Locked In with Ian Bick - DEA Criminal Investigator on Cartels, Undercover Work & Major Drug Busts | Chris Howell

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Christopher Howell was the Police Chief of the Virgin Islands — and he’s spent decades taking down drug cartels, weapons traffickers, and some of the most dangerous criminals in the world. From going undercover and running covert surveillance to leading international task forces with over 150 agents, Christopher’s career reads like something out of a crime drama. #PoliceChief #VirginIslands #CartelTakedown #UndercoverOperations #TrueCrimePodcast #DrugTraffickingStories #LawEnforcementLife #AmericaMostWanted Thank you to PRIZEPICKS, EXPRESSVPN & BLUCHEW, for sponsoring this episode: Prizepicks: Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/IANBICK and use code IANBICK and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! ExpressVPN: Secure your online data TODAY by visiting https://www.expressvpn.com/lockedin to find out how you can get up to four extra months. BlueChew: Visit https://bluechew.com/ and use promo code LOCKEDIN at checkout to get your first month of BlueChew FREE & pay five bucks for shipping. 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 Inside the Virgin Islands Drug Trade: How It Really Works03:03 Growing Up in Paradise: Early Life & Influences09:09 Becoming a Virgin Islands Police Officer14:46 First Undercover Mission: How It Nearly Went Wrong23:24 Corruption & Crime in the Virgin Islands Exposed27:19 Joining the Gun Task Force & Chasing Firearms36:36 Creating the DEA Task Force from the Ground Up41:53 Rising Through the Ranks & Building Massive Cases53:08 Guns, Drugs & Federal Operations That Changed the Islands01:02:08 Cracking Major Drug Trafficking Rings01:17:30 Crazy Surveillance Stories & High-Stakes Takedowns01:26:01 Biggest Busts & Close Calls With Death01:39:16 Taking Down Violent Gangs & Organizations01:55:42 Retaliation & Fear: The Dark Side of Police Work02:08:38 Murders, Corruption & The Cases That Haunt Him02:23:49 Big Wins, Big Losses & High-Dollar Asset Seizures02:40:08 Wiretaps, Covert Ops & Creative Police Tactics02:53:00 Promotion to Police Chief & Why He Almost Said No03:00:10 Lessons From a Career Fighting Guns & Drugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100, and the X-Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. The drug task force was, it was untouched, and there was so much cocaine flowing through the Virgin Islands. I think a lot of people think that when I tell these stories that I'm embellishing them, I promise you I'm not. There were literally guys driving around with brand-new BMWs with licensed place that said paid for by

Coke. Stuff we see in movies, it does happen in real life. Pickup truck speeds up and then passes them. And when you get side by side with them, there's guys with high power rifles perched in the back of the pickup truck. They opened fire on Diaz's truck. What was one of those early cases in those early years of the task force that you'll never forget that might still be on your mind to this day? Christopher Howell has spent his career taking down drug traffickers and gun runners across the globe. As chief of police for the U.S. Virgin Islands Police Department assigned to a DEA task force, he's led international task forces gone undercover and coordinated operations with over 150 agents at a time. His cases have been featured on the FBI files in America's Most Wanted, and today he's here to share the most dangerous and fascinating moments from his career.

Chris, welcome to Lockton. Thanks so much for flying out here today to be with us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we love the law enforcement episodes, and so does the audience. So it's going to be great. I know you have a ton of stories. My good friend, Maddie Ice, out there, had dinner with you last night and was telling me some of them. And we're really excited for this episode. Thanks.

I appreciate it. And it's good to be here. Where'd you grow up? I grew up in Michigan, right along the Lake Michigan shoreline and the western shoreline. So spent most of my childhood there up until the time I graduated from high school. And then I got sick of Michigan weather and went someplace warmer. What was your upbringing like? A typical upbringing, you know, a small town that I grew up in wasn't a great student in high school.

I took an interest in engineering and stuff like that and actually had some engineering scholarships that I never used. But, yeah, like I said, not a very great student, but had an interest in law enforcement early on. And when I graduated from high school, I wanted to get out of that town as quickly as possible. possible. I hated Michigan weather. You know, the few months out of the year that it was warm, that's what I enjoyed. And then when winter rolled around, it was just brutal for me. So, so, uh, but, uh, right after I graduated from high school, I, I knew some friends that were older, that were musicians. And they, they talked about the U.S. Virgin Islands and they used to go there to play music. And it sounded good. So I bought a one-way ticket and headed there. So what do you

think sparked that interest in law enforcement at a young age? Well, I don't know. I found it interesting. And when I lived in the Virgin Islands, my first time when I moved there right after high school, you know, I saw a place that it looked like the criminal element was just running wild. And, you know, I was living, I was living in a small apartment and I was working on charter boats doing trips to, like snorkel sail and dive trips on the daily. And I was kind of living this beach bum life. And I spent a year doing that. But, and I didn't really. I didn't, I was, you know, to work and home and didn't really hang out a lot, but I could see that the Virgin Islands was a dangerous place. And you heard a lot of, a lot of the stories about things that were going on. Certainly the drug culture there was very strong. And so I saw a place that needed a lot of help. And I think I figured if any place in the world, if you want to be involved in law enforcement, you want to be involved, you know, be in the mix of things all the time. That was a good place to start.

So I went back to the U.S. mainland after a year working on the charter boats, went to college for two years, and then I returned back after that. And did college end up being for engineering? No. I just got an associate's degree initially. I later went on and got a bachelor's degree after I joined the police department. But it was just general studies for that first two years. So really wasn't, didn't declare a major or anything. What did your parents think about you going to the Virgin Islands? I think originally they were in disbelief. It didn't seem logical or like that I'd have the means to do it. And you hear the Virgin Islands and you think of like sunshine and rainbows and bikini-clad women and Pinacolades by the pool side.

And, you know, for a tourist go in there, that's probably how it is. But the reality of it, it's a very different place. So I think when I initially went there, they were in disbelief. but then I went there and spent a year there. And then after I came back, you know, there was, and I came back and spent a summer in Michigan and then right back into the winter season and then two years of college through the winters.

And I just wanted to go back, I wanted to go back to this place that I'd grown accustomed to. What was your parents' line at work? My father was in sales and he kind of skipped around between jobs and my mom worked as a secretary. So no law enforcement background at all? No, no. My dad was former military.

He was Army Intelligence during the Vietnam era, and he did two tours in Vietnam doing that. So once I got into the federal law enforcement side of things, I think he, you know, he was definitely interested in it. But as far as my mom went, I think even to this day, she was clueless of the things that I was involved in. And she really, I don't know if she deliberately didn't want to know or she just couldn't wrap her head around it, but she had no idea what was going on. Did you express any interest in joining the military after high school? I had some interest, but no, I not, yeah, it was kind of a passing interest. How would you describe yourself after high school once you graduated after that year in the Virgin Islands and went back to college for those two years? Well, when I started my law enforcement career, things got very serious very quickly.

and and so I was doing you know I was young I was I was I think I was 22 years old but I was doing I got thrown in undercover work very early on and and you know I went through the academy and I was very driven I wanted to get through it and I wanted I wanted to excel in this career so I would say that the years that I was working for this boat company doing charter book trips it was like I was a beach problem. It was just, I was having a good time and, and, uh, and, you know, I was, I was in shorts and T-shirt every day. Once I got in the law enforcement, things, you know, got very serious very quickly, so. Do you feel like you had to grow up really fast? Yes, definitely. Yeah. Looking back on it now, do you wish you kind of took some more time in your younger years before making that step? No, I don't. I don't have any regrets about it at all. Um, I mean, I got through the academy and it was 22 weeks of abuse it was just it sucked but the you know I could see even before the academy that there was a problem with corruption within the police department I saw that very early on

and then once I graduated it became extremely obvious to me and it was I mean it was there was definitely a lot of nepotism but there was also like before I graduated from the academy I was kind of jumping around from places, and I stayed in a place that was in a really shady part of the town. And there were places of prostitution that surrounded me. And the rumors were that a lot of them were own high-ranking members of the police department. And looking back at it now, you know, I think to a lot of people they viewed it as misdemeanor prostitution cases, but they were textbook examples of human trafficking. These were girls that were brought in from the Dominican Republic,

specifically for this purpose. And I think in today's world, it would be viewed very differently than it was viewed back then. How different do you think the training is to become a police officer there versus the United States? I think that like everything in the Virgin Islands, they tried to mirror what's going on in the United States. But I think it is that there's something lost in translation.

