Julian Dorey Podcast - 😯 [VIDEO] - The DEA Agent Who Infiltrated Most Notorious Cartel of All Time | Ken Magee • #140

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

Support Our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Ken Magee is a former DEA Agent and Author. From 1989 to 1996, he was stationed in Colombia as one of the lead US agents on the Medellin and Cali Cartel cases. His tenure in the country was the longest of any DEA Agent in history. Follow Ken's Page: https://www.tiktok.com/@thedeaguy?lang=en ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Ken’s flight with Pablo Escobar’s family 8:11 - Netflix Show “Narcos” & its connection to Ken 12:18 - Ken’s childhood in Michigan 22:31 - Ken’s earliest days as a cop pre-DEA 31:08 - Ken’s personal experiences with dr–gs in his family 37:40 - Dr–g Legal1zation Convo 45:42 - The failure of the war on drugs 54:44 - Empathy for worst criminals 57:33 - Julian tells story of 2 friends who went very different directions; Crime & violence 1:09:15 - Who Pablo Escobar was 1:15:05 - Ken explains why Pablo Escobar’s son’s book is awesome; Escobar’s interesting traits 1:21:47 - Cali Cartel’s deal w/ Escobar’s wife 1:24:21 - Ken’s early case work in the DEA 1:30:48 - Ken starts DEA SWAT Team 1:36:55 - The Colombian Runway Sting 1:45:21 - Operation Dustbuster & Operation Backlash in Colombia 1:51:46 - Ken gets reassigned to Pablo Escobar team 2:00:24 - The suitcase smuggling operation 2:06:46 - Breaking down The Escobar team 2:12:54 - How to maintain cover in Colombia & South America 2:22:57 - Threats to US Agents’ lives in Colombia Intro Credits: Narcos (Netflix) Miami Vice (2006) Drive (2011) American Made (2017) Band of Brothers (HBO) Sicario (2015) Sicario: Day of Soldado (2018) ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, if you're on Spotify right now, please hit that follow button so that you don't miss any future episodes. And also, if you have a second, I'd love to see you drop a five-star review. Both things are a huge, huge help on this platform, as well as on Apple. To all my people over there, same thing goes. So thank you to all of you who have already done so, and thank you to all of you who are going to do so now. I also want to thank all the people who have already joined our Patreon. Very excited about that, and very grateful for all of you who believe in this show. The link to the Patreon can be found in the show description above and I'd love to see more of you over

there as well. Other than that, please enjoy this episode with Mr. Ken McGee. We convinced the Colombians through a series of undercover negotiations that i was in to deliver a dc6 filled with marijuana and cocaine from the northern coast of colombia to a small town in down river michigan onto an airport on an island known as gros hill and they delivered 670 kilograms of cocaine and nine tons of marijuana that landed at six o'clock in the morning on this, what used to be a military base, now it was a recreational airport in this small little island, 20 minutes south of Detroit. So I had no idea until you got in the car today that it was you who was the DEA agent on the plane

with Pablo Escobar's wife and son when they were trying to get to Frankfurt, Germany shortly before he got whacked in 93. That's exactly right. It was me. And before they got on a flight to Frankfurt, they also had tickets to London and little people know that. So I didn't know where I was going until they got on the plane. And it was just you. There was no one else. No, there was two other Colombian National Police officers that traveled with me Playing clothes, obviously. Yep. Yep. They didn't know who we were. They had no idea that DEA was on a plane following them Oh, they didn't know that you know, the Colombian National Police did but the S bars had no clue no, the three of us traveled together the two CNP officers and myself and

and it was it was interesting and Nobody really knew we were DEA or police entities on that airplane. No one, not the flight attendants, no one. It was just us. And our whole goal there was to monitor the Escobar movement, get them kicked out of Germany and returned back. Because we realized when you chase a fugitive, when you're after a fugitive, the whole key to finding most fugitives is the family. Where is the family? Where's the loved one? Where's mom?

Where are my kids? Whatever the case may be. If you speak to a United States Marshal and if they've been looking for a fugitive for a long time, they're going to look right at you and say tell me his kids birthdays and his wife's birthday and his mom's birthday and i'll have them within a year because most people even they may lead a life of crime are regular people who can love and cherish and want to give birthday presents to their kids or to their mom or to their wife or whatever so even pablo escobar even pablo escobar even pablo escobar he loved his family and it's his love was his family which ultimately took

him down that day he would eventually have been taken down but it was the love of his family because he was so infuriated that his family got kicked out of germany he started making phone calls. This is also well documented in the book, My Father, Pablo Escobar, by his son, Juan Pablo. He told the truth about that. He told the whole story about how his father wanted him out of Colombia, and because Los Pepes and the rest of the people, the Cali Cartel, which was funding the Los Pepes, which were trying to kill Pablo Escobar, were now killing his attorneys, babysitters, nannies, homeschool teachers, you name it. Anybody associated with Pablo Escobar, Los Pepes were killing. So that's why he wanted his family out of there. And DEA seized on the opportunity. We

followed them. We met with the agents in Germany and it was very interesting in Germany because I spoke to the agent that was assigned to Germany. I said, I've got my bag here because what happened was they took the Escobar family off the plane and you could look out the window and you could see tanks

and all sorts of people and military lining the sides of the runway, escorting this in for whatever reason, because they knew the Escobars were on there. So they stopped the airplane in the middle of the tarmac, got the Escobars off. And as agents, we waited on the plane. And then we met with the DE agents from Germany. And I was explaining to the agent in Germany. I said, yeah, I got my briefcase here. I got a bunch of undercover photos from the plane. He goes, just keep that low profile. Don't let the Germans know. And I said, okay. Oh, so you had pictures on the plane too. You were taking them the whole time. Exactly. Exactly. And so one of the reasons he explained to me is that some of the laws in

Germany, and I don't claim to know those laws. I was just taking the advice of the lead agent in Germany because of what has agent in Germany because of what has happened in Germany over the years where people have been persecuted and their rights have been violated. They've created all sorts of laws where law enforcement can have serious restrictions placed on them that what we would be considering traditional investigative techniques. I believe he even said, and I don't know if he said this in sarcasm, was if a German officer's on surveillance, if he writes down somebody's license plate on surveillance,

they've got to document it. So take that for what it's worth. That's what he told me. He might have been just trying to explain to me the aspect of how the Germans are so careful in regards to not violating people's rights. Well, they don't have the best history with that, so I kind of get it. No, I can give you six million reasons why they don't have a good record for that. I was looking at that the other day, too, like the official numbers, like 33 through 45,

where they were counting all deaths. I think it was excluding deaths of German soldiers in the war. The Nazis were responsible for like 21 million total killings, obviously including a lot of their own people. And it was, at the time, around 1% of the world population. It's mind-boggling. And what's even more mind-boggling is when you speak to those 90-something-year-olds that were fortunate enough to get out of Germany at the time. I have an organization that I work with where we honor military veterans, and one of them was a guy named Guy Stern, and he's still alive.

He was part of an elite unit called— It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.

A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. The Richie Boys. And the Richie Boys were an intelligence unit, and that's something that you can do a little bit of research on another time. But 60 Minutes aired them for 20 minutes. It was so popular. It's one of the few 60-minute episodes they reran and did the entire 60 minutes.

But the Ritchie Boys guy, Sterndy, honored them, and it talked to these Holocaust survivors and the people that made it out. Real quick, Ritchie Boys were an intelligence unit made up of people that were german refugees that have left germany and they created an intelligence team to go back to germany and work on on solving some of the atrocities during the war and getting information and intelligence so back to escobar and a family going to Germany. It was fascinating, the trip. And I kiddingly say, who's the only guy ever to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the Escobars two days in a row? That would be me when it comes to the DEA.

So the only DEA guy to ever do that was me. Was there a layover on that? No. Or was that a direct flight? No, come to think of it, we stopped in caracas on the way over there with the lutonza jet we stopped in caracas i think to tap off the fuel tank and then we worked our way to germany wow all right so i'm going to bury that lead a little bit because people people are like holy obviously a lot of people are huge fans of the stories around the

the medellin cartel and pablo escobar and everything it's it's been incredibly represented in mass media as well you had narcos come out which I believe those are some of your friends Pena and absolutely Steve we all worked on the same team in Bogota together Steve Murphy and Javier Pena the way it worked was we had a group that was assigned. It was the Medellin Task Force, basically. That's for lack of a better term. But we had a codename, Operation Boulevard, and we also had the group. It was a group that was led by a group supervisor,

and at the federal level, that's what they call a grade 14, and he had several grade 13s working for him. I was the backup supervisor. So if the lead supervisor couldn't be there, I was the backup supervisor. And myself and Murphy and Pena were on that team, as well as a few other agents. I won't mention their names because they weren't part of this permission to actually be able to speak. And obviously, Javier and Steve have put their name out there sure but overall the whole thing was run by our country attache a guy by the name of Joe Toft he was the head of the DEA yeah he was the

country attache in Bogota and the head of the DEA in Bogota Joe Toft and he's a good friend of mine and his he's very well documented as well as being part of the Escobar investigation. And he was one great boss, one tough son of a bitch, and that's what you needed there. You needed somebody who was a good boss, a good leader, but somebody who was tough. And he was really tough on us. He was really tough on us.

But I developed a very good relationship with him that I have till this day I went and visit him where he lives in another part of the United States this last year and I talked to him on the phone about once a month that's pretty cool but what I what I wanted to tell you about Joe real briefly is that you needed that almost a Vince Lombardi type of toughness in a coach because it's not like if you fumbled the ball, the other team got it. It's not like if you were off sides, it was a five-yard penalty. If you made a mistake, people die. And he had a lot of responsibility and a lot of pressures. And he was a no-nonsense

leader, no-nonsense boss who demanded excellence, and he got excellence. And I love the guy, but Joe Toft is a guy that is an unnamed hero in this whole story. He periodically pops up on interviews, but if it wasn't for Pablo, or if it wasn't for Joe Toft, the Pablo Escobar investigation would have ended, but it would have ended differently. And so just wanted to throw some props out there to Joe Toft, country attache, leader in DEA, and he retired very shortly after the Escobar investigation. I mean, look, it was an incredible success taking that guy down. It's hard for a lot of people to fathom if they haven't studied exactly how big he was and what he was in charge of but it's not that he was the only guy down there we know he wasn't but the the range of his rule over a vicious empire was dramatic to say

the least i mean this when you're talking about a guy who was technically even an official politician at some point a guy who could build his own prison we'll talk about all this today i'm sure but he could build his own prison when he agrees to go to prison for a short time and then escape when he wants. He would buy off entire neighborhoods. And all the while, he's sending kilos and kilos and kilos and kilos and kilos of drugs all over the world, to say nothing of obviously the United States where there's a huge market. And, you know, it's just, it's wild to me that this was only like 30 years ago. This is not that long ago. And it's also wild to me that we see a lot of these same problems still today, less from Colombia in this case, and more from Mexico. But, you know, the circle of life there is certainly interesting. Before we get to all that, though, what about you? Where are you from? How did you, did you like dream of being a DEA agent? I know you couldn't have because it wasn't even around the 80s. Well, that's a great question. And you told me earlier, if I want to emphasize a point,

look straight at the camera. Look straight at the camera right there. That's good. One of the things I can tell you about myself is when I was younger, I was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My father was a neurologist at the University of Michigan. My mother was a social justice warrior, social worker in the Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, Michigan area. So you don't like Ohio State too much? No, we're not real big on Ohio State and Ann Arbor. As a matter of fact, not in the slightest. As I was telling you on the car ride over here, I've written several books on Michigan football, and one of them is on the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry. So a huge football fan, born and raised in Ann Arbor, and I barely got out of high school. I was kind of a young – I had four brothers who were extremely brilliant – or I'm sorry, three brothers.

And of the four boys, the four McGee boys, there's only two of us left. But the other three were really smart guys great entertainers very great at academics me not so much i was kind of a kid that got in a lot of trouble nothing that would send me to prison but definitely stuff that was very mischievous that would give me the label of if he's not careful he's going to be a juvenile delinquent it was more than throwing snowballs at cars it was sometimes borrowing bicycles that didn't belong to me whatever the case may be that's okay but that's when i was a young young teen and then i got in high school and i met somebody and that was a police officer her name

was tanya pageant and tanya took a liking to me would talk to me i always like talking to her about police stories and she said well it's a great career shortly thereafter they had a summer camp and i was just talking about this with a major from the michigan state police yesterday in the gym and that summer camp was for kids that wanted to go into law enforcement for 15 16 year olds i graduated first in that camp the prize was I got to ride in a Michigan State Police helicopter. They had a summer camp for like would-be cops? 15, 16 year olds. It was put on by the Kiwanis, the Michigan State Police and the Ann Arbor Police. Very similar like an explorer's camp. We camped out. I was looking at the schedule the other day. I pulled out the book so I could

show it to the major from the state police. I said, Joe, take a look at this. They had us up at six in the morning and we had classes till nine o'clock at night, six days in a row. So I just really liked law enforcement and I liked the idea of the excitement and things of that nature. And graduating first in my class, my mom says, hey, you know, you can do this. You can become a productive citizen. You're not a fuck up. Exactly. Exactly. But I will tell you, on my 18th birthday, I went out with my buddies. We do this you can you can become a productive citizen you're not a up exactly exactly but i will tell you on my 18th birthday i went out with my buddies we went celebrating when i got home obviously we'd probably been out having a few cocktails i got home there's a note on my pillow

from my mother who worked in the criminal justice system she says in this note, I open it, it's hand typed, signed at the bottom by my mother, written on customized stationery from the county pretrial release juvenile justice program. It says, dear son, I want you to know as of two minutes ago, it was past midnight when I'm typing this, and you officially reached the age of 18, which is the legal age of an adult in the state of Michigan. And then she went on to say, if you are to get into problems and commit a felony you will be taken directly to jail and you will no longer be able to call your mother to try and smooth the situation out with the juvenile justice authorities mom wasn't messing around and then at the very end it said happy birthday and she signed her name like she was signing an official document.

