Fourth Reich Archaeology - #081 - Mafiocracy w/ Moe Tkacik (Side A)

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

This week we have yet another guest with whom to zoom out from the present moment and excavate critical contextual information and insights. This week’s guest is the great journalist Moe Tkacik of the American Prospect, who has brought a much-needed historical materialist perspective to coverage of the government and the laundry-list of crimes that the most powerful people therein are responsible for. Particularly, we dig into the mobbed-up background and low-down gangster tactics of “Little Narco” Marco Rubio.Moe walks us through the ways in which Rubio tanked a proposed prisoner exchange with Venezuela in order to fan the flames of war and pave the way to the regime-change operation he eventually spearheaded. She also discusses her deep research into his background and how it intersects with the OG mafia-state collaborations in the form of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Kennedy assassination, and the Iran-Contra drugs for weapons rackets. We talk a lot on this podcast about the King of Crime, Donald Trump, but as the great bit-character Ciccio testifies before the fictionalized U.S. Senate in the Godfather Part II, “the family’s got a lot of buffers.” And an ambitious up-and-comer like Rubio makes a phenomenal buffer.In the second part of the discussion - currently only available on Patreon - we dig even deeper and explore the Nazi roots of the Mafiocracy and trace the unbroken continuity of mob-state relations in the postwar era. Music: Songs of Carlos Puebla and Zach de la Rocha feat. Last Emperor and KRS-ONE.Moe’s Article: The Narco-Terrorist Elite (https://prospect.org/2025/12/23/narco-terrorist-elite-rubio-south-america-iran-contra/) Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. The three of exile, born and raised in Miami. The 39-year-old is the second youngest current U.S. Senator. A tidal wave of two-party-fueled anger helped propel Marco to the top of the hill. Capitol Hill, that is, and he's looking to make this more quickly. The Republican, most likely to have a big... He tries to wear likely. But in my heart, I'd be a king.

I understand what it means about the hard work and sacrifices that my parents made so that days like this could be possible. But at the end of the end, I think it's really a testament to our country. A country used to future, 39-year-old. Thank you so much. He has been one of Donald Trump's most outspoken supporters throughout the campaign and was in attendance last night at the Trump campaign's watch party turned victory celebration. He was also the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator, good morning. It's nice to have you with us.

Whose golden dreams will not come true. What I'm most impressed by is not just the size of the victory. I know the number is still growing, but the way Donald Trump won this election. He won it by fundamentally remaking the Republican Party, but I hope also revealing the people. This is more than just a realignment. I hope it's a realization that when you come to this country

and you put your roots down here and you raise your children here, you become an American, and everything from our economy, to our safety, to our national security, matter as much to you Much to you as they do to anybody else in this country. And we're going to try to keep America out of wars. We're entering into an era of pragmatic foreign policy in which the world is rapidly changing.

Our adversaries are uniting in North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, increasingly coordinating. I mean, actually, if you use, I'll use it for a word that he uses. He has conned the people of Florida. We had in our hemisphere, a regime, operated by an indicted narco-trafficker, that became a base of operation for virtually every competitor, adversary, enemy in the world. regime change?

Yes. Oh no, I think we would love to see a regime change. We would like to, that doesn't mean that we're going to make a change, but we would love to see a change. There's no doubt about the fact that it would be a great benefit to the United States. From the West is called, it's not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. It's one huge complex or combine. Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists.

And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic. or domestic, the Warren Commission, the science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to acquire information, which showed that there were two wars going.

His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds, vendors the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, over the CIA. This is a model. He knows so long as a die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis.

Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? This is the Fourth Reich archaeology. I'm Don. Dick continues his work deep under.

cover amidst the Iranian diaspora now infiltrating a small but highly radicalized faction of Zoroastrians. Welcome, listener. We've got yet another great show for you all. You know, we don't like to keep covering what we might largely group into the bucket of current events week of upon week because we do, after all, have several ongoing series and series within those series, most pressingly, she Harvey Oswald, which I think is becoming more and more relevant by the day as the country descends into conditions that could very well pop off into, if not a civil war, a sort of proliferation of skirmishes from city to city as the fascist, jackbooted thugs rampage their way across the United States, seeking to inflict harm and pain and instill

discipline among anyone who would dare to step out of their house, to step out of their way, to protect the vulnerable among us, the neighbors, friends, and loved ones that we have from these targeted communities who Justice Brett Kavanaugh has given the green light to stop and search on the basis of race, essentially through his Kavanaugh-Stops decision. And we continue to send all of our love, solidarity, and just warm. out there to the folks in Minnesota, resisting ice and putting ice to their use in foiling ice, if you know what I mean, talking about that wet bandits shit, making them motherfuckers slip because slip they have, slip morally, slip spiritually into a pit of Nazi cultism, led by

the real specimen of the master race, Donald J. Trump and J.D. Vance. I say that in jest, of course, those guys are some freaks. Freaks that are hard to believe that we continue to entrust day after day with the powers over all of us and over the multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, government that purportedly is administering all that money that we pay them through our hard-earned taxes, not just year after year, but paycheck after paycheck, you know, that income tax is going to these absolute criminals, pieces of shit, human refuse, soulless fucking ghouls at racist people you know people with the ultimate goal of ending anything resembling a free society and as that onslaught continues apace you know it we do think it

important to inform our listeners on the cast of characters that makes up this real clown show here this horrible Nazi clown show and that will be the subject of today's episode really starting zoomed in on one of these clowns that's right little narco marco rubio and zooming out to well you guessed it folks to the fourth rike because you know you scratch at the surface of this apparatus that we are blessed to have the wherewithal to observe with some cogency using, of course, the toolbox of the immortal science of historical materialism handed down by the greats. And, you know, we stand on the shoulders of these giants. We stand with our lenses sharp to the reality of what's going on. And that, that,

