Julian Dorey Podcast - #275 - CIA "Criminal" Spy Speaks Out for 1st Time | Matthew Hedger

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Thank you to our Sponsors: ZBiotics: https://zbiotics.com/JULIAN (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Matthew Hedger is a former undercover money man for the CIA. PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey GUEST LINKS - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-hedger-692a30324/ LISTEN to Julian Dorey Podcast Spotify ▶ https://open.spotify.com/show/5skaSpDzq94Kh16so3c0uz Apple ▶ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trendifier-with-julian-dorey/id1531416289 ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 - Matt was a CIA NOC (Non-Official Cover operative) 07:18 - Working NSA at Afghanistan (Tracking High-Value Targets) 12:31 - Intelligence Operation Example & Strategies of ‘Compromising’ 21:00 - Alliances Among Intelligence Services (Countries Own Motivation) 32:08 - Learning to Speak to People & Control Conversations 39:21 - Approached for CIA in Bar, Ability to Pick Up Emotions 48:21 - Training Protocol to become a NOC, Renaissance Man = CIA 01:00:37 - Cannot Write Anything Down (Most Retain ALL Of It) 01:13:11 - How CIA Launders Money Legally (Using Bitcoin Early On) 01:24:05 - Learning Ultimate Skills to Seduce Anyone 01:29:35 - Taking Over Mentor’s Sources, CIA’s Insane Compartmentalization 01:40:20 - 1st Operation African Ex-Nazi in Black Market, Matt Working Cartels & High Level Motorcycle Crew 01:50:37 - Communicating to CIA Working Senior Ranked Motorcycle Gang 01:59:37 - Skill to Avoid Important Questions Being Asked, 02:15:47 - Partying w/ Cartels & Wanting to Save Someone 02:25:21 - Matthew Afraid of Breaking Silence 02:31:35 - Getting Arrested for Assault 02:39:50 - Matthew Smoking Laced (Losing His Mind 02:45:30 - Getting into Cartel World CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 275 - Matthew Hedger Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fast forwarding to working with one of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations, cartels. I was out partying with some of these people and I get taken back to one of their warehouses and... It's a rare man who walks in here and makes me feel a little bit insecure in my bling, but holy shit, what is going on on your hands right here? Oh, this is the guy I robbed out front when I was waiting to get busted. He was balling. I'm looking at him like, a lot of people probably had to die for a few of those things. Just knowing what you do.

I don't want to put words in your mouth but it feels that way i just it depends on the definition of a lot but you're not making me feel better with that answer all right well i i've been really looking forward to this one matt because you know when i bring in some of the spooky people it's like a lot of them are diplomatic cover people. They obviously did some cool shit. I have no idea what they say is true or false. There's a lot of things that would be floating around there, as you well know.

But I haven't, to my knowledge, had in someone yet who is a knock. And so for people out there who are not familiar with that term, can you just explain what that is? And then obviously we'll get into your story. Sure. It's a broad term that basically refers to anything that isn't official cover, which is mostly what people use. That would be posing as the third secretary of economic affairs at an embassy somewhere, other types of things where you have a diplomatic passport and so the knock umbrella is basically anything that goes without that whether you travel as a businessman or a businesswoman or also what i ended up getting into criminal cover as well but it's not backed you know by uncle sam if you get in trouble, so you're completely deniable. Correct. Meaning if you get caught somewhere and they're like, the other country goes, we got one of your guys. We know he's CIA.

CIA would be like, no, the fuck he's not. That would be a decision that would have to be made at the time. But there's no guarantee. Oh, my God. All right. So you just mentioned it. You were on the criminal side, which for people out there, you're going to hear about today, but that's exactly what it sounds like. It's essentially you have to go undercover and be an international criminal and claim that you're working with these various organizations, but you're really working on behalf of the United States government. Correct.

Okay. So first of all, you got into this when you were 19? That's right. Yeah. I never even heard of that. How do you get into, well, I guess it was NSA first for you, right? Right. Well, I joined the Navy originally. And when I was in training, I got pulled by the NSA to serve in a civilian NSA billet instead of a military billet. And so I was sent over under their authority for my four years instead of the Navy. So I think I'm the worst sailor in the history of the Navy. I've never even taken a tour of a ship. So I was just with them the entire time.

Where'd you grow up? Alton, Illinois. And that's like pretty close to St. Louis? Right across the river. So it's not near Chicago or anything like that? Five hours south. All right. So when you were growing up, did you, were you watching like James Bond movies? Did you dream of being a spy? Just because like getting into it, accepting that type

of responsibility so young tells me that you had to be real excited about it. From the beginning. i knew as far back as i can remember that's what i wanted to do and it wasn't so much from the movie side it was i used to i was a super nerd i hung out at the library all the time i'd ride my bike there and just spend all day there in the summer and i think i read every single book i could find on the topic so that's how i fell in love with it. Like as a young kid. We're talking like 10, 11 even.

Even younger, yeah. God, there has to be something there that like snaps where you're just like, ah, I want to do this espionage. I've heard that in some of my colleagues too, you know, that same approach to it. Yeah. So what was your favorite book you read? Like what was the most influential one?

The first one was Bob Bear's book, See No Evil, that I can recall. it yeah so what was what was your favorite book you read like what was the most influential one the first one was bob bear's book see no evil that i can recall it was really like man i want to get out there and do you know what beirut bob was doing yeah who was who was beirut bob yeah so he was an agency case officer that had worked almost exclusively over there for a long time as a street guy and had more of the aggressive side of of all of that and so i just thought it was super super cool and was he a knock officially or was he another one that had diplomatic cover bob was a diplomatic cover officer yeah got it and there was like you were telling me this off camera there was like some sort of controversy with him like he got allegedly kicked out of cia or something like that i don't think he was kicked out i know that at the end um there were rumors that he had upset some people

in leadership and i don't know the full situation for him but he had a really uh big personality and can't do that they don't like that around there. Yeah, he was actually that movie, Siriana. I don't know if you saw that with George Clooney. Oh, wait. That's where I know it from. He cameos in that. No shit. Yeah.

Now it's coming back. One of the main characters in the hospital after he got his fingernails pulled off, the interviewing officer is Bob. Yeah. Love that. You take some fingernails in your days? No, I've never taken. You sure? Yeah, pretty sure. You don't like have a little collection at home? No. It's just little Jose's fingernails. I told you, Sean E. Delaney put us together. I told you I'm a ball breaker. This is nice and easy today. Don't worry about it. No, it's only, it's usually pinkies that I was going for. Good. Well, I can see that because you took a ring. So anyway, so they pull you at 19. You,

like, did you even want to be in the military or was that already, you were just trying to means to an end it, you know, with like getting into espionage? Yeah. So it was a means to an end. Right. And I was in college at the time and naively, I thought that the war in Afghanistan was going to end any day and i missed my shot to have any military experience i didn't know we had another 65 years left on that what year are we talking this is 2006 okay yeah so we're like five years in and you thought it was like ending i yeah i was like it's five already you know like what movie were you watching exactly so i thought i'll just go do my military time then i'll switch over after that i don't want

to be the only person that doesn't have some experience you know at that point and so and what was the official like time length between joining and them pulling you into the back room? So they talked to me halfway through training after boot camp. So I went to boot camp for nine weeks or however long it was. And then I went to my first training and they picked me up there. I never even got assigned to a naval installation. So quick. Now, going into NSA, because I've never seen a track like this before.

I haven't talked with people who went like NSA to CIA. I've talked with people who have, after their career, wherever they were, contracted, where they contracted for NSA or contracted for CIA. But you come into NSA and you do three or four years there four so my full navy enlistment was done there yeah okay now what what types of things are you doing at that time it was split between two different things the first uh when i went to afghanistan was doing more the traditional counter-terrorism targeting kind of stuff tracking cell phones for high-value targets and okay and things like that and then because of a fluke that happened in Afghanistan I kind of got sidelined into this special counterintelligence program to go support people that were more like what I ended up doing

later case officers and stuff like that from that signals intelligence side. And so that's how they got to look at me. Now, when you say support them, does that, I don't know, I'm trying to fill in blanks here. Does that include like actually getting out into the field with those people a little bit, or you're kind of supporting them from the office? Both, but not as much the field. If I was out there, it was to help feed them questions or to pass along information from NSA to help support what they were doing. So it was completely a support role for their main mission. And I'm trying to put the years together here, but you said you got in in like 06, so tracking it, you're kind of talking about maybe like 08, 09 right now when you started doing that? Exactly. I went to Afghanistan in 2008. And as soon as I got back, which I think was around the beginning of the year 2009, I switched over to what we were just talking about. Okay.

I bring that up because I've now had a bunch of tier one guys in here, whether it be Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Army Rangers. I had the Reaper Nick Irving in here. These were guys who were – Dan Corbett from Navy SEAL Team 6. These are guys who were in that theater, Afghanistan, in like the 07 to 09 2010 years. And holy shit, this is one of the most underreported things I've ever heard about. It was, I mean, obviously it's a war zone, but it was a hellhole of constant firefighting. Ephraim Matos as well, like he had crazy stories, I think, from that era, right? It's like, what the fuck was going on?

Like, why did it blow up that much during that specific period? It was rowdy over there at that time. I don't know why it spiked as much you know one of the things was there was a super uh big operation account intelligence operation that i supported to identify spies that were on the bases there was a huge infiltration that had happened where a lot of the interpreters were passing information to the opposition and so i think that that played a lot in it as well and then there was the hotel bombing in pakistan at the uh the marriott over there yeah and so that was right right when i was there what do you think made like obviously we

know how this turned out in 2021 with the end of a 20-year odyssey that just was unceremonious to say the least. But what do you think made it such that by maybe even the mid-2000s, suddenly the Taliban was, I don't know, getting some more – obviously they were using an iron fist in certain places, but they were also getting more support slowly on the ground. Why was that? Yeah, if you look at the transition from, let's say, like, Jawbreaker, you know, when the legends from my place, like Gary Schroen, went in there, and pretty quickly, they had a

good handle on the place. I think one of the things that contributed to it is we started fighting the war in a different way than that. But also a lot of foreign intelligence services started supporting our adversaries at the time. Iran was heavily supporting things in Afghanistan against us. And so that was ramping up as we were changing tactics to something that really just wasn't working. I have to tell you about this game-changing product I use before a night out with drinks.

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And you're fighting in the mountains and the woods out there. I mean you're fighting the terrain as much as the people. Right, right. Crazy. So some of the guys you're supporting on the ground, are these – I'm just trying to think like what this could be like what are these specifically NSA assets or are they NSA assets that really are in a part of the military that work on like kind of for the you know I'm saying like. Like what our primary target set was. No like the people that you were supporting. So these guys that you said were similar to what you ended up becoming. OK. Yeah. After I got back. Yeah. So these guys that you said were similar to what you ended up becoming.

Okay. Yeah, after I got back. Yeah. They were all either agency case officers or in a special program for the DOD. Okay. But they were all case officers that focused on offensive counterintelligence operations. And so they targeted foreign intelligence officers for their primary mission. Without revealing a specific mission or names or anything that's classified, could you give a high-level example of what a mission for one of those guys that you supported on would have looked like? Sure, and I'm going to have to keep this super high.

Take your time too let's say we were aware of a compromise that the adversary had made they were collecting intelligence off of us their mission would be to mess with that over a very long period of time in such a way that gave us an advantage for losing that information oh so like kind of planting false information it could be yeah it could be sometimes um but always controlling the narrative and once you know you have a a problem a leak you also have a pipeline to feed information yes through as well and so it's all about gaining control over what's leaving, not just trying to plug the hole because then they'll just make another one. So it's the devil that you know kind of thing. And it was very instructive for me at the time because I didn't know I was about to switch over from that defensive mentality to play offense myself. And it taught me a lot about how not to get caught watching all these other foreign officers get caught by us. And so I was able later in my career to switch

that around and say, all those things that we did to hurt them, like, don't do that. Fucking Machiavelli over here. What's the, do you have some examples of, of some ways that those guys would have gotten caught that you picked up on? You know, one of the primary ways is people don't know how to use their communications devices. People don't know how to use phones. You know, there's a lot of terrorists that are no longer with us because they didn't know about the, yeah, they got lead poisoning because they didn't know all right about the yeah they got lead poisoning because they didn't know how you know phones work and stuff like that and so they got lead poisoning

yeah oh right a little gotcha yeah so communicating when you're working in that role is always where a compromise can come from so it sounds like you're working electronics more than anything you're trying you're trying to find ways to trace people yeah at that point that right whether it's email or somebody's phone um you know when you one way that people would communicate you know a lot in that world is this is an old-school one like a cyber dead drop right you log in leave something in the message folder and then log out well somebody's got to make those email addresses yes to issue and sometimes those people get very lazy at their job and so those can be little holes to compromise well yeah it is a throwback right there well that's like that reminds me of like the google

docs thing like when you talk with people on google docs you just like leave a message on there yeah i don't know if anyone out there ever did that but during like the 0809 era we obviously still hadn't gotten bin laden and he's like in the wind out there. So was there ever any whispers or overlap with anything you did that had to do with trying to track him or was that really separate? Completely separate. I don't think I ever worked on anything that had to do with Alex Station or the Bin Laden op at all. Okay. with Alex Station or the bin Laden op at all. Now, what would like, because again, you're working in a support role.

You're not the straight up badass criminal on the ground yet. No. But like what would a normal day, if there even is such thing, look like during that era for you? So during that time in Afghanistan, it would be very much sitting behind a computer looking at little dots of where cell phones are, looking at call chaining of who's talking to who, getting selectors tasked and things like that. So very much sitting behind a computer and fighting the war from the air conditioning kind of thing. And where – are you allowed to say where you were stationed over there or that classified um no i was at bagram for some of it i went out to assadabad and then uh some stuff in other places but mostly in bagram is where that was happening and you built some decent relationships with some of the guys on the ground that you were supporting yeah that was you know my primary driver was if

i'm going to be in the support role i'm going to work as hard as I can to make sure they have everything they need and more to get the job done instead of just cruising through this thing. You said you left there beginning of 2009, right? Yeah, it should have been right around Christmas is when I took out of – Christmas 2008? Yeah. Yeah, it should have been right around Christmas is when I took out of – Christmas 08? Yeah. Okay. So I say that because that's right when the administration was going to be switching over. So the end – you were there for the end of the Bush administration when obviously a lot of shit was hitting the fan.

