Special Agent

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Twenty years later, Mason is sitting in his office at FBI headquarters recounting the story. At 49 he is one of the nation's highest-ranking black G-men. As the executive assistant director responsible for all of the FBI's criminal investigations, from gang murders to public corruption, he oversees a $150 million budget and half the bureau's operational resources -- 6,500 people in Washington and 56 field offices across the country. He also is responsible for the FBI's cyber investigations, its fleet of more than 100 aircraft, the elite hostage-rescue team and the 59 FBI offices overseas.

FBI Director Robert Mueller last summer tapped Mason and another African American, Willie Hulon, for the bureau's two top jobs responsible for all counterterrorism, national security and criminal operations. Two black men, in charge, at the highest level of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The history-making appointments are not something Mueller dwells on. "They were the two best qualified," he said in a recent interview. "They were the obvious choice."

They are also a symbol of progress, of how far the bureau has come from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, when agents hounded Martin Luther King Jr., ignored civil rights violations, set up the program COINTELPRO to monitor and sabotage national dissent, and made the minorities who joined the agency targets of bias and derision.

Mason knows this. And he knows this, too: For some black people, the trappings of his life mark him as suspicious, a black man who has risen to the pinnacle of a criminal justice system that has the world's largest prison population, with black men the largest racial group incarcerated. He helps lead an agency accused by some of racial profiling and one that's been successfully sued by its own black agents for discrimination.

But he's giving himself, body and soul, to the bureau, where he's at the top of his game. He even married FBI, an agent he met in his early days at Quantico. They've been married for 19 years, have two sons and consider themselves soul mates.

Everybody, it would seem, loves Mike Mason. He's punched all the right tickets on the way up. He's praised for his down-to-earth management style and his passion. And if you want someone to rally the troops, no one can do it like Mason, who can turn an FBI conference into something of a law-enforcement tent revival.

"I wanted to do this since the time I was in seventh grade," he said at a recent minority-recruitment event. "And I can tell you that my career has been better than anything I ever dreamed about. I feel like the guy who gets to walk out in the World Series tonight and pitch the fourth game. That's how I feel most days when I come to work."

Does he worry about the number of imprisoned black men? Yes, but he also worries about the number who resort to crime. He's had no problems putting them behind bars, including serving on the team that investigated former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. But he has also reached out to imprisoned and broken men. In his early days in the bureau he gave motivational speeches to prisoners.

So just how does the black son of a Chicago truck driver get to a spacious office in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, with a spectacular view of the Justice Department?

The Daily Drill

Mason's day starts at 3 a.m. when he slips on a pair of blue sweat pants and drives in the dark from his Centreville cul-de-sac to the gym at FBI headquarters. He arrives at 4:20 and begins his workout: 25 minutes lifting weights and doing sit-ups, 35 minutes on the treadmill, and then shooting hoops. His rule is that he must hit a layup, a free throw and a three-pointer -- consecutively -- before he's done. Sometimes he does it in three shots. Other times, in 50. Every time, though, it has to be done.