Julian Dorey Podcast - #223 - The Most Legendary 'Triple Agent' Who Created CIA Blueprint | Jesse Fink

Starting point is 00:00:00 Popov came to New York in August 1941. He had a meeting with Dick Ellis and some guys from the FBI here in New York City and said, look, here is this questionnaire that I've been given by German intelligence. They want specific information about Pearl Harbor. I'm telling you that there is going to be an attack on Pearl Harbor. Holy sh**. And this is quite a well-known thing, and I'm actually shocked that more people don't actually look into this stuff and that this sort of myth that the Americans didn't know about it sort of continues.

Starting point is 00:00:30 FDR was warned, right, as early as August 1941. Right, so... What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. Jesse Fink, welcome to America, sir. Nice to be here. Thanks for stopping through. It's very cool to talk to the guy who wrote the book behind Luis Navia, Pure Narco,

Starting point is 00:01:05 which I have right here, which is a phenomenal book by the way. But we talked with Luis for like six and a half hours or so and his life story is insane and you did an amazing job capturing it. Yeah. I spent about, you know, two and a half years, um, talking to Luis every day for hours on end. And really it wasn't until sort of the end of the writing process that I sort of visited him in Miami and spent a couple of weeks with him. In fact, I think it was three weeks. But, yeah, essentially wrote the entire book at the other end of the world um and uh he's a he's an unusual character that that is for sure we're definitely going to talk about

Starting point is 00:01:53 him today just because he's one of those guys that you can't believe he actually existed and existed as long as he did doing what he did and did it in you know in the most violent business in the world he happened to be like a not violent guy which is so strange in many ways but just quite a case study and one of the things like he and i talked a lot about was the morality of how he looks at things like he has a very black and white view of the world and in some ways is extremely amoral about things does that make sense yeah i think it that's it's um convenient to him to think in that way i think because he's dealing with some things that he's feeling pretty guilty about you know i don't think you you um can escape kind of moral culpability for being involved in a business that thousands of people are getting killed all the time.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Sure. You are part of that whether or not you actually point a gun to someone's head. You are involved with violent people and Lewis knew that for him to survive in that business, he had to have violent people around him who were going to do that kind of work. The fact that he didn't kill people personally still means that he has some sort of moral culpability for what he was involved in yeah it doesn't absolve you of the business that you're in for sure it's just unique you never hear about guys who like shy away from any of that that are in that business you always hear about

Starting point is 00:03:36 the dudes like cutting people up with with chainsaws and shit yeah and and the thing was um you know the people that i was working with, you know, the editors, the publishers, the lawyers who were reading the manuscript, they would say to me, you know, I on, we need to show, you know, sort of more compassion, more empathy here, some remorse, because there is going to be an element of the readership that is going to read your story and just still think you're a prick, right? You have to show some humanity here. You need to show some contrition. And there were moments where, you know where he had no problem showing that. There were other moments where there was a lot of bravado. He was sort of back in business with that sort of mentality that helped him survive for three decades at the top of that business. So that was a struggle. And this is the first book that I've ever done where, you know, I had to

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Starting point is 00:05:25 exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Even though I wrote the book, you know, it was based on his story. So that's, you know, that's fair. And he's alive while you're doing it. And he's alive while I'm doing it. But there were, you know, I had to sort of deal with situations where, you know, I would write a sentence where I'm kind of talking about, you know, his character, you know, my observation of his character and trying to show some of that sort of empathy and, you know,

Starting point is 00:06:00 sort of humility and some grace. And, you know, he would read it and not be very happy with, you know, how I had interpreted him. And he said, well, you know, if that goes in, I don't want to have anything to do with this book. Well, you know, okay, okay. How many times did he say that? Oh, this would happen all the time.

Starting point is 00:06:21 You know, we would be screaming at each other, you know, sometimes at 2 o'clock in the morning because it was in Sydney when I was writing this and, you know, he had been to a bar and, you know, wherever he was like, you know, Cuba or, you know, Key West or wherever, he just got out of a bar, he had a bit to drink and he was pissed off you know and so a lot of things were were actually cut from the book um because he wasn't happy with them and also um he uh he he sees himself as a sort of a bit of a comic character. I would agree with that, yeah.

Starting point is 00:07:10 So when he first approached me to write this book with him, you know, that he saw it as a sort of a Mr. Magoo of cocaine kind of tale. And obviously – Stupor. And he's very attached to that image of himself as Mr. Magoo. Yeah. Right? And he kept on wanting to see more of the Mr. Magoo in the manuscript. And I'm reading it and thinking, fuck, this is dark, you know?

Starting point is 00:07:35 Of course. You've just eaten spaghetti while someone's being tortured, you know, in the next room. Yeah, but the spaghetti was good. What do you want? Yeah. So that was a real challenge for me as a writer because I felt like the story was a lot darker than he wanted it to be. He does.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Like when he walked into the restaurant the night before, I hadn't seen him before, but he walks in and he kind of looked like Francis Ford Coppola. You know, like he was... You would never look at this guy and say cartel member. Right? He really... So I see where he's coming from with the Mr. Magoo thing, but to your point, you can't operate at those levels

Starting point is 00:08:22 and be around the people like the Marios and who was the other guy? Pilo? Was that it? Pauly. Pauly. You can't operate around guys like that and not have some sort of culpability for sure. And for what it's worth, I do think the intro of your book, like I was maybe six pages into it and I'm like wow this is this is starting to go long and then

Starting point is 00:08:47 about halfway through what ended up being about halfway through the intro i understood what you were doing it was an extremely long intro because you had to not you had to not only set the scene which is what the intro is for but you also had to play with what you just laid out which is your relationship with him and the difficulty in balancing all of this to write an honest book that also is something that he's going to be able to say, okay, all right, this makes sense. This is based on some truth and it gets my story out there for better or worse regarding the parts. And I thought it was just really valuable when I finished that up because then the rest

Starting point is 00:09:21 of the book, I could kind of put myself in your shoes. Like I'd be reading what you're writing, you know, it might be heavy shit or whatever. And I could put myself in your shoes with, oh, there were probably a lot of conversations about this one. And he got this one in there. I wonder which ones he wasn't able to get in there. Yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 00:09:37 And I had no intention of the intro being 52 pages long or whatever it is. But I was, you know, dealing with my own sort of moral issues, obviously in writing this book and spending all this time, you know, documenting this guy's life and I didn't want to glamorize him in any way. I didn't want to say, you know, cocaine trafficking is a good thing to get into. But, you know, there are various points when I was writing it, I was thinking, wow, this guy had a great fucking life.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Why didn't I do this? It sounds like a pretty good deal. You only go away for five years and you're involved in sending out 25 tons from the Venezuelan jungle. Yeah, we'll come back to that. sending out 25 tons from the Venezuelan jungle. Yeah. Yeah. We'll come back to that. There's a lot on the bone there, and I'm still figuring out, because we just recorded with

Starting point is 00:10:32 Luis, which one I'm going to put out first. I'll probably put his two out and then put one out with you, but that'll be TBD. But you actually have a book that's brand new now coming out called Eagle in the Mirror. Guys, if you're still watching this video and you haven't yet hit that subscribe button, please take two seconds and go hit it right now. Thank you. And this one I really want to dig into because I haven't had the chance to read this yet. this is and looking up this guy who you is dead now who you obviously spent a lot of time with as trying to re-piece together what was this man's life on your own who not only was at the middle of spying at the highest levels of world war ii but was intricately involved in some ways that i was

Starting point is 00:11:21 unfamiliar with in even like the creation of our CIA here in America as a guy who was supposedly MI6. This is a story that involves accusations being thrown around about his allegiances, being a double spy, triple spy, all that. But to just start it off, how did you even hear about this guy? Charles Howard, Dick Ellis was his was his cover name i guess in mi6 right so um after i um finished pure narco um uh the pandemic hit the world completely kind of wrecked the you know promotional campaign for for pure narco lewis couldn't uh come out to austco. Lewis couldn't come out to Australia. I couldn't come to the United States. It was a disaster really. The timing was terrible for us.

Starting point is 00:12:11 And then I wanted to write another book but I could not go anywhere. I was stuck at home. There was nothing that I could do other than essentially go to the supermarket, buy groceries, or go to thrift shops in the morning before, I think, noon. I think they just sort of stayed open. They let the thrift shops stay open? They let some thrift shops stay open, I guess because they're charities. Anyway, and you couldn't even sit in a cafe in Sydney. You couldn't sit at a cafe table.

Starting point is 00:12:50 It was ridiculous. Australia was crazy with the pandemic. It was crazy. And, you know, people couldn't play basketball and there were literally, like, helicopters turning up with police. Oh, yeah. And saying, you know, get off the fucking court, you know, go home, you know. And so I was spending a lot of time just sort of, you know, sitting at home,

Starting point is 00:13:17 going to thrift shops and buying CDs and old books. And my father was doing the same thing. And he called me up one day and said, oh, Jess, by the way, look up this guy Dick Ellis. I just bought a book and it mentions this guy called Dick Ellis. He's Australian. He was involved in espionage. He was accused of being a Nazi Soviet spy. And I was like, what?

Starting point is 00:13:38 I never heard of the guy. The amazing thing was he actually came from the same suburb, Annandale in Sydney, where my father lives. And I thought, wow, what a story. I've never heard of this bloke. And started looking into it. And the great thing was that because of the pandemic, the National Archives in London decided to sort of make all their files downloadable for free. So while I was being stuck in Sydney, I could download thousands of files from MI5. Is that who Andy, is that what Andy used? He used that?

Starting point is 00:14:20 Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. So you were allowed to do that online. So instead of paying £3.50 for every file that you downloaded, it was all free, right? So I downloaded 2,000, 3,000 files. That'll do it. Yeah, but they're hundreds of pages long in each file, right? And so I had so much material.

Starting point is 00:14:41 I didn't have to travel to London to get the stuff. I ended up sort of basically just doing, you know, internet research into Dick Ellis. And suddenly I had, you know, 5,000 files on my computer. And I thought, well, you know, this is the start of me trying to figure out who this guy was. And the thing was, it was really just a sentence at a time from whatever document and then piecing it together with a sentence from another document and then suddenly putting together a timeline of this guy's life, trying to figure out where he was. And suddenly I had sort of a very rough sketch of kind of his life from, you know, 1895 in Sydney through to 1975 when he died in England. And throughout the 80 years that he was alive,

Starting point is 00:15:34 he was involved in, you know, the biggest events of the century, you know, World War I, the Russian Civil War, World War II, creation of the OSS, which became the CIA, the Cold War, you name it. He was involved in all these things. And he was a fascinating person because he was a self-educated Australian guy who was born in fairly impoverished circumstances. His mother died when he was very young. His father had no money and he was sort of shuttled around sort of farms and, you know, boarding houses when he was a kid with his brother. He decided to sort of take up classical music,

Starting point is 00:16:23 became a very sort of accomplished classical musician, then went off to England at the start of the First World War, enlisted in the British Army, sort of went to the Western Front, then became an expert in languages. So he ended up sort of speaking like seven or eight languages. Like during the war? Yeah. So he started studying Russian towards the end of the First World War. He was sort of picked up by the intelligence corps of the British Army

Starting point is 00:16:57 for his sort of facility in Russian. He became a king's messenger for the king of england which is like a courier an official courier for the king of england um were you able to find any i don't know if it would be any first person stuff but any type of research on his takeaways his emotions his mind state regarding World War I and what that was like being in the trenches there. Because it's kind of – when you look at history, I like to study World War I as much as I can because it's almost like the forgotten of the two.

Starting point is 00:17:36 Everyone – we all love studying World War II. But World War I is really what started World War II, and it was a crazy fucking battlefield type in that war. I mean, these guys were, it was brutality at its worst. Yeah, and he was injured like three times and just thrown back in every time after he recovered. So, but getting back to your question, no, it was very difficult to sort of get any kind of insight

Starting point is 00:18:04 into what was going on in his mind or anything like that because he never really wrote about himself. And so there wasn't much documentation about Ellis. There were like some papers in the National Library of Australia, which included sort of a typewritten sort of piece by Ellis about his early life in Australia. So that sort of formed the basis of like the first part of the book about growing up in Australia. I couldn't have done it without those papers. But beyond that, it was very difficult to kind of get a sense of where exactly he was in the First World War. I mean, I obviously got his military reports and things like that, but they only tell you so much.

Starting point is 00:18:50 But the thing was with Ellis, he was obviously very good at languages and that was what sort of put him in the... The crosshairs of the spies kind of thing? Well, I was just going to say, yeah, it put him on the radar of MI6 when he got to Oxford University. So he started studying Russian at Oxford, and he was only there for a very short time. It was about a year before he ended up being sent off to Constantinople,

Starting point is 00:19:34 which is Istanbul, and his job was essentially intelligence gathering. The main enemy was obviously the Soviet Union. You know, the Russian Revolution had happened, and obviously everyone in the West was worried that the communism was going to spread to the West. And he was sort of an expert in sort of Russian and Russian affairs, and that was really how his intelligence career started in the early 1920s. And then he was sent off to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and all through the 30s and 40s,

Starting point is 00:20:20 his main target was obviously the Soviet Union. What kind of work is he doing at these places? Because we've talked with some spies on this podcast and we've had a lot of guys come in like yourself and talk about different ways that espionage can occur. But you have dudes who maybe in today's terms, maybe someone works at the State Department, but really they're there as a CIA spy.

