THE STORY ONLY MATT CAN TELL

When Reetta called and told him that their little boy was acting out at preschool and saying, “I miss my daddy,” Matt Pitcher pulled over and cried for an hour. There was no way to justify what he was doing to his family. Reetta did the justifying for him. “If you quit now, you won’t be able to live with yourself.”

It was true. And though he could have driven home in a matter of minutes, he wasn’t her husband anymore, or Caden’s father. He was Matt Pence, a rising star in a radical environmental anarchist terrorist group, led by a volatile sociopath named Billy. Matt Pence was dumpster-diving, sleeping on the street and learning to build explosives to bomb the upcoming Democratic National Convention. Billy and his followers were his family, and Matt Pence was reporting their every move to his FBI handlers.

The first rule he’d learned about undercover work, as a failed actor turned rookie narcotics officer, is to keep it all business. The minute you let things get personal, the operation is in danger and so are you. Then a routine drug buy from a friendly stripper led him up the chain to local mob leaders and to corruption in city government and his own police department. Suddenly, Matt was in all the way, well out of bounds for what normally gets called “deep cover.” And if he wanted to stay alive, he’d have to break the rules. For over three years and through two consecutive cases, what mattered most was how close he could get to the key people around him. Where faking friendships would have been impossible, Matt made them.

In his first deep cover role as a billionaire nightclub investor, there was an addictive thrill to living by his wits as he learned to navigate the hierarchies of the city’s underworld, mainlining adrenaline, and bringing down the bad guys. Being Matt Pence was messier, in an underground where disrupting and chaos were the only objectives. No matter how much he believed that what he was doing would save many lives, living with himself would never be simple again.

They say there have only ever been two stories: the hero sets out on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Matt Pitcher was both. On the day he received the abrupt order to pull out and go home, he sat for a long time in the driveway, unable to shake the feeling that he’d just lost all his friends, and that the woman and child inside the house would not know him when he walked through the door.

A decade later, Matt and Reetta have beaten the odds stacked against their relationship by PTSD and an occupation that required constant lying at every level. However, broken for the job of mundane police work by years of living in fight-or-flight mode, Matt has left law enforcement. And growing awareness of the psychological costs of deep cover work has led police departments to phase out such operations entirely. Matt Pitcher brings us an intimate account of what that work was like, and what it did to him. This is the story of a man who pushed the idea of a double life past the breaking point, covering his own tracks so carefully that finding his way back home would be the greatest challenge.

COMING SOON...

MATT'S NEXT
CHAPTER

After years of experiences that shaped who he is today, Matt is sharing his story in a way he never has before.

His upcoming book takes you behind the scenes of his life, the struggles, the lessons, and the moments that defined him. It’s raw, real, and inspiring, and it’s coming soon.