Locked In with Ian Bick - DEA Agent Reveals Truth About The World's Most Violent Gangs | Wesley Tabor Sr.

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Wesley Tabor Sr. grew up poor in a broken home, raised by a single mom who later married a convicted felon. Instead of following that path, Wesley became a cop and eventually joined the DEA, where he built a successful 23-year career fighting cartels, gangs, and drug traffickers. In this powerful interview, Wesley reveals how cartels smuggle drugs into the United States, the rise of violent gangs like MS-13, Tren de Aragua, and the Mexican Mafia, and why he believes there’s no real justice in America’s system. He also opens up about the DUI crash that nearly paralyzed him and almost ended his career, along with unbelievable stories from decades on the frontlines of the war on drugs. This is an unfiltered look into the dangerous world of organized crime, cartel trafficking, and the failures of the justice system—from someone who lived it every day. #DEA #Cartels #DrugTrafficking #MS13 #MexicanMafia #TrueCrimePodcast #TrendeAragua #organizedcrime Thank you to PRIZEPICKS for sponsoring this episode: Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/IANBICK and use code IANBICK and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! Connect with Wesley Tabor Sr.: https://infiltrateamerica.com/ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Presented by Tyson 2.0 & Wooooo Energy: https://tyson20.com/ https://woooooenergy.com/ Use code LOCKEDIN for 20% OFF Wooooo Energy Buy Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop Timestamps: 00:00 Opening: Torture Methods & Dangerous Gangs 01:00 Meet Wesley Tabor: Story & DEA Career 05:00 Childhood, Poverty, and Finding Purpose 12:00 Joining Law Enforcement: Early Experiences 18:00 Family Influence & Compassion in Policing 23:00 Brush With Death: Surviving a Devastating Crash 36:00 Fighting for Justice after the Accident 48:00 Joining the DEA: Motivation & First Steps 54:00 Drug Interdiction: Highways & Big Seizures 01:03:00 DEA Operations Inside and Outside the U.S. 01:16:00 How Drugs Are Smuggled: Boats, Logistics, and Cartels 01:34:00 From Border to Heartland: Drug Distribution Networks 01:43:00 Corruption in Law Enforcement: Inside Stories 02:01:00 Gang Proliferation & MS-13, Mexican Mafia, & Prisons 02:09:00 Evolution and Tracking of Gangs in America 02:17:00 Modern Gangs, Human Trafficking, and the Border 02:21:00 Struggles, Politics, and Bureaucracy in the Job 02:32:00 High-Stress Ops, Retirement, and Adjusting to Normal Life 02:38:00 Reflections: Career Lessons and Closing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The way they torture you in Venezuela is a little bit unique other parts of the world. They'll tie you up and they'll expixiate you with a bag. And then when you go to breathe, they spray bug spray in the bag. So you're breathing the bug spray. And then they expixiate you again and they'll do that for days. Who do you think is the most dangerous? I would say probably Mexican Mafia. What's a number one method that drugs are getting into the country?

Wesley Tabor Sr. grew up poor, raised by a single mom who later married a convicted felon. Instead of following that path, Wesley became a cop and then joined the DEA, where he built a 23-year career taking on some of the most dangerous gangs and cartels in the world. Along the way, a devastating DUI crash nearly left him paralyzed and almost ended his career. In this episode, Wesley pulls back the curtain on how drugs are really smuggled into the U.S. the rise of gangs like MS-13, Trend de Aragua, and the Mexican mafia, why he believes there's no real justice in the system, and unforgettable stories from his time on the job.

Wes, welcome to Lockton, man. Thanks so much for coming, and thank you to Steve Murphy for connecting us. Steve hooked us up, and Steve's great. He's a real gentleman, you know, the old Southern draw that he has and all that. But what a great guy. Did you guys meet over the course of your career, or did you meet after? No, so he was in headquarters just as I was coming on the job. And, you know, Steve's a legend of DEA, took down Pablo Escobar.

So when you think about a guy like him, at the time he was an SCS senior executive service guy, and I'm brand new, so I'm not going to meet this guy, right? But we all heard the stories because it was still pretty fresh. I came in. I was sworn in 1997 in Tampa, Florida, before I went to the academy. So everyone was still very big on the hype of what happened with Pablo. Oh, yes, by that point it had already happened and everything. Oh, 100%.

Yeah, yeah. So fast forward to the end of my career, and then I get linked up with Steve through a mutual friend, Chris Feistel, who is another legend, took down the Cali Cartel with Dave Mitchell. And they have a new book out as well. So yeah, yeah, so he hooked me up with Steve, and I talked to Steve, and first thing he's like, hey, brother, you know how Steve is. Hey, brother, Chris told me all about you, man, what do you need?

How can I help you? And I'm just like, who does that? You know, it's kind of rare in any business. And because of Steve, we're getting so many of these great law enforcement stories on the show. And so it's good to balance it out. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of great content for you. A lot of guys will tell the stories of things that happen around the world, stories that I think your viewers are going to really find interesting.

Definitely. And on the topic of books, I want you to tell the audience about your book that you brought me today. Sure. So with everything happening, with gangs in the country, of course, we've had Marisavitrucha, the MS-13, the MS-18, we've had prison gangs and so forth for many, many years, obviously. But then we had the introduction of Trenda Aragua, which is the gang out of Venezuela, coming to the United States. And then with the recent last four years, we had an opening of the borders,

and these people flooded into the country and committing mayhem and murder and so forth. So I said, you know what? This is a project that I wanted to do. It's not a project. It's kind of niche. Not a lot of people really care about gangs. other than what they might see on the news, but I said, no, I'm going to write this book.

So back in the early part of my overseas career, I had worked in Guatemala. So I saw firsthand how these gangs were destroying lives. You know, I had my life threatened by some of these gang members sometimes in the streets. You just happen to be at the wrong place at the right time, and you're going to get shot, right? So I started a program when I was,

this is going back many years ago, to identify through bio, data, and different matrix. from the prison systems, from the police departments, and also from the Fiscalia, which is like the prosecutor's office. And I collated all this information, fingerprints, photographs, tattoos, all that stuff. We created a program called Gang, which I named it, Gang Associative Networking Groups. And then we started working that to get all the other countries in Central America. El Salvador was plagued with a horrible problem with gangs at the time, right? Now they don't.

They're all in prison. I call it, so they're all locked up, but Honduras, Guatemala, and so forth. So I said, we can take this thing and make it really big, and we'll run it out of DEA, El Paso Intelligence Division. And then I was unfortunately told by DEA leadership, after I kind of pulled everything together, they said, yeah, we don't work gangs, we don't care about gangs, give it to the FBI. So the FBI had me come. I was speaking at conferences doing training sessions for AUSA's offices, you know, federal prosecutors.

I even did a class for the Supreme Court in Guatemala. I was teaching in El Salvador. I was having a great time. I really enjoyed the topic of what we were doing. But I took it all and I just turned it over to the FBI. And then they turned it into what it is today, one of the many programs they have now that target these gang members. That's awesome.

Yeah. Where did you grow up was? So I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. I'm a Midwestern. Wow. Yeah. I grew up. You know, I was born in 1970.

I grew up. you know, my teenage years in the 80s, Van Halen and, you know, all these things. And that's kind of the beginning of where I started looking at law enforcement, like around 1983, 1984, because I grew up very, very poor when I was a kid. I had a lot of love in the family. But my father was a Vietnam vet. He kind of left us in a sense in many ways when he came back for Vietnam. mom. He kind of lost himself drinking. He just couldn't settle down. He was kind of tormented. So he kind of

departed from the family. It was four kids and my mom. So my mom met a man years later. His name was Philip and he was a convicted felon, a multiple convicted felon, robbery, burglary, you name it, even escaped from prison at one point and they picked them up, you know, as Marshalls got him, brought him back. And he had come out of jail and met. my mother and they ended up getting married and that became my father. So when he got out of prison, he had told himself he's like, he was in state prison system in Minnesota, Gladiator Academy kind of environments, a lot of killings, rapes, you name it, he was experiencing. And when he got out, he's like, I'm never going to drink again. I'm not going to be a crime again. I'm not using

drugs again. I'm not doing anything that's going to get me back to that place. And I'm going to now assume a role of a father and a husband, and he did just that. And so when I was growing up, I was being raised by a felon, and I kind of found my place going into law enforcement because no one else wanted me. I was rag-tag. I mean, let me set the stage for you, how poor we were at one point. Here I am, six years old, we're in the woods in Maine. We had moved. to Maine in hopes to kind of secure a better future or a better job and so forth. And we're in a school bus that had been renovated. There was no running water. There's no electricity. We were taking baths and heated firewood water on a big metal tub. And we're taking baths in that. That's

setting the tone for kind of like how poor we were at one point, right? So I didn't have anything. I didn't have the look. I didn't have nice clothing. I didn't have nice shoes. And people, People in these smaller communities knew, you know, oh, this is the kid, he didn't have any money. The father was a felon. And they knew kind of some of the background, even though he was a totally upstanding guy. He hadn't committed any more crimes. He just had that kind of like kind of mean look to him. He did.

He looked very scary. And sometimes he was very scary because he was kind of a tormented guy. He had a bad growing up as well as youth. It was horrible. But he was the one that eventually supported me. more than anyone to become a law enforcement officer. And after trying the Boy Scouts, after trying to go into baseball camp, and I'd walk in and the parents would look at me and just dismiss me.

Oh, this, that Tabor kid, he's, you know, he didn't have shit. You know, I mean, I think to his name, whatever. Literally, no one helped me do anything. And I just got fed up with it until one day a kid told me, he goes, hey, there's a program called the Explorer's Program. And you can be like a junior cop. He goes, it's part of the Boy Scouts. I'm like, no, I retried the Boy Scouts, and they treated me like, shit.

They treated me horribly. And I'm never going back to anything like that again. So this guy's like, no, no, no, these guys are really cool, dude. They're all cops, state troopers. So we had moved from Maine when that kind of like fell apart. We moved back to Minnesota, where he did my stepdad, security job. And that's where I went to my first police explorers program. So here I am 13 years old.

12, 13 years old, I walk in, all these troopers are there, somewhere in playing clothes, somewhere in uniform, and he comes out, hey, man, what's going on, bro? Like, and I'm like, going, this guy's actually talking to me. Come on in, dude. He goes, you interested in being a cop? They're like, hey, bro, hey, what's up? They all came over, shaking my hands, brought me in, gave me, like a pamphlet, started talking to me, do you want to do this, you can do this?

We'll give you uniforms. They start talking at it. their kids came over really cool. I was like, whoa, this is very different from all my previous experiences. And at that moment, I was like, you know what? I want to look at this. I want to be a cop, because I want to be a truck driver before, you know, BJ and the Bear, you know, convoy. If you've ever heard the song, MC McCall, Convoy. And I want to be a truck driver. Well, all that changed when I met these guys, uniforms and the belts and the cars and police equipment and all that stuff. And that's what kind of set me on the trajectory to want to be a law enforcement officer.

If your stepdad never came into the picture, do you think you ever would have went down that path? Yes. Yes, I think I would have. But I think what happened was his support for my notions of what I wanted to do for my life when I told him, hey, I'm going to join the Explorers. He was like, that's great. That's a great profession. Cops are good people. And, This is a guy who had, he had told me. He goes, I had my ass beat my cops. Like over and over and over, I had my ass beat my cops. He goes, but, he goes, I deserved it.

He actually would tell me, like, you know, most of the time I pretty much deserved it. You know, I'd spit on them or I'd punch him and get in a fight and they'd just kick my ass. He said so, he goes, I think it's great you're going to do that. And he supported me 100%. But one of the things that I saw that later I kind of understood a little bit better was, The trooper that would take me on the ride-alongs, I had one guy. His name was Desmond Pepin. Never forget this guy's name.

He would take me on most of my ride-alongs. He was probably 50-year-old guy at the time. Here I am 14. And he would pull up to the house, roll the window down, and I'd be waiting for him, like on the stoop of the house, picked a table or whatever. And I'd be like, I can't wait to go to work, right? Well, listen, I'm a kid. I have a nightstick and a, like a...

set a khaki, like, you know, Dixies on, right? So my stepdad would be in the garage a lot working. And so he would tell, he would, like, say, hey, have fun. And he'd look at the trooper and just like this. And the trooper would look at him and they wouldn't talk. But they would look at each. It was like he didn't know anything about my stepdad, but I think they both had this, like, invisible communication.

and it was like the felon to the cop kind of communication, and for some reason they never really spoke. It was always like they would always look at each other and like kind of wave or kind of nod their head. And the trooper, the first couple times he picked me up, he'd kind of inquire like, that your dad? I go, yeah, it's my stepdad.

He's like, oh, okay, yeah. What's he do for a living? I said, he's a carpenter. ever been in trouble? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's like prison and arrested since he was like 14 years old. I said, but he was an alcoholic.

He was messing around with drugs. He was doing stupid things. That's all behind him. He's been clean and he's sober and he hasn't been in trouble many, many, many years. He's like, oh, okay, okay, cool. And the trooper never cared. He was just kind of inquiring, you know, is he got to know him. Did understanding your stepdad's past and who he was as a person make you more compassionate

towards individuals that you would encounter in your career? No doubt. No doubt. I mean, I would see the worst of the worst, right? And then sometimes I go into a house where it's just destroyed by some guy who beat his wife, beat his kids. You know, I remember one occasion I went to a house and the woman's there and she's bleeding from the neck. This guy had taken a beer mug, like a big crystal. little beer mug broke it when he broke he smashed on the counter and stabbed her in her throat

a bunch of times she was still alive when i got there she survived it and all the kids were crying they were they were poverty stricken they had nothing and i could totally like envision like back into my youth not that we didn't have that kind of violence in a home we didn't have that right so but what i'm talking about is kind of flashing back to what are these kids doing and how am i going to But I tell you this, it would make me very angry. That guy, he actually fled when we were pulled up to the house. He ran out the back and he fled. We didn't catch him that day.

But I caught him about a week and a half later. And he squared off with me and I kicked his ass. Yeah. I mean, he was stupid enough to square off with me. And I was like, really, dude, you know? And then I drug him back and the state attorney dropped the case because the wife wouldn't testify. And then, you know, he's right back in the house with her again, you know, another week later. And so, you know, when you're looking at these cycles of violence, and me, I didn't have that kind of violence in the home per se.

My stepdad would get very aggressive. He had a stick. If you misbehaved or did something, you're going to get whooped with the stick. But it wasn't like he was sitting there just beating us for no reason or beating my mother. He never did anything like that. That wasn't there. But when you grow up in a broken home, when you grow up in extreme poverty, when you grow up with the kind of background that might. my stepfather kind of had and the stories he would tell you, it would flash back to me. 100%. 100% on these different crimes scenes. This episode is brought to you by prize picks. You and I make decisions every day, but on prize picks, being right can get you paid. Don't miss any of the excitement this season on prize picks where it's good, to be right.