Starting point is 00:20:44 Then you have guys who drop in under an assumed name with a legend the whole bit and they live there and they're really working as a spy and maybe they do a little more on the ground like hand-to-hand type things if you know what I mean with that. What was his role in these early settings, be it in Germany and Eastern Europe, focusing on the Soviet Union and the spread of communism? I think from what I can gather, his main sort of role was sending out false information and selling of false information, sort of being involved with people who were sort of connected to the white Russian community, which is, you know, another word for essentially the Ukrainian community in Europe in the 20s and 30s who, you know, there was a group obviously

Starting point is 00:21:39 of Russian exiles who were against the communists and he married a Ukrainian woman. He was accused of sort of selling information to the Nazis sort of through the conduit of his own brother-in-law. Wait, why? So his wife's brother-in-law was involved in selling information to the Nazis, right? And the question is, how much was sort of Ellis cognizant of where, you know, this information was going and what information was it and why was it being sold. Let's fast forward in some years, obviously, right?

Starting point is 00:22:30 Yeah, but understand that this is all very vague and I'm trying to essentially sort of explain what the substance of the charges against Ellis are, is that he was involved in selling information about the British intelligence service to the Germans, right? What he's charged with. What he was accused of. And that also that at some point he was sort of compromised and then sort of ended up sort of working for the Soviets as well,

Starting point is 00:23:06 right? There's not much evidence against him in both regards. In fact, there's nothing to show that he was a Soviet agent at any time. There is some sort of evidence to show that he was involved in the trading of information with the Nazis. But, you know, you've got to remember sort of prior to the Second World War, there was a degree of cooperation between the British and the Germans against their common enemy, which at the time was the Soviet Union, right? And that's a story that really hasn't really been explored that much sort of as far as i know

Starting point is 00:23:45 in in and what from what i've read in sort of history books is is the cooperation between the british and the germans yeah in the in the early 30s you know after sort of hitler came to to power and obviously people know about appeasement and neville chamberlain and everything else, but there was a lot of, you know, sort of fairly dark shit going on in the intelligence services of Britain and Germany against the Soviet Union. Yeah, in all honesty, in America, we had some of that problem too with the guys who later formed OSS and CIA. Yeah. So my feeling, my takeaway from doing the research and what Ellis was accused of was that he was essentially being instructed

Starting point is 00:24:39 by his bosses at MI6 to trade information with the Nazis. And what happened was that at some point he possibly received some sort of money. Now, I don't know what the circumstances are. It cannot be proven what the circumstances were, but at some point there's this allegation that he sort of received money for some information. But, you know, as you know, you've probably looked into, you know, other intelligence stories. You know, intelligence is not a sort of a straightforward business. You're involved in some fairly kind of, you know, morally sort of compromising situations and I think that whatever he was doing, there was no bad intentions or there was no nefarious plan to undermine his own intelligence service.

Starting point is 00:25:42 I think he was involved just in doing something that MI6 wanted him to do, but it wasn't for the knowledge of anyone else. And then what happened was that after Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963, it only took two years for Ellis to be hauled into an interrogation room in London where he was grilled by sort of a joint committee of MI5 and MI6 officers about why his name was appearing in these interrogation reports of Nazis that had been interviewed after the war. So obviously what happened when Kim Philby defected was

Starting point is 00:26:26 they went back to all their archives, they went through all their interrogation reports of Nazis and they found, oh, who's this Captain Ellis that's supposedly selling information to these German officers? Why do these German officers know this guy called Captain Ellis? Who could that be? And the interesting thing was that one of these reports crossed the desk of Kim Philby, who in 1946 was still working for MI6. Yeah. So Kim, just for context for people out there, I'm going to have you explain this if

Starting point is 00:26:57 you don't mind, but Kim Philby was one of the reputed Cambridge Four, Cambridge Five, whatever it was, and became the highest ranking MI6 member to ever be revealed as a spy, in this case a Soviet spy. But can you just explain the background of how he was revealed and the defection and all that, just so that people understand? Well, he was under suspicion really from from the early 1950s um and uh he denied that he was a a russian spy and um and it wasn't until 1963 that he uh he was in beirut in in lebanon and actually sort of escaped in the middle of the night and ended up in Russia and suddenly, shit, we've got this massive high-level defection.

Starting point is 00:27:50 It's embarrassed the intelligence services of Britain and the United States and Canada and all the other sort of Western intelligence agencies. And what happened was that then there was suddenly a big witch hunt within MI6, MI5, the CIA, you know, to find other sort of possible Soviet moles, right? So they went back over all the sort of the interrogation reports of Nazis and this is where Ellis' name came up.

Starting point is 00:28:33 And going back to 1946 when no one was suspecting Kim Philby, one of these reports went across Kim Philby's desk. Someone said to him, do you have any idea who this guy Ellis might be? And he said, I have no idea who this person is. No further action. Ellis or Ellie? Sorry? Ellis or Ellie?

Starting point is 00:28:52 Ellis. So actually him. Yeah, Ellis. Captain Ellis, right? And I'll get on to it. There is another Ellie, but I'll talk about that later. Philby wrote, no further action, even though Ellis and Philby basically sort of shared office space. It was a very sort of odd thing for Philby to do.

Starting point is 00:29:18 So in the context of the 1960s, something like that looks very odd. Sure. You know? And that was really why kind of Ellis fell under suspicion that a Philby might be protecting Ellis or might have been protecting Ellis at that time and that Ellis in 1946 could have been a Soviet spy. And there were the others who were, the Cambridge four or five, whatever it was, who were uncovered to actually be Soviet spies who were associated with Philby.

Starting point is 00:29:47 Oh, they've all been exposed eventually, yes, into the 1970s and so on. But at the time, in 1963, Philby was obviously the big one and everyone was shitting themselves because, like, how did this person? Ever feel like your WordPress site is moving in slow motion? Switch to Kinsta's managed hosting for WordPress and watch it fly. Host your site on Google Cloud's fastest servers with worldwide data centers so your pages load instantly. Need help? WordPress experts respond in under two minutes and will migrate to your site for free.

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Starting point is 00:31:07 And it caused, you know, great embarrassment in the United States and Great Britain. And so Ellis was hauled into an interrogation in 1965 and confronted with sort of allegations that had been made that he had sort of sold all this information to the Nazis and that he was responsible for all these terrible things that had happened where people had died and he denied that he'd ever been a Soviet spy. He supposedly sort of said, yes, I had passed information

Starting point is 00:31:42 onto the Nazis. But the information that we know about what he confessed to has only ever sort of come up in the book Spycatcher, which came out in 1987, which was this mega bestselling book that went around the world by Peter Wright. A book by Chapman Pitcher called Their Trade is Treachery, for which Peter Wright, who wrote Spycatcher, was the main source. And books by a guy called Nigel West, who was a well-known espionage author. And, you know, West had his own sources for his case against Ellis. But none of these things have ever been proven. They're all very circumstantial. And I think, you know, they've drawn a very long bow to kind of accuse Ellis of being

Starting point is 00:32:41 a Nazi and Soviet spy. There's no evidence whatsoever that he Nazi and Soviet spy. There's no evidence whatsoever that he was a Soviet spy. And it also, like, that in and of itself, it's not to say there weren't guys who didn't end up having trails go back to both, but again, the Nazis and Soviets, as you laid out earlier, didn't like each other. You had opposite ends in that spectrum in that respect. You had fascism and you had communism. So it seems like we had our McCarthy witch hunt here in America. This was kind of like the post-Philby witch hunt where perhaps, yes, there were obviously leaks. There were guys who were part of this. That's been proven in some ways for – in many ways for some of these other guys but does that mean that all the people they're accusing including like dick ellis therefore you know have to be one of the one of the things that

Starting point is 00:33:31 quacks like a duck here yeah but but don't forget you know not not every nazi was a fan of adolf hitler either right so you know you've seen valkyrie yeah and you know about canaris and and all the the um the plotters against hitler um stauffenberg and and so on you know, about Canaris and all the plotters against Hitler, Stauffenberg and so on. You know, there was a core of officers who were against Hitler. Now, so the idea of, you know, a British intelligence officer having sort of some sort of cooperation with sort of Nazi officers who were against Adolf Hitler kind of makes sense.

Starting point is 00:34:05 Yes. So there are all different ways that you can interpret a British intelligence officer having some sort of communication with Nazis. You know, you can see it in a very sort of dark light. You can see it in that light, right? We don't know exactly what the true information is because his supposed confession has never been published. We don't know exactly what was in it. We're only going on the say-so of Peter Wright, who wrote this book, Spycatcher, which essentially he wrote to make money. He was broke and living on the bones of his ass in Tasmania.

Starting point is 00:34:42 He had to have a juicy story. So he came up with this story about Dick Ellis. So anyway, the point is, you know, I went through all these documents, these thousands of documents, went over and looked at the specific allegations that were made against Dick Ellis and came to the conclusion at the end of it that there really wasn't much to pin on him and that you really have to give him the benefit of the doubt and that if he had been, you know, the spy that he was accused of being for the greatest enemies that the West ever had, you know, there are other things that he would have given up to the Russians and the Germans. There's plenty of things that he could have given

Starting point is 00:35:30 up to Germany and the Russians, and he didn't. Why would he be given the Legion of Merit by Harry S. Truman in 1946 for his contribution to the American war effort? Why would he sort of be appointed sort of head of MI6 in the Far East and North America post-war if there was any sort of doubt about it? Well, at the time, I'm playing devil's advocate here not that i disagree with your overall takeaway but at the time you know kim philby got really high up because people thought he was fine right so dick ellis could get let's say he wasn't dick ellis could

Starting point is 00:36:18 get up really high because people think he's fine i think he's a good spy and then suddenly one day they're like oh he's not yeah but some but the thing is, you know, in 1946, if this mention of Captain Ellis in this Nazi officer's interrogation report is appearing in a document, you know, Kim Philby's not the only one who would have seen that document. Sure. You know? So suspicions really could have been raised about Ellis as early as 1946. Anyway, and it wasn't until 1965 that we were called in

Starting point is 00:36:48 and asked to explain, you know, why are these Nazi officers sort of mentioning this Captain Ellis as a source of information. Did you have a chance to talk with any of his surviving family in making this book? No. And the only contact I had was with his granddaughter who lives in New York City, I believe, and Ellis' daughter lives in New York City,

Starting point is 00:37:15 but his granddaughter wouldn't give me any access to his daughter. So because they had sort of been, or they felt that they had been let down by other writers who had wanted to write anything about Ellis and they were very upset about the way that Ellis had been treated. His daughter had sort of returned all his medals to the British government after he'd been accused of these things. And he died in 1975 sort of with this big cloud

Starting point is 00:37:52 over his life, his achievements, his reputation. He died basically broke. And, you know, for Ellis it would have been, you know, a bit of pill, you know, to see if he had been alive, you know, the success of A Man Called Intrepid which came out, you know, one year after Dick Ellis died. Yeah, this is a book we have up on the screen right now. Which, you know, went on to sell 8 million copies and became this mega smash around the world and had a, you know, went on to sell 8 million copies and became this mega smash around the world and had a, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:27 it was turned into a movie with David Niven. So, you know. And this talked all about him. And Dick Ellis actually wrote the foreword for this book, you know, before he died, right? So Dick Ellis is mentioned in A Man Called Intrepid, but he doesn't really appear in the book itself except under the codename Howard.

Starting point is 00:38:50 So he was, it's a bit of a clue. I mean, obviously, you know, the codenames they use aren't particularly sort of clever. And the other thing is, you know know you asked before about ellie um there was actually a there's this russian uh spy um whose code name is ellie who they've never actually um even today they don't know who it is so other than kim phby, this Ellie is the most significant Russian spy that ever lived. And what was his – so let's go down that for a second. The Ellie, what was his – obviously they, in some form of intelligence,

Starting point is 00:39:37 have been able to gather what his codename was, but what was his calling card as a spy? What made him so disastrous as a mole? Well, there was a guy called Igor Gosenko who defected, and he said basically there's this guy called Ellie. He's been under your noses all along. He is the most penetrative sort of agent that Russia's ever had. And what happened was that basically with the agencies of, you know, the United States and the UK and sort of this, there we go, Igor Gassenko, in this lather about, you know, how filled we had managed to get away with it for such a long time,

Starting point is 00:40:35 Ellie was the biggest of them all. And so much has sort of been written about Ellie and people have spent their whole lives trying to figure out who he is and there's a question about whether he's actually real or not and it was just a lie. But, you know, having written this book, you know, I mean, it's such a complicated story. I don't know if I'm explaining it very well.