Chickens coming home to roost for the first six, seven years of their administration towards the end. Did you already see like some changes in strategy or complications in what we're even trying to do on the ground before Obama got in there just because of like the backlash that Bush was getting? I didn't see that, you know, so much. Um, at the time Obama actually came through when I was out there when he was, and, um, did like a little tour and said hey to everybody so we knew it was like change was coming up but you suck the data out of his phone there was a little hesitation alessi i don't like that so he was touring that i guess before he was elected then right right and we heard so i was there right when he got elected.

I'd heard about that when I was downrange. Oh, you heard about that? Yeah. I was like, hey, we got a new president. Oh, cool. Yeah. What do you know? Yeah.

All right. So you ship out, oh, wait, you're still technically with NSA. When you were leaving there, did you already know or had they told you in any way that, hey, you're going to be getting in on the ground roll now? Or did you still think you were going to be doing desk support type stuff? I thought it was all going to be desk support the entire time. I was just hating it. I was like, oh, my gosh.

When is this going to be over? This is not the spy novels. Right. And I didn't know. So in the Navy, the job I had chosen was it said collector after right intel collector but it signals intelligence and i didn't realize that it wasn't you know this crazy i'm sitting there with like a microphone and some house in syria you know forward tactical stuff i was like i'm sitting behind this computer and this is not what i was looking for but all right so when you go back you ship back to america what happens

so as soon as i get back i get pulled into this other unit that i was i was talking about it was called the foreign counterintelligence activity it doesn't exist anymore it's become something else now is this within nsa still no so i'm the only nsa person assigned to this command at the time and it's under cia it's a it was a joint okay yeah with a bunch of different agencies fbi had a stake in it oh they let them in well if it's domestic you kind of have to so how much like what does this look like how many people are you working with? What are they, from a mission standpoint, what are they trying to get you to do? So I can't say how big the effort was, but it was a small unit and mostly very experienced people. They even had a program where people that had been in the military too long could switch over and stay in the job just to retain some of the knowledge.

And so I got to essentially sit at the knee of a lot of people that had been working this 35 years on the same topic. And so they knew everything about their target sets, about these different foreign intelligence services. And so it was very helpful later in life to just soak up the expertise these people had. Is there – like we hear these terms about like the Five Eyes stuff, for example, the English-speaking countries, an alliance in air quotes. Is there any such thing as an alliance, a real – not something that's just like announced in the news like, oh, we're friends. Is there any such thing as that within the espionage world? Within the espionage world? Absolutely not.

Right. There's no such thing as a friendly intelligence service. Right. Yeah. Were you surprised at some of the intelligence services that might have popped up as like say code reds that you're like, wait a second, we're supposed to be kind of playing for the same team, right? Yeah, everybody's always got their own motivation. They've always got their own goals. And so it can be a little overwhelming at times because you just want to be so focused on fighting the adversary, but you have to do so much of your own skill set just to be around the office

and to play that little game, especially with the foreign intelligence service, that you're working just to be able to work later. Do you think that there's any such thing? I try to think of it and it's impossible for me to do, but I do my best to try to think of how I would look at the world from your seat and seeing the worst of the worst and the things you've seen and how people trick each other and pull one over each other. Do you think there's anything that can exist in the world that is actually real trust between people or do you think people are inherently flawed to never fully trust each other? So I'm very much a shades gray person i don't think there's any situation you just described as completely white or completely black um so i would say to degrees you know you're always assessing to what degree can i trust this person but would i say there's ever a no matter what 100 moment not that i've ever been aware of so when you're at this desk though that they pull you

they pull you back to in america where i guess you're assessing foreign intelligence services at all times how long did you spend there So I just did my other two years there, a year and a half, I guess, at that point to finish out my tour. And that is once again, you know, in the office behind the desk, trying to track things very similarly skillset wise to what you did in Afghanistan. That's right. I'm very focused on the communications of the adversary and not so much the physical side I get into later. now you had told me very quickly when you first got here off camera that what was it you had an uncle who was a psychologist in the cia was that right right he was a psychiatrist

it was actually um a great uncle but um growing up i never knew it wasn't it wasn't well known within the family yeah he didn't announce it no no he didn't have like family parties or he wore you know agency t-shirt or anything like that but uh i found out later in life that that was the case now was he like involved with a little mk ultra type stuff for that kind of psychiatrist and if he was he wasn't sharing anything with me but um it would have been around that time period he was uh-oh uncle chuck gotta gotta search the books on that one so you didn't know that growing up but you did share you know as a kid or whatever with him

in earshot that you wanted to be a spooky person right yeah absolutely so and this is what you told me that was like i don't know if i've heard something like this before but you said that i guess because of that he started having the cia analyze you psychiatrically at like 16. so i don't i don't know that what um i know is that i had tickets that were starting to be processed early on. Tickets. Yeah. It's like my clearance tickets had happened before I joined. At 16, potentially.

Right. Right. And so sometimes they'll – I don't know if it was the agency or who, but sometimes they'll start taking a look at you a little bit early if they're assessing you for a certain thing. But I don't know if he spoke to them, but I assume that that's what would have gotten me on the radar. How did you even find that out that they were looking at you at that age? Did someone tell you that years later? It was an accident. So I was actually doing something with a security officer that handles the clearances and all that and they were looking at me like i was just crazy i was like i haven't even said anything yet this is going badly

from the beginning now like how do you have like this other clearance that was started you know when you were young i was like what are you talking about like maybe it's a typo, but yeah, I think it was because I had looked at getting in young. Okay. So you do the last two years of your rotation on this desk assessing foreign intel. As you said, you're still technically with NSA, but this is like a task force kind of thing where you're working with multiple different agencies. Right. How do you get pulled into CIA? So like I said, it was always my intent to go in the front door and just go apply and

get in that way. And so I know a lot of the case officers I worked with were aware of that because I was telling everybody like, as soon as my time's up here i'm gonna go apply and so i was approached at that time by someone how does that work um i can't go into all the details of of how that works for my program specifically you don't have to give the address i'm just saying yeah yeah so I finished applying, someone came and said, Hey, there's an alternate way to get into this. You know, let's talk about not going through the front door essentially. You're like, all right, Harry Potter. All right. So you can't say exactly how that was, but does that mean that they were trying to pull you into the – how do I say this right?

They were trying to pull you into the side that is automatically going to be off books, not diplomatic cover. That's why they did it that way? I assume that's part of it. Monte obviously was taken to the farm the whole bit kind of the regular way. Jim Lawler, I believe, same thing. You're a different story because they obviously identify you and say, all right, deniable. Now, the one thing I'm a little confused with though because I'm less – very unfamiliar with a lot of guys in your role is that you did have – prior to doing this, you were quite literally in the military and then working for an agency right and that's secret at the time though so okay so it's off books the fact that i was in the navy was was known but that i had been working for the nsa at the time was not public so that wouldn't be an issue though to make someone a knock when you know they kind of came in to the navy i told everybody in every you know role I had that I was prior military.

Oh, you did? Yeah, it's not necessarily something that's a deal breaker. There's a lot of prior military people that are up to no good. You don't say. All over the world. And so you just lean into it instead of trying to hide it. Got it. But the NSA thing is hidden.

It was at the time yeah what did we mean at the oh because now you've like talked about it so it's not right okay got it got it so they go to pull you into this now there's one other guy I talked with who at some point we're going to do a podcast with him he's in his early 70s he was a knock he claims he's out of cia but you know he started a private company with like four other spooky people and you know every time they show up into one of these third world countries six months later magic the government like gets overthrown so i feel like that might be problematic for him to talk about but Maybe he's just a lucky guy. Yeah, maybe. But he was telling me he had nothing. No military, no spy stuff, no interest in any of that.

I'll let him get into the story if we ever get him in here. But essentially he was just pulled aside by someone and said, yo, you got a good personality and you have access to this thing over here, whatever it was. And so would you be interested in doing this thing? And he becomes a knock. You work the official desk. You obviously came through the military. You work the official desk. You're working as in support. You understand all the language and lingo of all this stuff. And instead of them saying that, oh, this asset we've now invested, say four years in to train in an official capacity. Let's make him one of our official guys. They decide to take you off books and say, you got a particular set of skills we like, so we're going to put you as one of the off books guys. What was the reason for that? really how they approach it but i do know that a lot of it is based on a psychological profile you really want a certain type of person to be doing the work that i was doing and the agency is extremely adept at identifying suitability

in people and saying based on your unique psych makeup this is what you would be suitable for. And so I know that that played a large role. What about your psych makeup made you suitable? So without going into every single detail of the profile, because that would be not good for the adversary to know. We've got a lot of time today, I'm just saying. So to keep it broad enough that you couldn't – somebody couldn't identify other people that might be there. I would say that, you know, as a child, it was very hard for me to communicate with people. I couldn't look somebody in the eye.

I had to go to speech classes. It wasn't natural for me. But what I learned to do was to observe the behavior of people around me very well and if things were going well for them I was able to mimic like oh that's what I should be doing to to be liked that's what I should be doing to for things to be going well and so I think it was that approach and doing that for so long that they noticed um would be helpful in pretending to be other people essentially but daniel day lewis over here what kinds of things would would you pick up on as a kid that you wanted to mimic like what where because i can remember as a kid i

was an only child it's a different scenario but I used to have to spend a lot of time entertaining myself and then get dragged to a lot of places. My parents were at the watch people older than me and shit like that. And I would pick up on like, you know, all right, this guy's really successful. This guy's an asshole, stuff like that. And I would probably secondhand try more to mimic that guy a little bit, but like, were there specific traits that you wanted in a little bit. But like, were there specific

traits that you wanted in yourself that you'd say like, Ooh, that guy lights up a room because he does like this thing, whatever that is, I'm going to do that now. And then you'd be able to do it. Yeah. I think one of the big ones was playing it cool and not just, you know, walking up to somebody super genuine and being like wow I'm gonna put all my cards on the table in the first five seconds and just say like you know how cool I think you are and I want to be your friend and you know it can be that direct approach um can be overwhelming for people obviously and so I think one of the main ones I learned was that how to slowly come into it and and build it which you know can can seem manipulative on purpose when you break it down like that even if it's a great goal you

have is actually be kind and genuine and build a relationship with somebody but i learned that it's necessary to not you know just run up and do that. Yeah. Yeah. Like I always observe people's presence when they first come up. I talk to a lot of different types of people doing a lot of different things. But like you're this completely unassuming, cool customer and I more got to pull from you rather than getting it from you. Whereas like Jim Lawler, who, you know, I've had on here this episode 129, but he, he's also a very cool customer and you do have to pull from him on some things, but he also can then just start spewing stories and take you to another place. Like it's a

different, you know what I mean? It's a different lane of what you do. Yeah. And I think a lot of, you know, the job that I was in, especially when you're working around a lot of criminals and stuff, um, you can get yourself in trouble talking too much. You want to be listening a lot more than you, you want to be talking. And so I think that's a pattern that's been built into me doing that work over time is to not just get something and run with it for 20 minutes, leaking everything out. Were you, you said you had trouble talking with people, couldn't really look people in the eye

when you were younger. Obviously you got better at it as you got older because you were observing people, but would you describe yourself as an anxious kid too? Yeah, I would. Um, yeah, a lot stressed me out when I was a kid. Um, I was always worried that everything had to go perfectly. And if it didn't, it was very stressful for me as a kid. What was your home life like? My father worked for, uh, an oil company. It was Conoco at the time, now Conoco Phillips. He was just a hardworking, blue-collar guy that was always at work. We grew up fairly poor. And so poor enough to have popcorn for dinner a couple nights a week.

And so that was one interesting element of it. The other was where I grew up was right by East St. Louis, which at the time, I think, had one of the highest murder rates in the city. Yeah, in the U.S. And so you're right there between St. Louis, East St. Louis, and then super country, Illinois. And so these cultures just clash right there in the middle. It can be very violent. But I learned at that age how to assimilate to different types of people, mostly to just not get my ass kicked at the time. But how to read different types of people's backgrounds and say, well, at least we have this in common. Let's focus on that between each other. Did you have siblings?

Yes. Older, younger? Younger. I actually had a brother pass when I was in Afghanistan in 2008, I think. Geez. Were you guys very close? Yeah, I'd say you know as close as as close as uh sorry about that man i'm sorry wow yeah we were close you kind of looked out for him growing up

that's interesting that you grew up in such a cross-cultural area where there's so much going on yeah and that develops your skills yeah didn't know it at the time but that played a big role down the road do you mind me asking how your brother passed so it was actually narcotics related somebody had spiked his drink and he was so high that he actually walked off these cliffs we call the bluffs on the Mississippi River somebody spiked his drink yeah a bunch and his drink and then he's walked off so completely involuntary yeah wow that's that's horrible sorry to hear that What's that like dealing with something like that when you're halfway across the world?

You know, you compartmentalize it when you're in that situation. And when I was working, I was thinking about work. And I went home for a few days of leave to go to the funeral at the time. And I came back and I just put it in a different compartment. I went back to work. I find a lot of people find that that's the only way to deal with it, especially when they do something high octane, you know, they don't have a boring job or something. There's something that's high stress. They, they put all their emotion into that. Cause it kind of, like you you said compartmentalizes it put that puts that

away but then you end up dealing with that later right right i think with anything that's um you know stressful like that or trauma if you don't deal with it it's gonna come back up yeah down the road sometimes in ways you don't expect but were you close with your mom growing up yeah she's still with us today she is yeah was she someone who was really instrumental in your life as well as far as i don't know your psychological development i would say yeah i would say she had a big impact in my psychological development um but mostly books did you know a lot of what shaped me was was reading books and my parents were too busy trying to to make money to really you know have that as my primary influence but literature

was fine so you did spent but as a voracious reader getting yourself out of the house to go do that the library like you were saying even though you had a sibling and you had parents, your parents are out working hard trying to put food on the table. You spend a lot of time alone it sounds like. Quite a bit. Quite a bit. That makes sense. All right. So you get pulled in by whoever the guy is, wherever it is that you can't talk about to do this thing.

Are you able to say what the conversation is like where they officially tell you, dude, this is going to be totally off books. You're going to be deniable and this is the darkest of the dark shit. So it's actually not as sexy as you might think. The conversation happened in a bar with the person that recruited me. I knew ahead of time we went there on purpose to talk about it. And it was more matter of fact. This is the differences in this program than what you had thought about before or what you'd looked at. This is what that's going to mean.