burden that we thereby take on ourselves to make some use of this insight of this information is one that we should all think about how we're carrying and I think we could all, certainly speaking for myself, do even more to rise up to the moment because a moment of inflection indeed it is and you know sitting idly by as the moving train rolls past is not to be neutral paraphrasing the great Howard Zinn so before introducing this week's episode the usual thank you's and invitations you know thank you thank you so much for tuning in thanks for all of the support that you provide to our project here, you fuel our fire and keep us going. Thank you. From the bottom of our hearts, we are always reachable by email, forthrightepod at gmail.com,

or on Twitter or Instagram at forthrightepod. And we have a Patreon. You can find us there, and you can get yourself early access to some of our goodies. You can get some of the expanded Fourth Reich Archaeology universe goodies there, and you can show your support for what we're doing. But of course, that is only if you are able and, you know, we really shouldn't be at the very top of your list of things to support with your finances. There's a lot of folks out there that really need it right now in Minneapolis, in Gaza. world over, you know, we have got to get together to fight this dragon. Now on to today's episode.

Before kind of giving a roadmap of what I'll be talking about with this week's guest, the great journalist, one of my favorite journalists out there today, Mo Tessick of the American prospect, I wanted to read a little anchor. quote from our friend, Guideborg, from, of course, the comments on the Society of the Spectacle, because the subject of today's episode is the mafiacracy, the ways in which the Fourth Reich ruling structure resembles that of one big old crime family, crime syndicate, between the illicit forces of organized crime, of, you know, overtly criminal networks, and their deep, deep, and extensive entanglements, of course, with your above-board institutions of power, your governments,

your financial institutions, your corporate establishment, right? You think about the entire economy, you know, the global economy indeed, because there is no economy that isn't global at this point. Everything is connected. Everything is entwined. Everything is expansive. You know, to the extent that there's anything in existence outside of the reach of the global economy, that space is tiny and is ever shrinking. So when you think about this massive period,

pyramid, right? You think about the bottom resting upon a base of deep, deep exploitation. And the top is, of course, vast, vast wealth and the sorts of just disgusting ostentatiousness that we see from our ruling elites day in and day out, squandering the gifts of nature and really rubbing. it in the faces of the masses, that indeed their struggle, their struggle to earn a living to survive, which in turn produces surplus value for the appropriation of the capitalist class is in vain, right? That work is in absolute vain because what's it going to in the final analysis besides your survival, if you're lucky, it's going to. It's going to, to fund the stupidest, most evil shit that you could possibly imagine. And that trick, that

deception is only made possible by the involvement of a massive, massive criminal class that extorts and enforces participation in this scheme. So, without further ado, here's what we wanted to share from Guidebourg about this sort of phenomenon that we observe. And he writes, The mafia flourishes in the soil of contemporary society. Its expansion is as rapid as that of all the other products of the labor by which integrated spectacular society shapes its world. The mafia grows along with the swift development of information technology and industrial food processing, along with urban redevelopment and shanty towns, secret services, and illiteracy. It is always a mistake to try to explain something by opposing mafia and state. They are never

rivals. Theory easily verifies what all the rumors in practical life have all too easily shown. The mafia is not an outsider in this world, it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle, it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises. With the new conditions which now predominate in a society crushed under the spectacle's iron heel, we know, for example, that a political assassination can be presented in another light, can in a sense be screened. Everywhere the mad are more numerous than before, but what is infinitely more useful is that they can be talked about madly. And it is not some kind of reign of terror which forces such explanations on the media. On the contrary, it is the peaceful existence of such explanations which should cause terror.

And that, I think, segues very nicely into an introduction of today's guest, because I think she is a voice that writes with that appropriate terror, right, the peaceful existence of all these explanations out there in the mainstream media. And most of the media apparatus, right, most of its apparatchiks and bureaucrats and mouthpieces, just go about reporting as though this is all fucking normal, ordinary course of business. but today's guest takes a markedly different approach, and that's what makes her journalism so refreshing, so informative, and so cutting to the core of what is important.

That's right, it is. Maureen Mo Tasic, Investigation's editor at the American Prospect. And, you know, to beat a dead horse, Mo really is one of the best writers in journalism today. not only, you know, the quality of her prose and the humanity with which she writes, but also the subject matter that she covers, you know, whereas many journalists will just silo in, zero in, with no context, with no broader understanding on whatever the item of the day is,

you know, Mo really zooms it out and makes connections in, you know, not to put ourselves on the same plane, but in the same way that we aspire to do here on Fourth Reich Archaeology. The immediate prompt for this episode is an article that Moe recently published in the American prospect headlined the narco-terrorist elite. Why is Marco Rubio so hell-bent on making Iran-Contra again? And this article was very well done. It covers Rubio his backstory and ties him in and ties thereby our present moment in to the broader historical narrative, you know, beginning with the mafia rule of Cuba way back in the day, proceeding through the Bay of Pigs, through the U.S.'s absolutely relentless attempts to overthrow the revolutionary Cuban government. and through the conversion of that paramilitary project that kind of lost its goals after it diverted all of its energies from assassinating F. F. F. F. Kennedy.

And thereafter, that project really went underground, started getting involved in the large. central and South American drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, human trafficking, scams and schemes that were so lucrative in the latter part of the 20th century, and, you know, through Iran-Contra to today. So the subject of this episode is the Mafiocracy, and that's what we're going to talk about. we start out very specific, very contemporary, talking about kind of the gangster moves that Rubio and the Trump administration have taken over the last year that they've been in office. And from there, you know, we zoom out to the Nazi roots of the entire enterprise.

You know, the very first paramilitary groups that the U.S. kind of, of deputized to raise its own funds through black market activities were, of course, those SS members that coagulated under the Galen Organization on the CIA's payroll way back in the late 1940s, early 1950s, and that model has continued to replicate itself kind of one time and again up until the current day when the gloves are off, the mask is off, and all of this corruption, all of this highway robbery, and absolutely extortionist racketeering is taking place out in the open, above the surface, and before our very eyes. So without any further ado, let's get digging. All I have in this one is my balls and my wool.