Starting point is 00:41:06 No, you're doing good, Joe. But there are so many strands to it. It really is, you know, getting into an espionage book, there's so many sort of rabbit holes that you can go down and it's a bit of a mind fuck really. And you don't know what's real and what isn't real. And it's, you know's the old wilderness of mirrors. Well, you said you started with like 5,000 documents,

Starting point is 00:41:30 something like that, 4,000 or 5,000 documents, and they're all 100-page or hundreds of pages long. What was the most common type of document you were reviewing, like individual case files, communications internally that have been declassified? What types of things were in there? You're good. Don't worry about it. Mostly they were interrogation reports of Nazis who had been interviewed

Starting point is 00:41:59 after the end of the war. And it was a real struggle really, I guess, to find the information I was looking for because so many of these files are, you know, very faded, you know, hardly legible. It's not like you can sort of run sort of a software program and get it to, you know, copy the text in the document. You actually have to read the thing yourself and type it out yourself. And, you know, I'm looking for any kind of mention of Ellis

Starting point is 00:42:40 in all of these hundreds of interrogation reports of these Nazis. And there was one that I had to pay for. I actually had to spend 200 pounds. It was one that hadn't been digitized. So I'm literally paying 200 pounds. What's that in American dollars? Fairly similar. Right now the pound trades for more, right?

Starting point is 00:43:05 I haven't looked at that in a while. I'm not wall street anymore um you know a lot of money like 300 american dollars or something right for this this 200 page file about this guy called um vladimir von petrov who was this chilean uh german agent um who was interrogated in Santiago in 1956. And supposedly, you know, Dick Ellis was mentioned in this file, and it's all in Spanish. Oh, so you got it translated too. No, but there was no mention of Ellis in it whatsoever, except for one page where someone had written in pen.

Starting point is 00:43:42 Can you get your money back for that? Written in pen, Ellis, question mark. And that was it. Right. And so there was nothing in this entire thing. It was like, Oh shit. You know, that was a bit of a waste of money, but, um, but you know, this is the nature of what you you're doing. You're just trying to piece together this guy's life. You're chasing a ghost in a lot of ways. Yes. And, um, and so Dick Ellis made this massive contribution to Western intelligence, particularly in the early 1940s when he came to New York, when he wrote the blueprint for the OSS with what became the CIA. Yeah, this is the mindfuck part.

Starting point is 00:44:28 If you don't mind, I'd really like to dig into this. Yeah. Like you were telling me before, if I understood this correctly, this was right before it went on camera, that Britain had an office. I forget what it was called in the United States in New York City that was essentially to try to get America into the war. I guess this is in like the late 30s, like 39, 40, something like that. 1940, 41, 42. So it sort of ran through to – it kind of sort of disbanded really after Pearl Harbor happened. And Dick Ellis is important in regard to Pearl Harbor. Oh, really?

Starting point is 00:45:05 Yes. And this is probably the biggest bit of dynamite in the book, really, that Ellis came out. He was the deputy to William Stevenson at British Security Coordination, which was this MI6 agency that had been set up in New York, essentially to get the United States into the war. It was basically monitoring sort of Nazi activity in the United States, you know, sort of pumping out its own propaganda and so on.

Starting point is 00:45:41 But the raison d'etre of this organization was to get the United States into the war, right? And there was an agent, I don't know if you've heard of him, called Dusko Popov. Yeah, like the Popov's mole thing that John Newman talks about, I think, or I see. Yeah. Popov has been sort of held up as the model for James Bond. He was this sort of Serbian playboy.

Starting point is 00:46:05 Can you just stay like this? Sorry. Just because the camera's here. Sorry. He was this Serbian, there we are, Dosko Popov. He's regarded as the main sort of inspiration for James Bond. And Popov was a German agent, but he was also working for the British. And Popov came to the United States,

Starting point is 00:46:39 and he had been requested to finance information about Pearl Harbor for the Germans, for the German intelligence service, basically on behalf of the Japanese. So the Japanese were interested in Pearl Harbor. So his job was to come to the United States, gather as much information about Pearl Harbor as possible. This was like in, this was in, so December 1941 was Pearl Harbor, right? December the 7th. Yep.

Starting point is 00:47:06 Right? Popov came to New York in August 1941. He had a meeting with Dick Ellis and some guys from the FBI here in New York City and said, look, here is this questionnaire that I've been given by German intelligence. They want specific information about Pearl Harbor. I'm telling you that there is going to be an attack on Pearl Harbor. Holy shit.

Starting point is 00:47:35 Yes. And this is quite a well-known thing. And I'm actually shocked that more people don't actually look into this stuff and that this sort of myth that the Americans didn't know about it sort of continues to this day and that FDR didn't know anything about it because from what I read and from what Ellis said, FDR was warned, right, as early as August 1941. So Popov came to New York. He had this meeting with Dick Ellis, who was his minder here in New York.

Starting point is 00:48:13 His minder? His minder. Like, you know, just the guy to hang out with and show him around and pick him up at the hotel and so on. And these guys from the fbi right and he essentially said look this is that this is the questionnaire this is the something that you should be looking into and you should be very concerned about it and um and then supposedly and this has always sort of been denied by, you know, various people sort of who cling to this idea

Starting point is 00:48:50 that the Americans didn't know about Pearl Harbor, but that, sorry, sorry, that Popov had a meeting Sorry. Sorry. That Popov had a meeting with Hoover, right? Oh, directly with him. Directly. And that, you know, this has been denied. But Popov wrote in his autobiography that he had a meeting with Hoover, that he sort of warned him about Pearl Harbor.

Starting point is 00:49:25 And Hoover ejected Popov from this meeting and said, you know, piss off, I don't want to have anything to do with you, just get out, you know. So Popov writes about this in his autobiography. It's a well-known story. And, you know, the story goes that FDR, that Hoover knew nothing about Pearl Harbor before it happened. But Popov maintained in his autobiography that the Americans were warned, that they knew about it

Starting point is 00:49:59 and that they chose to do nothing. So what was interesting to me in the course of researching this book was that I came across a transcript of an interview that Dick Ellis had done with a Canadian documentary crew back in the 70s when they were thinking about doing a documentary about the life of William Stevenson a man called Intrepid and the head of the desk in New York for Britain he was the head of the the British secure security coordination right and and Stevenson is regarded as a war hero in Canada

Starting point is 00:50:47 and the United States. You know, there's parks named after him in Canada and, you know, he's regarded as a national hero in Canada. And anyway, Ellis was interviewed by this program about Stevenson and he was asked about Pearl Harbor and he said that, yes, that the Americans were warned that Stevenson warned FDR, that Ellis and Stevenson together had basically got a message to the President of the United States

Starting point is 00:51:30 through his brother, Jimmy Roosevelt. Sorry, Jimmy Roosevelt. Can you just get that up? Can we look that up, Alessi? So there was some sort of message that went through him, so it didn't go directly. Sorry, not his brother, his son. James. Jimmy Roosevelt.

Starting point is 00:51:52 This one? Or would it have been... Who was the other... Yeah, there we are. Franklin D. Roosevelt's son. This is the right guy? Yeah. Okay. That a message had got to the president through Jimmy Roosevelt that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. Now, I don't know exactly why it had to go through Jimmy Roosevelt, but the substance of what Ellis was saying was that we got a message to FDR

Starting point is 00:52:24 that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. So that's separate to the warning that Popov gave Hoover. So multiple streams. Multiple streams. So this is confirmation that Ellis and Stevenson had got a message to the President of the United States. So that goes against the prevailing narrative that the Americans knew nothing about it. Question. Could there have been... In these worlds, obviously, a lot of information flows

Starting point is 00:52:57 where there's information that's purposely sent to beat disinformation, to draw people offsideside or things like that. Could there have been some sort of situation like that, given that there were so many potential targets that could have been attacked in the United States or something like this? And that's a valid interpretation, because that's probably what Hoover thought of Dusko Popov. He's like, why should I trust anything that you're telling me? You work for you work for the germans right while you're also working for the british but you know you could be a nazi spy and i don't know any better so get out of my fucking office right which is essentially what what what hoover said to pop off right but if ellis and and and william stevenson were

Starting point is 00:53:43 independently warning the the president of the united States that there was going to be an attack on Pearl Harbor, that's a different matter entirely. Because Ellis and Stevenson were well-respected in Washington. They were operating at the highest levels of the United States security, intelligence security apparatus at that time. What year did Ellis arrive in the United States? 1940. Okay. And he went right to work for this office in New York. So prior to coming here, if we could step back for a minute to save some context. You had mentioned a while ago, obviously, there had been questions that later came up about about him trading information with nazis

Starting point is 00:54:29 the timeline there sounded like it would have been more like 1934 1935 to me is that about right yes but the the weird thing is that a lot of the sort of the timeline would suggest that these charges against ellis would have been would have been sort of happening at around 1926, but the Nazis weren't even in power at that time, right? So a lot of the timelines don't actually work when you look at the actual accusations made against him. So wait, you're saying that when they were making accusations in, say, 1965, when they were questioning him, they were literally, it's on record, they were saying like, oh,

Starting point is 00:55:02 you were trading information with nazis in 1926 well saying that oh when you were in berlin you were you know trading nuts information with the nazis uh when when you were in berlin but if you look at where where ellis was at any particular time between the 20s and 30s you you know, he was stationed in Berlin from 1923 to 1926. He went to... That's when Hitler was in prison. Yeah, that's right, right? And from 1931 to 1939, he was living in London, right? Now, could he have been visiting, though?

Starting point is 00:55:39 Yeah, of course he could have been visiting. So you can't prove that he didn't sort of turn up and spend several weeks or whatever in Berlin and all these things could have happened at that time. But he was sending his kids to school in England. He was a member of the sort of Royal Geographical Society. So all these things can be proven that he was in London. He had addresses in London. I've got all the addresses of him in London. He was living in London. Right. So if he was up to all this sort of bad shit in Berlin, I don't know when he was doing it. There is a record of him being in Berlin in 1932, but the Nazis came to power what?

Starting point is 00:56:14 1933. 1933, right? So there's a big question mark over exactly what he's accused of and what the evidence is suggesting is that it just doesn't stack up. What was his role when he was in London from 31 to 39? Do we know what types of desks he was working or what his titles were? I don't know exactly what his title, I wouldn't say that he had a title or anything like that. But at the end of the 30s, he was involved in sort of the tapping of phone lines from the German embassy to Berlin.

Starting point is 00:56:54 And there was a suggestion that he had sort of passed on this information to the Nazis as well, that, you know, the MI6 was onto the telephone lines and were intercepting the calls between von Rubentrop and Hitler. So he was at the front of that potentially. Yeah. Okay. Now, you said he comes to the US in 1940, and you had said that in this time period he was dynamite in the eyes of some of the highest people in the US. So in the 30s, just because sometimes I get a little lost in this history, like the OSS really formed coming into World War II as the Americans' heartbeat center for intelligence but prior to that some of these guys be it wild bill donovan i think dullis was

Starting point is 00:57:47 back working on as a wall street lawyer at the time but like some of these some of the guys who were deep government kind of spies in the united states where were they operating out of like what was our what was mi6's communication i guess like go-between with the United States in the late 30s. Sorry, explain again. So MI6 eventually had a partner with OSS, right? Prior to OSS existing, who did MI6 talk to? Like you mentioned the FBI, but we don't think about them

Starting point is 00:58:19 as this international spy organization. They're domestic police more. Well, the predecessor of the OSS was coordinator of information. That was the body that existed before the establishment of the OSS. But Ellis essentially was the person who was doing all the work and he was sort of talking to Donovan really as early as, you know, the early 1940s. And if you read the book, you know, I've got multiple quotes from people who were very high up in the OSS and the American government, you know, at sort of assistant secretary of state level to, you know, the head of the OSS in Europe saying, you know, the person

Starting point is 00:59:13 who was really running the OSS was Dick Ellis. It wasn't William Donovan. Running it? Yeah, running it. Right? How so? You tell me. I don't know. You know, it's... you know that's a crazy you know that's a wild

Starting point is 00:59:28 claim it's a big statement but if you if you if you if you read the book you you'll see um you know he not only was involved in sort of writing a blueprint for the the setting up of an intelligence organization in the United States, which is on paper. It's provable. He has been credited with setting up training camps for OSS personnel in the United States for setting up Camp X in Canada. Camp X? Camp X was like this sort of training camp for OSS personnel.

Starting point is 01:00:10 Which, all these sort of remarkable things and the crazy thing is, you know, who is Dick Ellis? Who is this person that no one knows about? British guy too. Well, Australian. I'm very parochial. Right, right. Represent Britain though, you know i'm very parochial right right represent britain though you know what i mean yeah yeah yeah um but he always sort of regarded himself as as british so you know um but uh obviously you know when i when i first wrote the book you know my australian

Starting point is 01:00:38 publisher was super interested in it because it was like this untold australian story and i think it's just sort of crazy that, you know, this classical musician who spoke eight languages was sort of running an American intelligence services in the early 1940s and that we know nothing about it. So that's where I, that was really the starting point for me. Who the fuck? Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play

Starting point is 01:01:03 on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. How the fuck is this guy? And once the U.S. got in the war, though, in 1942, after Pearl Harbor happened in December 41, what became of that office

Starting point is 01:01:27 in New York? So it sounds to me like that's when perhaps this office was then used to help spin up what became the OSS. Is that pretty much what it was? So what became of? The office in New York that was in charge with trying to get the US into the war. Oh, British security coordination. Yeah, it was essentially disbanded after Pearl Harbor. They got their marching orders, and Hoover didn't want the British operating in New York anymore.