These are the risks that come along with that. And if you want to do it this is going to be a big boy game to to play so it's your choice though is there anything that you sign to do this or is there not even that because you're totally you're supposed to be completely deniable but i don't know if there's like a secret repository somewhere for some record keeping. No, you know, we had, it was the same process for that as most, you know, clearances. But there wasn't a special, like, now that you're in this, you know, special program, you had to sign away, you know, anything like that or waive liability or anything like that. Right. Now you had been saying we got off it a little bit. You didn't want to go into everything that could help adversaries identify here. But there were there were some things about you that they said made you suited for this. Are there any other traits we haven't talked about that you think would be really relevant to bring up? I mean, so much so I can feel energy off of people. Like if they're upset or they're happy, I can physically sense it.

You know, we could sit, we could go to a bar right now and I could put my back to the door and have 50 people walk in. I could tell you just by feeling it, who the five violent people were that had walked in that day. I can sense it. That's interesting. So let me take that a layer deeper to make sure I understand. Were you empathetic because you're an empathetic person or were you empathetic because you had a skill to be able to turn it on, to be able to feel other

people's emotions? Cause, and I'll explain why I'm asking this in a minute. Because I'm an empathetic person. Okay. Yeah. I always have been from a young age and it was extremely helpful later on to relate to people and not even to fake it but to say you know I genuinely care what's going on with somebody did you even if it was someone you were undercover with that you're trying to pull one over on absolutely yeah it's not being faked it's real we're gonna get there so i think that that i don't want to pitch it in a negative way but it's very helpful right so the agency didn't have to tell me pretend to be empathetic i already am they just told me how it can be used effectively in the job right the reason i asked it that way is because as we already laid out like you know jim waller pretty well

jim is a guy who i really appreciate how in-depth he goes on the on the different psychiatric traits that they look for across different types of spies and stuff. And one of his, one of the things he's discussed a lot, and I've discussed this with other people after that, is that CIA is often looking for people who are borderline sociopathic. And the way he explains it is they tread that line. They're not full-blown sociopath or anything, but they have an ability to be what I would say is like anti-empathetic in a way, like not be able to feel things and just be able to get a job done and put on an act like you can feel things to get people's trust. And every person, including John Kiriakou and Andrew Bustamante that I run that by, they're like, yep. And when I sit here with these guys, it's so painfully true.

That's why you're a very different vibe from what I've gotten. So in a way, what this sounds to me like is for whatever role they're picking you here, they're actually choosing something a little different there. Like they're switching the radio dial because you're not that guy. No, no. And my mission set was not the stereotypical one that theirs was either my job was not to recruit you know foreign spies and so there's a little bit of a different mental makeup that goes into what i did compared to you know what they did as well but i can also compartmentalize that empathy if needed and in certain situations shut it off but naturally i'm much more empathetic than most

is it kind of easy i don't want to say easy but is it easier to shut it off if the situation is someone who's like a really bad guy yeah absolutely right it's like all right whatever yeah for sure guy gets marked too the cares right right yeah and if that person you know hasn't been humanized to you you know you haven't met their kids or spent a bunch of time you know seeing that side of them you know i've seen some really really bad people who when they're with their kid, they're like father of the year over here. They're not completely bad in every area of their life. And so the more you see those good sides of people, the harder it is to turn your empathy off for them.

It gets a little weird, right? Absolutely. It can get extremely emotional. I had Brian McMonagle in here for episode 115 he's one of the greatest defense attorneys of all time he repped bill cosby got him off and then quit and bill cosby got found guilty when the next guy repped him but you know i i had known this guy all my life because he was from my hometown okay and he's the most as far when you want to talk about like one of the morally greatest people ever it's him and you would never think this because the

guy's this high-powered defense attorney who i swear to god sorry brian 90 of people he's fucking defending are guilty of sin and sometimes he gets them off but you know to his credit he really talked a lot about this and kind of the human battle you fight with that. And obviously he believes in putting the government to the test and, you know, when they win the test, great. But, you know, one of the things he really talked about is for some of the people that are just the worst of the worst, like think the worst crimes that he's had to represent. He's like, you'll sit with them for hours, you know, going over the case or whatever the fuck you're doing, and they'll do these things that are so human. And suddenly you realize it's in there. All right, they're really bad.

They do this thing. That's not good. But maybe there's something okay in there. Did you ever – we're going to get into your story, but just on a broad context here, did you ever sit with some guys where you developed this empathy? You knew they were really bad and some of the things they do, but then you'd see this side, maybe it's with their kids or, or other things and say to yourself, maybe this person's savable. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes, sometimes you think there's no helping, there's no helping this person, but yeah, sometimes, um, there was one guy that, that comes to mind. He was, uh, he was a meth dealer. Um, and when he was also a user and when he would use it, he did some horrific things to people. Um, and he had, I think she was four years old at the time, his daughter. And he was like the father of the year with her.

And so I always thought, you know, I've seen this good side. I've seen that you can, you know, give a shit and care if you want to. He just chose not to. But I've seen people that, no, they're not switching yeah yeah all right so you you did you have any hesitation accepting this role like did you think about it like maybe i want to go diplomatic side what was that like no um in fact i was trying to like play it cool on the inside and like maybe this is a test. I don't want to just be like, hey, where do I sign?

Like let's do this. Can we do it right now? I was like maybe I should ask more questions. It doesn't seem like it's not so easy for them to get me. We'll do it live. Yeah, basically. All right. So – and I don't – you might answer this.

I forget. Was there anything you signed? Anything like that? Well, just like the normal employment stuff. OK. But nothing that would have been unique to that. That here is what it – got it. Yeah, yeah.

OK. I had some stuff later that was unique where I had to get like an attorney general letter. Oh, whoa. To be a part of some of the things I was doing that overlapped in the states um because it was a legal activity but yeah that's huge air quotes right there yeah got it so that's maybe like the only super special document to all right so what's the what's the training protocol for something like this you're obviously you're not going to the farm you're not doing the 12 to 18 months regular rotation the other guys do what what happens with you so I had some stereotypical training but what was cool

was I got to go to this mansion essentially where this wealthy person lived it became my mentor who was an officer as well he had made she was independently wealthy, but it also worked for the agency for a long time. So he's, if I'm understanding this, he runs some sort of company, whatever it is, or is wealthy through doing something. And in doing that job,

he's also doing things within that job for the government or are they totally separate? No, no, totally separate, totally separate. separate okay and so he had been an officer I think for about 30 years at the time and he had it was on a lake it had a guest house that I stayed in and it was super cool um we advanced some of the basic skills like uh you know when you're in regular training you'll do surveillance detection routes we would go over new ways to do that that would be specific to my mission set which I couldn't go into but please yeah or training that was way outside the box I got to learn stuff about wine I got to learn stuff about bespoke suiting I got to learn all these other things

that had to do more with the business world or big money world. And one thing that was super cool was he would bring in a chef, uh, that was working in Vegas at the time. And we would have these training things where I would learn about the food and get to watch the chef cook. And just not the typical thing you would think, you it's like spy training but what's your cover story later for knowing that type of information like where'd you say you learned that if someone asked you like if you're in a situation they're like how the fuck do you know so much about wine like you sommelier or something like where are you saying you got that skill? Just through college or living or working. Wine specifically was something I knew nothing about.

I had to learn a lot about that. Actually, one time when I graduated a certain phase, he had given me this cigar. It was extremely expensive. I forget the brand. It was maybe like a $2,500 cigar. I didn't know at the time. And so we're sitting out there on the dock and he's congratulating me on like, Hey, you finally did something right here and we're smoking it. I never smoked a cigar in my entire life at this point, but I'm not going to like tell him, you know, you inhale on it. Yeah. And so this thing is burning

completely sideways. Oh, you voted it. Yeah. And so we're just sitting there drinking scotch, and he looks over at me. This is supposed to be this really bonding moment with me and my new mentor here. And he goes, are you hotboxing me with a cigar, man? He's like, have you ever smoked a cigar before? I was like, no, I haven't. You want to bring that up maybe? He's like, this is ever smoked a cigar before? I was like, no, I haven't. You want to bring that up?

Maybe. He's like, this is an expensive cigar, dude. I was like, I didn't ask you to give it to me. It was super embarrassing. So it's just you and this rich guy at his mansion. So it was him. There was another person from the training staff that lived there. And then some people would come in.

So imagine every single topic that you need to know they would bring in somebody that was a complete expert in that topic could you give an example of a topic i'll use one that it was that i didn't use but let's say like lock picking they would have brought in like the most you know master thief that you've ever heard of to to show something like that i just whenever i think of any of these jobs and all the things you gotta learn you know first of all how long is this period you're at this mansion it's maybe nine months that's not a long time no no right yeah you're drinking from the fire hose You're drinking from a fire hose. You're drinking from a fire hose. And these are the most intricate things that if you're ever called on to do, I don't know, any of these 1,000 things or whatever it is you learn, it's going to be in a high-octane, high-pressure, potentially life-and-death situation.

So you better not be able to forget. How do you even process all that and learn all that stuff and, and like have faith that you've retained it? So one of the, this will go back to the psychology a little bit is they're looking for people, one, they're quick learners. You have to, you have to do that, but also that have the right psychological makeup that if we don't tell you exactly what to do, you're basically going to default to making the right kinds of decisions here. So that's key. If you can't rap with it, if you can't play jazz and go off the sheet and still know what to do, it's not the job for you. Makes sense.

So it's you. Does this guy have a wife and family too? Nope. He had been single his entire career. Never married. Never had children. Is he still, whatever way he made money, is he still doing that job at this time or is he retired from that? He's retired now. All right. So he's strictly just supporting, say, agency at this point with guys like you. And you're the only trainee there. That's right yeah

what what was what was i mean obviously you're getting trained but what's a day like you waking up at like 5 a.m and going for a run yeah actually we would go for runs uh he was really big on running for you know working with jet lag and things like that but also moving around like that is is beneficial in a lot of other ways you know you can get take your area fam done you can look for surveillance while you're running you can use it to cover a lot of other activities so he's like if you don't you don't run this isn't going to work which i hate running so um that was no good and also you know i'm not the tallest guy in the world, and he's a fairly tall guy.

So I'm like taking 20 steps for every single one of his trying to keep up, run around the golf courses by his place. How do you do like surveillance on running? Like what do you mean by that? Where he would train you on surveillance doing this? Like what types of things? Just that you can use that as one of the means to identify if you're under surveillance, right? Oh, going for a run. Correct. Got correct got it yeah how might you do that um i can't get into the the technical specifics of that but i'll i'll bring one thing up okay if other people are trying to follow you or keep up with

you but you typically have to be involved in what you're doing right and so you can draw people out in that way you know you can use it as a funnel right i can go places a car can't go if i'm running it is too narrow yeah for instance right so you can funnel so maybe if you're going for some 10 mile run one day, he could run a scenario where out of nowhere he goes, all right, car coming on the left. Where are you going? That kind of thing. Sure, sure. Yeah, you can come up with a lot of scenarios from it. And that's a lot of what the training was, was different scenarios over and over and over. It was also very much building my persona that I would use as cover, my personality. One of the things that is just key that was hammered in this is you do not want to look like some military guy walking around.

You've got to shed that part of the persona and look like a business person. You have to look like your attitude fits you know more what you're portraying so they're psychologically changing you absolutely yeah did you have the tats back then already or you didn't know that came later did you have long hair scraggly beard what was the so at that point I would say middle length hair but um that's another thing right so you want to have hair that says that's not a military haircut on purpose right um you also

can use having longer hair for other things like uh for instance when you're going through an airport or trying to hide something blow dryer is a good place to hide something in. Really? I actually haven't heard of that one. Why is that? Just because of the makeup of it and how the metal is structured within it. You can't see it in the machine? Depends on the machine, but sometimes you can hide things in that. That's hard to do if you're bald, right? Yeah.

Like to explain, hey, why is this in my bag? Why do you have a hair dryer? Yeah. I'm a bald frog. Yeah, exactly. things in that that's hard to do if you're bald right like to explain and why is this yeah exactly somewhere drewski's like we're gonna find it and what's like the surveillance training though if you're not doing what some of my other guys like all the guys talk about the training they did whether it be joe ted i he was here 149 186 187 i think dale comstock did some of that and he was 188 189 and then sean ryan talked about that in 148 but like what they'll do is they'll take you into dc or new york or something and you know they'll have dummy teams and stuff like that and they'll give you drills and no one else knows what's going on but you can't get caught you might have to figure out something where you're able to go

into a store and steal clothes without anyone knowing and walk out looking different and things like that. You weren't able to do that form of surveillance training though. How did they compensate for that? So they would bring teams in for that part of it. Would you go into town? Yeah. Yeah. So I can't say what city this was in, but it was right by a major U.S. city that we were in. And just maybe like 45 minutes outside the city. So we'd go into the city and run scenarios constantly. So you were in Westchester, New York. Yeah, precisely.

How'd you know? Yeah, and so you're building the persona you know i was learning how to dress properly at the time i was learning the difference between you know different layers of you know does your watch go with the suit right so you want to be consistent you know you can't have a $7,500 suit on and a $10 belt and you know it's got to be all in the same range. Right. Right. So you don't put $5 tires on a Ferrari.

And that inconsistency is what people notice, right? So if people are looking at you and they're trying to determine when you're out, they're looking for consistency as well. And it's also not very popular to fund things at the level that I was at. So the more money you're throwing at something, the less likely they're like, that's a government kind of op. Really? Yeah. they're like that's a government kind of op really yeah even even like in the modern era where we're taking flying planes in was with fucking large bills cash and just dumping them to people well they'll do that but you're not gonna see a lot of officers walking around in a

ten dollar ten thousand dollar suit that uncle sam paid for they don't want to spend money on that. But if it's money, black budget money, they might spend that money. I don't know. That one, I'm a little skeptical of that one. Right. So, well, I'm just saying it's not the norm, right? So if I'm a security officer from, I don't know, Badlanistan or whatever, I'm not expecting the person i'm looking for to come in you know with a ten thousand dollar suit and a thirty thousand dollar watch it's not my typical person i'm looking to grab so you are near a city though so you are effectively doing these drills that i was talking

about even though your training setup's different like they're doing the same things and you said they would bring in teams sure like for some of said they would bring in teams. Sure. Like for some of it, they would bring in support teams for the training to run scenarios as well. Meaning like they're the trainers or they're, or some of them are doing it with you. They're the trainers. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Do you like, do you have a notebook? You're writing this down all in? No. I was going to say like, you can't, you can't keep a record of this stuff. So you're just storing it in your brain, everything you're learning this down all in no i was gonna say like you can't you can't keep a record of this stuff so you're just storing it in your brain everything you're learning mostly yeah yeah and you're trying to to rehearse it enough that it becomes second nature to you yeah as well but now you know while you're doing this there's two things going on you're trying to retain all these things maybe it becomes second nature to do that but it's an

insane amount of things and then maybe in these nine months in month two you learn a skill inside now and then you get to month five you're working on something entirely different at this point you're like shit do i still remember that like you know i'm thinking all these different scenarios and at the same time during this whole thing you know at the end d-day whenever that's going to be you're going to be released out into the wild. And now you're going to be sitting around with some of the most dangerous people in the world, having to be the calmest guy. Like you need to be an Academy Award winning actor in every room you ever walk into.