And quite frankly, I think the instructors were people that had never really done before. and then they were asked to instruct something that they had had no experience in. And so you would ask questions that they didn't have answers for. So I think the physical part of it was rough, but, you know, the academic part of it, you didn't learn a lot. Do you think it was harder physically there versus here? It seemed like it was longer out there. Probably because they, I mean, they definitely put you through it. We were running every day.

I mean, I remember first day of the academy. I remember people throwing up during PT. And I went into it. You know, I was young, and I was running a lot before I went into it. So I was in pretty good shape. But, yeah, physically it was probably tougher. No, I know you said there was a lot of corruption, but was there a lot of crime out there at the time?

Yeah, absolutely. The Virgin Islands, the murder rate in the Virgin Islands is eight to ten times higher than anywhere else under a U.S. flag. So anywhere else in the U.S. And I looked at the statistics, and it's like, it's currently its second highest murder rate in the world. Still to this day? To this day.

Wow. So not a safe place for a tourist to go? Well, a lot of the crimes we'd see weren't against tourists. It was like it was two competing gangs going after each other or just someone with a beef, you know, that would, you know, kill somebody. But it was, but there were, there were occasions where a robbery would turn into a shooting that would kill a tourist, so you'd see that stuff. But, and people would freak out for a period of time,

but it seemed like everybody there had a very short attention span. So, you know, and things quickly become old news. Who were the gangs at the time, the main ones? Well, in that time, it was constantly evolving. It was always drug-related. So in the early, this was, I graduated from the academy in 92, and, like, the crack epidemic was in full swing, but the Virgin Islands was a transshipment location.

So you would get cocaine that came from South America, would get moved to the Virgin Islands through air drops, and then picked up by GoFest Boat, brought in the Virgin Islands, and then from the Virgin Islands and move out to the United States mainland. A very small percentage of it would stay in the Virgin Islands to kind of feed the epidemic there. But like crack cocaine was big, and the groups were constantly evolving, and still to this day they are constantly evolving.

You know, people are getting knocked off and new people are taken over. and but what we would see is you could have you'd have a group of you'd have a someone that you can even grow up you know poor in a housing project and they would make a trip down to Dutch St. Martin make a connection to a Colombian source and start getting supplied kilos. And so there was just a ton of cocaine flowing through the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico during that time. This predate all the routes through Mexico that currently exist. And that was at the time they called it the cocaine funnel. Everything was going through there. But we were seeing cocaine. We were seeing heroin.

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jumped straight into undercover work when you joined it was that normal to do that no so what happened was I was I started off as a a foot patrol officer essentially I was in the patrol division and but I was one of I think it was maybe two or three white guys in the department and there was a there was an agency that was a it was a local Virgin Islands government agency I don't know where their funding came from but they it was they were they were tasked with narcotics enforcement in the Virgin Islands. And, but their reputation was so bad, even at that time in the early 90s, that there was only one agent that they had assigned to them that were still allowed to file cases in court because they were so, their reputation was so bad. The other agents, their credibility

was like, like, they just wouldn't take their cases. And so, so this one agent who still could file cases that had a good reputation, I was walking foot patrol one day. And, and, he pulled up beside me and he started firing questions at me about who I was and when I graduated and all this other stuff. I was one of maybe two or three white guys in the department and during this time

there was an oil refinery there and they were building a new facility on the oil refinery and they had brought in a ton of state-siders from like southern states to do like specialty welding and different stuff that they couldn't find local talent for.

And so when these guys would leave the job site they would walk out through these gates and there was at any time it could be 30 to 60 drug dealers right there waiting for them to sell them anything they wanted. And so he wanted me to pose as one of these workers

come out the gate and start buying controlled substance from these guys. And so at the time he approached me about it, I didn't know who he was and he started firing questions at me and then he just drove away without any explanation and I was like, well, that's weird. And then I got a call just like 20 minutes later

to report to the chief's office, which I figured when I'm in trouble. And so I went up there and the same guy is there. And the chief says, this is, this guy works for agency. I won't get into the name, but, and he wants to know if

you want to work undercover. And I was like, absolutely, you know, I had no intention of, if it was working under cover or walking foot patrol and you know, 85 degree heat all day, I'd do that all day long. So I said, sure. And so he says meet me on this this this kind of dirt road um tomorrow morning and i'll explain to you how

this is going to work and he says you don't tell anybody what you're doing and so i met him on that road the following morning he gave me a can of beer and like sorry a jumpsuit that was like uh used by at this oil refinery and he says stop shaving stop bathing stop washing your hair it was a pair of jeans and a jumpsuit he says take take it was a pair of jeans and a jumpsuit he says take that clothing put it in a five-gallon bucket pour the beer all over it leave it in the sun to dry and I'll see you in a week and that was the first instruction that I got and so I did what he said in the following week smelling like a homeless person and this jumpsuit that smelled like fucking death because it's been soaked in beer and left out in

the sun to dry I showed up and he gives me a body wire he says give me your your service weapon which I gave him and he gave me a wother PPP that I'd never qualified with never shot before and he says you're gonna you're gonna buy heroin and so he he takes me to this job site and they get they may arrange it that through the security at the oil refinery I could walk out with the rest of the guys and walked into this out to this dirt road or this uh this dirt parking lot and there's all these food vans set up and there's there's dozens of people out there there's probably maybe 50 people or more out there some of them are selling food there's some workers out there and then there's the dealers out there. And immediately I started getting approached

and I'm buying, I'm buying heroin. And so, and so I would do this daily and this went on for like two months. And they would go very quickly. Like after they knew you were a buyer, they would just go very quickly. And only one time did I have things go south. I don't know if you want to hear that story. Yeah, we have to. So, so just for clarification at the time, DEA was on island, but there was two agents, and it was what was called a post of duty. So it was just two guys, and they reported to San Juan. And the two guys that were there, these guys were basically on vacation. And they were reporting up to San Juan. This is kind of important to know. They were reporting to San Juan. There was no cocaine on the island. They had no work. And so San Juan was kind of

calling bullshit on it. But at the same time, and so was the U.S. Attorney's Office. But these guys were, They were golfing every day. They weren't building cases. And so, but they had learned after getting close to the end of this, that they learned that I was buying, I was buying drugs every day on this job site. And that got word to the U.S. Attorney's Office, the U.S. Attorney's Office called San Juan. San Juan said, hey, how is this kid buying all this controlled substance? And you guys say there's no dope on the island. So they made contact with my handler and said, hey, we want to tag along.

and do it and undercover buy with you. And so they show up. And the guy who's, the one guy who's there, he's one of the DEA agents that's signed to the Post of Duty, he's signed to St. Croix. And I'm like, you know, I'd been doing this for two months. And like, he did not look the part at all. And I'm like, I'm telling my handler, like,

he can't hang with me. We're going to, he's going to get me killed, right? Like, this guy doesn't look the part. And now granted, the dealers were, they were, they were hungry. They would pretty much sell to anybody. And because no one was getting arrested, like they had no fear of law enforcement. So they might take a chance on them. But I didn't want him hanging out with me because I saw like this could turn into something really good and a long-term thing.

