John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S1E27 Prisoner Ex

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

THE BLURB: Having been a prisoner despite not deserving that fate, John is extremely interested in others similarly incarcerated. To that end, back before the 2024 election, we put together an episode... of a podcast called "Prisoner Ex" where we told the story of Donnie Reynolds, Jr, a young, ambitious Black entrepreneur who got swept up in the US government's failed attempt to catch and prosecute Mexican drug cartel leaders by supplying them with GPS-carrying firearms. Donnie and his whole family were law-abiding citizens going about their business before the DoJ's so-called "Operation Fast and Furious" forced itself into their homes and lives. SHOW NOTESIf you want to help Donnie Reynolds, Jr (and we urge you to join us in helping him), please send him a letter telling him you support him. Please address the enverlope this way: Donald Ray Reynolds, JrPrisoner Number 32349-074, FCI Cumberland14601 Burbridge Road SE Cumberland, MD 21502For more great podcasts like Dead Drop, please visit https://costardandtouchstone.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. I'm John Kariyaku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick. As always, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for checking us out. There are a lot of great podcasts out there. We know. We're huge fans of them, too, that you've chosen to spend your valuable time with ours means the world to us. And thank you for liking, rating, reviewing, and commenting on the podcast wherever you're catching it.
Starting point is 00:00:36 Those things especially have put a thermal under our wings. So thank you for helping us soar. Back on Earth, we're hard at work, readying the launch of Season 2 of Dead Drop, what makes a spy turned federal prisoner tick. While we work on that, we wanted to share with you an episode of a podcast that we made a little while ago
Starting point is 00:00:54 as part of a series we were developing called Prisoner X. Prisoner X was, it still is, about forgotten people who are imprisoned here in America and around the world but who shouldn't be. That shouldn't be forgotten or imprisoned. The podcast's mission? Tell these stories in order to help make these prisoners ex-prisoners. We worked on this podcast in 2024, but after the election and the way Washington's politics
Starting point is 00:01:21 swung, we decided to stick a pin in prisoner X. Well, time has come to re-examine that pin. That's in part because the politics in D.C. seem to be shifting again. And podcasting has grown considerably in its power and influence, even in this brief, time. In a world where the truth itself is under constant threat, people are seeking honest, clear, trustworthy voices. Podcasting is providing them. In an environment like that, a podcast like Prisoner X might actually help get some of the people whose stories we want to tell a legitimate shot at getting their freedom. One of the stories we worked on is about a man named Donnie Reynolds Jr. A bright, talented,
Starting point is 00:02:00 ambitious young black entrepreneur who got swept up in the American government's fast and furious scandal. That was 25 years ago. And he's still a prisoner of that scandal's corrupt aftermath today. If anyone deserves to be an ex-prisoner, it's Donnie Reynolds Jr. One could almost get nostalgic for the kind of corruption represented by the fast and furious scandal. It was truly terrible, but perversely, it pales in comparison to the corruption happening every day right now. That doesn't reflect well on us. Originally called Project Gun Runner, Operation Fast and Furious got renamed
Starting point is 00:02:38 after agents discovered that several of the chief suspects in the case were all members of a car club. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the ATF, ran Operation Fast and Furious from 2009 to 2011. The operation was designed, so to speak, if we torture that word a little, to purchase and deliver firearms directly to Mexican drug cartels. The point was to track every single one of those incredibly dangerous weapons using GPS devices
Starting point is 00:03:09 secreted inside the firearms. Perhaps in some pie in the sky world, that idea penciled out better. But here in reality, nothing when is planned. The GPS equipment, likely purchased from the lowest bidder, was inadequate. The batteries inside the GPS lasted only a few days at best, and the tracker signals were notoriously weak, and heaven forbid somebody put the object being tracked inside a car's trunk. Then the signal would just completely vanish.
