FBI leaves nothing to chance at new office

Sam Skolnik

Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006 | 7:09 a.m.

From the street, the three-story red-and-tan structure looks like any other new Las Vegas office building.

But just try getting inside uninvited. Visitors are allowed in only after passing through a metal detector inside a bulletproof and bomb blast-resistant guard shack. In the lobby, another metal detector and overhead security cameras await.

Even employees need to present their government-encoded pass card - and other, undisclosed types of personal identification, officials say - four times to get in through separate sets of security gates and doors.

In this post-Sept. 11 world, the FBI is taking no chances. Agents, instructors and supervisors with the bureau's Las Vegas field office moved into their new building - off of Stella Lake Street near the corner of Martin Luther King and Lake Mead boulevards - on Nov. 27.

"This is a very secure building now," said Dave Staretz, chief division counsel and spokesman for the local FBI office.

Staretz agreed to give the Sun an exclusive tour of the $50 million, 140,000-square-foot building - with conditions attached regarding how the reporter could describe what he saw to ensure this story wouldn't jeopardize the building's security.

The tall atrium is impressive, with a large and imposing black FBI/Justice Department seal placed high on the wall facing the front doors.

Inside, there are rooms an observer might expect to see, including well-appointed offices for Special Agent in Charge Steven Martinez - which includes a private study - and his two top assistants, Mark Doh and Bill Woerner.

Next door is the main conference room, with a large oval table seating 14 and a video screen that scrolls down electronically from the ceiling.

Most of the special agents work out of cubicles in sizable squad rooms, with their supervisors in enclosed offices off to the side.

The building houses several witness interview rooms, as well as "secure" interview rooms with metal bars attached to the walls, to which detainees can be handcuffed when necessary.

The building also boasts a photo lab with both a darkroom and digital capabilities; a computer forensics unit; a gun vault (which the reporter was not given access to); the "F.A.T.S." firearms training simulator room, where agents use a computer program to gauge their firearms proficiency; and an emergency operations center.

The center - a sort of war room to respond to terrorist threats and other high-profile criminal cases - typically is used only a few times a year, Staretz said.

The new building houses two "ELSUR" - "electronic surveillance" - offices for agents to monitor and review court-ordered wiretaps.

And last, there's the "confidential trash room," where top-secret and other classified documents meet their demise before leaving the building.

The trash that goes into that room "is powder when it leaves," said FBI telecommunications manager Roy Divan, who accompanied Staretz on the tour.

The new facility is called the John Lawrence Bailey Memorial Building, named after a Las Vegas-based FBI agent slain in 1990 while trying to foil a bank robbery.

For the past 17 years, the FBI has been housed in downtown offices on Charleston Boulevard. But that building was far too small to house the bureau as its ranks in Nevada grew. The new building, they say, houses a greater percentage - although not all - of the local FBI staff.

"Employees here have paid the price for a long time," Doh said.

More important, the old building, technologically outdated and just feet from a busy street, was clearly unsafe.

In 1999, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman gave the FBI the 5.3-acres for free, in part to make sure the bureau remained within city limits.

The official ribbon-cutting ceremony is slated for early next year.