Walter Kreitlow

Walter Kreitlow was a U.S. Customs Special Agent based in Tallahassee, Florida who filed the first Customs Service report in the Finders investigation, dated February 12, 1987. His report documented the Tallahassee end of the federal inquiry, as distinct from Ramon J. Martinez's Washington D.C.-based reports of February 7 and April 13, 1987.¹

The February 12, 1987 Report

Kreitlow was contacted by Tallahassee Police Department requesting assistance in identifying the two men arrested on February 4, 1987: Douglas Ammerman and James Michael Holwell, who were found with six malnourished children in Myers Park. He placed TPD Detective Bradley in contact with federal investigators in Washington D.C., initiating the chain of communication that led to the identification of the group's warehouse at 1307 Fourth Street NE and the subsequent February 5-6 raids.

His report noted that no customs violations had been identified at the Tallahassee end of the investigation at the time of filing. It served as the formal documentation of the Customs Service's point of entry into the case through the Florida arrests, while the substantive investigative findings were documented in Martinez's later Washington D.C.-based reports.¹

Both Kreitlow's and Martinez's reports were included in the FBI Vault's November 2019 document release under FOIA case number 1372462-0. Kreitlow's report has received less attention in secondary literature than Martinez's because it predates the Washington raids and does not describe the warehouse contents or the CIA interference. He is not known to have given any public statements on the case.¹