Today is the 34th anniversary of the FBI Miami shootout, perhaps the most studied (and most influential) gunfight in history. Very brief summary: eight FBI agents confronted two men who had been robbing banks and armoured cars. The confrontation ended in a firefight, in which two FBI agents (Jerry L. Dove and Benjamin P. Grogan) were killed and five more were injured (three of them seriously). The two suspects were shot and killed by Agent Ed Mireles, who was one of the agents seriously injured. (Agent Dove inflicted what would have been an eventually fatal wound on one of the suspects, but it was not an immediate stopper: the man Agent Dove shot kept fighting until Agent Mireles got in a finishing shot at close range.)
This is the second of the three events I mentioned in an earlier post. I went back and forth about doing a longer post on this event, and ended up deciding to do a short one instead. This isn’t a round number anniversary, and I’d really like to do more prep work before doing a longer post: next year is the 35th anniversary, and that seems like a good target. On the other hand, I didn’t want to let this anniversary pass without notice.
In the meantime, if you want to dig beyond the Wikipedia entry, I’d start with Ed Mireles’s book: I’m still in the process of reading it, but this has the “Hell, I was there!” factor going for it. Here’s a review of it (with bonus material) from great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn.
Massad Ayoob has written about this event multiple times in the “Ayoob Files”. His first article is in Ayoob Files: The Book (as a matter of fact, the cover illustration is a crime scene photo from the shootout). As I’ve noted before, you’ll get more value out of purchasing the 1985-2011 “Ayoob Files” PDF from American Handgunner, which contains the original article from 1989, “FBI Miami Shootout: An Update” from 1992, and “25 Years After the FBI Firefight: The Late-Emerging” (also online). There’s at least one more (I may have lost count) “Ayoob Files, “The FBI Dadeland Shootout: Hero Agent Ed Mireles Speaks“, tied to the Mireles book.
The other book I often see cited, and which has been recommended to me, is “Forensic Analysis Of The April 11, 1986, FBI Firefight” by W. French Anderson, which is violently expensive. Then again, this is kind of a specialized publication: I don’t know what it went for when it came out in 2006. (Plus, it was published by the now-defunct Paladin Press.)
“Dark Day in Suniland” was put together by Bob Gilmartin, a local TV reporter who also wrote the forward to Agent Mireles’s book. This documentary came out a year after the event.
Over at Karl’s site, he has another video that combines the FBI reconstruction video, “Firefight” and another video with personal reflections from the agents.
There is a made for TV movie, “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders” based on this event, but Agent Mireles states in his book that “dramatic effect apparently took precedence over some of the facts”.
The other agents involved were:
SA Richard Manauzzi.
Supervisor Gordon McNeill (seriously injured).
SA Gilbert Orrantia.
SA John Hanlon (seriously injured).
SA Ronald Risner.