Starting point is 00:03:38 This lack of technical sophistication, and I'm being kind, and the utter failure of the purchased GPS system as a tracker, totally doomed fast and furious from the jump. Of the 2,000 firearms put into play by the FBI, only about 700 were ever recovered, While a number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted none, not one of the targeted high-level cartel figures was ever prosecuted or even arrested. It's quite a story that's still happening to Donnie Reynolds Jr.
Starting point is 00:04:08 And we're truly happy to finally put Donnie's story out to the world. So without any further ado, here is Prisoner X. Hi, I'm John Kyriaku. Welcome to Prisoner X, the podcast dedicated to helping turn prisoners who show. and be into ex-prisoners. Sometimes people in power signal how afraid they are via their actions. They do things that defy explanation and logic and human decency. That's what people in power have done to my friend Donald Reynolds Jr.
Starting point is 00:04:47 In November 2007, Donnie was 29. He was a successful young black entrepreneur who owned and ran several different businesses. He bought and sold old cars. He was in the music business, live events, and he bought and sold antique weapons, all very legally. In fact, Donnie was one of a small group of African Americans to have something called Class 3 federal stamps. Having and keeping those stamps meant Donnie could keep silenced, fully automatic firearms. In other words, machine guns. In order to have and keep those stamps, Donnie passed an extensive multi-federal agency background check.
Starting point is 00:05:25 The federal government knew about every weapon Donnie owned. In fact, those weapons all sat in a federal database that allowed federal agents to browse such weapons as if they were shopping on Amazon. Stick a pin in that database. We will come back to it. Donnie Reynolds kept his record spotless in order to maintain those stamps. As Donnie himself put it, they knew I was 100% legitimate. So was the rest of Donnie's family. His dad, Donald Sr., worked at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 40 years in security. He served for two years in the Army.
Starting point is 00:06:02 His wife, Janice, Donnie's mother, also did national service. The Reynolds were a respectable, respectful family. They were the kind of Americans we want all our kids to be. And yet, on June 19, 2008, federal agents led by IRS agent Brian Grove and assistant U.S. attorney Tracy Plowell, along with local Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department, swarmed Donnie's home looking for drugs. They were sure they'd find a mother load. They invaded Donnie's parents' house, too, and turned it upside down.
Starting point is 00:06:37 Grove and Plowell didn't find any of the evidence they insisted they'd find. But that wasn't the beginning of it. As you'll soon hear, not only is it unacceptable that Donnie Reynolds Jr. sits in prison. The prison he's in is even, more unacceptable. For the past decade, Donnie Reynolds Jr. has been held at the Communications Management Unit, or CMU, in Terre Haute, Indiana. Created by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2006 as part of the George W. Bush administration's counterterrorism framework and shrouded in secrecy, these prisons are meant to isolate and segregate certain prisoners from the rest of the federal prison population. These are
Starting point is 00:07:22 supposed to be the hardest of the hardcore. Think El Chapo, John Gotti. Currently, there are two CMUs for men and another for women. Donnie is being held at the CMU in Terre Haute. Strangely, that's also the location of the federal prison system's death row. Donnie being at that CMU makes telling his story especially tricky, but then that is the point. Inbound communication is severe restricted, so's outbound communication. Prisoners get two 15-minute phone calls a week, unless the people running Terre Haute change their minds. Mail moves at a pony express-like pace, explanations for why or for pretty much anything else, are few and far between. That we can tell Donnie's story at all is a testament to the fearlessness and tenacity of several individuals
Starting point is 00:08:17 who defiantly resisted these attempts to crush Donnie and themselves. For four years, Marty Godesfeld was also an inmate at the CMU in Terre Haute, alongside Donnie. Now free, but not entirely free to speak, Marty became a kind of legal eagle while at Terre Haute. One of the people whose causes Marty embraced was Donnie Juniors. As for Marty and what he was doing at Terre Haute. In 2014, Marty, who associated himself with the decentralized hacktivist group Anonymous, shut down the Boston Children's Hospital's website and its ability to fundraise. Marty was protesting the care of a patient named Christine Pellateer,
Starting point is 00:09:02 a teenager at the center of a high-profile custody battle. Marty's actions cost the hospital tens of thousands of dollars and disrupted operations for days, but no patients were directly impacted by the shutdown. I've been in computer technology since a very young age. My dad was a Apollo program, rocket scientist, computer program. taught me to code on his knee when I was three years old. I wrote my first program when I was five, sold my first program when I was 12, was a full-time engineer at a tech company at 18 working on network infrastructure and data security kind of
Starting point is 00:09:36 topics. So I was intimately familiar with network and data security from the other side, from the defensive side. Before the attack, I was a data security coordinator at a Massachusetts biotech company, and I did business continuity, disaster recovery planning for health and other organizations right up through the Fortune 500. So I knew what would and would not be a risk to human life. And my jury refused to convict me. The government charged me with impacting or potentially impacting the medical diagnosis, treatment, or care of one or more individuals.
