Not Your Average FBI Agent

As he drives through South Los Angeles on an overcast afternoon, Special Agent John Pi of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is having trouble--as usual--making up his mind.

Pi, who in sunglasses looks far younger than 36, has an organized-crime case to work. But the call over a bureau radio is clear: The SWAT team is about to enter a house where it believes kidnappers are keeping a 3-year-old taken from a San Marino family two weeks earlier. The address is only five minutes away.

Pi, after wavering, heads over. As he drives up, two agents in full SWAT gear run toward him, waving. The child is alive, but needs medical attention.

“Doc!” they yell at Pi. “We need you now!”

Pi’s skills have always been in demand. He studied engineering and computer science at Columbia, where the New York Police Department recruited him. Instead he wrote code for IBM, which wanted to promote him, before he quit to attend medical school. He completed his residency at UCLA and earned a sought-after job at a Cleveland emergency room, where other doctors saw him as a future chief. Only a year later, he jetted off to enroll at the FBI Academy in Virginia.

“John Pi is kind of a phenomenon in the bureau,” said supervisory Special Agent Doug Kane, who commands the SWAT team in Los Angeles. “I don’t think you’ll find anyone with the background he has.”

The strange journey of this computer programmer-trauma surgeon-FBI agent--from a childhood in Taiwan to a spot in the Los Angeles organized-crime unit--is more than an extraordinary case of job change. It also highlights the quandary the FBI faces in attracting and recruiting the scientifically gifted agents it lacks.

The bureau needs more such agents to handle 21st century investigations into Internet fraud, biochemical terrorism or the mishandling of genetic materials. But the computer programmers and scientists and doctors the FBI must lure hardly fit naturally into the bureau’s culture. They tend to be like Pi, intellectual risk-takers in an agency that values caution and long careers.

Although Atty. Gen. Janet Reno has boasted in Washington about Pi as an example of progress, in Los Angeles it is less clear that the FBI and its only surgeon-agent have made any final decisions about each other. Pi, constantly called “Doc” or “the doctor,” is prone to wonder whether he will ever fit in.

He feels outside pressures too. His parents disapprove of the FBI. Married with two young daughters, he thinks more about the risks an agent must run.

He faces huge debts from his medical education, and on his government salary has been unable to buy a house. If he went back into computers or medicine, he would immediately make at least twice what he is paid by the FBI.

“But right now,” he said in an interview last summer, “I’m happy to sit in my car eating doughnuts and drinking coffee on a surveillance, or go along on raids. As for the future, who knows whether I’ll change my mind again?”

Family Emigrates From Taiwan to U.S.

The Pi (pronounced “pie”) family never much cared for law enforcement. John’s mother, a nurse from a wealthy Beijing family, and his father, a physician from a poor family of pharmacists in Jian Xi province, were forced out of mainland China by Communist police. The Pis fled to Taiwan, where they had two children, an even-tempered girl and her less-well-behaved younger brother.

Di Di, as his parents called young John, took money when his mother wasn’t looking. In his elementary school, authoritarian teachers often disciplined Pi for his poor work. When he was 12, his parents decided that their independent-minded children needed a more flexible education system. They moved to the United States, settling in upstate New York.

The new country brought out John’s natural intelligence, a tendency to try things out, understand them and move on. Enchanted by the heroes of “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” he studied computers and supersonic flight on his own. In 1982, he went to Columbia University to study engineering.

While in college, the curious Pi took a job as a reserve officer with the New York Police Department. He enjoyed directing traffic and talking to strangers, and submitted an application for a full-time officer’s post. But at graduation, he decided to try a different career.

A pattern of change was set. In his Columbia yearbook, Pi submitted a favorite quote: “Life is a one-way street: my way.”

That way led him upstate to Poughkeepsie. IBM wanted him. Pi joined a group writing software for mainframes. He talked computers all day and was upset when his family couldn’t understand him. (His mother took a computer class to ease conversation.) Pi liked the challenge and the disciplined atmosphere at IBM. Lunch was 42 minutes exactly--so people would remember not to be late.

Pi, as the youngest member of his group of programmers, stood out. He was a natural, earning the division quality award in his first year.

“I expected him to get into management within a few years, and rise quickly,” said his former manager, Frank Yolton. “But his family changed that.”

While Pi was working at IBM, his father suffered a heart attack. Pi had never seen his mother so panicked. And he found himself impressed by a nurse who cared for his father, handling thankless chores--like emptying bedpans--with grace.

As his father recovered, Pi applied to medical school at New York University, even though he did not have the prerequisite biology and chemistry. As a medical student, he proved to be a fanatic. His sister Diana, an NYU medical resident with whom he shared a dorm room, refused to watch medical TV shows with him “because he can’t stop talking about how they are doing the CPR wrong.” Pi spent part of his fourth year of medical school in Puerto Rico, treating rare tropical diseases and learning Spanish to add to his command of English, Mandarin and German.