And there's no such thing as a second take. Precisely. Are you even – can you even process that? I thought I was processing it beforehand. But if you've never been there, you have this very movie-type version of how things are going to be. And what you learn – you've probably heard this from a lot of people is that nothing is what you think it's going to be. It could be better or worse, but it's never what you think it's going to be. And so a lot of this you learn as you go in those scenarios that you're forced into.

And I made some mistakes, you know, right out of the gate. But you hope people don't catch them. You try to whittle those mistakes out as you go. Did they, during your training, did they, I mean, first of all, you're doing some things where you're literally sitting down, not in a classroom, but like in a room like it's class sometimes, right? It's not just out there always doing things. Right. Did they take you through scenarios or past guys without revealing classified information or things that you don't need to know where guys did get made or were killed doing something and here's the mistakes they made and what happened? Absolutely.

Yeah. Even showing video footage of things going bad for other officers. Was there anyone on there? It's truck month at GMC. Tackle the open road with added confidence in a 2025 Sierra 1500 Pro Graphite at 0% financing for up to 72 months. With an available 5.3 liter V8 engine, 20 inch high gloss black painted aluminum wheels,

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no no i never saw that that would be wild that would be like oh shit that was that was a guy yeah no mostly the scenarios they used were things that were well-known to go off of. What was an example of a video you saw where someone did something wrong? Well, not wrong. I won't say wrong, but they've shown interrogation videos of officers that have been caught before, for example, and what that looks like. And, you know, you actually get the audio of that somebody you don't want to be that person. You don't want to get caught doing this. And that's the point that they're trying to drive home when they show that. Meaning like someone getting tortured. Right. right what was well that's another thing did they did they train you for the scenario where you do

get caught and how to deal with torture sure but just like any you know see your school yeah yeah so you effectively did your own seer school correct and I had some training in the military along those lines as well and then there's you, you know, some more, I don't want to say like advice you get in the program that I was in because it's very different. You're not just trying to wait, you know. Yeah. Until the ambassador shows up or something like that. For sure. They do any fun shit, bury in a box?

No, nothing like that. Nothing like that? No. God, that's like my ultimate nightmare yeah so you got to watch video though where people have some of these things happen to them or audio some of it you know we'd collected that was just audio things going bad but you learn pretty quick that you need to be a serious-minded person to do this this isn't it's not a joke it's not a movie and people take it seriously and you should too.

Well, the other thing is that a, a very endearing, probably the most personability wise, I don't think that's a word, but you know what I mean? Endearing quality that someone can have and building rapport with another person is the ability to make other people laugh yeah right like just you know being not necessarily a comedian but someone who's who can be funny or quick-witted and things like that and yet i would imagine when you're in a role right like this it makes it harder to be like that because you are, even if you are able to get outside your body a little bit and forget exactly what you're doing and just focus on the present moment, you know, the stakes are always high. You're so worried about making mistakes and all your training set in.

It's like hard to be funny, I would think. was a lot harder when i actually got out there and i was around people it became much easier because in the world that i worked in people use humor as a coping mechanism constantly um and so you know you learn to be sitting in those bars and crack a joke to get somebody to de-escalate right so like if somebody's getting really upset sometimes a joke is the difference between sitting back down and having a beer with that person or them you know getting very violent and so you learn to use humor as a de-escalation tool pretty quickly and that sounds like it's obviously more based on the experience like actually being out there and feeling it rather than what you're being trained on yeah you gotta you gotta be in the moment um and then sometimes you look back and things that seemed really really serious at the time were just you know hilarious like yeah i'll give you one

example i think it was my first or second thing i did after training and i'm somewhere in africa and i just met with somebody i've got a backpack full of sensitive information on me and I'm in the lobby of this hotel and I go into the restroom and these two guys walk into the restroom behind me like at the same time and so it's a little a little weird and one goes to the sink just stands there at the sink the other one goes you know over to the stall and so i pick like a further sink away from this guy after walking up there and it has like you know those places that have cologne just like tons of cologne you know for you to use it was like that and the guy one of the guys grabbed one of them and sprayed the cologne like right in my eyes

and i got into a fight with these two guys and they're trying to take this backpack. And I'm thinking at the time, they know what's in it. They're trying to steal this. I just got out here. I'm going to ruin everything right now. So I get into a fight with them in the restroom of this hotel. And after that's over, I leave and I go back. My mentor's with me on this this op oh the guy from the mansion yeah yeah yeah so we worked together initially after that like kind of like a training wheels cut your teeth scenario we'll come back to those people don't worry but i want you to finish this yeah and so i get back and i don't realize i have a little bit of blood on me, and I smell horrible.

Like, it's just the worst cologne you've ever smelled, ever. And he dumped it on you, effectively. Yeah, basically. And so I get back, and my boss, my mentor, he looks at me, and he's like, why do you smell like fucking patchouli, man? Like, no concern for me bleeding, you know, at all. I thought I was going to get this big pat on the back, and it did not go that way. He wasn't very happy.

But you took two of these guys. Well, I was like, man, I'm going to get, like, you know, a handshake for just Jason Borning these guys in the restroom. What did they look like when you left them? Not like that. I don't recall. Not good, right? Maybe as bad as me, because according to his his face I looked like I just gone 10 rounds

with Tyson because he was just shocked like this oh my gosh why are you walking back over here after this face so he never let me live that one down were you did you get pretty much all your hand-to-hand combat training during those nine months or had you had some previous with NSA military um I had done stuff privately you would be surprised how little hand-to-hand training people in these scenarios get. Really? Yeah. So you'd done some privately? Yeah, I'd boxed some privately. I did jujitsu a little bit on my own, but there was definitely no ninja training for going fist toisticuffs with somebody in an alley mostly what wow the training that i was in was situationally based like high-risk meetings

how to be reactive how to deter aggression how to not end up in that situation is mostly what they focus on not so much the because it takes so long right like if you you look at somebody like like jason bourne in the movie to be able to fight like that it would take decades right right of training every single day i thought you were jason fucking bourne i'm disappointed no no sorry to let you down i think he's the next interview i'll just get the heck out of here so they didn't spend a lot of time in those nine months teaching you that. That is a bit of a surprise to me. No.

No, they teach you that you need to be aggressive, right? They teach you essentially what we refer to as reverse life-saving, right? So if you're going to save somebody's lives, it's the ABCs, airway, breathing, circulation, right? So if you want to hurt somebody just do the opposite you want them not be able to breathe right step on the trachea yeah you want the blood to not be able to to do what it's supposed to do so it's just the concept of it is helpful did you ever find out who those two guys were so of course there was a review that was done like we're trying to figure out how did they know?

Is this like, you know, is this hot blown? And it turned out that the hotel that I was in was really big in the rough stone trade there in Africa. And so a lot of people would come from the Near East, stay in the hotel, go to the bazaar, buy stones, and then mule the stones back. And so we assessed that they thought i had a bunch of you know like diamonds in my backpack they're just trying to rob me okay so it wasn't an intel breach it was just a coincidence right okay and that it taught me a lesson very early on which is you don't have to look out just for what you think the problem is going to be, right? Or your cover, you have to look out for anything that anybody could mistake as a problem, right? So just because they didn't think that I was an agency officer with classified material did not mean that I had not projected something

that got me in trouble and could have potentially compromised that. Sure. So they'd be able to take some sort of lesson from it no matter what i got you now back to back to those nine months though with your mentor before you guys go out in the field during this time did he i don't know like what the protocol is here with him having to still be classified around you even though he's your mentor like was he able to give you intensive details of his previous a lot of his previous experience and places he was and things he did? So you were able to be read in on all that. Yeah, he had been in Nicaragua.

He worked that stuff down there. He had actually been in Cuba as well at one point. Whoa. Yeah, he was a legend. This guy had done a lot. He had worked in eastern europe heavily as well so whoa he had a lot of experience to pass along yeah and you can't really tell these stories obviously no on it from a 30 000 foot view though are these i would imagine he's doing

a lot of different scenarios but could this be everything from being a fake arms dealer to – Yeah. Okay. Nailed that one quickly. Yeah. Good guess. Yeah. So like I said, I wasn't predominantly doing the recruitment part, right?

And so what I was being trained to do and what my primary role was, was twofold. One, I moved money for the government overseas to support operations. You were trained in these nine months to do this specifically. Right, right. Essentially to become a legal money launderer for the US government. And then the primary goal was to buy foreign technology that we were interested in or foreign military technology or weapon systems that other countries were developing and then get them back to the United States. Okay. You ever seen the show Breaking Bad? No. I know exactly what you're talking about.

You know what it is. But you ever hear of Saul Goodman? The lawyer in that? Yeah, Better Call Saul. so yeah and they later had a show better call so so one of my favorite scenes in breaking bad is when he's sitting in in his hokey lawyer office and explaining money laundering to walter white and he's like what do you mean you don't understand all right money line takes out a cup he's like so you take a whole bunch of these toothpicks right right so nail salon yes yes all right so you have seen some i saw the clip yeah okay saw it conveniently yeah right another money launderer watching what the professionals do so in a better call saw like simple man scenario yes how would you explain the

money laundering you did to the layman and to all of us out here so money laundering first the steps in money laundering are not illegal right supporting an underlying crime is what's illegal right so you could move your legal money all over the world through trusts you know like you could do whatever you want that's not that's not wrong but it usually always follows the same three steps placement layering and integration right so let's say you've got a bunch of money that's from selling dope you want to get it into the banking system you have to take it from bulk hard cash and get it into the banking system somehow then you want to move that around and separate it from its original source so nobody can tell the origination of those funds and then

you want to be able to to spend it and so if you're doing what we would call covert finance operations we don't call it money on and call it covert finance yeah it's catchy yeah the government is starting with this money it all says Uncle Sam you know essentially on it and if if I'm going to buy something, let's say in Eastern Europe, that's a classified communication system off of somebody and we don't want anybody to know the U.S. was involved, then you have to distance that money and run it through, you know, different businesses, trust jurisdictions, different banking jurisdictions, and make sure they can't trace that money back to the United States. How do you make sure they can't trace that?

Isn't everything technically traceable if you follow the pathway correctly? I mean there are ways to break it. Like our adversaries have done this, like a Hawala network, right? So if things are passed informally on notes and there's no actual bank trail, that's very hard to trace that money. But you can do a lot of things like invoice manipulation, right? So let's say you have a shipment of bananas, but you're paying what would break down to a hundred dollars a banana, right? So you can move the money through that business by manipulating that. So you change the pricing on it. Yeah.

That's one way to do it. Other ways. You said your boy was in Nicaragua. That sounds awfully close to home. You're right. Right. Noriega was using some of that dirty money. What's it?

Hooray, Contra. Oh God. I'm sorry. I had some of that dirty money. What's it? Rank Contra. Oh, God. I'm sorry. I had to get that one out. Art's another one, right? Oh, yeah. That's a big one. That's a perceived value.

So when you're laundering money, it's best to not think of it as moving money, but as transferring value. Right? And so especially with new things now like ETFs or something like that, like I can go to a, let's say you make a painting. If I feel like your painting's worth $25 million, that's not illegal. Right. So I can pay you as much as I want for that. And now with cryptocurrency and stuff, it's getting a lot easier to, to do these value transfers. Meaning I want to make sure I'm thinking of this correctly. Let's say I had $25 million in cash. I'm just a regular criminal, and I need the government to not know about this.

That's where you get regular criminal. I'm a very good criminal. And I go to this street artist in New York, and I say, you know what, I think you're the next Basquiat. I'm going to give you $25 million for that painting. I give him it in cash so there's no record of it. And then there's some sort of like underground street conversation happens like, yo, this motherfucker sold his painting for $25 million.

So now it at least still retains some of that value. Exactly. Okay. So even if I had to pay, even if I ended up selling it for $19 and took a $6 million loss, I still got $19 million off the books untaxed that no one ever knew about. You got it. Okay. So you're doing this on behalf of the USM Day.

And this is within the – you didn't have any previous experience with this before those nine months training. No. No, I've never laundered money in my life up to this point. God, there's so much that happened in that nine months. Yeah. So that would be like one of the experts I said that came in. Yeah. Somebody knew exactly what they were doing on this topic.

I hope he did. Yeah. Was his name Matt Cox? No. No, it wasn't. Are you doing any of that like con man stuff though where you're also, you know making fake documents and forging okay stuff yeah especially for the logistics right so you're either using logistic networks that have been set up companies um that you're you're moving things through but sometimes you're gonna actually

fake you know what's in a package right you're gonna label this fake, you know, what's in a package, right? You're going to label this something else. You can also fake like an end user certificate, right? So if I'm going to send something from, let's say, hypothetically, North Korea, right? Yeah. And it's going to come back here. Technically the end user is within the United States. Well, you can't put that on the label at customs at the time, right? So you got to fake an end user destination and then maybe send it to Singapore, go pick it up, repackage it and send it again from a jurisdiction that wouldn't be upset about something going to the United States. Okay. So it's, I get it. It's a logistical problem. Now you're coming into this

though in like 09, 10, 11. We're really starting to get into digital age. Was that making things difficult? It was making things a lot easier. Really? So I was super early on using Bitcoin to do this back when it was like – That's how he has the ice, bro. That's how he's got it.

I understand. You're laundering your bitcoin and that boulder on your finger okay all right so you're using bitcoin in like the earliest days close to the earliest days when it was just several hundred dollars a coin and you know back then i don't know if you were you're dealing with it in the early times no but you could meet somebody anonymously, like physically, and buy it off of them. They could transfer the coins to you for cash. And so somebody was handling this op already. And I get told, hey, you're going to take this over.

You're going to start buying these coins, these digital currencies off of the source. And so I was like, OK, what's this look like and so they show like the arranged meeting points and stuff and it basically boiled down to like me meeting dudes in parks and buying stuff off of them but and it wasn't as sexy as i was as i was hoping to get into like oh you're not here for the glory hole oh no that's over there two benches down. Yeah. No joke. I mean, some of these people that I was meeting to buy this off of were probably moving down to the glory hole as soon as I gave them the cash. So you meet some interesting people in this line of work.