And so I didn't want this knucklehead like burning my cover. And so they said, no, he's not going to be with you. He's going to walk out on his own. He didn't even walk out. He wasn't even like in a jumpsuit or anything else like everybody else. He just wandered up to the site while I was there. So I had been sitting against the fence line, and there was a couple of girls there that were heroin users, and they were injecting heroin on the fence line, and I was right next to them. Well, the area all these dealers came from was just up the road in an area called, it was called the state profit.

And they also called it Little La Pella. That's little, it means the La Perel. I'm probably screwing up the Spanish translation, but it means the Pearl. So I'll have to get into that in a second, but most or if all the, if not all the dealers, came from that area just up the road. And a group of guys that had bought from before had come up and it showed me like the inventory of drugs they had and I was doing a purchase. Meanwhile, this DEA agent is jerking off somewhere on the side. I think he was successful in buying something or maybe he wasn't. I don't really remember. But I was very uncomfortable because this guy was here and this was the

first time. And so I'm making this transaction between myself and these group of guys. There's probably three guys. And I hear someone say, that's a fucking cop. and I turn around, there's this guy there with stainless steel machete he gripped in his hand. He's looking right at me. And there's, so they kind of give you the layout. There's a street, and then there's gates on both sides. And the gates are, they're probably 12 foot tall fence lines with barbed wire on the top, right? So there's no run in a way.

And at that point, I knew that a machete attack doesn't end well for anybody, right? And so I like play it cool, and I turn to the dealers like, oh, who's he talking about? and then one of the dealers says he's talking about he's talking to you he's talking about you and I so I turn back and I go who do you think I am you know and I kind of get rough with him and I'm like get the fuck out of here so I can get my dope and get high and then like things get kind of quiet and I'm like all right if this guy raises that machete or takes a step toward me I'm going to have to kill him right because there's no defending against a machete attack and so I've got that Wother PPP shoved in my pants that I've never fired with never qualify with have no idea that if I'm going to get just a justified shoot if I have to kill him especially in a weapon that I'm not supposed to be carrying quite frankly and one of the dealers kind of steps in he goes hey man that guy's loco he he don't know you he's crazy and then he tells him get the fuck out of here and so the guy but the guy knew he was right I'd seen the guy before when I was in uniform and so he was right and he kind of like the other dealers kind of like

scared him away and so he walked away with that machete and I I'd finish the transactions. And normally I would stick around for a while. And I'd, like, call license plates for the deal and under the wire. So it could be recorded. I was like, I'm done. I'm out here. So I immediately went to the neutral location, got in the car.

And keep in mind, those deals are not like, they were not like undercover deals are supposed to run. You're supposed to have plenty of backup. Like, like, looking back at it now, it was, it resembled drug transactions in the 1970s where there was all these strict guide. lines that governed how you did undercover, none of that was in place. So these things were very sketchy at best. And so, and that was kind of the end of that undercover assignment at that point. And so they, they did a roundup and rounded up all the guys that I had purchased from over the last two months. And then I had never heard anything again. I never testified any of those cases. They just, I don't know if they all pled. I don't know what happened to those cases.

But the one thing that was very clear from that undercover work is there was two sides of it. You had to worry about the guys you were buying from because it's an 87 square mile island and you'd run into them. You could be at a grocery store line. You have guys kind of trying to sell you heroin in front of the grocery store clerks. It's a very small island. And then the other part of it is it was very obvious that there was among the guys that were legitimate and on the right side of the law in law enforcement. they were very concerned with the people who weren't. Like the one guy I was working for, he trusted nobody in his office.

And he told me, you certainly don't ever talk to these guys. There was times that they would try to follow his vehicle to figure out who he had working undercover for him. And so it was very obvious early on. There was a lot of internal problems in the Virgin Islands government. Yeah, that's what I was wondering if you're operating during doing undercover work on an island, how you were able to get so many successful bus before you ever even got found out that last time. Right.

The only way we did it is it was me and one other guy. There was no one else involved in that. So there was no surveillance team. There was no takedown team. Like if shit hit the fan, I was either on my own or at best I had this one guy who would try to back me up. But there was, I knew I was on my own

and there was no, I just assumed there would be no help coming. So when you asked me early on, did I grow up quickly? Yeah, I sure did because of what was going on there. And then after that assignment was done, I went back to the patrol division. And so I began patrolling that same area in a state profit or went back to patrolling that same area in a state profit that I had just taken, I had to been 20 or 30 people out of that were involved in drug dealing. 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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I did, but that target was a lot worse later on when we get into the DEA stuff. We'll talk, We can talk about that. But the state profit stuff, that will come back up in the interview. I'm sure. We'll talk about that more. How long were you with them before you moved on? With who? With the Virgin Island police department.

Yeah. So I was always with them. But what happened was not long after that undercover deal, those undercover deals, I got recruited to go to an investigative role. assigned to a police captain by the name of Pete Anderson. And it was called gun group. And basically, we were targeting gun trafficking in the Virgin Islands. And he was a police captain, originally from Ohio,

spent some time in Vietnam with the Army, moved to the Virgin Islands, and joined the police department. and he was an incredibly smart guy. I mean, probably one of the smartest guys I knew, spoke, taught himself how to speak Spanish by reading Spanish comic books with a Spanish-to-English Translation Dictionary. That's how he taught himself Spanish.

And he spoke perfect Spanish. And he was by far the best investigator I had ever met. I learned a lot from him, especially interview and interrogation. So I got assigned to him and, like, three other guys assigned to him with the support of the U.S. Attorney's Office. So to kind of understand the dynamics of it, during the early 90s, the Virgin Islands under the Organic Act, was allowed to prosecute all serious felonies in the Virgin Islands, even if there wasn't a federal crime to it.

So they were doing murders, rapes, robbery, stuff like that. Well, that transitioned out in the mid-90s, and it fell back over to the local prosecutors to prosecute those cases. So they were out of work. Meanwhile, they've got agents on the island, the federal agents, they were supposed to bring in them cases. and they were playing golf. So there was a U.S. attorney at the time that was in charge of the criminal division and had worked with Pete Anderson a lot on homicide cases because he was a chief of detectives for a while. And Anderson said, let's go after gun trafficking.

And so they supported it. Pete Anderson was one of these guys he could beg, borrow, or steal anything. And kind of a funny story. He had formed the first canine unit in the Virgin Islands. And they filmed one of the early episodes of Miami Vice in St. Croix in St. Croix. And the thing ends with Crockett and Tubbs jumping a vehicle off into the Christianstead Harbor. And they wanted the VIPD's dive team who Anderson worked for to recover the vehicle. And Anderson agreed, but he says, you sign the title of the vehicle over to us, even though they jumped it in the ocean or into the Caribbean Sea.

and so he ends up recovering the vehicle and they got it running again and used it for a canine vehicle as one of the first canine vehicles. So Anderson was really resourceful and knew a lot of people who donated money to gun group and we started doing undercover buys for firearms

and it was just myself and three other guys and under Anderson and then we were somehow, even though the Organic Act had expired, we were allowed to, those were federal cases. We were charging people with federal gun crimes.

in the Virgin Islands and starting to funnel work at him. ATF was on the island, but there was only one agent. And we were pissing off him as well because now we're filing gun cases, and he was doing the same thing telling his bosses there was no gun crimes in the Virgin Islands. And so we were pissing off most of the federal agencies. And at the same time, we were executing search warrants for gun cases, but we were getting drugs as well.

So it was destroying the narrative that there wasn't any work federal agents here but the U.S. Attorney's Office was happy because they were they were getting they were getting cases and then I did gun group for about a year and then they formed the DEA height of task force and that I should back up the gun group like we would we'd go after gun trafficking cases but we would execute search warrants and there was no telling what we would get like there was there was one guy we executed a search warrant on and we're we had already gotten a gun he was a convicted rapist and a pedophile.