And I don't break them. The president and his family is trying to make a car. The president and his family have used the office of the presidency pocket at $1.4 billion plus dollars since he was won. We also see the president wielding U.S. power overseas in a way that advances the interests of his billionaire buddies. And in the case of Venezuela, President Trump has said, he talked to oil executives about toppling Maduro and going into Venezuela before anyone in Congress knew.

The president always elicits its opinions from all sorts of people, including, for example, Chevron has an active license in Venezuela. Buffer. There's someone in between you and your possible superiors who gave the actual... Right. Yeah, buffer. The family had a lot of buffets. All right. Well, Mo, thank you so much for being here.

Mo Tassick, this is how you have pronounced it on other podcasts. I'm going to follow it soon. Yeah, I can... There will be continuity in the pronunciation of my name. Perfect. getting into the theme of continuity already, which will recur, I believe, throughout this conversation. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us here on Fourth Reich Archaeology.

Really glad to have you. I know we've been kind of going back and forth and trying to schedule this for a while, and things on the ground have developed a little bit, but have also kind of fallen off the radar. And in any event, you know, I think the conversation that we're going to have is not so limited to the day's current events, but rather the context for what has been going on in South America with this Operation Condor 2.0. So I'm really glad to have you and really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, my God. Thank you so much.

It's such a pleasure to. talk about this stuff. And yes, the the mafocracy or the mafia socracy, I think, is a word that I use for once, is all that anyone seems to be writing about these days. But it's new. The, you know, stripped from any sort of veneer of levels of analysis,

right? Everything that happens is is the result of some mafia mentality. I was just listening to preparing for this podcast appearance by listening to Max Blumenthal on a podcast.

I don't know, I don't remember which one. It just had a lot of right-wing listeners who were sort of upset with some of his takes, which was funny. And I didn't realize that he claims that the sole rationale for sending 283 Venezuelans to Seacot, I don't know, you know, way back, God knows, you know, when that was, but last spring.

Yeah, the ancient history of 2025. Right? The, yes, the ancient history that, you know, thankfully, like, Barry, very wise has maybe contributed to de-memory-holling a little bit. just by trying to suppress it. But he says that the reason that that happened was because Rick Grinnell, the Kennedy Center chief,

the Trump envoy who had been dispatched to actually have negotiations with Maduro, work out some deals, talk to Maduro's, some of Maduro's allies, in the United States and in Caracas, that Grinnell had worked out this swap agreement, and Maduro had agreed to take all of these deportees that they had locked up in exchange for,

I think we had, we demanded 10 prisoners, including a triple murderer, who's still triple murderers, special forces, veterans, who is presumably out there somewhere. Triple hero, you mean? Yeah, that's a tangent that'll go, you know, maybe revisit in just a sec. But yes, we had this prisoner swap worked out for us to get back, I think, maybe two of the participants in a coup attempt, a 2020 coup attempt, Operation Gideon.

And so they had worked up this deal, and Rubio needed to nuke it. Because if we were negotiating with the Venezuelans, if they were taking our deportees, then Trump was going to lose any interest that he had ever had in regime change, which she didn't seem too hot on. In the first place, having gone through the motions with Juan Guaido and determined that Juan Guaido was, in Trump's words, the Beto Oroque of Venezuela, which is, I think that is actually like, really genius. And I think that's sort of like a kind of ongoing theme here. But anyway, so Rubio decided that instead of allowing those prisoners to go to Venezuela, where they were supposed to go, he was going to have them diverted to Buckelis Gula, which is.

it checks out in so many ways in that there were a large number of strange, violent, and very audacious crimes committed by Venezuelan migrants, very random crimes. And there was a lot of very flagrant, audacious sort of gang activity that was almost like gang cosplay in certain parts. It's lots of, you know, people running around with extremely large guns. No fucks given. Is this including like the Colorado apartment building, Snefu? Yeah, this is like an Aurora. There was a migrant center in the Bronx where there was a little bit of this. Even the murder of Lake and Riley was like just a bizarre, like it.

no rhyme or reason to any of these crimes. So we had many, many, I would say at least 100, Venezuelan migrants who had committed or were alleged to have committed violent crimes in our prison system. And, you know, they, we had detained them. We were, you know, they were going through the criminal justice process. And I always, it always kind of boggled my mind that we wouldn't bother sending any of those people. to Sikot. We're going to send all these Venezuelans to Sikot, tell the world they're the worst of the worst, and not even send them any of the bad guys? Like, it seemed bizarre to me. And my only thought was that, well, maybe some of the guys, because Maduro, when the Trenda Aragua chatter began during the election season, Maduro said, Listen, Tranda Aragua, you know, some of these guys are under the control of Gilbert Caro, a long time Venezuelan opposition, you know, treason guy, basically, who incidentally killed a boy in a hit and run. Or maybe, no, maybe like a 20-something year old in Miami at 4 in the morning.

and so it was actually, you know, throughout 2024 and 25, I think, dealing with his own criminal case. But Maduro basically said that Trennairagua, far from being under his control and what the Trump administration line is that Trennairagua was sent by Maduro to infiltrate and destabilize American democracy and that, you know, they were establishing all of these. cells, this is a rationale that's been used for a lot of, you know, the legal invoking the Alien Enemies Act and, and all of that stuff. There is like an intelligence report that is classified that supposedly kind of goes into this dastardly plot to destabilize our democracy with their prison gang to Trenna Ragua. It's complete fiction. Yeah, in league with the same people that rigged the 2020 election. Yes, exactly.