Starting point is 00:10:10 And the jury ultimately refused to convict me on that account. So they got me for just financial damage. But that was kind of the narrative the government used as a cudgel. You know, this guy risked children's lives. But at the end of the day, they failed. to prove that to a jury in a courtroom where they had every advantage where I wasn't even allowed to argue that I acted in the defense of another person's life. These two prosecutors, David Diadio and Seth Costo, were unable to prove the ethical core of their case to a jury. When the palatier situation came to my attention and it was obvious to me that this girl was going to die if something was not done, I figured I'd rather run the rapids than deal with my
Starting point is 00:10:48 conscience if something happened to her and I knew that I could have done something and chose not to do so. Donnie Reynolds and his circumstances likewise became a focus of Marty's conscience once they met and became acquainted at Terre Haute. Once again, Marty saw an abuse of power and chose to do something about it. He had a total, I believe, with four companies. He was involved with trucking. He was involved with some high-end cars. So it looks like, to me, that through the high-end car stuff, Some of the original informants on Fast and Furious came to learn about Donnie and came to learn about his firearms permits. And this was around the time when they were looking for strawman purchasers for Fast and Furious. Operation Fast and Furious was originally known as the ATF gunwalking scandal.
Starting point is 00:11:43 Back in 2006, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was under pressure because of its focus on arresting low-level dealers and sellers of unregistered or unlicensed guns. Many of those guns ended up in the hands of members of Mexican drug cartels. So the pressure was on ATF to overlook those initial gun sales and then track the movement of the guns up the chain of command to see where they ended up. That's what the Bureau did. They traced the guns movement but then didn't really do anything about it. Here are some of the details.
Starting point is 00:12:17 Beginning in 2006, ATF agents in Arizona began allowing licensed gun dealers to make technically illegal sales to straw buyers hoping to track the sales back to the cartels and then make high-level arrests. By 2011, after the sale of 2,000 guns, not a single cartel member had been arrested. And only 710 of the guns had been recovered. The rest were just missing. To make matters worse, several of the guns were found near the scene of the murder of a border patrol agent, and Congress was calling for heads to roll. Without any ability to get to the cartels, ATF and the Justice Department began focusing on the little guys again. By then, it was all about the Justice Department's saving face. Dozens of arrests came out of Fast and Furious, largely over the violation of three different gun sales laws,
Starting point is 00:13:13 and most of the sentences for those offenses were in the range of three years probation, up to eight years in prison. By all accounts, ATF agents hated the operation from the start. Their job, after all, is to interdict weapons, not to let them just walk into the arms of the cartels, but that was the order from the Justice Department. In the end, when everything fell apart, when Congress demanded answers,
Starting point is 00:13:39 the department began looking for scapegoats. and if that scapegoat could take the fall for the murder of a federal agent, so much the better. And that is how Donnie Reynolds Jr. showed up on the Department of Justice's fast and furious radar. Well, the thing is the war on drugs is what made these cartels power. I think it was two customs and border protection and one border patrol agent and untold numbers of civilians south of the border. And the Mexican government's still looking for answers in terms of how this all kind of happened. the Obama administration asserted executive privilege to quash a legislative subpoena from the House while the House was investigating the operation.