And he was just kind of hiding out in the Virgin Islands. When we got into the house, we started finding these huge cardboard boxes with polaroids of little girls. And that case ended up being a child rape case. I ended up locating one of the victims. And he ended up getting 35 years in jail for that. So it was like I quickly, what I learned from gun group, One of the things I learned from gun group because I learned, but one of the things I learned is if you had an opportunity for a search warrant,

you always step up to the plate because you never know what you're going to get. And so Gun Group, the DEA Haida Task Force Forum, and Haida stood for high-intensity drug trafficking area, was basically federal funding that teamed up federal law enforcement with local knowledge to go after drug trafficking. And we were under DOJ mandates to go after the big stuff. So we didn't typically do street-level stuff unless it was an avenue to get to something higher. How often were you coming across issues working with local police on some of these raids?

Well, we were coming. We were never liked. From the time, even in gun group, one of the search warrants I executed was a guy who was selling us guns. I think he'd sold us seven different firearms, usually with obliterated serial numbers, federal crimes attached to him. executed search warrant in his house. His brother was in the police academy at the time. It had an unlicensed firearm and we arrested him too. So that was like one of the first cops that I had arrested. He was due to graduate from the academy in just like a couple of weeks when we arrested him and that ended his career. So it's kind of like and as far as like management went, they

couldn't publicly say they didn't support what they were doing but behind the scenes that we had the impression they weren't happy with us either. They were to let they would rather we we left things alone as far as the police department went because it was giving them a black eye. And then once I got into the DEA task force, then it really became pretty crazy then, you know, as far as law enforcement went, local law enforcement. Did they start building like government buildings to house you guys on the island? No, we were, we were. So in gun group, the U.S. Attorney's Office was in, there was a three-story building. The U.S. Attorney's Office was in the second floor. we were up on the third floor across the hallway from us was FBI,

and back of us was DEA and to the side was ATF. So you had, I think there was two FBI agents at the time, two DEA agents and one ATF, and then there was us. And from what I understand now, we were basically squatting in the space. Like P.N. Anderson just said that this office space is available, we'll take it. And so he just kind of put us in there and no one said anything about it. And the U.S. Attorney's Office was right downstairs.

When the DEA task force started, we took up space in the federal courthouse. And so DEA moved in there. We had DEA, one FBI agent, someone from immigration with us, and we started off really small. We had just two DEA agents at the time. But after the first year, they saw how active we were, and they turned it from a post-a duty to a resident agent in charge. So we got probably doubled in size or maybe even tripled in size as far as DE agents we had. And is there a federal prison there or do you guys fly them back to the United States? So there's in Puerto Rico, there's a federal detention center, Guinebo Federal Detention Center.

And then once they're convicted, they won't stay there. They'll go someplace in the U.S. mainland. Okay. But that having been said, we quickly learned that Virgin Islands juries were undependable. So you would have, you know, in order to convict, you have to have a unanimous. verdict and we were getting hung juries like crazy even on cases that there was just tons of evidence on so one of the first agents that came in to replace the two knuckleheads that have been golfing for four years he he was like we need to we need to change our venue and get him out to the

united states mainland and the only way to do that on a on a case is you need what's called an over to act and a conspiracy so if you're if you're slinging dope in the virgin islands let's say you you move a thousand kilos of the Virgin Islands and one gram of it makes it up to the Southern District of Georgia, that gives you venue to take the whole thing to the Southern District of Georgia. But the problem with doing that is you piss off the U.S. Attorney's Office because this, you know, they're dependent on this work in order to keep their doors open. And there was talk before the creation of the task force to shut down the U.S.

Attorney's Office in St. Croix, just leave it over and send, leave it over in St. Thomas, and send agents over or send prosecutors over as necessary. And so when we started trying to change venue on stuff, they were pushing back and we became unpopular with our own prosecutors because of it. So, yeah. How does that work when there's a DEA task force? Are you sworn into the DEA? Yeah, so I carried DEA cred.

I was sworn in with DEA, and that gave me jurisdiction to file cases in federal court. So I had all the, went through background check, did everything that a DEA agent would, had all the powers that a DEA agents had. But I was still at my parent company, parent agency was the Virgin Islands Police Department. I was just assigned to DEA. And so I had a DEA credit card, you know, did all their paperwork. Everything was the same, except I was still employed by the Virgin Islands Police Department. And my overtime was paid for by DEA, maybe even my salary too.

Was there an additional level of training? Yeah, there was, yes, they sent us to a lot of training over the years. And they also, we had to qualify with firearms every quarter, whereas Virgin Islands Police Department, I could go years without having to qualify. That's kind of scary. It's very scary. How did officers in the police department at the Virgin Islands feel that you were kind of rising through the ranks very quickly? They hated us.

They hated us. I mean, not all of them. And I don't want to say, I don't want to, like, lump, put them all in one basket and say that, that all the Virgin Islands Police Department was bad. But there was certainly, there was, like, this, this atmosphere. If we walked into police headquarters, like, people kind of, like,

a lot of people turn their backs on us. They felt we were, like, hanging out with the feds, and that in some way we thought we were better. but then once we started arresting police officers, like it didn't matter what they were involved in. And some of the, I mean, everybody we arrested was involved in really bad stuff. Then things really got rough for us. Now the guns coming in to the Virgin Islands,

where they meant for the U.S., like the mainland? No, they were coming from the mainland. Oh, to the Virgin Islands. To the Virgin Islands. So guys would leave the Virgin Islands, go up to like Miami. They get a Florida driver's license, walk into a pawn shop, and buy 50 guns. And then they'd obliterate serial numbers,

send them back to the Virgin Islands, and the value of them would, like, go up like 10-fold. So they were killing it. We had two guys that were putting themselves through college by trafficking guns back to the Virgin Islands. And that was on plane or boat? They would come in, even by mail. They were mailing them back, FedEx and them back.

They were, or they would put them in suitcases and bring them back. Wow. And there was enough people to coordinate all this like that when one say those two guys when they get busted someone else fills their shoes yeah those those two guys were i want to believe if i remember correctly that we had we had like 65 guns that were tied to those two guys before we had we had we had arrested them but i think it's done on a much smaller scale like all the time there's guys that even even individuals that want guns they'll go to the version out or go to the u.s. mainland and do the same thing they do what's called a straw purchase

where they'll obtain a driver's license specifically for a purpose of obtaining a firearm and then send it back. And so, yeah, that happened quite often. Or a lot of times there would be a breaking in someone's house that had a registered firearm and those guns, you know, ended up on the street. So what we would do is there was a lot of guns

with obliterated serial numbers and we would get the serial numbers raised. There's a process of recovering those serial numbers off of the weapon and then we'd do a trace. And Pete Anderson was, he was, He would send donuts and VIPD baseball caps to the ATF training center or the ATF tracking center. And they would track as many weapons as we wanted. And so we would trace every gun that came into our custody.

And some of them were using homicides. Some of them were just taken by the patrol division. Some of them we were covered. And during undercover buys, we trace them all. How old were you by the time you joined the task force? I was in my early 20s. Were you the youngest on the squad? Probably, yeah.

Who would you say was the oldest age-wise? Peter Anderson. And he was actually doing the actual missions with you? No, he was the guy behind the curtain directing the action. But he would, like when it would come to interviews and stuff like that, he would get involved because he was phenomenal during an interview. There was no one better. Yeah, you said you learned some techniques from him.

