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A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior

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One definition of insanity is that a person keeps doing the same thing over and over even after he knows that it won't work. I have met people like Joey O'Shay who have such a deep seated drive to wipe out the drug business that they almost couldn't function doing anything else. Popeye Doyle of French Connection fame was one.

I've also seen them reach the point where perhaps they have been shot a time or two, perhaps they have looked at all the drugs that the French Connection stopped from comming into the country ($32,000,000) doesn't mean that drugs are any harder to get. (In fact police tell me that the drugs on the street are of higher quality and lower price than ever before.) Then like Joey O'Shay they begin to question the futility of our never ending war on drugs. And somewhere along there Mr. O'Shay you'd better find a way to leave this life behind.

I do not profess to know the answer to the drug problem, but, Guys, this isn't working.

As you might guess, in this book Joey O'Shay is a cop on the undercover drug beat. He's being very successful, but the people he puts away are replaced immediately. He's involved with another huge drug deal. He's having a problem understanding that winning the battles he is fighting isn't winning the war.

"The city does not sleep at this hour...the streets belong to the feral, to predators coursing its arteries for prey". Joey O'Shay is agent for the DEA, deep undercover, his home for the last twenty years the dark streets, the shadowed alleys, where drugs are for sale and life is cheap. His network of agents and informants bring the players close. O'Shay takes them in and odes the deal.

The drug trade is nothing if not cynical and Joey has been too long behind the scenes, making deals and dodging death, caught up in a web of deceit that he manipulates so skillfully, he has thus far avoided the bullet with his name on it. But the agent is weary, grown used to the game, but with no way out. So he continues setting up the deals, meeting with the Mexicans and the Colombians, pushing the tons of cocaine, marijuana and heroin for the insatiable appetites of addicts.

This is a world of ambiguities, where contradictions abound, where day is night and the player's sleep with evil. This book enters a world beyond the senses, revealing the titillating details of drug trafficking, the connections, the cold business of exchanging money for product. Joey O'Shay is the doer, the man behind the scenes, building an almost impenetrable web of associations. O'Shay lives his obsession, always planning, always in the deal, a long time survivor who is reaching some kind of crisis, inhabiting this cold life for too long.

His career started with breaking in doors and busting small-time dealers, but has progressed, along with his skills, to include the big Colombians who move enormous quantities of product. These are the deals that please the bureaucrats of the DEA and their bosses in Washington, the phone calls that can be traced to map out an entire network. And O'Shay is never there for the take-down; he moves on to the next deal. To break the spell of this world and make it more livable, the agent paints, listens to music late at night and reads a holocaust survivor's account of the death camps ("Man's Search for Meaning"), identifying with the author's feelings.

Edgy and brutal, O'Shay's stream-of-consciousness hops from past to present, tossing bits of information against the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting. He is surrounded by a cast of shadowy characters: Cosima, his best confidential informant; Alvarez, a man ready to make a deal to save his own life after losing other people`s money; Bobbie, part of the straight world, but drawn to the darker one, close enough to O'Shay to read his state of mind; and Gloria, Cosima's friend and South American connection, who makes the mistake of trusting O'Shay's soft words and pays for it with her freedom.

This book is a psychological investigation of one man's life as he goes about increasingly difficult undercover work for the DEA, but the real toll is on his mind, the cost of business eating away at his sense of himself: "It is the self-questioning and needing to know ore about the meaning of life...that frightens me. Almost a fear that when I stop pursuing them... I must pursue who I really am or what I became." O'Shay is a very smooth thug and a killer, but he works for the good guys, although now he identifies more with the dealers he sets up. He stays in a life that rots the soul, as jaded as a hardened criminal, unconnected and untouched by humanity because it is too dangerous. He is the Shadow in the City, but it's also the specter of death that haunts his every move. He has become a creature of the streets and it is that private hell that he shares with the author, against a backdrop of other agents and CI's, a lonely figure trying to work his way back to himself. It is the price he pays for this job. Luan Gaines/2005.

In January of 1935, shortly before Steinbeck sent off his manuscript of "In Dubious Battle," he wrote, "But man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. This books is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing. I think it has the thrust, almost crazy, that mobs have." What does this have to do with Bowden's latest book? Everything and nothing.
He is a poet trapped in a journalist's psyche, and this is no more evident than the opening of this book. I think the same could be said of Steinbeck who approached the world scientifically through metaphor. I would have enjoyed this, a conversation amongst Bowden, Abbey, Ricketts, Steinbeck, hell, throw in Joe Campbell.

Buy this book and learn about the animal within us all. An animal that purrs while ripping the flesh of a gazelle.

