Fellow member "Jeep", in another thread, brought a couple of incidents to mind, so I thought I'd share a few here.
I'm sure all of us in LE have stories of this sort so please feel free to add your own if you're of a mind to. They're good for a laugh if nothing else.
1. Early 80's. Working in NYC. An agent who would shortly thereafter become a Branch Chief (or higher) had his badge and gun stolen by a hooker who handcuffed him to the bed in his hotel room and then absconded. (Oh, yeah, she took his cash too.)
(He was all class. I caught him puking into his drink at an agency holiday party which pretty much put me off booze for the rest of that evening. )
2. Late 80's, early 90's. Former ATF agent who would later become a DSAC in my old office shoots himself in the groin area through the trunk of his G-ride when he tries to put his fully loaded Glock back in the old style tupperware case over the trigger guard post. Glock awarded him a healthy financial settlement, put warning stickers for learning challenged federal agents on the box, which was subsequently changed, and he was later promoted for his obvious brilliance.
3. An agent who started as a Marine Enforcement Officer eventually gets promoted to GS-15 in HQ but not before, while we were on SRT together, he does the following...
...As we're about to make entry into a home in Miami, I tell him that whatever he does, (due to the carpets, rug and staircase myself, (as secondary), and the primary are about to ascend after we breach the door), not to throw a flash bang.
So there we are going up the stairs and I hear the telltale sound and then hear and see the device land at the top of the stairs in front of us and then start rolling down the stairs toward us. I grab the primary, (the agent who later was shot by one of his ICE subordinates in SoCal a few years back), pick him up and carry / drag him down the stairs back toward the door we had just breached.
Flash bang goes off and promptly sets the carpet on fire filling the house with smoke and some flame. We get it out in concert with the FD which responds quickly. I nearly wrung the knucklehead's neck when he told me that he thought it would be safe to deploy the bang despite the warning I had specifically given him beforehand.
4. 1992...Married DEA supervisor leaves naked pictures of his squeeze in his G-ride which gets totaled during Hurricane Andrew. Orders one of the agents in the group to empty out his ride whereupon he finds the pictures which prominently display her adorned with only the supervisor's badge and gun on her most private parts.
We laughed our asses off for weeks especially after he had to find a way to quietly ask the agent if he had found anything in the vehicle he might have forgotten to return. I had encouraged him (jokingly) to blackmail the not well liked supe by dangling the pix, but he was too much of a weenie and returned them a week or so later on.
Perfect HQ material, wouldn't you say?
Fuck up and move up. It's a beautiful thing. (Not!)