Absolutely. What makes a good interview? Good. Yeah. So he would, to give you an example, the one pedophile that we interviewed, and kind of a side story about that, the reason he had me target that guy, and he didn't tell me up until, I didn't know it even up until the time we arrested him, we were interviewing him, is this guy's son was involved in a homicide, murdered a guy, stabbed a guy to death on a boat.

and Pete Anderson knew that the target that I was targeting on the gun stuff would likely fold on his son and give up his son and so when we walked into that interview Pete was like the nicest guy in the world and he said no

he told me beforehand and you know Pete was very brash he was like he's going to tell you some horrible stuff in there he says you show no reaction to it whatsoever he says you keep a straight face he goes you need to resist the urge to jump over the table and beat the shit out of this guy because he's going to tell us horrible shit.

And he was right. I mean, this guy was molesting a five-year-old girl. And I sat there with a poker face the whole time just like my blood-boiling, wanted to kill this guy. And Pete Anderson, he would, he made it out as this guy was like his best friend. And he was empathetic to him.

And what Pete would do in an interview is, it hadn't, it didn't matter what did. If you murdered somebody, you murdered your mom, there was always something worse. And Pete would always give the person an avenue, like, yeah, you're selling drugs, but I can't blame you. There's no work out here, you know, you can't find work. You got to survive, right? You got to eat. I get it. And, you know, you murdered your mom. Yeah, you murdered your mom, but she probably wasn't a very nice person. She probably got on your nerves. He would always find some way of, like, something worse and justifying, like, why the person did it. And so that was always the key in getting.

someone to confess is you first have to get inside their head to figure out why they did what they did and how they justified it in their mind. And once you did that, people talk to you. So did you see a common theme among these individuals? No, I can't say that I did. I think the one pedophile, he was a sociopath. There was no doubt about it. He had no remorse whatsoever about what he did. And he, listening to him talk was like, everything was like a monotone voice and there was no inflection in his voice at all. He didn't get emotional at all. And he gave up his son almost immediately. He knew that was only, it didn't help him in his case. But in his mind, he figured if he gave up his son who committed a murder, then it might help him in his case. So he was happy to do it.

What was one of those early cases in those early years of the task force that you'll never forget that might still be on your mind to this day? In the gun task force or the drug task force? Either one, whichever one you want to share. Horrible. Going online without ExpressVPN is like putting a big sign on your front lawn that says, hey, I don't lock my front door. It's basically an open invitation for anyone to come in and take your stuff. That's what you're doing every time you connect to the internet on public Wi-Fi without protection.

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on my laptop, phone, and tablet in seconds. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvPN.com slash locked in. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-Sv-V-P-N. Dot com slash locked-in to find out how you can get up to four extra months free. ExpressVPN.com slash locked in. The drug task force was, I mean, we hit the ground run and it was untouched. and there were so much cocaine flowing through the Virgin Islands. And this, I'm not making this up.

And I think a lot of people think that when I tell these stories that I'm embellishing them, I promise you, I'm not. There were literally guys driving around with brand new BMWs with licensed plates that said paid for by Coke. And so, like, they felt untouchable. And so there were two cases that were working kind of at the same time. There was a case that I had on a group of individuals. It started with a prominent family in the island that was a lot of rumors going around that they were involved in drug trafficking. And then they were connected to the main guy who was an individual by the name of James Springett.

And James Springett was a St. Tomian who had made it all the way to the top echelons cartel-level drug trafficking. And he was involved in thousands of kilograms of cocaine that were airdropped in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands. Islands waters, brought by his GoFest into the two locations in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands. And then from there, they would transship it up to the U.S. mainland where he had a distribution network out there. In that case, so in, I was working that case on that prominent family and was up on a wire, was the first wire in Virgin Islands history on that family. and the and one of Springett's

girlfriends was a member of that family and and so we were kind of we were seeing a lot of things in surveillance you couldn't conduct like traditional surveillance that's done throughout the United States mainland we were in full gilly suits in the bushes and we'd spend hours in the bushes watching what was going on and part of what we got

when we became a height of task force is we got funding for like state-of-the-art surveillance equipment. So we could be like a mile and a half, two miles away at night and see what was going on on someone's porch, you know, two miles away. And like with details that if they were drinking a can of soda, we could tell you what can, if it was a Coke or a Pepsi or whatever they were drinking, we could tell. That's how good the equipment was.

And so we were doing tons of surveillance and we were up on this wire, but the wire was largely fruitless. And so, but it, what, did is it got us to the point where we could execute search warrants. And one of the individuals that we intercepted on the wire, or we intercepted on surveillance, rather, was a Virgin Islands police officer who was hanging out with this family that had a reputation that wasn't so great. And so this police officer kind of was on a radar. And then in June of 1996, there was an incident in Tortola, of British Virgin Islands where they had, they tried to traffic stop, two vehicles that were

traveling in a car, like a van and a truck right in front of it. And they tried to traffic stop in the middle of the night with a roadblock. The truck managed to ram the roadblock and get through it. The van was stopped in its tracks. Well, that truck belonged to that police officer we were doing surveillance on in St. Croix. And so the office. Officers began to approach the van and all of sudden the occupants of the van went full auto with AK 40 or with AR 15s through the windows of the van and through the through the front windshield of the van at the police officers so a gunfight ensues. There's a police officer that shot in the head. He takes around right to the eye and he goes down.

They returned fire with a mini 14 rifle and a shotgun and the van the van the van The occupants of the van continue to ram this roadblock until they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they're, they're, they're, they're pouring out transmission fluid. They get just a few hundred feet down the road and have to abandon the van and inside of it is 1,260 kilograms of cocaine from an air drop. So the police officers are doing triage. The drug suspects make their escape. gets back to us the following morning and what's happened. And that's kind of like this turning point for the task force. At that point, it was like we knew there was a problem. We didn't know the extent of it.

And now all of a sudden we have direct connections in the U.S. Virgin Islands in St. Croix because the truck that was used that was later recovered was owned by this police officer. And so we continue to do surveillance. We continue the wire for what it's worth. and the information is that this is a shipment that James Springett had organized. Well, James Springett goes into hiding. He disappears. And there's cases being worked up in the U.S. mainland in the Southern District of Georgia

that implicate Implicate Springett as well. And so the decision is made that we're going to execute search warrants as part of my case. and on this family that we've been looking at. We had enough information from the wire and the surveillance is in order to do that. And so I write a search warrant application along with IRS gets involved from Baltimore. They fly down on the money laundering portion of it.

We jointly write the search warrant application, and we're going to execute 14 search warrants on this family. Well, this begins the problem of, like, where do you get enough agents to execute 14 search warrants at the same time? And so we didn't know, like, who we could trust in VIPD. Certainly the truck belonging to a police officer had us concerned. And so the decision is made that we're going to import agents from Puerto Rico, federal agents from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands,

and bring them all down to execute these search warrants. So these guys are coming down blind. They've never been to the Virgin Islands before. They don't know the roads. They don't know where they're going. or anything, but we team them up with the local guys we can trust, and we begin executing search warrants. We get into the girlfriend of James Springette's house.

We find $550,000 in U.S. currency. Then we find a fax transmittal about the purchase of his brand new yacht up in Miami. Then we find a Rolex watch that's worth $122,000. We find more jewelry that's worth another $100,000. We find that he's purchased a house with cash in the Virgin Islands. So for the next week, I'm just flying here and there and seizing everything. We find safety to deposit box keys. We start executing search warrants on those.

This goes on for like a week of just activity of seizing. And we seize like a few million dollars worth of assets all within that week on this family. Or most of it belonging to spring out. And then at the same time, we're working another case with an agent that, that's new to the island by the name of Jimmy DiCaprio. So DiCaprio's case involved a group that, again, there's a police lieutenant, his two sons are involved in drug trafficking. And they were bringing, they were getting cocaine from Springett, maybe through a third party, but ultimately that was cocaine that Springett was bringing in an island. And then they were bringing it up to Alabama, and they had a distribution network there.