Starting point is 01:02:00 Hey, guys. If you have a second, please be sure to share this episode around on social media and with your friends, whether it's Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, doesn't matter. It's a BSC agent, who also corroborates the Ellis Stevenson story that FDR was warned. Whoa. Roald Dahl. Roald Dahl. There's a throw warned. Whoa. Roald Dahl. Roald Dahl. There's a throwback. Yeah. So, you know, there was a group of pretty interesting people working for BSC,

Starting point is 01:02:53 you know, including the playwright Noel Coward, you know, Roald Dahl, some fascinating people. And so you've got Stevenson, Ellis, and Roald Dahl saying FDR was warned. Now, I don't know why this hasn't sort of been more of a thing, but, you know, if you go and read about sort of Pearl Harbor on Wikipedia and things like that, this whole idea of FDR being warned is sort of dismissed as a conspiracy theory. They usually are.

Starting point is 01:03:23 Yeah. But here you have someone like Dick Ellis who is well-credentialed, who is well-respected, saying something that goes against the prevailing narrative that we've all been led to believe. And, you know, why was Dick Ellis discredited as much as he was? You could interpret that in a way. It's like, well, okay, we need to take out this guy. He said too much.

Starting point is 01:03:55 He's saying something. If you're conspiratorially inclined, it's a very sort of easy thing to do. Yeah. When you're in a situation like that, I think about that often. It's like you're in a situation like that i think about that often it's like you're gonna lose lose lose if you're the government because if you say well yeah we did get warned but it wasn't a conspiracy we just fucked up well now you all look like complete imbeciles to history but if you say yeah it's a conspiracy and it was real because we let it happen well now you look like you know false flag crazy people you can't really

Starting point is 01:04:27 win so it's amazing that something that happened christ over 80 years ago at this point is still kind of policed that way but it's a central part of not only u.s history but world history it's like if we don't get into the war there maybe war doesn't turn out how it is and we're all speaking German right now. Yeah. It's a real thought. But also what were the advantages of America getting into the war? There are many reasons to get into the war. And what would you say those were?

Starting point is 01:04:58 A war economy. I mean, look, why did people get into wars? Why did the Americans invade Iraq? Yeah. Right? The military-industrial complex. You know, it's a great employer. It creates industries.

Starting point is 01:05:14 It bankrolls an economy. So, you know, there are all sorts of reasons to get involved in a war. But anyway, these are questions I can't answer. All I could do really around this sort of Pearl Harbor thing is kind of just report what Dick Ellis said, and I thought it was pretty fascinating really, and it sort of warranted further investigation. So even though the office was disbanded, he remained in the U.S. for a couple of years, right?

Starting point is 01:05:42 That's right. He didn't leave until like d-day 44 something like that he left in 1944 okay so it was during this time where he's setting up like camp x and and all that stuff you'd already yeah he and he was more involved sort of i guess over the border in canada and with camp x and stuff okay and then he goes back to to england and um and England and then he's sent out to Asia. He sort of runs the Far East office for MI6. After the war? Yeah, after the war.

Starting point is 01:06:16 So he's sort of, he's out in Asia. He sort of sets up the Australian intelligence services for the Australian government. And then the 50s, 60s, it's sort of fairly quiet, really, and then it sort of all blows up in 1965. Oh, sorry, in 1963 when Kim Philby defects defects and then suddenly within 18 months or whatever it is, Ellis is hauled into an interrogation room in London and sort of confronted with all these reports of these Nazis being interrogated in the 40s who mentioned this guy, Captain Ellis. Yeah. And he's still working actively at that point in MI6.

Starting point is 01:07:05 Well, the most interesting thing is that he was actually employed to work in the library of MI6 and weed the files. So at the same time, yes, right? So why are you entrusting someone who's sort of under this cloud of suspicion with actually going into your library and throwing out files we don't need anymore. Very convenient. Yes, yes, you could look at it that way, or you could look at it and say, well, maybe they trusted this guy. And the fact is that various heads of MI6 still held Ellis in very high regard. And so even at his funeral in 1975, the head of MR6 at the time,

Starting point is 01:07:49 a guy called Morris Oldfield, was there, you know, and he slipped a note to Ellis' daughter and said, if there's anything you need, get in touch with me. If they really thought that Ellis was a Soviet spy, they wouldn't, you know, be doing that. It wouldn't have anything to do with the family or the funeral. So they wouldn't be sending Ellis a birthday card just before he died. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:15 Yeah, there's a lot. It's very strange. So I think my feeling is, having done all this sort of work to piece together Ellis' life, that Ellis took the fall for MI6. MI6 was involved in something that they didn't want anyone to know about and I think that it incriminated Ellis' bosses at MI6, who were still alive at that time, in 1965. So he was, I genuinely think that on the basis of all the things that I've put together in that book, which are very complex and very detailed

Starting point is 01:08:55 and I can't adequately explain everything that's in this book here sitting with you you now but there was nothing to suggest that that that that ellis was anything but a loyalist to his country well there there's also more history beyond just mi6 here with looking this way like you pointed out there's the famous story about appeasement with neville neville chamberlain but before them which is really what we're talking about there literally was you know some coordination between nazis and and the uk and maybe the us as well i know there's some evidence of that because you know they're fighting against the soviets but you know to me looking at it it all kind of starts at the top and one of the most embarrassing moments in 20th century British history was when King Edward VIII was revealed to have ties to Hitler and Germany. Because essentially I guess in like – he abdicated the throne in 1936. 1937, he's living in France in some ways in disgrace because he had left behind his throne

Starting point is 01:10:09 but he was writing and coordinating with adolf hitler and leadership of the nazi party eventually ended up visiting germany in 1937 and there were pictures of him in addition to his correspondence found you know giving this salute shaking hands with Hitler with his wife Wallace Simpson and there were there have been discussions of potentially if Hitler were able to take England that he would return King Edward the eighth to the throne because the only reason he had left is because he fell in love with this American divorcee and the Church of England wouldn't let it happen, so he left the throne. But this didn't come out until years later and was how bad this was in 34, 35, where, you know, we're working with them. That might just be, in the eyes of PR-ville, a bridge too far, if you will.

Starting point is 01:11:17 Fair to say? Yeah, fair to say. And I think this whole, the relationship between the British and the Nazis sort of in the mid-30s is a fascinating part of history that really hasn't been investigated enough. And I do remember one historian who had read my book sort of contacted me after it came out and he said you know that is really sort of the you know the blank part of the story that's that's the part of the story that that is the hardest thing for any writer to kind of put together but it's probably the most interesting kind of thing you could be looking at right now is what were the what was the the nature of the relationship between you know the british government and and the British government and the Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s.

Starting point is 01:12:09 You going to write that book? No, no, no. I think you should. No, no, too hard, too hard. Too hard. That's too hard. You've written some pretty hard stories here. You don't want to take that one?

Starting point is 01:12:21 Yeah, but look, that book's only 350 pages long, and that took me three years or whatever to write. And I've got to survive while writing these books. If someone was to give me half a million dollar advance, I'd happily do it if I had seven, eight years to write this thing. Because these things take an inordinate amount of time. Absolutely. But the thing was, at the end of the day, I just felt like after my father had suggested

Starting point is 01:12:52 sort of writing Ellis' story and I started looking into it and I saw his sort of crappy Wikipedia entry, I thought, you know, I owe it to this guy to kind of make an effort to kind of put his life together. Can we pull up his Wikipedia? I'm curious to see like how they put it. I haven't read his Wikipedia. Oh, it's good now. It's good now.

Starting point is 01:13:10 But when I first – Oh, they changed it? Yeah, yeah. It sort of covers a lot of kind of what's in the book now. But when I first started working on the book it was very brief interesting so you know it sort of covers now you know really the things that have come out in the book and um oh so they're using a lot of yours okay oh yeah yeah yeah can you go now alessi real fast go down on the page I just want to see some. Keep going.

Starting point is 01:13:45 All right. So, yeah, this is very extensive now. Yeah. And they're citing a lot of what you found. Yeah. Yeah. Now, that's kind of cool. So you've got something into the official record, if you will, the official online record.

Starting point is 01:13:59 Yeah. Did it change the narrative a little bit? Yeah. change the narrative a little bit yeah but but you know really i i i felt like i owed it to sort of dick ellis to try and write his story to to have an open mind about whether he was innocent innocent or not and um and i and i certainly didn't sort of go into it sort of with any kind of idea about how it was going to end or anything like that. I had a very open mind.

Starting point is 01:14:29 That's good. Yeah. And really by the end of it I thought, well, no, it just doesn't stack up. And really if he was involved in what he was involved in, quite aside from the allegations that were made against him, having, you know, served, you know, the British in the First World War, you know, be a decorated war hero in the Second World War, set up the, you know, the intelligence service of Australia

Starting point is 01:15:00 and the United States, you're a remarkable person. Not only that, he wrote a book on the League of Nations. He wrote a book on the League of Nations? He wrote a very respected book on the League of Nations. When? When he was an agent in Geneva in 1927. So an active agent wrote a book. That's really cool.

Starting point is 01:15:21 He wrote a 600-page book. 600 pages. We got to get you to do 600 pages on this period. Come on now. And so not only did he do that, he wrote a book. He was a scholar of Central Asia. He was sort of an active anti-communist, you know, right through to the early 1970s. He was a remarkable guy.

Starting point is 01:15:46 A man of many talents. A man of many talents, and why don't we know about him? Because no one had attempted to write his story. So stupidly, I decided I was going to be the person to do it. Here we are. Here we are, talking about it. What did he have to say about the League of Nations? For people out there, that was the, well what ended up being a predecessor to the un but it failed where the united states woodrow wilson invented the idea a bunch of the

Starting point is 01:16:11 allies after world war one joined it but woodrow wilson had political enemies in the united states and so congress didn't pass it so the u.s never joined it and then world war ii happened so it obviously didn't work but like and he's writing this in 1927 so this is when a lot of the european countries are in it it's active supposedly it's kind of work and what did he have to say about it well it's hard work to read and i wouldn't recommend anyone read it because it's you know written in very in very dry sort of prose um But the biggest takeaway from it was that Ellis was above all else. He wanted peace. He wanted peace between all nations. And he very, very obviously regarded the Soviet Union

Starting point is 01:17:01 as the biggest threat to world peace. And that's all through that book. The same guy who ends up being accused of being a Soviet spy. Yeah, exactly. obviously regarded the Soviet Union as the biggest threat to world peace. And that's all through that book. The same guy who ends up being accused of being a Soviet spy. Yeah, exactly. Right? So it doesn't make any sense. And so he's writing anti-communist kind of, you know, pieces,

Starting point is 01:17:22 academic papers, anti-communist pamphlets, all through the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. So the idea that he was a Soviet spy is completely preposterous. Well, let's play devil's advocate for a second. I tend to agree with that. But let's say he's writing the book in 1927, and he really is actually anti-communist and anti-Soviet and probably harbors that feeling politically throughout his life. It's not like that changes.

Starting point is 01:17:49 But in the 50s, 60s, let's say he had been turned. It would be a part of keeping the cover to be'm studying different guys who have flipped in the past and the whole Cold War and what went on there is that sometimes guys who became spies for the Soviet Union, they didn't do it because of the ideology but you know they got caught with their pants down in the wrong place or you know their wife left them and they had no money and they weren't seeing their kids and you know mr ggb comes in and says we think it or this problem for you and now suddenly boom i'm on team soviet so is it possible like again your takeaway is your takeaway and and I tend to agree with you. I think this guy had a pretty distinguished career. But is it possible that someone like this could have had a blind spot somewhere that was seized upon? Yeah, absolutely possible. But, you know, this guy had no money at the end of his life.

Starting point is 01:19:05 He was financially struggling. I really believe that if he was in the employ of the Soviet intelligence services, the KGB... He would have had more. He would have had more. You know, he wouldn't be struggling. He couldn't even, you know, pay his club memberships in London. You know, He could hardly afford clothing. The book, A Man Called Intrepid, sort of started off as a manuscript that Ellis

Starting point is 01:19:33 wrote himself. So he was sort of... What do you mean? Well, basically, he wrote a bunch of manuscripts about British security coordination that were rejected. Stevenson sort of asked him to sort of write an early manuscript about, you know, the work of British security coordination. It was rejected. Another book came out in the 60s called The Quiet Canadian. And then Ellis's manuscript was kind of used really as the basis for what became a man called Intrepid. But Ellis never saw the money.

Starting point is 01:20:14 But, you know, just going back to the Wikipedia page, if you scroll up, if you go down a bit and there's a painting. Down some more? Down some more. Right there? Yeah, so there's a famous painting. Isaac Brodsky's The Execution of the 26 Baku Commissars. Yeah, which was this incident in what is now Turkmenistan, which was then Transcaspia, where Ellis was actually accused of being

Starting point is 01:20:47 one of these British officers that had been painted here, who were witness to the execution of these 26 communists by a railroad. And it was a big deal at the time. It was turned into a very big deal by Stalin. And there was a man called Reginald Teague-Jones, who is also supposedly one of the British officers in this picture, who Stalin sort of personally held responsible for what had happened. And Teague-Jones ended up changing his name to Ronald Sinclair

Starting point is 01:21:29 and spent the rest of his life under this fake name because he was so worried that he was going to get assassinated by Soviet agents. What year again was this? This was 1918. Oh, so this is right as the revolution has gone underway. Yeah, that's right. So this was right at the end of, yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:59 And so when did Stalin come into power? Stalin would have been like the 30s, I think, right? Like 32, maybe 31. No, I think it was earlier than that. Might have been earlier. Was he 20? Let's check that, Leslie. Was he all the way back at 23 or 24?