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That prosecutor that dropped the case, did that kind of tell you a lot about the criminal justice system, that situation? So for your viewers, so they understand, there is no justice in the criminal justice system. There is no vindication in the criminal justice system. You're not dealing with a system that's set up to provide justice. People will say it all the time. Oh, you must serve justice. We need justice.

There's going to be no justice. And I'm just telling you, I've seen it over and over and over. Sometimes, actually, what you'll see is a more aggravation of the problem. And then, you know, when we're taking these kids that commit crimes and they're saying, we need justice. And I'm not talking about aggravated felony, you know, forcible felony, rape, child molestation, homicide, things that. I'm talking about lower-level crime, say you have a kid that is using dope and starts stealing, cars and then he gets arrested and you're throwing him into juvenile lockup. And then after juvenile lockup, he gets out, he gets charged again. This time he's 17, they charge him as an adult.

Then they're throwing him in a gladiator academy where he's going to learn how to commit more crimes. And then you just created a monster. So I don't have all the answers, but I know one thing. The system is not working. We're building so many jails, so many prisons in the United States. And when you look at per capita of how many people are going to jail compared to the rest of the world, there's no comparison. We're off the charts. Something's not working. But yet we keep hammering that nail, hammering that nail. And so over my 30-some years of working in law enforcement security and so forth, I saw firsthand. In fact, I was a victim of it. I was a victim of a crime. A drunk driver hit me in 2001. I'll tell you this story. So I had been a police officer for about five years. I was a sheriff deputy in Tampa, Florida.

Then I joined DEA. I'm in DEA for a few years, and my brother gets married. So I'm located in Des Moines, Iowa, of all places. You're like, DEA agent in Des Moines, Iowa. During the 90s, Google it, guys. In the 90s, methamphetamine was off the charts. Okay? And when I say off the charts, I'm talking thousands of labs a year in one state called Iowa.

You have 4,000 labs a year, 3,000 labs a year. Think about that. That's like a lot of labs. Now, some of the labs are little shakers, you know, with the batteries, the peals and all that stuff, and the pseudofedrin. But some of them weren't. Some of them, there were, you know, underground buses. People were blowing up their homes. It was out of control.

but that's where I was stationed. So all my family was in St. Paul, Minnesota. So I'm coming back from the wedding. Spring of 2001, brand new agent, 31 years old, prime of my life, man. I could run 10, 20 miles. I could lift, warm it up at 250. I mean, I was just a beast. I was like, man, I just got the world by the balls, right?

So my brother's driving. I'm in the passenger seat. We're in a Saturn. Do you remember the Saturn's? Yeah. I'm 6'5, big dude. I'm not meant for a Saturn, but I'm like the Mario Kart guy in this little vehicle, right? And I look in the mirror because I'm hypervigilant about everything.

And I see a car that's rushing behind me. And I told my brother, I said, dude, we're going to get hit. Brace. He's like, what? He looks up. This car is doing like 100-some miles an hour. comes from behind, hits the back of our car,

almost like a pit maneuver. And it spins our car. We roll it five times, end-over-end twice. So when it came end-over-end, the roof collapsed. I had my seatbelt on. And what happened was it just crushed me

straight vertically down on the end-over-end. So when it came down, this is the roof. It came down like this. And just crushed me. See, three, four, five, and six. all the facets in the back were just destroyed. Fissets, so you have the spinal, like the discs and the bone material.

Then in the back, you have these little bones that come out like this. You can feel them on your neck. All those bones in the back were all crushed. Instantly paralyzed. Totally paralyzed. Well, I can move my left arm. I could flop it a little bit. And I'm upside down the car in my seatbelt.

Smoke. I tell my brother, like I'm like dude he goes get out of the car bro get out of the car my brother's about six foot one uh he wasn't affected i'm four inches taller right so i'm totally parallel he came in in his eyes when he looked at me he just was like he couldn't even talk right and i'm like bro i cannot breathe all i can't move all my weight is on my chest and every breath i take i can't take another breath in so is it cinching i can't breathe so i'm basically choking, right?

I'm expixating. And I'm like, you got to take the seatbelt, he goes, dude, you're going to drop. Because remember, I'm upside down, right? And he goes, there's fucking fuel coming out of the car. I was like, dude, just undo the seatbelt. We'll deal with what we have to deal with. So he lets it loose, and I just drop like a sack of potatoes.

So I'm totally paralyzed. And so now I'm kind of laying on my side, and my hand is on, the dashboard and I'm upside down and the glasses there and the sun setting and I'm like man I'm going to die here this is I'm going to fucking die I'm going to die in a car hit by some dude I didn't even know what had happened at this point but I'll get to it and I'm like man I was envisioned myself going in a blaze of glory you know sundance in the kid or whatever you know I'm like I'm going to go out blazing and no I'm going to die in a freaking car in an accident that I've seen

50, 60 people died before when I was a cop, right? And I'm like, geez. So I'm having this internal struggle. Like, you're going to be okay. Suck it up. It's not that big of a deal. Shit, I'm going to fucking die here. No, you're not.

Like, literally, I'm having this conversation. I remember it like it's yesterday. And I can use my arms now, so you guess what happened. You're going to die. No, you're not. Yeah, you are. Yeah, you are. Don't be a pussy.

You're going to, I'm doing this in my mind. because over the years, cops, lawyers, doctors, you name it, nurses, paramedics, people in certain professions are used to very high stress tempo. And they become accustomed. They can conceal stress. Okay. And I was really good at that. Like I had been, you know, when I was an officer of street crimes unit doing surveillance, I was on SWAT, you know, I just handled a myriad of people killing themselves in front of me. I had a lot of experience in being able to kind of compartmentalize emotion. And I was having a hard time, bro. I'll be honest with you. I was having a really hard time. It was very difficult to be able to compartmentalize that.

But I did a pretty good job looking back on it. I'm like, you know what? Okay. You held it together. I told my brother, I said, if it catches fire, you got to drag me out. Fuck it. What happens? If I die, I die, but I'm not going to burn in the car.

I've seen people burning cars. You don't want to go like that, right? And you can't get them out. So shortly after that, paramedics arrived. And they're like, we got to cut this car apart to get to them. Like, it was like I was free, but they couldn't get me out because they had to put me on a board, stabilize my spine, or I could potentially die. They knew my neck was broken and it was paralyzed already.

And this doctor pulls up. He comes to the car. And what I didn't know was, and I found out later this doctor, he had just, done a training session on emergency vehicle extrication and emergency management of scenes like this, just like a half hour before. And he was driving home. So he just drives by the accident, sees the crew, he just trained. He comes out.

And he tells the paramedic. And I'm sitting there, I'm all fucked up, man. I'm like, like, like, you know? And never lost consciousness. And he goes, I got this. This is my scene. The paramedics like dutatures. He's like, yeah, that's mine.

Get the fuck out of them. my way basically. He was like all business. He crawls in. He's looking at me. He goes, can you move? He said, now, man. I go, I got a little sensation my right arm. I could kind of flop it, but that was it. And my head, my neck was, so in your, in your, you have, you know, your spine, and you have the spinal cord. So my neck would have been bent, but not like, not like this, like literally looking behind me, right? because it was broken. And he knew it.

And he's like, you've been like this for maybe eight or nine minutes, 10 minutes. He said, if we don't straighten your neck, you're never going to walk again. And he goes, we have to straighten it. But it might kill you. Do you want to do it? I was like, fuck, yeah, do it. Like, didn't even question it. I'm like, yeah, do it.

So he's like, okay, he's maneuvering behind the seed. He gets in. He grabs my neck. He goes, you're ready? I'm like, do it. And he just, and at that moment, I felt a burst of electricity go through my whole body. Because I was from the neck down, dude, right? I felt a burst of electricity go through my whole body. And I was like, dude, I felt something. He goes, do not fucking move. Do not move. I said, I'm not moving. I'm just telling you. I can't move, but I felt something. He goes, okay, okay, we just got to wait. Just wait. they finally, they covered me with all this burlap or some kind of fire blanket, and then they cut the whole car apart. And the whole time this was happening, the guy that had been driving the car, it was this one guy with another guy.

The one guy was American citizen, the other guy was like from Sudan or something like that. They both had been drinking hardy. When they pitted the car, just like in a trooper car, the troopers are fine, right? the other car usually flips or spins out. Oh, they just kept going. They went to another bar down the street. Well, there was a truck driver that saw this. And these truck drivers, man, I can't shout out enough about these truck drivers.

I got a childhood friend of mine named Pete Russell. He's in the state of Maine. He goes all over the country delivering goods for us, right? That's what these guys do. And you'll see stories about these truckers, stopping to help troopers, stopping to help people that are hurt, reporting crimes, doing things like that and this guy did exactly that. He called in the license plate of the bad guy. So now they had a license plate. Well, this guy just drove off. The truck actually stopped. But then firemen came and he

couldn't do much more other than provide that tag number. It's 2001. It's not like we had traffic cameras and, you know, whatever. So these guys go to a bar and they start ordering more drinks. And they don't even care that I'm like half dead, right? So next thing you know, No, they get kicked out of that bar. A state trooper gets a call. He's like, oh, that must be them. Like a couple drunk guys in this kind of vehicle. Then the 28, or 1028 is a code for license plate, talking cop here, came out on the radio and they grabbed this guy.

This is where it gets interesting. So I go airlifted out to a level of trauma area. They get this guy, they bring him in. He gives a fake name. Now they didn't know he had over 300 alias names. Okay. This guy over the course of his criminal career had used over 300 alias names. So he gave one of his trusted alias names and he pled guilty at first appearance.

I'm guilty. I'm Jimmy John. He wasn't Jimmy John. And I'm guilty. So they worked out a deal while I'm being rehabilitated. Like I'm not even being notified what's going on. Okay. This is Rochester, Minnesota. Okay. And the judge agrees to give him like six months probation. Let's them out with a bond. It lets them out with a bond. Disappears. And they're looking for Jimmy John. Well, it ain't Jimmy John. And they kind of realized like, oh, you know what? Maybe we should have checked the fingerprints in Apis. Maybe we should have ran something. They didn't. They fumbled the whole case.

How'd they not check his ID? It gets better. So I rehabilitate. I'm messed up, dude. I mean, I'm not supposed to walk again. Doctors like, yeah, I don't know. It's going to happen. I couldn't feel my arms.

I couldn't even talk right. They had to do surgery and fuse and put three plates, 12 screws, all this stuff. And they're like, he goes, the only reason why you're alive is you were in such good shape that your body is able to recover from this. because you were you were close to death and i remember not being a little to breathe at then before i before i uh passed out so i was messed up took me a year of rehabilitation to get back in okay though i go back to work i had no business going back to work i show up my boss at the time his name was mark he's like have a seat at the desk i'm going to give you some things you have to

run for us he knew i couldn't even move i was in so much pain this a year later i went from total paralysis to walking, using my arms. Like, I couldn't even use my arms. Like, I'm like this. Two, then I start working out, rehabilitate myself, eating right, doing everything I can to come back. And I got to come back. Fast forward to the end of my career.

And then we'll kind of have to probably regress. I retire. So last year, I get a phone call from a prosecutor just outside of Rochester, Minnesota. I kind of forgot all about this guy, to be honest with you. I was just focused on my life, focusing on my job, focusing on everything I could, but not looking back on this guy. Even though I'll tell you the story about the second guy, I'll tell you that after. So they call me and they say, hey, we got this case on this guy. You know, he broke your neck, but, you know, do you really want to pursue it?

It's kind of old. I'm like, yeah, dude. Actually, I do want to pursue it. Oh, well, you know, it's kind of. kind of a rough case because we have a print card, but it was digitized. It was digitized. They didn't save the hard copy. I said, it's not a problem.

You can have an official. Remember, it's for a living, right? At the highest levels, like all over the world I've done this stuff, right? It's like, I go, it's not a problem. It's a certified electronic. You know, this is what they did when they converted all this stuff. And it won't be a problem in court. You get it certified.

Wow. You know, they really, I said, why don't you have an identity hearing? Pick him up. Have an identity hearing. He's like, yeah, I guess we could do that. But, you know, I'm like, dude. I told him, here's the deal. I said, I did this for a long time.

I'm not letting it go. Do you understand me? I'm not letting this go. And he paused on the phone. And he understood. He's like, okay, okay, okay. I'll look into it. But can you do me a favor?

I'm like, sure. He goes, can you call the state police and maybe pass the tip where this guy is in Atlanta, Georgia, and kind of track him down that way? I'm like, yeah, sure, I'll do that. So I call the trooper. The trooper's like, just want to let this is Minnesota State Police. Remember, not my alma mater, but my beginnings of law enforcement. I'm very proud of Minnesota State Police.

I'm sure there are a lot of great men and women at the Minnesota State Police. This sergeant's probably not a bad guy. He's probably on a recorded line. Maybe, I don't know. But he says to me, he goes, just so you know, even if you weren't a cop, we would do this for you. I'm just like, really? Come on, dude.

I go, listen, here's the deal. He's in Atlanta. This is what you're going to need. Get the electronic print. If he's going to say that he's not the man, have an identity here, blah, blah, blah. He goes, I said, you guys owe me this because you fucked it up. He's like, we'd do this for anyone, but I'll do it for you too.

Oh, Jesus. So next thing you know, I get a phone call. We got him. Oh, by the way, he decided not to fight the extradition because it's actually him. Oh, no shit. Of course, you know. When you tell me you got the electronic prints, you get to, you do the aphus. It's done.

You're done. Judge is going to look at it. And Samarity would be like, send them back. It's an active warrant. It's a valid felony warrant. So, fast forward another couple months. And they say, do you want to come testify? I'm like, yeah, I do, actually.

Victim witness, right? So I go in court and they're arguing, well, he pled guilty at the time to six months probation. We should abide by the six-month probation. That's what his defense counsel and the judge was like, I got a 35-year-old judge, elected judge, young. From what I hear, little inexperienced, not a lot of depth inexperienced. And judges usually have to have a lot of depth. But then again, they are elected.

So, you know, you take what you get. And the judge is like, hmm, well, he did grow up with a pretty poor background. Hmm, sound like someone else? He didn't have the opportunities. Hmm, really? Sounds like someone else. so I'm going to abide by the original agreement. And I'm thinking in my head, I'm thinking he didn't use the right identity.

He used a fake identity. And you're going to let him plead to what he pled under a fake identity after he fled for 23 years and no additional charges. He had no false identity, flight to avoid prosecution, obstruction, nothing. He had no six months. That is what he got, six months. And the last, the cherry on top of the cream on this cake. So I get up and talk. And I still, even though I sound a little sarcastic, I'm a little charred, obviously, right?

But I was like, you know what? I got to let it go. I'm not going to harbor hatred toward this guy because it's just not going to help me. I learned that a long time ago. So I say, listen, dude, you know what? you did what you did. Luckily, I'm alive. I've recovered.

I mean, I didn't gain what I had. You know, I still can't feel my right arm, but God gifted me. I can still feel my trigger finger. And, you know, I can run, I can work out, I can do all the things. And most people don't even know I was totally paralyzed and fought back, able to come back from paralysis and go right back into police work. Three years after my accident, I'm in Central America, you know, in fatigues on helicopters, doing missions with S&S. SF and DEA agents, you know? So, yeah, hearing this guy talk about his background, he didn't have opportunities, I'm like, bro, you make your opportunities.