And they had created a money laundering front where they were, they had different businesses on the island. One of them was a trucking business, like a heavy equipment and trucking business, that they were using as to try to show that they had a legitimate source of income. And so we began doing surveillance on them. And then the guys up in Alabama and there was another team in North Carolina, these guys were working jointly with Jimmy DiCaprio and us down in the Virgin Islands. and the decision is made that we're going to dight this case up there. So nothing's going to hit down in the Virgin Islands. And they had cooperated an individual there who was from the Virgin Islands on like a weed case. It was like a few pounds of weed.

And they were going to cut the guy. And but they went and interviewed him and he was so scared. He says, I've got 50 kilos of cocaine in the Virgin Islands. I've already paid for it. I just got to pick it up. So I'll cooperate if you, if you, if I don't have. have to go to prison. And so they cooperate him. We send in an undercover from North Carolina to purchase, not to purchase, to pick up the first 25 kilos. So we do it in two 25 kilo

shipments. And the plan is that we knew they had dirty baggage handlers at the airport. The plan is that they would, he would fly in, he'd get introduced to the guys that were holding the cocaine. then they would arrange for the cocaine to be put in a bag, get it smuggled past for customs and all this other stuff, get put on the plane, and then he would get on the plane with it. They would give him the claim ticket for it, so you'd pick up the bag on the other end.

So we work this undercover deal. Eventually, we get, I'm sitting surveillance at the airport in an incinerator building. The worst surveillance location ever worked. Everything's just covered in this like ash material. took years off of that equipment's life. It was like the worst environment possible. But we get the undercover,

we get the dirty baggage handler smuggling the plane past customs checkpoints in the middle of like 2 o'clock in the morning when no one's at the airport. So we get that and then they put him on the plane the following morning. Well, the same dirty officer that's truck was involved in the Tortola shootup,

he's now a canine officer. He shows up the airport. and decides to run his dog on our plane, just completely random. And so we're like, well, what are we going to do now? Like, because there's no way to tell the undercover, look, we think your bag's going to get taken off. So we just got to let it run and hope the dog doesn't alert on it. Well, the dog does alert on it. So we had agents sitting there ready to go to pounce on him because we don't know if he's

going to steal the cocaine out of the bag. We don't know what he's going to do. And so we grab it. We get the 25 kilos. Well, by that point, the plane is in the air. The undercover has no idea that we've taken off the cocaine. And so a few hours later, the plane lands up in North Carolina, and the undercover calls.

And he goes, and we said, we answered the phone. It was like, we know, we got it. Don't worry. We got the cocaine. And he's like, what do you mean? And I go, there was a dirty canine officer. He found the bag, but we've got it here. Don't worry the cocaine's secure.

He goes, I don't know whose bag you got, but I got my 25 kilos. So there were two groups running 25 kilos on the same plane at the same time. And quite frankly, there could have been 50 groups running cocaine on those planes at the same time. If you were on a plane leaving the Virgin Islands during the 1990s, I would almost guarantee there was cocaine in bags on those planes. So do you think that was a normal racket for some of these Koreans? up cops to just send the dogs through to pick up? It could have been. And there were other cases that we knew about that cops came across drugs and it was

stolen. I don't know that this one wasn't just completely random. And I don't know because we were, we'll never know, because we were right there and we were able to grab it. You know, he never had the opportunity to take it. But it was like, it was an eye-opening event. because it's like, I keep in mind just a few years earlier, he had two DEA agents on a post of duty who said there was no cocaine.

There's not a more than a kilo of cocaine. If you were to put it all in a pile, there's never more than a kilo cocaine on the island at any given time. And we've got two groups running 25 keys both on the same plane at the same time. And later on when I interviewed major like cartel-level drug traffickers, they would say, we brought in 1,000 kilos every two weeks. And it was like, well, how did you get? a thousand kilos out every two weeks.

And they go, there'd be mules on plane with it. Well, how many mules would you have to put on a plane? A lot. But we could get a thousand kilos out. And I said, how long would it take you to get a thousand kilos out? I said, and originally I said, you can't do that in two weeks. Like, we could do that in two days if we had to. We would just saturate the plane with mules.

No one would know each other and everybody was carrying cocaine. So there was a ton of cocaine going out through commercial airlines during and the baggage handlers were getting rich. So I don't know what they got paid to put a bag of cocaine in it, but on the plane, but, you know, they were making bank for sure. How long were they able to use planes for? Did 9-11 change everything, or was it before that? Like the commercial aspect.

I know private. Yeah, so the major change that I saw with 9-11 wasn't so much with that because they were bypassing. They were bypassing. If you had a dirty baggage handler, I don't think it would be as easy in the U.S. mainland. But in the Virgin Islands, if you had a dirty baggage handler, they could get past all that. I think they could get past all that security stuff. It wasn't an issue.

But after 9-11, there was routes that you could go to foreign locations in the Caribbean on smaller planes and never have to pass their customs in the process of doing it. Or even, like, some of the smaller islands, you wouldn't even have to pass through, like, security screening. So you could have a bag full of cocaine. there was no security, you know, clearing for it. There was a, there was a, I won't say what airline it was, but there was an airline that was kind of notorious for this. And I was talking to someone on the inside,

and they were giving me heads up that they think this bag has got cocaine in it. And I said, said, why? And they said, well, they would ask, they would ask the passenger how much their bag weighed. They didn't actually weigh them. Said, how much does it weigh? And he says, this response was, he says how many pounds is it and he goes well how many pounds is in five kilograms so he was asking him to convert five kilograms into pounds for him because he knew he had

five kilos of coke in the bag yeah now when it got to the airport in in on the mainland does it get searched again like does it go through security or just it could it could they could run a dog on the belt that's not uncommon especially I think toward the late like later years they were doing it more commonly because there was so much cocaine coming through. So that, yeah, customs, and I'm sure they're doing a lot more now than they did back then. But back then, during that time, it wasn't happening a lot. And was there any way to tie the bag handler to the actual bag if it was under the cargo? It's not like what it is now with the tracking and everything.

No, and they would print bag claim tickets typically at the counter, but these guys would handwrite them. Oh, yeah, there used to be handwritten bag claim tickets back in the day. There was a lot of primitive ways that were very successful back in the 90s that you couldn't get away with now. Another one was like how they had moved money from the U.S. mainland back to the Virgin Islands. We saw a ton of it coming back through Western Union. And then there was what was called Casa de Cambios, which were like House of Chains. It's a literal translation of it where you could go in with a bag full of money and go, I need to send this to the Virgin Islands. and you could, like, New York had a cost of a combo.

You could send cash to the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. And you could literally walk in there with cash. And sometimes, like, not by any, like, anything dirty, but sometimes guys would learn how to launder money just out of someone else's laziness. Like, like, they would go into the post office and they say, I need $20,000 worth of postal money orders. And the person would go, well, I have to feel like. out of this paperwork here, meaning the currency transaction reports, you know, or suspicious activity reports, if you do everything with me, but you can buy X amount here, go to the next clerk, buy X amount, buy X amount from him, and then none of us have to fill out the

paperwork. So they taught them, inadvertently taught them how to launder money. Now, when you're working with agents from different states, different countries, different areas, do you trust them right off the bat? Because these are people you've never met a day in your life. Right, but we had a pretty good rapport with like the guys in Tortola, you know, those guys, those are like my brothers. They, they were

you know, and they were, they wanted, they wanted blood because one of their own got shot by these guys and so they were fully coopering with us and they also knew that they were out of their league. And so, and they were concerned because they had told me

one of the guys over in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, one of the drug traffickers, Like he bought all the kids in his neighborhood. And how he did it is he bought in like a tractor trailer full of brand new bicycles. And he gave it to every kid in the neighborhood got a new bike. Well, what he essentially did is he made all those kids lookouts. He said, do you see anything that looks suspicious? You come and tell me.

