The Untouchable

Michael Taylor's friends say he is a top undercover man. Critics say he is out of control -- and that federal agents are protecting him. One thing is certain: the government doesn't want you to read this story.

by Tim Sandler

Part 2

The more Monahan pursued the evidence, the more he discovered two strikingly different portraits of Taylor.

There was Michael Taylor the former Army Special Forces group sergeant, an undercover federal drug operative with a reputation as a brilliant, resourceful man -- a person who could befriend a leery drug kingpin or penetrate Lebanon's perilous factional boundaries with equal ease. He was patriotic, hard-working, and fearless.

By contrast, there was another Michael Taylor, the master manipulator, a man who reveled in his mercenary image, real or manufactured, and didn't hesitate to cross legal and ethical boundaries to get what he wanted.

And the closer Monahan looked, the more he came to believe that Taylor's darker side warranted investigation. With time, Monahan put together an extensive list of allegations.

In that briefcase, Monahan says, he found indications that Taylor had pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal drug proceeds. He received some of the money from a trafficker in exchange for providing phony Greek passports, arranging a jailbreak in Florida, and helping the trafficker to stay a step ahead of the law. The rest he allegedly swindled from the trafficker, who had put up money for what turned out to be a bogus investment in Nigerian sugar futures.

Monahan also found that Taylor had twice been charged with sexual assault in the early 1980s. One charge was dropped under circumstances that the investigating officer characterized as suspicious. In the other, a Worcester County Superior Court judge declared him not guilty; police records suggest the victim may have refused to testify. Further, there was evidence that Taylor had been involved in an illegal wiretap -- a federal crime -- while working on a divorce case as a private investigator.

Those are serious charges indeed, especially for a man who has spent much of the last decade in the quiet employ of the federal government. But they still remain little more than unproved allegations. No official charges are pending against Taylor. And although a significant portion of the evidence Monahan unearthed is certainly compelling enough to warrant an investigation -- as even a state-police detective lieutenant agreed -- the truth may never be known.

The reason: Monahan never got the chance to prove his case. Instead, when he took his allegations to state and federal authorities, he was rebuffed at most every turn -- the same reaction met by others who have tried to investigate Michael Taylor. Eventually, the 38-year-old Monahan was forbidden to conduct criminal investigations, branded psychologically unstable, threatened with court-martial, and reassigned to the highway patrol on the Massachusetts Turnpike.

The soft-spoken and deliberate Monahan came to feel as though he were being made the criminal in the case. Eventually, in August 1995, Monahan filed suit in US District Court against the Commonwealth, the Department of State Police, and two of his former superiors, citing the state whistleblower-protection law and the First Amendment. His case was taken on by an ACLU lawyer named Eric Maxwell, who has taken the Monahan case with him to private practice.

"Initially in the investigation, I realized that due to his Special Forces background, Taylor had the capability to be a very dangerous individual," Monahan says. "But what I didn't understand was why this man was so protected."

Part 3

Tim Sandler can be reached at tsandler[a]phx.com.