In this fascinating episode of Epic Begins With 1 Step Forward, Zander Sprague sits down with Eric Robinson, a recently retired FBI agent whose career path is anything but ordinary. Eric shares how he went from serving as a Baptist pastor to spending 24 years in federal law enforcement. He discusses the surprising reasons behind his career shift, the reality of life inside the FBI, and the lessons learned from working cases involving gangs, organized crime, white-collar crime, and crimes against children. Eric also reflects on the intense camaraderie among agents, the adrenaline of high-risk operations, and the deeper purpose that guided his work. This episode offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the FBI while exploring courage, service, and the unexpected paths that can shape an epic life.
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From Baptist Pastor To FBI Agent: Eric Robinson’s Epic Career Pivot
I have a great guest for us. Eric Robinson is joining me. Eric, tell me who you are and what you do.
I do very little because I just retired after 24 years in the FBI. Prior to that, I spent about a dozen years in Christian ministry. In April of 2002, I left the Baptist pulpit to join the FBI because I felt like I needed a career change.
From Christian Ministry To Federal Law Enforcement
I have to say, that is quite the epic change to go from the Baptist pulpit to being an FBI agent. You touched on it a little, but that’s a pretty major career change. What made you want to do that?
My health made me want to do that because I had a string of two years where every single day without fail, I had stress-related headaches. It was obvious that the stress was coming from my work because better men have done a better job of handling ministry than I could. What I found was that when people in my congregation came to me with a difficulty, I couldn’t let it go. There’s a balance there that I couldn’t find. Which is to address it and then not worry about it afterwards. I was unable to do that. I told my wife, “I’ve got to find something else. I got to find a job with less stress.” I joined the FBI.
I got to say, Eric, you wanted less stress, yet you joined the FBI. I don’t see how there’s less stress being an FBI agent.
The stress spikes, and then it’s gone. For me, the issue was that I cared that somebody said, “I think my wife is going to leave me or my child is forming a drug habit.” In the FBI, I’ll bring twelve people to be indicted by a prosecutor. They’ll say, “We’re only going to charge four of them.” I know eight guys are going around who are criminals, and they’re not going to be charged. Ultimately, I know that life’s going to take care of them. They’ll get caught some other way. I didn’t internalize it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with working in ministry.
Is it safe to say, Eric, that you might have been one of the more experienced FBI trainees when you went through?
I had shot a gun once, so no.
I meant age-wise. If I’m doing my math right, you spent twelve years on the Baptist pulpit. Unless you were twelve when you started. I’m guessing that you were somewhere in your 30s when you joined the FBI.
I was about 33 years old. I was in the middle. We had an older class. The recruits coming into the academy now tend to be a little bit younger. Maybe late twenties. I even had one individual. The cutoff for entering the FBI is 37 because you have to retire at 57. I had one classmate who was 43. He had been in for 9 years and out for 8, then got a special dispensation from the attorney general to come back. I was about in the middle. Though, I think I outlasted just about everybody else from my class.
What were some of the more challenging parts of going through the academy?
Fortunately, for me, I was in decent shape. I had been running marathons, which came out of having the headaches. The only thing that helped me was running. The longer I ran, the longer the headaches would go away, then they would slowly come back. I was adding more and more. I was in good shape for that. The hardest was understanding the FBI. Twenty-four years in, there are countless aspects of the FBI I still don’t understand.
I focus mainly on, “This is what I’m doing here. This is the violation I’m working on,” the things that go on in DC, and some of the acronyms. People sit around making up new four or five-letter acronyms and don’t tell people what they are. Coming in without that experience, not having even done law enforcement of learning. This is how a judicial process is carried out through interviews, subpoenas, and all the techniques that we have available.
Here’s something that I learned from someone who was a former FBI agent. I was surprised to hear this. Is it true, Eric, that you routinely have polygraph tests as an agent to make sure that you haven’t been compromised?
That’s true. Polygraph were coming in. My pants were soaked with sweat by the time I was done. I was a pretty clean guy, too.
It’s like getting called into the principal’s office, where you know you haven’t done anything wrong. All of a sudden, you’re like, “What did I do?”
You’re going into the confessional booth, but they’re asking you questions and know if you’re telling the truth. It’s supposed to be every five years that you’re polygraphed to go through basic questions that you haven’t been compromised. My five-year reinvestigation came at fifteen years. With all that the polygraphers have to do, sometimes, it’s a little delayed getting around.
The FBI does many things differently. There are agents doing different particular parts of law enforcement. What were you doing throughout your career? Did it change?
One nice thing about the FBI is that there are a variety of offenses and violations you can work on. Sometimes, you’re assigned to them. Sometimes, you can make a choice to move on to a different squad. I started out working on Mexican and Colombian drug cartels in Chicago, then gangs. After that, public corruption civil rights, organized crime, White-collar crime, crimes against children, human intelligence, and national security. I did most of what we had available.
