Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Handguns '86 miami shootout

Massad Ayoob wrote a story of this incident in one of his books. I think it was called the Ayoob Files it had multiple stories of shootings from various incidents with the one above. Very well written and detailed.

Correct.

In the teeeveee movie it was full auto, but don't believe anything you see on teeeveee or in the flicks, boys and girls. "Reel" life and "real" life are very, very rarely one and the same.

L.W.

The TV movie producers probably got a deal on a bunch of used full auto Mini-14's from "The A Team".

I fired a full-auto Mini-14 at a LE carbine class once. I almost wish I had one. They heat up really, really fast, though!

I don't think anyone would seriously recommend a Mini-14 over a quality AR for serious tactical use. But they aren't crap, despite their minute-of-bad-guy groups at 100 yards, and they will take a licking and keep on ticking.

If you want super accuracy out of a mini-14 I guess these are the guys to go to:

http://www.accuracysystemsinc.com/index.php

The main lesson to take from the Miami shootout is that mental toughness is the best weapon you can carry into any fight.

It also shows how bad things can get when mental toughness fails.

The biggest mystery of the Miami shootout, to me, is what happened to S.A. Grogan. Grogan was supposedly the best shot of all the Agents, the guy who had trained his whole career for just such a confrontation. But something went very badly wrong for S.A. Grogan at some point during the fire fight.

He had lost his glasses in the initial collision, and although profoundly near-sighted, he still managed to engage targets and actually score some hits. After the incident, investigators determined that he had fired 9 rounds from his 14+1 capacity S&W 459.

When Platt charged his position at the back of the car, Grogan still had six rounds of ammo left and his weapon was still operational. Even though he had an apparently unobstructed view of Platt, he did not engage him as Platt approached him and shot him in the chest.

The nearest survivor, S.A. Hanlon, stated that he heard Grogan exclaim "Oh, my god" just before Platt shot him. So Grogan apparently was aware of Platt's approach, but for unexplained reasons was not able to engage Platt. Why? Did Platt's assault un-nerve Grogan to the point that he was unable to react? It seems that it might be a possibility.

Supervisory Agent McNeil, who was also wounded in Platt's assault, stated that he remembered very vividly that Platt was smiling at him as he was firing on him, a very un-nerving sight for anyone. Seeing an assailant that has already taken numerous hits that should have incapacitated him approach your position, smiling at you as they take aim, could very well be enough juice to flip someone's breaker.

We will never know for sure, and I can understand the reluctance to probe the subject much out of consideration of the deceased, but something unusual happened at the back of Grogan & Dove's car. Something that ought to be probed if we want a better understanding of combat psychology.

You bring up some good points Gadfly.

I remember my drill sergeants telling us recruits that the first kill is the toughest and it gets easier after number three.

I remember my drill sergeants telling us recruits that if we survived our first fire fight our chances of surviving combat went up exponentially. The reason they gave is that new soldiers in their first fire fight tend to freeze and forget their training. My police work tended to bear this out.

All my drill sergeants were former airborne, ranger or special forces. All had a minimum of one combat tour of Vietnam, many were Korea War vets, and a few cought the tail end of WWII.

Derby Dude, you just earned a cigar. Bullseye. Experience makes a huge difference.
For one, you need to survive the mistakes you made in first one(s). Then you know.
Take the post above. How come the FBI agent, who was very near sighted and lost his glasses, didn't fight better ? He lost his glasses and that threw him off. When he was charged, he wasn't prepared for that. Ever had to fight back after taking a solid blow that barely left you able to stand ? It can get that bad very quickly.
Proper, realistic training, and alot of it still isn't from what I've seen, does make a difference. But the ability to react fast enough, coupled with situation awareness, is also crucial. The ability to remain cool and adapt to changing conditions is also important. Training can help all of this. But experience is the best teacher of all.
The real benefit of these types of incidents and many others like them is their value as a training aide. LAPD did just that with their gunfights. And earned the title of having the best survival rate of any big police force, anywhere in the world.
Do you guys remember Stacey Koon of the Rodney King incident ? He went up against a guy armed with an AK-47 and survived. He was armed with a 6 inch, .38 Special revolver with RN ammo BTW. E

Thanks. I've never been in a fire fight but I have taken a blow so hard that I was dazed and couldn't re-act. I just wanted to lay down and rest. In a fire fight or any kind of a fight that's not a good move.