You might make mistakes, but everyone has an opportunity to correct and move on with their life in some fashion to do the right thing, okay? Everyone. I firmly believe that. It's harder for some people than others. So I get done saying my piece. I said, I forgive you, bro. We'll move on from this. So he says, you know, when he talks, he goes, you know, if you hadn't been tailgating me, this never would have happened.

And I'm like, tailgating. I was on the interstate. You came up at 100 miles an hour from behind and struck me. What do you mean? And I, I have the prosecutor. What the fuck is he talking about? He goes, oh, no, that was another DUI case. Another accident.

He was confusing the two. What? That's so fucked. So let's get back. to your question of justice. There's no justice. So the second guy, what happened to him? The second guy.

You're going to like this one. I was suing under Dramshop Act, which is you can sue the person that actually served up the alcohol. If you can show, they had a blatant disregard for the person. These guys, I think, I won't name the company

in which they're drinking. I have a very large bar company, large nationwide. International, actually. 12 long island ice teas apiece something like that 11 or 12 yeah wow that's one of the strongest it's a little it's a little abhorrent right so their defense was going to be very tough to kind of like i can't move after it was a lot it was a lot it was like 10 or 12 or something like i don't have the exact number of my it was a lot right so this guy after they crashed apparently they had pulled over

briefly and switched spots because the guy's like i can't be I can't be caught behind the wheel. You drive and just say, I wasn't driving, which is true, right? He wasn't driving. But he aided this guy in getting away and they didn't stop to aid me or anything. So this guy ends up getting arrested later. And he was here on a visa. And he was from somewhere in Africa, either Sudan or Kenya.

I can't remember. Well, then he disappears. And we're filing a civil lawsuit. And my lawyers like, dude, my voice. investigator cannot find them. Now this is about six, seven weeks after I'm out of the hospital, eight weeks after I'm out of the hospital. And I have a collar on, but I can kind of walk like Frankenstein. Like, I can actually walk. But it's, it ain't pretty. It's like a stiff gumby. Like literally, I'm like, you know, and, uh, you get a lot of different reactions. Your muscles

contract. And it's, it's a mess. So I said, what do you mean to? can't find him. He goes, my investigator can't find him. I said, give me the file. He's like, bro. I said, give me the fucking file. So he gives me the file. Sends me some papers. I think he faxed him, 2001. And I look at it, and I see his girlfriend. And I see Galtier Towers. And actually, I didn't see Galtier Towers at the time. I called the girlfriend's phone. And I'm like, hey, I'm looking for this guy. He said he was going to pay me. He ain't paid me.

And the girl on the other end was like, fuck that motherfucker. He owes me money, blah, she goes off. I said, I tell you what, you tell me where he is,

I'll give you 20% of the money that he owes me. What? I said, yeah. She goes, he's down in the Gall-tier towers. I hope you find that

motherfucker hings up. I'm like, Gall-tier towers. What's the Gall-tier towers? I start looking. This is back in, you know, when you're,

you didn't, have the great Google search engine and stuff, but I found it. It's a project housing in Minneapolis, Galtier Towers. There's two of them. I get in my car. I always carried a backup gun. So I always had like a Glock or an H-EK, whatever I carried, and I carried Whiskers was my backup. Wiskers is a 640 Smith, 2-inch barrel stainless with a packmire grip, stubby packmire. So it's a little two-shot revolver, but you can't see the hammer because it's internal. It's kind of smooth around the edge so you can pull it out from

your boot, from your gun, a holster, and it doesn't snag, right? So, I'm a mess. I take whiskers. I have a hoodie, and I put the hood up, and I have the little pocket in the front, and I put whiskers in there. And I sat on this couch. I sat on the couch

in the Galltier towers for about two and a half days. Literally, pissing, coming back. Pissing, coming back, pissing coming back. Take out food, coming back for like two and a half days. The third day, guess who shows up? He said, that's fucking him. He comes strolling in. So I had cut the hoodie a little bit, and I had the collar. It's called an aspirin collar. It's a hard collar. I just got out of the hospital like two months before. And I really can't move that well. So he's at the elevator bank,

pressing the button. And I'm like, yeah, I walk up behind him and I have whiskers in my pouch. Not that I'm going to kill the guy, but if he attacks me, I'm fucked. Like, if he goes to slap me or punch me or push me, I'm fucked. And I'll fucking kill him. If he does that, if he comes at me, I'll warn him because I'm not there to hurt him. But if he tries to do something to me, I'm going to have no choice. I'm that fragile. I'm really bad. Okay. Plus, sitting there, I was in so much pain. I'm popping all these pain pills. So I tap him on the shoulder.

I got whiskers. And I tap him on the shoulder. Dude, he turns around and he's like, literally. He was like, and I go, yeah, motherfucker, you owe me. And he goes, what are you doing here? With it like an African accent? I said, you owe me. And I had taken off the Aspen collar and left it on the couch.

because it was so bulky I was trying to incognito it was fucking best so he's looking at and I went like this you can't see it now but I have a scar

or here and the whole back of my my neck is all opened up I have a huge scar on the back because they opened it up they had to cut all the facets that we talked about on the back

they had to remove all those they had to fuse my spine all this stuff and I went like this still had the stitches in it and you fucking owe me and he goes okay what do you need

I said you need to talk to my lawyer and tell him the truth he goes all right I'll give him my phone and I said no I'll talk to a fucking hell and he goes right now I say yeah he goes

okay flip phone flip phone days probably before your time but maybe remember I had a flip phone I'm like bro I got him you need to get someone down

what You fucking got us. Yeah. Get your ass down here and take his statement. Investigator came. He showed up. I'm like, I'm out. Hobbled.

Hobbled. I wasn't even supposed to be in a car. Like, I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know what I was thinking. So anyway, that guy, he did get sentenced. I think he did a probation stint, maybe a month in jail or something like that. And he did provide a sworn statement to the ambassador. The case later, they were going to settle out of court and write a nice big fat check.

But the law firm just keeps getting better. This is why I talk about justice. The law firm that was representing me, they had a major school bus accident of kids that were on like a volleyball tour or something in another state. And it was not the fault of the bus they were in or that driver. It was the fault of someone else. and it was like a big rig, big money, big case. So my lawyer called, he goes, they're ready to fucking cut a check. And I'm like thinking, I'm never going to work again.

Even though I'm going to try, I won't get a disability check other than a non-service-related disability, which is, you know, $1,500 or whatever a month. Yeah, you know, I've got a family. I'm like, I need that check. Like, I'm going to need that money. So he goes, they're going to fucking offer us something tomorrow the next day. He calls me like the next day. He goes, hey, I had to call them, put it all off.

I have to go on this other case. So he's busy on this case for weeks. They decide they're not going to write the check now. They're kind of backing up. Case fell apart. Even though it was a solid case. Next thing you know, it was like a $15,000 check they wrote. And it was just, I'm just like.

like, okay, that's fine. It's not going to change what I'm going to do. I'm going to get better. I'm going to run again. I'm going to walk again. I'm going to be an agent again. And I'm going to go overseas. I'm going to do everything that I ever wanted to do, being a cop. And it starts right now. So don't sit there and crying your weadies.

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Justice? There's no justice. It doesn't matter in most cases what's right or wrong. Who did what or who didn't do what. If you have a lot of money and a lot of authority and a lot of connections, you can get away with almost anything. So I'm curious your take on this. The people that kill someone like the Brian Koeberger case, right?

Do you think it's justice that he got life in prison and not the death penalty? Like that he was able to take a plea deal, avoid trial, and just serve the rest of his life in prison? So a lot of states do not give the death penalty anymore anyway. They might even recommend it. The judge will usually say, when was the last time other than like an Alabama or Florida? You saw a death penalty? Missouri, right? Outside of those states, where have you seen a death penalty?

Not really. Not really, right? So I think what the prosecutors will do a lot of times is they will say, of course, this goes all the way up the chain, right? Including the governor's office in many cases, not about the handing of the sentence per se, but there's a lot of politics involved in a death penalty case. And I think when you look at the totality of influence that's coming, they say, well, you know what, for the better of the public interest, are we going to have this huge trial and spend millions of dollars on experts and testimony and all these preparations and outside of the, counsel and all, or the guys ended up getting life anyway, why don't we just give them a plea for life? And that's what happens a lot in these cases, I found. And then you kind of feel for the victims, though, because the victim's parents will say that

they didn't feel like they're included and that's not justice. It's like a no-win situation. There is no justice. We got guys and gals sitting in jail for 20, 30 years for a crime that maybe they should do four or five years for? Is that justice? So after five years in the sheriff's office, you decide to join the DEA? Yeah. How does that happen?

So I became obsessed with going after drug dealers, right? But I had a real understanding of, like, my job is to put you in jail, and most of them will understand their job is to avoid going to jail and still do their thing, right? So for me, it wasn't personal where I was like, they're evil people, they're just terrible people. They're just, I just want to lock these people up.

They're just, that wasn't my thought. My thought was it's my job to do this. It's their job not to get caught, right? If they're going to make a decision to commit a crime, they have to understand that there's someone out there that makes a decision to go after them. So, and I was, I was a huge dude back then, like 275, 65, and my arms were like, like, 24, 3-inch arms, 22, 23-inch arms. I was huge for my accident.

And my nickname in the projects was big arms. Right? So we would go down and like, big arms, what's up? Starman, what's up? Starman is in Florida. You have a star, a five-point star, and the police would have just a shield. Well, in Florida, the sheriffs, hands down, they run the ship. I mean, they're in control of everything, okay?

You have big police departments, you know, that are very influential. In the end, the sheriff, he calls the shots. What happens in the county, the sheriff is going to determine, for the most part. So they called us Starmen or Star Women, but at the time was mostly males. Starman. So big arms and Starman. And I started working these cases. And back then, you could do what I would do oftentimes that I would roll up into a known drug place,

getting a chase, wouldn't even call it out sometimes, get in a chase, grab the guy, take his dope, look at them and say you know what you could be doing 10 years for this throw it on the ground just try it and say now you fucking owe me okay you're gonna pay one way or the other but you're gonna pay me back and you're gonna pay me by I want to know

whatever one two three four and they'd be like oh man I can't do that I'm not you sure about that it's like that that kind of like that video with the guy you sure about that I would say that like, you sure about that?

And they were, sure is shit. I get flagged down sometimes or I get a call, you know, in prison, they'll kite stuff. Like I actually had that one time. A guy was like, what's up? What's up, big arms? Hey, man, he leans into the car and drops it on the floorboard of the passenger side. And then he'd say, we're good.

We're good, right? We're good. So, we're good. And they'd tip me that way. I mean, that's just as a street officer. So I started understanding the dynamics of now I'm not a civilian. I'm a police officer. What's happening in the projects or what's happening in, you know, in the rural areas,

they had a lot of freaks that were dealing some pretty dangerous drugs. Heroin, methamphetamine started coming about. So you had a dynamic of different environments in whatever you're patrolling at the time. And I was like, okay, I started getting a hang of what I was supposed to do. And I started doing interdiction on the highways. And one story I tell you. So here I am, 23 years old, 24 years old. I'm on the highway, pull a car over.

And I just, and a lot of cops will describe this. I don't know the officers you've talked with. I could just smell if they had dope. Literally. Like, I would just be like, this guy has got dope in the car. And I'd walk up one time, this isn't the interstate store. I got so good at this. I walked up to the car. I looked at the dude

and I go, if you give me your dope right now, I won't take you to jail. If you make me find it, you're going. And he just, you're just like a 40-year-old white dude, like going home from

work, like briefcase in the car. And he looks at me and he's like, okay, just a little bit of Coke. He pulls it out of the center console, it gives it to me. I dump it out. And I said, wrote a number down, you owe me. He's like, I'll do whatever you. This guy, this suburban whatever.

I'll do whatever, whatever. I said, if I don't hear from you in the next couple months, if you don't give me some good information, I'm going to come find you. No, no, no, I will, I swear. And I did. And I heard from this guy. I said, we're good. And you could do those things back then.

But when I was starting to work at the interstate, it was a whole new level. We weren't talking, you know, half, ounce of rock. We weren't talking, you know, 30 grams of Coke. We weren't talking. Little Baggies of meth started showing up. Now we're dealing with kilos and millions of dollars of money, right? So I'm on the interstate. I pulled this car over with two guys. And I'm like, they got dope in the car. I just, they got dope. So I walk up to the car and he's like, hey, officer, how you doing? Very friendly. Two white dudes. And the passengers are sitting in like this. I said, how you doing, man?

Good. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just knew. But I couldn't search without consent, right? So I get the driver out of the car using control of the vehicle. And I said, hey, listen, you know what? You were speeding. Yeah, I know, man, I'm so sorry.

I said, don't worry about it. I said, here's the deal. I want to take a look around your car. You ain't got no grenades in there, right? You had a dead body in the trunk? No, no, man. I know, of course not, bro. I'm like, swords.

No, no, no, no. You don't have any, like, you know, tied up puppies or you don't have, you know, any ICBMs or drugs or you don't have this. He's like, no, no, no. I said, then I could take a look, right? Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's okay. Go stand over there. We're on the inside of the interstate.

He's down. Now he's down about 10, 15 feet, 15 feet away from me. 10, 15 feet. I had him go way down in the swell because you've seen videos where the cop cars get hit and people get hurt. I want him out of the way. So I got the passenger out. He's like, what are you doing? I said, no, he just gave me permission to take a look in the car.

So go stand by him. Have a seat down there. And he's like, oh, do I have to? I have to. I said, yeah, actually you do. Go by your buddy. But do I, can't I stay here? No, you can't.

And I'm like, hmm, I think I know what? the dopis. So he gets out, he goes, sits by his buddy. So I'm alone, right? And these two guys are there. I didn't pat him down. I wanted to stay away from them. But I had a good reactionary gap, you know, a good 15, 20 feet.

So I'm looking at the car and I see the carpeting of the vehicle's a little fucked up. I pull it up, trap inside on the floor. I pull that up, like four or five kilos of Coke. So I pop my head up. They're like, they know. They know I found it, right? They both stand up. I'm like, sit the fuck down right now.

They started walking at me. Pull my gun out. And I said, I'm going to fucking to the driver. I'm going to fucking shoot you in the head. And then I'm going to kick your ass. So you decide, I'm not fighting two people. I am not fighting two people. That's how you see guys die.

Right? So they saw, and they knew I was, there was no hesitation. He would have came at me. I would have plugged them, and I would have kicked this other guy's ass. And he would have went to jail, and he would have got charged with the homicide for the other guy. So that's, now I started seeing, like, these guys can be passive, but they can be aggressive too. And they're moving multiple kilos. And this was a small amount compared to what I got later in my career, which is, you know, metric tons, 50, 60, 65 metric tons of cocaine.