Starting point is 00:14:16 Biden was potentially involved because he was there at the time in the Obama administration. You know, Donnie, if he gets his Brady material, his discovery material, potentially there are some very interesting answers in that material that Donnie's defense was owed before trial to talk about the credibility of some of these witnesses who testified who were produced at trial to testify against him. were some of the same names and same surnames that we see mentioned in some of the very limited, fast and furious stuff that has since surfaced. And it looks like Donnie was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. They needed people who would look authentic to the cartels as the people to pass off these weapons. And now you have Donnie. He's got to deal with universal records, right?
Starting point is 00:15:03 He's an antique firearms collector. He's into high-end cars, right? He's a great guy potentially for the Justice Department to try to put under cover to the cartels as the source for these weapons. He's got a great story, a great front that they would not have been able to build otherwise with a different person. But Donnie refuses to play ball. And so they bury Donnie. Now, just a reminder, what Marty is saying is conjecture. We don't have notarized receipts that say this is what the Justice Department did.
Starting point is 00:15:36 We just have the end result. An innocent man, a trial where Donnie Reynolds wasn't given the opportunity to defend himself adequately, and a sentence that defies explanation. Unless you factor in corruption. Let's dig into each of those end results and point to the corruption. First, Donnie's innocence. Prior to this moment in his life, had Donnie Reynolds ever been in trouble or even been in trouble with his parents? Donnie's dad, Donald Sr. is unequivocal. He never give us any problems at all in school or anything.
Starting point is 00:16:13 In fact, he was an athlete, and he did everything he could do to run the business. Marty got us felt. And I think they assumed, you know, black hip-hop mogul with guns, they were going to find drugs. Which they didn't. Funny thing, as these law enforcement officers tossed the Reynolds' houses and violated their privacy and their rights, they did so without a search warrant. Oh, they had a search warrant with them.
Starting point is 00:16:43 It just wasn't filled out, or signed by a judge, or legitimate, therefore. Donald Reynolds, Sr. The search warrant wasn't signed by a judge, and later the search warrant was signed by a judge. They made the search warrant up at my kitchen table. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know much about that. But I would think that if you gave me a search warrant at my house,
Starting point is 00:17:12 that search warrant would be the same as if I went to pick it up at the courthouse. A day or two later, I went to get a copy of the search warrant. And my search warrant was different from the search warrant they had on file. I mentioned earlier, I was in the military, and I grew up, taught to respect authority, the government, and everything. And one of the things I did was went to the military. I was really surprised that the government would use such tactics as it's gone. And I'm getting more surprised as time went along. Then there were Donnie Jr's guns. The ones the government knew would be there because they were all permitted and legal. If you're enjoying Dead Drop and
Starting point is 00:18:04 of course, we hope you are. Then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great, granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there on the ground right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com.
Starting point is 00:18:54 There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcast at Costard and Touchstone, like the donor, a DNA horror story. The Hall Club. closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop. Because Donnie Jr. had kids. His parents had bought him a large, heavy gun safe. The law enforcement officers made Donnie Jr. open it for them.
Starting point is 00:19:27 Donnie Jr.'s mother, Janice Reynolds. And when they found the gun, he had to open the safe. and they look and they opened them up all the certificates there and they went laid into the garage where he kept them kept the safe because it's too big
Starting point is 00:19:47 get upstairs kind of hard it was really heavy they put it on the ground, went through it and they took whatever they went out of it and they loved what he had because he had some he had sent it out of gay special special color like gold to it and everything.