In 1992, UCLA offered him a $48,000-a-year residency in its prestigious emergency medicine program. As a resident there, he wrote a computer program to track trauma patients and reduce human errors. “There were times when he’d be seeing twice as many patients as anyone else,” said Dr. Scott Votey, who headed the residency program.

Among Pi’s class of 12 residents, nine have stayed with medicine full time. Two others--one a surfer, the other an aspiring screenwriter--practice part time to pay their bills. Pi, a star, seemed destined for a long career in academic medicine, perhaps even medical administration. But he had met law enforcement agents in the emergency room, and began to talk about the FBI.

Votey counseled him against leaving medicine: “You just finished training in a specialty. You’re a hot property in the job market. Don’t go!”

For a time, Pi took Votey’s advice. MetroHealth Medical Center--a county facility and Case Western University teaching hospital in Cleveland--beat out other suitors by giving Pi a prestigious $140,000-a-year job supervising the residents and teaching. Pi accepted, and soon began to have second thoughts.

In Cleveland, he was happy with his job and his life. He married his childhood sweetheart from Taiwan. At work, he was a sensation. He led regular discussions of medical publications and brought his laptop to work to manage cases--a first for a MetroHealth physician. Doctors seeing immigrant patients sought him out for his fluency in Spanish and Mandarin.

But Pi says the police officers who haunted the emergency room interested him more than his job. Among the regulars was James Simone, a longtime patrolman on Cleveland’s tough west side who had once been shot in the line of duty.

“I told him that I’d never fallen out of love with law enforcement work,” Simone said. “If he could afford it, he should try it.”

As a doctor, Pi had grown accustomed to handling the casualties of crime, the injured and dead who came, bleeding, through the emergency room door. Law enforcement, he thought, would give him an insider’s view of the world’s tougher characters and offer an education in how to stop that crime in the first place. “I had seen the medical life,” he said.

Mindful that he was nearing the FBI’s age ceiling, Pi, then 33, knew he didn’t have long to decide. For the first time in his life, he began working out, running along Lake Erie and doing push-ups in anticipation of the bureau’s test. When he sent in his application in 1997, his colleagues were shocked and angry.

“You know, this is such a talented person that wherever he works, management will have a hard time keeping him interested,” said Votey. “I thought, ‘Good luck to the FBI.’ ”

Bureau Desperate for New Agents

John Pi’s application arrived at a desperate bureau. In recent years, the FBI has seen a steep decline in the number of applicants for open spots, even as baby boomer agents have been retiring. The retirements have left the bureau with a younger force--about half of all agents have five or fewer years on the job. Few of the new agents--and even fewer of the veterans-- have scientific or computer backgrounds.

The bureau’s age ceiling for new agents--36--tends to limit the number of applicants with extensive training in another field. Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh say there is a “severe shortage” of agents with other skills, and have asked Congress for millions to fund improved recruitment and training. A special commission on federal law enforcement this year called for an “upgrade” in the caliber of agents.

Left unmentioned in the talk of new initiatives is the bureau’s mixed record in deploying the scientific talent it already has. Much of it goes unnoticed, leaving a sharpshooter with a PhD in chemistry, a veterinarian working bank robberies. The FBI application, while asking if recruits are accountants or lawyers, has no boxes to check for medical personnel or computer programmers.

“There has never been a systematic effort to identify and employ the talent in the agency,” said Jim Settle, a former head of the FBI’s national computer crime squad. “If the FBI wants to improve and attract these kinds of people, it needs to make up its mind to adapt its entire culture.”

Freeh has filled some expertise holes by hiring scientists specifically as civilian employees, rather than agents, under a special federal exemption that allows for extra pay. But such workers are few, and face a backlash.

Starting pay for an agent is $40,000 annually in most offices--$50,000 in more expensive places, such as Los Angeles and New York. To join the FBI, Pi had to accept a pay cut of nearly two-thirds. Over a 20-year career, a switch from medicine to the bureau could cost him nearly $2 million.

Pi, more interested in an intellectual challenge than concerned by the salary cut, arrived at the FBI Academy in the fall of 1997. The 16 weeks of training covered investigative subjects, physical fitness, self-defense tactics and the use of firearms.

But there was little instruction, Pi noticed, in science or computers. Freeh makes much of the fact that new agents receive their own laptops. Pi learned that the laptops are little more than word processors. They don’t have modems.

Pi’s wife, Emily, supported the career change. But his father was furious. He did not trust federal law enforcement, an attitude that could be traced to his family’s experiences in China. How could his son leave medicine, an honorable profession that had provided opportunities for his father, his mother and his sister?

At the academy, Pi’s roommate had 25 visitors. Pi had none. His family did not show up for his graduation.

Pi thought he might like to stay in Cleveland to be close to his sister, or return to New York to be close to his parents. But the FBI assigns agents with an eye to staffing levels, particularly in large offices such as Los Angeles’.