And so like every kid in the neighborhood was looking out for this guy. He was like Robin Hood, you know. And so but the guys, to answer your question, the guy's in the verge, like most of them we trusted. And we worked well with like Danish authorities in St. Martin, British Virgin Islands. Later on, we had, I don't know that I'd say I'd trusted them, but I trusted them to some extent down in South America and like Venezuela and such. And so, yeah, I mean, generally we trusted them. And the guys up in the U.S. mainland, we never had any concern about them. Our biggest concern were the people that surrounded us because we were, you know, during that time from gun group up into the time I left the task force, I figured it out one day that I had arrested 14 Virgin Islands police officers during that time.

So that was not looked at well like that. And, you know, these were these were other police officers' friends, you know. And so it didn't matter what they were involved in. to them they just they didn't care so what happens to them are they placed in the prison there or given light treatment a hard treatment what did that look like um so yeah some of them stayed local and then some of them did federal time so yeah there was it was a combination of both um we had one police officer well we had three police officers that came to us and wanted to they wanted to qualify operate. And they, well, here's what happened.

They actually wanted, they said they wanted to learn how to do drug cases, right? And they were coming to us for advice. And then, then they came to us and they said, there's this dirty police officer,

and he's involved in a whole bunch of shit. And, uh, they were happy to give him up. And so we, we worked that case by, um, leaking information through the dirt.

through the officers who were cooperating with us, that there was a house on the east end of the island that had 50 kilos of cocaine in it. That was what was called an oil spill. So if an airdrop went south, the cocaine ends up in the ocean, doesn't get picked up. Someone finds it.

That's called an oil spill, right? And so the information was this guy who owned this house in the eastern had been out fishing one day and found an oil spill, 50 kilos, and he had it in this house. And so the dirty police officer says, let's go break in and steal it. And so we had set up cameras all over the house.

We had manufactured 50 kilos of fake cocaine, put it in the house, and we caught the guy breaking in the house, right? And so he gets grabbed up. Well, not more than a few weeks later, the three officers that had been given us the information, they ended up confessing that they had been stealing money and drugs, even a vehicle during a search warrant they had executed on a drug dealer's house. So we ended up arresting those three.

too. So, and, and so we, we knew, like, we got to the point where it was like, we didn't trust anybody other than what we were, who we were working with. And there was, there was some regulars in the VIPD that we trusted. But there was also, there were times that we got burnt with those, too. There was one in St. Thomas that the St. Thomas Task Force believed that this guy, he was the only person they would go to and trust with information, you know, with information or get information. And later on, they found out he was dirty, he was leaking everything. out. So you got burnt all you got burned a bunch of times and it it was it was very difficult a very difficult environment to work. You didn't trust anybody other than the people you're working with. Would you guys start to take extra precautions after you know say the first few? Yes and we always ran on that same if we were doing a big roundup what we call a roundup or search warrant operation or arrest warrant operation we always imported them. We just brought people in and it I don't know what it costs the federal government, but it can't have been cheap because sometimes there's 100 people or more that we brought in.

Now, on that topic, do you think what they were spending paid off, I guess, financially, because you're doing a lot of big bus for cash and drugs? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. No, we, I'm sure we definitely made more money in seizures than DEA spin on us and, you know, all things considered for sure. Now, when something seized, because is that taken from them pending trial? Do they ever get that back? Yes, no, there's a process. They can attempt to get it back.

But I think there's only one case where I've actually seen someone do it. People just walk away from it because they can't justify it. There was one guy who was involved in that same Springett group that was living in this very lavish house. And he had like a government. job but didn't pay a lot certainly can support his lifestyle and um he had won the virgin nana's lottery three times in one year and uh i actually looked this up like what are the what are the odds that someone could actually do it and it's like 7.9 could trillion to one or something like that it's like but what it was just a money laundering scheme he knew someone obviously knew someone in the

version island's lottery that would approach someone who had a winning ticket and say i know know someone will pay cash for that right now. You won't pay taxes on it. He may even give you a little more than it's worth. And so he was buying winning lottery tickets so he could justify his financial situation. But then he'd still pay taxes on the lottery. Right. But it's still an excuse for why he had the money. Correct. I've never heard of that for money loan. That's pretty smart. Yeah. And in the Virgin Islands, I don't know how well it'd work in the mainland, but in the Virgin Islands, he got away with it. How long were you with the task force for? I was there for 14 years.

And then, so it kind of went through like periods in the task force, I call them. Like we would, we started off with two really strong agents, and then we started building up speed. We would get additional agents, and some of them were okay, some of them were not so great. And then, but I was always very active. I was working cases, like I was nonstop from the time I was in the time. I was in there. And I'd say in like 2004 is like when we hit like the best group of guys we had. And that's when things got really serious for us.

So but we were always, we were working cases the entire time. And we were, we had assets that were available to us that I would imagine they're still available. But some of them I can't talk about. But we were doing a lot of like tracking transponders on mostly boats, like go fast boats. So we could keep track of where these guys were at any given time if they were out going out and picking up loads and stuff like that. And that equipment was phenomenal equipment that I won't get into the background of where it came from. But it was great stuff.

And so we had those assets available to us. And there was really never a time that people said no as far as if we needed something. And it was, it was, usually we could find it, we could get it sourced someplace. So how many years ahead is law enforcement and technology? Because if that was 2004 and that equipment was that good? Um, I mean, I think there's a lot of companies out there that are manufacturing some really great stuff. Like, we were seeing the digital era like pour in. Like we, like, I had a case that we were doing undercover videos and, and we were still using, like,

digital eight recorders at the time and secreting them they were small you know Sony made some really small ones but we could but you know and like probably early 2000s we started to see the digital stuff come out where you normally have like a recording deck and now all sudden this thing you know is the size you know it's like not much bigger than a a potion stamp quite a bit thicker and they could do the same thing that a digital eight recorder was doing and it would do it in digital format. So, you know, I'd imagine the stuff out there today is really phenomenal. But the other stuff that was available to us, it was coming, it wasn't coming from law enforcement and it was made

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Join Blu Chu's mission to upgrade humanity one thrust of the time. Head to Bluchu.com for details and safety info. And big thanks to Bluchu for sponsoring the podcast. Why did things get more serious in 2004? What changed? Well, so, yeah, so in 2004 we had a really good group of guys. And I say it's the best group we've ever had. You had a detective that was assigned to me.

At that point, I was the guy who was in charge of VIPD. And he was, his name was Anheald Diaz. He grew up on the island, a former Army guy, really, solid guy tactically. He was top notch. We also had another guy. He was a local guy. He was a local guy. He was a ton of local knowledge and really solid guy. And he and I

have worked together since I was in gun group. And then you had a DEA agent by the name of Rick Rambo that had come in. And I'll tell you the story when he arrived and what that looked like. So Rick came in. You also had another DEA agent. His name was Joe.

And then he had a group supervisor last that was there that was a solid guy. And so we had an FBI agent that was good. We just had a good group of guys. And we were, we were all working cases. And, and, but there was a, there was a group that was a very violent organization that they were connected into a drug trafficking organization. And they were kind of the muscle for the group. And that violent group had been, these guys were killing people left and right and all these cases were going unsolved by VIPD. And they, when they, traditionally they would, I call it the leave them, leave them where they lay

stage. They would kill someone. They just, the body would just stay there. But they got to the point where they were doing contract murders where they would scoop up the body and they originally they were barren them on beaches. And I remember there was one incident where they had buried a body on a tourist beach. Early morning hours when no one was around, tourists came in the morning about the same time, mortis kicks in and a freaking arm pops out of the stand from the body that was just buried the night

you know the night before and so then they started like dismembering bodies and then dumping the parts out to see and so that organization was a violent crime organization who was looked into a drug trafficking group and the lead guy in that drug trafficking group was getting cocaine from a source in South America and Columbia. And so you have the trifecta of a real problem. You've got unlimited financial support from this drug trafficking organization and you have a very violent organization

that's willing to carry out homicides and anything that they've asked for. And the task force was like running and gunning during that time. We were executing searchways pretty much weekly on stuff. I was working a case called, Operation Limpia Casa. And remember I told you during my undercover days, there was a group that, the group that I was buying from was all from one neighborhood that it was just up the street. So that group was an area called a state profit.

