Hogan's Alley, Virginia Crime

By NANCY TRAVER

Life in Hogan's Alley (pop. 200) is exceedingly slow -- so slow, in fact, that there is no need for a stoplight on Main Street. On one recent morning, a Gomer Pyle look-alike loafed on a sidewalk outside the post office. Another resident slogged his way to the Pastime Bar for a morning pick-me-up.

Suddenly the silence was broken by the boom of a shotgun. Three police cruisers, their tires squealing, encircled an old faded green station wagon idling at a curb. A pack of fresh-faced young men and women in navy blue polyester jackets dashed around the corner of the Dogwood Inn motel. Each brandished a drawn revolver and a look that said, One false move, and you're dead.

As the earnest gang of gun-wielding do-gooders closed in on the station wagon, its driver -- scruffy and overweight, with a menacing air -- lunged out the door. The lawmen forced him to the pavement, pointing their weapons at his head. Two young men shouted in unison, "Freeze! This is the FBI!"

Another case closed at Hogan's Alley, training academy for would-be G-men and G-women who dream of becoming agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This year about 500 trainees will attend classes in frisking, lectures on handcuffing, armed-arrest laboratories and seminars on interrogating witnesses at the 20-acre academy site, nestled amid the pine and birch trees of rural Virginia, 40 miles south of Washington.

The $1.5 million mock-up of small-town America opened in 1987, after the FBI decided its fledgling agents needed more true-to-life experience before they % dealt with dangerous criminals. Says the make-believe town's make-believe mayor, Jim Pledger, a 24-year FBI veteran: "Crime doesn't unfold in a classroom. We realized we could no longer limit ourselves to a square brick building."

So the FBI built itself a Potemkin village, complete with a bank, drugstore, barbershop, pool hall, Greyhound bus station, coin-operated Laundromat and quiet residential streets. Several double-wide trailers and late-model automobiles, all seized from real-life crime scenes, sprawl around the town. Even the movie theater, the Biograph, is a monument to real-life crime. Its main attraction, Manhattan Melodrama (starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy), was showing at the Biograph in Chicago when the bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead outside the theater by FBI agents in 1934.

A huge billboard at the town limit warns that DISPLAY OF WEAPONS, FIRING OF BLANK AMMUNITION AND ARRESTS MAY OCCUR. IF CHALLENGED, PLEASE FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. HAVE A NICE DAY! And true to its admonition, mock bank robberies, kidnapings and drug busts take place like clockwork. Mayor Pledger brags that Hogan's Alley is the most crime-ridden town in the world. Says Pledger: "The next crime wave is usually just around the corner. Fortunately for us, though, we've got a 100% success rate at catching criminals."

The felons who menace the streets of Hogan's Alley are more polite than the hardened crack dealers, pimps and prostitutes that lawmen face in real life. Hired from a role-playing company called Day By Day Associates, these make- believe meanies are paid $8 an hour. The company's roster of 60 role players includes part-time students, the wives of Leathernecks stationed at the neighboring Marine Corps base at Quantico, retirees and off-duty firemen and policemen.

None of them has had previous acting experience -- or any experience as criminals. They are carefully screened to make sure that their records are clean. Explains Pledger: "We don't want real felons on the job. This is not a training ground for bank robbers or dope dealers. Also we don't accept anybody from the Soviet embassy."

The impersonators seem to love their work. Suzanne McGohey of Dumfries, Va., was a schoolteacher until she started impersonating a hooker at Hogan's Alley. Given the alias Wanda Lust, she swaddles herself in a mink coat and pearls that the FBI seized in a drug raid. Says she: "Where else can you act like a sleaze and get paid for it? It enables you to be deviant in a healthy way."

Across town at the pool hall, three crooks sat around a card table playing a desultory game of seven card no peek, while waiting for the fuzz to arrive. In between dealing hands and looking for ways to cheat, Brett Langenderfer, 27, of Woodbridge, Va., explained that he was pretending to be wanted on a charge of interstate theft. When the agents stormed the building, Langenderfer tried to flee down a back stairway. "They call me the 'Rabbit' because I always run. It really gets the adrenaline going when the cops arrive, almost like rushing out of the locker room for a big game."

Most of the trainees are in their late 20s and look toward the FBI as a second career. Few have previous law-enforcement experience. Although the agency once tried to recruit lawyers, Pledger says the emphasis now is on hiring accountants. Their main mission: to track the drug trade. "We use financial investigative techniques to audit books and seize assets," says Pledger. "It's the best way to put the dopers behind bars."

Each class of about 46 agents moves through an intensive 14-week training course that begins with lessons in surveillance. They track a suspect from his home, then observe him at a shopping mall as he sells a small bag of phony cocaine. Next comes a class in simple arrest, when agents burst into a fleabag motel to capture an unarmed John as he lies in bed with a make-believe prostitute. Agents learn how to frisk suspects, read them their rights, and complete arrest forms. Instructors, all of whom are former agents, carefully critique every arrest, providing pointers on how best to subdue a struggling suspect or slip on handcuffs. No detail seems to go unnoticed. At one recent training session, a future agent was told he should go home, stand in front of his mirror and practice shouting in a forceful voice "Freeze! This is the FBI!"

Nine weeks into the course, trainees practice arresting an armed felon. They then investigate an assault on a judge and conduct a court-authorized wiretap. Their final lessons are held in a mock courtroom, where they face actors who pose as a tough team of defense lawyers. "We really let the sharks go after them there," says Pledger. "Having to eat your paperwork and watch the criminals go free teaches you to do everything by the book."

On average, three fledgling agents in each class flunk out of Hogan's Alley. The standards are exacting. Says Pledger: "Anyone who shoots a fleeing felon in the back doesn't have what it takes to be in the FBI."

The work at Hogan's Alley is enough to make most role players swear off a life of crime. Says Ronald Grayson, 33, of Triangle, Va., who plays a dope peddler: "You get to see how the law works without being on the wrong end of the stick. When they twist those cuffs on you, boy, it makes you think." Hogan's Alley has a similar sobering effect on its students. Says Raymond, an agent-trainee whose last name was withheld to protect him from the genuine criminals he will encounter after he graduates: "When you arrest someone, it hits you: you're going to change someone's life forever. My hands started to shake. For the first time, it seemed real."