Yes. The Venezuelan plot to give Joe Biden the presidency. So Gary Bernson and Martin Rodeal are the two guys who are behind that, you know, the 2020 election conspiracy and the Trondyaragua has infiltrated, you know, sent 50 cells of, you know, gangs trained in paramilitary tactics to our cities. etc., etc. So that those are two guys, Martin Rodiel and Gary Bernson, Gary Brinson's a X-CIA guy. Martin Rodiel is a Mossad asset and a DEA informant who also is, I think, wanted for extortion in Spain.

He has this, like, kind of diabolically genius racket that we can get into. I think he's an important node of all of this. But getting back to what I was originally saying, I had thought, okay, these Trenda-Iragua guys, they must be intelligence assets, right? But because why wouldn't they send people who'd committed murder or kidnappings? I mean, there were Venezuelans in this country in 2024 who committed some pretty crazy crimes. You know, it's not entirely a fiction. You know, there needed to be enough of a kernel of truth.

And there was also this dynamic where in a lot of cities, especially in Aurora, Colorado, there was a lot of nervousness. There was a real attempt to kind of sweep under the rug what was happening. And it wasn't like, you know, it wasn't an invasion. And the biggest cause was the fact that our most multifamily real estate on the lower end in America is deeply underwater. So there's all these absentee landlords who don't really. have any skin in the game anymore because they purchase these, you know, apartment buildings that dramatically inflated prices and the banks don't want to take them back because then they'd

have to market to market and that might cause a financial crisis. So there's these kind of zombie properties all over America, again, mostly in the workforce housing, lower end housing sector. and in places where there are a lot of Venezuelan migrants, you have seen reports, and some of these reports are very credible, that the buildings have been sort of taken over by gangs, or conversely, that they're just inhabited by squatters, and they can't actually get anyone to pay the rent anymore because nobody's going to pay the rent when they can't flush the toilet,

when there's no running water, when, you know, the roof is caved in, yada, yada. Anyway, digressing. So getting back to the original thing that I was just, the original observation that there was something that Max Blumenthal said, and I haven't seen it anywhere else. The sole reason that we sent 280 people, 280 men, to a torture chamber,

280 men who had committed no crimes for the vast majority to be sodomized and starved and beaten and psychologically and physically tortured for four and a half months was because

otherwise we weren't going to get our regime change war because Rubio needed to do something to get in the way of the MAGA America First faction that within Trump's inner circle that, however, incompetently has been trying to steer him away from this neo-con mafia shit. And like there was a huge effort during the first Trump administration to make sure that Trump never actually talked to Maduro. There was this sense among all of his aides that if he,

he talked to Maduro, that would be the end of it. You know, that would, like, that would ruin their whole scam. Because Maduro is an utterly pragmatic guy who desperately wants his people to not starve and would have done what he needed to do. It would have made Trump an offer he couldn't refuse. Yes. And Trump viewed him at the, toward the end, as being strong. You know, he thought he respected Maduro for for sticking around despite their their efforts and he did not conversely respect Wang Guido because nobody did so that to me I mean that is so evil right I mean that is just such a and I haven't even seen I haven't seen that anywhere but it makes total sense the timing lines up and it also explains why they would not have anything to say

about, you know, what, like, they wouldn't have any like to stand on when it comes to, you know, saying that these guys are actually criminals. They're the worst of the worst. You know, they, they deserve this shit. No, it was just like this last minute idea that, you know, somebody got. And there's a lot of relationships between Buckele, Buckele has a shadow government, just as Venezuela does. And it is, my understanding is that it consists almost entirely of Venezuelan exiles. So there's a lot of cooperation between these guys. And that is, you know, that's just something that I want to bring up there because, again, I haven't seen that. Have you, have you seen that? And it's so, it's such a mafia move. It is, it is so sadistic. It is so diabolical. And totally.

It's so nonsensical, right? Like, this is, this is cartel shit. Just sending 283 guys who have done nothing. to Seacot for four and a half months because you because you told Maria Carina like you'd make her a SAR I don't I you know I it's it's just it's staggering but you see a lot of that

obviously we're all seeing a lot of this from the Trump administration you know we have the gentleman who was just acquitted on the murder for higher charges that they made up you know that our criminal justice system the TOJ has been completely emptied out of anybody with any.

Yeah. Pride, you know, intellectual pride, as I'm sure you know, know better than anyone. And it is now just an instrument of cartel, mafia, justice, right? Totally. And so we're still adjusting to this staggering, really, like, aggressive hypocrisy that is drenching, like, every... single one of our policy decisions. Yeah.

So to that end. It's alarming because it's so out in the open now that, you know, whereas once upon a time you might have had, like even in the 80s during Iran-Contra, of course, Rudy Giuliani was positioned as a federal prosecutor for the DOJ in New York and had some big prosecutions that had a lot of these irregularities that were being used as an arm of foreign policy back in those days too. And they could kind of use the criminal prosecutions as an arm of enacting their covert foreign policies, whereas now there is nothing covert about it except just lying and

relying on the fact that, like you said, is not why. reported, you really have to dig to find that piece of information about these individuals that were deported to Seacot. But the fact that the people who were deported to Seacot were innocent is pretty obvious, right? Even Barry Weiss's CBS News eventually aired the report interviewing the guys who had done nothing wrong. And I do think that it was CBS News that, like, to just give them some credit pre-Berry Wyss CBS News that broke this story that, hey, we got these names and we've put them through all of our databases and there's virtually no criminality among these men. They are, you know, they've been detained on visa violations and maybe, you know,

a criminal mischief here or there. So, so yes, that is something that was known and I always thought, you know, it was a little surprising to me that there wasn't more outrage about that. I found it unbelievable. I found it especially alarming

just having looked into the Trend de Aragua phenomenon and realize that, oh, there were crimes. Like there were, you know, human trafficking, a lot of strange kidnappings, a lot of really aggressive robberies, again, like kind of ISIS-stst stuff,

crimes here and there committed by Venezuelan migrants. And there's a whole lot of intrigue that I do think that a lot of it was somehow staged when Abbott, when Governor Abbott in Texas launched his

