much of a natural habitat for the forty-six-year-old agent. He’d grown up in a tiny town in Minnesota called Thief River Falls, just across the border from Winnipeg. Options out of high school were limited, so he enlisted in the Army at age seventeen to become an airborne radio operator. Believing he was training to manage com- munications equipment on planes, he quickly discovered that in- stead he would be carrying a radio and jumping out of them. “My recruiter lied to me,” he said. “If I’d known what I was going to end up doing I would have said no frickin’ way.”

He took to it, though, and eventually he joined the Army’s Spe- cial Forces 2nd Ranger Battalion in Fort Lewis, Washington. By the early 1990s, back injuries from jumping kept him out of the First Gulf War, and threatened to confine him to a desk job. One day he was assigned to train a group of visiting DEA agents pre- paring for operations in South America—survival, escape and eva- sion, booby traps. After a few weeks of hanging out with them, he decided to quit the military and join the agency.

After his training Bailey landed in LA, where the agency was targeting drug-trafficking organizations south of the border. Bailey employed his friendly Midwestern accent to mask a no-bullshit approach to law enforcement, and paid his dues with grueling street work. In an eighteen-month investigation tagged Operation Silent Thunder, he helped crack a methamphetamine ring in which Hells Angels had linked up with Mexican traffickers and white supremacists, resulting in almost three hundred arrests. Over the years, Bailey developed a philosophy about the kingpins on the other side of the law. Even the most successful ones, he concluded, generally weren't the evil geniuses that they appeared from the street. Their every maneuver might look perfectly calculated. But when the agents finally had them in custody, they would usually discover that those brilliant evasions were, more often than not, just dumb luck.

After four years in Los Angeles, Bailey’s wife pressed him to look for a post closer to their extended family. He found one as a