And a stop like that, wouldn't you want to search them for? first, though, just to make sure that they don't have any weapons. So you have to make a decision sometimes. Do you want to put yourself out there a little bit? Or do you want to take a chance in frisking this guy? And then he breaks bad. And then you're in an entanglement. You can't get out of quickly.

And the other guy comes out and jumps on top of you as well. So for me, if I was alone, I would size them up what they're wearing, what they're doing. And I got really good at what we call printing. I got really good at discovering who would be carrying a weapon because I could see the print. I could see how they walked. I could see, like I can usually see people and tell if they're armed, even if you can't see it.

Usually you could tell by how they move, how they act, how they walk, all these things, how they bend, how they do, whatever. So I was pretty confident that they didn't have a very large weapon. Maybe they had something small, which I've had before, guys with pocket pistols. I could tell you that story, which was crazy. So I made the determination, you know, I told the dispatcher, I would be like, hey, listen, 1050, Florida 28, Charlie Alpha Golf, 5, 3 Charlie, right, whatever, the license plate. I'm on traffic stop, here's the license plate.

I would say little things like this so that the zone partners, you have a bunch of zones. So you have 20 zones in the county. You might have two or three guys in each zone, right? But you might have a section of the zone. So instead of calling for backup, because no one wanted to call for backup, because we're all men, right? We don't want to call for backup. I don't need backup. If I had a weird feeling, I would say Florida 28, Florida license plate, 1050, I would call out the traffic stop, occupied two times.

So whenever you heard something like that, why is he calling out that has two occupants of the vehicle? And your zone partner would be like, and the dispatcher would immediately be like, like, oh. And then they would expedite running the license plate. And then they might expedite maybe saying, hey, are you available? They'll go to another channel or your zone partner would just say, oh, 51, which means I'm just going to go there and back them up. So I would put off searching because sometimes if you go into a search, the person might

feel a little bit intimidated, and then they won't give permission to search the car, right? So this is just, you're playing cops and robbers, right? And that's what I was doing in this instance. So does the DEA reach out to you or do you reach out directly to them when you were ready to make that shift? Yeah, so I applied with them. They don't reach out to you. Unless you're a task force officer and maybe you have people that know you or something like that for the most part. If you want to join DEA or the FBI or ATF or Secret Service, you file an application.

I filled an application and it took almost two and a half years to get hired. It's a huge process. Really? Yeah, it's complicated. Was your stepdad kind of an issue to apply as well because you were related to him? I know law enforcement now there's a big screening, especially with family members, but back then was that a obstacle? It was like that back then, but they didn't care. In fact, I brought it out on one of my interviews at that time.

My stepfather is a major felon, but he's been clean for many years. hasn't been in problem for I've never seen him in trouble as long as I've known him and they were like, no, it's not a problem. Never had a problem. What did you know about the DEA when you joined? Nothing. All I knew about were guys like Steve Murphy, Columbia was all over the news, right? I mean, you had Pablo Escobar shooting down aircraft, bombing things, right? But I didn't understand the full extent of what he was doing to that country, which is like, you know, kind of what Mexico's kind of going through or close to it, to put in a modern day perspective. It was a lot worse, though, with Pablo Escobar.

And I saw the destruction of what drugs were doing in homes, in families, and lives, in the jail. I mean, we were arresting people left and right for drug offenses, you know, and I'm in the out of the jail booking people constantly. And the jails are full of all these people for drug crimes. So I was like, man, this is a huge problem. I want to do something in my career that is going to be a little bit more than arresting someone with a kilo or four ounces of cocaine or crack, maybe, you know, 20 rocks a crack or 40 rocks a crack. I want to do something that's going to be putting a real impression in a change maker regarding source countries and where the cocaine's coming from, where these drugs are coming from, the money laundering.

And DEA was, you know, the shit. Everyone knew. I'd see pictures of them on the news standing with their machine guns and their masks on on top of, you know, bundles of cocaine in Miami. And I'm like, I want to do that. And the more I looked into it, the more I saw that DEA was all over the world. I mean, we have offices in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, Caribbean, South America, Central America. And I was like, man, I could have an opportunity to actually go and do things in these foreign countries. And so that's really what led me to believe, like, well, you know what?

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how a lot of these law enforcement agencies do operate outside the country. Like growing up as a kid, I always just thought CIA was out of the country and DEA, FBI, ATF, or whatever was just in-country. Yeah. So when you look at the dynamic of federal law enforcement and you have, break it down quickly, so you all have attaches. I was a country attaché in Venezuela at one point in my career. And that's a very unique position because Venezuela was more of a,

almost like a denied country area. And we could talk about that a little bit later, but it's not a friendly environment to go to. It's not like I'm going to London. I'm not going to be sipping tea and eating crumpets in Caracas, Venezuela, right? So they also had what's called a legal attach, who is the lead legal advisor to the ambassador,

wherever that is. And almost every embassy has a legal. League at. And they have ALATs too, assistant legal attaches. And then you'll have the chief station and then officers and so forth, you know, that worked for the agency in most countries. And then you'll have ATF sometimes as a sign. HSI has made a huge gain in what they're doing overseas. I mean, when I first went, I remember my first overseas tour in Guatemala, we had two HSI guys. They didn't even do enforcement. They were doing more of the immigration stuff. And And they weren't even called agency at that time.

We're still talking about, you know, the old immigration agencies. And so you have embassies all over the world. There's like, I don't know what, there's hundreds and hundreds of U.S. embassies or consulates as well, right? In Mexico, I think there's like 10 or 11, 12 consulates in Mexico. Then you have the main embassy. And you'll have presence of many of these law enforcement agencies, certainly DEA in the Western Hemisphere, in all of them. We're all over Mexico. We're all over Central America.

of South America. And we have been since, you know, the 80s and the 70s. So the presence and what we're doing overseas is far different from what we do domestically. And to be honest with you, half my career was domestic. Half of my career was overseas. And I feel like on the big scope, 30,000 foot macro level, I did a lot more overseas with the exception of Miami-Dade. And I'm not, you. tour than I ever did domestically. Miami is a little bit different because we were doing a blend of overseas and domestic. And in one case alone, we see 60 metric tons of cocaine in hand, put our hands on it. And we arrested over 120 people.

Maritime interdiction, Coast Guard, intelligence, humid sources. We were doing wiretaps. We were doing everything. And we seized $20 million cash with that as well. So that was a huge case when you take off 60 metric tons of cocaine, $20 million, you take down a cartel that's operating, you know, the Pacific Coast, Ecuador, Colombia, semi-simmersibles, launch vessels. GoFest, like the one we just saw that got blown up. I love to see all these experts. They have no clue what they're talking about, many of them.

And they're talking about that, go-fast was not this and it was not that. There was no dope. That was 11 people. I was like, please. you can clearly see the dope bundles. Let's break down the facts on that just alone. You can clearly see the dope bundles on the boat. Now, the order to shoot it with a missile and blow them up,

I'm setting that aside for now. That's not for me to judge at this point. But you can clearly see there's dope on the boat. And it's more of a launcher. It's not real go-fast. They put some big motors on a launcher, and they bring it out. And let me tell you how this works.

People like, they're not taking that boat to the United States. No, they're not. And they're saying, why would you blow up the boat? It's not even going to the U.S. That boat can't make it to the United States. Let me tell you what happens here. Let me break this down so you understand. It's called logistics chain.

Okay. These boats get launched from the coast of Colombia or Venezuela. They go out to a certain point, to a waypoint on the GPS. oftentimes they are met by another refueler vessel that will refuel that boat and send it up to the next thing. It might go to a chain island in the Caribbean and drop off on a buoy. They might actually dump the dope over and then that clip it to the buoy and then go back to Venezuela or Colombia. And then another boat comes and takes that. They might do a transition at sea to another boat, right?

or they might have a mothership that's out there collecting. They might have a surveillance ship that's going around looking for Coast Guard naval assets, okay, that will warn them, hey, we have a problem. These boats are in the area. You have to go back or you might have to go to another secondary or tertiary spot, right? So, yeah, the launch a or this GoFast boat is not coming to the U.S. what it's doing is it's part of a chain of logistics in order to get the dope where it needs to go. Okay?

So all the experts you're seeing, they say, I have 11 people, that boat's not going to. I heard a guy today. Like, he was supposed to be some expert. And he goes, I don't even know what's going on with this boat. Why? It's not going to the U.S. And I'm thinking, you're an expert, bro. And he's reaching like a million people.

And I'm like, just explain to the people how this works. He didn't know. But everyone wants to, you know, there's a big saying of a guy I know I won't say who it is. Everyone wants to be a hero, right? Even if you don't know what you're talking about, I'm going to be the hero. And I'm going to say, this is what's happening. And sometimes you're just listening to it, like, this guy doesn't even know what he's talking about. But yet he has the microphone, the audience, to do that.

That's a dangerous thing. Now, the question of, should we bomb them, should we kill them, should we do this, should we do that? I think this, we have lost. A million people in the last decade alone, we lose 100,000 people a year to counterfeit pill, fentanyl, and different drug overdoses, primarily due to fentanyl. Now carfethanol is coming out. Carfetanol is like a thousand times stronger than fentanyl. Okay?

So we're dealing with these drugs that are increasingly more dangerous, increasingly more powerful. It's time we put a stake in the ground and say, if you cross this line, because you're killing millions of our people. Millions. I can't tell you how many mothers have come into their children's bedroom, 14, 15, 16 year olds. They got a pill from a friend or they ordered on from the dark web where they get online to these marketplaces. The pills come to a friend's house to a peel box, whatever it might be. They take the pill thinking it's percocet or some other drug. And and then they die. You only need one to two micrograms of fentanyl to kill you.

Okay? You start taking these pills that might have three or four, five micrograms. Your heart's going to stop. And that's what's happening by the tens of thousands. So you're telling me, when I hear people that argue about the aggressiveness of what we're doing, and by the way, I'll tell you about an operation we did where people died on a one-person actually died, a crew died, and we're doing off the coast of Central America, how we've been working with the military doing these operations for decades, decades, this isn't anything new.

What's new is we're using kinetic strikes on the boat. And I really believe, in a sense, it was more of a theatrical approach and a warning to the traffickers rather than a true, like needed tactical strike on that boat. and let me break it down what happens on most of these maritime interdictions. Okay? When I was in Central America 20 years ago, we were doing these all the time. We're doing air ops. We're doing maritime ops.

At that time, we're working with SF and Coast Guard, Navy, U.S. Navy. And don't forget, you have a myriad of other boats out there from other countries. You have the Dutch, you have the French, you have the United. English, all these are working with us in our hemisphere to stop all these drug traffickers and launching of the maritime vessels. It's not just us, okay? So we're working a case in Central America off the coast, Pacific side. Hitron, which is a helicopter that's equipped with, it's almost like a sling they stretch across the door that you open up on the helicopter. They put a sniper rifle on that strap, and they have a sniper up there,

and he will shoot the engine out of these go fasts. First, what they'll do is they have like a mini gun, and they will strafe the front warning the boat, the go fast. Hey, if you don't stop, we got the Mac Daddy coming in next, and you better stop. Most of the times, especially back then, we might have different responses now, but back then, they kept running, okay?

So this case we had developed through human information. We knew what was going on, just like the same echoing sentiments of what happened with this other vessel. We knew who was on it pretty much. We knew who controlled the dope. We knew there's like a ton of Coke on it. Might have been a little bit more than it might have been 1,200 kilos or something. And we were like, you know what? We're going to take this off.

We coordinate with the Coast Guard. We get everything ready. We have full communication. The boat launches. Helo goes off of the boat. It's a hitteron. I mentioned 60. Launches up. Heel intercepts the boat. Brup, brop, brop, you better stop. The Mac Daddy's coming out. They're like this. He gets the sniper rifle and he shoots the engine. When you're dealing with ballistics and metal, anything can happen.

And they, after round and they found out. Because what happened is when that 50-k-all bullet hit, it sheared off a piece of the engine, the metal, and it took the guy's leg off. Took his leg off. Guy lost his leg. So now he's on the boat bleeding out. You're talking major artery, right? Femoral artery. He's going to be gone in about 10 seconds.

That's how fast you bleed out, 10, 15 seconds. So the traffickers are like trying to help him. 10 seconds, he's out. blood all over the place, and this is what traffickers do. This isn't like a big old family reunion. They grab them, throw them overboard, and keep going, okay? Because they still got one engine left. So the dead traffickers in the water, they just dump them, okay?

There's no honor among criminals in this element, okay? Hitron, takes the other engine out, dead in the water, grab them. So we arrested in that operation, we had, had maybe 20, 25 guys, 23 guys, something like that. So the plane comes in, a prop plane, because we're landing on a lot of clandestine strips. It's just better to have a prop plane rather than an engine. You don't have to worry about intake, sucking, and dirt and debris and things like that. So we get the body from the Coast Guard, which they threw in the freezer because we don't want it rotting.

So we have a body bag with, you know, a frozen guy in it, and we put it in a box and we load it up onto the aircraft and we strap it down and then we bring in the 20 guys or 23 guys put them in the aircraft and they're all you know belly chained they're all like strapped in and we have the dead guy right in front of them they're all looking at the dead guy and and you know they're all seat belted in and we have agents obviously you know pulling security and making sure that you know this guy's you know not all the guys are not going to be a problem for us and we tell them too like if you do anything, you're going to be put down really fast because we cannot have this aircraft go down. We can't have them try to breach the cockpit.

We can't have take over. And we're talking 20-23 traffickers, right? Or mules. They're not real traffickers, but some of them might be. But most of them are just guys that are going to get four or five hundred bucks for making the trip with the dope, right? But they know what they're doing. They know the risks. So we get everyone squared away.

I go to the front of the cockpit, and I'm going to ride in the front when we take. take off. So we have a runway that's kind of sloped down to the ocean. Oceans here. And we go to the very end of the runway. It's a short runway. It's it's a paved runway, but it's it's a pretty crappy runway. A lot of potholes. It's just, it's almost clandestine runway. We turn the plane and he sits and I'm like, and I'm looking at this runway and I'm like kind of short guys, you know. And so the pilot's like, He goes, hey, let off the break. He goes, dude, I don't have the brake on. And the rotors are running. He goes, man, we're heavy, dude. And I'm like, listening to these guys talk about, like, you think we can make it? Yeah, we could do it.

That's good. Don't worry. I'm like, Jesus. So they gun it, and they do put the brakes on to hold it back to gain tension on the aircraft to release it. And we come down the runway. And we're coming up, the ocean. We're coming at the ocean. and the pilot's like, all right, just ease it, ease it.

And I'm like, are you freaky kidding me? We're going to run in the ocean with a dead guy in the back and, you know, these 20 traffickers and the agents. So we just barely take off right before the ocean. Barely, he's like, just take it easy. Just easy. And he was being so careful because I think he was afraid of stalling it. And we just went over the ocean slowly as we burned more fuel and got higher. fine, but I was like, man, I got this dead trafficker and all these bad guys.