campaign to bus migrants to the blue cities. He, this is something that was in a pro-publica story. He explicitly wouldn't let anyone go if they had work authorization. Now, everybody under the, everybody from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, or Haiti was for many years under the Biden administration starting 2022 entitled to get work authorization. They just had to do the right thing with the app. The generally those who did not, who arrived without work authorization because they swam over

in the Rio Grande or they arrived on foot, those migrants were much more likely to be sort of under the control of human smugglers. And that industry has, as I understand it, become way more cartelized. And Trinairagua is in that business. Understandably, that's the growth industry of Venezuela, as people leaving Venezuela. So Greg Abbott explicitly would not allow anyone who had work authorization get on those buses. He wanted sort of the most desperate people to show up in these blue cities. And there was a whistleblower. He paid unbelievable. The amount of money that Texas paid to send those folks out was like thousands of dollars ahead. I mean, it's completely insane. But there was a whistleblower on one of the

with one of the bus companies who said that, you know, the line for him, he felt like, you know, they were extremely inhumane. They didn't want to tell anyone they were. They were going. They would deliberately take somebody

who wanted to go to Miami and send them to Denver all the time. That was just like a policy that they had. But the thing that really pushed him over the edge was that they were, the Abbott had to, that he wanted to pull off a media stunt where they would drop a whole bunch of Venezuelan migrants outside Kamala Harris's house. And then at the last minute, they decided that Abbott said,

or somebody, one of Abbott's aide said, you know, one of Abbott's aid said, you know, one bus load isn't enough we need two. And so he said that he gets a, he's in Virginia, like he's in, like, Prince William County, Virginia. And he gets a call from another bus. and the guy on the other bus his counterpart on the other bus says listen, can you just hold on for a while because Abbott wants to put you know, he wants to really

you know, make a splash here. He wants two busloads of Venezuelans disembarking at Kamala Harris' house. So just wait up until we arrive. And he's like, okay, cool, you know, that's fine. Where are you? And he says, now, well, we're in Arkansas. all.

And he's like, are you kidding? And he said, you know, I stood there in this parking lot with children crying and screaming and people, you know, shitting themselves because they weren't allowed to go to the bathroom in a parking lot for 11 hours. And all because he wanted this like stupid media stunt. And again, this guy gave an interview. I think to Nightline. I've been trying to track him down.

That is, I think, I don't think that that story ever got nearly enough attention. But it also speaks to the sadism and the criminality of what is, you know, what's been going on here. And the extent to which that, you know, I mean, I'll be honest, like, as somebody, my husband's in the restaurant industry, you know, we've dealt with labor shortages or, you know, people, especially after COVID, a lot of folks went back to Mexico and had trouble getting back in. And then just decided, well, you know, it's not that bad here. But I didn't think when Abbott started busing migrants to blue cities that it was such a bad thing. I thought that, you know, that probably made sense to do.

But the way that they did it was obviously, like, extremely malicious to all parties involved. So, including Kamala Harris. I don't know, you know, if that became the media stunt that they wanted it to. But yeah, I thought that there was an enormous effort. And you see this from Steve Miller, had a nonprofit, like legal foundation, like a legal research. Foundation called the America First Foundation, I think. America First Legal Institute? Yeah. And you can see if you go through all of their press releases, how the Trend

Aragua thing really starts to bubble up in 2023. This is how the Trump administration has decided they're going to bridge this gulf between the America Firsters and the lunatic neocons, like the Rubios and the Steve Fannons, they are going to make it about immigration. They're going to make it about this invasion. There was just an incredible amount of like orchestration of these media events because Trump did not, I don't think, by all accounts, Trump did not want to try doing regime change in Venezuela again. I think he thought it was stupid.

Maybe Maybe I should get to get to get to get to get to get to Maybe I should get to what my story is about. I thought that one interesting way to get at this bald basiveness of the lies that we are fed about some of these, especially the Venezuelan regime change, is to look into Marco Rubio. Now, I sort of thought that it was better, more conventional wisdom that Marco Rubio had a brother-in-law that was a big drug trafficker. And he was busted in the late 80s, spent 12 or 13 years in prison, got out early and then went on to be a real estate agent apparently until he died. I think he died in 2023, lived with Marco Rubio's mother

till the very end. But yeah, this is, you know, this was in Marco Rubio's family. So I thought, well, you know, it's the 80s. There's probably something that can be learned there, right? Like we can this guy is probably in some way, maybe tangentially related to Iran-Contra. And even if he's not, It's an opportunity to kind of remind the readers that, like, you know, our deep state is very much enmeshed in these drug trafficking networks. Maybe even is the drug trafficking networks, right? So I thought that that would be a quick and easy story. And it turns out that a lot of people, it's not really conventional wisdom or it wasn't really conventional wisdom that Marker Rubio had this family history. history. He really went out of his way to try and suppress it. Univision broke the story. He tried to

boycott Univision afterwards. It's one of those things that if you read the Miami New Times, you know about it, but otherwise, the mainstream media tends to not think stuff like this is relevant, which is, you know, I think a big reason that the mainstream media sucks, because Marco Rubio's brother-in-law, Orlando Cecilia, actually worked for a drug trafficking organization that was a direct outgrowth of the Bay of Pigs invasion. It's, I think, well known. After the Cuban Revolution, the CIA set up a covert operations headquarters called Jam Wave in Miami. and you can go back when you start looking into the archives there,

and thanks to the tireless efforts of the JFK researchers, there's a lot of declassified files you can just go look through. It's nothing like the Epstein files. And pretty much if you are trying to research a prominent Cuban exile who was there in the 60s, you're very likely to find that they were working for the CIA on some project or another, and there were so many projects. I mean, just an unbelievable number.