Starting point is 00:20:05 And they fascinate older guns. You know, he's doing just like most American whites do it. And they do more than we do. But he did it by law. He took the class and got it done. And he said he got the stamps and stuff. He was real proud of himself. Because I think it was great for him to doing stuff he was trying to do.
Starting point is 00:20:31 and show people that everybody can live within the laws and make it different. And we worked hard to what we got. At trial, Donnie Jr.'s case was further complicated by a trial unusually biased in favor of law enforcement. Judge Dennis Inman had worked for the Knoxville Police Department, Marty Gottisfeld. Donnie's judge used to represent the Knoxville Police Department, the same police department that was part of the federal task force's house. Prior to that was a state level attorney who represented Knoxville Police Department when they would get sued for police brutality.
Starting point is 00:21:09 So his job was to cover the ass of the police department when the police department did bad things. Judge Dennis Inman refused to let Donnie tell the jury anything about his legitimate businesses, like the live music business, to explain why he had large amounts of cash on hand. Instead, the prosecution leaned on other witnesses, drug dealers, and gun runners who'd also been caught up in the fast and furious investigation. Most of them were actual criminals who understood that when law enforcement wants to bury an innocent person like Donnie Reynolds with your help, you help. Because putting Donnie Reynolds on the hook got them off the hook. The truth has no place in it. Donnie's case wasn't helped by his legal representative.
Starting point is 00:21:56 either. For a while, Donald Sr. paid for the best lawyers he could afford, but they too seemed to think Donnie was guilty. I've paid the lawyers to do a job for me. They paid lawyers. And they told me at the time that they were experienced in the type of case that my son was doing. But yet when the trial came, it was obvious to me that they didn't, hadn't done their home. homework and that they were collaborating with the government. I kept pushing the search warrant
Starting point is 00:22:34 and they did not want to go that route. So that to me was saying, okay, if you guys don't want to push the search warrant, you're not trying to help solve this case. Harrison and Swartzworth. Why do you think it is
Starting point is 00:22:50 that these lawyers, not just the ones that you've paid for, but a string of lawyers have been either unwilling or unable to provide Donnie with documents from his trial, including transcripts. Now, these are documents that should be freely available to the public. You go to the courthouse, you pay 25 cents a page or whatever it is, and they should give you copies of these documents. For some reason, these documents seem to either not exist, or they are not available to Donnie to try to.
Starting point is 00:23:26 to, let's say, launch an appeal. Why is it that the people who are supposed to be on his side have been so unwilling to help? That's been a mystery to us also. Because we've been reaching out to people ever since this began, and the story remains the same
Starting point is 00:23:48 that he is, for whatever reason, not able to do that. I don't know. You can't. We hadn't told us when. When this thing started, it just kept getting bigger and deeper and deeper. And as it progressed, we are where we are right now. It did get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Starting point is 00:24:11 And in part, it became bigger because Donnie would not flip. There was nobody to flip on, right? We all believe he's innocent. They kept saying, well, we'll give you a deal. If you flip, he didn't flip. And then the prosecution made a recommendation of something like 15 years or 20 years. And then he gets essentially a life sentence. And in the federal system, there is no parole or probation.
Starting point is 00:24:39 You get 15% off for good behavior. But 15% off 75 years. Big deal. He'll be 100 years old. How did that happen? And why do you think that happened? I'll tell you one thing that happened in the court. She mentioned the court.
Starting point is 00:24:56 We didn't get to hear a lot. We weren't right up front with the testimony because they said she had said something to Donnie or something. And we had to go outside of the courtroom during part of the trial. And I think that was by design. So we couldn't hear and see, you know, the gestures and everything that was going on. and that's one reason I can't answer your question to appoint. Life plus 75 years. Why on earth did Donnie Reynolds, with no previous offenses of any kind,
Starting point is 00:25:36 no record whatsoever, gets such a staggeringly harsh prison sentence? Life plus 75 years. Yeah, longer than Al Chapo. Marty Goddisfeld. But they never found any drugs on Don. and there's no accusation that he ever hurt anybody. He's more dangerous to them than El Chapo in some ways because he stands to implicate them.
