"Jesus Christ, who here isn't law enforcement?" screamed a man in a black ski mask, pointing his Uzi at his cohorts.
The bank lobby fell silent for a brief moment as every member of the gang analyzed the room, looking for someone to arrest. Collectively the realization was met that each had been involved in an undercover sting operation against other law enforcement agencies. Naturally, this led the heroes and pillars of the community to sort things out like upstanding, intellectual men, and proceeded to yell and curse at one another.
"Ah shit, man. What the hell kind of job are y'all runnin here?" screamed the group's munitions expert, Roy.
"Roy, I've been tracking your shitty life for weeks man, you can't possibly be undercover." screamed a stout man holding a shotgun as he threw down two Duffel bags full of cash.
"Yeah Jon? Well while you were tracking me, did you happen to notice I was tracking this son of a bitch, Jim, right here?" Roy responded, pointing his Uzi at a man guarding the door.
"You weren't actually tracking me though. I was undercover while you tracked me, so you tracked a persona." Jim calmly explained as he kept a watchful eye on the street outside.
"Which one of you were tracking me?" spoke a soft looking man wearing glasses over his ski mask.
The three other men looked around at each other shrugging their shoulders.
"You mean nobody tracked me at all? What the hell?" the small man whined.
"Ben I actually pegged you as a plant from the start." Roy explained. "I was gonna let you know who I was once we got to the van, and obviously Jim over there blew his cover when he decided to arrest us here in the lobby."
"I already dropped some pretty serious hints earlier, I'm actually worried you suffer from brain damage or something." Jon explained.
"Hints? Like what hints?" Ben inquired.
"Like when I said 'Ben I work for the government, Ben I'm DEA, Ben I'm part of an undercover sting operation and I recognize you are law enforcement as well so when I give the signal help me take these guys down. Does any of this ring a bell?" Jon explained.
"Oooh" Ben began as he slowly realized what Jon meant. "OOOH" Ben proclaimed even louder as he actually realized what Jon meant. "So like, what does the DEA want with bank robbers?"
"We had reason to believe the money would be used to purchase narcotics from the cartels across the boarder." Jon explained.
"What made you think that?" Roy asked.
"You and your damn persona." Jon complained. "You kept meeting with that South American looking group, we thought you were setting something up."
"Man this is east-LA, that's not a South American group, it's my captain and the rest of the team. We were discussing how we would bring down Jim over there, who we thought would use the money to purchase illegal firearms. I'm ATF dammit!" Roy yelled. "Jim who do you work for? We have piles of photographs and documents man, we were positive of who you were."
Jim's calm voice became irate and loud, "I'm FBI and I have been working this case for the past three years. We too were investigating illegal firearms, except for very different reasons. They were linked to human trafficking, and my involvement brought me to this job with you three nitwits. Our investigation was coming to an end and you screwed it up."
"We didn't screw up anything. Firearms is our business, you should have let us in on the investigation. Now you three morons are all taking up room on this team that criminals, actual criminals, would have been a part of." Roy yelled.
Completely aggravated, Jon added his own screaming, "Who are you calling a moron, you dumb asshole? What do you think those guns and tracked humans were being used for? Drugs! That's what. This all clearly falls under DEA authority and I am not going to be the one who goes down for this."
"Hey idiot, if they never got the guns, they could never do any of the other things, so this is ATF business." Roy yelled back.
"There are human beings who are being trafficked! I need to let this money go to where it needs to go so we can save their lives!" Jim intervened
"You shoved those bank workers in that vault and you're telling me you care about human lives?" Jon yelled at Jim.
"They were gonna be fine! Roy's the one who hit that guy in the face with his gun." Jim yelled back.
"I had to make it look real! I thought you guys were bank robbers, hello?" Roy screamed at the top of his lungs.
The three men continued to scream at each other citing articles of law and landmark cases which all proved who had authority over the others. As the first sirens could be heard outside in the street, the men were shaken from this devastating state of conflict. Looking around the room, all three men realized the same thing at once and began to panic.
"Where's Ben?" Jim said while looking around the bank lobby.
"He was just there. Shit man and he took the money!" Roy screamed as he pushed his face into his hands and fell to the ground.
"Which agency did he say he worked for?" Jon pleaded
"Well?" Jim followed up.
"Man, he's asking you!" Roy insisted.
"Well this is just great!" Jon screamed as he pulled off his ski mask.
The sirens of emergency vehicles from every agency buzzed and whirled outside and muffled the faint screaming that could be heard from each team the men belonged to. The chaos was joined by a news van and crowds while local police attempted to put up barriers.
"This is the most public yet of my many humiliations." Roy muttered as the three men walked out of the front of the lobby with their hands raised in the air.
Later that night, people around the city watched news of the bungled bank robbery bust as what could only be described as the screw up of the century.
"It is nothing short of the screw up of the century." The focused reporter explained into her microphone, live on the scene. "As you can see, law enforcement personnel from an assortment of agencies have converged on this bank robbery and all hell has broken loose. Excuse me, captain, can you explain what is going on here?"
The camera focused on a man in an ATF uniform yelling obscenities to the group around him. His attention was diverted to the reporter for only a moment before returning to screaming at the other agencies, "Get that camera outta my face you bitch! _You guys screwed this up. We have court orders and. No! No-- You--"
The reporter spoke into the camera again as she walked away from the irate captain, who's obscenities and screams became inaudible noise among the others just like it.
"So there you have it, folks. There are law enforcement personnel everywhere from multiple agencies, I see ATF, DEA, and FBI. We arrived shortly after receiving an anonymous phone call from someone who'm we believe to have been involved in the bank robbery itself." The reporter continued as she checked her notes, "An anonymous tip from a man who only called himself 'Ben', news channel five learned of these events and arrived shortly to the scene. Now if you look over here--"
As the report on the television was switched off, the image on the screen was replaced with Ben's reflection against the glass, grinning ear to ear, sitting on a pile of money from a bank robbery that took years to plan and orchestrate.