Starting point is 01:22:16 No. Yes, it was around the early 20s. 1922. Yeah. Oh, shit. That's right. That man was there for a while. He was there for a while.

Starting point is 01:22:26 Died in 53, right? Yep. And so Stalin held Reginald Teague Jones responsible for the massacre of these communists. And so the question is, if Ellis was really a Soviet spy, why wouldn't he give up one of his best mates to the Soviets who were, you know, dispatching people all over the world? Assassins were going out killing people all over the world.

Starting point is 01:23:04 You know, the great purges of the late 30s that Stalin was involved in. And Reginald T. Jones, under the name Ronald Sinclair, actually ended up becoming vice consul to Dick Ellis in New York City. Whoa. Yeah. Okay. So that would be... In the early 40s, right?

Starting point is 01:23:25 He's literally working right next to him. And then he's a Soviet spy working next to a dude who actually – yeah. If you're a Soviet spy, why wouldn't you give up your best mate to Joseph Stalin, who was then very much alive? And very much bloodthirsty for any type of revenge. Exactly. So it doesn't make any sense. So this whole thing though because this is a part of your reporting looking at this era politically and how communism shaped so much before World War II. He's got a really good channel. I recommend it to people. He put out a video earlier this year. I want to say it was called like what really caused World War II. dichotomy all the way back to the Russian revolution of the fear of communism, which we focus on as the Cold War phenomena, but we forget was a major theme, as you've kind of pointed out today, between 1918 and 1940. In fact, it was really the theme that led to the rise of then

Starting point is 01:24:40 right-wing nationalism, be it the Nazis, be it the fascists, the fascisti in Italy and all that. So when you look at the fear that this puts into people, like obviously I'm not a fan of communism. I think it's pretty disastrous. I also think far right-wing fascism is disastrous too. Like it seems to me that there's something in us that when we see something that we politically really don't like we can't just be like okay we don't like that we have to stoke such fear of it throughout history that then we end up creating the opposite of it which then can cause problems every bit as big if if not bigger. Yeah. No? Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:25:27 And there was, you know, apropos of that, there was a program I think on Netflix about the Cold War that's on at the moment. Have you seen that? No, I haven't. Turning Point, the Cold War, I think it's called. I have not seen that. There was a Turning Point like 9-11 one. That was pretty good. Fascinating.

Starting point is 01:25:42 It's really good. And it's like a nine-part series about the development of nuclear weapons and how it's got completely out of control let's put that on the list yeah put that on the list it's actually really good but um you know it really documents that you know the the fear of of uh you know the russians sort of cause the americans to um you know get involved in things that they really shouldn't have done such as you know, the Russians sort of caused the Americans to, you know, get involved in things that they really shouldn't have done, such as, you know, obviously the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you know, the nuclear testing in the Pacific. And, you know, that, you know, there's not a good ending when you're involved in something like that.

Starting point is 01:26:28 No, there's not. And that's one of those things, like, I've always thought about that, us dropping the bombs. Like, I guess everything's hindsight 2020 and not to be too much of a Monday morning quarterback, but that always felt like a button, no pun intended, but a button you just don't press, right? Because luckily it didn't at the time, but that's the kind of thing that could lead to like a nuclear holocaust and all that. Yeah, but what the makers of this program were essentially kind of trying to make very clear was that, you know know it's that butterfly effect

Starting point is 01:27:06 okay you drop a bomb in Japan then you've got an invasion of Ukraine you know however many decades later it's all interconnected so they attack that in that documentary yeah and it's very good

Starting point is 01:27:21 so you know yeah I agree with you. Yeah, that's fascinating because you're right. It really does. It shifts. I mean you could go back to even like in America in our history. You look at the Revolutionary War and some of the standards that that and the immediate aftermath set still affect today. That's what, like 250 years ago something like that so it makes sense that the

Starting point is 01:27:45 the biggest war of our time of period world history world war ii which seems like a long time ago coming up on like 80 years it's still it drew all these new borders that now we are we are dealing with today that in fact as you just laid out but both wars that are happening right now draw back to world war ii and things that were drawn right after that absolutely crazy yeah so what was it you know obviously you had your takeaway that that dick ellis was treated unfairly here but were there any broader takeaways about maybe anti-communism or you know the soviet scare things like that that you that you thought there maybe there are other things that we need to reconsider about history and how people were treated maybe some people who besides dick ellis who were accused of things that perhaps

Starting point is 01:28:39 didn't do it did you come across any evidence of that or was it really just all focused on dick um well one one big thing that i took out of doing this book was you know it's the tendency of of modern journalism really to kind of you know rely on one source for a story. So, you know, the days of sort of going and sort of independently verifying something and then verifying it again and then verifying it again before you publish, are long gone. It's all just sort of incredibly reactive and it's like, you know, let's publish this as quickly as possible. You know, this person's made this allegation.

Starting point is 01:29:35 Okay, report that now. You know, put it online now. Tweet it out. Tweet it out rather than make sure it's right. And I think, you know, Ellis was a victim of that in that you had this sort of, these three books in the 80s that came out where his story was laid out and these accusations were made basically formed the basis of every newspaper story that has ever been published

Starting point is 01:30:06 about Dick Ellis ever since. No one else has sort of gone and independently tried to verify kind of the claims that were being made. And who were the sources for these claims being made in these books? What were their motivations? What did they have to hide? What was the veracity of what they were saying?

Starting point is 01:30:29 You know, there were reasons, you know, for people to say certain things about Dick Ellis, maybe to cover their own arses or their own intelligence failures. So, and, but I see this, this as the major problem. Even with, okay, you've got on the table Bond The Last Highway, which is a book I wrote about the lead singer of ACDC, Bond Scott, which took me four years. I mean I've spent more time on that book than any other book that I've written and and that is about um the the the last

Starting point is 01:31:08 three years and the death of Bon Scott and if you if you watch any um ACDC documentary about the death of Bon Scott or you know the the story of the Back in Black album you know it's that you know Bon died in the back of a Back in Black album. You know, it's that, you know, Bon died in the back of a car in London in 1980, that he'd had too much to drink and that his mate Alistair Kinnear couldn't take him up the stairs. And, you know, Bon choked on his own vomit and died. You know, that's the story.

Starting point is 01:31:41 And then, you know, ACDC triumphantly released Back in Black, that Bond had nothing to do with the lyrics on that song. And this is the greatest rock and roll story of all time. And this is the second biggest selling album of all time. And ACDC, a bunch of heroes. But, you know, the real story is very different. How so? Well, I spent a year and a half investigating Bond's death, right, because the police never did it in the first place. And I did it, you know, 40 years later, right, and found two witnesses who were there who saw Bond with their own eyes who said, oh, you know, he said, oh, yeah, he took heroin.

Starting point is 01:32:26 Mm. Right? And there wasn't one person back in East Dulwich with Bon in the back of the car. There were actually four people there. So this idea that, you know, one person couldn't carry Bon up to the flat because, you know, there was only one person there is completely false. There were four people.

Starting point is 01:32:48 If there were four people, he could have been taken into the flat and he could have survived. He wouldn't have been in the car. He wouldn't have been found in the car dead the next day. I don't know how much you know about this story. I don't know a ton. But my point is, getting back to your original question, is that when this story gets told, the people who write the story, they never sort of research it themselves. They don't go and find their own information. They don't actually kind of try to look at it from different angles

Starting point is 01:33:19 or different explanations for what might have happened. And the thing was, having done it myself, I found that there was a completely different explanation for what might have happened. And the thing was, having done it myself, I found that there was a completely different explanation for what happened that night. So I learned a lot from that. And, you know, and that was the same sort of diligence that I took into writing Pure Narco, where, you know, Lewis can tell me all these incredibly wild stories,

Starting point is 01:33:45 but I still have to go and verify them. And how do you verify? I mean, you can't verify all of them, as you said. No. But, like, how do you verify much of anything besides going to other people who supposedly were witness to it? Yeah, I mean, that's... That's pretty much it, right?

Starting point is 01:34:07 Yeah, there's that. Yes, it's very difficult, obviously, in the drug world to sort of go and find people who are prepared to talk to you on the record about what happened or whatever. But, you know, there are always sort of traces of, you know, information in old, you know, there were always sort of traces of, you know, information in old, you know, criminal case files, in old newspaper reports or whatever that helped me at least establish that, you know, when Lewis was telling me a story that, you know,

Starting point is 01:34:37 he was there, you know, in Medellin or Bogota at the time that he said that he was there, you know, and that these drug traffickers that he was involved with were alive at that time, you know, things like that. So you can't 100% verify something, you know, beyond a doubt with a book like that, but you certainly do as much as you can and then you just sort of have to make a judgment call about whether it's true or not. And I never really got a feeling that he was, you know, bullshitting me. And I said to him, look, if you lie to me at any point, forget it.

Starting point is 01:35:24 I don't want to have anything to do with it i cannot be a party to um a lot of bullshit you also don't want to write like a a novel that turns into some sort of hero's arc in in some way for someone who wants to change the story no but but my my point is that you know if you're going to connect with the reader what the way that you who wants to change the story no but but my my point is that you know if you're going to connect with the reader what the way that you're going to connect is you have to be completely authentic and fearless and be prepared to kind of you know um face up to your own fuck-ups and show some contrition and like we't talked about it, but the second book that I wrote was a book about my marriage, the failure of my first marriage,

Starting point is 01:36:12 and dating and all the terrible kind of time that I had after the dissolution of my first marriage. But it was a very naked book and it wasn't very flattering to me in any way. And I confessed things that, you know, most people would never sort of confess in a book, you know, things that weren't really meant to be put on a page. But I went ahead and did it and I put it in the book and then people would write me letters and say, oh my God, man, I relate to that so much because finally someone's sort of talking about the same things that I've been going through.

Starting point is 01:36:56 What kind of things? Oh, I mean, I've had OCD since my mid-20s. Me too. Yeah, have you? Okay, yeah, which is a terrible thing for anyone to go through, and I don't think anyone sort of adequately sort of explains what it's like to live with OCD. And I had to sort of put that in the book.

Starting point is 01:37:22 I didn't really want to, but it was kind of like I felt like it was an explanation for my own behavior during that time. You know, I was very promiscuous. You know, I was dating all the time. I was, you know, sleeping with three, four girls a week or whatever at that time. But it was like it was my way of dealing with that OCD. There was no other sort of explanation for it. And I don't know what kind of OCD you struggle with or whatever, but it's been something that I've been able to manage.

Starting point is 01:37:55 But at that time of my life when my life was falling apart, it was just very accentuated and very intense and, and sex, which just became a release from that. So I had to document that in the book. I had to talk about my own struggle with OCD and that's not something that I really wanted to kind of voluntarily do, but I felt like if I'm going to write a memoir, I have to do it as honestly as possible.

Starting point is 01:38:23 And the only way that you're going to connect with a reader is that you have to, you know, take that leap of faith. Yeah. And people can smell bullshit too. And people can smell bullshit. They can smell it. But the thing is, to this day, even though, you know, Laid Bare is, it never got published outside of Australia. But to this day, it is still the book that really that I get the most letters from readers about, you know. Probably Bon Scott and Laid Bare.

Starting point is 01:38:59 And I look back on that and I think, you know, yeah, I'm proud of that. That's very cool. That's what I should be doing as a writer. And, you know, I think I've taken that approach with all the books that I've written. And I do have a degree of, you know, empathy, I guess, for, you know, like for Bon Scott, for Louis Navier and now for Dick Ellis. I mean, I think they're all kind of either misunderstood people

Starting point is 01:39:37 or people who can't explain themselves, you know. They're just not able to explain themselves. But they've all got these sort of unique stories that are worth sort of putting on paper. I think that's the sort of the common strand. But yeah, you know, Laid Bare was, you know, the book that probably'm probably most proud of because it's the one that I was sort of given the opportunity

Starting point is 01:40:09 to be the most personal. Yeah, I think also in the era where we are currently facing with social media focusing on this whole, I got this perfect life, look at me, look at what's happening, this is all good I can selectively show you what I want most of the people who are posting those things almost everyone at least inherently may know that like shit's not that good for them even if their life is okay like it ain't like that and there's this weird competitive thing that happens where you

Starting point is 01:40:44 feel like you have to do that to show that your life is this so that you can look good to your friends or to people you don't fucking even know or care about. And so we have a higher degree of currency now, and there is more appreciation, righteously so, for people who are willing to be honest about stuff. Not in a way that's weird like shitting in public or something like that, but in a way that is just like, hey, this is a deal. This is my experience for better or worse. Take it as you will. And by the way, maybe there's some things in there you could relate to. And maybe us talking about this out loud or doing something in this case public with you writing a book that people can refer to that many people who don't know you can see you can help someone out that way unknowingly and it also you know and it sounds like this and how you're explaining it also helps yourself it's pretty therapeutic for

Starting point is 01:41:34 you yeah definitely therapeutic for me um and i mean i always just I always just get really upset, you know, when someone would say, oh, I'm so OCD. You know, I rearrange things in my fridge, you know, or I do this in my sock drawer. And it's like, no, dude, that's not fucking OCD. That's not really the worst part of it. The worst part of it is these intrusive thoughts that you get. I don't know if that's what you've been experiencing or dealing with,

Starting point is 01:42:12 but for me that's what was the hard part. It's like it's why these people do these compulsions. You don't really talk about these terrible things that are going on in your head. You can't stop them. There's no way you can stop this sort of terrible kind of process that you're going through. And I tried to sort of distract myself so many times, you know, just with drinking or sex or whatever I was going through at that time and it's not very productive.