But by that time, I'd already gotten all the, gosh, what's the word I'm looking for? Just the call to want to be. Well, the call to want to be, but I had already gotten out of my system all those antics that kids do and pranks and things like that. And I was past that. So I ended up going to school. I didn't have the greatest grades in high school. I went to Northeastern University in Boston and spent one year there, got on the dean's list three times in a row, studying criminal justice. I really loved the topic. Transferred to Michigan State, ended up graduating first in my class. Wait a minute. You graduated from Michigan State

and you're a Michigan man? Yeah, a lot of people asked me about that. I don't know about that one. Well, a lot of people asked me about that, and I have a fun story about that in a minute. But in conclusion, I ended up getting my bachelor's and master's from Michigan State and graduated first in my class for bachelor's, and I ended up also going to Michigan for a while

to work on an exercise physiology degree. Okay. All right. But what I was going to tell you, the story about Michigan State, I was a walk-on kicker at Michigan State when Darrell Rogers was the coach. I ended up getting cut because they recruited a guy named Morton Anderson. Oh, yeah. And Morton Anderson's in the college football Hall of Fame and the pro football Hall of Fame. But I'll never forget, I at i was at home summer vacation and i went to a house with barbecue and bo schembechler who was a

family friend of ours was at the party with somebody else and i'm in the living room and mrs pilcher looks at me and she says hey kenny this is right in front of bo now that you're going to michigan state who are you pulling for the in the big game in the fall and there's bow staring at me like what am i gonna say i mean i've idolized this guy played little league with his kids and to this day i'm very close with the schoenbeckler family and he says he looks at me and he could see that i was struggling to even speak because i idolized bow and he looks at me and he says, Kenny, before you answer that question, let me tell you one thing. I would think very little of anyone

who wasn't rooting for the school that they were attending. And then he just stares at me. And I said, I understand, Bo. I got it. Thank you so much. And I graduate in a couple of years and I'll be back.

So he was, he was, that was not what i expected him to say right there but he was a legend he's that guy's in the hall of fame right oh absolutely he's liking everything absolutely absolutely and uh a lot of people don't know that beau was also a coach at ohio state at one time i didn't know that beau worked for woody hayes at ohio state so being raised in Ann Arbor in the shadows of the big house, it was an incredible time. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people. I often talk about young people today need three things in life, in my opinion. Three things. If I was a parent of a young person today, I would strive to have my child have three things.

And that is heroes, mentors, and role models. And Bo Schembechler was all three of those things to me. Wow. Thanks for asking. That was a good trip down memory lane. Yeah. And go blue. Yeah. And you would later, like skipping way ahead here, but didn't you do like, you ran like the security for the school for a couple of years, like after your career? Yeah. A lot of people like to call it security,

but it was actually a police department. And one of my goals when I became the chief of police at the University of Michigan was to elevate the stature so people would look at it as a police department. I think it was very effective in doing that, from having advanced tactical units to enhancing the detective bureau, increasing awareness of the sexual assaults on campus.

I made it much more of a police-oriented agency as opposed to a security agency, and I was proud to do that. However, sometimes your dream job is not your dream job. So I left after a couple of years at the University of Michigan and went on and pursued other things. But it was some of the best times I ever had in my career was being the chief of police at Michigan. But then again, sometimes it was also some of the most frustrating times. I could imagine why I would probably go down

a rabbit hole with that one. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the career before that though, I mean, you're going from the most adventurous stuff ever to then, I mean, let's call it what it is. You're the head of a police force on a college campus where kids are partying and getting drunk and buying some of the drugs that you were stopping going from the source down there. That's got to be a big curveball. That's one way to look at it, and you're exactly right.

But as I've often said, sometimes it's not necessarily the kids on campus that you're concerned about or that cause you to stay awake at night or give you headaches. It's sometimes the administrators. And sometimes the administrators want the images of the university to look a certain way. And when you're a retired federal agent who really believes in truth and justice in the American way and salutes the flag and does all of those things you can still love the university you can love the sports programs and things of that nature but you can also

be somewhat frustrated with some of the direction that the people above you want you as a law enforcement leader to take hey guys if you saw the previous two episodes you probably heard me announce that the patreon is officially live I want to take a moment two weeks in to thank everyone who has joined that I do not take that lightly at all And it is more initial support than I anticipated. So I'm very very grateful to see that and besides the patreon We also have the channel Julian Dory clips live. It's been up since January 2nd I think we are posting daily mid-form clips on YouTube. You can access it by hitting the channels panel on my main page on YouTube,

which it says Julian Dory Clips, and there it is. Hope to see you guys subscribe. Other than that, back to the episode. So I'm not there anymore. I'll let you- I'll leave that one right there. I'll let you come to your own conclusion, but I still love the sports teams, go to all the games. And when I was talking about honoring a veteran, that's where we honor the veterans at the Michigan football games, and we get them on the field in the second quarter. Second quarter of the game, you march this veteran on the field,

and 110,000 people stand up and cheer. It's outstanding. It gives you chills. Very cool. Okay. That's a really, really cool cool so that that's me in a nutshell and then um i graduated uh from michigan state i also went to the police academy during that time did you have i'm just curious i'm sorry to butt in but did you have some sort of experience when you were in high school or college or something where you got passionate specifically like on the subject of drugs or did that just did

you kind of fall into that no that and that's a great question that's that's an excellent question and uh real quick because i didn't make the transition from college straight to the dea right there was a four-year gap there where i worked at the jackson michigan police department as a patrolman and i also uh worked as a firefighter because I was laid off for a little while. And that was a good training ground to learn how to be a professional police officer. And I saw a lot of things that gave me a lot of experience. Had a Michigan State police trooper get shot and killed. And I was with him when he died on the side of the highway. And well, he died in the hospital, but I rendered safe first aid to him until we got him to the hospital in the back of an

ambulance and i had a firefighter building collapsed he died i lived um so a lot of interesting things for those first few years as the as a young patrolman. So the age of innocence is... It's gone. Once you see a state trooper with bullet holes and I'm on the side of a snowy highway on February of 1982, and you're just some 23-year-old kid, it changes you. It changes you a lot.

How did you deal with that? Well, I was young enough that I didn't have ptsd and things like that and i i i looked at it more as a learning experience but it's a tragedy and i also learned i have a feeling that i've always had this saying and that is take life's tragedies and turn them into treasures. So that tragedy led me to say, okay, whenever you're in a uniform, always make sure you have your bulletproof vest on. This trooper had bulletproof vest on, but it didn't have side panels.

Ironically, his wife, after he died, created a strong, strong grassroots movement to have police agencies require bulletproof staff side panels on them. Because one of the reasons Trooper Craig Scott died was the bullet, one bullet went in here through his side, one went in to the lower right-hand side. And so she took that tragedy and turned it into a treasure and has probably saved numerous lives in law enforcement since then. So I was young enough that I used it as a learning lesson and the same thing when the

firefighter died in front of me. And because it was an arson, I had to go to his autopsy the next day and catalog the autopsy and document it. But it was those things that it was no longer, oh, you're driving in a patrol car, you take your car through the car wash, you wave to people, you go take a little complaint, there might be a B&E, might be a stolen bicycle,

might be a slip and fall, who knows? Who knows? And then that happens. It changed everything. So let me get back to your question about the drugs. And so I was, as a patrolman, I decided I wanted to try and become a federal agent. So I ended up applying to the DEA. And-

What year is this? This is in 19, when I applied for DEA, it was probably around 1983. I ended up getting hired in September. No, I take that back. I had applied much earlier, right out of college. And here's what happened. And here's this good story for your listeners. And that is when you're in an interview, always tell the truth. So what happened was right out of college, I applied for the DEA. And we're going to get to the passion about fighting drugs and all that in a minute. And what happened was I ended up having a situation where in high school, I had experimented with marijuana. At the time,

if you smoked marijuana at any time in your life, you were bounced from the application process. That's tough. A lot of people getting bounced. So that was in the early, early, early 80s. And I told the truth. And I'm glad I did. And I reached out to some of my mentors. And I said, this is the dilemma.

Just tell them. And they said, tell them the truth. And that's exactly what I did. And that bounced me from the process. Well, it turns out the recruiter was also a graduate of Michigan State. Three years later, he had my name on a list of people. He called me and said, they have changed the policy. They now allow experimental use.

And I said, outstanding. the policy they now allow experimental use and i said outstanding now what do they mean by experimental by experimental you could not have bought it or sold it and used it in a social situation due to one of a few different reasons, peer pressure, curiosity, and did not continue repeated use after that. Oh, so you just weren't like a repeated use guy then in that scenario? Yeah. I had tried some weed in high school. Right. It wasn't for you. At this point in time, how many years ago was that? 50 50 years ago i don't remember if it was two or three or four or five or one or two it just wasn't right it wasn't something like i like hey do you remember bra when we used to go back and get stoned in the back of your vw you know no it wasn't like that so they don't sit around at the dea with all the with all the weed that they still get over there

and like you know pass a joint? That doesn't happen? Yeah. What movie did you watch last night? I'm convinced that still happens. I'm convinced with the weed it's different. No, we do have random drug tests as well. Yeah.

I mean, I figure you do, but weed's one that's pretty easy to hide. Well, if you're smart enough to become a DEA agent, you're probably smart enough to either A, make sure you don't smoke weed. True. Or B, find that masking technique. But ultimately, you're going to get busted. And have agents been busted? Absolutely.

I was going to say, that one's like so different. Not often. Not often. I remember once, I remember there was an agent in New York City that had an opioid issue, and he died of a drug overdose. So things happen. That's some real shit right there. Yeah, yeah. But let me tell you, let me tell you, so many of the DE agents, they're honest people. They don't smoke weed.

They hate drugs. You know, their drug of choice could be alcohol. It could be sports. It could be sports. It could be whatever. My point is they could really enjoy other things in life, but they take their job very seriously. They're professionals. You have to go through hell to get on the job

and then go through hell working your way to becoming a member of DEA. And then once you're with DEA, you basically sign your soul away and they can send you wherever they want, whenever they want, however they want. And you had just wanted to be a federal agent. And it sounds like this was just the one that you selected to go to because it was a newer agency. I think it started in like this, was it the 70s or 80s? The title was new. The agency is old. It used to be the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. And then in the mid early 70s, I think it was 73, became the DEA. Got it.

And for your listeners, it's the Drug Enforcement Administration. If you're taking a test after this, it's not the Drug Enforcement Agency. You'd be amazed. I read books or I read investigative journalist articles where they say that. And they call it the Drug Enforcement Agency. Oh, that's a Google away. They get an F on their report card. No question about it.

Yeah, you got to get that right. Yeah. It's one thing if you're doing it in conversation, but if you're writing a book and you get that wrong, that's a Google away. Or when I have the guy interviewing me and he says, well, tell me what it was like to be in Bogota. And I'm like bogota and he said yeah and i said you know i had a chinese restaurant last month and somewhere in michigan named the bogota are you talking about bogota so so you know and some people do a lot of research before their interviews some people

don't you know and I've had them both. And unfortunately, you're one of the ones that did a lot of research ahead of time. Well, I love this topic. Oh, I bet you do. Have you ever been to Bogota? Never. Have you ever been to Bogota? Never.

I've never been there for sure. I've never been to the real one. Let's circle back real quick. We'll get back to your original question because it defines me some of these things and remember what was the sad i thing i said about tragedies what do we turn them into treasures tragedies to treasures take a tragedy in your life and turn it into a treasure i had a father very famous brain doctor a neurologist at the university of michigan wrote books just one of the most brilliant men in the world he became a medical

doctor at the age of 18. they let that happen yeah they did and he was he was phenomenal he knew neurology these days neurologists rely on machines that can just scan your brain. My dad was incredible, but he was also an alcoholic. He wasn't a mean alcoholic, wasn't a raging wild alcoholic. He just, after work, he'd drink himself to sleep. And this continued and continued and continued. And ultimately, it killed him. My parents got divorced several years before. My dad died at the age of 56 of alcoholism. I had an older brother. His name was Bobby. For you listeners, my last name's McGee.

Bobby McGee. You can put two and two together. Was my brother part of Janis Joplin's song, Me and Bobby McGee? No, it wasn't. But if you listen to that song, there's a line about putting my harpoon in my dirty bandana. Well, the harpoon in the drug culture is a hypodermic needle, a bandana, where you hide your stash. Well, Bobby McGee was a great musician and a very good guy. However, he became extremely involved in drugs at a young age, and ultimately he died of a heroin overdose.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. So my brother... When was that? My brother who died of a heroin overdose was in the early 2000s. Oh, so this is long after you were in the agency. Yeah, my father died two months after that state trooper died. So it was 1982 that happened so in that same 82 i had a trooper died my dad died and firefighter norm krieger died so it was a 82 was a rough year

why did you i'm curious i don't know if you ever learned this answer so if you didn't ignore it but did your dad just start drinking habitually or was there something he was dealing with? That's a great question, too. That's a great question. And my mom used to tell me what happened was my dad always wanted to be a surgeon. But he had a hereditary disease that's called tremor. And there's more of a medical term that's a little more sophisticated. So for those of you looking at me in the camera, his hands would shake like this.

