Kash Patel’s boasts about his record of capturing fugitives on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list have been ridiculed as “bulls--t” by current and former bureau officials.
Patel’s bureau took another victory lap last week over the capture of alleged Tren de Aragua leader Anibal Alexander Canelon Aguirre, hailing him as the 10th Top Ten fugitive caught since Donald Trump returned to office—2.5 times as many as were apprehended under Joe Biden.
While Patel, 46, has repeatedly touted his tally as proof of vastly improved performance, MS NOW has reported that FBI officials accused the bureau of “gaming the system” by adding fugitives to the famous list when their capture was imminent.
Analysis for the Daily Beast by its sister investigations Substack, PunchUp, suggests a striking pattern.
The FBI says it has captured eight Top Ten fugitives since Patel took charge in February 2025, compared with four during Biden’s presidency. Those eight spent a median of 37.5 days on the list before capture. Among the seven fugitives both added and captured since Patel became director, the median was just 24 days.
For those apprehended under Biden, it was 482 days.
The quickest anyone went from being added to the list to being arrested under Biden was 105 days.
Under Patel, two fugitives were captured within roughly a day. Another was nabbed in Mexico just 73 minutes after being added.
While the findings do not prove Patel’s FBI manipulated the list, former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi said the data “speaks for itself.” He added: “The compressed time between placement on the list and capture smells like a strategy to game the system in favor of quick stats.”
Daniel Brunner, a retired FBI supervisory special agent who worked the capture of a Ten Most Wanted fugitive, was more scathing. “They just put them up right when they are about to capture them, when they are closing in or doing surveillance,” he alleged.
“People don’t look into the story—they just want to see the claim: ‘Hey, we caught the Ten Most Wanted.’ Then they have moved on to the next Instagram reel.”
Brunner accused Patel of playing “the stat game,” adding: “It’s hogwash.”
A serving FBI official, speaking anonymously, said of Patel’s approach: “This kind of Soviet ‘operations as propaganda’ bulls--t started like day one and has been a constant.”
The FBI strongly rejected the criticism, saying the Ten Most Wanted selection process and criteria have not changed in the list’s 76-year history. Additions, it said, are selected by career professionals through a months-long process, and that Patel neither chooses fugitives nor instructs officials whom to add.
The bureau said its improved results were down to Patel increasing the standard reward from $250,000 to $1 million and his increased engagement with foreign law enforcement agencies compared with his predecessor, Christopher Wray.
It also said Top Ten fugitives arrested since 2025 had collectively spent 13,200 days on the run—more than three-and-a-half years each on average. That measures their time as fugitives, however, rather than their time on the Top Ten list.
Lauren Anderson, a former FBI executive who spent nearly three decades at the bureau and worked investigations involving at least three Top Ten fugitives, said the figures raise questions about “what investigators knew and where each investigation stood when the decision was made to place the individual on the list.”
She added that, if investigators already knew a fugitive’s location or believed an arrest was imminent, using the capture as evidence of increased Top Ten effectiveness would be “misleading.”
The difference between administrations in arrests of those on the Ten Most Wanted list is like night and day.
Four Top Ten fugitives were apprehended during Biden’s presidency. Rafael Caro-Quintero had spent 1,555 days on the list, Jose Rodolfo Villarreal-Hernandez 816, Octaviano Juarez-Corro 148, and Michael James Pratt 105—a median of 482 days.
Under Patel, Francisco Javier Roman-Bardales spent 24 days on the list before his March 2025 capture. Cindy Rodriguez Singh spent 51 days there before being returned from India.
Former Olympic snowboarder and alleged drug kingpin Ryan Wedding spent 323 days before his apprehension in January. Aguirre spent roughly six months on the list before being apprehended in Venezuela.
Then the apprehensions sped up. Samuel Ramirez Jr. was added March 10 and arrested in Mexico 73 minutes later—the fastest capture in the program’s history.
KaShawn Nicola Roper, placed onto the list April 14, was arrested in Florida the following morning. In her case, the FBI explicitly said tips generated by the announcement led to her capture.
Gregory Henderson Jr., a fugitive for nearly three years, was elevated to the Top Ten on Aug. 11. At 1:55 p.m. the following day, FBI agents arrested him in Mississippi.
Robert D’Amico, who spent 26 years as an FBI special agent investigating violent and organized crime and served overseas as a legal attaché, said Roper’s case demonstrated how the program can work as intended.
But Ramirez, he said, was different. “I have never seen a sequence of events like that happen in 73 minutes,” D’Amico said. “Too many things have to happen in between. It could be 73 hours, not 73 minutes, and it still stinks.”
He added: “That arrest was almost certainly already in motion. The listing didn’t produce it, and counting it as a Top Ten success inflates the numbers.”
The FBI declined to answer questions about whether investigators or partner agencies already knew Ramirez’s location or had made preparations for his arrest when he was added to the list.
It also would not provide the dates on which the selection process began for Ramirez, Roper, or Henderson—the three fugitives captured within roughly a day of being added.
Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.