That’s good. You mentioned gangs. When I went to college, I was outside of LA. Very close to Pomona, California, where there was a large presence of the Bloods, the Crips, and all of that. That was in the news all the time. It was top of mind at that time. Now, we don’t hear as much about that generally in the news. However, that does not mean that all of these gangs aren’t still incredibly active, fighting each other, and killing people and stuff. In your time in working with the gang, what can you say about how gangs have evolved? I know it may be a few years, but as I said, they’re still around.
It’s like many trends in criminal elements that organized crime was huge in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It then started being taken apart, dismantled by the FBI. I don’t know that the FBI has dismantled gangs, but I would agree. When I was in Chicago, we had Latin Kings everywhere. We had Gangster disciples. They were in many ways running areas. You didn’t come into that area unless you were known. They had young kids on corners who would be watch lookouts for them.
Having seen how some of my colleagues were working gangs in the Toledo area, much of it is less about that identification that it used to be. To me, it seems that young men were looking for something that they needed to be a part of. It’s a bit more evolving into something that people join as an opportunity to maybe make some money or sell drugs on the side. It almost perpetuated itself that because this gang was violent, now I had to join a gang in order to be safe from this gang. That’s an astute observation that, in many ways, has calmed and hasn’t seemed to be such a necessity.
Gang violence perpetuates more violence with the false dream of achieving lasting peace.
That’s interesting. We’ve heard of some big gangs like the Norteños.
There’s the MS-13.
What’s the violent one out of Venezuela?
I don’t follow those guys as much anymore.
FBI Agents In Fiction: How Close They Are To Reality
It’s all good, Eric. Don’t worry about it. We’ll move on to other parts of your epic career. I watch TV. I watch movies. I see stuff involving the FBI. How much fictionalization? You’re not getting into gun battles every week, probably.
Correct. I’ve pulled my gun many times. I’ve been in deadly force situations where I could have engaged in deadly force, and where teammates have engaged in deadly force. What’s fortunate for the Bureau, which differs from police because oftentimes, the dispatcher says, “Go here.” You get what you get. We have a greater ability to control the situation, time, and location of an arrest or search warrant.
When I come with twelve other people, and we’ve got rifles, or we may have armored vehicles that we can take safety behind. You’re less likely to make a bad choice. When you see rifles surrounding a building and a PA calling you out. Pretty much, your choice is made. Many times, as a SWAT operator, we would see that. We’d see someone in a window or by a bedroom, and they would come out voluntarily. As we enter the house and clear it, by that window is a gun. Here’s someone who is considering their options. With such a show of force, it makes the situation much safer, both for us and even for the bad guys, too.
I’ve got to imagine if you’re rolling up to serve a warrant or something. You talk about stress, adrenaline, and all of that. I got to imagine that it’s pretty high simply because it’s controlled if you try and make it. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know that this person might have a whole arsenal of guns that they’re like, “I don’t care about giving up. I’m shooting my way out of this.” Can you talk a little about that?
They may choose to oppose us, or they may choose to surrender. Which we hope they do. I don’t mean this to brag in some macho way, but I was never scared. Maybe that was foolish. Maybe it was because we’ve always come out of this fine and here I still am. I’m a survivor. I knew the guys around me were well-trained. I knew we were well-equipped. I knew we had a well-thought-through plan. This is our operations order. Everyone knows what they’re going to do. Almost the heart rate would rise only in a sense of what the body knows it’s got to do something it has to perform. Now let me give you a little bump.
It’s the fight or flight. You know there’s some danger. It makes sense. I’ve done bungee jumping.
That I won’t do.
It was great. I can tell you. I was all excited. It was something I wanted to do. When I got out there on the platform, the heart rate was going. The adrenaline was pumping. You’re like, “I could possibly die here.” That fight or flight kicks in. You don’t have any control over.
There was one occasion we had where we had a barricaded subject who wasn’t holding her son as hostage, but she had a ten-year-old son with her. We were concerned for his safety. We’re letting negotiators do their job. As eight of us were positioned ready to make entry, if need be. Our triggers were either if she threatened the safety of her child or if she fired a shot. We sent the robot down for the negotiators to speak through the robot and to listen. That set her off.
She fired a shot through the door. I remember looking back at my team leader going, “That was a gunshot. Here we go.” She had said, “Anybody coming through the door needs to bring body bags.” That’s the closest I came to fear. As I think about it, it was less fear and more of the resignation of, “I’m probably getting shot. That’s going to hurt, but here we go.”