Starting point is 00:26:00 If his stuff comes out, people in power are going out of power, potentially going to prison, so they view Donnie as a bigger threat than El Chapo. And they're just desperately hoping that the whole thing doesn't bust open and all of the scandal come out, because like Donnie's case is not the only case there that stands to implicate some very high of people.
Starting point is 00:26:23 When the police came, at first they attempted to kick the door in, but whoever was attempting to kick the door, I guess they didn't know what they were doing and didn't get the door to open up. So when they proceeded to enter the home, they had my father lay on the ground, and the agent proceeded to put his nine millimeter handgun to the back of my head. That's the voice of Adonis Reynolds, Donnie Jr.'s son. He might be this terrible story's most heartbreaking victim. Consider the repercussions of being eight.
Starting point is 00:26:53 Eight. And having federal law enforcement point a gun at your head while barking at you to get on the floor. When you're not the son of a drug lord, not living the life of an actual crime family, it could be pretty shocking when the authorities crash into your house, looking for drugs that aren't there. Had his father's trial been fair,
Starting point is 00:27:14 it still would probably have impacted young Adonis. They pointed a gun at his head, But nothing about the trial or anything surrounding it or anything since the night they raided his fathers and his grandparents' houses has been even remotely fair, not to Donnie Reynolds or his parents or his children. Adonis went from a future filled with athletic promise to a future filled with uncertainty instead. Before they came to the house, my life was amazing. I've always been in the sports. Like I ran AAU track. I was in multiple different tournaments.
Starting point is 00:27:52 I was doing things for football, tracks, soccer growing up. So my dad never missed a beat when it came to that. Any type of organized sports or any type of school activities or anything that he could be present for, he was there for. I have four championship. I have four state rings. I have this jersey right here from the SCF championship in my XFL trials with the Orlando Guardians. I've had an excellent athletic career. Different circumstances prevented me from excelling to where I wanted to be.
Starting point is 00:28:25 With everything that happened with my father's situation, it pulled a lot of my college scholarship offers off of the table. My dad and my grandmothers were really kept the family close-knit together. On a daily basis, I know that my family is struggling mentally with having to deal with this, but I just feel like sometimes I have to try to carry the weight on my back to absorb a lot of the stress of what's going on. It's hard for me to find meaningful employment to keep myself afloat. The McDonald's won't even hire me.
Starting point is 00:28:59 So it's just like I work specific jobs that I can work as long as I can until the terminage. The nightmare continued and got worse. Suddenly, Adonis found himself attracting the undue attention of local law enforcement. enforcement because of who he was. I've been beat on by the police on multiple different occasions. Incarceration, from getting pulled over at traffic stops. I've been pulled over by undercover police officers in Knoxville. That's one of the main reasons why I left. Because I value my safety and I value my life a lot and I'm not going to allow myself to be unalived by a police officer in Knox County. Unalived by a police officer. That's a chilling way to put it, don't you think?
Starting point is 00:29:45 Donnie and I are in pretty regular touch. He'll send me an email, and sometimes it'll take a day to get to me. Sometimes it'll take 10 days to get to me. He'll send me mail. Sometimes it arrives. Sometimes it just disappears into the air as though he never sent it, even though it has a tracking number on it. And sometimes it's emails.
Starting point is 00:30:08 We don't get them, and his phone calls are just months a week. because sometimes twice a week, I don't know, what they have privileges or whatever anyway. But it's really restricted on his phone conversations and stuff. Do you get the feeling the Department of Justice and various people in the federal government want Donnie, his family, and his situation to be hopeless? Well, we don't believe in hopeless here at Prisoner X.