And there wasn't the medications to help tremor. And they said alcohol was one of things. And my dad just started to drink and he drank more and more. And I think at the end, because he always wanted to be a brain surgeon, but he couldn't do it because of his hands shaking. So it bothered him so much. So he would mask the shaking of his hands with the alcohol make a long story short

it caught up with him yeah and then it was no longer i'm going to be a surgeon i'm i'm a world's renowned neurologist i i diagnose i teach, I write, I do all those things, but the alcohol stayed with them. So here you have it. Dad dies of alcoholism, brother is a raging drug addict. Well, how long were you aware? Because you said your brother died in the early 2000s? Yeah. So how long were you aware that he was... Between client meetings, managing your business, and everyday tasks, who has time to worry about website hosting? With Kinsta's managed WordPress hosting, you don't have to.

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My dad found his stash and his hypodermic needle. At that time, he would have been about 16. But he went through every drug known to man. He was a coke addict at one time, a heroin addict. He loved to smoke his weed. He was an alcoholic at times. And he was a really nice guy, a really funny guy. But ultimately, when he started getting into heavy drugs and continuing into that into his 20s and 30s, he died in his early 40s or mid-40s um in atascadero california he died like

i said of that heroin overdose and um ultimately i had to kind of disassociate myself with him i just said to him bobby you know i'm a federal narcotics agent and you have a serious drug problem i love you like a brother but you need to get help. When you get help, when you finally get clean and sober, and you've been that way for two years, call me. We can reacquaint ourselves as brothers. So he did. And we got reacquainted for a while, and then he slipped again. And he never got better.

Wow. Yeah, you know what it's it's the kind of thing when you're talking about substance abuse of any kind anyone out there who's fortunate enough to have a family and a bigger family especially statistics say you know we all have someone close to us in our life who who dealt with that i've had several in my life and it's not it's one of those things where you're almost either way you know do you do you always be there as as their shoulder no matter what and then it just enables it or do you have to have tough love or something like that and make hard decisions as as you seem to for a while there and you know i just always try to remind myself i've only ever lived in my head i can the best i can do is learn from what other people tell me is their experience but you know i see it and and i have a lot of empathy for the fact that people just you know there's some people who are wired

in a way where they just can't a lot of people who they just can't kick that kind of thing right right well you were uh very accurate and the two examples you gave was the possible enabler showing them love and care and then after that tough love in reality that's the path you take as in my opinion because if you want there are a lot of people that do get clean and sober in the very beginning when you show them kindness and love and things of that nature and then some people it takes tough love yeah so in in the wide wide world of tiktok and my career going to different places and speaking to different groups of people there are always these people and you're going to have this on this broadcast when people write comments. They're going to say, just legalize dope.

Legalize it all. Legalize it. Do that. You know, we wouldn't have a problem with crime if we legalize it. We could spend hours talking on that conversation. We could. And we absolutely could. But I'm a firm believer in that.

Some of those people are the same people who say, abolish the three-letter agencies and I and I often talk about this and I just say and and believe me as a narcotics agent and as a cop and as a guy that cares about society I do not think we're going to arrest our way out of the drug war. I don't think that arresting every single person with drugs is going to solve the problem. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. There's a difference between drug users and drug dealers. And drug dealers prey on the weak, and a lot of those become the drug users, number one. Number two is those same drug dealers are the ones causing a lot of violence. Legalizing drugs does not take the criminal element out of it. And we could spend days talking, to be clear. I'm aware of that. And they're going to find their racket. But if you legalize drugs is what you're saying, they're just going to move to something new. And that's going to be the source of violence.

So you're just, you're creating a bigger problem. No, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying they're going to move to something new. There's still tons of marijuana being smuggled in the United States. Yes, regulation is a problem. There's still tons of them. And then what happens is, and let's take marijuana out of the equation here in regards to legalization. Because that train has left the station a long time ago. It's legal.

And I embrace that and I say, okay, celebrate it, do whatever you got to do. I don't smoke weed. But then again. I didn't know that. I don't smoke weed. But I don't care if you do. It's as legal as an ice cream sandwich you know just whatever it's not part of the conversation anymore i'm talking about cocaine

heroin methamphetamine and some of the other drugs we create if you legalize cocaine heroin and methamphetamine the addictive natures of those drugs imagine what society would be coming become like i have a theory it's called the m m theory do you like m m's i like m m i've been in your house you have a beautiful office here i don't see any m m's around here i'm not you know my great grandmother when i was very little she would keep a a cup of m m's on every table exactly what would happen who did that and what was what would happen when you went there i didn't fucking all of them you'd eat them all exactly it's what i call the availability but there are some people that wouldn't eat them all but it's the it's it's

what i call the m&m theory availability equals consumption the more things are available, the more subsections of society will consume. Of that group, those that consume, some of them will have that addictive gene and become addicted to cocaine, methamphetamine, or heroin. But remember I said I don't think there's a way to arrest our way out of the situation, and I don't believe legalizing drugs. I still believe in what is a 360 approach to look at it all the way around. And I created an acronym, and the acronym is PETR. It stands for Prevention, Enforcement, Treatment, Education, and Recovery.

So that's the way I look at it. And I think a lot differently than a lot of DEA agents as well. And that's one of the reasons, I think, why I was so successful, and that I had the theory in that in order to be an successful law enforcement leader, a successful cop, and a successful detective, you sometimes have to have the ability to think outside the, and what do you say? Think outside the what? The box.

You say the box. I say think outside the badge. Think a little bit differently. Don't think like a traditional cop all the time you catch a guy with a small amount of heroin maybe he doesn't need to go to jail maybe he needs to go to rehab immediately or maybe you defer and you don't charge them with a felony and things of that nature yeah or think outside the badge yeah how are you going to attack problems differently yes how are you going to find fugitives differently how are you going to do this differently and that's that's great that's great to hear you say that you don't hear that a lot from from guys that come from a position like

yours it's a little bit more you know why the book well it's it's called they call it a drug war and there's a reason for it being a war and that is it kills drugs and alcohol have killed more people than all the world wars combined yes and there but there is a question so alcohol is legal exactly now what it sounds like to me and this this might be very fair by the way but you have different it's like in your mind and i'd probably agree with you you have different grades on it so as an example Yeah, i've used someone drinking and someone using heroin is two very very different things, right? Like the level of the damage that can do to you, right? So you're kind of separating out like you look at alcohol and weed and where that is and then you say okay

But to use your exact terms cocaine methamphetamines and i think heroin is what you said through those opioids okay so those are the ones where you're like when we're having this overall conversation of legalization i think you were saying availability is going to equal use availability equals consumption that's the m&m theory your grandmother subscribed to it great-grandmother subscribed to it in a certain way. A lot of people want to make the comparisons, alcohol, marijuana. And a lot of times when I've given speeches, I say, I'm glad you bring that up. Alcohol is legal. Look at how many millions of people have died because of it. But you want to make the comparison.

We'll continue. Nine out of 10 people who drink don't drink to get high. It's a social thing. They drink one drink. they have a beer after they mow the lawn they have a drink at dinner whatever the case may be so one out of ten nine out of ten people don't have a problem and look at all the devastation that's caused already yes one out of ten weed nine out of ten people smoke it normally smoke it to get high i'm yeah yeah and that's that's the objective so my point is they're very vastly

different in and of themselves as well but remember what i said a couple minutes ago let's not go down that we're not gonna change anyone's minds and and that's the other thing about tick tock that i and and some of these other questions that i have to answer in public what's your tick tock page by the way it's called the dea guy it's a great page people should go follow it but we'll talk about it later we'll make sure we got that so and maybe one of the one of these days on tiktok on the dea guy that's my third time for those of you counting some of you are right now going to do that do that okay um but when i get to ask this question I already know what they think. Yeah.

And that is, what do you think about legalization? I can tell you. I've been asked that question a thousand times. I can tell you on one hand, there's only less than five people that were against legalization that asked that question. So the nature of the question and my reading of people over the years is when they ask that question, I already know what their answer is. And no matter what I say, I'm not going to change their mind. But they say, hey, I got a DEA agent here. I got this guy, et cetera, et cetera etc that knows all about the drug world the drug culture

and all that and those are the same people that hadn't heard me speak about prevention enforcement treatment education and recovery well i think a lot of it is people look at the failures of those systems in the past the failures of the quote-unquote war on drugs and what that did i'm not talking specifically about the dea right now i I'm saying like in general, when you look at it across society, the failure of the rehab industry, which is really, you know, I'm glad for some people it works, but it has something along the lines of a 3% success ratio. Look, I worked in finance. I was around some of the financing of some of those types of places and saw some things that I or heard some things I should say that that I can never really unhear as far as some of the

corruption that goes into that and I think people get frustrated with that and they want to they want to then like everything else in the world every reaction gets an equal but opposite reaction and so they want the total opposite to be clear on counting on your hands with the people who are asking that question, I don't have an opinion yet on what that is. If you asked me right now, I would say no. I'm not going to legalize everything. But I would say, like, how do we look at, like, your availability problem, for example? Because I'll tell you, nothing shocked me at college except one thing. And that was great. I went to college and it was kind of exactly what I expected. I had

a good time, but it was like high school, but on steroids, everyone had fun, great experience. The one thing that shocked me, though, that I did not see coming was that the number of people who use blow in college was stunning. By my senior year, it was used, and I would use this word, excessively more than marijuana. And I was like, you know, my line was always simple. I was like, can kill me, right? So if I had a line of like what I was going to do, I always fell on the side of, I'm going to drink some alcohol and smoke some weed because I got gotta drink a lot of alcohol for that to kill me and weed's not gonna kill me coke was always something like uh i don't want to be len bias you know that

can stop your heart and it also looked like a really really good time i'm like i feel like i would like that a lot so i never did it but the number of people who did was shocking so when we're talking about availability with black markets and we're going to be laying out where this all comes from and how you are intricately tied to that absolutely no question about it how do you stop that well just imagine just imagine if it was available down at the local packy liquor store for you to buy hey let's go down and buy an ounce of coke it's the price is only 90 today they're having a special or it's a two two ounces for one or whatever imagine all those college kids etc etc

and some of them end up like lenny bias or some end up like john belushi or some of the other folks but my point is this and i like the parallels that you gave when you talked about cocaine over here and you talked about marijuana and alcohol over here. And then you used the word, I think two or three times, line. No pun intended. A line. I got it. I got it. I got it.

But that's exactly where I thought you might be going to when you had that there. So no pun intended. Good play on words. So we could talk the drug legalization and all that stuff. Some people say, oh, you you know you're just a hardcore de agent look at him the guy you know he's got his head shaved you do look like a cop see me when i was younger as i told you earlier i didn't look like one and uh you know and and uh and so my my point is i do i do come up with life experiences that show me a lot of different things.

I will never believe that cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine and some of the other drugs should be legalized. Marijuana fought that fight. Government fought it. Everybody else fought it, whatever the case may be. It's over there. Put it in the past, when you're really pro this and you have your 13-year-old daughter come home stoned three days in a row and she says, yeah, I was smoking weed at school, age changes opinions sometimes. Yes, it does. It does. I'm like, what do you mean you're smoking weed? Well, dad,

I heard you and mom talk about it. You said it should be legal. Some people use it for medicine. There's a million excuses. And of that 13-year-old daughter, some will, dad will punish her and she'll never smoke weed again. Some will continue to smoke weed and some will end up graduating and doing some other drugs and move on, et cetera, et cetera. And some will end up growing up to become Supreme Court justices someday. Who knows what the DNA in that that specific kid is but my point is when you've seen so many things and and let's get back to dea and enforcement in a minute but i want

to tell you this really quickly the biggest proponents of legalizing of marijuana are former marijuana users that go to NA, Narcotics Anonymous, and AA meetings. You go in there and you talk to them and they're like, dude, you wouldn't believe it. They say it's not addictive. Well, it might not be physically addictive, but psychologically, that's all I ever did. I woke up and smoked weed all day long. I lost my family. i lost my kids i lost my job because i was a stoner the entire time those are the people that that that the that the monster godzilla grabbed them and and squeezed them and shook them and said you know

i'm i'm i'm your bitch now yep you know i don't think anything's 100% good. Exactly. I think there's always going to be, with any type of substance, I don't care what it is, there will be people who go down the wrong way with that. I know people. When you give me that example, I can think of people in my head that I knew in college that I thought to myself within a week of knowing them, weed is not good for you. You really shouldn't do that. it's the society we live in and everybody's got an opinion and i've got mine you've got yours and some of your listeners will have them but that's just one of the things

i mean if if you want to legalize the hardcore drugs because you think it would take the criminal element out of it you know sorry you're wrong you've you've had maybe a drink and you think that's a great idea it's not if you really study it let's get back to some really let's get back cool stuff dealing with as opposed to helping people at na meetings a things like which is which is which is really what you think the truth of the matter it is really cool when you mentor somebody that had a drug problem they later on come up and say to you, you saved my life. That's a cool feeling as well.

And you've done that? Oh, absolutely. Oh, wow. My wife and I, we like to mentor young people. And for some reason, some of these stray pups gravitate towards me because as hardcore as you can be and you know my background and you know some of the violence and some of the things I've seen, that the key elements of being a good person, in my opinion, is being compassionate towards your fellow human being. I might have told you a couple stories, but there was another one. My partner and I arrested a guy in South America. He had murdered 30-some people in Puerto Rico.

And when we were taking him to the plane to extradite him and send him back, we didn't extradite him. We expolled him from Colombia, as a matter of fact. You what? Expolled him. Expulsion. It's like the country kicks you out. You get expelled. We took him and we got him a hamburger on a drive-thru

on the way to take him. And just because we knew he'd be sitting in a Puerto Rican prison probably for the rest of his life. That is, unless he escaped somehow. And like that other guy I was telling you about, we arrested that escape with a helicopter from the Puerto Rican prison. But my point is compassion.