Bowden's latest sheds light on a dark subject-the life and times of Joey O'Shay, a man who fought on the front lines of this thing we call the war on drugs for the past twenty-plus years. When I say dark, I mean dark.

I found myself closing the book to escape-to make sure the world of comfort I now inhabit was still there. But then I was drawn back for more, like some kid peering through fingers at a scary movie, wanting to see, yet not wanting to see, because I know that this is real: the people are real, the blood also, the deception, the lies, the callous disregard for life and family and love, and all those ruined lives, not the least of which is the life of Joey O'Shay.

Bowden digs deep into the mind of Mr. O'Shay and forces the reader to see things most would rather avoid-how those on the cutting edge of this war start out good-hearted, well-intentioned people and then are forced to commit evil acts or lose at the game. Each of these acts creates wounds to mind and soul until nothing is left but pain, scars, and awful spirits that torment a man who at his heart may be a good person.

Over time, O'Shay begins to doubt that what he does is effective or the cause just. Two problems: he is so damned good at his job and he knows nothing else. So he continues to fight this war with almost suicidal abandon. But he doesn't believe in suicide and he's either too good or too lucky to lose. He looks for death but death is not to be found. All around him, men he considers better than he fall, but the bullets aimed his direction miss the mark, his lies and deceptions go undiscovered and he is left to endure nights of pain, misery, and tortured dreams, dreams that he alone must bear.

Bowden is fearless in his excavation, going where most will not tread and the subject of the book is also to be commended for allowing us to see into this world, for he is in fact is the source of the information and also participated in the writing. My only regret is that he cannot reveal his true identity. I think the book will be even more powerful should he choose to do so.

In the beginning chapters I judged the style as a bit aloof. It does not take long, however for Charles Bowden's wordcraft and narrative style to hook you into the surreal life Joey O'Shay leads.
A Lone Efficient Wolf, down a long hall....in an office, deep inside the belly of the DEA. The Eagle Scout agents will not even walk past his door. It does ones spirit good to know they are not all twisted right wing suits.
I highly recommend this book for those who think they lead a strange life. O'Shay lives in a dimension all his own, and one largely of his own careful making.
I hope he allows us more when he retires.

I'm an unabashed Bowden fan -- I'd read his grocery list if he published it. This isn't his best book (that honor would lie, in my mind, with either "Blood Orchid" or "Down by the River") and he does things a little differently here, such as using more traditional storytelling devices, such as suspense. That said, I read it straight through, hanging on every word. This is a dark and depressing book -- the kind that made me question not only what kind of world we live in, but also what I even know about the world today. Throughout his entire career, Bowden has worked hard, finding characters such as Joey O'Shay, the undercover drug "warrior" in this book -- and I get the impression that he devours their insanity, insecurities and internal demons and can only try and purge that burden by writing books that the rest of us will then wonder about long after we've finished reading them. There are two main reasons to read this book: One, because it's really good. And two, because smart journalists and great writers such as Bowden are a rarity and deserve to be supported whenever they share their thoughts and experiences with the rest of us.

Very well written, if somewhat uneven, this "non fiction novel" traces the career of a master undercover "nark" who slowly comes to realize that the "honor among theives" of the criminals he pursues is to some extent more worthy than the duplicitous code of the cops. Along the way, we are treated to a fascinating tour of the high-stakes underworld of the big time dealers. Very poetic in parts, and leaves one pondering the moral ambiguities of the "war on drugs."

As he did in Down by the River, Charles Bowden takes the reader deep into the shadow world that is the war on drugs. This book reads like a well crafted literary mystery novel - think Graham Greene or Scott Turow -except it's true. If you read both River and Shadow, you'll get some idea of the personal toll the drug war takes on the cops and their families, and also wonder how they can go out and fight this evil day after day and year after year. Especially since the street agents are the ones who pay the biggest price, while the "suits" play the career game. Joey O'Shea could be the model for Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice.

The problem with this book is the same as with all Charles Bowden books, they read like maybe a bad acid trip but you know it was just one of his typical jaunts. You can read it but if you think about it, it will scare you to death knowing it is all true.

Bowden writes in a style I keep wanting to call "straight news poetry." It sometimes seems a tad hard to follow but you eventually realize that is the nature of his subject matter. He does a very good job of conveying the impact of an event without resulting to superlatives, over-hype or trick ponies. The man strings his words together with great skill but I suspect his greater skill is going where others dare not tread, investigating in detail events which frighten away even the state police and he comes back alive to tell it all.
If you can handle the truth about arguably the nastiest business on Earth, step into this book and look through the eyes and mind that spent more than 20 years living not "on the edge" but far beyond.
It is all true with no glitz, no smoke, mirrors or other tricks, no lectures or flashing lights.
Just the facts.
And hard to put down once you get started.