double life

my character is about a former FBI agent that reveals his favourite fake identity to infiltrate criminal groups.

Marc Ruskin was an undercover agent with the FBI from the 1990s until 2012, and says it’s nowhere near as simple as that. He’s infiltrated gangs and normal professions to get the dirt on whatever they were doing wrong. Some of it was as dark as it gets, and other missions focused on white collar crime.

Mr Ruskin has worked his way into a Jewish right wing extremist group. In his two decades doing undercover work, he used about 12 different identities, and was sometimes juggling three at one time due to different cases overlapping. Despite becoming so many different people over the years, his favourite by far was a man he called Alex Perez. Marc had a ponytail and would sport some bling to create this character.

In one of the cases he said he was using Alex Perez because that was when his undercover career was really blossoming,” says Marc. “We were kind of wheeling and dealing all over the place and it was a really fun time. Eventually I had to start using other names because Alex had been a little over exposed, so I had to start coming up with other stuff before that name started getting repeated a little too much.”

And in one of his cases There was an incident which Marc describes as ‘amusing’ in the 90s when he was working two cases as once and using two different identities. But because resources were tight at the FBI, he only had one pager. He was beeped from an unknown number and asked to call, and the person on the other end of the phone asked who he was. But because Marc didn’t know who he was speaking to, he didn’t know whether to be Alex Perez or was Sal Morelli. Thankfully, after a lot of awkwardness, Marc asked, ‘Who are you looking for,’ and the bloke replied, ‘I’m a friend of sal’.

Marc says these days it’s much harder to be an undercover agent with the advent of the internet and social media. When he was getting started in the 90s, he would be able to create these identities and have people vouch for him.

But now, it looks suspicious if this fake identity has only had a Facebook page or Instagram account for a few months. While those things aren’t essential, they tend to rouse suspicion. Marc would usually use social media pages from countries outside the US, which made it harder for his subjects to trace and verify.

He says there about usually only 100 active undercover FBI agents at a time, which is nothing compared to the roughly 11,000 regular agents within the bureau.