Lou Valoze

For more than two decades with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, Lou Valoze distinguished himself as one of the most decorated undercover agents in the country. He spent the last two decades of his career working in an undercover capacity for long term, high profile and complex investigations of home invasion crews, outlaw motorcycle organizations, organized crime groups, murder-for-hire schemes, and conducting storefront operations. Throughout his career he was deployed to various areas in the country to work in an undercover capacity to infiltrate criminal organizations. Lou is the only undercover agent in history to purchase over 1,000 crime guns during his career. Mr. Valoze once posed as a hit man in a murder-for-hire scheme where a doctor hired him to kill his wife and provided Lou with the gun to commit the murder. Based upon conversations Lou had with the doctor on his undercover cell phone, Congress was prompted to change the federal murder-for-hire statute as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in that case. Living and working among violent criminals brought him face to face with the Chicago Mafia, outlaw biker gangs, ruthless street gangs, international firearm trafficking rings, with every moment a razor’s edge between life and death. His work would ultimately rid the streets of more than one thousand illegal weapons and have a long-lasting impact on the way crimes are prosecuted, but his undercover operations would eventually court controversy for him and his fellow agents. The “storefront” operations he helmed, setting up fake businesses that lured in criminals and captured their every move on camera, set the standard for undercover investigations, but earned the wrath of the bureaucracy. Despite having his signature method of investigation stymied by red tape, Valoze earned numerous accolades for his work, including Outstanding Law Enforcement Officer’s Award from the United States Attorney’s Office, Gun Crime Investigation of the Year award from Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) Program, Gang Investigation of the Year award from PSN, and Case of the Year Award from the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF). Valoze currently resides in Savannah, Georgia with his family.