But it was completely anonymous to do so at the time. And then you can move digital currency across jurisdictions so easily yes even now you know you could get an encrypted thumb drive with a compartment compartment on it put your cold storage wallet on it yeah and walk through any airport in the world just fine it's a lot higher limit than ten thousand dollars you know in cash that you're carrying on you you're not doing any favors for the conspiracy theory about the nsa creating bitcoin because you come from the nsa and you're

using bitcoin in the earliest days if i had invented it i would not i didn't say you invented but you know maybe your friends over there i don't know we're doing a little satoshi nakamoto they should have hooked me up more if they were my friends i guess but that's that's crazy you were using it as a mecca they were using it this early as a mechanism to move things around. Did you end up using that with some of the high level criminals later? Absolutely. Oh, wow. Yeah. Especially the ones that didn't know, um, too much about it. They weren't very tech savvy. They would never be able to tell that they were signing up for stuff that could be like super traceable by getting involved in it oh yeah because i would have all the wallet numbers for their oh

yeah their activity yeah it's crazy my my friend andy greenberg actually wrote a book about the traceability of this stuff he's been he's a long time reporter for wire he's been deep in in i mean he was like the first guy to talk with julian assange like like in person on an interview he was the only guy to interview dread pirate roberts ross olbrich when he wasn't caught interviewed him from behind a computer and he wrote a book a couple years back at the end of 2022 can we actually get the name of that alessi it's it's escaping me i want to give a shout out but he he demonstrated all these cases from all different government agents where they were able to track all different types of cryptocurrencies that were supposedly untraceable yeah around the world and make all these cases yeah not not sandworm it was it was the tracers

in the dark that's it okay yeah I have to read that there are ways to move it in an untraceable way but they're not very well-known ways you know so a lot yeah a lot of people getting caught with that right now oh yeah did you get to have a conversation well obviously the conversation happens at some point but how early in that nine-month process or even was it before you even started that? Did they tell you here's the first undercover op you're going to be doing? Like here's what your actual role is going to be. You're going to be this guy.

So it was a hybrid. As far as like an operational assignment, it didn't happen until afterwards probably because if I didn didn't graduate they didn't want me to know about you know something that was going on but the general persona that i used for my primary cover was being developed the entire time the attitude that needed to go with it the the look the background the consistency and and portraying that was the primary focus of the training and so you would never drop it right it wasn't like hey let's go into the classroom and then you know let's let's rehearse acting like this it was you act like this from now you're in character forward yeah yeah you don't break so you essentially become a method actor now for the rest of your life doing

this absolutely yeah that's crazy yeah and then when you get, you know, different covers as it goes on, because I had, you know, more than one, you learn how to tweak little things, right, and not everything, the whole persona. So if you, you know, think about like one of those old stereo systems where you can move like everything up just a little bit here, right? So you have like your baseline personality, and then you just want to move things a little bit here right so you have like your baseline personality and then you

just want to move things a little bit right you don't want to jump up here it's impossible to maintain that over a long period of time and so you learn to make little tweaks that once you change them can make you seem like a completely different person. What's an example of a little tweak you made? So one could be like how generous you are, right? As a tipper, like at a restaurant, you can change a lot about how you're perceived and your attitude just by adjusting that to being like a rude tipper all of a sudden, right? Because you can even just

hearing it right you can start to think of like yeah i know that person right yeah they do other things besides that that's a simple move that i get it now yeah okay because then it it you can do something that on the difficulty scale of being able to act it out is very low but on the perception scale of other people trying to see who you are is very wild well said yeah yeah exactly so i guess you're a bad tipper well that was something that was hard for me you know at at first is when people make bad cover they try to be as likable as possible in every single way and they create these unrealistic people that don't exist yes right and so it's easy to build in all the cool things that are gonna you know be about you and it's not so easy to think of the little

asshole things that you need to build in to be a believable person in regular society, let alone in a criminal world or in like a black market kind of thing. These are not always, you know, the nicest people in the world. And so if you're going to represent that that's the world that you're a part of, you need to build in some flaws. Yes. So they're training you this is this is a strange dichotomy here they're training you how to appear and act in small ways that are synonymous with what a rogue international criminal might be like right while also developing incredible you way using some of your empathetic skills and things like that developing an incredible ability for you to have people gravitate towards you without putting on the front that makes it seem like you want people to gravitate towards you i

think about this very maybe i'm drawing the wrong distinction here correct me if i'm wrong but i think about this a lot like with women. If you make yourself too available to women or too all over them and too nice, they're like, fuck that. But if you're a little bit like, hey, I'm in my lane. Nice to see you. Great. Wow. Cool.

Moving along with your days. If nothing's going on, they come right to you. Excellent analogy. It's one that was actually brought up in doing this. This is seduction. At the end of the day, you're seducing somebody, maybe not into bed, but into the end goal of what you want to happen or into you being safe or into selling you something that they're not supposed to sell from the company that they work for. And so it is very much a seductive process. Was there like a graduation day at the end where like, woo, you did it? No.

The guy that had trained me was a very strong personality. If you met him, you would have thought that he was like, I don't know, in the mob or something. He was a very, very strong personality and he didn't give a lot of positive reinforcement right so you were definitely outside new york i know it i know it this is some italian italian i could see it keep going so yeah he didn't you know i think he said like three nice words to me in my entire life you yeah pretty much but in the right order right yeah so you get done though and he did you know why you were training that your initial apps were literally going to be with him not until the end okay how did that go down he's like congratulations you work with me

now yeah so essentially what what he was doing was a handover with some of his connections in that world. He would introduce me to them so that I could take over the relationship going forward. Introducing you in the context of being a criminal though, not someone where they're a CI. Yeah. It could have been a criminal or just a businessman that was a little bit willing to play outside the lines. It wasn't – Meaning they didn't know who you guys really were?

Oh, absolutely not. Right. No, no. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it wasn't until later in my career that the official criminal stuff started happening. In the beginning, it was just you want to give the vibe that if there's a rule that needs to be broken here, i'm about that you know and there are really subtle ways that you can do that

with people without telling them like hey you know i'm into doing dirt in case you yeah in case you're wondering but now if he's still active though around the world doing some of these things nine months off the reservation in a mansion seems like a long time to me. Maybe I'm wrong, but like, did he ever have to step out to go do things? Um, yeah, he was gone at times. Yeah. All right. That makes sense. Especially when they would bring in another expert, um, to train me on something else. Um, I wasn't aware of what his schedule was. Did he ever show you anything like at the desk there where he's like, Hey, I'm actively working on this right now. Watch me, you know, la launder some money so he would bring back um like tech specs from like

weapons or like foreign manuals for like you know classified projects that an adversary was working on like a comm system for an airplane hypothetically and show me like hey this is this is what's valuable about this this is what you would want. So I was aware of some of the stuff. Now, they're training you to be a specific person and carry a specific role where you are on the – not even the chessboard. On the puzzle of what is the full US national security system. You're just one little piece somewhere doing one thing. And so a lot of guys I talk to, they talk about that compartmentalization, how you're just in your world. But from a high level, were there discussions like strategically that are happening where you're not necessarily being read in on, but you're being explained the biggest picture enemies that the United States

is currently most threatened by that all these little operations around the world in some way come back to. Absolutely not. It was completely, completely compartmentalized. At this period of my life, there could have been something going on that every single person knew about on the news that I might be oblivious to. I was pigeonholed out into what i was doing and where it was

how were you with like technology obviously you mentioned you're using some of it whether it be to move bitcoin and stuff like that or to create some digital differences and stuff like how good were you with different i don't know like spooky high level gadgets that would be cool to me yeah so the nsa background helped a lot with this um and i had an educational background my uh my first degree was in cryptology so for covert communications right or or things that we would do in that i had i had a background for that already so that helped quite a bit oh yeah um but i'm not like a computer hacker or anything like that that would be outside my my wheelhouse did you do did you get to do any cool disguise work

during this time like we hear the stories about the masks and the things that cia had i mean they had it 30 40 years ago john kiriakou talked about it with you know john amendez and some of the things they had back in the late 80s early 90s and he explained like him using it and how indistinguishable it was for a real person did you get any of that during this time so we worked with like close and uh you know, a little bit of it. But what might surprise you about the program that I was in is how low tech we did stuff. You know, we were running things close to how like the OSS did it, you know, World War II. Wow.

Just to stay off the radar. Right. too wow um just to stay off the radar right so it's very important when you're going out on these operations that the security service does not pick you up in the beginning right um you probably heard like the term going black right where people are under surveillance and then they they did surveillance and they they do something in my program they, they do something. Um, in my program, you don't do that. If you're under surveillance, you don't, you don't do stuff. You stay under surveillance. Yeah. You just, you're not going to be able to conduct your operational act. Like it's not the same approach to that problem. Can you explain that a little more? I'm a little lost on that. So if you are in foreign country X, let's just – you're in Russia. Let's make it simple. And you realize you're under surveillance. Andy Bustamante walked me through the three types of surveillance. What was it, Alessio, was like? Track to something, track to whatever, track to catch. You know what i'm talking about yeah so we have the term it's like a pbg right patch badging gun right you're always looking at the different levels of the security

service right so here we'd have like a local cop we'd have the the fbi right like there's different levels to it and in what i did if you were being observed by them, you're not, this is no bueno, right? So the trick is to not get looked at, not try to defeat them once they're looking at you. But if they, were you ever in a scenario where they were looking at you? I was in a scenario where I was pretty sure that that was happening. How did you determine that? Just through like my surveillance detection routes and, um, some other support that we had.

Okay. Right. And so we were fairly sure that I was on the radar. It was probably because I was associated with criminals. Right. And so like their version, this country's version of the FBI is, is looking at me.

And so, um, but if you don't know, right, you don't go through with what we call the operational act like you don't know if you're being watched or not you don't go through just do nothing yeah how do you come back and do it later yeah how do you make that excuse though to people you're working with so like if i was going to go buy something sure so you use the truth as the excuse, right? Like, yeah, I thought I saw some cops following me. I didn't want to bring that here.

Got it. Okay. I don't have to tell them I'm very good at determining if they're following me. So, all right, this is a little different though because it seems like it might actually just based on the crews you're running with, it would be a lot easier to be under surveillance. It would actually just – from the outside, me looking at it would just be a part of the business that you'd have to accept unlike a regular spy whose job is to be a normal person. Maybe they run a business or are a businessman in town. They're not supposed to be like an overt criminal but if you're like making something up some fucking international drug dealer and you're in the country meeting with a lot of shady people you're going to be under surveillance and they may not they may have most likely actually have no idea that you're

actually a spy they just think you're a criminal that's the point so that's what eventually i was going for is i want to get dismissed as potentially doing espionage in this country because they think, no, I'm just a criminal. And it actually, the way I accidentally ended up getting into a criminal organization was because of this, this scenario. So I was traveling overseas and we had information that this foreign service was looking into me. And what they did was they called, they had a woman called private investigator back here and say that she was with me and wanted to know if I was stepping out on her.

And so they essentially gained surveillance on me in this way. And so our idea to defeat this was to just reinforce the cover that I was, you know, the scumbag that i said i was so we got a list of all of these known organized crime bars essentially and i would start hanging out at them so what would happen is this person that i know is following me around this pi goes back and says look he's not cheating on you but i think you should know like he's a dirtbag like this guy's a criminal and that just reinforced this is so weird you're

trying you're trying to do the bad things unlike other people who are trying to not be seen doing the bad i wanted to be seen doing the bad things so you just like walk into like a mob bar be like what's up Frankie pretty much yeah sometimes you don't know right like they're not all wearing name tags and stuff in there and so this is how I accidentally got involved in in something that wasn't the plan so one of the bars I was hanging out at I would hang until close talk to the bartender you know just trying to to make myself known and her boyfriend would come in and help her close up at the end of the night and i struck up a a friendship with this guy he was super super nice

you know person and i'm making my contact reports at this time saying like i talked to this person blah blah blah and eventually it came back to me through my boss at the time hey do you know that this guy is like a serious figure in an international organized crime group the boyfriend yeah who's closing up the bar yeah i didn't know who he was but he was he was huge so you weren't even thinking like when you're striking up a conversation with him you're not thinking anything's going to come of this you're just trying to blend in and act like you're a regular dude in this place right you know because i'm not a cop i'm not looking for criminal activity i don't care what you know they're up to in that way i just want to get some of that stink on me you know from being around them you know and i want

anybody who's following me to say like yeah it's it's not like when i come home from these trips i turn into a choir boy all the sudden right you know that's not consistent right all right so we're going to come back to how you get into scenarios like this but now that i think we've gone through thanks for going through like so much of the nine months there i have like a pretty good picture of what you did it's pretty wild how much you fit into that but when you come out of this and now he's like congratulations you're in you fuck yeah you know what's what's day one like what how does he now suddenly say all right you're in the organization here's what we're gonna go do so it's pretty simple he just said you know like i mentioned earlier we're gonna go to this country um i'm gonna introduce you to somebody that's been, you know, helping me for a very long time. And so he's taking the training wheels off easy with, you know, essentially an asset that's pretty broken in, who was just a trip of a person to me. Like, I don't know if he was messing with me right the guy he introduced me to um we went to his house for a barbecue this is in somewhere in africa right and he takes me

into his basement this is the contact right and he's got a freaking nazi flag in his basement and i was like south africa it's somewhere down there and i was like is this this is probably just a prank right like this is like i'm on candid camera here um but no he was he was serious full-blown nazi yeah like he was all about that life did he like give you the speech like trying to recruit you into nazism no he just acted like it didn't exist you know like it was just some random painting on the wall oh my god yeah what was the nature of this guy's background so he was an intelligence officer from another country who had essentially fled from that life and was now working with some pretty nasty countries. He was moving black market stuff based on his former connections he had had,

and we were buying it off of him. Was any of that illegal ivory trade type things? No, no. This would have been like tech stuff. Okay. Wow, what a— Military gear from other countries. what a trial by fire right there dumping you right into it yeah okay it's the same trip i got the patchouli spray in my face right yeah right so that's that's that's the first one but you're what you're known for i guess the

things that you became most synonymous with during your years were twofold. One, getting deep in with the cartels and two, getting deep in with an unnamed, very high level biker gang. Is that right? Right. A friend I said, I made at the bar, it was a international motorcycle club. Oh, that was it. Yeah yeah he was in one of the big four motorcycle clubs got it okay so you get dumped in africa on this first one how do you end up in the crosshairs of the cartels so i end up meeting them through connections in the motorcycle club world. Oh, so it was motorcycle first.