Starting point is 00:30:42 I know from experience that hope and struggle go hand in hand. So what can we do to help Donnie Reynolds other than tell his story? Well, if you can write an email, short and sweet's okay, then you can help make Donnie Reynolds an ex-prisoner. Marty Goddisfeld. I think it would be great if a lot of people just wrote to him and started opening up communications with them so that the prisons at the CMU would know that
Starting point is 00:31:11 that his situation with his mail is being watched, And if they clamp down, people are going to notice. For the size of the case that he has for what's at stake, right? He's really obscure. He's not really well known. And that's kind of their number one goal, right? As long as he is this obscure individual, they can keep doing this to him. And they can keep this evidence from ever being presented in court.
Starting point is 00:31:40 So I think one thing would be just to have a thousand people write him a letter and to have the CMU have to deal with that and know that there are people on the outside watching. But even like the cartel people were like, we never knew him, we never met him. Like his trial transcripts are out of this world. If you've not read the trial transcripts, really, I commend them to your reading. Because that's where they mention some of the cartel people, they mention El Chapo, they mention the cop killer guns, they mention, you know, all this. But then these cartel people are like, no, we never met them.
Starting point is 00:32:09 And these cartel people, like one of them ordered a hit on American soil. and this person who ordered this murder, contract for hire murder on American soil, is coming to testify against Donnie, free on bail, and get sentenced to a lot less than Donnie did, even though he admitted to a higher drug weight than they even charged Donnie for. And Donnie gets life plus 75.
Starting point is 00:32:37 They've got to keep him quiet. On our website, you'll find a list of, of email addresses. You know what they say about sunshine and bullshit? In the matter of Donnie Reynolds Jr., they didn't just criminalize a man. They criminalized his entire family. The people behind Fast and Furious are all walking around free today, as they always have. They've got their lives and their homes and their relationships and their wealth. They still have their futures. The same isn't true of the Reynolds family. 25 years after the fact, and the Reynolds family remains as much a prisoner of this madness as
Starting point is 00:33:20 does Donnie. It's just a stone cold fact. What the DOJ did to Donny Reynolds was criminal. What they did to his family, that was even worse. Like I said at the beginning, sometimes people in power signal how afraid they are via their actions. The people in power responsible for the design. disastrous, fast and furious scandal have blood on their hands.
Starting point is 00:33:44 If innocence could bleed, those people would have Donnie Reynolds' innocence on their hands, too. We hope you found Donnie Reynolds Jr.' story compelling. We have an update. Donnie was transferred from the maximum security CMU in Terre Haute, Indiana, to the medium security CMU, which is now located in Cumberland, Maryland. While that may sound like good news, it actually isn't. As Donnie Sr. told me when he updated me about six months ago, the CMU itself was transferred. It's still a CMU, and the level of prison security is, well, it's pretty much irrelevant.
Starting point is 00:34:21 Donnie still has no access to the outside world. And the outside world has limited access to him. But that's why we have got to go at it. Here's Donnie's new address, and it'll be in the show notes too. Donald Ray Reynolds, Jr., prisoner number 323419. F.C.I. C.I. C.I. Cumberland. 14601. Burbridge Road, Southeast. Cumberland, Maryland, 21502. On the Bureau of Prisons website, which I'm looking at right now, it says, name Donald Ray Reynolds. Register number 32349-074.
Starting point is 00:35:05 Age 47, race, black, sex, male, release date, and in all capital letters, it says life. We need to fix that. We need to make Donnie Reynolds Jr. an ex-prisoner. Like I said, Prisoner X is one of several podcasts we're working on. Please let us know in the comments what you thought about it. As if you weren't going to anyway. In our next episode, fingers crossed, we'll begin the next part of my saga. How My Training as a Spy prepped me for life in prison.
Starting point is 00:35:38 You're about to meet some truly amazing characters, and we think you'll enjoy them. Until next time, I'm John Kariaku. Dead Drop is written by John Kirooku and Alan Katz. Costart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kriaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.

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