In 2010, Joe Piersante, a Detroit cop-turned-U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent, landed a coveted spot on a prestigious, somewhat secretive special forces unit of DEA agents called the Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Team (FAST). Created during the George W. Bush administration, the FAST program investigated and fought Taliban-linked drug operations in Afghanistan. A former football player, bodybuilder and Mr. Arizona, Piersante was thrilled to join the commando-style squad, train with Navy SEALS and serve in Afghanistan, despite the obvious risks.
On his second tour in Afghanistan, in 2011, Piersante’s team was attacked. A bullet slammed into his helmet, barreled through his brain and exited the other side. His comrades rolled him onto the helicopter that eventually arrived, assuming he was dead.
Piersante survived, but with PTSD and total blindness. After multiple surgeries at Walter Reed National Naval Medical Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, followed by several months at a residential school for the blind outside Chicago, Piersante returned home.
He had to figure out how to rebuild his life without sight. Philanthropy played a major part in that process via the DEA Survivors Benefit Fund (SBF), a small nonprofit founded in Detroit in 1997.
Cofounded by Richard Crock, a former DEA agent and supervisor, SBF began as a spontaneous effort by agents to raise funds for the family of Detroit-based DEA agent Rick Finley, who was killed on assignment in Peru. This desire to help Finley’s family and memorialize his life grew into SBF, which has now disbursed more than $9 million over the past 25 years to families of DEA agents and DEA employees, and other task force officers killed in the line of duty. The SBF also supports wounded agents like Piersante financially and logistically. “There is risk in everything DEA touches,” Crock said, commenting on the ongoing need for SBF. “Half of the terrorist groups in the world are funded by drugs. These are people with a propensity toward violence.”
Funded by grants from a dozen foundations, corporations and private individuals, and run by Crock and a team of 200 volunteers, SBF shows how a few private citizens motivated by loss can create a foundation to fill a need. It also demonstrates, as in the case of Piersante, the value of nonmonetary support.
Varied backers, with a corporate focus
In a philanthrosphere increasingly dominated by major donors and other large grantmakers, SBF is something of a counterexample. While it gets funding from large corporations and foundations, it also relies on gifts from anonymous small donors as well as small-scale fundraisers like benefit golf outings. Long-term funders include Motorola Solutions Foundation and Glock (a gun purveyor for many federal agencies), which each made a $30,000 grant to SBF in 2022. Other long-term supporters include Ford Motor Company Fund, Chevron, UPS and Home Depot.
In an interesting twist for a fund serving U.S. federal agents, SBF’s largest current funder is the Wannabe Group, a South Korean tech firm, which gave $50,000 this year and plans to increase its commitment in the future. Why is Wannabe backing the DEA Survivors Benefit Fund? Paul Kim, a volunteer with SBF’s outreach efforts to the Asian community and a board member of the California-based drug education and awareness nonprofit DEA Citizens’ Academy, said that there is a growing interest in the DEA in South Korea because of a rise in drugs and drug-related crime there, and a feeling of debt to the U.S. for its help during and after the Korean War. As Kim told me, “Since 2014, I have been assisting Mr. Crock and helping DEA SBF with all my heart.” (The Wannabe Group’s profile of its chairman, Young-cheol Jeon, lists his involvement with DEA SBF as one of his top nine philanthropic and humanitarian efforts.)
Funders tend to be business acquaintances with connections to Crock or to Detroit, or champions of law enforcement generally. Another backer from across the Pacific is the celebrated South Korean visual artist Min Tae-Hong, who has donated dozens of paintings over the years for SBF to auction and plans to continue doing so, raising a predicted $200,000 in the process, said Kim, who helped organize this gift. Min’s donation is personal — a way to pay back U.S. troops for saving his father’s life during the Korean War and to support efforts to combat the rising drug trade in Korea.
Supporting the law enforcement community
When philanthropy addresses the topic of law enforcement these days, its focus is often on reform. As we’ve written, “giving to criminal justice reform organizations has soared to unprecedented levels in recent years,” fueled by the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and other visible examples of police brutality and overuse of force.
There’s good reason for funder attention to criminal justice reform, of course, including around issues like juvenile justice, racial justice, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the connection between incarceration and cyclical poverty, a focus for funders like the Ballmer Group.
SBF is an example of a philanthropic fund focusing on the other side of the equation — namely, the lives of the individual officers. It is not attempting to stymie reform or combat greater accountability. Rather, its aim is simply to support law enforcement officers themselves, and their families.
The reality is that law enforcement is a necessary, risky job. Nearly 200 police officers are killed in the line of duty each year. (Those numbers more than doubled in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID-related deaths and remain elevated this year.) As the SBF website puts it, “A law enforcement officer is killed every 59 hours in the U.S. and over 66,000 law enforcement officers are assaulted each year.” A rise in crime and in violence against police officers makes the job increasingly perilous, Crock said. Narcotics law enforcement is particularly dangerous.
Offering cash and care
When a DEA agent is killed in the line of duty, families are often left more alone and strapped for cash than you might think. While we’ve all seen elaborate funerals honoring fallen officers or soldiers on TV — maybe with bagpipes and a flag-folding ceremony — there is no federal money earmarked for this kind of memorial for a fallen agent, nor a department charged with arranging one. The cost falls on the family.
Also, death benefits and life insurance can take a while to arrive, but expenses keep rolling on in. Crock told me about an agent who had been living paycheck-to-paycheck and prepaying his household bills based on the assumption of steady salary payments. When he was killed, his salary stopped, but the bills continued to arrive, and his wife, who was pregnant and raising their kids, was quickly hounded by creditors.
To address these kinds of issues, the SBF immediately disburses $25,000 to the surviving spouse of a fallen agent, plus $10,000 for every child under the age of 21 living at home. It also pays for four years of college tuition for fallen agents’ children. College is its largest expense and there is no tuition ceiling. Some kids go to community college. One went to welding school. One starts at the University of Southern California this fall.
Another major expense is costs associated with line-of-duty injury. SBF paid the mortgage on Piersante’s home for a year after he was shot. “We didn’t know whether he was going to live or die or what his condition would be,” Crock said. “He had a long journey of working through rehab and getting stabilized and going through all the surgeries from his wound. During that time, we basically made his house payment to stabilize his family finances.”
For Piersante, the SBF was a huge support. “The money really helped us survive and pay the bills. It took a lot of stress off us,” he said, noting that in 2020, SBF covered the cost and travel for him to get a stellate ganglion block (SGB), an injection of anesthetic into a collection of nerves in the neck that is used to treat a variety of conditions, including PTSD.
Crock has a very hands-on, personal approach. He flies out to visit families of fallen agents, coordinates fundraising events around the country, and constantly looks for ways to connect people in his sphere. He helped Piersante land an office job with the DEA after the former agent recuperated enough to work, and then worked with him to launch a career as an inspirational speaker. Crock strikes me as a special agent of empathy, working to raise funds and to extend financial and emotional support.
These efforts have been key to Piersante’s post-injury career and have given him the time and space to throw himself back into his other early love, bodybuilding. Piersante won Mr. Michigan in 2021 and is one of the only blind pro lifters in the world. At 53, he is at an age when most pro lifters have retired, but this past July, he won the over-50 class of the IFBB Chicago Pro bodybuilding competition.
Now Piersante plans to retire from professional bodybuilding and turn to inspirational speaking full time. The DEA Survivors Benefit Fund is still helping. “Dick has always looked out for me,” Piersante said. “When I fell into this speaking thing, I wasn’t comfortable with public speaking. I just went to tell my story, and DEA and other people started asking me to speak. Dick became my pro-bono agent. He’s still doing that.”
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