Starting point is 01:42:40 It doesn't really get you anywhere. And then eventually you reach a point where it's like, okay, I just need to manage it. And I guess in some ways, someone asked me this years ago, said, you know, have you managed to kind of utilize your OCD in a sort of productive way with your writing? And, yeah, I think I have. I'm very meticulous about research, you know, about getting everything

Starting point is 01:43:08 right, about examining every possible document or, you know, being just absolutely fastidious. You seem pretty obsessed with the truth too, which is good. Yeah. But, you know, there's so much bullshit in the world it's like well you know um for me um you know the story of bon scott um i i really i was very passionate about putting that out there because i felt like i was correcting this ridiculous myth that had sort of built up around not only him but the Back in Black album. And now with, you know, Dick Ellis, I feel like, hey, you know, if my hypothesis is true that Dick Ellis wasn't guilty of the things that he's been accused of, he was a remarkable man.

Starting point is 01:44:05 He was one of the sort of the great men of Western intelligence in the 20th century. Pioneering men. He deserves much more than he's been given credit for. Irrespective of all the allegations that were made of him sort of providing information of the Nazis or being a Soviet spy, it's like what he was involved with was really impressive. We should know about these people. I think it's terrible that, you know, people like that just get forgotten and neglected and sort of put into the too hard basket. So it was good for me to write this book

Starting point is 01:44:42 because, you know, like I said, it started in the sort of at the beginning of the pandemic. I couldn't travel. You know, the Australian government made sure that we couldn't even leave the country for two years. That shit was crazy. It was fucked up. But, you know, it was great for me in that, you know, I could get really stuck into it and eventually it sort of became a bit of an obsession. You know, it was good for my OCD.

Starting point is 01:45:09 On that note though, with living in Australia through this, do you, as an Australian, you're now living in the UK at the moment, but do you fear that like something like that could happen again? Because I wasn't there obviously, but we were seeing the videos here in the United States and it got, I would say, really bad here in some places for sure. But like you described earlier, helicopters over the houses, cops knocking on your door saying we saw your Facebook post. Has there been some sort of blowback that people are saying never again on that over there, or is this still like you feel like this could happen again? I think so. I think there's sort of a great mistrust really of institutions

Starting point is 01:45:52 that we used to sort of venerate and sort of hold up. And I'm not saying I'm anti-government or anything like that at all. But when it was over, it was like, fuck, I'm never taking my freedom for granted again. Just my ability to travel. So, I mean, I don't know what happened in the United States, whether the government said you couldn't go anywhere, but it's like, you know, where does the government get off

Starting point is 01:46:22 telling us that we can't even leave? Yeah. You know? That's where it's... I don know, where does the government get off telling us that we can't even leave? Yeah. You know? That's where it's – I don't want to be here. My fucking right as a human being is to leave. Mm-hmm. You know, if I want to leave, yeah, I'll take the risk.

Starting point is 01:46:35 Yes, it might cost me tens of thousands of dollars to come home, but I still want to leave. And I couldn't do that. And I'm stuck for, you know, two years. Can't – that. And I'm stuck for, you never miss a good song. With this card, you never miss out on getting the most points on everyday purchases. The PC Insider's World Elite Mastercard, the card for living unlimited. Conditions apply to all benefits.

Starting point is 01:47:12 Visit pcfinancial.ca for details. Can't do anything. Can't even bloody, you know, go to a gym. Can't sit at a cafe table, you know. And people are fighting over fucking toilet paper in Australian supermarkets. Did you have the same people are farting over fucking toilet paper in australian supermarkets i don't know did you have the same thing in the united states i mean we had some craziness don't get me wrong we definitely did it just it felt like especially like i remember watching these videos in we're talking november 2021 when things here had started to slowly go a little bit more normal and like we're looking at

Starting point is 01:47:47 australia like holy shit that's like mad max ferry road out there right now and particularly in melbourne melbourne had it a lot worse than than sydney why is that well because but because all the covid rules were state-based rules premiers ofiers of individual Australian states could make up their own rules. And, you know, obviously we're all thinking, you know, what is the point of having a federation if all the states are just sort of making up their own rules about something as important as COVID? It's like, why are we all operating under different rules? It was, yeah, really terrible time. It was devastating to me, you know, on a professional level, obviously with,

Starting point is 01:48:33 you know, having worked for three years, you know, writing Pure Narco and Pure Narco coming out at sort of the height of the pandemic. And I just thought to myself, yeah, never again. I'm just never going to take my freedom for granted. And so, you know, when I got the opportunity, I got on a plane, went to Asia, and it's like, you know, never looked back really. You went to Asia? Yeah. Went to Asia. Did you live there for a time?

Starting point is 01:49:05 I wouldn't say I lived there. I was a tourist, but I was just shuttling between Bali and Thailand and Vietnam and Japan and Sri Lanka and just using the opportunity to get out of Australia, which I'd been wanting to do for years. And that's why you're still writing this book, the Dick Ellis book. So, yeah, essentially I was working on the manuscript, staying in homestays and, you know, doing it on the road.

Starting point is 01:49:41 You know, you can do it with a laptop. Oh, yeah? And obviously with a book like this everyone's dead pretty much you know there's no one really to interview and you know i could do it sort of remotely so it was um something that was sort of easy to do on the road and then um you know now I'm engaged. Congratulations to you guys, by the way. Thank you very much. Very exciting.

Starting point is 01:50:10 And living in the UK. Yeah. So I moved in with my beautiful fiance. And we're sort of building a new life together over there so that's awesome real quick i gotta go to the bathroom we'll be right back we're gonna get to louis navia all right we're back so you and i at the very beginning of this conversation touched on louis navia who has been on this podcast i recorded with but how did you first get in touch with him in the first place, being a guy from Australia, and he's this ex-cartel man of the world living out in Miami? What was the connection there? I wrote the book on Bon Scott. And I went down to Miami in 2015 and I met a bunch of people down there. One of these people, I can't say who,

Starting point is 01:51:18 after the book was released in 2017, they called me up and said hey I know this guy in Miami you know we were sort of mates in the early 80s he was a big time sort of cocaine trafficker he wants to write a book would you talk to him? So really it all came out of the sort of the ACDC sort of connection,

Starting point is 01:51:46 as these things do, you know. And, you know, literally I was, you know, sitting in my shorts and seeing that back in Australia, sitting in my backyard, drinking coffee, what's happening with Louis Navier? And when he first contacted me, all I could see on my phone was a picture of John Belushi as the Blues Brothers. That was his profile pic on his phone. But it was interesting really when we first started talking because he was kind of testing me out and he was obviously unsure

Starting point is 01:52:37 about whether I was the right guy to kind of work with and he had actually been working with another writer, I won't say his name, but who had gone down to Miami on a magazine assignment for, you have a magazine called Harper's? Yeah, Harper's Magazine. Yeah, so they had commissioned a profile of Louis Navier for their magazine. And this writer had gone down to Miami and, you know,

Starting point is 01:53:13 spent a week sort of hanging out with Louis and meeting, you know, the DEA agent Eric Kolbinski and Bob Harley from US Customs to put together a profile of Louis Navier for the magazine, but it had never come together. And he'd been working on it for a very long time. And this person was a client of an agent out in Hollywood. And Louis was very disappointed that the project hadn't sort of come together, that this person hadn't written anything about him in all this time. And he said, like, I'm getting very frustrated with this

Starting point is 01:53:48 because I feel like my story really would be a fantastic film or a TV series. And at the time, Narcos and Narcos Mexico was sort of the flavor of the month and, you know, sort of American Maeve, Tom Cruise and all that. Narcos was very popular. Yeah, Narcos was great. And so Lewis started talking to me on WhatsApp and we, you know, went back and forth for probably a couple of months

Starting point is 01:54:23 before I thought, you know what, he's actually got a really good story. And I had no issue whatsoever selling it to my publisher, Penguin, in Australia. They really loved the idea and we just started working on it. And it was an interesting process because basically every time he called me, I'd record the conversation and there were some times where he was completely lucid, other times he was absolutely pissed. He'd been in a bar in Key West or something.

Starting point is 01:55:01 I just need to tell you this, you know, while I still remember and, you know, tell me this story about, you know, some fucking terrible drug trafficker that he'd completely forgotten about who had, you know, chopped someone's head off or whatever. And he was somehow still a good guy. Yeah. I want this in the book, you know, so make notes. And this is at 2 o'clock in the morning or whatever in Australia.

Starting point is 01:55:28 So I had a big file of essentially voice notes and emails and, you know, whatever he was sending me. And it was just like this massive collage of sort of things that I started putting together, which became Pure Narco. And the big challenge, obviously, when you're working with a guy like Lewis, who is, you know, he's very kind of scattergun kind of brain, you know. It's like whatever he's thinking at the time, you know, and then he can sort of go off on a tangent about something else,

Starting point is 01:56:05 is, you know, and then he can sort of go off on a tangent about something else, is, you know, structure. What's the structure of his life? You know, putting together a timeline. Where were you at this particular time? You know, where were you studying? What was your first job? You know, when did you meet this woman? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 01:56:22 You know, like putting all these things together and then suddenly you're putting together the chronology of a man's life, which he never did himself. So he was always hammering me, get the timeline right, get the timeline right, get the timeline right. And that was the sort of biggest part of really getting the book right was figuring out when it all happened. And because obviously a lot of this information isn't on the public record. At the time there was some footage of him actually being arrested in Miami,

Starting point is 01:57:03 turning up at Fort Lauderdale Airport after being arrested in Miami, turning up at Fort Lauderdale Airport after being arrested in Venezuela, which was on actually on YouTube, but for some reason it's no longer on YouTube. But there were headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post and Guardian. So it was obviously a big deal. So his story checked out. He was obviously who he said he was. And you said you spent like a couple months talking with him before agreeing to do it. You had been able to at least broadly check out some things in that time period to be able to say,

Starting point is 01:57:37 okay, we're going to find out all the stories, but the general idea is he really was this guy. Yeah, but the biggest issue really was his family didn't really want him to do it. Really? No. What was their reasoning? I don't know. You spoke to Lewis, and I don't know if he talked much about his family, but they obviously had concerns for their own safety,

Starting point is 01:57:59 and he had concerns for their safety. So he didn't really even want to bring his family into the story. But, you know, the family was the story. It was like I said to Lewis, you can't sort of write this book about your time as a drug trafficker and being a normal guy, being the Mr. Magoo of cocaine, unless you kind of bring your family into the story. The fascinating thing is that you had this fucking crazy life while being Mr. Normal. Yeah. And your kids didn't even know that you were a mega cocaine trafficker, right? They had no idea.

Starting point is 01:58:44 He was just dad to them yeah you know it's like the breaking bad thing yes yes that that's what made breaking bad work and it was the same thing with pure narco i said lewis unless we kind of talk about how this affected your family there's no point doing it one because it's just not going to feel authentic, but two, people aren't going to relate to it. That's exactly right. And also, I think the family is a fantastic vehicle for you to show some remorse and contrition and show your human side. Because if we don't do that, it's just like all these vignettes of craziness and violence and and after a while

Starting point is 01:59:25 it gets very boring that's exactly yeah i couldn't agree with you more that's that's why you look at godfather one godfather two goodfellas movies like this people relate to it because of the family aspects and they're not just because it's like they can't relate to being most people can't relate to being the hardened gangster or something like that but they can relate to you know your wife walking out to wife walking out on you and the kids screaming and wondering what the hell is going on. And it's interesting you say that because for me, the greatest sort of true crime book ever written was Wiseguy.

Starting point is 01:59:55 Pelleggi? Yeah. Yeah. And the thing that made that book work was really the story of the wife. Yep. Right? And so I met Lewis's wife in Miami and sat down with his kids and had dinner. Without him?

Starting point is 02:00:18 He was there. Oh, he was there. So his ex-wife, his kids, and we're just having a normal meal. And I'm thinking, I'm having a normal meal with a normal family, but this guy's a fucking big-time cocaine trafficker. This is just fucking weird. But this is what makes it fascinating, that these people can sort of exist among us and you would never know.