And so, but my point is, this was in 2005. So we did these operations all the time. This is nothing new. What's new is the kinetic aspect where we're actually bombing them. What will happen to those guys that got arrested that day? So most of them will get very small amounts of time for their participation in a conspiracy. They might do a year and a half or something like that. like that. They might do even less. They might do a repatriation of some of them. They're not

going to get total time, even though we're dealing with, in this case, it was like 1,200 kilos of cocaine, just on this one trip with the people involved. But some of the other cases I've had, for example, in Miami, where we had 120 people, boat crews coming out of Columbia, coming out Ecuador and we're doing wiretaps and humid, you know, investigations where we have sources on the ground and everything else. And you have all of these traffickers, and I call them traffickers, even though they're not real traffickers, most of them are lower level guys, but they're all skilled in what they do. And they know exactly what they're doing is wrong. They know they're flooding the U.S., but they want the payday because there's no opportunities in their country. There's none.

you're in Buenaventura, Colombia, there's no opportunities for you. If you ever go to Brunevontera, Colombia, which I would suggest you don't go. But if you were to go, have bodyguards an armored car and take a look around, there's no opportunity. So when they come to them and say, $400 or $500, they take it. But they know they're committing a crime. So we would, the boat crews would launch. We would task Coast Guard because they were doing all of our tasking on the ocean. So when you see the Coast Guard with all these bundles and all that stuff, most of that information, not all, but most of the intelligence is coming from U.S. law enforcement.

Okay. And they do the tech, because DEA doesn't own frigates. We don't own frigates, and we don't own hitrons, and we don't go on the ocean like that. We do have boats and we do different things. A lot of river boats and things like that they used to do back in the day. Now we task Coast Guard and Navy, right? So we would interview the boat crews when we'd come. catch them. In this case that we worked, we were doing international cases, and we dedicated a lot of time to this specific case.

We had two different sets of case agents. One set of case agents were very senior guys. The other one was with a senior guy and a brand new dude, like a couple of years on the job. Great job. They were killing it. And we would interview all of these boat crew members, literally. Like, We'd get them from the Coast Guard and we'd bring them in a cell and we'd say, hey, we want to talk to you. Read them in their rights and talk to them. And most of them, for the most part, would talk to us. They would say, yeah, you know, I know Kiki and Kiki is the one that hired me to come do this job. I'm like, show my lineup.

Yeah, that's him. That's Kiki. I'm like, oh, really? Well, that's the main target. You might have one out of, you know, 30 or 40 guys that could idea them. but if you get five or six out of several bulk crews and their idea and the same guy and you have other information, obviously,

you're building a very, very, very thorough case. The cases we were building were extremely thorough. We had wiretaps at the time it was Blackberry. That's years ago, right? Blackberry and the foreign countries would be doing the wiretaps and they would give us all the information. We would send a guy down in the wire room and we'd meet with the DE agents on the ground,

get all the information we need, come up, work up the intelligence, work up other sources and assets, and then we would take that information and give it to the Coast Guard and say, they're going to be launching or they're going to be doing this or going to be doing that, get a beat on them, and then they'd go out and make the seizure. And then we would interview them and continue with the case and just keep doing that over and over and over and over and over. And we would catch, I would say we're lucky if we're catching 10%, and we see 60 tons in about a year and a half.

And we caught maybe 10, 15%, maybe. Which is low. And that's one cartel. It never ends. It never ends. It's never going to end. So do you think, well, I guess you just answered it that you think it will never end. It's never going to end.

Why do you think it won't end? So in the United States, I mean, look at how society treats drugs, right? You have singers talking about weed and weed, weed, weed, and weed, and we, weed. I could care less. Someone smokes weed. Right? People ask me, I'll, do you say, you care if they smoke weed? No, I can care less, right? I don't smoke because smoking kills you. If you think marijuana smokes better than cigarette smoke, I hate to tell you, it's not, right? Now they have edibles and all these other things you can do, and that's your prerogative. I could care less. What you do with your doctor, what you do with yourself, whatever. What I do care about is when you have fentanyl-l-laced pills

and drugs when you have new drugs like car fentanyl, well, it's not new drug, but new introduction into what we're seeing in the United States with fake pills and so forth. And you're killing kids? Yeah, I got a problem with that. If you're addicting someone to heroin that's going to be a lifetime habit, because kicking heroin is extremely tough, right? Ask Keith Richardson, right? Ask some of these guys that it took 20 years to get off heroin, right? Yeah, I got a problem with that. we're not talking about weed. We're not talking about, you know, even ecstasy and things like that, in a sense. We're talking about China shipping over all these companies from China with the, in a sense,

a tantzic kind of approval from China because they're allowing it to happen in many cases, even though they pretend there aren't. You can't have the kind of metric tons quantities of fentanyl coming into this country from that country. from that country in not being regulated and not being noticed. Just not going to happen, right? You can't have multiple flights a day coming out of Venezuela or multiple go-fasts with ton quantities of cocaine coming out of the coast of Venezuela without someone knowing about.

That's where it comes into the Cartel de los Solis. A rogue country that promised prosperity with Hugo Chavez back in the 90s, we're going to have a socialistic movement where everyone wins, where we heard that before, Cuba, right? It never turns out good. It never turns out good. Sandinistas, Nicaragua, not turning out good, okay? Well, he promised everyone a free fridge, a free house.

This is what he did. Kind of sound familiar in some aspects with what's going on in New York City, right? Everyone should have a free house. And that sounds great. And I wish everyone could have a free house. but it's problematic because who's going to pay for all this? How are we going to do it? Are we going to change the whole model of our country to make that happen?

Well, look to Venezuela because now Venezuela, their money is worthless, their visa is worthless, and the people live under dictatorship. You oppose that government, you're going to be killed and put in prison. That's what happens in Venezuela. And so another consequence was the corrupt aspect of what was happening in Venezuela grew, and then you had the government becoming involved in enriching themselves from the president,

who is Nicholas Maduro, who has a $50 million reward on his head. His reward is bigger than Osama bin Laden's. Think about that, all right? $50 million reward for Nicholas Maduro. He's 1,200 miles off our coast. and all of the generals below him, many of them, are indicted as well. They have all been indicted since 2020.

Okay? So we're talking five, six years now. They've been indicted for narco-trafficking. They are supporting terrorism within their country, harboring fugitives, providing material support to the FARC, which is the Armed Force Revolutionaries of Colombia. Hezbollah, Iranian proxy, out of law. Lebanon, in Venezuela, you have a myriad of bad actor states that operate in Venezuela for

nefarious activities, and they're sheltered by that government. It's not just narcotics. So what do we have? We have an oppression of what's happening in the country to the people themselves. The Venezuelans have no freedom. They're suppressed at every level, economically, socially. Their freedoms are severely impacted. And you see on the TV where they have the militia, They're parading these, you know, 70-year-old guys around with a rifle. And they're saying, oh, we're going to fight to the death and we're going to do this. And they have these poor guys with, you know, like a six-shot, 30-30. You know, it's sad to see because it used to be one of the wealthiest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

They have the Orenoco Belt with oil. You can't tap all the oil they have. It's a heavy crude. It's kind of tough to process. Chevron has been there for many years. You have Spanish oil company that's there as well. So they have the money, but it's just wasted, just wasted and squandered and capitalized by people like Nicholas Maduro.

But it goes beyond just the money. The socialistic Bolivarian movement was, we are going to take our place. Simone Bolivar, the guy who chased out the Spaniards from Latin America, Our leader, that's how we gained our independence. We're going to gain a new sense of freedom and get rid of the imperial, which is the United States, the Yankees, okay? And we're going to do that, how are we going to do that?

We're going to steamroll everyone with our economy. Well, that really hasn't turned out to be the case, right? Because that's not happening. They've squandered it because they'll put their cousin in charge of the Ministry of Petroleum. and the cousin was like a barber before so everything goes to shit and then they're left with nothing right and they've already kicked out people have fled all the engineers all the scientists everyone's gone and they're left with the barber who has no clue what he's going to do so what are we going to do we're going to flood the united states and we're going to destroy the social fabric of that country

with drugs and you know what has blood's going to help us China's going to to help us. Iran's going to help us through other proxies. We're going to be successful. And this is their plan. This is what they wanted to do. And we ignored it. I was stationed there. 2010 to almost 2013. I was a country at Deshae. I was there. I saw it. I saw it eroding and eroding and eroding. And to the point now that it's just out of control. We have the FARC terrorists. These guys are horrible people, kidnapping, taking young girls away from their families, turning them into prostitutes, trafficking them.

They are the ones cultivating the amapola or the heroin. They make heroin labs. They make the cocaine. They turn into cocaine labs. They put mines. They maim and injure thousands every year. I mean, it's a horrible terrorist organization. When they get in trouble or they're in trouble,

They go to Venezuela and they have safe haven. And who moves all of the cocaine from that source country? The FARC. They use the topography, the geography of that country in Colombia to move metric tons of cocaine into Venezuela. And once it gets into Venezuela, the Cartel de Los Angeles makes sure, no, no, no, no one's going to touch it. It's all good. In fact, let's use military, trucks, aircraft to move it to where you want to launch it. And that's why when you see the president talking about, you know, it's a terrorist organization, the Trend de Aragua and all these other things, that Trende Aragua is another slice of the pie.

I can talk about that a little bit if you want to get into that, but it's just another terror organization, in essence, that's flourishing in a country that's providing its shelter. What's a number one method that drugs are getting into the country, into our country? So it depends, like anything. But when you have what's called the accordion effect, this is how I term it. The accordion effect is this. You have an accordion, right? When you squeeze one side, the other side kind of goes out. You squeeze it back and forth, and it's kind of hard to squeeze it in the middle,

but you see them playing like this, right? So the southwest border, after years of being open, we had, what, 11 million people come through? We have no clue who these people are. going to find out who they are because we're going to have some really bad things happen. It's going to happen. Okay. Hopefully it doesn't, but I'm pretty confident. We're going to have some pretty bad things happen.

And then we shut it down. So we have the southwest border that's shut, locked down solid. I mean, you'd be lucky to smuggle a turtle, you know, across the border under the fence. I mean, if you had a tortoise that's coming across, he's going to be inspected at some point. They have it locked down. So what happens? The accordion, and this has been going on for decades, the accordion swings back out to the Caribbean. Okay. So you have the Caribbean corridor opens up, typically, because all the assets are moved and focused on this side, and then it opens here. And that's what was happening at first.

Not now. Now we have naval presence like we have never seen right around Venezuela and right along the eastern side of Columbia. where all the dope comes from, and also in Ecuador, because Ecuador is turning into a huge transit country, huge transit country, okay? So we can talk about that a little bit later, but right now the naval presence is there. So they're trying to sneak people through, and now you have kinetic strikes going on these boats, and now the traffickers are like, oh, boy, what are we going to do? How are we going to get our product into the United States? How are the cartels going to move this dope and let me break down when I say cartels. So the world's drug trade is run by Mexican traffickers.

Okay, it's Mexican traffickers. They run the global drug trade, okay? Not everything, but they're running most of everything. You have the main cartel, Sinolaa cartel and the CJ&G, Halisco, right? They depend on source countries to get their cocaine and they get their their chemicals from China to create these fake pills and fentanyl laced, whatever it might be. They might say, well, this is heroin. Well, it's really not heroin.

It might be just a product filled with fentanyl to mimic what heroin is, right? And then they'll try to pawn it off as a white heroin. So these guys are depending on the movement and the logistics that we talked about to move hundreds of tons of cocaine and other products every year. Now, the China side, you can see the FBI is announced to do an operation box cutter. They're going after the cryptocurrency side of things. They're going after the financing of it. They arrested individuals on a conspiracy where they're going to be importing chemicals to Mexico that are going to be manufactured and then tried to bring up through the border. So it's a complicated question because you're dealing with a myriad of different drugs,

different types of things, repatriation of funds, right? So right now, what's the best way that the trafficker can get drugs across the border? There is no best way. They're all fighting amongst themselves in Mexico for routes. Tamolipas, when you look at, you know, on Baja, California, they're all starting to have big fights. Who's going to get the most beneficial routes that they can stage drugs? They're going to use tunnels.

We've seen where they have, it's been on the news in multiple segments in El Paso and other places where they've discovered all these tunnels coming across. They might have a non-suspect building in Mexico on the border. Looks like a mechanics garage, for example, right? And then they have a tunnel underneath that going to a beauty salon on the other side, you know, in whatever, in Texas. in California, in Arizona. And so they're really good at building these tunnels. So we have a lot of that going on as well. So the investigators in the U.S. government is trying to field all of this.

And that's why you have a resurgence of retired guys being called back to service. And they're offering a $150,000 bonus and basically a 200 grand a year job. Right? So the first year you go back, they give you a 50 grand bonus. and you make almost 200 grand a year. And because you were in 1811, which is an investigator series for us, it's a criminal investigator special agent,

you can come back, you take a two-week school, kind of get caught up to speed, and then you jump right back into the game. Like, if I had to go back, if I wanted to, which I don't, I don't want anything to do with Uncle Sugar at this point in my life.

But if I did, I go back for two weeks, I could get back in the game real fast, right? I know exactly, what to do, what I'm going to do, how I'm going to do it, where I want to go, how I have to go about to do certain things, and that's what they want. They want seasoned guys that can come back, and they're calling them back by the hundreds and hundreds, because they need guys that can go and do these things. They need guys that can also go out and grab illegal immigrants. I ain't doing that. That's not what I want to do, especially after doing this job for 30-some years.

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Now, say once it gets in, say it's going through one of those garages you were just describing that's attached to the hair salon, right? How does it end up in a state like, say, Maine or one of these states that are so far away from the border or from just in the middle of nowhere? How do the drugs even make it there without getting caught along the way? It's very complicated. So when you look at, again, logistics, these cartels are businesses. Okay. When you look at like Jay or he was the head of the Sinola cartel in Chicago, Margarita Flores.

Yeah. Okay. when I was stationed in Chicago, I worked the money end of Jay's organization for Chapo. Okay. We seized in about a year and a half, about $28 million of Chapo's cash. That Jay was kind of running the operation there, okay? And so, but what was happening is you have the drugs come across the border, and then they're shipped in vehicles such, we'll just take an example.

and this is highly documented, you can look at it yourself, they'll have tractor trailer rigs that the bed of the truck, the trailer, is hollow. And they'll put like a stop plate with a rope, and then they'll put the stop plate in this hollow compartment

that reaches all the way through the trailer. So you have the whole length of the trailer that's hollow. And you might have 10 or 20 veins of that. So you have a 40-foot trailer that can put a kilo of Coke like flat next to each other and you get hundreds of kilos in each vein. 100, 100, 100, 100, 100,

you might be able to get two or three tons of Coke in the trailer. And when it comes time, then you put a face plate over it that looks very natural, very concealed, very secure, no one would guess that inside of this are all these veins full of cocaine kilos.