It was the largest CIA station outside of Langley in the whole world. I mean, you know, I haven't done enough. It was really large, and they shut it down. But it was, I think, you know, I've read stories on how Jam Wave was like this massive economic development engine, which I think is probably true. But what kind of economy are we developing? developing. And that's kind of the interesting

piece there. So like the flagship project of Jamwave was the Brigade 5206 or the MRR or you know the Bay of Pigs crew. A you know 1,500, force of 1,500 armed commandos who

were supposed to take out Castro but got betrayed by the Dulles brothers and and JFK and have been out for revenge ever since. So these gentlemen were, you know, mostly sent to training camps in Nicaragua and I think Guatemala. And, you know, after the Bay of Pig's invasion and after the Kennedy assassination that involved an unbelievable number of Bay of Big's veterans.

Oh, yeah. You know, they needed to. do something with their lives. And, you know, most of them, there was a, the leader of Brigade 25 or 6, Manuel Artime, you know, was just constantly recruiting Cuban exiles to come train and fight, and they were going to do sabotage and they were going to overthrow Cuba once and for all, you know, they were going to get it back. And some of these guys, you know, were just mobsters, right? The mob had been extremely powerful in Cuba in, you know, the casino business. And the other big industry in Cuba, of course, was the sugar cane industry, which I've done a little work on. It's just unbelievably

exploitative. You know, Cuba didn't abolish slavery until, like, chattel slavery until 1888. and it really does seem with the sugar cane industry like a lot of sugar cane barons just sort of kind of think they should just be allowed to own people you know like come on. Oh yeah. Very sinister stuff in that industry. So sinister in fact that one of the first investigations

of the sugar cane industry in America one of the biggest was actually J. Edgar Hoover clamped down on the labor trafficking that they were doing. He was disgusted. If Jagger Hoover was disgusted by, you know, the gruesome conditions of laborers, you can imagine how bad they were.

But anyway, so there were some gangsters who were kind of, you know, guys who were already gangsters. And I would say that the patriarch of the drug organization, the Marco Rubio's brother, brother-in-law was basically a number two or number three a guy in was getting arrested for stealing cars in Havana in 1959. He was probably already involved in organized crime before Castro's revolution.

But there were some, you know, I think more idealistic types who just, you know, for whatever reason, I mean, there were people who, you know, supported Castro, hated Batista, but then were, you know, understandably freaked out by, you know, some of the things that you have to do when the CIA is, you know, trying to sabotage your every move. And there was a woman who went to the, you know, to Congress and the FBI and she said, listen, I got a letter. My husband was my husband was recruited by Manuel Artime to go train in this paramilitary camp in Nicaragua to work for this guy, Manuel Artime. And I got a letter, an anonymous letter saying that he had been killed

because he didn't approve of what they were doing there. And then I got another letter that said, listen, you know, we're told that we're going to do sabotage, We're going to learn how to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. But what all that anyone is really doing is smuggling. We're smuggling whiskey. We're smuggling clothes. At this point, this is 1964.

There was no mention of marijuana or cocaine yet. But that would very shortly become the main enterprise. So as early as 1964, and indeed, this man had been killed for, you know, trying, attempting to blow the whistle on what was going on there. So at the same time as this is happening, our teammates got some lady problems. His wife is like a slutty lesbian who's like in some smutty pictures with she also used to be Batista's mistress. So the CIA tells our teammate to sort of just lay low and get out of the United States for a while. And he goes full force to basically building a pan central American secret army, right, of, you know, guys who are mostly drug traffickers, but the whole purpose of

their mission. I mean, our teammate is a physician. So he's not like a classic mafioso mafia boss. Although it is alarming how many physicians pop up in those worlds. Like, there's a lot of, there was one in Guatemalan doctor that was an another big financier of these networks back in the day. Mario Castellon was the name of the Guatemalan Contra doctor who smuggled funds from the U.S. to the Contras under the guise of a medical aid project. And this was a guy who Jeb Bush personally introduced to Oliver North. Jeb Bush, of course, another Florida politician like Marco Rubio.

They also worked with the Tulane Medical School and Dr. Alton Oshner there, who was a CIA-connected doctor that would operate on like Juan Perron when he needed an operation. It is always a little bit weird. Not really hypocratic oath. Yeah, 100%. There are a very strange number of doctors involved in some of the, like, weirdest business here, including Tina Shea had a doctor, I think, who maybe he was also a chemist, but I think he was also a doctor who was in charge of setting up his cocaine lab. And, you know, Chile is not that close to any of this action, but everybody in Latin America in the 1970s. 70s, you know, all the right-wingers wanted to get into this business because it was a way to

fund your terror campaigns. It was a way to keep everybody happy. I'm sure it was a way to keep everybody productive. And it's shocking when you go back and look at the evidence. It was us. It was the CIA. And it was our, it was right-wing fascist dictatorships that we, were financing and backing in every way that were doing the vast majority of the drug trafficking and enabling the vast majority of the drug trafficking. And for all of our bluster about the war on drugs, especially during, you know, the Reagan administration had this very, you know, prohibitionist, very prohibitionist vibes. But it was 100% bullshit.

And to the extent that our, um, our. enemies, the Senanistas, or you know, even Noriega is a slightly different case or or FARC or any of these guys are on the left are involved in drug trafficking.

