FBI agent in charge of LR office retiring
Posted on Thursday, May 15, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/225747/
Bill Temple never said so out loud, but everyone he worked with at FBI headquarters in Washington, D. C., knew what it meant when he strolled through the office wearing a silly little grin and a puffy, foam Razorbacks hat.
It meant “Woo pig.”
“It was ridiculous,” said Bucky Cox, a retired FBI agent who worked alongside Temple at the time. “He wouldn’t say anything — not a word — but you knew Arkansas did something good. We begged him to stop.”
Temple retires today as special agent in charge of the FBI’s Little Rock field office, a post he has held since 2002. His 57 th birthday Wednesday forced the timing, bringing Temple to the bureau’s mandatory retirement age.
He held the job by choice. Most agents in his position stick around for far shorter tenures. But Temple was where he wanted to be.
He moved to Fort Smith in fifth grade from Muskogee, Okla., where he was born, yet even when his job took him to Alabama and Florida and the District of Columbia and West Virginia, he was still an Arkansan.
“It was more than that,” said Cox, a friend for 25 years. “Seriously, it didn’t matter where he lived. He never left Arkansas.”
Because he is an Arkansan, it made him more accessible to people in the state, his colleagues insist.
“It helps a lot for people like Bill and me,” said Bob Balfe, U. S. attorney for the Western District of Arkansas. “I walk into a room and say I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help, and I get nothing but a roll of the eyes. Now, I tell them, hey, I’m from Arkansas and all that stops and people give me a chance.”
Balfe said having someone who knows the state and is committed to the state in the FBI’s top Arkansas job helps law enforcement agencies work better together.
“Some people here in my office tell the story of an FBI special agent in charge who was new to Arkansas a little while back and came out to Fort Smith and said, ‘ I plan to spend a great deal of time here, ’” Balfe said. “And that was the last time anybody saw him.”
Temple, Balfe said, was more than simply around or available.
“Whether we win or lose a case, he’ll often call up the assistant U. S. attorney and tell them how he appreciates their work on the case, how much effort they put into it,” Balfe said. “Win or lose. Doesn’t matter. That’s rare. The man is loyal.”
Bentonville Police Chief James Allen said that in 19 years of running his department, he had never had such a good working relationship with a federal agent.
“Usually a federal agency wants you to give them information, give them manpower, whatever, and you don’t get anything back,” Allen said. “That’s not how it works with Bill. He tells us whatever we need — training, other assistance — if it’s his to give, it’s ours.”
Temple believes deeply in preparation and attention to detail. Prepare right and know what to look for, and it’s much easier to succeed, whether in a criminal case or in a job opportunity.
The key, he said, is to always be ready.
His late father was a plumbing-supply wholesaler in Fort Smith. Temple’s first job was delivering pipe and toilets. He went to Hendrix College in Conway and studied history and political science.
“I never really knew what I wanted to be,” he said.
Law school at the University of Arkansas didn’t clear anything up. He didn’t really want to practice law, but he took a job as a deputy prosecuting attorney in Fort Smith. He lasted all of 18 months, until he heard the FBI had lifted a hiring freeze.
“I don’t think I’d ever shot a gun before my FBI training,” he said.
Temple’s first assignment was Birmingham, Ala., and white-collar crime and civil-rights cases. It was 1978.
“The Ku Klux Klan was still very active,” he said. “We’d get into some of those counties down there and, boy, we’d take a lot of agents with us.”
He moved on to Miami in 1982 and got assigned to the drug cases he’d hoped to avoid, thinking he didn’t join the FBI to do small undercover drug buys like a municipal police officer.
“I was very, very wrong,” he said.
Along with other agents, he investigated Colombian cocaine cartels and followed the mountains of cash around the country.
“We got a call out at one point to an abandoned house out near the airport,” he said. “Nobody around. We go in and we found $ 4 million in cash sitting upstairs. Just sitting there. That kind of thing happened all the time.”
Temple said he decided to leave street work for management in 1989 and not long afterward decided to leave Miami, in part because he said he’s “not a beach person.”
Stops at FBI Headquarters, then Little Rock as the No. 2 agent, then West Virginia moved him up in the bureau’s hierarchy.
Other agents said he was a good fit as a supervisor.
“If you go out there on the street with the agents, some very good agents who make very good decisions will stop making decisions altogether and look to you to make the decisions,” Cox said. “Bill knew better than that. If you let him, he’d make you better, no question. But he knew how to get out of the way, too.”
And then, in 2002, Temple got the chance to come home to Arkansas. He would supervise 150 employees — 80 agents — in nine offices around his home state.
He was prepared. He was ready.
“It was perfect timing and the perfect job,” he said.
Temple said he doesn’t know what’s next for him. Maybe teaching. Maybe training. Maybe something he hasn’t even thought of yet. He said he’ll talk to his wife, talk to his two grown sons, and sort it out.
“Whatever it’s going to be,” he said, “I can’t imagine it’ll involve leaving Arkansas.”