Good Guys Win in High-Crime ‘Town’

The real crime capital of the world may be a small town nestled in a rural Virginia forest where bank robberies, kidnapings and deadly extortion plots are running rampant. The town’s mayor, however, shrugs it off with a serene smile.

After all, as the interminable struggle between good and evil rages outside his office window, Jim Pledger boasts a police force that would be the envy of any big-city mayor--dozens of smart, square-jawed young FBI trainees.

Pledger is mayor of “Hogan’s Alley,” a fictitious but strikingly realistic town built on a wooded, 20-acre site at the FBI Academy, about 40 miles south of Washington, where students practice nabbing criminals, interrogating witnesses and gathering evidence.

At first glance, the town is picture-book America, with its own post office, drugstore, bank, barbershop, combination pool hall and Greyhound bus station, coin laundry, movie theater, motel and boarding houses.

All are phony except for the Pastime Bar, where FBI employees can step inside for a cup of coffee or a sandwich while waiting for the next crime wave.

Visitors with long memories might notice something familiar about the movie theater, the Biograph, which features Clark Gable and Myrna Loy in “Manhattan Melodrama.” It was under the same marquee of the Biograph Theater in Chicago that gangster John Dillinger was shot dead in 1934.

In this town, there are no mothers pushing baby carriages or merchants hurrying to work. The streets are strangely empty until the silence is broken by volleys from blank-firing shotguns and revolvers, the squealing tires of police cruisers and shouts of “Freeze! This is the FBI!”

The make-believe bad guys and witnesses who inhabit Hogan’s Alley are amateur “role players” hired by the hour.

They include housewives from the neighboring Marine Corps base at Quantico, schoolteachers, retirees and off-duty firefighters and police officers. None has any previous acting experience.

“In this town, crime pays--at $8 an hour,” says Pledger.

A huge sign on the outskirts of town gives visitors fair warning:

“Welcome to Hogan’s Alley. City Limits. Caution: Law enforcement training exercises in progress. Display of weapons, firing of blank ammunition and arrests may occur. If challenged, please follow instructions. Have a nice day.”

Last Wednesday, the day started literally with a bang at 8:20 a.m. when the Hogan Bank was robbed. Three gunmen fled with about $30,000 in play money, some of it in $50 bills bearing Pledger’s portrait.

Four teams of FBI trainees--44 in all--sprang into action, following a minute-by-minute script written by their supervisors.

While the first team was interviewing bank employees and dusting the teller’s cage for fingerprints, other trainees quickly arrested the first suspect, a shaggy-haired man in plaid shirt and jeans, at his hideout in the Dogwood Inn motel.

Another gunman was grabbed, handcuffed and frisked outside his three-story townhouse while his girlfriend loudly complained and a nosy neighbor gawked. The third suspect, who lives in the local trailer park, was caught in an FBI ambush at Will Johnson’s Garage, where he had left his aging green sedan for repairs.

Case closed in just four hours.

“These trainees know they’re play-acting, but their adrenaline really gets pumping,” said training supervisor Donald J. Gray.

The nosy neighbor outside the townhouse was Thomas Burkhard, a retired Massachusetts dairy marketing executive who now lives in nearby Woodbridge, Va. His daughter, Lisa Bennett, a doctor’s receptionist and mother of two, played the bank teller in the phony robbery.

“It’s fun, frankly,” said Burkhard. “I don’t do it for the money, I do it because I enjoy it. It’s ideal for me--gives me something to do three or four days a month.”