Top managers in Washington might tout their plans to exploit the skills of agents like Pi, but on the ground in Southern California, the reality was different. His status as a doctor was a curiosity, but it made little immediate difference in his work life. And most supervisors were unaware of his computer background. “They really didn’t know what to do with my skills,” he said. “It took the bureau the longest time to figure out what to do with me.”

Pi, eager to fit in, made no complaint when he was assigned to the organized-crime bureau. His life was grunt work and waiting. He did surveillance and stakeouts. Like other new agents, he often found himself dispatched to breaking crimes. He became a member of the SWAT and crisis negotiation teams.

Still, the job was less taxing than working the emergency room--fewer long nights, less coffee, less death. And on the street, Pi’s hospital bedside manner was disarming.

“Every task that I’ve asked of him, he’s done it beyond my expectations,” said SWAT team leader Doug Kane. “The idea is for him to be an agent, not a doctor.”

Two terrorist attacks in East Africa forced a slight change in that philosophy.

On Aug. 7, 1998, massive explosions ripped though the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Together they killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 5,000. FBI agents responding to the disasters found themselves isolated, lacking equipment and medical support.

As they scrambled around the sharp, wet wreckage, agents suffered foot infections (from lack of waterproof boots), cuts (from metal in the debris) and sprained hands and feet.

In Washington, officials began scouting for agents with medical backgrounds. After a week, they called Pi. Arriving in Dar es Salaam, he found that one hospital emergency room had only two nurses. Another hospital had only three units of blood in storage, and two of those had spoiled.

Pi asked for more supplies, particularly of blood and anti-fungal cream to treat infections. “And we prayed a lot,” he said. “Since it was the FBI’s first large-scale national deployment, we were not as prepared as we should have been.”

After the bombings, headquarters responded by ordering the creation of Rapid Deployment Teams in four field offices, including Los Angeles. They can respond anywhere in the world within 24 hours.

Pi immediately was added to the L.A. team. Over the last two years, he has gone to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, where he worked with agents looking for remains of people killed in the drug trade, and to the remote mountains of western North Carolina, where his team provided medical support to investigators hunting for fugitive bomber Eric Rudolph. In those wooded hills with few roads, Pi learned to jump out of a helicopter to reach agents with supplies.

“A lot of times what we’re doing is making sure people get their medications or their asthma medicine,” he said. “And I answer a lot of questions. If there’s a hostage situation and one of the hostages has diabetes, there are sure to be questions about insulin.”

Pi’s medical work takes up only a fraction of his time. But it has undermined his best efforts to fit in. Headquarters, eager to show off the agent, included a picture of Pi jumping out of a helicopter in an internal newsletter. Reno began referring to the doctor in public.

The exposure prompted grumbling. To agents who knew nothing of his organized-crime assignments, Pi’s medical work seemed to violate the bureau’s long tradition of devoting one’s first four years to being an investigator.

“They make such a big deal of him,” said Roger Browning, a retired special agent from Phoenix. “They are going to spoil these kids with expertise. He needs to spend another five years working bank robberies or something.”

In Los Angeles, Pi suffered an increase in ribbing, and in people calling him Doc. “They do that because they know it annoys me,” said Pi, who prefers John.

More and more, his organized-crime work seemed routine. His instinct for a new challenge welled up again. Noticing that the computer intrusion and infrastructure protection squads needed people, he requested a transfer late last summer. “I don’t want to do organized crime forever,” he said.

Family and friends, picking up on Pi’s restlessness, held out hope that he might suddenly switch careers again. In Cleveland, doctors and nurses asked Diana if her brother had any interest in returning to medicine.

“He has such a hard time making up his mind, you never know,” she said.

Pi’s children are not yet school age. He has not bought a house in Los Angeles, making another move less complicated. As a weekend computer enthusiast, he has maintained most of his programming skills. And as a doctor, he has kept his license by attending medical conferences and working as an unpaid clinical faculty member in the UCLA emergency room.

That raised two other sore points. The government has not helped him with his educational debts, as recruiters had suggested it might, he says. And the bureau has not paid the approximately $4,000 annual cost of license renewal, even though it depends on his medical skills, he says.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if he came back to medicine full time--lots of places would love to have him,” said his UCLA residency supervisor, Votey. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he was doing something else, completely different.”

Another Job Change

This fall, Pi switched jobs again.

But he remained inside the FBI. His request for a transfer came through. For the last two months, Pi has been assigned to L.A.’s infrastructure protection squad--nine FBI agents who work to protect computer networks and electrical grids from terrorists and hackers.

In the new job, his IBM training is crucial. Pi works at his computer most of the day, examining codes and systems for weaknesses that make them vulnerable to attack.

For the first time, the federal government is getting the full benefit of John Pi’s expertise.

“Maybe,” he allowed with a laugh, “I’ll stick around for a while.”