You take the plate off and there's a little like a pull tab in essence and you pull it out and you just yank all the kilos come out. of Beach, Bain, right? So that's one way they do it, right? And documented the case, you can see pictures online and go check it out. And what I found in Chicago was, and I was there 2007, 2010, and we were working these money houses. And what I found was a trap-making operation on one of the cases that we were working, where we were on a money house and the guy,

we were seizing $3 million, $5 million, $2 million, $5 million, $6 million. We were seizing millions. it was nothing for me to to see two or three, four, five million dollars. I mean, I remember one time we had multiple seizures in a couple days. I think it was like $8 million or $10 million or something like that. I was like, whatever. You know, for me, it's just evidence. I never looked at it as money.

I never looked at it as, you know, oh, wow, I could take some money from this. My brother was always like the one that was with me at the accident. He told me, he's like, don't you ever like think like, oh, maybe I could take some of this money? I'm like, no. Why would you even say that? He's like, well, I know you're not like that, but I'm just thinking to myself. Like, he goes, if I was around that, I might take 40 grand. I mean, no one's going to know.

And that comes down to, again, when I was raised by a felon, right, out of prison, he told me. He preached to me, don't take anything that doesn't belong to you. Do the right thing. And this is a guy who did all the wrong things. and you know what he came out of it he raised me when my own father wouldn't you know um and so those things were embedded in me from the time i was a young kid and when i took my oath as a police officer and as an agent i really believed it still believe it to this day you know that's not to say that i didn't have other people that i worked with that may have been suspected of

or not really suspected of, but I had a bad feeling about, give you a perfect example of that. So I'm in Chicago. I'm not from Chicago, okay? I didn't even want to be in Chicago. I went to Chicago because I had had a divorce, and I was broke, and I had kids, so I want to see my kids.

They're all grown now, and they were living in Chicago. And there's a saying in DEA, don't go to Chicago if you're not from Chicago okay it's kind of like the t-shirt that I gave you you can put some you can actually show people this you gotta tell the story okay there's a lot of brought it up

yeah there's a lot of storytelling that talks about the culture the culture of DEA and this shirt says who's your rabbi I had these made I actually gave one to Steve Murphy and Mike Ritland when I did their podcasts and now I gave one to you. So when I come in person, uh, for a podcast, I always give them a shirt. So who's your rabbi kind of refers to who's the guy that's going to get you your next post that you want to get to? Who's the guy with the juice or the gal

with the juice that's going to get you where you want to go? And we call it a rabbi. And like you said, in prison, the rabbi is kind of the guy calling the shots too. So there is a parallel there with DEA. So, you know, I had, I had done the soft white underbelly. And a lot of guys were like, how would you do that show, man?

It's like a lot of this or a lot of that. And I was like, let me tell you something, dude. I'm no better than these people that you say, you know, I have a drug addict or I have this guy went to prison or this guy, whatever, no better than that person.

I made different choices in my life. I worked hard on certain things and they didn't. And they made a choice not to do whatever. and they're suffering from the consequences, but I'm no better than any of these people. So I don't know what you're talking about. I was talking with one of my friends. And he wasn't trying to be like a negative kind of guy.

He was just like, hey, the bottom line is, dude, it's kind of like a weird channel. And I said, I look at it totally differently. Couldn't be more opposed to what you're saying. And now when you're looking at it, Scott Payne was just on, I think yesterday he came on, you have some other individuals, doctors, lawyers, scientists, a lot of other people. He's becoming much more diverse in who he puts on, as well as keeping to his model,

which is he's looking at these people that have destroyed themselves in many facets, right? And they're telling their stories, and it's all about telling your story. And so I only do podcasts or any events where you're telling stories. and a lot of people think, oh, he was a cop or he was this or he was that. Yeah, I was raised by a guy that was a multiple felon that should have went to prison because he probably did a lot of horrible things that he should have been in prison for many, many, many years he just didn't get caught for. Okay?

And that's the guy who raised me when my own father was a military guy. Didn't even have enough decency, unfortunately, to even pay for my medical care, right? He didn't even pay child support. My stepdad was killing himself. Seven days a week, 14 hours a day. A guy that didn't even graduate from high school that spent his life mostly in prison, that's the guy that I learned the most from. So when I see these shows and I go on shows and I see the stories and I look at the impact of others,

and I look way beyond, oh, that's a show with a drug addict. Oh, that guy went to prison for this. It's way more than that for me, right? Way more. But getting back to Chicago. To Chicago. I go to Chicago. I'm broke.

I mean, I just got cleaned out in divorce, and I'm paying child support alimony, all these things. I'm living in Indiana, so I have like an hour drive because I can't afford to live in Chicago. This is right before the crash, right before and just about after, 07. And so house prices were off the charts, and I'm like, how am I got to do this? I mean, I had changed jars where I had to get changed to go get hot dogs at Dairy Queen, like two for a buck, you know, that's how broke I was. Here I am, you know, supervisor, brand new supervisor. I can't even afford, you know, barely afford a hot dog. I was starving half the time. Good friend of mine, Scott Ando, he was my ASAC. He would actually buy me lunch a lot.

I think secretly he knew I was screwed and he was actually being nice, but I'm like, no, I'll pay, I'll pay. I like, I need he to have any money, you know? This guy's like, he goes, yeah, he had been divorced. And he's like, bro, I got you. It's all good. You'll see. When child support and he would talked to me and keep me off the ledge all the time, you know. But we would work with Test Force guys and PD guys from different PDs. And in Chicago back in the day, a lot of times you would have a money house. And this money house, we'd hit it. And we hit it, you'd have cops showing up from agencies.

You didn't even, you're like, who the hell's this guy? What is he doing here? I don't even know that chick. What is it? Oh, no, they're come because they want to dag it. what's a DAG? A DAG is where their agency gets a little bit of money for participating in the seizure. Okay. So they'll say, oh, we came to help and we worked 14 hours. So we deserve, you seize 3 million, we want 10 grand of it. And then that agency will get assigned a percentage of money that goes into a pot

for their agency when it's all awarded and designated through DOJ, main DOJ takes the money. DEA doesn't keep it. We put it the main DOJ. main DOJ, process it, make sure it's all in compliance. It was seized properly. There's no contesting from the defendant. There's no this or know that. There's no, sometimes you might indict the money. Sometimes you do administrative seizure.

There's different ways you can do it. Then DOJ, when it's all over, we'll cut the check back to DEA. DEA has a check sheet for all the agencies involved. And they say they get 5%, 2%, 1%, 20%, 30%, whatever. And then DEA is issued. used the check to that police department that participated. They have to use that money for carter narcotics type of effort. Okay. So that's how that works. When you see on TV, oh, the tyrants sees the money or the tyrants did that or the tyrants, you see these all the time,

right? There are cases where it's kind of like, what are you guys doing? I've seen a couple where I'm like, amateur hour. You're like, what do you, these guys are knuckleheads out there. I saw one with a couple of DEA guys and they just did not look. good. They just, they went into the situation like, you're going to do what I say, and I'm in charge, and that's not how you do interdiction. Whenever I did interdiction, I was their best friend, because it goes back to this again, doing my job. I don't hate these guys. I'm very cautious dealing with them, because we had an interdiction guy, and I believe it was in Phoenix that was shot and killed by a guy when they approached him. They had armored vests on and guns, and they shot and

killed the supervisor. So it could be a very dangerous work. But you're going to tell me that they were tyrants going after that guy when the guy shot him because he had money he was moving. They were doing the right thing in that case, right? So most agents, most police officers, most whatever, always going to be looking to do the right thing. Most, most. There's exceptions to every rule. And that's why we're talking about Chicago. And Chicago has great officers. Chicago. has very legitimate cases. There are a lot of good agents and policemen and policewoman, and 99.9% of them want to do the right thing, okay?

But sometimes you have that exception, and this one exception I'll tell you about, I was working a money house. They probably had a couple million dollars in the money house, but we followed a guy away from the money house that I thought was a little strange. So I brought another guy with me. He was a task force guy. and we went out in the sticks south of Chicago, and we came up on this garage and had these huge bays.

It was a tractor trailer like mechanic shop. Probably had, I don't know, five, six bays or something like that for big trucks. So I'm looking on binoculars and I'm seeing, I'm like, you know what? These guys are building traps. And it wasn't one or two traps. And when I say trap, I'm talking about concealed compartments for big tractor trailer. rigs. Concealed compartments where they're going to be storing money and dope to be transporting it around the country. Typically in this fashion, they're going to be taking money back to Mexico

because you can just drive right into Mexico and bringing dope back to Chicago for the Sinola cartel. Okay. I'd never seen, and I had never heard of a trap operation as big before. Ian, I'm telling you, they had 14, 15 guys there, 12 to 15 guys working day and night. Like these guys, their only job was to build traps in trucks, traps in the airfoils, traps in the cabs, tracks in the trailer and the gas tanks, tires. They were doing it all. I was like, holy shit, this is crazy. This is like, now we got the money. Now we got the transport.

What else are we missing? you usually don't get two elements of this because you're so busy focused on the money and this guy just kept saying to me this policeman I want to get back to the money house I want to get back to the money house I want to get and I'm like dude gives a shit about the money house we got a huge trap operation here this is big it's it's it's it's almost bigger than the money it's critical in an investigation if you can identify logistics of it and trap makers you never get this kind of trap-making operation. I've just never seen it, right?

In my 30-some years of being a cop. Not like this, where it was a factory, big-time factory, a big-time trap. So this guy, we get word over the radio, they're going to hit the Money House. They had been watching, we've watched it for three or four days. And when we go out for three or four days, like I leave my house, I'm in my car for three or four days, day and night, sleeping in the car, eating in the car, getting out, pissing on the sidewalk, getting back in the car, sleeping. You do it for a week, four or five, six days, right?

I would lose like 15, 20 pounds that week. That's how much you're running. You're surveilling. You're running. You're sitting. It's a crazy way to live, right? But I kind of liked it. So, word is they're going to hit the house.

I'm like, hit it. Because they're not going to get any more money put into the house. The house is going to have a limit of cash before it has to be brought. The money has to be brought somewhere and repatriated back to whomever. in this case, a similar cartel. This guy throws his radio, starts swearing. This is bullshit. I can't get it.

What the hell? This bullshit. He's furious. He goes, I don't care. He puts it in drive and he leaves. He's going to the money house. Left me alone outside of this trap location. And we had other people coming.

But I was alone for a few minutes. And I'm thinking, what is this guy's problem? What does this guy want to go to the money house? so bad for, infuriated me. He didn't work for me. He was an officer from another department. And so, but he had come out because everyone wants to get involved in the money seizures because their agency gets big bucks, right?

We'd take down the money house. We'd take down the trap thing. Huge success. Awesome, right? I think we get two and a, it was, I say huge. We got a couple million bucks for that, for us. That was like, whatever. We were turning down 3,000 pounds of weed cases.

We're like, yeah, no thanks. you know like we're just doing the biggest stuff there is right sinola cartel in chicago is big it's like a stronghold for them so fast forward i go back to the office my my asa scott's there i'm like god this guy pissed me off man he just left me man he went back he goes what i thought yeah he was like obsessed with this money house and i and i i don't know what the hell is this problem he's an asshole don't worry about it well a month later he's on a traffic stop with a trooper where they're stopping a guy that has money in the car.

The trooper sees him take a bundle of money and put it in his pants. Trooper walks over to him, grabs him, throws him on the car, handcuffs him right there and arrests him. At the traffic stop. At the traffic stop. I go up to Scott's office the next day. I'm like, bro, you know, he goes, I know.

He goes, I know. He's like, a son of a bitch. That's why he wanted to get back to the money house. So police officers, agents and all this, we're not immune to seeing suspicious behavior. Now, that doesn't mean that you have concrete evidence that something's going on, right? Tell you now the story. We had another house in Chicago, a central or cartel house, get a call of a seizure. It was like one and a half million bucks, maybe 1.7, I think.

Maybe it was that time. and I get there, and there's one guy up top, I'm like, usually when you get a money house, you're going to have someone on the outside, front and back, you have someone upstairs, a couple guys upstairs, then you have people processing the money. And how do we process the money? We have bags that are serial numbered, and they have a self-closing adhesive, and you log those serial numbers. We don't cut the money.

We bring it to Brinks. We bring it to another money counter, bank, and they will take care. of counting the money. We don't get involved in that anymore. We used to do that back in the day. You count the money five times, it's a different quantity every time. And no one's playing games. It's just hard to count millions of dollars. So we get an official count and we go with the official count. And the protocol is when you seize the money, secure the house, make sure that the house is secure. And I'll tell you why we do that before I continue with the story. New York, 1990s, search warrants are conducted where they seize money.

in these different cartel-operated locations in New York City. They're on wiretaps. Wiretaps come in. DA's in the house. You want us to go take it back? They were talking about going and killing the agents in a firefight to get their money back. And they were talking to Colombian traffickers in Columbia. And the Colombian trafficker answered, nah, it's only $10 million or whatever.

Let it go. So we were brought up as agents. Just because you have a house and you're in a house does not mean you're safe. So you always have lookouts to make sure if it's coming, we're going to be made aware. At least we have a trigger point where someone's going to say, hey, someone's coming in with guns. Are we getting a firefight outside before it comes inside? We're not surprised. So when I showed up that day and I looked at the guy, go, where the fuck is everyone?

I'm like, what does that mean? And he's like, they're downstairs. Chicago accent. They're downstairs. I'm like, why aren't you downstairs? I'm like, get the fuck out of the wall. I'm going downstairs. So as I'm coming down the stairs,

I see a group of cops, task force guys, some other guys, around a pile of money on the floor. And as I'm coming down, the one guy turns and looks at me with a look on his face is like, you motherfucker. And he had his hand by his gun.

And I'm like, what are you going to shoot me? You got to take me out? Listen, I have no evidence what they were doing that night, but I knew deep down in my heart they were talking about something to split some cash. Not all of it, but I think some of these guys have got pinch off money. And they were very pissed when I came downstairs. Could I articulate that? Could I file a beef?

Could I do a complete? No. I didn't have evidence, but I knew something was messed up. The way it went down, I knew. I've been around it a lot. My whole life has been a cop. I can smell it. Just like I'd smell it when I walk up to a car and say,

give me a dope, but I won't take you to jail. I know what the fuck I'm talking about. And most of the guys just left. They just literally left the scene. And I was like, get me bags. I want them now. Put the money in the fucking bags. You get the fuck out of it.

here, you get out of here, give me the money. Yeah, and we sealed the money, and then we had multiple people, witnesses, I'll take it back to the federal building. So, you know, it's not just my imagination. This shit happens. And by the way, a guy that used to work for me in Chicago, a task force guy, I got word, what, like a year and a half ago, two years ago, who's arrested for bribery. He was a police chief now. And he actually got arrested for some kind of kickback scheme bribery thing.

I don't know all the charges, but he was arrested federally by the FBI. And he was a police chief. Wow. So, you know, back then, was he doing that? I don't know. It makes you wonder. Makes me wonder, right?