Starting point is 02:00:40 And eventually sort of Lewis understood that. And so then began this gradual process of convincing his family to get involved with the book. His daughter didn't want to talk to me at all. His sister didn't want to talk to me. She was against the project. There were people in Lewis's family who didn't want anything to do with it. His son was very supportive he understood that it was a good thing for his father to do

Starting point is 02:01:11 so I had no issues with him but but it really wasn't until the end of the book that it was virtually finished that I even spoke to his daughter for the first time Why do you think she finally talked with you? that it was virtually finished that I even spoke to his daughter for the first time. Why do you think she finally talked with you? I guess she probably heard from her mother, from her brother, you know, that Jesse was an okay person to talk to,

Starting point is 02:01:38 that you could trust him. And that's a lot of what authors do is you're sort of gaining trust with people. It takes time. It's not something you can just sort of gaining trust with people. It takes time. Oh, yeah. It's not something you can just sort of do straight away. So that took years. And by the end of it, you know, the family became a massive part of the story. It's like, you know, I can't even remember how many chapters

Starting point is 02:02:01 are in Pure Narco, but it's like sort of 65 or some crazy amount of chapters, right? And a lot of them towards the end of the book are all about the family. It's like, you know, how can you keep a marriage together when you're living like this, when you have to just fucking leave a country at a moment's notice because you're about to get arrested by the federales or whatever? You know, it's like it's it's crazy it's a crazy life and and and do you have any guilt and remorse for putting your family through all this shit right yeah you know and i i you know lewis is still

Starting point is 02:02:36 a friend of mine to this day we you know we i only heard him from him earlier today like we still talk to each other yeah i feel like he calls you every day jesse i have another story for you man no no sit down sit down you gotta hear this one no but he he he wants to do another book of course he does i think there's like 10 books in that guy and we were talking at one point about doing like a you know a treatment for a tv show he's got i mean he's got a lot of ideas um which would would all be fantastic it just has to be handled by the right people and um you know we we did have some sort of interest from you know tv um production companies in in in the book but you book that just didn't work out

Starting point is 02:03:28 the way we had hoped. So Lewis's big hope is obviously that someone sort of picks up the book and sort of turns it into a TV series because it's a fucking crazy story. But there's so many ways you could tell it. Exactly. And to your point that you're making right now, if I could see it coming together just from the outside of how a TV show or some sort of miniseries or maybe even a movie would come together,

Starting point is 02:03:58 it has to be told as the guy who has a wife and kids and he and his wife have an interesting relationship for various reasons he can lay out what that is and then he happens to be a guy in the cartel not the guys in the cartel and by the way he has a wife and kids it has to lead with the thing that people like that's why people like tony sopr. Because, you know, here was a guy going through a midlife crisis who was talking to a shrink about it and his kids were annoying him during puberty, but he happened to be in the mafia. And that's what we remember from the Sopranos, right? Stay with the mic if you don't mind. Sorry. That's what we remember from the Sopranos.

Starting point is 02:04:37 Yeah. Is the relationship that he had with his wife and his kids. And that's the ending of the show. Yeah, exactly. It's with his family, right? It's all about family. So I said to Lewis at the beginning, I said, the family is absolutely critical to us doing this book properly and doing it well. And there's no point in us doing it if we can't get that cooperation.

Starting point is 02:05:01 So he worked on that and eventually they came around. But it wasn't easy. Yeah. And for people out there who haven't heard the podcasts I did with him, can you just explain what Lewis's role was in the cartel? Because as we said already a couple of times, it was quite unique. Well, he describes himself as a transporter um you know the guy who you know does all the logistics and um a guy who you know never carried a gun was never involved in the sort of the the horrible side of the the business which was the you know the killing obviously and the intimidation and but the guy who would, you know, get the money

Starting point is 02:05:46 and go and buy the container ships or buy the planes and, you know, organise the pilots and everything else. You know, he kind of, I think there's a line in the book where he says, you know, I could have, you know, sort of taken these skills and sort of, you know, I could have, you know, sort of taken these skills and sort of, you know, started a franchise with these kind of skills. You know, yes, they're business skills. And he was just very good at it.

Starting point is 02:06:17 And, you know, as you probably know, he has a certain amount of charm, you know. Oh, yeah. He has an amount of charm and he regards himself as a funny guy. And, you know, he still berates me for, you know, hey, there's not enough humor or, you know, there wasn't enough humor in the book. But, you know, hey, Lewis, you know, this is a pretty difficult kind of project for me to pull together. I can't sort of do all these things simultaneously. We can work that into the movie. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:58 But, you know, like I said before, there's so many different sort of ways you could go with the telling of this story. You could have a whole film about Operation Journey itself, which was the, you know, the operation that took him down and which involved, you know, Britain and the United States. Oh, yeah. And it was a big fucking takedown. Or you could, you know, like you said, just sort of concentrate

Starting point is 02:07:20 on the family, which would be my preference, you know. But in amongst, you know, all that were all these sort of crazy vignettes about life in the cartels, which were sort of stories that you don't really get in, you know, narcos and all those sort of, you know, drug-themed sort of films. It's very different to Sicario, for instance. You know, it's a completely different story. Yeah. And very long.

Starting point is 02:07:53 It's like a 600 page book. But when I was finished with it, I mean, we could have done another 600 page. Sure. It was, he's done so many things. And, you know,'s had also had a life after the cartels too which is another interesting story yeah he did he ended up doing like five years in prison after cutting a deal there was the whole like he in some ways had permission to

Starting point is 02:08:19 be able to share with the government on some of these guys like they were cool some people at least were cool with it and then the part that i imagine no one's cool with from his old life is that he gets out from prison and ends up doing work with the government like he did some undercover stuff for them like the way he described it to me that i thought was pretty perfect is he's like my whole life i'm either on team white or team black i'm not on team gray so once i got off team white and you know joined team black like that's it and so yeah you know that's that's what i do and that kind of goes like the whole amoral thing i was getting at earlier like he just feels like okay well they want me to go do something undercover i'll do it you know even if that's guys who were in his old life,

Starting point is 02:09:06 then maybe, you know, he doesn't want to fuck over some. He's like, well, I play for this team now, so this is our job. I think really at the end of the day, it's whatever gives him the most adrenaline. Yeah, I think that's a good takeaway. That's how I see Lewis. He's addicted to adrenaline. Yeah. And he just takes that attitude into

Starting point is 02:09:26 everything that he does. Whether it's his personal life or his time at the cartels or whatever he's up to today. It's all about having fun. He's like a little kid. Yeah. That's exactly how I describe him. And I admire that in some ways. Like I said to you just before the show, just driving with him in Miami, he just decides to fucking do a U-turn in the middle of nowhere. It's like, Lewis, what the fuck are you doing? Why not? Who does that?

Starting point is 02:10:00 I would never do it, but he's just got that outlaw mentality and he's just taken it into everything that he does. And that's what's fascinating because he has this outlaw mentality, but he's also trying to adjust to kind of normal life and a normal paycheck. And he's not used to normal paychecks. I mean, it's a guy who grew up well as well. It's not like he grew up poor or something like that. Like he grew up well. He went to Georgetown and ends up in this world.

Starting point is 02:10:33 I think you're perfectly stated saying he's addicted to adrenaline. Yeah, and his father was a super rich sort of sugar baron. So he's been used to a certain lifestyle all his life and then suddenly, boom, you know, come out of jail and, oh, you know, I have to, you know, do this kind of manual labour to get by. He's living in Miami, which is one of the most expensive cities on earth and I think he struggled with that. So obviously a big motivation of him wanting to do the book was, you know, selling the movie rights.

Starting point is 02:11:13 Yeah. Seeing it sort of made into a TV show or a film. And I understand that. And the book was written with that in mind. I wanted it to be as visual as possible. But I also didn't want it just to be a sort of empty, soulless little piece of entertainment, which glorified drug traffickers, because I don't think that's the right thing to do. And that's also, it's a tough thing to wrestle with with because when all these guys, once they get out of prison, I wrestle with it in this job too with some of the people that I end up bringing on here.

Starting point is 02:11:51 But they all want to write a book. They all want their book to be made into a movie. They all want to take their old life if they've fully left it behind and monetize it, which in some ways I understand that, but it creates, you know, obviously conflicts of interest sometimes with the truth and with what people's motivations may be in doing that and with glorifying everything they did. And that's certainly something that, like, I'm always going back and forth on, like, okay, well, if I had a 15-year-old listening to this episode, I wouldn't want them thinking like, hey, maybe I should go do this, right? But at the same time, yeah, I'd love to see that they were entertained in doing it. But also like me as a young teenager, like my favorite movies were all gangster movies. I didn't like want to be a gangster. So part of it's like, well, you should be able to separate it.

Starting point is 02:12:43 But then not everyone does i guess yeah yeah and uh i i i think um i think lewis has so many other books in him um that would you know be just as entertaining. Anything specific come to mind with that? Like things that maybe you didn't get to talk about in the book? Pure narco? Well, I mean, you touched,

Starting point is 02:13:15 I don't know exactly what Lewis told you in his interview, so I need to be careful kind of about what I'm talking about. But you said know, him flying off to do these missions. Yeah. You know, he's quite secretive about that, but he was obviously involved in something. And that wasn't something that I felt like we could sort of put in the book because I didn't want to kind of jeopardize his own safety or sort of, you know, compromise any sort of ongoing sort of investigations that were

Starting point is 02:13:46 underway or also find myself a target for some people. Sure. And that was the other big thing was like, yeah, I don't want some guy from the cartels sort of hunting me down because Lewis describes some guy as an orangutan or whatever. So, you know, I literally had to, I remember that line. There was, there was, there was some sort of hairy guy in one of the cartels that he said, oh, he's a fucking orangutan.

Starting point is 02:14:18 And, and, you know, and, and I was like, yeah, this guy might be dead but his family's still alive and they may take umbrage at the fact that you know you described him as a fucking orangutan let's take that out you know what's what's think. That's what we have to write. Yeah. So, um, yeah, so his, his safety, my safety were obviously in paramount importance, you know, writing the book and, you know, uh, nothing's happened, touch wood, you know, hasn't caused any sort of issues for me or for him. He's still sort of living in Miami and, you know, safe. His family's well and, you know. I think we did it very responsibly and sort of, you know,

Starting point is 02:15:17 our safety was, you know, the number one priority. Yeah, it's also a period piece at this point too. Like when you went to write it even. Yeah. You know, he had gone down in 2001 it had been a while i think that helps with things people die people move on you know some of the players obviously most of the players are not the same from when he was in there so it's like if he had written that book you know worked on it in his jail cell and put it out in 06 or 07, it might be a different conversation.

Starting point is 02:15:47 Yeah. But even as recently as, you know, a few months ago, he was sending me a message saying, oh, you know, look, this guy has just been released from prison. You know, this guy doesn't like me. You know? He'll make them like him again. Just wanted you to be aware that You know, so and so Has just been let out

Starting point is 02:16:07 You know And also When you lose 25 tons of cocaine You know It's not great Who's going to forget it? Yeah When it was their cocaine

Starting point is 02:16:19 Yeah Right? So I don't think there's any sort of You know, statute of limitations on revenge. Yeah. And how many countries were working on that? Was it called Operation? 12 countries.

Starting point is 02:16:31 Operation what? Journey. Operation Journey. So that was down in Venezuela. This was like a standard kind of, he's figuring out the logistics of moving, in this case, 25 tons of of blow he was in the he was in the venezuelan jungle um preparing to uh ship out you know 25 tons of cocaine to europe using container ships that he had purchased in greece for the express purpose of moving that cocaine. So they owned the ships.

Starting point is 02:17:06 The cartel owned the ships. So they could do their own welding and, you know. Customize it. Yeah, customize these hulking, you know, rusty vessels for the sole purpose of moving cocaine into Europe, where obviously at the time they were getting a far better price for coke than they were in the United States. So that's where this cartel was particularly interested in moving their product. And unbeknownst to Luis Navia,

Starting point is 02:17:39 he was being tracked in Venezuela by the DEA and by the British, by the US Customs, because he had touched a glass in a hotel in this shitty town in the middle of nowhere in Venezuela and an agent who was following them had picked up the glass and got a fingerprint off the glass and they'd run it through their records and they had found an old traffic violation from Miami where they'd taken his prints. So the guy that they couldn't recognize was suddenly Louis Navier and they had their man. They thought he was like the Greek or something. Yeah, they called him the Greek because from his time in Athens

Starting point is 02:18:39 purchasing the container ships that were used in the smuggle. So the Greek suddenly had a name and that was Louis Navier and the funny thing was they got it from a traffic violation back in the 80s when he'd been pissed one night and been stopped by a cop for being drunk and ended up back at the police station and had his prints taken and they still had those prints. So the lesson of that

Starting point is 02:19:06 is um don't drink and drive that's it that's it maybe he'd still be out there but what so you had a chance to talk with all the main investigators who were who were against him and i'm forgetting some of the names now but you know the a lot of these guys like bob hartley's one of them i think right bob harley bob harley a lot of these guys are friends with him today today like what do they think of him obviously like he's entertaining and is fun to be around and like his story is pretty wild but like they spent so many years trying to take him down he was around all these dangerous people that they don't like with good cause and horrible things happened that he was at least around and, I mean, call it what it – like he was a part of. Like how do they rectify the fact that they're really good friends with him today?