You gotta be compassionate, in my opinion, besides knowing that you're going into violence and you're in a very dangerous field etc etc there's times in your life where you can find compassion for people and and uh i tell this story briefly about a guy that i arrested that kidnapped and shot two agents and as we're getting ready to put him on the plane i said to him you're going to be in handcuffs on a plane for the next five hours do you need to use the restroom or do you need any water and i we videotaped this whole thing and later on i was showing it to my mom god bless her i mean it was just it was the video that we

took because we never wanted him to accuse us of of harming him like putting the handcuffs on too tight he had kidnapped and shot two agents. Is that the guy you carved the initials into the handcuffs? Exactly. Into the handcuffs because I went on a... His name was Rene Benitez. I was on a six-year quest to capture this guy. But my point is, my mother watched this video.

When I went on vacation, I said, Hey, Mom, you want to see the video of the guy we arrested? I'll show you what he looks like. It wasn't any confidential document or anything like that. And she looked at it and she said, sometimes I can't figure out if you play the part of Rambo or Mother Teresa. This guy kidnapped and shot two agents and left them for dead in the jungles of Columbia, and you're offering them a glass of water. And my point is, just be compassionate towards people. Well, as a broad question from your entire career on that exact kind of wavelength, did you ever find yourself feeling empathy for some of the really bad guys once you got them and really learned about where they came from and how they ended up being this monster

not really because there are a lot of people that came up the same way the same way that didn't become monsters they became laborers they went to school they construction workers whatever they led a life they had two or three kids they didn't leave a life of violence and crime and not really not much empathy towards major drug dealers especially the ones that walked down the path of violence that would eliminate the competition through homicides. I told you earlier about the FBI top 10 fugitive that I arrested named Armando Garcia. I don't think you told me about that one. Here's a guy I told you about. His name was Scarface. He was on the FBI top 10 most wanted list. He was a former cop in Miami that ripped off drug dealers and several of them died. They started to steal drugs from a guy on a drug shipment vessel on the Miami River.

And one of the intercoastals and some of the bad guys jumped overboard and they all died. And this guy, his name was Armando Garcia. It was a Miami River cop, a police officer. But my point is, when we arrested him, spoke to him, just like you and I are speaking to him, he looked at me and said do you know who won the game the other night the Monday night football game and here he is hiding out in Colombia top 10 FBI most wanted fugitive asking the DEA agent that helped just arrest him with the Colombian

authorities and my partner Chris and he's saying or no my partner Dirk on that one and he's saying like uh who won the Monday night football game you know and but my point is I was kind to him yeah you can be compassionate and kind to the John Wayne Gacy's of the world or to whomever you're separating compassion and empathy here I understand that exactly where where I but but never give excuses as to why you ended up like this. You can hear the story. There's one story I've told it before. I think it's been a while though. But I always think about this one because I do think sometimes there's circumstance with things. A really, really close friend of mine from college, Josh, was actually on this show, number 54.

He grew up in the Bronx and he's a really, really smart guy. And so he also had the not usual scenario where he had two great parents at home. You know, he grew up in the projects, and obviously that's something where we see a pattern where there's one parent and they always work or something like that. And both his parents are awesome and raised him really well but in addition to that you know he was able to get into some amazing programs that basically you know he worked his way up and and is now an extremely successful guy and and got a great education out of it but he was able to get out of the regular school system and get into like the honors type school system accelerated Accelerated AP. Yes. And then eventually that got him to be able to go to school outside the city before college. So when he got into the program that sent him away to high school, he comes back home. He's like 14 years old, I think it was.

He comes back home to the Bronx and he's coming up on the corner and he sees one of his buddies he grew up with who just wasn't as smart as him on the corner and he knows what it is you know the kid's strapped and he's he's working for for the neighborhood business somebody and i i give the friend a lot of credit for this the friend saw him and he wasn't like excited to see him but he smiled walked up to him dabbed him up and he said you doing good josh like yeah yeahbed him up, and he said, you doing good? Josh's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's going well. And he goes, listen to me. You're going to walk across that street, and from now on, you walk on that side of the street. You need to keep doing what you're

doing. This is not for you. And he walked across. They kind of looked at each other. They had a moment, and there was an understanding there. And I look at that, and I said, now that 14-year-old, 15-year-old friend who's going to end up in that life, it appears, unless something drastically changes. There's a – number one, a ton of humanity to him, a ton of care to him, and also perhaps a lack of an opportunity that Josh did. And it's not to say, oh, therefore, whatever happens to him next and whatever decisions he is a human being makes are excused but it does that story always adds a lot of nuance to me where it's like It's not like that kid was doing things wrong Josh was just gifted and did a lot of extra things right and also his parents deserve a ton of credit, too

You know, how do you rectify that it's hard for me it's it's very like that as as a lay person someone who hasn't sat in your seat especially so you know you have a different perspective on this that's probably more qualified definitely more qualified for me just as a human i that that's hard for me well there's um when you hear that story it's the kind of story that country songs and other songs are built on sometimes. Like there's a song by Lou Rawls. It's called The Windy City. And it talks about getting out of the city, getting out of Chicago, where he went out and got himself a job and he moved on.

It's a great song, by the way, from the 60s. There's another song. I think the way, from the 60s. There's another song, I think the author's name is Don Williams. They call him the gentle giant. He talked about leaving his country home where his best friends burn themselves up on bourbon and speed. And he says, I learned to talk like a man on the six o'clock news. So about people escaping that area. But when it comes to the empathy, there's a lot to do with understanding. And there's a lot of programs out there, unfortunately, there's just not enough of them

to try and help the people like Josh, episode number 54, who got out. But when it comes to some of these criminals, as we were talking earlier on the airport ride over here i've looked into the eyes of eric rudolph the olympic park bomber and i've spoke to his underwear bomber no eric oh oh eric rudolph 96 bomber right eric rudolph eric rudolph the olympic park bomber i've looked at him and i've spoke to him in a courtroom and i've seen the evil in his eye and he heard the evil in his voice you talked about the underwear bomber who's got a name that 99% of the people kit could not even pronounce so I

won't even bother with it right now but I looked at him dead straight in the eye on Christmas Day December 25th 2009 and I saw the representation of evil in his eye and there was no way I was ever change this guy who was indoctrinated into wanting to blow up airplanes so he could kill as many americans as he could but i saw him i spoke to him and then speaking to the fbi top 10 fugitive when we arrested him or renee benitez who kidnapped the two federal agents in 1982 and a lot of these people that i've seen and and for example giovanni Littlejohn, the guy that killed the state trooper, looked at him in a courtroom, and he just looked at me, and there was something just vacant, that he just didn't understand the ramifications. All he knew was he was going to go to prison for life when he was found guilty, and it was just a formality. I mean, we knew he did it.

It's just a matter of going through the courtroom process. So you see some of these people. And on a final note, what I'll add on that whole topic is every now and then, which happens a lot, meaning if you're involved in a lot of things, every now and then means a lot of situations. How many times have I actually had a guy say to me, you know, that I've arrested, whether it be with a kilo of cocaine or whatever, 10 kilos of Coke or whatever, or we arrested him after we worked undercover against him or whatever. How many of them have said, you know, I always wanted to be a cop when I was younger. I always wanted to become a police officer. And it takes me back to my childhood

where there was that line that I speak about where I was doing juvenile delinquent stuff, just crazy things that kids do. And then I met a police officer who put me on the right track and got me interested. So mentors, role models, and heroes. There you have it right there. And those guys never had it. The ones that said to me, I always wanted to be a cop. Now that train left the station a long time ago when you decided to rob that liquor store or when you decided to start selling Coke or when you decided to do whatever.

So anyway. And one action builds on to all the others. Exactly. That's how it goes so it's been a uh um we can now break and say like kumbaya and all that stuff all the there's a lot of touchy-feely stuff that we talked about compassion and and and morals and seeing people have destroyed themselves and then people have picked themselves up out of the ashes like josh was on his way to not being able to cross the street to some of the other folks.

But when it comes to the world of drugs and narcotics, drugs and drug dealers are just like arms dealers. They're just like fencers or whatever. It's crime. You're selling something that you're getting to somebody else who needs it or wants it and you're making a profit and you're doing it illegally for whatever reason it's illegal and the ramifications of not paying the bookie the ramifications are not paying the drug dealer the ramifications are not paying the person for that stolen steak truck that you got that's filled with fish frozen fish that because it was

hijacked coming from uh saugus mass or whatever the case may be all the way over to new jersey the ramifications are exactly if the camera could look at you yeah oh it is looking at you there you go yeah it's boom boom boom you know so that little thing is not like just straight out of compton that's wherever it may be. It could be Barry Seale getting killed in Louisiana. It could be whatever. What's the old saying? Snitches get stitches.

It all leads the criminal behavior towards violence if the rules aren't played. But there's one rule that should never be broken, and that is you don't kill cops and cops don't kill you unless it's a violent confrontation. My point is, every now and then, in this world we live in right now, obviously with social media and the news, we've seen a lot of tragedies on the news where some cops have acted horribly. Yes. Absolutely horrible. And the person that hates a bad cop the most is a good cop. Yes. And for your listeners, please remember that quote because you can tell that to anyone.

I can guarantee you the people that hate bad cops are good cops, more than anyone. But my point is, when a bad guy crosses the line and kills an agent, like we had Kiki Camerain in Mexico, or we had the agent, two agents that I talked about, Rene Benitez kidnapped and shot. Their names were Kelly McCullough and Charla Martinez. Kiki's was interesting. That was a little different, but yeah. Well, the two agents that I just mentioned miraculously lived, and it's a whole fascinating story that's documented out there in numerous different websites and TV channels where I've been interviewed on it. But then there's other ones where you, if you just randomly pull over a cop and, or I mean you pull over a bad guy and the cop shoots a bad guy.

I'm sorry, the bad guy and the cop shoots shoots a bad guy i'm sorry the bad guy shoots the cop out of the blue it's it's just rules that you don't want to violate cops don't randomly kill bad guys we don't live in the star chamber where we seek out and we have vigilante cops out there do we have some bad cops absolutely yeah And fortunately, it's being brought to light and slowly but surely, the recruiting processes will change and other things will occur. And we'll make sure that we hopefully rid communities of bad cops. But you talked about crime and these people who went the wrong way, compassion and ethics. My point is all of those people that ended up getting into a life of crime that's moving dope, moving fencing stolen property, high-stakes gambling.

There's an example. You legalize gambling, they still got illegal gambling all over the country. People love gambling. Exactly, exactly. So it's a service. But my point is, boom, boom, boom, someone's going to get taken out if you don't pay the price. And that's a really fair point.

And like you said, we could go on and on and on about that. But I really want to talk about your career and continue that conversation. So to your viewers who didn't like this part of the segment, tell your friends if they watched it, they can fast forward to a certain time so we can get away from all the all policy and changes etc etc listen there are there people out there who when they hear something they disagree with will flip out into those people tend to find them their way into youtube comment sections yes but a lot of people a lot more than we think and would think looking at social media these days like hearing things that you know if it's not presented like a dick or something like that that don't necessarily jive with their

worldview but give them some sort of perspective that they didn't understand that you know maybe they don't have to agree with it but they can appreciate why that person has it i mean that's my favorite thing about this show that's why i don't mind having a silo there where we go back and forth on some of that because these are look if these were easy questions you know we wouldn't have these problems exactly but i do request just keep your hands where i can see them at all times okay i don't know if i've done that this whole time okay so i've noticed you want them on the table i just want to make sure i can see your hands at all i'm loaded right underneath what i said right do not reach under the table but you know we talked about the level of criminal

and you you were talking about pablo escobar in the very beginning and we're going to obviously talk about him we're going there i gave an interview to cnn um mark bowden wrote the book killing pablo it's a very good book yeah um he was also the gentleman that wrote uh black hawk down yes where they made the movie out of black Hawk Down. He used to be a reporter, I believe out of the Philadelphia Examiner. And he turned me on to another reporter by the name of David Zucchino, who worked for the Philadelphia Examiner as well, that wrote a story about those two agents that were kidnapped. But back to Killing Pablo and Mark Bowden's book, CNN did a special on Killing Pablo many, many years ago in the early 2000s. And I was a lead interviewer for DEA.

And one of my comments at the very beginning, which ended up being the comment that they used in the promo advertising and all the advertising several weeks before. And that is, in my opinion, Pablo Escobar was the largest criminal the world has ever seen or will ever see. And then I said in the interview, if Al Capone was alive during the time that Pablo Escobar was around, Al Capone could have probably been a driver, maybe a bodyguard for Pablo Escobar. Meaning Pablo Escobar was responsible for thousands of police officers being murdered. And ultimately Al Capone goes down for income tax evasion. But he didn't nearly, I mean, you could count the time probably less on one hand that police officers were killed because of Al Capone but you can count the times that you can count the

times you need a calculator to count the times of how many police officers were killed thousands of them as well as prosecutors and judges people in the government it was crazy escobar blew up an airplane killing over a hundred people to kill one person on the airplane he didn't have a yonk airplane he's it's one of those things where you can be a huge fan of the stories and stuff like that because it happened you know and it's wild to think about as i am but you know something that shouldn't get lost in is that any any cultural rewritten tales about paulo escobar being robinar being Robin Hood or having a few good things, totally false. Because anything he did that was remotely good, like buying, building some neighborhoods and shit like that. Building neighborhoods, building hospitals, soccer fields, things of that nature.