So, and listen, you'll never hear me defend a corrupt cop. You're never going to hear it. They deserve more punishment than the average criminal because they're betraying their oath and they're betraying what they swore they would protect to the citizenry of the United States. And that is to defend the Constitution and to protect the people they're in. Right. So, you know, for me, they deserve even more, more time. And I worked with two guys in Miami that are both sitting in federal prison right now because they were selling DEA information.

to lawyer, they just dropped the charge on a lawyer, by the way. These two guys, one was retired, one was in headquarters, big names in DEA and all that, and selling their souls to get money, chump change. And then now they're both sitting in federal prison. And that's the reason why I never wanted to go back to Miami after my initial tour where we were seizing 60 tons. I didn't want to go back there.

I had an opportunity to go back there. I didn't handle the opportunity right because the guy that wanted me to come back. His name was Jaime. He was the assistant or the associate sack at the time. He wanted me to come back. I should have just told him and said, Jaime, I don't want to be part around corruption stuff. I just don't want to be around it.

I've been around little things that I thought, you know, were happening before, like I said in Chicago. And I fucking hated it, you know? And then obviously these guys getting taken down and all that stuff. There was another case brewing with some more corrupt guys. And I'm just like, put me somewhere where I don't have to worry about the corruption. Something I want to discuss with you today because I know you're so knowledgeable about it is the gangs in America. There's a huge fascination with MS-13 and then even like the prison gangs, like the Mexican mafia,

where we hear so many stories on this show about it. Yeah. If you could tell our audience about the gangs in America. Sure. So let's bring it back to looking back into the 70s and 80s with the MS-13. You have a influx of immigrants from El Salvador that came up into the United States after they funded the Civil War in El Salvador. People were killing, people left and right. It was just chaos, right? So then you have all these immigrants.

They come into the United States, and they're kind of isolated away. They're not Mexicans, right? Southern California, Mexican, primarily. They're El Salvadoranians. So they start forming these little groups, and they, start calling himself Mara Salvatrucha. So MS-13. So then you have other elements of Central American populations that come to the U.S. as well.

But the Mar-S.-avatrucha, being El Salvadoranian, basically says we're only going to accept mostly Salvadoranians. So the MS-18, the 18th Street guys, they then say, oh, well, we'll take pretty much anyone, right? We'll have a Honduran, we'll have a Mexican, we'll have whatever. I'm oversimplifying this because it'd take hours and hours long to explain all this stuff. And then you have within the prison systems, you have what La Eme, the Mexican mafia, which runs things within the prison. And then you have groups outside of the prison that kind of answer to what's going on in the prison, because as we talked about, you have people that are going to be in and out

of prison their whole life. So at some point, when they go back to prison with the Mexican Mafia, they better be loyal to the Mexican Mafia because when they get out, they're going back in a year and a half, two years later, or even less, right? So then we have this collective of these different street gangs, and then you have mass deportations, which happened back in the late 80s into the 90s, where they're sending people back to El Salvador. Well, in El Salvador, the police at this time were in.

it will prepare to handle anything, let alone now this new street gang, the MS-13, for example, that's being put back into the country that's formed a union with each other where they've become brothers and sisters and they come back and that the police are inept in many fashions. Police in Latin America don't have the train, don't have the money, don't have the education, they don't have the programs, they don't have the ability to combat that. And what happened as El Salvador is the gangs grew. and then they started taking over the governments in a sense. They would charge impuestos or taxes on, you name it, they're charging it against store owners,

populations of people just to let their kids go to school. They're charging them money. I'll tell you a funny story. It's not funny. I'm in Guatemala. And the Matasafo Trujua was really bad in Guatemala as well, Honduras as well. I mean, they were going on buses and just killing everything. including little newborn babies, killing everyone.

Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, just killing everyone. And then putting a note on the steering wheel of the bus driver saying, you want a war with us, President so-and-so, this happened in Honduras. You want a war? Merry Christmas. They did it at Christmas. Babies were killed. People are savages, right?

Guatemala, the guy that I worked with, lived in this one neighborhood. It was like a, I'll describe it as like a bowling alley. You come into, to the entrance, and then there's just a big strip of homes on each side, right? Called the bowling alley. Well, the Matasavatrucha came in, and they would go to the doors. This is what they do everywhere.

Knock on the door. No one answered. They put a note. If you don't pay me, you have to give me your daughter, or your son, or you have to do whatever, or we're going to come back, and we're going to either kill you, take your daughter and turn her into a sex slave or prostitution, whatever.

So those are your choices. And they did that to everyone in this community. 20 homes, whatever. So I was like, what would you guys do? You know, what happened? He goes, well, he goes, they control the whole barrio. Like, they control everything. So, but we just decided we're just going to get in our cars,

go at the very end of the community. It's a bowling alley and have the cars lined up. And when they come and they get halfway through the neighborhood, we've got to just run them over. I said, why? He goes, yeah. I said, run them over. He goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've got to kill them.

You know, we might have repercussions, but we'll try to kill them too. And we're not going to give up our kids, you know. The police, they're like, dude, they have to pay taxes to patrol in the area. That's how bad it is. So the police have to give the gang members the money so they can patrol in those areas. That's how bad it is. So the guys came. As they went into the neighborhood, they had their trucks and cars, and they drove, and they ran over like five or six of these guys and just killed them.

And ran them over, ran them over, ran them over, make sure they're dead. And then they grabbed the bodies and just threw them outside of the little entrance, the little walled entrance. And, you know, a day later or whatever, their coroner shows up with the cops and they put the bodies in a dump truck or whatever, and they haul them off. He said they never came back for us again. I was like, so that's one example. That's the life that some of these people have to lead in this, in this overseas environment. And the strength that the gangs were gaining because the police were ill prepared to deal with it. And then you start having modern day transient movement of gang members into the United States.

And the growth of the gangs, the growth of the types of criminal activity they were conducting in prison, and outside of prison, right? You have Norainio, Sorreño, Mexican Mafia, you have the north and the south answering, you know. And so you have, then you start having turf wars, you start having gang wars, and you watch movies like Colors from the 1990s, which I don't know if you've ever seen it.

Make a note of it, watch it. Colors, because it's called Colors, okay? C-O-L-R-S. It's a movie about gangs in L-A back in. the 90s. Okay. And it really shows a historical kind of flare about the interaction with the police and the gangs and some of the things we talked about where you might catch a guy with something and kind of destroy it and say, you owe me. All those things are in this movie. But it kind of describes in this case it was a lot about the bloods and crips and things like that. And I don't really

work with those gangs too much. They were in Chicago a lot. But that's not what I was doing. I was focusing on how can we identify these gangs. This is back in 2004, 2005, 2006. How can we identify these gang members from foreign countries when they're coming to the U.S., committing crimes, and running back to their country? And we don't know who the hell they are. Kind of like the guy that broke my neck.

But how do we identify these guys if they use fake names, which are all going to use fake names? So I came up with a program called gang, gang associative networking groups. I said, oh, that's pretty slick. I thought that myself, you know, I mean, I am college educated, but I'm not the brightest bulb in the pact by any means. So I create this program, and I'm going around to the Fiscalia, which is the, like, the prosecutor's office. I'm going to the police departments in different municipalities, the national police. I'm going to the courts.

I'm going to the jails. And I'm getting all the inmate data, all the arrest data. I'm getting the fingerprints. I'm getting the photographs, the taty, two's case files and I'm putting in in a huge database. And my boss at the time, Larry Holyfield, regional director. I was in Guatemala. He's in Mexico City.

He was like, dude, it's a great program. We didn't have anything like this back then. Now we have all these HSI and FBI and all this stuff. They have all these great programs. We didn't have any of this stuff. So he's like, this is awesome. So I'm like, this is great. I'm speaking all over the country, national gang, association.

to the board. I'm teaching in Guatemala. I'm doing classes to the, to the prosecutors, how we're going to do this, what we're going to do. I even gave a class to the Supreme Court of Guatemala. I was speaking to Ilya and El Salvador. I'm doing things in Miami. It's great. I'm really having fun with this. It's actually, I'm doing my job. I'm having fun. And I'm, I'm creating a program that we're going to use to really combat the gang movement. Well, then a new boss came in and he calls one day to my boss. And he goes, hey, he said, turn everything to FBI, D.A. doesn't want to do this shit. We don't work gangs.

I'm like, what are you talking about? This is critical because these gangs are doing a lot of crimes, which now we know what has happened. Fast forward. So I gave everything to the FBI. At first they called me and said, hey, will you work with us? We like the program. And I'm like, I ain't working with you. I'm just giving you everything I got.

And they turned it into a new program, which is basically this one program derived from what I gave them back in the day. my gang program, I think initially they called it cafe. Now it's called something else, but we have a lot of these databases. But it was a new thing back then. So I've been involved in this gang stuff, not so much investigating the gangs themselves, not going after the gang members, but doing the macro level stuff that I've always wanted to do with DA, and that is how can we identify the trends, the identities, and what's happening in the transits, the transit points, and the effectiveness of,

what we're doing to track these individuals across the world. Fast forward to last year when Trend de Aragua started becoming a big problem out of Venezuela, and Trend de Aragua, I don't know if you know this, started in Aragua state. And this is a, it's not as powerful or embedded gang as MS-13 or 18th Street or the Mexican Mafia. And they may not reach that level because the actions that have been taken from this administration. to grab everyone that they can and throw them out of the country. Because once they get embedded in the prison, and you know this more than most people, once they get embedded in the prison environment and it becomes another,

in essence, another spoke in the wheel, it doesn't go away. And it churns more, and it churns more, and it churns more. It spits them out, sucks them back up. Spits them out, sucks them back up. So it becomes this cyclical kind of sickness. that occurs in the jail system. So it's a myriad of difference. Spring isn't just about clearing clutter.

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I would say probably Mexican mafia. Even with all the stories that we hear about, I feel like MS-13 is more mainstream, like we hear more about it. But me being in the field, I'm in, I hear so much about the Mexican mafia and how brutal they are. And we'll put up clips of how people were recruited

and the general public, it's like there's no way this happened, but it really does. Every day. And these poor individuals that are going to prison for whatever are getting recruited and they don't have a choice.

They don't have a choice. There's no choice. And the prison kind of just lets it happen. So you got a guy that's going in for two years. Next thing you know, he's got to kill a guy. Or he'll be killed. And then he's doing life. Do you ever see the movie Shotcaller?

Yeah. That was a perfect example of what goes on the prison system. And that was pretty accurate. I don't know who consulted on that. Because when I watch some of these movies, I'm just like, there's a TV show called, LAPD or something. Oh my God, it was so horrible.

It was blasphemous. It was so horrible. It was like they took a high school janitor and said, consult us on this, please. It was that bad. So when you see like shock collar, you're like, okay, that's legit. That's legit.

Mexican mafia, think of all the jails, all the prisons, all the federal institutions, and who runs, who runs, who runs the lion's shirt for that for Latin gangs? It's Mexican mafia 100%. Do you think the average American citizen needs to be worried about these gangs? I mean, especially with all the articles and news about MS-13 hurting an innocent civilian? So look at it this way.

Gangs are not just gangs hanging out in their neighborhood drinking scotch and smoking weed or committing a burglary or whatever. gangs have moved into a modern element of business, extortion, theft, burglaring, prostitution, human trafficking. When you look into the border and the connections they have and the nexus they have with the cartels, you have where they're doing protection status, they're doing movements, they're doing communication and protection also as well as lookouts and all these other things. things, they're fulfilling multiple roles. But I think some of the most horrendous stuff is when you're looking at human trafficking.

And what they'll do on the border to these migrants, what we were allowing is just, I couldn't believe we're allowing it because you have the Matasavatrucho, for example, in Mexico would board a train where the immigrants are right on top, okay? A lot of times they're right on top. And they'll just grab children, babies, to rape them. Rape the women, rape the babies, kill them, grab them, take them, take them, with them, pass them around, rape them for weeks on end, maybe kill them, maybe sell them to an organ trafficker where they take out their kidneys or their liver or whatever and then dump the

body. I mean, the realities of what's happening is, and when you have the soccer mom or the soccer dad who's sitting there criticizing, you know, the fact that we want to do some kind of enforcement action to control the border, and you're saving lives. You're saving lives by doing that. by putting up the red flags to the traffickers, and I'm not talking about just the drug traffickers. I'm talking about the human smuggling traffickers, which they're all in one now. The gangs, the cartel, all these human traffickers, they're all working together. They're all working. They're opposing groups, obviously.

You're going to have conflict. But in a lot of, you're finding that they're pairing up and linking up, and they have this nexus point where they say, okay, I tell you what, you're going to be here anyway. It's going to be too much focus. if we fight you, let's just kind of work together. We'll give you a piece of the action kind of thing. That's what's happening. So when Americans are like, why do we even care about these gangs?

Well, because they're raping and killing children, women, and not only that, but they're participating in the destruction of what we have in our country through, in essence, the purveying of narcotics working with these traffickers. So how can you be for a gang or say there's not a problem with a gang? gang, it's proliferation every avenue, every square inch of the fabric of our country now with drugs. And gangs are all over the country. We have like Trend de Aragua is like it in 23 different states, 24 different states.

And that's what Trenda Aragua is really good at. International movement. They're in Chile. They're in Brazil. They're in Panama. They're in Central America, Mexico, all over the United States. and the U.S. government, by the way, helped move Trenda Aaragua throughout our country. We actually pervade that organization throughout the country because they would come in through the southern border.

Hey, I'm going to claim asylum because in my country, I'm in danger. And that does exist. And those cases have to be filtered out. But for the most part, they were just being field interviewed. biometrics taken on a little handheld machine, given a cell phone, giving a debit card, say, take this piece of paper that says you're allowed in the country because you're a refugee or whatever you might be, whatever your status is, you can fly with this paper. And where do you want to go?

Oh, I want to go to New York. Here's your ticket. Here's your money. Here's your phone. Go ahead. Oh, and by the way, you know, 90 days from now you got that court date in El Paso. Yeah, sure. I'll be there.

No problem, right? They go to New York, kill rape, beat cops, do whatever they do, free housing, free food, everything free, free, free, free, free, by the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, right? And then another guy will come in, where do you want to go? Well, I'm going to go to Aurora. What could happen wrong in Aurora? Right? Well, then you have, they're all reaching back to their friends and family, and they're saying, hey man, I'm in Aurora. because it kind of got hot in Chicago, or it got hot in New York because I, you know,

I beat up a cop or I did whatever. And now I'm in this place called Aurora, Colorado. It's awesome. I get free housing. They're giving me debit cards. And we're extorting all the other Venezuelans in our community. It's sweet. We're making a killing.

Come on up. Oh, awesome. They come up from Venezuela, shipped by the Venezuelan government, because what's the Venezuelan government do? They want to inundate us with what? Problems. Cocaine. Now they said, let them all out of prison guys. Ship them up to the United States. Let all these trended out of our prisons.

Not all of them, but a lot of thousands of them. Let's give them a ride. They arranged for transportation. The government did. Cartel de los Soles. they brought them to Mexico and said Bon voyage

Bono Suarte cross the border when you get there this is what you have to do gave them the playbook they do it they take them in where do you want to go

I want to go to this place called Aurora here's your ticket you don't need a passport you don't need a license just use this piece of paper and make sure you hang on to your debit card

with $5,000 on it in a cell phone and then they fly to Aurora and like welcome hey you made it dude all right let's go let's go extort some people.