Remember Waco and the ATF after they made initial contact with Koresh and company? The AFT never expected to be attacked and take casualties. They panic and retreated and lost the initiative.

In case anyone reads Ayoobs rendition understand he was not privied to all of the detailed information and his version takes into account a significant amount of "educated guesses and editorial license".

DD, you bring up a very important fact: experience in actual fighting is highly correlative with winning the fight, which happens to correlate well with survival.

Ken Murray, in his seminal book Training at the Speed of Life, used the examples of fighter pilots as proof that highly realistic combat simulations can get a warrior past his first 3 dogfights (the ones in which he is most likely to be killed) without actually risking death. If the warrior has enough realistic simulated fights under his belt before he ever goes into real combat, his chances of winning his first combat are exponentially higher than they would have been if he had gone into combat "cold".

This is the principle behind the highly realistic training we do in law enforcement now with SIMUNITION, Airsoft, and computer simulators. Cops who have been intensively trained in the art and science of gunfighting by these modalities not only have a higher success rate when/if they get into a real gunfight, they have better discriminatory skills that prevent them getting into a "bad shoot".

I've been using these training modalities as an increasingly important component of my LE classes, to the point where I won't do a class any more without having a computer simulator at least, and preferably with computer plus airsoft and/or SIMS. The speed at which people learn gunfighting thru these modalities continually astonishes me.

Ok, so here's the question I have never seen asked in all of the tons of analysis and coverage of this event.

The situation is that you have 15 car loads of agents scouring the mean streets of Miami, specifically looking for heavily armed and known to be hostile bank robbery, kidnapping and murder suspects...some real bad-guy desperadoes we're dealing with here.

These are senior FBI Agents and some of the Agents are supposedly SWAT certified, dressed in suits and ties, and not wearing body armor.

And these Agents are out on this patrol with their main weapons locked-up in the trunk.

Was this FBI procedure out of the manual at the time?

Did they ever give any thought as to what they were going to do if they actually ran into the guys they were looking for?

What did they expect to do, stun 'em by flashing their badges and meet up for coffee later?

How they were armed leads me to think that they didn't really expect to find them.

I think the whole caliber debate afterward was a cover-up...but that's just me.

TC

About the only positive thing you can say for them is, at least they didn't run from the scene.

I don't think a lack of courage was a problem.

I think if you are in the FBI, you do things the FBI's way or you turn in your badge.

I think they acted with great courage, to attempt to face down guys with an assault rifles armed with 5 shot Detective Specials as their main weapons.

I personally wouldn't expect to walk away from that scenario...

Life has taught me not to be so arrogant...unless, maybe, I was feeling really lucky that day...but no, not even then.

TC

Grogan and Dove had high capacity S&W 9mm, others had M-19 S&W revolvers as well as shotguns, etc no detective Spl that I am aware of

Take_a_Knee is clueless pure and simple

Do I remember correctly that McNeil the supervisor...he called for the take down, and he had a 5 shot S&W 38 and he was the first to open fire?

TC

If memory serves Pratt opened fire first, I don't have my reference with me to check at the moment. Mireless also had a 5 shot S&W back up revolver but I do not remember any Detective Specials

Considering the level of carnage...I can understand his point of view.

Most of the discussion at the time, and even now, seems to be centered around the quest for finding the FBI a 'new and more effective law enforcement caliber', as if that were the real problem.

As you previously suggested, a heavier bullet from a heavier caliber weapon could have made a big difference in the outcome.

I agree, of course, but the FBI would have first had to approve of their agents fielding such a weapon, and someone still needed to have the mind-set to deliver it.

The FBI was looking for these guys for what...like 6 months...as a minimum, some kind of mental preparation and planning ahead of time would have helped them out a bunch.

I don't think it's unfair at all to refer to the Miami Shootout as a CF of the first magnitude.

TC

The FBI had a rolling stakeout in motion since they had no idea where these guys would strike next. The Agents knew how dangerous Prat and Matrix were and had talked about how they shot people for no aparrent reason. Thingsset in motion and timing of events that day worked against the agents. They believed that the suspects had ID'd they and were in flight and if they were going to take them it had to be now or not at all

That's how I got the picture.

They were rolling out in force trying to locate and take down some real nasty customers, before they slaughtered more innocent lives...full well knowing how ruthless this pair was...

...with their weapons in the trunk...no body armor...and no coherent plan.

They were armed like off duty cops...and I can't help but assume that was a reflection of their mind-set on that day...that's what I have never been able to wrap my mind around.

TC