Yeah. Okay, so how did we get to guy at the bar? Like how soon – how long after you being an active agent at this point or spy was – were you in that bar? A year later. Okay. a year later okay so in that i this this is what i'm trying to get at because i just like to paint the picture in my head for my purposes here hopefully helps people out there too in that one year obviously mentioned the first mission here some of the shit that goes wrong guys in the bathroom all that what are you doing to establish yourself like you ever seen the movie

donnie brascoe yeah all right i'm very familiar with the story so he had to establish yourself like you ever seen the movie donnie brascoe yeah all right i'm very familiar with the story so he had to establish himself as you know donnie donnie diamonds or whatever you know he was dealing diamonds so for months and months and months i think like a year or two he was a diamond dealer around the world on a legit basis or around the country on a legit basis in that way and ends up getting in the crosshairs of the bananos are you just putting your services out there as a money launder to anyone and everyone for that year to like set yourself up in that space so i have a at the time i have a primary you know corporate cover that i'm using right so i'm still a businessman that's traveling i'm just a

businessman that's doing you know dirty stuff got on the side right so there's a lot of layers you got to keep this is a public company it used to be yeah okay yeah so I mean these are real real companies that they get used for this sometimes but um so I'm doing that and that's within the tech world so I'm a businessman who works in the tech world and then I'm doing this buy stuff and the money stuff on the side would you be given people to target to get jobs like that or did you have to kind of identify people where you're doing that on the side i can't i can't say you can't say that yeah okay how those corporate things are set up is is very sensitive all right so i want to run a scenario by you just to see how

realistic this is and if you can't talk about it you can't talk about it but i had one guy who i would call a friend who was he did things around the government and it's like a really connected dude and so he gets a phone call i don't know this is a few years ago now at least he gets a phone call from someone at a majorly public company in the united states multinational company because they all are but it's based out of the United States. And I say this because you had mentioned earlier, like, for example, the CIA is not supposed to spy on people within the United States and things like that. They're supposed to do things internationally. However, we all know that definitely still happens.

But he gets this call and they say, hey, someone pretty high up at our company just walked into the office of the CEO like it was another Tuesday and revealed that they are a CIA spy. They have been – and they were told that they were now supposed to go tell the CEO this. And they were here for X, Y, and Z reasons and then A, B, and C reasons that they can't talk about. And the government had asked them to be on the up and up about that now because there were things that we needed to figure out to be able to advance whatever mission, whatever all this stuff was. Essentially, the CEO is looking at this dude like he has 10 heads like, what the fuck is going on? So they call one of the CEO's top people, knows my guy, and they call him and they go, have you ever heard of this? And he's like, yes. And they're like, okay. So he sets up a meeting with the CEO and him and the person who walked in the office.

And I don't know if other people came as well, but I know those three were there. And essentially they iron this all out and they get it figured out so that, you know, whatever they got to do, they do that over here, but we don't know anything about it. Cool. Whatever. Yeah. Is that a scenario you've seen before? Not specifically, but I will say that, um, there's a lot of legal stuff that goes, goes into this. It's not as cowboy as, as people think. And if an employee was going to be used in the United States, it would be disclosed to the entity that employee was participating in the government thing, whether it's the Bureau or somebody else going and explaining it. But it's not like they're just hiding us in these companies and nobody knows in a nefarious way.

But if they went to explain that, would they be legally able to tell said company, like, by the way, you have to keep this confidential? Or couldn't the company technically be like, the government just told us this dude's working for them? Well, it depends on the status, right? So it is a felony to disclose the identity of an officer, right? Even if you're not in? Yeah.

So like if somebody in the public knew about the identity of an agency officer that was working at the time, you're not allowed to tell them. Really? Yeah, it's a crime. I never knew that. It's good to know. You never know who you're going to run into with this shit. Right, right. There's a lot of you guys out there.

Okay. know you never know who you're gonna run into right that shit right yeah it's a lot of you guys out there okay yeah because i like we all know the bad shit the cia is done and we talk about that shit all the time on the show whether it be mk ultra potentially whacking a fucking president definitely whacking a fucking president things like that you know but i also i am a realist you talked about the gray area earlier i am very much a guy who lives in the gray. I recognize that like the people who are pissed about everything about the CIA who are like, defund the CIA. Well, that's probably not the brightest move. That said, I also recognize why – like this scenario I'm thinking of, I can't give details of it. That might make it easier for people, but I fully understand why the CIA wanted, would have wanted to have someone there because it had nothing to do with the company. The company was doing nothing wrong, had nothing to do with them and had to do

with the fact that they do business around the world. And there were some bad people who completely unbeknownst to them could take advantage of some things. And the CIA basically just said, don't worry about it. You know, we, we want to cover that up yet. This is supposed to be something that's like not legal. I don't really understand that when, when we live in a global world now where everything's connected, like technically you kind of have to do things. There's no way around doing things in the United States. No. Right. Right. And so there's overlaps, um, to where you have to notify. So there were federal people that knew when I would be in the United States and the attorney general's office knew some stuff as well. And so I've been in states where the special agent in charge, you know, like for the DEA, for instance, had known about that. We had to disclose like, hey, this guy's working here. Right. So there's all kinds of lawyers that get involved in this and they try to play it by the book more than people would think.

You ride by the office, give them a little – Right. What's up, DA? Fuckos. Yeah. That's funny. OK. So this first year, you can't say how you were getting placed to do certain things, but you're doing certain things basically to establish yourself as what your skill set is money laundering and then you end up in this bar

which you already also explained was because you were trying to be seen in places like that right and you fall into this you know i guess like the luckiest lottery winner in the bar pretty much where this dude completely unbeknownst to you turns out to be in a top four biker gang yeah now that you got a senior officer in it he was a senior officer not just a guy he was a senior officer in that organization was there any like was he wearing like bling like you or something that you could tell like he was loaded no no no he looked like a normal joe wow all right so he was a good criminal yeah right. So now that you're told that information by your people, actually, real quick, how would you communicate? If you're off the books and everything, how does that even work to communicate with base without revealing classified information?

Sure. So there's just classified types of technology that would be used for me to communicate or i would physically just meet with my boss during this time like leo and the departed kind of deal yeah yeah yeah so i'd have a clandestine meeting with somebody to pass the information along and in that first year you know before we get to this biker guy this is your first year in the role you actually are being baptized by fire you already mentioned the incident in the bathroom that sounds scary as fuck you found your way out of that good job but like you know you'd mentioned there's some mistakes that are made and there's moments where

you think oh shit like did you have anxiety off the charts just while you're adjusting to now being actually out in the field or how how did you how did you actually process moving into the role officially i think you just give yourself to it as much as possible right and so all these hesitations that the real you would have these don't exist that's not how this persona thinks right so you just dive into it and you build in things that help your mind. Like what? Like bravado, like how somebody would handle a certain situation, right? So when you're working cover like that, you are constantly planning.

When I go in here, if this person says this, I'm going to say that. If they say this, I'm going to say that. If this happens, I'm going to do that. You don't want to think of these things as they're happening. You want to consider as many potential scenarios as possible and think through what your reaction would be, whether that's what you say back or what you do physically. But yeah, there were some mistakes. And one of the things I realized early on was, uh, I didn't know shit about riding motorcycles and that's going to be a problem.

Um, so I found this guy who was a tweaker and he'd been like, just Mr. Harley Davidson his whole life. And I didn't know it at the time, but he, he he kind of looked he didn't look like a real outlaw he looked like a wannabe or like an undercover cop but um you know he had like 50 patches all over him that said you know like clever little phrases and stuff like that and this guy will call him everybody called him teeth that was his nickname because he had like three of them. And he was a maniac. How did you find him? Hanging out in the bar. Oh, right.

And so he wasn't one of the made dudes, but I needed somebody that I could ask questions to without them getting like too bristly about it. And this guy, when he would drink, you could not shut him up. So I could ask a winner for you anything and he used to carry this plastic uh whiskey jug in his saddlebag on his bike and he would sip on it like at a red light this guy was wild like he was all about it i almost got into trouble with him a couple of times was the mistake right so where i was at there had been a big gang on gang shooting. I think nine or 10 people had died in it recently. So everybody that was in that world was on very high alert at the time.

And he's showing me how to ride my bike and kind of mentoring me a little bit. And, you know, his, his criminal ways is very low level criminal ways. And he's like, Hey, let's, uh, you know, on Saturday, let's meet up early. We'll go bar hop and I'll, I'll show you around town. And I'm thinking, Oh, this is going to be fantastic. So it's like 11 in the morning on a Saturday. And, uh, we take off and he takes me to this first bar. It's not a bar. It's a tiny house. And there's like picnic tables out front, a big parking lot, this gravel parking lot. And there's like picnic tables out front a big parking lot this gravel parking lot and there's like eight or nine guys sitting at these picnic tables outside so we pull up next to all these bikes he backs in like wow this is an interesting place and we're walking up to this

bar hypothetically and all these guys have this look on their face like you just asked you know what color their sister's panties were or something just a mixture of confusion and anger and we go in it's not a bar there's like a regular fridge you know like from walmart in there um there's no bar top there's no there's a couple pool tables and a bunch of signs that indicate like this is one of the gangs it wasn't a public bar it was their clubhouse and so right after we get in he grabs a beer and of course these guys are coming in to ask us what the are you doing here and so he's playing hard to get with them.

And I don't know why he's like toying with this guy. Cause it's pretty much about to get his brake speed off. And then all of a sudden he, he points at the wall and there's a picture of like this old member, like from the eighties or whatever. And this little kid, he's like, I'm that little kid.

That's my dad. His dad was a member of the club but he thought it was funny he played this out for like 10 minutes while they're looking to you know beat the heck out of us oh he just enjoyed it he thought it was the funniest thing but what are you and the whole time what are you doing just like i barely know him yeah who the fuck is this guy yeah somebody call about the electrical work here you know yeah had you is this after like because you said you knew nothing about bikes or biking or anything had he been i guess like taking you on bikes and you picking up things

at this point from him yeah so i knew how to ride a motorcycle i didn't know how to ride a motorcycle like you're in a club like as aggressively as they ride and uh i mean he wrote too aggressively you know he'd been arrested like i don't know 300 times probably in his life and he ended up it wasn't like a go and blow or something like that but he'd have to check in at his house like on a schedule right for some like part of his release or his parole or whatever right and so he tried to time when he would drink so that he'd be ready again and then like you know as soon as he checked in he'd go get some more and so we're shooting pool this is later that night and all of a sudden he gets a call from his wife and we're like maybe like five minutes from his house at this point and she's like you better get home you missed it like he's in trouble she's like the cops are gonna be coming he it looks like

tasmanian devil just like spinning out of the bar like there's a dust cloud that's left you know he gets on his bike so i run out after him it had to be 30 40 seconds later after he took off here come these two squad cars like behind him so i get in behind them like fall into the house he was so drunk because he'd been drinking all day he parks his bike the cops are getting out he jumps into the front yard and tags it like it's home base like nope i was here you didn't see me anywhere else when you arrested me i was at my house so he was watching this from behind yeah like this guy might get me in trouble but he was you he was your lefty rogerio he was useful to learn the ropes yep okay stepping stone but and again like you see your would you say you

were used to it pretty quickly used to being this guy and putting on this role yeah when you talked about like going over every scenario of what's said and what you'll say back i'm just thinking of a random 10- 15 minute meeting you could have with some international criminal that could be a million things yeah how do you even possibly plan that like i don't plan out before i come in here i mean you see how this is i'm playing out anything i just go with the flow but the stakes aren't that like you might shoot me at the end of this because i'm made right you know what i mean those are the stakes for you that like you might shoot me at the end of this because I'm made. You know what I mean? Those are the stakes for you. How do you even process all that and then like put it to work in a believable way when someone says something and you're like, oh, that was number 27 on my list.

Let me put that one out there now. Yeah. So, I mean, when you're building your cover, there are key elements of it that you need to be able to defend and so you have categories of questions that would you know penetrate that cover like you know do you work for the agency you know as a question that you probably should think of what you should answer before but a lot of it is and as you get better at it as you go what you get good at doing is steering people away from ever asking you the questions that you don't want to be in a conversation with. How would you do that?

You can do topic changes. Usually humor is a good way to transition between topics or to bring up something, you know, that's more important. Like if you see the conversation head in a certain way, that's what's important to them, right? They want the conversation to get there. You need to introduce something that's more important than getting there on the topic yeah and also people even in that are criminals they don't generally want to be rude right and so you can force somebody into feeling very very rude to circle back around and ask you a pointed question

right you can set that up to where that would be unnatural for them to do that your character that you're playing during these years how similar from a words per minute standpoint is he to you right now spoke faster spoke a little faster spoke a lot more less less louder louder louder. Louder, faster, and less. The exact opposite of what Jim Lawler's voice sounds like. Got it. Okay. Can you turn that voice on right now? To just talk fast and be more aggressive?

Yeah, so how would you talk? I'm a criminal but i'm um i am a middleman for the cartel moving cocaine in charge of transporting the cocaine once it gets across the border from the border to la okay yeah what are we what are we talking about we're talking about why the fuck why you're wasting my fucking time right now yes yeah yeah so the time thing is what i would focus on right but so if i'm going to talk faster it's going to be because my time is important to me and so i don't want to be sitting here all day spending all this fucking bullshit time on this when i don't have it like if you don't have what we need then get the fuck out of here right you don't want to sit back right and just like take it right you got to be the person in the room i gave you your 20 kilos you're telling

me i need 30 now but that's not that's not telling you anything i'm not telling you anything we already set down what happened we don't even need to discuss it right now it's already been brought up who brought it up fix it up i brought it up that's why i'm here why with who the big guy why the fuck else am i here no i the easter bunny sent me here so all right i see i see um the reason i asked that is because i want to know All right. I see. I see. The reason I ask that is because I want to know how much – you're very good at making someone have to move the conversation along but also move it in the direction you want, right? Because that's also – that is my job title in all fairness. But it's not that much different in the world when someone else is coming into the room and you both have some sort of goal that has to get accomplished here. They need you just like I need you to be good today, which you're doing a great job by the way.

