Special Agent: My Life on the Front Lines as a Woman in the FBI by
Candice DeLong (Hardcover - Apr. 25, 2001)
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a remarkable FBI agent ranks ..."
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   31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
 I Led Three Lives, April 13, 2001
By  Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See
all my reviews

.............
This is the most inspiring book I have read about a woman's career
since I became familiar with Ms. Jane Goodall's books about her
pioneering work in Africa with chimpanzees.
Many people will see Ms. Candice ("don't call me Candy") De Long as a
real-life Clarice Starling (the FBI agent in Hannibal). I think she is
more impressive than that. This fascinating book recounts her three
lives as a psychiatric nurse who worked with violent patients and did
home health care for poor people, an FBI special agent (specializing
in profiling of repeated, sexually violent offenders) from 1980
through 2000, and as a divorced mother raising a son alone. Each side
of her life is equally impressive, and she is the kind of person we
all should admire. She has always done her duty, and we are all the
better for that. While many pioneering women in "men's" professions
often were given "token" roles, Ms. De Long wanted and went to where
the action was. During her career, she rescued a child from a
pedophile abductor, captured a terrorist who had murdered three men,
and caught a Class A fugitive. She was also present and part of many
famous investigations. Her memoir will give you a much better idea
about crime and how the FBI and DEA combat it. The book also contains
many lessons for how women and children can avoid becoming crime
victims.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972, there were no women field agents.
By 1980, around 4 percent of the agents were women. At her retirement
in 2000, this had risen to 15 percent. Ms. De Long sacrificed a lot to
become an agent. She had to leave her young son for 16 weeks for the
initial training. She missed a lot of evenings and weekends with him
to do surveillance. The training included a lot of harrassment (female
and general). For example, she was made to fire a shotgun so often in
one day that she developed a permanent injury that kept her from being
able to use that shoulder for firing a shotgun again. Another time,
she had to box a large man who knocked her out cold. Her starting
salary was half what she had made as a nurse. She could accept that.
"I wanted to lead a heroic life." She certainly did succeed in that
objective. She took the men on at their own game, and was proud of
being called one of the "b_____s with badges." Her signature was the
fedora she always wore at the Bureau.

Some of the famous cases she worked on included the Tylenol tampering,
being part of the surveillance team on the Unabomber leading up to the
arrest of Ted Kaczynski, and the brothel closings in Chicago.

She correctly says relatively little about her personal life. But some
of the anecdotes will keep you laughing for days. When she was asked
to be a hot dog mother in her son's third grade class, the children
noticed that she was packing. She got a lot more respect after that,
and was invited back to talk about her work. Another time, she
accidentally noticed a surveillance suspect while driving around and
tailed her. The team had lost the suspect. Only well into the chase
did she realize that her son was in the back seat. She kept him safe
while her eye was peeled on the suspect.

The profiling work will intrigue you. You will learn about all of the
different kinds of creeps who victimize women and children. It was
amazing how well the profiles predicted who the guilty party was.
Using the profiles allowed the FBI and local police to find the
suspects much faster than would otherwise have occurred. Since these
are repeat offenders, lives were saved and injuries were avoided as a
result. Part of the worst of this was that many times the women could
have been saved if someone had called the police. "If you are ever
assaulted, never count on help."

The stories of the harrassment she endured from insecure males in the
FBI will amaze you. She indicates that conditions improved over time.
One of the most ridiculous examples was when she was sent to the home
of an informant to babysit his child while the bust went down. She put
up with this only because the safety of an innocent child was
involved.

I was even more impressed by her work as a psychiatric nurse. Shooting
tranquilizers into writhing, distrubed patients being held down by 7
orderlies was probably more dangerous than any of the arrests she did
for the FBI. There she had a gun and usually lots of backup.

Her courage was most impressive. When she arrested the terrorist, she
kept waiting for her partner to put the cuffs on while she had the
drop on the suspect. Eventually, she looked around and realized that
her partner was sheepishly waiting in the car calling for back-up. In
her haste to make the bust, she didn't take time to put on her bullet-
proof vest. Fortunately, the error did not lead to harm, but she took
a grave risk in the process. She was astonished to find that the
terrorist was more frightened of her than she was of him.

Money problems eventually caused to need to moonlight as a nurse. The
moonlighting stories are very entertaining. At first, she kept bumping
into agents while she was working the wards. To avoid this, she
started doing home nursing in the poorest neighborhoods. This dual
career eventually led to her needing to retire in the middle of
administrative hearings about whether she was being unprofessional in
her moonlighting. Someone should have cut her more slack.

I was impressed by her courage, her idealism, her persistence, and her
commitment to doing the right thing. I hope that all young women (and
their parents) who are thinking about taking on a dangerous career
will read this book. You will be very inspired.

My hat's off to you, Ms. De Long! You're way more than a five star
person.

Ms. De Long and Ms. Petrini have done a fine job of writing about this
fascinating life, and you will enjoy what they have to say.

After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you rethink your
ideas about what women and men can and cannot do. This book once again
proves that anyone can do anything, if they want to badly enough.

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