Starting point is 02:19:56 Good question. I mean I spent a night with Louis Navier and Eric Kolbinski who was the DEA agent who took Luis back to Miami from Venezuela, one night in St. Petersburg. Those two together were just like old mates, absolutely getting hammered. And we passed a bar at one point where, you know, this set of drums had been set up on a stage and there was no one in the bar, right? Like the band that was going to play that night hadn't started playing yet. Tommy Luis started playing.

Starting point is 02:20:37 Yeah, fucking Lewis. Ran up onto the stage and started playing the drums in this pub, just doing the fucking, you know, the who. Out of nowhere. Until he got ejected by the bouncer. And Eric thought it was the funniest thing in the world. We were in hysterics. And that's the kind of relationship they have.

Starting point is 02:21:09 They're very good friends. And I think that's great. I think that sort of says a lot about not only Lewis, but I think that's the whole point of the criminal justice system. You've got to give these people a second chance. And he's shown that he deserves that chance. Yes. You know, he's become a good man, you know. He hasn't gone back into that business. You know, he could very easily go back into that business, you know. Even now, you think? Well, look at what's happening in Ecuador, you know.

Starting point is 02:21:42 What's happening in Ecuador? You should be looking at what's happening in Ecuador. Oh, with the government? With the cocaine boom that's going on in Ecuador. Ecuador has become a massive... Take note of this, Alessio. We need money. Ecuador is becoming a massive coke center?

Starting point is 02:22:04 Well, it's becoming a coke state. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, they're all coming, you know, they're coming up with different ways of kind of moving cocaine and the product's still being sold. Yes, you know. Stop snorting cocaine if you want to help Ecuador.

Starting point is 02:22:26 It's a bad start to a title because that's in Bloomberg. Everyone on Wall Street is like, yeah, fuck that and fuck Ecuador. I mean, basically, Ecuador is almost a failed state because of cocaine, right? Okay. And the funny thing was not so long ago, Lewis was saying to me, keep an eye on Ecuador. Keep an eye on Ecuador. Something's happening here. It's getting out of control.

Starting point is 02:22:56 But he said, if I ever went back into cocaine, which I would never do, but if I wanted to start again. If. If. If. If I were to start again, you know, it would be very easy to be moving product out of Ecuador, you know, and this was a long time ago before all this shit started happening. Wow.

Starting point is 02:23:16 You know, cartel gangs, you know, ambushing sort of live TV transmissions you should look into it it's out of control I want to do a podcast on this just the titles of some of these articles right there Galapagos Island gets pulled into Ecuador's drug trafficking

Starting point is 02:23:36 violent trafficking right to revolution baby wow the great thing with Lewis he's very intelligent he knows he knows the subject he knows what's going on he stays abreast of all the kind of the issues and and and he knows a lot of geopolitical stuff going on he does he's very well read on that i think he's he he would be a great asset to any you you know, government agency, whether it's, you know, American or, you know, from any other country that is interested in kind of dealing with

Starting point is 02:24:09 the cocaine problem on its doorstep. You know, like Australia has a massive problem with cocaine. You know, Britain has a massive problem with cocaine. Spain has a massive problem with cocaine. And it's starting to move into, you the far east to to japan and china and you know thailand what do you think of his idea to legalize it to solve a lot of these problems yeah i agree with it yeah i i think there's an argument there for cocaine some of the other ones i think i think it gets a little tougher but be very interesting yeah Yeah, 100% totally agree with the legalization. Yeah, I had some interesting conversations with him at dinner where it got into me asking him about some of that stuff. Like, don't you think you'd be like a hell of an asset?

Starting point is 02:24:57 And he was very cagey about that. Yeah. But, you know, I guess guys like that don't ever want to think of themselves in that way. But it'd be – like he's the kind of guy, like I said, he's a perfect creation of a spy. He's so unassuming. He's very unintimidating. He's friendly with everyone. He's charming.

Starting point is 02:25:21 He's unpredictable. And he knows how to party. He's all these different things. And I was thinking, I've talked with some of these CIA guys. I'm like, man, they would like this dude. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think even if you weren't involved in sort of work as an asset, I think just sort of as a consultant or as someone who, you know, could give lectures to governments about what it's like to work

Starting point is 02:25:49 in this industry from the inside so they can understand it better, so they can intercept, you know, the flow of cocaine into their own countries and do it better, you know, like Antwerp, you know, Scandinavia, you know, all these places in Europe that are suffering because of the flow of cocaine could benefit from talking to someone like Lewis. Yeah. And I think he's very keen to kind of offer up his services. He would love to do that. I'm sure he would really appreciate having to do

Starting point is 02:26:29 the day job that he does to pay his bills and make use of the knowledge that he's acquired from all these decades working in the drug business. Absolutely. When you were doing this book, obviously, like you're writing about his time in there, which was a while ago, but did you have a chance to talk with, be it guys on the ground right now actively in cartels or guys who are, you know, deep embedded journalists covering cartels, or is it more like you were talking with Luis and the players within his story? In terms of – look, the thing was I had to be very careful to keep what we were doing a secret.

Starting point is 02:27:26 Because had it become common knowledge, you know, within those circles that Lewis was working on a book, prospectively we could have been in some sort of danger. So no, I wasn't talking to kind of other journalists sort of working in the field or anything like that. I was obviously working with and talking to, you know, officers and agents and all those guys from, you know, the British, you know, services who were sort of working on Operation Journey because it all started with them.

Starting point is 02:27:58 Oh, it started with the Brits? With the Brits. And so that was, they were very supportive and they were very helpful and they were very helpful because they were literally like sending me, you know, PowerPoint presentations about Operation Journey, things that they'd put together themselves, all their old photographs. You know, all the photographs of, you know,

Starting point is 02:28:17 the major cocaine halls had sort of come from agents themselves. So they were very supportive of that. Um, uh, but in terms of, you know, talking to actual, um, other cartel members, no, no, not, not active current cartel members, but I did speak to or have communication with, you know, people who, um, were involved in the business in the past. And obviously one of them was his ex-girlfriend who was given another name in the book. And that's the other thing is that every person in that book who is mentioned was given a pseudonym.

Starting point is 02:29:00 Sure. We just had to do it. Yeah, that makes sense. And the amazing thing is neither lewis nor myself have been um caught out yet giving their real names so we're very careful about it yeah and that's probably a smart way to go from a safety perspective for sure but the you know lewis when he was in there he didn't have to deal with like this fentanyl stuff yeah things like that and it was interesting talking with him i think we talked

Starting point is 02:29:30 some on camera about that as well but i talked with him a lot off camera about you know the quandary that that would be because he's like well that's obviously quite literally poison that can kill someone in an instant and when he was moving his product or merchandise as he calls it it was pure cocaine which you know certainly can kill someone if you do too much of it but it's not like fentanyl so you know this is kind of a hypothetical question but do you think that he would if he were around today and active he would feel differently about moving this stuff knowing that some of it could be very deadly i don't think he would do it i really don't no not a chance i think i agree with you i mean he looked at as a business but again

Starting point is 02:30:20 like he also like enjoyed doing cocaine himself or whatever and if he he had a product that was cocaine laced with fentanyl, I don't think he'd enjoy doing that. Well, if his friends were dropping dead from doing cocaine with fentanyl, I don't think he would be involved in it. Yeah. The thing was, he and his friends were doing cocaine and having the time of their lives. That's right.

Starting point is 02:30:39 Right? That was his attitude. It's like, hey, this is great shit. Why shouldn't I sell it? Sex, drug, and rock and roll, baby. Yeah. And that's his attitude. That like hey this is this is great shit why shouldn't i sell sex drug and rock and roll baby yeah that's right and that's his attitude that's the way that he lives that's what i said to you before about him being an adrenaline addict that's what gave him his thrills yeah the thrill was making money he loves money he constantly talks about money

Starting point is 02:31:01 um and i can kind of understand it being in New York for a day. Fucking everything's so expensive here. It's like, I don't know how you guys live. Yeah, you go to the city centers in America. It's just kind of how it is now. It's insane. It seems like everything's doubled in the space of a couple of years here. Yeah, New York City, because I live in Hoboken here,

Starting point is 02:31:21 everything goes up about 30%, 40% when i cross the path right there right i mean it's that drastic for sure yeah i was down to the drinks you order yeah absolutely like coffees for like espresso for six dollars espresso better be incredible that's all i'm saying yeah and they were fucking terrible it's like six dollars for fucking disgusting espresso so you know i don't know how you guys live. You know, you've got to pay rent and everything else. Yeah, you pay fucking $4,000 for like a two-foot box in New York right now. And you go out for a couple of bowls of noodles and you've got no change from $75.

Starting point is 02:32:00 That's right. It's just fucking mad. That's right. It's a lot. No wonder these people are involved in these sort of industries. You know? You know, it's easy money for them. And, you know, yes, there are risks, but, you know, what's the payoff?

Starting point is 02:32:14 Yeah. So I think, yeah, in answer to your question, no, I don't think Lewis would get involved in fentanyl. I think he is moral in that sense. Yeah, it's very sad what's happening with that around the world and how quickly that's happened. And that's got obviously insane geopolitical implications. You know, you have a maybe reverse opium war in that case with something like that. But I got to get in some people to talk about it.

Starting point is 02:32:41 My friend Tommy G has done some great documentary content on his channel about it and it's really on YouTube. It's really eye-opening at how, not just how awful it is, but how on what a grand scale it exists within this country now with people who are just addicted to fentanyl and then people who are dying the first time they take it. It's very, very scary. Yeah. And the other issue, of course, is that, you know, the drug war, the war on drugs, whatever you want to call it, I mean, employs a lot of people. You know, as Lewis says in the book, you know, if you, you know, legalized these drugs overnight, you know, suddenly all these, you all these millions of people would be out

Starting point is 02:33:26 without their pension plans and being able to pay their mortgages and your economy would collapse and there's tens of millions of people in this bureaucracy that keeps this drug war alive so there's all there's all these you know sort of um elements to this story that that are you know very complex it's not it's not an easy thing to kind of you know come up with a simple solution oh it's so hard i agree i agree it's like when you have people when when you identify a problem in society or something right at the beginning, you then have to attack it. And to attack it, you have to ask for people's time and their expertise. And time and expertise means you have to compensate them

Starting point is 02:34:14 with money. And once it's the double slippery slope, you either don't attack it and the problem gets way worse, or you attack it and maybe it gets a little better. But you now create a whole industry that means that it can only get a little bit better. It can't get all the way better because we still need jobs. And each person is like, well, as long as my job still exists, we'll be all right. So whatever we got to do to make that happen. You just laid out part. Like that's exactly what the problem is.

Starting point is 02:34:38 And we see it with homelessness in this country too. Joe Rogan has talked a ton about that. These people are in these cities making $300,000 a year to be the homeless coordinator that's not someone who wants to solve that crisis because then they won't exist and they won't have a job paying yeah you know that amount and lewis lewis talks a lot about that a lot in the book you know um that it's not in the interest of these drug agents to crack the case immediately because if they do that, they're not going to have the next 20 years of their salary and their pension and they won't be able to retire at 50.

Starting point is 02:35:12 It was all solved. Yeah, you've got to let it drag out a little bit. Exactly. That's what essentially he was saying. So there's no vested interest for these guys to solve it. Do you think part of it's the cop needs the criminal and the criminal needs the cop? Yeah, absolutely. There's some sort of game in there?

Starting point is 02:35:33 Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, the older I get, the more I realize that exists in far more places than I realized. Yeah. And I mean, America has a bloated government just like the UK has a bloated government, just like Australia has a bloated government. And, you know, obviously what's happening politically in this country is reflective of, you know, there is a certain element of the population that doesn't believe that it's

Starting point is 02:36:03 effective government. Yep. But that's a whole other story but that's a whole other story that's a whole other story and what do they you know what do they want to fix it with again it goes like this it doesn't end well when that happens so i do worry about that but jesse i'm going to be checking out the new book you just you just wrote laid it out today we'll put the link in the description to the eagle in the mirror for everyone out there want to check that out we'll also have the links in the description for your book on bon scott from acdc as well as the one we just spent a lot of time talking about pure narco on louise which this one i've read and this one is fantastic

Starting point is 02:36:39 highly highly recommend and i hope to see you also have like a second edition of this come come out when they get the TV show on this main because that definitely has to happen. Yeah, thank you very much. And that would be the ideal outcome for both of us because I just think there's so much more to Lewis' story. And I think he's a natural for television. Oh, yeah. 100% agree. Very charismatic guy. Thank you so much for coming in, sir. Thank you. Great for television. Oh, yeah. 100% agree. Very charismatic guy.

Starting point is 02:37:07 Thank you so much for coming in, sir. Thank you. Great to talk with you. Alexis, thank you for being here. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.

Starting point is 02:37:15 Thank you guys for watching the episode. Before you leave, please be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. It's a huge help. And also, if you're over on Instagram, be sure to follow the show at Julian Dory Podcast or also on my personal page at Julian D. Dory. Both links are in the description below. Finally, if you'd like to catch up on our latest episodes, use the Julian Dory Podcast playlist link in the description below. Thank you.

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