But I need you to kind of go through your shit. They need you to go through the business shit or something like that. So I'm getting to see what that's like making me have to do today on my end. And I'm trying to imagine what they might've felt like in some of these scenarios where it involves, you know, let's call it what it is. It's criminal work, but it's business. Right. Right. It's, it may, it makes sense to me, like why you would have been, why that would have been pretty natural to you. Cause you're, you're very, uh, what's the, the what's the term your pitch is very consistent too that makes people feel comfortable kind of like a radio operator a little bit i would imagine that's

probably one of the reasons they liked you perhaps yeah okay so you get used to this role now we're back to the biker guy in the bar how do you once you are told who he is, you start making friends with teeth to learn the ropes and everything before you make an approach. How did you determine it was time to make the approach and how did you do it? So I didn't make the approach. They approached me and I used teeth to make this happen because teeth can't keep his mouth shut. And so anything like we talked about before those uh those avenues to pass information right teeth was my avenue i knew that anything i told him would get repeated and so i didn't have to say it directly to anybody and so i leaked things that were valuable to them right like

a skill set right like being able to to move money right so i get drunk enough one night and i just happen to tell teeth you know that i can do this money thing did you give him like examples of how you okay yeah so then he tells them now what what he doesn't betrays my confidence right right but you wanted him to right was it the guy himself who made the approach to you or was it someone else there's someone much more junior okay how did that go down they just came up and said like hey would you like to to come around more often and meet some of the people and hang out so the first phase in that world is being a hang around right so they just asked me

to to be there invited me and send me showing up uninvited all the time was the first step do you still have that corporate cover yeah and they know that yep so they know you work for some company but they're like oh this guy does some shit on the side yeah which is what they're all doing right a lot of those guys have straight jobs really even in that yeah i mean they got when you say straight jobs like running a liquor store dentist lawyer they got dentists and lawyers yeah and outlaw motorcycle clubs yeah really yeah are they like disguised no i mean so a lot of times one one thing you'll see if you look at pictures of a big club where they're all together sometimes people have their back turned like with a hoodie up some people will be facing the camera that could be because you know somebody's

got warrants it could also be because they've got a job that they think they'll get fired from if they're alessi can you pull up a picture of hell's ain't hell's angels biker gang because that's one of the big four right that is one of the big four okay hell's angels biker gang group photo let's see if we can pull one online that they have i've never looked at this that's interesting all right oh yeah get that no i mean you can see like on the second row everybody's doing it oh yeah yeah look it's woo hung out at the hell's ain't yeah they're taking the picture in reverse and one guy's got his tattoo showing nice job okay and it's this you know so if you look at the bottom rocker there for the territories and stuff you know you see like belgium and

you know it was that international presence that was what was helpful for me because again i'm not trying to you know do a law enforcement op on these guys i need the international excuse to be somewhere that's not the United States to do my real job. Oh, shit. I keep forgetting about that. My day job, yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that guy was talking about earlier, the other knock, who may or may not come in here at some point. When he was approached to do his thing, it was because he had access to someone really powerful

and then they you know they thought he had good personality traits obviously but he immediately said oh no fuck that i'm not i'm not snitching on someone i know find someone else whatever they're like no snitch we don't want you to snitch we want you to work with them. Right. We want the access. So CIA is telling you, break whatever laws you want. Do what you got. Why do you hesitate? There are some laws that you cannot break, like homicide, for instance. Like I couldn't kill somebody in a street fight in the United States. Now, is that because we're on Camry?

No, that was off limits. Right. So this is the attorney general's letter i was telling you about it specifies specifically what activities you are not allowed to engage in you said in the united states right but if you're somewhere else i mean yeah um killing people anywhere without being ordered to is definitely not on the menu at any point of it. Unless your life is in danger. Sure. It's the same for an undercover law enforcement officer. Okay. So essentially though, the CIA has no interest in sharing with their FBI counterparts what you're finding out or shit that's going on in fact they want this all to continue because with a gang like this whatever one of the big four you were in you are going to be able to

go around the world and i'm gonna throw out a random country let's use russia again you may be able to go to russia and in russia because of your skill set you may be able to steal some i don't know nuclear documents because you're there. That's basically I'm on the right track. That's the scenario, right. And it would be extremely unlikely that the local security service in that scenario thought that I was working for who I was. Right. That's not.

Because you're in a biker gang. Yeah. Now how, like, bikery did you get? Like a goatee that came down to here and shaved my head. Oh, you shaved your head. It wasn't a good look. You know, a lot of they say this with the disguise stuff too, right? At the agency.

When you go into disguise, you're going to look different, not better. Right. So I definitely didn't enhance my sex appeal at all. You got in so young. Are you single during this whole time? Yeah. You have to be. I mean, I guess you don't have to be, but it would be pretty dang difficult.

It would be very difficult to be able to maintain any kind of relationship. But are you meeting any women along the way just to take care of your needs i mean you meet a lot of women in that in that scene and uh you know you get treated like a rock star um when you're made in that world so that was one of the the interesting things about getting out and dropping that cover and that persona is overnight i went from getting you know treated extremely well by you know men respect you women want to be with you too just little old you all of a sudden i'm like why aren't people holding the door for me like why are these women not like throwing themselves at me across

the room all of a sudden yeah okay and how how long did you spend with the biker gang? Three and a half years. And during that whole time, are you doing all kinds of money laundering things for them or are you also doing other things? Other things as well. What kinds of things? I worked at a strip club for them for a little bit. Nice. And it just doing like low level stuff for them. I was involved in narcotics stuff with them

to at times but mostly my contribution was the money stuff what what's the nature like the narcotics like what are what are their roles are they just distributors like or i shouldn't say distributors street distributors are they smugglers, essentially? Everything from the bottom up you can think of. Because it's not as mandated or organized as everybody might think. You might get a guy that's got a Kinect in Mexico where he's moving metric tons a year. But you might get somebody else that's like barely scraping by selling meth you know out of the back of the strip club it's not a consistent thing across all the members okay and not everybody in there is even involved right there are people that aren't committing that

crime they're in the organization too did you ever do things with them whether it be in the narcotics or something else where you understood this is part of the role is what you got to do but you had a real mixed emotions you had real mixed emotions about the downstream effects of what you were doing yeah sure yeah yeah i thought i thought about that a lot. Really? Yeah. I mean, not to hit too close to home or anything here, but you know where I'm going. I know exactly where you're going. Yeah.

Like your brother obviously was murdered by somebody. That's what that is. And his life was taken because of his substances and then you're involved in moving some substances. Yeah. Yeah. So there was definitely a um a weight you know you feel like a hypocrite a little bit but you're always trying to see the bigger picture right right you know you got to stay focused on that and not get too deep on the thought you're

just talking about yeah how could you ever turn off like during those three and a half years? Like, could you ever go home off the clock and suddenly just be like, all right, I'm mad again. Fuck these people. No, no. You're that guy. Yeah. Did you ever feel like you were becoming that guy? Absolutely. Well, and I'll, I'll share something with you. Um, you know, so I said, you, you tweak the personality stuff a little bit. And one thing that really struck me, um, emotionally was not just that people seem to like me better when I was in my persona than who I was before I joined, but also I liked me better in some ways as well. You know, like felt better to be that person than yourself at times. Did you ever feel like you were losing yourself though because of that? I didn't ever feel like I was losing my base, like my morals, my, you know, who I am at a core.

But as far as being recognizable in my personality type, completely different. Like if the people I went to high school with, you know, saw me later in life, they'd be like, oh my gosh, how did this person end up being that person? Wow. But you're making those, you know, really subtle, almost imperceivable changes over time that are just huge after you add up years and years and years of doing it you're saying you never lost the moral compass though which maybe i'm taking this a step too far so pull me back if i am but that would therefore mean that you never got even when you're

doing the work that involves bad things you never got lost in actually for a minute snapping in and thinking, oh, this is the right thing. Meaning like you didn't switch teams in a way. You always knew that was wrong. Yeah, I never had the sense like I was going to go native. Right. Is what they refer to that as. I never had the fleeting thought of not being loyal to my country or being involved in certain things that were like hard break lines for me like child sex trafficking or whatever. Yeah. It's never – so those things I didn't lose but everything else changes yeah so you but that's that's interesting you had a moral line with things

and yet you're literally the most deniable elite type of spy that the cia has and i say this because every this is this is not a cia thing this is literally any big name agency around the world there are horrible things that they have to facilitate sometimes. And it includes that stuff. Yeah. You know, and that stuff makes me sick. And I'm very glad I don't have a job where I got to make those types of decisions. But did you run scenarios with yourself where you might run into something like that and prepare yourself for the fact that you might have to let that happen? Yes. And there were times where I was in the room when

things were happening that I wanted to stop, you know, that who I really was on the inside is saying like, you know, you need to, to hero stop this scenario from happening to somebody and you can't. Um, what's a scenario like that? So fast forwarding to working with one of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations, cartels. Um, I was out partying with some of these people. And I get taken back to one of their warehouses. And we're going to party more after it. But it wasn't that. It was a setup.

There was something happening there that was extremely violent. And there was a child involved in it. And they wanted to see how i would react um and you could tell because as i'm coming in to seeing this this horrific scene they're all just staring at my face and you know that's what this is yeah as soon as as soon as i saw that we weren't going back there to, you know, polish off a few last beers before the night was over, I knew it was a test. How had you mentally prepared yourself for that? You got to compartmentalize, you know, a lot of things. And in that scenario, the most important thing is not doing what they're hoping that you're gonna do

right and um you really have to just focus as much as possible this comes back to your core though as as you self-described it and i believe you very empathetic individual we all know the weakest spots for for having our empathy overtake us involve vulnerable people right not the least of which is kids yeah so you have to override your most deep internal trait in the most intense worst scenario possible right and i would imagine this isn't two minutes no no it's maybe i don't know it felt like years but maybe 10 minutes long that i was exposed to it and you don't want to say what it was i know i mean you might want to edit it out later i'll say it but say if you want to edit it out later. I'll say it, but if you want to edit it out later. They were taking a carapela to this kid's face.

The person's father had messed up with something. They were punishing the father and his child. Yeah, like I was saying, there's big boy rules for some of this stuff. You know, there's a line I think about a lot. I've had Bustamante in here a bunch of times. And the second time we ever recorded episode 107, we were having some whiskey that night like really having fun going at it but some of it got serious and i was really pressing them on this scenario of like good versus bad

you know say like constitutionalism over the alternative and stuff like that okay and it was a crazy moment because in this job one of the reasons i love to do it and will only do it in person is because I can really feel the other person. Just like you feel the empathy kind of thing. That's my gene too. And there's this thing that happens very rarely where I quite literally see someone's soul leave their body and just they're on – like they're on a pre-programmed like thing comes out. And this happened with him where he said it, you know, I had mentioned something about like a terrorist and he said, you mentioned that terrorist, I've lived that.

You have not lived that. And I was just like, and he starts going in this speech. He's like, I've seen that shit, you know, where someone's baby gets microwaved or, you know, and he names all these awful things. And what he was saying is you can't get rid of that hard drive. It's baked in. There's no like, you know, sitting in a therapist's office for 10 years, you know, five years after this happens and trying to delete it. You know, there's no control off delete.

It's there. So when you like when you just described that to me, I could see you seeing that again. Yeah. It's never going to go away. Is that the kind of thing that haunts your dreams? The things that bother me are where I thought I could have done more or been better. It's not maybe the stereotypical things. I think about stuff like that that we just talked about from time to time.

But more consistently, I think I still go over scenarios in my head where I could have delivered that line a little bit better when I was working. Or maybe I could have worked a little bit harder and not had to use somebody else in that, you know, in a negative way. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Now, during this 10 minutes or whatever that this hell is going on, they're watching for your reaction. They're watching to make sure that you just stand there stoically, you know, nothing. Yeah, they want to see a very sociopathic response. Right.

You know. Is there any scenario where they tell you you got to join in? Not for me. It wasn't. Thank God. But there were other people in there they did that with. Yeah. And they all did it.

No. No. Most of them were just watching. No, I'm saying the people that were asked to do it, though, did it. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. They didn't ask me, but that's.

Was there ever another type of situation not necessarily the same thing but where you were told you got to do something and you did yeah but more in like a um not to that level at all um but i was always ready with you know what i would say like to not have to cross a line like that right you know like that's another another opposite to this you know another side of this coin is when i said like you don't want to build a perfect person you also don't want to build like a perfectly bad person either you know there are plenty of people in that world that have lines that they don't want to cross and you're allowed to have one too you know know, when you build your cover. And so luckily I was just never asked to do something like that.

But if they – so you were prepared. You were responding in a sociopathic manner and character correctly, painful as that was. You were able to pull that off. But you're saying you were prepared for if they handed you the carrot peeler for you being able to get out of it without them sensing a problem yeah how would you have gotten out of that um so my approach would have been that i'm not here to be the carrot peeler guy you know i'm here to move the money like if that's not enough and you know you need me to be involved in

this then you know just call somebody else but i don't see what this has to do with me handling your money and i also am kind of wondering what your leadership is going to think that you're potentially compromising this you know relationship with me because i'm about to bounce i don't want to be a part of this there you go turning it around to something more important. Okay, that makes sense. I might buy that too. That's a pretty good one Good for you. I guess like being able to pull that see that's why I could just never do what you guys did Like my I can't override that Yeah, I'd be made very quickly. Yeah. All right. So the three and a half years though, that we were talking about in the biker gang, you're doing all this different shit. How, I mean, you mentioned the relationship with teeth at the beginning,

it was just kind of a crazy person, like kind of your your way in but how deep of close relationships did you make with other guys during that time amazingly deep relationships you know like i'd watch some guys kids you know where they're at work you know babysit for them yeah yeah you want to get as close to people in that way as possible right because you know I mentioned how it humanizes them. You want to humanize yourself to people as well. Right. Like, um, and what it helped me do was I ended up with a lot of people in that world that wanted to protect me, you know, look out for me, um, like in a big brothery kind of way or things like that. And it kept me from a lot of dangerous situations people would step in and and take it for me right like bar fights for example yeah so if they think you're like an that doesn't give a shit about them they're very less likely to do that for you Right? So that humanizing goes both ways. Any of the guys, I mean, we're going to get to how you end up having to leave all this shit, which is many, many years from now. But any of the guys that you were in with at that time, do they know who you are now?