So much of the evidence of that is planted by CIA commandos and CIA assets. And I so that, you know, that's another thing that these Bay of Pigs guys

do a lot of in the 1980s is they plant drugs. They try to plant drugs on people that they say are officers in the San Anista government. And, you know, it'll later turn out. And, you know, this will be the cause of a huge, you know, state of the union address and huge media campaigns about the importance of backing the contras that the contras who are traffickers. you know, thousands of tons of cocaine can displace these narco terrorists, the Sandinistas. You know, it's, it was, it was almost 100% concocted by the same people who were doing the trafficking. And I do, there's, I think there's a lot of evidence to suggest that that's the Maduro indictment is, is, is, is,

full of that very dubious things that seem like in as much as there is any evidence in the Maduro indictment because a lot of it is just words. Yeah. A lot of it is like... Yeah, we did a whole thing reading the indictment. It's so goofy. Oh, my God. Well, yeah. And there's, you know, inasmuch as there's any cocaine that's actually trafficked in that indictment as opposed to, you know, evidence of meetings that supposedly where, you know, deals are worked out and there's something about Malaysian palm oil or something like that, they discuss this seizure of 1.3 tons or metric tons of Coke at the Charles

de Gaulle airport, right, that's come on a commercial airliner from Caracas. And I'm thinking, like, that's a lot of cocaine to be putting just in suitcases on a commercial airliner to like, the what, the third busiest airport in the world? Like what? Like that doesn't make sense. And, you know, then I looked that up and a totally unheard of

a British crime boss. He's supposedly a crime boss, but like the crimes that he had there to for been charged with were like, you know, intimidation. And like he wasn't, he wasn't like a, a well-known criminal.

Like, it wasn't a well-documented criminal. But this guy was apparently caught on a wiretap saying to somebody that the drugs that had been seized at Charles de Gaulle were his. And so they put this guy in prison. Then he denies it. I don't actually know. Somebody's got to go and find this gentleman who I think is still in prison in the UK somewhere. but a really, really odd, like, just very, like, odd turn of events.

Doesn't seem to implicate Maduro at all, but it also does sort of smack of a kind of setup, you know, which is that there was another seizure in a plain of dubious origin that they mentioned in that indictment. And it all just seems like it smacks of a. deliberate campaign to actually set up at the world. And there's another case where his nephews are, and his nephews were actually charged and convicted of trying to attempt it. Were they his nephews or his wife's nephews? His wife's nephews, yeah, the narco nephews. And there seems to be some evidence that they were trying to do something. They said that they

needed money for an election. They don't seem terribly bright. I'm really not sure what the deal is. of him as like Venezuelan Hunter-Biden's? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe like, but like, you know, like sweet. But yes, I don't know. But yeah, so, but there's store of cocaine, I think that the majority of the cocaine that they were, you know, said alleged to have been trying to traffic was found in their room at the La Romana

resort in the Dominican Republic, which is owned by the Bon Hul family of Miami. These are these really hardcore billionaire, multi-billionaire sugar barons who've been very, they're big Trump donors, friends of Epstein. Classic. Bob Menendez, former senator. In 2013. Boolean Bob. This, yes, Boolean Bob.

So before, you know, 10 years before the bullion appeared, there were some, underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic who went to the daily caller to tell the daily caller that Bob Menendez had been, you know, trying to sleep with them or something like that. Or they, was their story, like, was very weird and it never really checked out. And Bob Menendez said that he thought that the Fon Hul family had framed him and sent the underage prostitutes to his room to frame, like specifically to frame him because they were mad about his vote on a sugar bill.

Now, Bob Menendez, reliable narrator, sometimes when you're writing about this sort of stuff, these mafia politicians whose actions seem to illuminate reality, like, you know, the deep reality, yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's guys like Bob Menendez who are somehow like more trustworthy, right? Like I do think that if Bob Menendez, you know, if you're listening, no, like if he, that he would write a great memoir if he, you know, if he was allowed to to spill the beans. And, and I do think that, like, you know, he, he talked a lot of smack about Netanyahu's Jewish supremacist cabinet in

2022 right before the gold bars appeared. And so, yeah, I mean, I do think that, like, there's probably, you know, lots of this kind of crazy stuff happening all the time. And getting back to Marco Rubio's drug trafficking brother-in-law, and this is a guy who, again, like, Marco Rubio really, you know, loves this brother-in-law of his. In his memoir, he sort of credits Orlando with, you know, giving him this job. but he was cleaning and building animal cages because he worked for an animal, like an exotic animal supply store.

Now, the family, the Tabrao family, Guillermo Tabrao is the patriarch. He was actually part of the Beapag's invasion. He was the paymaster of the MRR, the brigade. And his son, Marr, and his son, Marr, who was on the show Tiger King. If you remember the pandemic, he was the guy who claims that his life was the basis for Scarface. No, like zero reality to that.

Zero reality of that. And he also claims that he dealt Coke to support his animal habit because he just loves these exotic animals so much. But they had this exotic animal front business. And, you know, they did have a lot of exotic birds and they were said to even traffic, cocaine, inside snake bodies. But that's not in the indictment. I need to just, you know, point that out in the, because he's also very, Tabrao is extremely litigious when it comes to anybody accusing him of, like, animal cruelty. he's like sued like you know

conservation groups sometimes they say that I'm the prototype for Scarface Mario Trabwe and his father Guillermo are accused of

operating a 10-year top dollar family drug enterprise the money coming in suitcases to the bank I did that but that was a fat guy

in the band that was a corvette that did it by myself I will call the bank in the band and they'll have 10 tellers who sit back There was no county machines.

Back then, I sold drugs to maintain my animal habit. I got to a point where I was on the phone saying, Mario's drugstore, especially I said marijuana, cocaine and quailutes, anybody interested come get, including you, Metro Day, Organized Crime Bureau. They got me on tape. Working out of zoological imports unlimited to Braway is also accused of covering up the murder, mutilation, and cremation of a federal drug informant seven years ago.

His name was Larry Nash. He was an ATF informant. guy who worked for me, shot him, and they panicked and dumped them on my farm. I had a crazier partner than me. He says, let's just cut up and burn him. So, Marco Rubio, you know, kind of got these jobs here and there dealing with the front organization. And his brother-in-law, Orlando Cecilia, you know, cooked dinner. And he put them up when his family moved to, very inexplicably moved to Los Angeles. Vegas for a few years in 1979.