There was always a cost to it. Yeah, how many people died to get the money to get to that point exactly. Or what did he do with the people who then he viewed as owing them a favor that's true i mean it was it was the guy was the ultimate extortionist and i i don't i don't think you're wrong i i think that's yeah i'm trying to go through like my head of like famous criminals especially over like the last hundred years i i think you're probably right he was he was the guy well he had he also created alliances and a network of people that would support him most of them were poor for example taxi cab drivers in columbia people of that nature that would be informants not for the government but for pablo escobar yeah so they would notify

him hey there's these two gringos that showed up or whatever the case may be. I feel bad if it was like the petroleum businessman that was going down to Medellin to put together some deal with British Petroleum or something like that. So he did that. He created those alliances. And it was a great marketing tool for him.

It allowed him to stay alive. It allowed him to stay alive. It allowed him to get information. It built his network. And people to this day will go to his gravesite. People to this day will say he was like a Robin Hood that saved so many people. But he left thousands and thousands of widows in his wake. And there's no question about it. But, you know, it was brilliant the whole thing

with taxi cabs you know to get the drivers they all would receive a little bit of a stipend from from some of the people that work for Pablo Escobar and uh it reminds me of like for example there's a restaurant in Boston called I think they closed by now it's called Anthony's Pier 4 it was a huge it was a huge seafood place Maybe it's still around. But every year, one day out of the year, they closed the restaurant. And every taxi cab driver in Boston would get free meals, a free lobster. They could bring themselves and their family in. They pull in their taxi cab. They have dinner at Anthony's Pier 4. It would cost 50 60 bucks who knows um and why did they do that it's a great marketing tool because anybody that got off the airplane got in a taxi hey where's a

good place to eat oh go to anthony's pier four bada bing bada boom they they did it they did it for years now in this advent of uber and lyft and things like that i don't think they do that anymore but uh so i i think of that when it comes to the taxi cabs when i think of the parallels of pablo escobar utilizing the taxi cabs as a international or a inner city network of just giving information yeah they're they're basically positioned spies who just need a reason to spy give them a little money yeah if it was today they'd probably have an you know the app would be now the app would be you know click if you work for pablo escobar press this button and hey two gringos just showed up on the plane and you know i can't i i can probably safely say that a guy like escobar at the level that he existed today even even in other countries

even in pick out other third world countries around the world I don't think he could ever exist at that level well I have to be he'd have to be completely government-backed like a powerful well well that's in in the statement that I talked to you about in that killing Pablo uh tv special on CNN the lead-in statement that everybody heard me say was, the world will never see a larger criminal than Pablo Escobar. And they cut it off right there. But the continuation of my sentence was, unless it's a political criminal of some sort my point being we considered people like saddam hussein uh idi amin and dictatorships things of that nature some of those people could grow so large that and amass the amount of wealth and power and dictatorship and violence and killing thousands of people you you go to some of these places

miramar places like that and and you look at the violence associated with their political leaders and i don't claim to be an expert on that i read the paper like you yeah yeah whatever paper exists anymore but they're back the point is they're ahead of a government i didn't stop you earlier when you said that and i'm glad i didn't because now you're bringing it up yourself but i was gonna i was gonna ask you when you were talking about the level and height of escobar's crimes i was gonna ask you does that exclude like world leaders manual manual noriega right i mean adolf hitler like he can't come you know what i mean like they have a whole government behind exactly exactly but this stems from what you said a couple minutes ago and that is there will never be a drug dealer as powerful as pablo escobar again or a criminal that large

it just won't happen do they have their in thailand they've got the opioid mover or the opium movers and shakers and things of that nature which is a whole fascinating area if you go out to the the area of where what we used to call the golden triangle it was burma laos and thailand and um but now burma has become miramar but my point is they have their their whole multi multi-millionaires but pablo really capitalized it on it and a real simple book to read to learn a lot more about Pablo and how he thought we spoke about it earlier and I was fascinated because I went into this son's book exactly I went into reading this book thinking I'm not gonna learn much about Pablo Escobar

but it was the book called Pablo Escobar my father by his son Juan Pablo Escobar, but it was a book called Pablo Escobar, My Father by his son Juan Pablo Escobar. So here this kid is at 16 years old that I followed to Germany. And you were on a plane ride with him. But so interesting in the book, I was so excited to get the book too, just to see what he described as that trip was basically a paragraph. It was a paragraph, his trip to Germany. That's all you got. That's all I got out of his book, where I could have written a whole chapter for him. He didn't say this fucking DA agent, six rows ahead, taking pictures of me the whole time. He had no clue. But, you know, like you saw earlier, some of the pictures that I had, the pictures of his passport that was confiscated by the Germans, that I took pictures of in the restroom on the plane back to Columbia.

Oh, do you have those right now yeah i've got them here somewhere um i'll take a look while you're talking um in here so what happened was on that airplane i'm taking pictures of his passports and where he's been and all that stuff and i'm thinking to myself that uh okay we might never get a chance to photograph these things again so i'm taking pictures of these things in the bathroom, and then I slip them back to the German police officer that was on board the plane transporting the Escobars back or escorting them back.

But my point is this. When I walked out of the bathroom with the passports in my pocket after I took the photographs, who was waiting in line at the bathroom when I opened the door face to face with 16 year old Juan Pablo and I'm saying oh excuse me and I kind of walked by and I'm thinking if he only knew but let's get back to the book my point is you learned a lot about Pablo Escobar in that book one might say why am I doing a promo for a book by Pablo Escobar's son? And it's not because I am saying, like, it's not because it's on my TikTok page store, and it is. But my point is, it was fascinating reading why why was it fascinating because you

learn more about Pablo Escobar is the man the father and you hear all the lessons that he taught his son but I also learned that near the end Escobar's family weren't living in a life of luxury they the son and his daughter and his wife they were going from apartment to apartment hiding they were they were being persecuted because people wanted to get to them, kill them, so they could get even with Pablo Escobar. But you hear all these stories, but you also hear Juan Pablo talk about the lessons that his father taught him about a lot of different things. And you learn more about Pablo as a person and some of his nuances.

Like he never wore a tie. His shirt would always be buttoned up unbuttoned down to the third button he took three hour showers or baths three hours yeah and that he very rarely he only saw his father drunk one time his entire life his father loved to smoke weed though and uh see that's the thing if you smoke, you become a member of the Medellin cartel. Yeah, it worked that way. No, all kidding aside. Oh, did you lose, by the way, just this thing right here on the headphones?

Just go like that and you'll be able to hear it. Okay, are we back? Yeah, we're good. And that was obviously a joke. But my point is because that's a joke taken off of um reefer madness from the movie the government made in the 30s that so if you smoke marijuana you become a zombie you walk around and all that so and that was that was my little tongue-in-cheek uh example of how ridiculous the movie reefer madness was as the propaganda by the government many, many years ago. Ann Slinger, all that. Exactly. So that was before Ann Slinger. That was before him?

Yeah, because it was in the 30s or 40s, Reefer Madness. But with that being said, the book, it's an incredible book because it also talks about after Pablo died, how the Cali cartel utilized their power and went to Mrs. Escobar and said, we're going to kill your son, and we're going to kill you probably, because your father costs us tens of millions of dollars. So she had to work out with numerous drug dealers and drug barons throughout the country saying, take this building, it belonged to my father or my husband. Take this. He gave a helicopter away.

All these things that were bought with drug gains. But they all went to members of the Khali cartel. It's amazing how he went from this most powerful figure in the world to a scrambling rat at the end of his life. And then his family was left with nothing. And not that that's not really with nothing the colleague cartel said the colleague and you're right pretty much nothing the colleague cartel said we're going to let him keep these two or three buildings because he gave those to his kids so when they finally made the decision they finally made the decision not to kill juan

pablo and they tell the whole story in a book and. And Juan Pablo at that time is like 17 years old because they were concerned that he was, he talks about after his father was killed, he got a call from a reporter five minutes after his father was killed. And he said something to the effect, I'm going to kill every one of those motherfuckers that were ever involved with harming my father. I'm going to hunt them down and kill them. It was something to that extent. And he said, the minute I uttered those words, I regretted it it and i regret it now for the rest of my life because very shortly after that i thought i can go down two paths i can either a be like my father or be a member of the community etc etc and they tell this story about how he becomes and the truth is i would love to have a cup of coffee with a guy i'll bet you yeah i would love to have a cup of coffee with a guy. I'll bet you would. Yeah. I would love to have a cup of coffee with Juan Pablo and just say, I read your book,

and then this is the compassionate side. I got it. Yeah. You were raised by Pablo Escobar. Yeah. If you became a drug-bearing, ruthless, murdering criminal, I wouldn't excuse it, but it might explain it. Yes.

It might explain it yes it might explain it but you're to be commended because of the path that you did take yeah and uh and so the book was fascinating learned a lot about pablo and i would recommend it to people if they were interested in learning more about pablo as a person because obviously let's face it pablo's not writing his autobiography no he's pretty dead yeah there's a few pictures in there and kind of prove that yeah we'll get to that but back to your career just before in the build-up to columbia so you said you joined the da was it 1983 i became an agent in september of 1984 84, okay. And I spent almost a quarter of a decade, almost 25 years. So when you went in there, because you went to Columbia in 88, right?

I got to Columbia January of 1989. Okay. So in the four or five years, four and a half years, whatever it was, leading up to that, were you right away like a case agent like making making kit like what kinds of things were you doing well I went to the Academy in Glencoe Georgia it was at that time uh that what's called fleetech the federal law enforcement training center that's where DEA had their training Academy a few years later a couple years later they moved to uh the F Quantico at FBI and they built their own DEA Academy, especially. It's a pretty elite place.

It shares more or less the same property location as the FBI, so we can share assets like Hogan's Alley and some of the other places. So I went to the DEA Academy, and I graduated and moved back to Michigan. I got assigned to Detroit, Michigan, my hometown. Oh, really? Yep. Not a lot of people get assigned to their hometown outside of the Academy, but I did. Why? Because not a lot of people wanted to go to Detroit, and I did because it was home. So I ended up going to Detroit, and I spent four years there. And during that time, I worked on several different programs. In the beginning, I was a young rookie agent, and so I was assigned to a senior agent. And I would get coffee for him and help write his reports and do surveillance on his cases.

And slowly but surely, I became my own agent. In order to get a promotion, you have to work undercover. I was reviewing some notes. I saw the memorandum that said he's entitled to his next promotion as he has performed in an undercover capacity. I almost laugh about that at this day. But back then, it was like that was important. So I was buying heroin in the ghettos of Detroit. And let's face it, I didn't blend in.

But I was successful. I was successful. How would you do that? How do you pull that off? It was called Herman Gardens. It was this complex that was the projects. And I went in there and I just said, I need some and I need some dope. My brother's really sick.

He's sick. And I just played up a story. And this guy says, if you're a cop, I'm going to kill you. And I had an informant with me who took me in there. No agent does it alone. You are part of a team, whether that team consists of informants or other agents and or both, which is most likely the situation. For example, the Pablo Escobar wasn't just two guys. It was a team of people. It was a small elite team of DEA folks,

but it was a huge team as you start to expand out of Columbia National Police and all sorts of other intelligence agencies as well as people coming in and helping. So it never happens without a team. So I go from buying a couple grams of heroin. That parallel there was a couple grams of heroin to taking down Pablo Escobar. So that was about as being involved on the team that took down Pablo Escobar. That's about as big of differences that you can make.

But I basically played off that. I wasn't a heroin addict. My brother was sick, and I was there trying to score for him. And so I remember going back to the office and they take you off for a drink on your very first undercover deal. And I had these black agents who said, you went where? And I said, I was in Herman Gardens and I bought the heroin. I'll take you some time. Yeah. And they go, are you? And they're like, you're fucking kidding me. And one agent who just passed away a little while ago,

his name is Baby Hayes. He died in Chicago. He was a very good undercover agent and a great guy. And Baby Hayes says, man, that guy's got some balls. And I'm walking away getting ready to go process my dope and put it in the, anytime you seize drugs or seize dope, there's always two agents present. When you're doing the seizure.

When you're doing the seizure and when you're processing it and you're doing everything. Never does cash or dope ever end up being only in the possession of one agent. There's always two people. So that means there's two people stealing it for everyone following at home. And that's what some of you people who watch late night TV, go to the movies and all that believe. But that is the exact reason why it's done that way. So nobody can ever accuse you of corruption. And number two is it verifies in court one person's story versus and the others.

Like we, it's the chain of custody. It went, you know, I initialed off on it on the scene. I put it in the chain of custody. It went, you know, I, I initialed off on it on the scene. I put it in the trunk of the car. My car was followed by agent Johnson who followed agent McGee to the office. We opened this trunk simultaneously, removed the duffel bag filled with cocaine and transported it up to the upstairs where it was, you know, whether we videotaped or photographed or whatever. So it eliminates the argument of corruption. Does it totally eliminate no because

we've had corrupt agents luckily just very few very few and i can tell a story or two about that another time no no you can tell now if you want um but but i want to finish the analogy so working undercover and and working in that area that's how i I started my career in Detroit. And then I was assigned to the airport for interdiction. I had an accident. I broke my leg really bad. So I had problems walking. So they- How'd you do that? I was playing fastball. I slid in the third base. Yeah. I was safe, for those of you who wanted to know. I was safe. But I had to have my right ankle rebuilt.

And when I was in rehab. This is in the 80s? Yeah. What, they used duct tape? Yeah. Christ. You walk pretty good. Yeah, thank you.

No, I've done a lot of things since then. It doesn't impact me. But anyway, so I was assigned to the airport interdiction team at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Hold on. I'm sorry. Hold on one second. We'll be right back. I just got to check the camera over there. Hold on one second. All right, we're back now. I had one little camera problem, but I think we're good. So you were talking about how you broke your ankle and then you got into something after doing the Detroit. So, so it shattered my ankle, just shattered it, metal plate in it, tendons rebuilt, ligaments rebuilt, you name it. And so they put me out at the airport, which was, which was interesting because you met a lot of drug dealers going back and forth through airport. It was called the Airport Interdiction Unit.

