Drug task force chief had series of high-profile roles

Jack Killorin never aspired to be the man at the microphone. He'd rather run law enforcement operations from behind the scenes.

Yet Killorin was the voice of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives during one of its most tumultuous — and most often criticized — periods.

It was Killorin who answered the phone in 1993 when reporters clamored to know about the bombing of the World Trade Center, and soon after during the weeks-long siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.

Killorin also led the ATF Atlanta field office while investigators tracked Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph.

Now he leads an anti-drug task force in Atlanta aimed at dismantling powerful drug cartels.

They are all high-profile roles for a man who shies from the spotlight.

“I often look at my own career and think there’s an irony there, because in a way I’ve led such a public career,” Killorin said. “My preference would have been just to do the work and never have my name in the paper.”

Born into a working-class family in Long Island, N.Y., Killorin was one of the first in his family to attend college. His father was a pressman for the New York Daily News and his mother a housewife.

Fueled in part by a family history of military duty, he enlisted in the Navy right after graduation in 1968. Killorin served a tour of duty in Vietnam and returned to Norfolk, Va. To secure an early discharge, he applied for and accepted a job with the Norfolk Police Department.

Killorin started as a beat cop but was tapped as the department’s first public information officer because the chief knew he had a college degree in literature.

Then, as now, he had a strong belief in accountability for law enforcement.

“You have authority to compel behavior up to and including death,” Killorin said. “That needs to be some pretty transparent stuff.”

Killorin’s next step up the career ladder was to become a narcotics detective, and that helped him land a coveted spot as special agent for the ATF. He relished the hands-on investigative work. But his involvement preparing testimony for 1982 congressional hearings on outlaw motorcycle gangs convinced ATF brass that Killorin was the right man to head the media affairs office in Washington. It was a promotion but not one to which Killorin aspired.

“I’m going, ‘Why me?’ ” Killorin said. “I thought I escaped that when I got out of the Police Department.”

Colleague Robbie Friedmann, professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University, describes Killorin as neither a back-slapper nor a knee-slapper, but a leader who listens as much as he talks. That skill as a communicator was learned in a trial by fire.

‘It was hell’

As spokesman for the ATF, Killorin was confronted with the mother of all public relations problems — a 51-day siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. It began just two days after the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, an incident that had left the Bureau reeling. Killorin nearly drowned in a flood of media attention from around the world. Simply put: “It was hell,” he said.

The siege started with an ATF raid and gun battle that left six David Koresh followers and four ATF agents dead. It ended with the burning of the compound and the suicides or killings of 76 people, including more than a dozen children. The ATF was criticized for continuing the operation even though it had lost the element of surprise, as was the FBI for allowing the confrontation to escalate.

Killorin acknowledges that the ATF erred going forward with the raid even after agents realized that the cult knew they were coming. But he doubts the cult deaths could have been avoided.

He said the Branch Davidians believed that dying in a confrontation with nonbelievers was the path to paradise, “which to my mind means there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between David Koresh and Mohamed Atta [who planned and died in the Sept. 11 attacks].”

Killorin’s other career exploits in the ATF could flesh out a novel — as a spokesman, a field supervisor in Hartford, Conn., the assistant special agent in charge of the Washington office and finally special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office. Over 30 years, he was involved either intimately or tangentially with the investigations of the Ruby Ridge siege, John Africa’s MOVE organization, the Santiago firebombing in Philadelphia, the raid on the Covenant Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) Christian Identity organization, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Unabomber.

Retirement from ATF

One of his biggest challenges came in 1997, when Killorin was promoted to special agent in charge of the Atlanta field division. Minutes after walking into his new office for the first time, an operations officer approached him with this ominous greeting:

“Welcome to Atlanta, Mr. Killorin. We’ve just had a bombing at an abortion clinic.”

The hunt for Eric Rudolph, the radical extremist behind a series of bombings at Centennial Olympic Park, two abortion clinics and a gay nightclub, would consume federal investigators for the next seven years. About 200 federal and state agents were involved at the height of the investigation, and Killorin helped orchestrate the “three-ring circus.”

Killorin directed almost all other cases to be put on the back burner so laboratory scientists could scrutinize bomb parts and agents could follow leads. Authorities asked the public to send photos or videos taken immediately before the Olympic Park blast. They obtained one photo of a man sitting on a bench where the backpack containing the bomb had been left. However, attempts to enhance the image were unsuccessful.

“You couldn’t make anything of it,” Killorin said. “It was very frustrating.”

Killorin retired from the ATF in 2002 and took a job as head of global securities for a Baltimore-based company. By then, the Sept. 11 attacks and the Washington Beltway sniper killings had already caused the ATF to shuffle its efforts away from Rudolph, who was captured in 2003.

“I thought for the longest time there was a chance we would not get Eric Rudolph,” Killorin said.

Back in saddle

But retirement from public safety was short-lived. In 2006, he was coaxed by former colleagues into becoming director of the Atlanta High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program. The program is under the auspices of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Now he coordinates a task force of local, state and federal law enforcement officers whose goal is to eradicate drug trafficking. Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan, a longtime associate, equated the job to herding cats.

Before Killorin took over, the GBI had pulled its agents off the task force because it was so mismanaged, Keenan said. Killorin got it back on track.

“He’s not the person that is drawing public attention to himself,” Keenan said. “His goal is to get things accomplished and he does that.”

A career spent dealing with criminals has left Killorin leery of disclosing too many details about his life.

But topics such as his preference for crime thrillers set in foreign lands are easy enough to broach. Other pastimes include going to Georgia Tech football games, playing tennis (“not as often as I should”) and spending time with Denise, his wife of 38 years, and two adult daughters, Killorin said. But it’s hard to probe much deeper.

Keenan said the man is “one of my favorite people,” witty, immaculately dressed and unflappable.