According to Marco Rubio, this was because there was just no, like, the hotel industry was sort of bottoming out in Miami in 1979, so they thought that there would be more opportunity in Las Vegas. I really don't think that that necessarily checks out. I know that, like, the, you know, that there were the Volker shocks and there was a lot of economic pain in the 70s, but in Miami, the Miami hotel industry, I'm not really sure if that was necessarily true. But in any case, they moved to Las Vegas. Rubio decides to convert the whole family to Mormonism while they're there. But every time they come back to Miami,

they stay with Orlando, he cooks like a big, you know, a home-style Cuban meal. His father is is happy once again and the whole family just like ultimately just realizes that they belong in Miami and boy do they belong in Miami and so yes one day Cecilia

is you know arrested in this massive bust on you know in which 12 of his colleagues are also arrested and Rubio says he has you know he had no idea and, you know, he was only 16, so on one hand, sure.

But on the other hand, this, before, the year before Cecilia went to work for this animal, this exotic animal pet store, the same guys, the Tabra family and all of these conspirators had been busted in a massive drug bust in which they, eventually. got, you know, got all of the charges thrown out because Janet Reno had, you know, there were problems with the wiretap. Some of the problems were due to the fact that the Tabraal family had very good lawyers and they found an episode where, you know, maybe they really were talking about an exotic bird and they weren't just using the bird as, you know, code word for a kilo of cocaine. But really, it was this whole debacle where, I think, two years worth of wiretap recordings into drug traffickers.

And this is back in like 1981, had to be thrown out. And every single one of these organizations, these drug trafficking organizations, was a Bay of Pigs, you know, veteran-run organization. It's another example, too, from the way that the legal process intersects with kind of deep covert action, especially at that time in the 80s, where you might have somebody from one of the intelligence agencies that wants just as a matter of surveillance and reconnaissance to obtain information that may intersect with informants, it may intersect with informants, it may intersect with assets. whatever, it's their goal isn't the same as the prosecutor's goal. In other words, the prosecutor wants to get a criminal conviction, which requires the admissibility of that evidence, but the spook doesn't really care if the person gets prosecuted or not. Like, you know, you could think about the prosecution of Danilo Blandon, the case that

Gary Webb followed so closely in Los Angeles in the Iran-Contra scandal as well, where I think he ended up getting a pretty good deal out of the prosecution, even though he was brought before the federal court, he was prosecuted, massive investigation. But it's unclear to what degree the investigation itself was being driven by the DOJ. versus by the CIA, which historically has always had its little tentacles in every branch of government, in every agency, and can kind of manipulate and use them to its own devices. I don't know if that was necessarily what happened here, but it reminds me of this phenomenon that was kind of recurrent. Yeah, so I should have said, so, so Guillermo Tabrao, the patriarchal, the patriarchal, of the family.

He runs a jewelry shop that buys stolen jewelry. They also seem to have, like, in the 80s, you see them advertising in the newspaper and they have, like, a Rolex account. They have, you know, Patake-Falilip account, you know, they have accounts with these fancy brands.

But what they're mostly known for in this 1970s is selling stolen jewelry at very competitive prices to cops and judges. So he is running this little, like, sort of criminal organization and he's got you know

it's believed that like he there's some hookers who he's got on his payroll many also owns he co-owns an abortion clinic in case they get and he's and he's bribing these judges to

let off these underage hookers that he's got working for him and that becomes a little bit of a scandal but also at the same time in 1975, I think. So in 1970, there's a massive drug bust orchestrated by the Bureau of the DEA, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerstogs. And they arrest 150 of the people they say are, you know, the biggest drug traffickers in the world and

whose organization is responsible for 30% of the heroin trade in America, like 70% of the cocaine trade and like 70% of the marijuana trade. So, you know, I'm sure these numbers are coming out of somebody's ass, but, um, and they're saying, and nobody that we picked up is a known member of organized crime. But 70% of the, of the men arrested that day were veterans of the Bay of Pig's invasion. So suddenly the, the NDD, which becomes the DEA, is like, like, oh, shoot, it really seems like we have a problem on our hands with these baby pigs guys. We probably trained them to do a lot of the stuff that they're doing. You know, there was a little bit of nervousness.

And the CIA comes in and says, hey, listen, we're going to start a branch inside. We're going to start like an elite unit inside the DEA that will keep an eye on all of these Cuban drug traffickers. and let you know the lay of the land. And this program is called, it's called something and then it gets called Deacon. And the Deacon program signs up, you know, countless, you know, dozens of informants, right, from this world, one of whom is Guillermo Tabrao,

he becomes a CIA informant. He's making $1,000 a week or something, $10,000 a month. I mean, he was making a good living. He really shouldn't have had to supplement his earnings. But almost as soon as he takes that job, he also, you know, starts trafficking marijuana. Prior to that, I think he was just sort of letting the drug trafficking happen inside his store. But then, you know, once he earns this sort of informant role, he becomes a lot more

balzy and starts trafficking enormous quantities of marijuana and cocaine right off the bat. So yeah, I mean and very famously Deakin produced zero prosecutions.

This whole program that they had. And there was, you know, there were people inside the DEA. There were people involved in it who, you know, said, wait a second, like, you know, we got to stop this. Like, we got to, you know, kick these guys out. There was understanding within the DEA that the CIA was like rat-fucking all of their investigations and destroying all their leads, so that they were sort of at like war with the CIA. And that was an understanding that like deepened and deepened within the DEA, I think throughout the 80s.

Yeah, I feel like you see all the time the DEA agents or ex-DEA agents giving statements or you know, making claims that all of their investigations when they follow them to the conclusion lead to CIA agents and assets at the top of the pyramid. Yeah. Well, folks, that does it for Side A of our broadcast for the full thing where we'll get a lot deeper and a lot broader on the context for all of these shenanigans, head on over to patreon.com slash forthrighted archaeology and subscribe today. Otherwise, fret not.

The rest of the episode will come into the free feed in due time. You'll just have to wait a little bit longer. Until then, my name is Don. On behalf of Dick and on behalf of Motiv. saying farewell and keep on digging. When you be doing that