A lot of direct flights from Miami straight to Detroit, a lot of cocaine being trafficked back and forth, et cetera, et cetera. So when I was a patrolman over at Jackson, I was on the SWAT team as well, Jackson Police Department, and I was on the SWAT team. And so one of the bosses in Detroit decided he wanted to start a SWAT team. Even though I was a young agent, I had the most experience I SWAT so he called me and he said hey you want to you want to help me start this SWAT team and over the DEA for the DEA in downtown Detroit and I'm thinking to myself you know here

I am a couple years on a job two or three years and I got the big boss in here talking to me about SWAT and all that I'm like we need grenades we need we need AKs no but it was it was uh it was really pretty neat so he ended up sending me the FBI SWAT academy um I was one of four DE agents ever to go to through the FBI SWAT academy is that at Quantico yes it's at Quantico was the FBI SWAT training schools of three or four week school It was really interesting because just a few weeks before I went, a SWAT officer from the FBI died. He was part of their elite SWAT team. Gosh, what's the name of that team? I got a mental blank on me. I'll Google it right now. They respond. They live at Quantico. They train every single day. And he had been out on the ropes course and was repelling. And there's this drill where you don't go until they tell you to go.

And he didn't go. And he got fatigued and he lost his grip and he fell. So a SWAT officer died. The hostage rescue team? No, it's not. HRT. That's what's coming up. Yeah, there's another name for it.

FBI Special Weapons and Tactics teams? No, that's SWAT, Special Weapons and Tactics. Oh, duh. Yeah, it's just say, go elite FBI team based at Quantico. That's how I typed in. Elite FBI team based at Quantico. So basically what they are is a bunch of agents. And what they do, when they're not training, they're also doing research so they might be researching hostage negotiation

techniques or firepower you know ballistics and all sorts of things and and and the evolution of what kind of vehicles to utilize when you're raiding a place etc etc etc so um we'll come up with the name of it later on but they just keeps telling me hrt and that's not what you're talking about yeah well hrt is one of them. I thought HRT they utilized more locally, but let's just say that it is HRT. And because I went to the school back in the 80s, I got a memory blank on that one. But with that being said, so I ended up helping formulate this SWAT team, right? Well, what happened was there was this deal that was going on.

They said, we got this informant that used to run a lot of dope back and forth to Michigan, but he'd fly from South America. So they had this informant that wanted to introduce an agent to some major Colombian drug dealers. And he was a pilot? And he was a pilot. And he was trying to work off his sentence. And so, remember, it's all about a team. And why do people become informants?

For a lot of reasons. Number one, they got themselves in a bad position. They gotta work off time. Two, they wanna make money. Three, they wanna eliminate the competition, and it's up to us to try and figure that out. Four, they do it for religious reasons or ideology reasons

whatever the case may be you know it at the training academy informant 101 you got to learn and memorize all those and you know why does a person want to become an informant a b c or d or e or f all of the above but my point is so they assigned me to this this case because he wanted me, knowing that it was going to be a major deal, to coordinate the takedown. Oh, so this had been going on for a long time. No, no. It hadn't been going on for a while. It had been going on for about two weeks. And they already had the takedown idea.

No, no, no, no. They knew it would lead possibly to a takedown idea. Okay. So we had a guy by the name of Joe. He had a Hispanic last name, and I won't tell his name because he's still alive, and he worked undercover on this case. He made the very first undercover meeting with the bad guy. And then Joe got promoted and transferred. So he had to leave Detroit and he went back to Texas or someplace. But before, they said, who's going to go undercover? And my boss said, well, Kenny, you know more about the case than anybody else because you've been studying it. You're the case agent. You're going to put it all together. Because remember, when your listeners are listening to agents speak,

it's always important for the agent to remember to know your audience. So there's a difference between a case agent and an undercover agent. Very rarely are case agents undercover agents because the case agent has to know everything that's going on or the undercover agent just needs to know what's going on in his little world. So the case agent always have to be aware of, is the undercover agent in danger or whatever, where the undercover agent, also known as the UC, never really needs to know like, who's processing the evidence over here or who's on this surveillance team or who's doing this?

He has one job and one job only. And that's to be aware of his surroundings and negotiate the deals with the bad guy and then coordinate with the case agent. So I was the case agent and he said to me, why don't you just take over the undercover duties? And I'm thinking, okay, in the academy, they told you case agent and undercover agent should never be the same guy. So, but he was the boss. So I listened to him and I thought, okay. And guess what? It was the best thing that ever happened to me because I became the case agent and the undercover agent. And I was working with this

other unit that I was assigned to. At the time I was assigned, after I left the airport, when I could walk better, I was assigned to the Dearborn, Michigan task force that focused on Middle Eastern Lebanese heroin traffickers that were smuggling heroin from the Middle East to the Dearborn area. How were they doing that? Oh's it's many different ways you know it's like you know they they they they had they were organized crime themselves they had their people in Dearborn they had their drug dealers and drug smugglers base same as the Colombian same as the tie same as the Mexicans say that's a random place though you know I would think like miami norfolk elizabeth port something like that you're talking about like the middle of america and the reason is because they can trust their own culture so you got the lebanese folks living in dearborn who again 99.9

were good people yes you just had that 0.1 that were drug dealers that would coordinate with their home country. And they spoke a different dialect. They spoke Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi, and different languages. So wiretaps and things of that nature were very difficult to do, very caustic. Just very difficult because of the foreign language. And so I was assigned to that team. I worked with Dearborn police officers. It was a task force. Then I got called in to be run the SWAT program on this. And then next thing I know, I'm working the undercover aspect. And I brought my entire

team. And almost the entire team were senior agents to me. They were local narcs with the Dearborn police department that I was the new guy assigned. But then all of a sudden, they're thrown in this position where now we have an international major drug deal going on. So I said it was one of the best moves that ever happened to me because what happened was we convinced the Colombians through a series of undercover negotiations that I was in to deliver a DC-6 filled with marijuana and cocaine from the northern coast of Columbia to a small town in Down River, Michigan, onto an airport on an island known as Grosse Ile. And they delivered 670 kilograms of cocaine and nine tons of marijuana on this dc6 cargo plane that landed

at six o'clock in the morning on this clan on this what used to be a military base now now it was a recreational airport in this small little island 20 minutes south of detroit you were starting this though I might have lost you for one second in there because I was trying to keep track of all of it in my head before you were getting into that you started this though with the Lebanese traffic no no the parallel was it has nothing to do with the Lebanon okay I was assigned to Dearborn to work on that task force and then my boss asked me to run this program on this one major case.

So I started to, and because the Dearborn officers were assigned to the DEA task force, it doesn't mean all their work happens in Dearborn. They're what's called task force officers. They're sworn in basically as federal agents. So they have national jurisdiction as well. So they're task force agents. And so they became my partners on this operation. And so we convinced the Colombians. And by Colombians, who specifically? Well, we, through a series of different networks of informants and working our way up the chain, ultimately, the person that gave the permission to do this operation was a guy named Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. And if you

read Pablo Escobar's biography, he is one of the people that mentored Pablo Escobar in the beginning. He ultimately was shot down. He was killed by the Colombians in a pursuit shot from a helicopter, and him and his son were both killed. And I think I showed you some pictures of that earlier. I hate to see it. Of the aftermath. Yeah. So we convinced them to deliver 677 kilograms of cocaine, nine tons of marijuana to this small airport. Make a long story short, we get all the drugs.

I meet with the Columbians as they get off the plane. Some Columbians jumped on the plane from South America and met with them, and then we took all the drugs. We pretended we were offloading. I was going to send the marijuana through to Canada is what I told them to sell to Canadian hash oil dealers and told them I got a bunch of marijuana for you, and I was supposed to send the cocaine to New Jersey and New York.

Take me there though, real quickly, if you don't mind. Sure. What are they like? So they get off this plane. You've agreed through intermediaries as you laid out that they were going to do this and they actually sent a couple of their, I guess, more senior type individuals here. They get off the plane. You're with other people who are all a part of this task force.

Yeah. No, well well it was only me and an fbi agent working undercover together the task force helped arrange things like they were surveillance coordinators and things of that nature meaning you had other people in the area oh tons of people in the area but they get off this kind of nondescript this isn't like a major airport obviously or anything right it's no we're in the middle of nowhere and and i'm glad you brought that point up because the main guy on the plane was a guy named Flacco.

That was his nickname. Joe? Joe Flacco? No, it wasn't Joe. It wasn't Joe from the University of what? Was it Delaware at one time? Yeah. Yeah.

Played for Casey Keeler down there. So it was a guy named Flacco and he gets off the plane and he's kind of like stretching his legs a little bit and kind of going like this because it was warm being in the back of a cargo or cold being in the back of a cargo plane. He looks around and goes, I've been here before. And I'm like thinking to myself, that's interesting. That was interesting. He said that.

We could never confirm that later on that he had been there or not. But interestingly enough, I mean, this was a huge deal. We had well over 100 agents working on this thing when the plane landed. We had agents in the tower. We had agents at the police station. We had agents surrounding the island. There were only two bridges on and off the island.

I'll put a map of the island in the corner of the screen for people to see. Sure. Grosse Ile Island. And so we convinced them. They brought it all up. I said to them, look, we're going to wait until some of our prospective buyers. You've got prospective buyers.

We're going to put this in a warehouse. We put the warehouse over in Dearborn, Michigan, where we had this warehouse where we put all the dope in the warehouse. And over the course of the next handful of days, different people came in to take a look at the product and so we videotape all of that so we get them so they're part of the conspiracy and then ultimately a few days later we invite all of them at the

same time to come pick up their product and when everybody's in the room I give what's called the bus single signal and everybody, all the cops come out of the woodwork. What was the signal? At that time, in that deal, what happened was I was speaking to one of the folks that was there from Colorado, thinking he was going to get some of the dope and take it back to Colorado. I asked him if he wanted. I knew it was going to go down. We had everything. So I was just getting everybody ready.

I had my pistol in the glove box of the car and I had another one on me. And, um, I basically said, do you want to stick a gum? He goes, yeah, or no, or whatever. I said, oh, well I want one. And so I reached into the car, reached over the glove box and as reason, the glove box to pull out my pistol, my elbow hit the car horn on purpose three times and when everybody heard honk honk honk it was like i was fumbling around in the car and i was accidentally hitting the horn and within seconds everybody all the police were converging on i grabbed my pistol i turned around i looked at him and said peter you're under arrest and i'm a federal agent and um that's how it went down and so my point on that whole you asked what i did and where i was before bogota and all that and i said the best thing that ever happened to me

was being assigned to that deal because that put me on the map. The supervision in Columbia recognized my talent. And I was fortunate enough to be one of the people selected because one of my former bosses in Detroit was now in Bogota. And so he said, he told the top boss, Joe Toft, who I talked about earlier, said, Joe, there's this guy in Detroit. He's a hard charger. He's dedicated, compassionate, or passionate about the job,, Joe, there's this guy in Detroit. He's a hard charger. He's dedicated, compassionate, or passionate about the job, et cetera, et cetera. And so they selected me, but I just couldn't go to Columbia. They had to send me to Spanish school. Oh, you need to learn the language first. Exactly. So I went to Washington, DC. So we work on prosecuting this case, and it was about six months later I got selected for Bogota.

So we're in 88 now when you get selected? Early 88, yeah. And then I go to Spanish language school and was in language school for seven months in Virginia at the Foreign Service Institute. And learning language, Spanish language, there was five people in the class and we sat in the classroom for six months six and seven months wow eight to five and learning spanish just a room smaller than this yeah and uh they were department of state officials i think one atf guy that was going to go to mexico and they were teaching us the language but our professor always told us hey you married guys here pay real good attention here in class because when you get Columbia or when you get to your designation, you're not going to really have a chance to speak a lot of Spanish outside of the office because you're going to go home to your families and speak English probably. That's if you had – I should clarify.

Were you married? Well, I should clarify one thing families weren't allowed to come to columbia at that time so it was if you brought your wife you couldn't bring kids at that time um and i was not married and the professor would say for you single guys when you get to columbia you're gonna fun. You will learn what a long hair dictionary really looks like. And you're scratching your head. The bottom line is you're going to be out. You're going to have some drinks.

You're going to go out for dinner. You're going to socialize. It was a very addictive job. You worked your ass off. But then again, you were human. So you went out periodically and you had fun wherever it may be, whatever might might have been a nightclub or whatever but there were also times when there were

threats involved against us where we couldn't go to any places and you had to go to the office and go straight home or whatever the case may be when I when you're doing this though and in these classes it's obviously a few months after you get assigned did you when you got the assignment did you have any idea did they they give you details of what you would be doing down there? Or was it just like we're sending you down to the task force? You'll figure it out later. Well, what would happen is you would call agents and say, what's it like?

What do you do down there? And when I went down there, I was involved in this cargo smuggling program. I ran it with a customs guy. I was involved with the Fugitive Extradition Program. I was very proud of that program. I was very proud of that program. I was also involved in a program that I helped create called Operation Dustbuster, where we seized airplanes from drug dealers in Columbia, and we would utilize small little vacuums that had a little pouch in it that would save all the particles in the airplane, and we would send that off to the lab. And if we had a certain percent of cocaine

residue, we knew that that plane was utilized to smuggle drugs. Operation Dust Buster, we would seize airplanes. We were responsible. What a name, Dust Buster. I named it. I named it. Yeah, I was pretty proud of that one. That's incredible. So we were responsible for the very first drug smuggling plan to be seized, and the Colombians ultimately took it, painted it white, green, put their numbers on it, and it became a Columbian aircraft. So I got involved with a whole bunch of things.

