an angry, often violent man who more than once claimed that he had been persecuted because of his race. In 1976, he was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison after being convicted of second-degree murder in his brother's slaying in Memphis, said Dorinda Carter, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Corrections.

Ex-Marine's trial: An article in Friday's Section A about former Marine Sgt. Jose Luis Nazario Jr. pleading not guilty in the 2004 killing of prisoners in Iraq identified a military investigator as Rear Adm. Mark Fox of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He is Mark O. Fox, a special agent of the NCIS.

A 66-year-old retiree apparently upset over losing a lawsuit related to his Social Security benefits opened fire in a federal courthouse lobby Monday morning, killing one person and wounding another in a chaotic shootout. The gunman, identified by law enforcement sources as Johnny Lee Wicks, died from gunshot wounds after fleeing across the street as court officers returned fire. Stanley W. Cooper, a 72-year-old court security officer, was killed in the minutes-long gun battle.

I promised I would bring the gun. I would buy it in New York, where I was going to see my publisher. It should have been the easiest thing in the world. I wasn't planning to draw down on a murder suspect. This was for an author photo to appear on the jacket of my novel "Judas Horse," the latest in my series of mysteries about FBI Special Agent Ana Grey. How better for a crime writer to appear than armed and dangerous? So before I left Los Angeles, I secured a leather shoulder holster on loan from a law enforcement friend.