No. And they wouldn't who you are now? No. And they wouldn't recognize you right now on camera? It's not likely. Why do you say it's not likely? I don't look the same as I did back then. I mean, some people might figure it out, but a lot of those people are either dead or in prison

at this time, too. But somebody might recognize me me i think if they did it's a it's an interesting way to see me right like because i never i never hurt their organization you know i didn't testify nobody's in prison because of me i'm sure they were confused as to what was going on with me after i left but okay. Okay. How did you, well, actually, before I get to you leaving there, over these three and a half years, you are not comfortable, obviously, saying specific countries and things like that, right? I couldn't. No, you couldn't. That's classified. Okay. So without doing that, you mentioned you're getting access to a lot of things internationally because it's an international organization what i'm right up against the line of stuff you can talk about so i'm just trying to

pick my words here what types of things were you able to accomplish for the actual knock cia mission set during this time period that you were able to access through these guys. So the, the money stuff, you know, like moving money overseas and then also like the weapons buying stuff is tangentially connected to that world. So that opened up some doors. But mostly it's just the cover to travel just the reason to be there and then if somebody asks like who is this guy we're going to look into him if you're

a made guy in a transnational organized crime group yeah it's just pretty good bona fides for you know how does that were you like do they have that like the mob or you're made like is that a term yeah so in the do they have that like the mob where you're made? Yes. Is that a term? Yeah. So in the, in the motorcycle community, you go hang around your prospects where you're trying to join and you become a full patch. That's what they call a full patch member. Okay. Is there like a ceremony? Uh, yeah, you get your patches and each club kind of does it differently. And they used to do it really interesting back in the sixties and stuff, but.

What do you mean interesting in the 60s oh like beating the crap out of you making you fight for your patch pouring motor oil and nice alcohol all over you you know urinating on you or something and they softened up over the years uh it depends on what uh club and what chapter you know each of the the clubs are broken down into chapters and they all kind of have their own personality but some are pretty imagine you're out you're like a dentist by day like all right timmy your teeth look great you go to the biker gang at night you're getting pissed on motor oil yeah yeah there's a good book um with uh billy queen he was an atf agent that was at green brain vietnam it's called under and Alone. And he went into,

it was the Mongols Motorcycle Club that he had infiltrated. They talk about a lot of stuff in the book about that he had to go through getting his patch. Were you, when, when you started this relationship at the beginning, when you first start getting in there, as you already said, there's no like turnoff time where you're Matt or whatever. But when you're at home, did you read any books or any material that could help you do your job with them more? Yeah. So it's funny you ask me this because I've gotten this question several times recently. And people always assume, man, you would just want to turn off from it. But it wasn't like that for me.

I would read books about it. I would still like stay connected to the topic. I was always thinking about it. There wasn't a lot of, you know, let's just go think about rainbows and butterflies for a while moments. So you're accomplishing some of these things, money laundering or weapons stealing. When you say you'd have access to weapons stealing, is that because the gang would be purchasing weapons from groups that you would also want to get some weapons from? Or am I – Close. It's usually – so if you think of like several hops of, you know, like tiers of how you know people in your circles, they would usually know somebody that either knew somebody or that person knew somebody that's the key that first guy that everybody's

known for 20 years telling the first contact that i'm legit that's the the domino that starts everything instead of me just coming to the end and saying like hey you don't know who i am you know would you like to give me some classified technology please but you would have to get away from like i'm gonna pick a random country let's say you're in belgium with these guys and you're gonna you're like oh i can get through them to this other guy to this other guy who sells these weapons you'd have to get away from them in a different capacity and not be you know biker mad anymore right so i wouldn't travel with them i would just use them as a vouch oh yeah like you can call dave back there you can ask him about me or dave hey i going to be traveling.

I need to know somebody in the city. Can you give me somebody that knows their way around the city? And they would never ask you why you're traveling? You don't ask a lot of questions in that world. Like the biker guys? Well, I mean, so that's one of the great – that's one of the beautiful things about it is you don't sit around talking about crimes with each other in that world either right and they know that phones can be listened to right so they're not going to say like yeah what kind of shady shit are you going to be doing once i make this introduction you know you don't talk about stuff like that so that's a deterrent for them asking

did you ever get picked up or arrested or anything like that during this time i was arrested once yeah what happened so the charge was aggravated assault um i didn't do it no i did it i definitely did it um that was on the list of ken deuce yeah yeah so i got rolled up in a group um that had been involved in a violent encounter and charged with aggravated assault. What's the, am I allowed to ask like the nature of that violent encounter? Are you like fighting another biker gang in a bar or? Yeah. So that happened once. Um, well that happened a lot of times, but, um, one time that was really interesting that, that was very-opening for me about the humanity of these people was I'm sitting in a bar with four guys from the club that I'm in.

And the bar is structured such that the front parking lot, you can have cars. But to get to the back, it's a very narrow thing, so you can only ride a motorcycle around back. And this is a bar that's like not on google maps you know there's no cameras in here and we're sitting there and then all of a sudden you just hear like these loud noises like these bikes coming and it's getting like it'll it'll vibrate if you have enough like bikes coming by a place and we're sitting on the back porch and all of a sudden we see the other club like boom boom boom boom like coming into the back there was probably 40 40 people and the guy i'm sitting right next to who

was an og in that world like the first thing he did is he reached inside his cut snapped open where he had his his pistol inside the cut and then everybody didn't say anything. They just looked at each other and were like, yeah, here we go. Are you armed too? Yeah. Okay. Some of these guys, if they're dentists, lawyers and stuff like that, what motivates them to be a part of something like this? I think a lot of people are drawn to the brotherhood the camaraderie of it um for one a lot of people want the status you know they

want to get treated like a rock star you know they want people to fear them or respect them or or want them and um sometimes it's drugs you know it's a good life to be in if you want free drugs all the time right so. So a lot of different motivations. And it was really key for me to identify those motivations and the people I was around the whole time. Play to them. Right. How did it come about like leaving the gang? Just say like, ah, I'm moving on fellas. Yeah. So it was the, uh, the arrest that I'm talking about. And so I essentially told them that during my incarceration from my arrest initially that I was approached by the feds for information. And I thought that I was going to have a long trial, a long process in delaying the trial and everything that i thought it was a hazard for me because they were pressing me for information and i wanted to step away during that time you weren't worried about being whacked over this no not at the time i mean it's not like it used to be if you don't want

to be there you don't have to be there it's not like a keeping you for life or else right it's a little different than the mom yeah and i basically you know kind of wussed out to them and said you know i'm getting so much pressure from law enforcement that like i just don't i don't want to keep doing it my heart's not in it anymore and they just accepted that yeah wow so you were actually they took everything back right like yeah i think that the logo on it and stuff like that and told me to keep my mouth shut about them you know it's like turning your badge in yeah yeah kinda so you were actually incarcerated like you were in just in jail yeah I didn't get a prison yeah yeah yeah see I took care of it no um so the they let me out on bail

and they're like let's just go through the regular lawyer process here like to not to not yank this and so it was a year and a half that i was like pending on i was i was out right like doing whatever but we let it go and they ended up dropping it but does your corporate job find out about this how did you keep that from them i just didn't bring it up i got a hard stop at three you gotta meet with my lawyer okay so you're still doing you're still getting access to some places around the world and things like that. Yeah, it was just a little speed bump.

I went right back to it after that. And if anything, it added to the credibility for me. Did you have any contact with your mentor during this time? Like is he involved with you in any way? Not at this point, no. Was he ever involved with you again? No. Do you talk with him today? Nope nope you've never seen him again not since it's been years yeah the first one you're talking about yeah the guy in the mansion

yeah yeah but the guy that um was my boss after that who was with me for almost the entire time he's like like a father to me we talk almost all the time what does a boss look like in that role you mentioned earlier there's classified ways you guys are able to communicate and everything i would imagine some of that is actually vocal but you know not on your fucking iphone or something like what you're meeting with him in person sometimes discreetly most of the time that's most of it would happen yeah and so you're close with him today? Very close, yeah. And what type, without revealing classified stuff, like is this someone who sits at a desk at Langley? Or is this another off-books kind of guy?

I would say it's a hybrid. He sat at a different location, but it a government you know place it's not as well known to be affiliated but yeah do you guys have safe houses yeah it I would imagine all across America that you have access to at any time yeah I had one when I was doing this how off the beaten path was it um if I was going straight from where I was at it was probably like 40 minutes outside of where i was working straight there and you knew every possible way to get there to try to evade detection yeah but it was you know structured in a way it wasn't so safe house would

be a bad term more like a cover house right like so if they wanted to show up it would look real it wasn't like this empty you know thing you see in the movies right like there's pictures that are backstopped there's it looks like a real life wow is that where when you'd meet with this guy i mean sometimes you're meeting with them in public places, but would a lot of times be in a safe house? Sometimes. Sometimes we'd just meet in a bar. Sometimes it would be an off-site that was more secure for certain things. And would he talk to you directly about the criminal activity you're doing, or did he not really care about that? Was he more mission-based and like, all right, what are we doing to get to this place to do this thing with this guy for cia

he cared about everything that i wanted to be talking about and you know as far as you saying like going home and turning it off or whatever this was my outlet he was a therapist to me the entire time had he done stuff like this himself yes so he knew i think about that some of those scenes in the departed all the time when leo's like you know he's on these drugs and he's somehow keeping it straight in person but behind the scenes he's like losing it a little bit yeah did you ever have that yeah so i was um actually in a strip club one time and I smoked something that was laced. I didn't know what it was ahead of time. I ended up on this couch in the back of the strip club just losing my mind for what seemed like forever.

And all I was thinking about was like, am I saying it? Am I telling? Right. Yeah. I should have asked that more clearly did when you would go meet with this guy did you ever as you said it was like an outlet did you ever as an outlet just fucking lose it like you know if you were just in a scenario you watch someone take a carrot peeler to someone's face or something you know what i mean yeah so i was

much more emotional with him than any other interaction that I had in life at the time. Yeah. And even in ways like, you know, that I regretted, like looking back, like I was kind of rude to him, you know, at the time. Like, and he was just a sponge. He would soak it up and let me be who I needed to be when we talked. Because like you said, he did it. He understands. Yeah. Because like you said, he did it. He understands. I can't imagine having to be a character at all times having no ability to break it, even in an empty room to myself, frankly. And you can go in there and just let it out. And

maybe it's only for an hour and you know, you got to turn it right back on when you walk out of there. But I can't even imagine what that emotional, what do you feel like? Yeah. It's, it's extremely powerful. It's dangerous too, because, you know, once you let that tap open, you're not quite sure how much needs to come out or how long. You want to be able to get back into thinking straight. Did you feel – I mean you were so mission-focused and you mentioned it a couple times that you believed very much in what you were doing and working on behalf of the united states and stuff but did it ever feel like you know matt was being left behind like your your life your i don't know normal having a family things like that sure but that's not what was part of the contract you know that wasn't the deal um so it was no one's obligation to ensure that I was having a life.

It's a voluntary assignment. Did you have any contact with your family during this time? No, not really that much. Did they know what you were doing? No, definitely not. Like not exactly what you were doing, but did they know he's not – we haven't seen him and we haven't talked to him literally because he's doing some sort of government shit where he can't do that? Or did they think you had just abandoned them? More of the latter, yeah.

Really? Yeah. That had to be hard on you. Yeah, when people – they don't know that and they misperceive. It's just because you don't care. When you do, they don't know that and they misperceive, it's just because, you know, you don't care. When you do, that can be a mental weight. So you can never just, like, call up your mom? Not at the time.

I mean, you know, you can't cross these worlds over, you know, and so you got to stay compartmented. And there are ways, like, people in that role, they do stay in contact with their family. There have been people that did it. I just chose not to personally as much. Who was the most dangerous guy you met during that time? That's not classified. Dangerous, violent? Sure. I mean, definitely some of the people in the cartel world, just because of their capacity to not be affected by some stuff you can't even think of on your own.

I wasn't even there yet. But yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all. I'm talking about the time you were in the biker gang. Yeah, there's some dangerous cats. You meet some people that are there just because they like the violent side of it and that's what they're they're looking for okay all right so you have that year and a half period where you're kind of in limbo you're still working the corporate job you're not telling them you're in limbo the cia says let's let this get handled naturally

it gets handled naturally i would imagine you got like a probation sentence or something like that. It was like a year. If I did something naughty during that year, it all comes crashing back kind of thing. Right. Now, just a quick aside question. Today, is that wiped from your record? Yeah. Because, okay.

Yeah. And you were under an assumed name, right, at the time? Some of the time, yeah. So in that world, sometimes you do things in true name sometimes do things in an assumed name so did you get probation in the name of matthew hedger that i can't answer okay i don't want to be specific on that please okay no problem but either way like you're good on that now yeah everything's good yeah it went away on its own all right so you told these guys

i'm going to be leaving this is too much whatever they made you turn the shit in and it was cool and during that year and a half you're still doing some of your money laundering stuff where you can based on your connections around the world all right cool how do you get introduced to the world of the cartels? So that was through the club originally. Okay. So that wasn't a target set. Again, this was more like just leveling up into a better cover for what I was up to. And the great thing about – I won't say the great thing.

The advantageous thing about them was their't say the great thing, the advantageous thing about them was their money was so much higher, right? So when you're laundering money, you need a forest to hide your tree in, right? So you can only move so much based on legitimate money or money that's obfuscating the true thing. These people had so much money. It allowed us to get a lot higher with how much we were moving for our own personal reasons. Bigger scales, essentially. Exactly. Okay. Now you made that relationship while you were in the biker gang. How did that, like who, what kind of person did you meet and, and how did you keep that relationship like on your own? Yeah. So I met somebody, you know, that was essentially a bulk cash smuggler

for the cartel. That was their job is to pick up all the cash after sales had been made and then move that, that money. And so I made a relationship with that person and I was able to take some off their hands, help them with what they were doing. What do you mean take it off their – oh, like launder it. Yep. Okay. So that year and a half, you never reached out to that connection. What changed so that you – how did you reestablish that? So I didn't – so the year and a half is right at close to the to the

end right and so um of the so it's the full end of the biker stuff right so i did like that okay yeah right and so i still have all these other connections out there when i'm not talking to them i'd pretty much use them for what i needed and it was all good. Okay. I had my own network at that time. And somewhere within this network, you then have a new meeting where suddenly you get pulled into that world. Yep. And I'm keeping that going after that. So I essentially hopped off of them and on to the Mexican side.

Okay, real quick. I got to go to the bathroom. What time is your flight out of here? It leaves at 6. And you changed it. It's going somewhere else now, right? Yeah, D.C. Okay.

I got to either this is going to be the end of the episode and we're bringing him back or we're going to change flights and there will be another episode after that. We'll figure it out. But if you haven't subscribed please subscribe we'll be right back i guess 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,

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