I was then assigned to the intelligence unit there, and then ultimately they had a huge shakeup. I was working in the intelligence unit on the drug smuggling program through Cargos, and they had this all-office meeting, and they said, okay, folks, and I was kicking ass. I was doing great. It was called, the operation was called Backlash, Operation Backlash. And I was killing it. It was easy for me by this tone. I had informants in Cartagena and Barranquilla and all over the country telling me where drugs were being smuggled into cargo shipments, whether they put them in a box of coal that they're shipping to

another country or whatever. There would be fruit going to Miami, stuff that was in these cargo containers. And so I had the forms all pre-printed out. I had contact with agents all around the world. I could make a phone call to one person and boom, we're going to have a team on this. So my point is, this is one of the assignments I had. And so they call an all office meeting and they say, we've decided we're going to do some changing around here.

And I'm sitting in the back and thinking, okay, my job's secure, meaning I'm doing a great job. What year is this? This would have been in back and thinking, okay, my job's secure, meaning I'm doing a great job. What year is this? This would have been in 90. Okay. No, this would have been in 91, more or less. Can I stop you just before we get all the way there? Because what's clear is obviously you did a lot there.

You were originally, I believe you told me, were assigned there for two years. You ended up being there for seven. Yes. signed there for two years you ended up being there for seven so yes it's two year increments with a maximum of six but i stayed in extra extra year because i asked for a um i appealed my transfer it was even a promotion that i delayed because i wanted to finish the case i was zeroing on the guy that kidnapped the two agents and shot him oh 1982 i caught him in october of 95 and after we caught him i was out of the country within a week. Got it. I went back home.

So there were a lot of different assignments that I had over the time. But when you go down there, so you learn the language and you go down there and you already highlighted some of the stuff you were doing. But day one, you know, what's... Actually, let me back up for a second. Before then, this is a more important question at what point does pablo escobar like the idea of him come on your radar where you're thinking about it every day let me pick up where i was where i was we called the office they called the office meeting in 90 no um 90, 91, sometime around there.

I forget exactly. But they said, we're going to make changes. And I'm thinking, well, my job's secure. I'm not going to be assigned to this. Or I might go on a jungle program, temporary assignment, which I did all that stuff as well. But the very first name they mentioned, the first person we're going to transfer from the intelligence group over to the other group, Operation Boulevard, is Ken McGee. And my jaw about hit the ground because I was very tight with the boss, Joe Toft, and the other guy. And he said, you're now assigned to the Medellin group.

And that was Operation Boulevard. Yeah, along with Murphy and Penny and a handful. I don't think Penny,phy was there yet penny was there penny got there before me and they're the just for people i think we said this earlier but they're the two main characters within narcos exactly exactly again hollywood took their liberties and their their creative geniuses and molded this whole thing to just make the whole search like that was Steve and Javier. Believe me, they did a great job.

They're very good agents, but it was a team effort. Right. And there's a lot of things on Narcos that are not in alliance with the way we really operate in DEA. Got it. Okay. I mean, I'm kind of used to the idea that a lot of these things aren't exactly. Yeah, like sleeping with informants gets you fired. It doesn't get you information, it gets you fired. If they find out about it. Yeah. Well, if they find out about it,

you're fired and you should be as a matter of fact. Yeah. But so after the meeting, I go in and see my boss and I said, what did I do? What did I do wrong? And this was a lesson in leadership I learned. And he looked at me and he says, you don't get it, do you? I said, what? And he goes, you didn't do anything wrong. You're going to get received a super great award for all the work you've already done. You've seized tons of cocaine coordinating with groups all around the world.

You took that program and built it to what it was. You've seen tons of cocaine coordinating with groups all around the world. You took that program and built it to what it was. You didn't do anything wrong. You did everything right. But you're not challenged anymore. And that's why I want you in the Medellin group. I want you to be challenged. I want you to work in that group.

And I want you to learn and take that skill and that passion and that energy you have. And so I went in the office kind of upset because I had it going pretty well. I was traveling all around the country, meeting with informants. I'd go to Cartagena, Colombia, right? I'd check into a hotel and I had it scheduled where I would meet an informant at nine o'clock at one hotel, not my hotel ever. They didn't know where you stayed. Nine o'clock at one hotel, not my hotel ever. They didn't know where you stayed. Nine o'clock at this hotel, 10 o'clock at this cafe, 12 o'clock at this restaurant, four o'clock at this beachside resort bar, whatever the case might be. I would meet with informants all day long and pay them the money that I would give them to provide me information. I had the life of Riley. It was going great.

But my boss knew I wasn't challenged. And that was what changed right then and there. I ended up going into that group, and shortly I ended up being promoted, not an official promotion, but an internal promotion where you get more responsibility to something called backup supervisor. Javier Pena was senior to me. Normally, he would have been the backup supervisor, but

Javier was working on the Medellin program with Pablo, and Pablo was one of my assignments to work on the team, but they needed a backup supervisor, so they picked me. And I'm really glad they did because I was able to be the buffer between management and the street guys while I was a street guy and be able to convince upper management that we would be able to do certain things so that's how I ended up becoming very close with Joe Toft and yeah Penny would always come to me and say they always listen to you why don't you go in and why don't you go in and ask for this or ask for that and and uh so um that's that's where it happened and that's how it happened here's what's really confusing to me this is a part i can't really rectify in my mind obviously like

you liked what you were doing you were doing cool shit and you were stopping all kinds of things around the world with cargo and working crossency and things like that but you get assigned this is 1991 as you said this is two years before pablo got hit december 93. so it's a couple years two three years whatever it is before before he dies he has been in power wreaking havoc now since like he's been a household guy since probably the mid 80s right you get assigned to the team to take down the biggest criminal of all time and your thought is wait a second this other thing like because the original question i asked you was when did pablo escobar become like a core thought in your day and it sounds to me like from 88 to 1990 he he wasn't. Well, let me clarify something. And that is he was. Because

when you're an agent in Columbia, every day you're involved, all the agents are involved in the same briefings. But there are certain people that have different responsibilities. For example, we had a guy that was full-time assigned to the jungles to go out and destroy cocaine laboratories. But periodically, other agents would be assigned to go do that. I was one of those guys. Spent a lot of times in the jungles blowing up cocaine laboratories, blowing up clandestine airstrips where drug smuggling planes would land. Well, we'd blow holes in them so they couldn't land their airplanes. They'd divert to another area. We'd seize the airplane or whatever. And the same with the fugitive program. There was a guy assigned to the fugitive program. Ultimately, that became me after the Pablo Escobar thing.

And so everybody had an assignment that they were responsible for, but everybody would get all the same briefings every day. We would all know what everybody's working on. And there was something that we called the duty agent. The duty agent was every week, it would rotate. Any calls or tips that came in, you answered the phone or you met the person in the lobby or whatever. So the duty agent could be something from, oh, we got a call from our London office that wants some information on a passport of a Colombian person that they arrested there. And they want you to check with the local Colombians to see what flight he flew out on. That's a duty agent responsibility. Oh, we have, and so you'd write a report and do it. So you'd have some of the lesser jobs that you'd have to

do just for that week, but then also informants would come in. So you come in, and this one informant came in, for example, one day, and you never interview informants without another agent. So Murphy, or I'm sorry, Penny. Is that the official rule, or is that actually how it went down? That's mostly the official rule. If you had to meet with an informant alone, you would have to document as to the reasons why. But a better stated question i asked that

the wrong way how often were guys breaking that rule not often really not often yeah i almost don't believe that yeah well you're gonna have to believe it because i'm saying it i don't have a choice yeah i wouldn't lie to you you know i'll bet you didn't break that rule very much no well but i'll bet other guys no i'm not breaking the rule if I follow the protocol and advise that I've got to meet the person alone. Right, and I'll bet a lot of other guys didn't. No, for the most part. Because it wasn't too hard to sit there and say, I've got to meet with this person on the north side of Bogota in a hotel. And keep in mind, it didn't have to be an agent, too.

It could be a Colombian police officer. And at times, back in the day we even sometimes had a secretary come in that was we we frown upon that now because you're putting them in a position that you don't want to or you would have a secretary look through a two-way glass to make sure everything is right and they documented that they witnessed the conversation right so you've got all these different roles that we all play but an informant comes in says i've got some information on pablo escobar so you start writing it and if it start writing it down if it starts to look credible you may call the person like in that case penya

you know like penny and i were once i got a call and i took javier and it was really interesting we had this guy comes into the embassy with a suitcase. And there was nothing in the suitcase, right? And he says, I want to talk to you about a new smuggling technique. And I said, what are you talking about? And he goes, well, there's a technique that can smuggle two kilograms of cocaine in the United States with no one even knowing it's cocaine. He goes, what are you talking about? And Penny and I are looking at each other like, what are you talking about?

He puts a suitcase on the counter and he goes, there's the two kilograms of cocaine. Obviously, what do we do? We open it. There's nothing in there. It looks less like a Samsonite bag. What it was, was it was a hard acrylic bag that they mixed the acrylic and all those those those substances the composites and blended cocaine into it and they made a hard shell briefcase and penny and i were like this is fascinating so we said how do we extract how do we extract the cocaine and he goes you need this kind of acid and this kind of acid i said uh you didn't happen to bring that did you and he said i did but they confiscated at the front desk where you come into the embassy which we knew they would could you imagine if these guys spent this time trying to cure cancer we'd be there we'd be there but the guy and

unfortunately the guys who created all this stuff are probably all dead because of cancer, because of all the fumes, the smell, the smelling. So, so, uh, uh, Javier and I ended up getting, uh, the, the stuff, the, the, the acids, the sulfuric acid and a couple other components. Um, and he showed us how to do it. So we cut a piece of the plastic off. We poured this stuff in, we watched it fizz and everything. We put it in like a cotton rag.

We went like this. And we got all the materials. All the liquid comes out on the bottom. And on the top is all the composites, the polymers that aren't cocaine. And there it is, powder. Son of a bitch. And it was unbelievable. But my point is, that was a duty call.

Just came in on a duty call. And so if somebody got a call that they're smuggling 500 kilograms of cocaine out from Barranquilla, Columbia, and it's going to probably go on a certain vessel, but they don't know what vessel, at that time they would call me and the Operation Backlash guy. Or after I left Backlash, they called in another agent by the name of Steve, and he would take the information. So we all had a working knowledge. How many SEALs have you interviewed? It's actually a good question. I think I've had zero in here so far. Okay, well, if you study the techniques of SEALs, they are all cross-trained.

They are all experts in one area, but they're all cross-trained in every other area. And that's the exact same thing it is with a DEA agent in Bogota. So Pablo Escobar was on everybody's mind all the time. All the time. I can't wrap my head around the idea that when you were literally put on the team that was going to be hunting them down you thought that was like a demotion because like in pie i mean to the idiot like me at home just looking at pop culture i think that that was like going to the fucking super bowl number one is i didn't think it was a demotion i just couldn't understand it you know and i thought okay i'm king of the hill right now on my program i got the respect of everybody all around the country and now I'm the new guy assigned to

another program even though I knew a lot about that program I was the new guy on that team and quickly became the assistant supervisor the backup supervisor and and did all sorts of things so it was I didn't think of it as a demotion it was more I couldn't understand I couldn't understand leadership's move because I was getting praise all the time so as it turns out here i am i get transferred in the group and it was the best thing that ever happened to me because the next thing you know i'm um you know i'm working i'm getting to know the head boss better um which is always career enhancing and i wasn't kissing his ass because i argued with him. Joe was very competitive. Once a week we'd play volleyball.

And we'd play volleyball, the teams at the embassy. And he was so competitive. And one time he started screaming at me because of something I did. I said to him under my breath, fuck yourself. I said that. And one of the family members were watching saying, I can't believe he just told Joe Toft to fuck himself. And the next day I get called to his office.

I get called up to his office. And I'm thinking, oh man, I'm in trouble now. That would be like a sergeant telling a general to go screw himself, right? While they're playing horseshoes or whatever. And he calls me and he says, hey, I want to talk to you about this case. And I just read this report that you wrote and I want to talk to you about this. I'm like, okay.

All right. And so I told him all about it. And then a few minutes later, he goes, how are you doing today? I said, I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I said, are we okay? He goes, yeah, you doing today? I said, I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I said, are we okay? He goes, yeah, why? I said.

Oh, I don't know. And I said, oh, just wondering if everything's okay. And knowing that this competitive guy who didn't take shit from anybody. And the truth is, it was in such a, the heat of the battle in volleyball, contact sport. He didn't even remember just looked at as like part of business i said you don't remember he goes what and he goes i told you to go yourself and he goes you did yeah i said i did he goes well he goes get the out of office. He might not have said that like that, but make a long story short. So I was confused as to why I was doing such a great job and I got moved.

And a lesson in leadership, and I've used it numerous times later on that, you know, mentoring other people in different programs and different ways is extremely important. And that's exactly what he did. And the guy that worked for him, his name was Jerry Reinhart, who I went to Pablo Escobar's Finca Los Napoles with. And you saw some pictures of him earlier. And Jerry just died a couple of years ago of a brain tumor, but he was an outstanding agent as well. And they sat back and made the team. And it was like a major league manager deciding who he wants at what position, and that's exactly what they did.