Preparing For And Participating In Marathons
You alluded to having run marathons. I too have run some marathons, half-marathons, and stuff. It’s like when you’re in the corral. You’re ready and prepared, but there is that, “This could hurt.”
It’s definitely going to. You get jazzed up in your first mile. You’ve got to tell yourself, “Don’t run this fast.” By the time you’re at mile fifteen, you’re like, “I need some of that energy from before to keep going.”
I was fortunate enough to get to run the 2014 Boston Marathon. Full disclosure, I was in on a sponsor exemption. I did not, nor would I ever, qualify for Boston. I’m just not that fast. I grew up outside of Boston, the bad was I knew the course from mile five. The rest of the way I knew. I had nightmares about getting detoured and having to do an extra six miles and stuff like that. When you start off from Hopkinton, the first 5K is a slight downhill.
You’ve got all that pre-race energy. I’m running Boston, so now we’ve amped it up. I’m going slightly downhill. It was the fastest 5K I ever ran in a marathon. I was trying to slump. It’s not steep. Honestly, I don’t say that was horrible, but it was hard. I was trying to hold myself back. You’re like, “I feel so good. It’s so easy.” I’m like, “I have so many more miles to go.”
I ran Boston in 2000. I had been living in Western New York. The hill outside my front door was huge. I was always running the hills. I remember running and getting to mile 22. I asked somebody, “Where’s Heartbreak Hill?” It was back there. That was nothing. That’s back when I was in good running shape, though.
FBI agents must know how to learn from older agents and throw away methods that are not working anymore.
For those of you who don’t know, Heartbreak Hill isn’t particularly steep. It’s just a series of little hills. What makes it challenging is when you get to a mile, it’s mile 17 through about 20. When you get to it, you have just come out of the hills of Wellesley. Your quads are shot because it’s mile seventeen to begin with. You just came down a whole series of hills. It’s harder than running uphill because you’re trying to control your body and stuff.
That’s why Heartbreak Hill is hard. It’s not steep. I don’t think anyone will call them steep hills. They’re bumps. The other thing that messed me up when I did Boston was that, through all my marathon training before that, running coaches said, “When you pass an aid station, get water, even if you have water on you, because if you get behind on hydration, your day is done.”
Boston is unique in the fact that there are water stations every mile. By the time I got to about mile sixteen, I had probably had an additional fifteen cups of water. I was feeling a little sloshy to say the least, but it was only because mentally, I was like, “They’re normally 2.5 miles in between.” You don’t know when your marathon is going to get considerably harder, which they all do most times.
That’s part of the learning experience. I went through that with marathons of learning how to best drink water, how to consume it. A lot of that played out, too. As I was going for marathons, too, in the FBI, I started knowing nothing, learning from the academy to some extent. Over the years, I was applying that and learning from older agents. I was observing how they did things, taking what worked, and throwing away a few things that I thought weren’t pertinent.
Solving Notorious Crimes Against Children
What would you say are one or two fondest thoughts of your time in the FBI? Perhaps a case.
Working with crimes against children was fascinating. Every day, I was living in a world that people walked past but didn’t know was there. I had a friend who was working at prior, then I got to engage in that with her. At the time in Toledo, Ohio, we had a task force that focused more on rescuing the teen prostitutes. Setting up the hotel stings was always crazy adventures where we tried to draw in underage girls based on their photos online.
We might have certain ones that we’re looking to bring in because social workers had said they ran away and are probably going back to the streets. Ultimately, we’d be bringing in Johns as well. Part of what heightens it is because it’s such an embarrassment to them. We had a doctor once who came. He was in between surgeries, taking his lunch break. He was wearing scrubs and came to visit a prostitute who was an undercover.
We’ve had so many instances where pimps are coming, and are pulling guns. We had one where we had to stop a vehicle. At this time, I was out on surveillance on the street. I believe this was the man who had dropped off the girl for prostitution. As we went to collapse in on the vehicle, he started trying to escape up a berm that he was backed up to. I put my vehicle closer. Finally, he was wedged in. We got out behind our vehicles, everybody with their rifles up.
As he was looking at us, he reached under his dashboard. I was hoarse for three days afterwards from yelling because I didn’t want to kill him. Here’s a man who’s reaching under his dash. We don’t know if he’s grabbing for a gun or whatever. It turned out he was trying to stash his phone and hide it. We came up to the vehicle with a shield. I busted out his window and we yanked him out of there. That was a time when the adrenaline probably spiked. I’ll give you that one.
If somebody believes you are an informant for the FBI while you are recording them, they will leave the situation immediately.
I can imagine. Did you ever go undercover?
