13 FEBRUARY 9-15, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | other activists began to catch on to Wind- ecker. The snitch’s ties to protesters frayed until they broke entirely. His payday with the FBI may have ended. After he received all the tapes and papers from Denver, Aaronson connected with Windecker over the phone; on the podcast, Windecker denies that he worked for the feds. He hasn’t responded to Aaronson since that initial call. When Westword called the number where Aaronson had reached Windecker, the person who answered said that he wasn’t Windecker and that it was the wrong number. While Windecker’s informant work of- fi cially resulted only in the seizure of Shelby’s guns — which he eventually got back — and the case against Hall for buying him a gun, Aaronson believes that Windecker had a much more insidious effect on the protest movement in Colorado. Placing informants within organizations that are engaging in protected free speech ac- tivities has a corrosive effect that can lead to suspicion and the eventual failure of certain movements, Aaronson notes. One of the most egregious examples of the FBI overstep- ping its bounds — and going after protected First Amendment activities through what’s known as COINTELPRO — was placing informants to spy on Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. The FBI also investigated the Black Panthers and the Chicano movement in Denver. Following a series of congressional hear- ings in the 1970s, the FBI ostensibly appeared to rein in some of the agency’s worst prac- tices. And in recent years, FBI leadership has stated that the law enforcement agency doesn’t target people for First Amendment- protected activities. But that may not be true, as evidenced by the federal agency’s work with Windecker. “What I was really struck by in reporting there and in interviewing the activists was the sense of paranoia that had developed in Denver from that summer,” Aaronson says. “COINTELPRO no longer exists. But even though it no longer exists, these methods still exist. And Mickey’s case shows that.” The FBI’s work with Windecker did lead to an undercover, pink-haired Colorado Springs Police Department officer infil- trating left-wing activists in that city. But activists soon discovered her identity, and she vanished from the Colorado Springs scene. That saga is the focus of one episode of Alphabet Boys. Another ramifi cation: Hall was labeled a snitch by some in the Denver protest scene. A common tactic of FBI informants is to get those in groups they infi ltrate thinking that an- other person is a snitch rather than the actual informant, in a move called snitch-jacketing. “I’m so happy the snitch jacket is coming off. It’s been terrifying,” Hall says. “When you put a snitch jacket on someone, in any situation, [whether] it be gang, mafi a or anything, especially if there’s a protest situa- tion, it puts you at risk, because people might want to hurt you.” Hall, who says he no longer belongs to the PSL or goes to protests, is looking forward to the podcast not only clearing his name, but stopping Windecker from working as an informant. He’s also hoping that other infor- mants who worked across the country during the George Floyd protests will be unmasked. “Where are the whistleblowers?” he wonders. Shelby says he’s glad that people will at least learn the truth about how the FBI operates. “At bare minimum, at least people get to know that this is how your FBI gets down,” he adds. “I feel like they did exactly what they were supposed to do. The FBI is not something for Black folks. The FBI has a lot of instances historically of doing things geared toward making us look bad as a race, as a people.” Refl ecting on his decades of work report- ing on law enforcement, Aaronson says, “From a very cynical standpoint, there is just an incentive built into the system to create these kinds of cases and to pursue these cases as big cases rather than cases that you can kind of preempt by scaring someone. I think in a lot of these cases, if someone like Bryce Shelby or someone targeted in one of these terrorism stings, I think if the FBI went to their home dressed in suits…in most cases, those people would just stop: ‘Oh shit, I took it too far, my rhetoric was too heated, and I didn’t really mean it.’” But as Aaronson says FBI agents have told him over and over again, they’re not a social services organization. “We’re a hammer looking for nails,” they tell him. In Denver, they didn’t hit many nails. Besides Hall, the feds prosecuted a hand- ful of people connected to the George Floyd protests in metro Denver, including a man who fi red a gun into the air and another who trained a laser on a helicopter. Several members of the PSL were arrested over the Aurora protests; those charges were eventu- ally dropped. And while Denver police ar- rested hundreds of protesters, only a handful were ultimately prosecuted. But the protests still resulted in plenty of court action. Dozens of protesters wound up suing the City of Denver and the Denver Police Department for their heavy-handed actions during the demonstrations. One case involving constitutional violations of the rights of twelve plaintiffs resulted in a $14 million verdict against the city in March 2022; Denver has appealed. Other protester suits are still pending. Email the author at conor.mccormick. [email protected].