How many people were on that team? In that group, at that time, there were six people in that group. In the Escobar group? Yeah, but keep in mind, there's only about 12 or 14 agents in the entire office at that time. In Columbia? At that time in colombia at that time i went and visited the office about eight years ago and the embassy had changed location and there's only one office down there right well there was one in cartagena and i believe now

there was one then in barranquilla and then one in cartagena and they had both like 12. no they the office of marin key only had five or agents. So you're telling me that during this war on Escobar, we had, call it rounder number, 18 agents for the DEA down there? Probably a lot less than that, too, when you think about it, because Barranquilla was in their own world. They handled northern coast cartels. Son of a bitch. They would get information periodically, but they'd have to forward it to us and then the da bogota group had group one group two in the intelligence group the intelligence group had i think four agents and the escobar group had five or six agent the other other group

had four five or six agents and that included supervisor so but cumulatively, there was probably, hell, somewhere in here I have, I had the information. I kept a card with every agent's name and I still have it from then where we had contact numbers and radio code numbers and all that. But it wasn't a lot. that were assigned to the intelligence group, and one was assigned to the Escobar case that would basically manage all the massive amount of documentation, sightings and statistical data on seizures and who was killed and would write the executive summary reports on searching for Pablo, and they would have an analyst assigned to the cargo smuggling program too, and some of the analysts had two or three different jobs how many guys were like you and Pena though like actually

out in the field like working and developing informants like how many agents were like that in Bogota 10 at the time a lot now I went down there a handful of years ago more like a decade and the office had changed from one embassy to an the other and the first embassy the one that i was assigned to was in downtown bogota in the middle of a district where there were banks and you know they had barricades around the embassy and all that stuff but it was it was a small building it was a four story building and that's all it was was a building now it's over by the airport and it's massive amount of property with a fence around it and all sorts of and for if you entered the embassy from the outside to get in the embassy old embassy from the outside of the front door

it was a 30-yard walk. Now it's like a quarter of a mile drive from the main road. So there weren't a lot of us. And there were guys that came and went, and guys that came and went. So the life of a DEA agent in Bogota, Columbia was a very, as I said to you earlier, it was addictive work. You were involved in so many different things. And you could, and it's the same way as a DEA agent in the United States. In the morning, you could be working surveillance. In the afternoon, undercover. And in the mid-afternoon, you're doing a search warrant helping another agent out.

So you have to be multifocused on doing a lot of different things and being able to adapt very quickly as to how your daily events are going to go and you learn how to prioritize. I'm going to go meet with this informant. We're going to talk about a drug smuggling deal and somebody calls and says, hey, we just got a threat on an agent. We got to go respond to this area and check out this location. You drop that appointment, you move somewhere else. The boss calls you and says, what's going on?

And I say, well, we've got an airplane out. They're getting ready to land at a small airstrip. And he's going to drop off some agents that are going to work with the Columbia National Police. He says, stop, re-divert that plane, drop off the agents. We need to take our plane and fly it to this other area because I just got a call from a general. Five Colombian police officers were ambushed and they have no capacity to get into

that area and drag those officers out. And that happened. Five officers, all wounded, all shot up. Several of them died in the back of a DEA airplane where Joe Toft sent the airplane to go get these wounded officers that were killed in some sort of fire shot in some sort of firefight to help transport them back to Bogota. And so those are the kinds of things. And then, then there's the fire drills, you know, you got the head honchos in Washington, DC. You say, I want this and I want it now, or what something called a CODEL, which means a congressional delegation. You got to get this because we got this congressman visiting. And Joe Toft knew that sometimes you'd have to appease the people in Washington, D.C. or headquarters to get the job done. So the CODEL comes down and you take them

out to dinner and you provide protection for them and all that. Or, you know, Joe assigned me once to a Hollywood script. There was a, I think a TV show at one time called Drug Wars. And he assigned me to help the Hollywood team for two days. I said, why me? He goes, because you know everybody. And lie to them about everything. Yeah, no, you know every, no, what they want to do is film Drug Wars, and they got approval from DA Washington, DC.

But they came down they said we need something that looks like a colombian motorcycle we need to get colombian police uniforms we need license plates that are colombian license plates and i had connections everywhere so i called this guy i said look can i borrow three or four uniforms i need this i need can you give me a couple of those license plates that say colombian police on them you know and we did that so the hollywood guys would have authentic props but the idea is the longer you were there the more people you knew but here's the other thing and i just keep thinking this like obviously you mentioned you went to dc and learned spanish for six seven months so you're speaking the language and

everything i see pretty pretty proficiently at the time and you were a single guy so i'm sure you learned it from a lot of ladies down there but you know you're really white like you you don't look colombian exactly and you're putting your fingers all over the place it sounds like how the hell are you keeping your cover like because these people would kill on demand if they even thought like uh maybe maybe that guy is i got you know what i mean i got you and i see what you're saying and you are right i'm very white and and colombian i i have a daughter that's colombian as a matter of fact. I married her mother. We're not married anymore in the United States a couple years after I left Colombia.

But product of the marriage is my daughter, who's a beautiful 25- Who set up this thing, by the way. Shout out to Daniela. Yeah, she did a great job. She's a social media expert. She's a graduate of a prestigious university here in the United states and uh no in chicago in chicago area and she's um she's just a good kid who learned a lot and she's half colombian and so a lot of times our conversations are in spanish so you say at one time i spoke spanish i still try and continue to speak Spanish. That's great. Yo quiero hablar español contigo.

Si las personas que están visitando tu podcast y quieren hablar conmigo en español, por favor, mándame un email y podemos charlar en español otro día. Gracias. But let me take you in the life of being at the embassy. The embassy is not just DE agents. There's other foreign agencies three-letter agencies that are foreign in the country oh you took the words out of my mouth number one number two there's also the state department that processes applications for passports there's also

yeah how many passwords do you have sitting here right now by the way yeah there's also one two three four five six seven eight nine this looks like a printing clinic over here. You know, it's kind of funny. Let me see those real quick. But what I was going to say was that there's a lot. There's foreign aid. There's Department of State. There's all sorts of different things, you know, whether it's helping crop

surplentation. There's also military groups assigned there that work with the Colombian military for training. So the embassy has got hundreds of people in it that are Americans. But they don't like – but to be clear, and maybe I'm skipping a little bit here, but they don't care about any of that. If you're an American, they think you're evil. I got your question. They normally don't think you're evil.

They just think the DEA is evil. Really? Yeah, for the most part. Now, then there's the guerrilla trafficking groups and the guerrilla groups that will kidnap Americans if they have a chance because of the ransom and all that. But basically what you do as a DEA agent, if you are cornered, say, hey, you're an American, whatever. Say, yeah, I work at the embassy and you make up a department. Oh, what do you do? And you could make up whatever agency you wanted to. Oh, I work with the department of farmland aid. Well, what does that mean? Well, we're helping crop

supplementation for Colombian farmers to teach them how to grow better crops. And so the bug infestation isn't going to destroy their crops and whatever the case may be. And you rattle off some stuff and you throw out some, you throw out a few acronyms and just say something like, yeah. And, and so we work very closely with the government of Columbia's DOF and they're like DOF, you know, but you act like, you know, and they pretend like they know what the DOF is. And I just made it up. It means nothing. But my point is, you can convince people that you're not with the DEA, that you're just a state department employee working at the embassy, and that's

what you're assigned there for. And you better be able to do that very good. Otherwise, you're not going to live for a long time. And if you don't do it well, like if you do do it well, though, it's just, I mean, obviously you made it clear right there. It is just surprising to me given what it, I mean, let's call it what it is, what a terrorist guys like Escobar were, the Cali cartel and everything. The fact that they wouldn't just be like, oh, we don't like him. We're not sure.

Or, you know, yeah, he's not DEA, but he's an embassy guy fuck him kill him like that to me it seems like that would just be so maybe not commonplace because you're an american there's some things that go along with that but these guys certainly didn't bat an eye right well you would also carry different identification for example you fly in and out of the country, you have the diplomatic passport. And you're holding this up to the camera right now for people watching. Exactly. And the diplomatic passport is what grants you a lot of immunities. And so it helps you in a lot of different ways. But you don't carry this around. When you get this Colombian passport, the Colombian government issues you a small little booklet. It's red. It's called a red carnate, which means red card, basically. And you also, if you are traveling anywhere, you also want to carry the blue passport. Because if for some reason something happens when you're on the plane and you're flying from point A to point B, I might have to fly to Chile or to Ecuador or someplace

like that, you are carrying this because that's how you get into the country. But you want to have this as well. Because what happens is if something happened, if there was a terrorist act and they kidnapped or grabbed you, snatched you at the airport or they hijacked the airplane or something like that, you are trained to dump this passport. You want to get rid of it. The diplomatic one.

Yeah, you want to get rid of it. The diplomatic one. Yeah, you want to get rid of it. If you know it's a criminal element taking you, wants to take you out. Because all of a sudden your stock rises tremendously. We have a government employee. Oh, you could be an agent. You could be whatever. So you would dump that and keep this. My daughter, when she was being raised in Columbia after my wife and I separated, she was instructed to tell people she was Canadian because she looked,

she had blondish, light-colored hair and blue eyes and not as pale white as I am, but she was obviously a white girl. But she was instructed to tell people she was Canadian. Why did it matter? Because of your history there? It was not only my history, but I guess it's for the... What's a good analogy I could come up with? For people that want to kidnap people,

the Americans are the prime rib of the steak world it's canadian it's not so much it's kind of no of the kidnapping world where money will be paid more right you know um the the prime rib versus the ribeye my point is nothing against the canadians it's just that the the foundation of america it's like they think we're rich you know they think that we have all this money at our disposal and they will look at and say the american government will pay and the america you compare the size of the canadian embassy to the size of the american embassy it kind of shows the differences so she was instructed to tell people she was canadian how good was her canadian accent yeah a lot of of A's. Yeah. So anyway, when you get these diplomatic passports and then there's another passport, it's called

the official passport that you might use for something else. And so over time, you just wear out your passports and you get more and more and more of them. And so I've always hung on to my passports because whenever you get a top secret clearance, you always have to document any foreign country you've ever been in, when you've been and where you've been and why you've been. And you fill that out on any of the background sensitive investigation forms. How many countries have you been to?

I haven't counted. Ballpark. Well over a dozen, two dozen. Not close. I don't think two dozen, but more than a dozen, less than two dozen. I did not. I've done the European route. I didn't do the Far East route.

I haven't done much there. I mean, I've been to Egypt. I've been to Jordan. I've been to Germany. I've been to several countries in Europe, several countries in South America. You're going to run out of fingers if you're counting. But I've been to a lot of places. But I didn't do much in the Far East.

Learned a lot about it because then you go to Washington, D.C., you get assigned to headquarters, and part of your responsibilities is learning about all the different countries on whatever assignment, top secret assignment you've got at our DEA headquarters, which I ran an intelligence unit at a headquarters during my assignment there. But so you learn, back to your point, pale white guy, yeah. You learn to just, people think that you're a State Department employee or whatever. And that's okay. Yeah, and then ultimately, I mean, there are a lot of people that learn you're a DEA agent. You've got informants all around the country. They know you're a DEA agent. You've got informants all around the country.

They know you're a DEA agent. And you can keep operating. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're meeting with those informants. But keep in mind, the informants don't want to tell people they just met with a DEA agent. But you've got to be careful. Remember I said earlier, when we meet with the informants, I don't sit there and tell them what hotel I'm in.

Right. I meet them at different locations. Remember the story i told about the two agents that were kidnapped from the hotel room on february 10 1982 yes well they were in that hotel and people knew they were de agents and they were kidnapped from that hotel room and taken out and both of them were in a series of events shot several times and And by the grace of God and their courage and their intestinal fortitude, they survived. And ultimately, I caught the guy that was a ringleader shooting them both, the guy by the name of Rene Benitez, the guy whose initials I put on the handcuffs several years before because I was obsessed with finding that guy.

So you talk about the different assignments, remember? that was my pet project i was always working on whether i was working in this unit in this unit or this unit or whatever i was always working on that where did you where did you say you lived again when you went there you mentioned something quickly maybe like 20 minutes ago 30 minutes ago i think but like because you're talking about don't know where the location is and everything but if you live in one place and that's just you know exactly on monday and tuesday they can know that let me answer that question in two different ways also if you're identified as a de agent and there's a threat they do two things like joe toff would call you and say we have a threat on your life we're going to take you off the street for a little while until we can ascertain what's going on and cool things off or we're going to send you off the street for a little while until we can ascertain what's going on and cool things off. Or we're going to send you back home for a few weeks.

And if it's a credible threat that we can't neutralize the threat, you get sent home permanently. They normally give you your choice of places to go. And so the goal is not to have a threat against you unless you want to go home. And I've never heard of anybody doing that. But my point is, the goal is to not get threats against you. And a way I also want to answer that as well is that Kiki Camarena was killed by the Mexican cartels. It's one of the longest investigations DEA has ever had. The case is still open. Prior to us capturing Rene Ben benitez that was the longest case ever open until i caught that guy

but kiki camarena's case is still open and what happens is the reason people like pablo escobar collie cartel emitting cartel are hesitant about harming a de agent is because they knew remember what i talked to you about that rule earlier we won't kill you if you don't kill us unless it's a situation where violence occurs. They realized that if they killed an agent, they would overcome the wrath of the government 10 times stronger than it already was. And that's what happened with Kiki Camarena. They have not stopped that investigation to this day. Well, I assume you know some of the background there as far as like why that might not be getting fully solved or fully litigated. I've watched that documentary too, and there's a lot of different angles we could take off of that. All right, guys, that brings us to the end of part one of two with mr ken mcgee ken was here

for like four and a half hours so we had to split it into two episodes and so the second one really needs no introduction we are going to be going deeper and deeper into the pablo escobar case and the front row seat or i should say like the action seat that Ken had in helping take down the biggest, most notorious drug kingpin to ever live. So if you are watching this episode on YouTube or listening on Spotify more than a week after it came out, then guess what? Part two is already up and the link is in the description. If not, I will see you next week. Oh, and I almost forgot. Don't forget to like the video and subscribe to the channel on YouTube. And that said, you already know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.