I didn’t. The undercover program for the FBI is very intense. I’ve had friends who are undercover employees for the FBI. I’ve heard stories. For me, you could threaten me or break a finger, and I’ll be fine, but I need my sleep. Part of it is sleep deprivation. I already know I’m out. I can’t do that. I need to get seven hours for sure. We’ve worked with plenty of undercovers. As they travel and get to do those prime jobs, they always have crazy stories to tell, too.
Based only on stories I’ve read from people who were undercover and Hollywood’s depiction of what that is. I’ve got to imagine that the level of stress on a near constant basis is hard, especially if you’re undercover in a biker gang or a criminal enterprise. If you get found out, they’re going to kill you.
I’ll tell you this. They could. This is not to say it lessens the stress. I’ve worked with many informants who, in some ways, play an undercover role. We’ve talked over, “What if they find me out or they ask questions?” I let them know, “We’ll be there to come in and rescue you.” Also, if somebody believes that you’re an informant for the FBI and you’re recording them. They are leaving the situation, most likely. They know that if they bring any further harm onto an undercover or to an informant, that’s going to seal it for them.
That’s more trouble than they want. That’s interesting because that’s not obviously the way it’s depicted.
That’s not to say that there wouldn’t be somebody who would do it, or it would lessen the stress. I sent an informant once to meet with a white supremacist group. Part of his initiation was that they jumped him to see how well he did in a fight. He was like, “That was awesome. I crooked that guy’s nose and took care of myself well.” He was an extraordinary informant able to handle that situation rather than backing away from it.
What Eric Misses The Most In His Work As An FBI Agent
What are one or two of the things that you are going to miss now that you’re retired?
It’s the people. The action is fun. There were a lot of boring times. Being on SWAT gave me some of that experience. Being on SWAT also gave me the best experience because the FBI has good, competent, and very positive-looking people who are trying to bring about justice. They’re some of the best people I’ve ever met. The most dedicated of them are often on SWAT. These were guys I would spend long hours with in dangerous situations.
Though, we didn’t talk about it to each other we all knew implicitly, “I’m willing to die for you.” That bond was there. You can say it’s a brotherhood. It was a special closeness of experiences we’ve shared. When I share this experience where the adrenaline does hit high, or we were in danger, and we both survived that together. We don’t have to talk about it. We just feel that we are now closer to each other.
It certainly makes sense from a psychological perspective, “We were both in danger. We survived it, and we both know.” Similar to you and me having both run marathons. There’s a certain understanding about what’s involved there with how challenging that can be. It’s saying, “If I have to crawl across that finish line, I am finishing this thing.”
We’ve had that shared together.
Eric’s Not Yet In Life
One of the things I love to ask my guests is, in my book, I talk about two words, not yet. Talk about those epic journeys where we go, “Someday, I’ll do this or whatever” Eric, what are one or two of your not yets?
I started my adult life speaking to a congregation. In the FBI, I wore a number of training hats where I would teach firearms, tactical training, and defensive tactics. For me, not yet would be getting an opportunity to carry that on, teaching the younger generation, and helping them to learn some of the things. I was very blessed to learn at a high level in the FBI. I pass that along to them.
Get In Touch With Eric
That’s commendable. That’s awesome. I say all the time, “Knowledge is useless if you don’t share it.” If you know how to do something, the best thing you can do is share it so that more people know how to do it. It’s a whole existence of human beings. Someone figured out how to make fire, and they shared it with someone else, who shared it with someone else. It’s how we got here. That’s commendable. Eric, if people perhaps want you to come teach, or they want you to come speak, how can they get hold of you? How can they find you?
My Instagram is @_Eric_Robinson. My LinkedIn is my name. I’m not sure how that works. If you type in FBI, I’m sure you’ll find me as well. I’ve written a book to come out in the fall that has crazier stories than the ones we talked about here. It talks about my journey from being a Baptist pastor and then how I tried to implement that into my FBI life as well.
What would the name of that book be?
The working title is Irreverend because I was a reverend and did some irreverent things. We also kicked around Preacher to Breacher.
That’s awesome.
That one gets smiles.
It does. I like that. It is catching. Eric, thank you so much for joining me. It is such an interesting conversation.
Thanks, Zander. I appreciate it.
I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, remember, epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
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About Eric Robinson
Recently retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), after 24 years as a special agent, Eric Robinson worked a range of crimes including white collar, counterterrorism, crimes against children, gangs, drugs, and public corruption. He served as a SWAT operator, a firearms instructor, and a tactics instructor.
Eric will soon release his first book, a collection of the humorous, surprising, and intriguing moments from his career. The memoir combines his years in law enforcement with his career prior to the Bureau. Eric joined the FBI after 12 years in Christian ministry, to include pastoring a Baptist church in Western NY.
With a background as a pastor and years of experience in HUMINT, recruiting and developing informants, Eric is a gifted and easy speaker. He uses humor to disarm and a quick wit to win people over.