 IN
MEMORIAM
IN MEMORIAM
WIFLE is deeply saddened at the loss of Bonni G. Tischler, one of its founders and one of the top female law enforcement officers for the past thirty years. Bonni died of cancer on August 9, 2005, at the age of 60 years, in Washington, D.C. In 2002 she retired as the highest-ranking female federal law enforcement officer spanning a 30-year career at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Bonni was a founding lifetime member of WIFLE and helped to create the former Interagency Committee on Women in Federal Law Enforcement. During the 1980s she served as the Treasury co-chair of the Interagency Committee, the predecessor organization to WIFLE.
Bonni Tischler was one of the first female sky marshals hired in the early 1970s and became a Customs Special Agent in 1977. Prior to retirement, Bonni served as the agency's first female Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Investigations (1997-2000) and, also the first female Assistant Commissioner for Field Operations (2000-2002) with responsibility for all cargo and passenger screening.
In 1971, she was living in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., with roommates who were flight attendants. From them she learned about the sky marshal program, shortly after President Richard M. Nixon signed a 1971
executive order granting women equal status in federal law enforcement. She
told The Washington Post in 2002 that she volunteered for what she called "a
guy kind of environment" when she joined the then-Customs Service in 1971
and, subsequently, "fell in love with law enforcement.” According to a story in the Washington Post, she was known as "the girl with the golden gun" for the small, gold-plated Smith & Wesson .38 she carried in her handbag. Bonni purchased the golden gun in Miami in the early 1980s, when she was investigating Colombian drug traffickers, who favored flashy clothes and ostentatious gold jewelry. The golden gun was a big hit and drug traffickers regularly offered to buy it when she made an arrest.
Bonni received numerous awards during her career in law enforcement, including being the first recipient in 1984 of the Interagency Committee's Julie Y. Cross Memorial Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements in law enforcement. In 2000 she was recognized by the National Center for Women and Policing with their Lifetime Achievement Award. That award is presented to female law enforcement officers with exceptional service and career achievement who have helped other women in law enforcement as mentors and role models.
Law enforcement has lost an outstanding role model, leader, mentor, and friend. She will be missed by all who knew her. WIFLE extends its deepest sympathies to Bonni's family and friends. The family has asked that donations in Bonni's remembrance can be made to the Roger L. VonAmelunxen Foundation, 83-21 Edgerton Boulevard, Jamaica, New York, 11432, or the Women in Federal Law Enforcement (WIFLE) Scholarship Fund, 2200 Wilson Boulevard, #102, PMB 204, Arlington, Virginia, 22201.
Throughout her many speeches before women's law enforcement groups, Bonni
liked to quote the Robert Frost poem, The Road Less Traveled":
"I shall be telling this with a sigh,
somewhere, ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference."
Bonni Tischler made a difference - a difference that will be felt for many years to come.
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