And then you had the government in Aurora saying, there's not a problem here. Not a problem. I actually was contacted by a reporter, Vincent Arena. He contacted me. I did a couple spots for him because he's like, something's not right at the very inception of this whole thing. He's like, something's not right.

Like, what are we doing? I think we have Trenda Aragua here. I go, yeah, you do. I reach out. I have tons of sources. in Venezuela, in Colombia, in different parts of the country. I'm like, what's going on with this? And they're telling me, okay, okay.

And that's when I kind of got re-involved in the gang thing. So we have a culmination of multiple types of gangs. We have a lot of misinformation about the gangs. And that's when I said, you know what? I'm going to write this book for the public. If they want to read it, great. And that's when I wrote it. Did it ever get discouraging, showing up and giving your best to a job where, you know,

for every one criminal or drug bust you bring down, there's a million more in the way. Like, does it feel like you're not making progress? And then you add the politics and bureaucrats and everything into it, into the mix. Yeah. So some places I would go to and have a lot of support, for example, when I worked in South America,

my rabbi, Jay Bergman, and Bruce Goldberg was my A-R-D, both Jewish guys, by the way. And so they supported me wonderfully, like anything I needed. But I produced for them as well, right? So if they gave me a leash, I produced.

I brought back lots of bones. Like it was like every time they gave me a leash and let me go, I'd bring back bones. And it just kept rinse and repeat, right? So that was really good to know. And they had my back, because they're the kind of guys that are going to have your back.

Even if you make a mistake, as long as you're not doing something nefarious, they got your back. And I was doing stuff in Venezuela that was like off the charts by myself, doing all these missions and operations by myself. There was no one there half the time. And so, but when you have knowledgeable guys that know what they're talking about, that back you, it's great.

When I was in another part of the country on the left coast in California, I did not get along with one of the guys that I worked for. I won't get into it too much. But this guy was so difficult to work with. I mean, he had never even been to Mexico, and he was the agent in charge. His whole career was in L.A. Whole career.

Well, I did two years in Special Ops Division. So when you're a brand-new supervisor and you take the step up and you become a supervisor, you have to do what's called the headquarters tour. Well, they have headquarters tours that are not in headquarters because everyone hates headquarters. No one wants to go to headquarters because it sucks. You're not working. You're just in meetings all day long.

It's administrative, right? I'm not saying it's not important, but it's administrative. Most agents want to be out getting it. You want to get it on, right? So this guy was an SOD, a couple of years, and then he went right back to L.A. So his whole crew was in L.A. Well, we're talking about Mexico, the importance of Mexico, like, super important. I was leading the CJ&G investigation for the Attorney General.

We were it. My guys had the case for the whole United States on CJNG, period. They were the primary case agents. And so it was obviously a very, very big case. They are now going to be surpassing the Cynolora cartels soon, I believe. two big cartels in the world, right? So we were talking, I said, hey, we have to go Mexico City. He goes, oh, I'm not going to Mexico.

What do you mean? He goes, I've never been to Mexico. I'm not going to Mexico. I'm like, you've never been to Mexico? Like, a DE agent, like, a DE agent working cases, like, you're going to be in Mexico. If you're anyone working cases, like tip of the spear cases, the big cases, huge cartel cases, you're going to be going to Mexico because Mexican cartels control the trade globally, hands down. So when he told me that 20 whatever years that he had in L.A., which is four hours away by drive to the border, never been to Mexico, I was like, wow, how can you not have gone to the country that is infested with the biggest traffic?

on earth. Even, even just a meeting, you know. And so with that guy who had a lot of issues, he wanted my guys to take a money seizure at one point. And we didn't want to do it because we didn't want to get the informant killed. And he ordered it and he put his finger on my, I'm the boss. I'm like, really? I'm like, you're going to, and I told the guys that he wants us to take the seizure. And they're like, we can. I'll get a person killed. I'm like, he told me he's the boss. He's like, what? I know, yeah. And we took it, and then we had to put the person in witness protection. You know, so it's like, dude, so we did not get along at all.

And in fact, when I retired out of L.A., I got a phone call from one of his ASACs. They call him the elf, because he has his pointed ears and he's like a little tiny dude. So they call him the elf. So the elf calls me, and he's like, dude, he goes, you have to send your badge and creds back to us. we have to put them into headquarters. And I'm like, why don't I just send them to headquarters? Because what happens is with DEA, when you retire, you get a shadow box. Has your badge and cred's in it. Actually, now I think they only give your creds, which is absolute bullshit.

You should keep your badge in a shadow box. It should be a whole thing. But they stop giving your badge. I'm like, this is bullshit. I'm like, give the guys their badges. So he wanted me to send them in. So I sent them in. and the division pays for the shadow box, and this guy refused, and he never gave me.

So all my years of work and all these things, I never got my shadow box. They just sent me my retired creds and my HR 2A team, which is a permit to carry anywhere in the U.S. In an envelope. I got a white envelope in the mail from headquarters saying, here's your stuff. That's how they gave me my retirement credentials. How hard is it to be in retirement after you've done all these things? You've gone to all of these countries. You've been in danger multiple times.

How do you live a normal life after that? I know you do stuff on the side, but just in general, how do you go from that fast-paced lifestyle to, I guess now it's exciting to fly to Connecticut to do a podcast. I think probably some of the most exciting stuff I did was like Venezuela, where I had, like, lot of threats of my life and doing a lot of things by myself where I would tell the Marine, hey, I'm going to be out. If you don't hear from me by 0200 or 300, you have to tell someone because I'm gone, right? And then I go out and I would do a surveillance or I would do a meeting or I would do whatever it was that I had to do, sometimes working with different people, different local police or whatever it might be that I had to do.

And the danger element was really, really high, like, really high. And I really felt at that time that it was totally worth the risk. And I thought what I was doing was noble, and I had to do all these different things. And I was meeting, like, you know, on the extraditions, like terrorists, like Turek al-Aa-Saimi, who was the vice president of Venezuela at one point, and all these other cartel members. And I'll tell you, we were,

We were extraditing a person, and I was standing on the tarmac, and one of the indicted generals of the cartel of the Solis, because I've met like seven or eight of these guys, all the way to the top, I mean, literally to the top near the presidency. And they surrounded me with these guys with rifles, and they all had tactical gear on, and this one general comes to me, he's like, you think you're so fucking smart.

You think I'm a criminal. I'm not a criminal. In Spanish. I'm not a criminal and you better be fucking careful because you might find yourself not breathing one day and all these guys have their rifles

and stuff they're all around me and I'm like you know like oh really okay yeah yeah not breathing well I don't want that to happen and the guy was like pissed because I wasn't scared and I'm like I kind of knew Uncle Sugar if they did something to me

like in that kind of environment if Uncle Sugar would come back and they would be in big, deep shit, right? So I kind of felt like I had the backing of the USG, but sometimes what they will do is they will, if I were to go do a certain meeting with someone, they will grab me, torture me,

and the way they torture you in Venezuela is a little bit unique to other parts of the world. They'll tie you up and they'll expixiate you with a bag. And then when you go to breathe, they spray bug spray in the bag. So you're breathing the bug spray. and then they exphyxiate you again, and they'll do that for days, days and days, days. So it's a great way without showing an exterior kind of lesion or damage to your skin or no bruising, no nothing, but it really messes you up.

And those guys are really good at it. I mean, they know when to give you the air, when not to, how not to kill you and all that stuff. So that was the biggest fear that I had when I would go out, that they were going to grab me, torture me, try to get information because I had a shit ton of information my brain, right? It would be valuable of them. And then what they'll do is they'll throw you out somewhere like you were robbed, make it look like a robbery, have the police come and all that stuff. So I had to worry about that on three or four different occasions.

One time I was actually doing a meeting when I'm sitting down with a person and I'm like, he's not alone, which is fine, okay? But then I realized he's trying to set me up for a conversation, and he's recording so they could arrest me for espionage, which, by the way, I have an arrest warrant in Venezuela for espionage. So you're not going back to Venezuela? Yeah, I can't go back to Venezuela. Anywhere near the border or even on the coast.

So I had a guy tell me about a month or so ago. He goes, bro, you know you have a warrant for espionage. I go, I do? He's like, yeah. Yeah, so you're positive, which I'm pretty sure I did have one, but I wasn't. He goes, yeah, yeah. I don't want to talk about it. And they hung up the phone.

I'm like, oh, shit. So I was meeting with this. guy and he's recording and I'm like they're going to arrest me they're going to try and do in my mind they're going to try to do something and make an international thing out of it so I said hey I have to go the bathroom so he's like oh you do you really have to you have to go to the bathroom like he's talking to a microphone or something so someone hears and I'm trying to spot where the the people are so I go to the bathroom and then I run down the stairs dude and I run out of this restaurant and area to another mall and I go across the whole mall I come out on the other side and they run

across the parking lot to the back of this other place and I run behind a dumpster and I'm like just sitting and I'm just sitting behind the dumpster and I'm waiting wait and waiting I stayed there for like two and a half hours two and a half hours so then when you come out you have to like change your clothes and all this stuff because you can be visible and I'm not easy guy to hide I mean I'm pricking huge and then you have to find a way to get back to where you have to go that's going to be a script so I'm going to go by taxi right I might go by taxi so what do you do when you're trying to get a taxi you're going to look to see who is the most basic older dude that's not on a cell phone he's not texting he's whatever and I would find the guy the old man that would be leaning

against his cab in the in the shadow of a tree playing a crossword puzzle and I would watch like I'm hiding dude like literally like hiding like watching for like 10 15 minutes like is he answering his phone is he talking to people nothing I'd walk up to him hey how you doing jump into cab hey I'm Canadian I need to go near the Canadian embassy my buddy's house is over blah blah can you take me there Yeah, yeah, you speak good Spanish. Oh, thanks. Yeah, yeah. Where do you live in Canada? I live in Ontario. Bo, blah, blah. Ontario is north of Minnesota.

I know several of the points. So if he questions me, he says, I know Canada. I came from, I can actually talk about it, right? And then he'd get somewhere near the embassy, and I would fucking throw $20, $30 on his lap and haul ass to the embassy and get to the fence and be like, open the gate, open the gate. And then they'd open the gate and I'd go in, you know. So I would do. that over and over and over doing all kinds of different operations. There's a lot more close calls than that. We don't have time for some of that stuff, but I was used to doing those kinds of things.

So when I came back stateside, I was bored. It's bored. In 2019, I actually had a contract on my life put on me. I can't talk about any of it other than I had a contract. So I was kind of like, kind of relieved. It's kind of, I hate to say this, but I was kind of like, oh, that's kind of cool again. So I'd come out of my house with my gun. Yeah. Yeah, right? You're like, I wasn't believed. You're saying it so casually, though.

But I was like, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm doing something again. Like, I felt like, I felt kind of weird. I felt good. I mean, I had to go away. I had to go some, they had to bring me somewhere for a while. So I had to leave L.A. to another place I won't say where. But I've gone, and other threats have been in, like, Hawaii in different places, like

in the Midwest. like doing nothing, you know. But this time, I actually got to choose where I wanted to go, and they approved where I wanted to go, which was awesome. And I actually, at this time, I went to a place, remember that guy Nazir or whatever, that steak guy with the salt? Oh, yeah. Salt bang.

Yeah, salt bang. Yeah. I went to his restaurant. I had no clue he was, and I'm like, kind of stressed. I had my gun, and I'm like waiting for people to kill me and shit. And I go to the restaurant, and I'm like, who's this freak with the salt? I didn't even know who he was, because I was so entrenched. and what I was doing in these in these other divisions or whatever this was in L.A.

I didn't know who this guy was. And he wouldn't come to my table because I was making fun of him. And he was pissed. He had the sunglasses on, you know, this Nazir guy. And I'm like, get away. I don't want this guy putting salt on my whatever. Then I found out later he's like famous for that. I was like, shit, I could have this guy put the salt on my steak.

I had no clue. But my point was I hung out outside of L.A. Far away from, very far away from L. Very, very far. And I waited for some things that we won't talk about. And then I felt confident that I could come back to L.A. I didn't move. So I still would, you know.

And I was an ASAC then. So I was in a suit. I was miserable being an ASAC because it's so freaking boring. But it was great because I got to take care of some really good dudes and gals and guys that were doing the job and really wanted to do the right thing. And we were just fantastic agents. But then you had some real douchebags. It was like a potpourri. I always used the word poeperee.

People make fun of me. It's a poeperee of just like super good people. And then just a few total douchebags that are just like, man, you guys are worthless. But it was good taking care of the really good guys. But I remember I had whiskers. I would wear them on my leg because remember I'm an ASAC now. I'm in a suit. It's like kind of boring.

For a while I carried a bigger gun when I had the contract on me and stuff. just in case I needed more action. But after more time went and more evaluations were done and they were like, we think you're going to be, you're fine, just chill out, you know. Don't chill, but you're probably okay. Then I just carried whiskers. But I always had, I come out, look up and down the hall, go out to the main door, look, go to my car, walk the car, because I used to have to do that in Venezuela.

I look for wires or explosives or, you know, tampering. I would do certain things so I could see some. someone went in my car. I could see if someone touched my doorknob. I would do certain things. I won't talk about those things. So that life was embedded in me. You know, it's embedded in all these guys that are doing these things.

And, you know, there's so many guys around the world doing these types of things, maybe not to that extent, because that's really, we don't have guys in a lot of denied areas anymore. But it becomes a part of your life. and you can't let it go and then you kind of miss it and I still miss it to this day and I still, when I come into a room I know where the exits are

I know where everything is I know exactly what I have to do to get to that you know because that's what I did you know and I always had a plan to escape and you have to be like that or you're not going to survive a 30 year career or doing that kind of work in these countries you know what I mean

so but it was a wonderful career. I had a great time. And I got to serve my country in many different ways than I never dreamt I would have been a kid that came from nothing. The first one of my family graduated from university to have a college degree, to learn another language, to travel the world, to do things in Venezuela and meet with members of the Cartel de Los Solis, like not just members, but the top level, the top level of the Cartel de Los Solis, you know, and not just meet with them.

I won't get into some of the things, but like, I was doing things that it'll be out in my book probably in a year or so beyond blurry lines, which is kind of a memoir, but it kind of details a little bit more with some of the cases get disposed of. And I'm sure the Cartel de Las Soles and Maduro will be gone by that point in Venezuela. Awesome. Well, Wes, thank you so much for coming on the show

today, man. I really appreciate you taking the time to come and speak with me. No, thank you for having me. It's been great. Yeah, you're one of those guests you could talk to for literally hours, so we've been going for almost three hours now. And it felt like it was a half hour. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed. I enjoy being here. You got a great program. I wish you all the best. And if you ever need anything, just call me. I'd love to help you out in any way I can. Thank you. And when your book comes out, we definitely got to have you back on. Absolutely. Just let me know. Absolutely. Safe Travel's back. Thank you.