I Was a Teenage DEA Informant: Part II

October 26, 2026

Joshua Bennett-Johnson,  Author and Licensed Counselor & Owner of JBJ Counseling

Tom O'Connor, Publisher

The following article is Part II of a two-part series which is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir "Blue Eyed Son" regarding my struggles with substance and alcohol use disorders. Part I was published last week.

KEY POINTS

Joshua Bennett-Johnson continues his account of becoming a teenage DEA informant, describing intake, secrecy, and controlled buys.

A friend’s warning sharpened his sense of danger, but he says he still told others about his involvement.

He recalls growing dread as the work continued beyond the point when he expected the case to move forward.

The installment ends with him feeling the adults running the operation were overlooking a frightened 17-year-old; it doesn't reveal the case’s outcome.

In the passenger seat sat a squat, solid-built man with cropped hair, the stereotype of an obvious police officer. You would know just by looking at him. In the driver's seat sat a curly-haired guy with a bushy mustache who looked just a couple of years away from a pension. He did not fit the profile of a police officer. He looked more like an uncle or a grandpa. He had kind eyes. His partner did not. His were narrow and beady, with a palpable ripple of intensity. He seemed like the type who enjoyed tackling a perp or kicking down a door; his partner looked more like the type to call you over for a chat about life wisdom and feelings.

Still, they were both accommodating and undeniably incredulous when, in a few instances, they confirmed that I was doing this voluntarily. They seemed stunned. I answered in the affirmative and went on to tell them nearly a year's worth of stories about all the business circulating in the quiet neighborhood, in the small white home up on Pleasant Ave—the Highlands.

One of the safest and most desirable neighborhoods in our fair city. They kept swapping looks that told me they were both flabbergasted, giddy, and excited like little kids on Christmas Eve. A huge case had just been dropped in the SUV's backseat, and they were dying to untie the ribbon and open the prize.

I was no longer Josh, now. I was fingerprinted. I was assigned a number. Confidential Informant #: ________. It was a long number. I guess many more had come before me, who'd gone through this arduous process of intake, protocol, waiting, and signing forms, and thought many more would follow in my footsteps. Three different suits interviewed me, always asking the same questions, and they told me many times to sit and wait. It was a huge office area. Ringing phones, clerical types filing files. It smelled like coffee and cheap cologne, perspiration, and ink.

They brought me into an interrogation room, though they never cuffed me or treated me like some kind of hard case. These people had, no doubt, worked on the far end of the criminal spectrum with some pretty wild characters in their day at the DEA, but everyone who interacted with me that day had my number before they even greeted me. They saw right through me. They saw the scared kid. The seventeen-year-old. And they let me smoke in the little private rooms as I recounted all of the intel I had on The Widow.

Then they brought me back downstairs, and this time the aggressive little guy I'd been saddled with was the only one in the SUV with me, driving me back to where they had retrieved me earlier that day. It was a bit past dusk. With no conversation on the ride back, I walked back inside Elliot's house. It wasn't the house where Josh had to knock before entering. My bud was sitting on his couch, playing his guitar. When he saw me walk in, I could feel the anxious energy vibrating off of him.

" Get over here," Elliot quipped, even though we were the only two people there. "Dude, she's a fucking Angel!" He very nearly snapped at me. "Do you hear me?!? A fucking Angel, dude."

He was stiff and tense. Always the sarcastic clown, I replied to him, "Widow? Oh. Yeah. Sure. She's a real fucking peach."

" No, you fucking dumb fuck. Her family. Her dad. He's like a ranking member of the Hells Angels. Do you have any fucking idea what you're all mixed up in now?"

His eyes showed sadness, anger, and worry. I told him, "Yeah. I think I'm pretty sure I do. But it's begun."

I told him what happened that day. He didn't say a word. I told him I was heading back to my place, and asked him if he'd drive me to the train station for the ride back to Cambridge. Instead, he drove me straight home in his early-70s muscle car, and we rode in complete silence. When we got to my house, before I could climb out of the passenger seat, he gently took my face in his hands.

"  Don't say a fucking word to anyone."

And, of course, I did. Slowly at first, but tell one person too many, and word has a way of spreading—the Game of Telephone. Somehow, thankfully, it never seemed to get back to Widow, even though many people had heard the sordid tale and were still frequenting her house when the gang was all there.

But I could tell, when I was around certain friends in my group, that they were receiving me, my presence, strangely. They say if you tell one person a deep secret, at least 10 people will know within a short window.

"You have to PROMISE you won't tell anyone, but guess what I heard about Josh…"

People talk. They say a lot.

The drill was always the same, though in different locations. I'd call Widow and arrange a meeting of her choosing. I'd contact my new co-workers. They'd come to pick me up in a jiffy and bring me to the local department. There, they would talk amongst themselves out of my earshot, allowing me to sit in an open interrogation room with a styrofoam cup of water for my ashes.

I'd then be prepped—a small microphone taped to the center of my sternum, a small wire connected to a battery tucked into my back waistband. Someone on the receiving end would go outside the building, a few hundred yards away, and check the sound levels.

Then I'd ride shotgun in the beat-up undercover's pickup truck, and we'd go to the prearranged waiting spot, usually a large public parking lot, and sit. And wait. He wasn't much for small talk, and he insisted on using a ridiculous name to refer to himself —see, their goal was ultimately for me to pass him off to her after I squared away my debt, but like anyone who plays in the dirt, they get dirty.

See, Widow was far too cautious to meet someone new she hadn't had a chance to commune with. He was unknown to her. She felt comfortable doing business only with me. Still, it was strange that the woman who never left her house never delegated any of these deals to her other mules. She always insisted on meeting me face-to-face.

I think she knew, on some intuitive level, that something was off. On several occasions, she asked me if I was certain this guy was on the level. Thanks to my high school drama department director, I could always smoothly convince her he was just a big shot at a university out in western Mass—UMass, to be specific, a notorious party school —and that I'd been dealing with him for years. She knew I had lived out there for a year or so in the earlier times we'd sat in her living room, passing around a joint.

It's a good thing she wasn't a "hugger", by nature. She surely would've felt the surveillance equipment beneath my shirt.

Part of me was experiencing a modicum of guilt, probably absorbed from all the criminal capers and rap anthems and music videos and television I was conditioned by, about being a snitch—a rat. If I'm being honest, part of me was also feeling a kind of preternatural satisfaction at the idea of putting her away. I learned within the months of doing the controlled buys that she had approached the younger brothers of some of my peers about doing business with her, and she had directly approached, introduced, and successfully gotten another one of our group heavily involved in using heroin. He was only snorting it back then. He would graduate to injecting it. He died just about five years ago. He was a talented chef for years before he stopped breathing after suffering a heroin overdose.

I was also in a permanent state of dread. When would the mask start to crack and erode on this caper? The G-men hadn't been true to their initial word to me that "They would file charges against her as soon as my debt had been resolved," and with the intel I'd given them about her hiding spots for mass quantities of every controlled substance under the sun, it seemed enough for a big bust. Fish in a barrel.

But they wanted me to keep going. More evidence. More discovery. More months, years? More dope on the table at the news conference? Were any of these agents getting promotions on the horizon? All I could ruminate on was that they were putting me in harm's way on a weekly, sometimes bi-weekly basis. They gave not a shit about the frightened 17-year-old boy.

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Read Josh's bio by clicking his icon at the start of this article.

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