Posted: Nov 10, 2014 9:53 PM CST
Updated: Nov 11, 2014 3:53 PM CST
Elaine Smith, a former FBI special agent, wrote a book about her career.
Ken Eto, also known as "Tokyo Joe," survived a mob hit to fight back with Smith.
CARMEL, Ind. -
At age 36, Elaine Smith got a late start as an FBI agent - but she quickly made up for lost time.
The story of her trailblazing career is a story filled with violence, intrigue and the mob.
"His name was Ken Eto, 'Tokyo Joe'," Smith told Eyewitness News reporter Kevin Rader in her living room.
It was Chicago, February 1983. Eto was shot three times by the mob.
"The first survivor out of 1,100 mob murders in the history of Chicago to live and tell about it and he only knew one name in the FBI and it was my name," she continued.
Smith's new book, "A Gun in my Gucci," details how two outsiders would work together to take down the Chicago mob.
"To have a mobster ask for you on his deathbed is an amazing thing," she added.
But he didn't die and for the next 17 years Eto and Smith, who has called Carmel home for the last ten years, made the mob pay. The two mobsters who botched the murder met their untimely death one week later.
"Oh man, this is great stuff. I can't wait to get it written down and tell everybody. We gotta open a case on this. We need to do this and this and this. I was very excited. I knew it was a pot of gold," she remembered.
Forty-five mobsters would be brought to justice in cases involving millions of dollars. The Teamsters would be turned inside out and former Illinois Governor George Ryan would be turned out of office in disgrace.
"Everybody suspected George Ryan, but no one had hand-to-hand payment to him, but he had," Smith noted.
Even today, 12 years after she retired, Smith handles the handcuffs with the expertise of an FBI agent and she misses that .45 pistol.
"I left the FBI and I knew it was going to be changed. I would have loved to stick around to see how it would be changed and see how things were going to go," Smith reflected.
She says the book which she dedicated to her husband Tom, who was also an FBI agent, took six months to write.
"People ask, 'Did you do any undercover?' I said no. I never wanted to be anyone's girlfriend, wife or somebody's secretary. That is not why I went to school and that is not who I grew up to be," she stated.
She grew up to be the first Supervisory Special Agent in the Chicago FBI. A position she held the final 10 years she spent in the bureau.
"I think this would be a fabulous movie. You would just need to sex it up," she concluded.
But there is an abundance of violence and intrigue.
By the way the Smiths are both retired from the FBI, which means they were the very first Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
But they didn't try to kill each other. They helped each other.