And they also called it the Pearl, the Spanish translation. I'll mortar it again. It was like La Pella. And so that name came from an area over in Puerto Rico called La Pellda. Have you ever seen the Despacito video? Yeah. That's filmed in La Pella. The music video?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so that's filmed in La Pilda. But during this time frame, like, the police would not go into La Pella without the National Guard. It was extremely dangerous. And it's still, even after, you know, it's kind of been revitalized, it's still very much a drug neighborhood. But heroin was, was, there's a lot of heroin in La Pellda. Well, my group in St. Croix was getting their cocaine.

from sources in La Pelda. And they were trying to emulate what was going on in Puerto Rico. And so you couldn't go into this neighborhood, like you couldn't just pull a vehicle, like a police vehicle into this neighborhood or even an undercover vehicle because they'd have heroin addicts and cocaine addicts or crack addicts on every street corner. As soon as your vehicle pulled in the neighborhood, they'd start yelling, Agua, Agua! And they would go right up the street to the next one until it got to the drug turf and then all

the dealers would disperse. So you couldn't just walk, you couldn't just get into this neighborhood without being detected. And so how I, how I broke through that is I had a, I had a guy I cooperated. And he was, he was a down island guy. And he was a crack dealer himself, but he wanted revenge because he was, he was, he was laced with a marijuana cigarette that had crack in it. And they got him addicted to crack. And he, like, lost like five years of his life before he checked into rehab. and got himself clean.

And so he wanted revenge on these dealers in La Pelda. Now, and so he was willing to, like, provide information and make undercover videos in La Pelda. And so we were, we were hooking him up with equipment every, about every day. He'd go in for a few hours, make recordings of drug transactions. And the shit he was coming back with was, like, off the chain. Like, he was, there was people shooting heroin in the middle of the street. We were seeing, we were seeing gun play. We were seeing transactions left in.

right and these guys to tell you the level of activity when they were cooking crack they would cook it in 24 inch wash pans they were cooking crack cookies that were 24 inches um in diameter and then they would walk out on this this porch that was on a second story building hold it up for everybody to see and all the dealers would start screaming yeah you know because the the block was full again and then they were sending they were sending mules over to porto rico to uh lapelda to pick up drugs from over there, bring him back. So in any given time, it was an open-haired drug market. You could have 30 guys slinging dope all at the same time.

And like I said, if law enforcement went there, it would just shut down. So he got in, he started making these undercover recordings, and this went on for a while. And this guy, this guy was a character. He was, he was a street guy. One of my favorite stories with him is we would go to this, what we call a neutral location, which was usually like a dirt road, dead-end dirt road in the middle of nowhere, where we give them the equipment,

wire them up, we debrief them there, do everything there, and then we would leave, and he would leave a little bit later, and so no one would see us interacting with him. Then he would go in there, he'd do what he needed to do,

he'd come back to the neutral location, and we'd grab the equipment from him, and the process would start again the following morning. Well, one morning, we go there, we meet him at the neutral location, we're pulling in there, and it's like dirt road, It's all like overgrown with guinea grass, this, you know, five foot tall grass that lines the road.

It's kind of a canopy in the road. You know, it's like closing off the road. And, you know, no one's going to see anything. And he's got an uncapped bottle of rum up on the hood of his car. And he's looking into his mouth with a piece of broken mirror. And the other hand, he's got a pair of pliers. He had a cavity. And before we can get out of the car and tell him anything, he reaches into his mouth with that pair of pliers and rips his tooth out.

Then he takes a swig of the run, rum kind of swishes around in his mouth, spits it out on the ground with a bunch of blood. And he's like, I'm good to go now. And then he went in and started doing undercover work for us. And this guy was hardcore. And so he had racked up charges on, I think it was 37 local or federal cases for sale of controlled substance, including one that was sale controlled substance resulting in. death and then some drug trafficking stuff for people that were bringing stuff in. We had like over 100 drug exhibits that we attributed to him. His information was so good that I could write a search warrant and he'd be the only source

and I could tell the judge, this guy has provided information for this many months and he's never provided information that's been proven faults and the judge would give me a search warrant based on his information alone. He was really good. And I don't think I can say that about any other source I ever had in my career. and so he told me one day he says um he says there i know this is a long way to get to your your question but you kind of have to understand the the the the the i have to lay the foundation first so uh he he said to me one day he goes they're cooking crack in this apartment i go how

much he goes it's a kilo but they're cooking in a microwave and they got a full kilo they're going to cook it in a crack it's like all right i write a search warrant we get together a group of guys we're trying to figure out how are we getting into this neighborhood without getting detected so one of the guys says i know someone who's got a horse trailer so we grab a jeep we rent a jeep it's got a hitch on it hook up the uh the horse trailer to it put all whole entire team and tactical gear in the horse trailer one guy puts on a rasta wig turns up the reggae music loud drives right past all the lookouts gets us right in front of the drug turf back of the horse trailer drops out we we go flying

out immediately dealers are running everywhere they're shit in their pants in the middle of drug transactions as we pull up there's probably 30 guys on the block but we're we're driven we're going directly to this apartment where they're cooking crack go there break down the door there's three guys in there they're playing video games in the living room we go and put them down on the ground get them a handcuffs clear the rest of the house and walk back into the kitchen i say all clear and as soon as i say that i hear i hear it ding one of the guys walks over opens up the microwave. There's two vials of crack that just got finished cooking in the microwave. So that was the sort of stuff. This guy was like, he was good. I mean, he was very good at what he did.

And so we were racking up all these drug exhibits and keep putting people in as like on the defendant list. And at the same time, the local prosecutor, we had assigned to the task force said, anybody you've got that is using controlled substance, meaning like their heroin addicts, we'll take them on possession of drug paraphernalia. and so and their their sole goal was to get them treatment try to get them some help um and there's there's some good stories that came from that but so that case is being worked and it's we're we're building up to go ahead and take that case down at the same time joe one of the DEA agents has been working remember the same guy that's the dirty cop that was involved in the the tortola shootout his vehicle was in the tortola shootout the same one that was a canine officer that came across the bag. He becomes a source for us. And how he became a source is he got arrested by

the Virgin Islands Police Department Investigation Bureau on a stolen property charge. He ends up going to jail and he becomes a convicted felon. Well, Joe gets information that he's got a gun, so he's a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. We said, screw it, let's execute a search warrant. So we go break down his door and we get the gun. So he doesn't want to go back to prison, so he agrees to cooperate and tell us what he knows about drug trafficking. And so he becomes a source for us. And I don't want to get sidetracked by side stories, but this is actually a pretty good one. One of the things we found when we execute the search warrant in his house is we find basically a murder for hire plot.

He had been hired by this very wealthy guy that was from Las Vegas that had a home in the Virgin Islands to murder his estranged wife. And he actually got paid $50,000. We had the wire transfers of the $50,000. He went to Las Vegas, never carried out the murder, but blew it on, you know, strippers and blow probably, you know, and flew back to the Virgin Islands empty. But he, but we had, he had basically given up that whole murder for hire story as well. So he cooperates with us and what he does and what Joe's working on him is, is he's debriefing him daily on information that he's getting. And he gives us up, he gives us, I think it was five, five, five. guys that are involved in like they're they're like contract guys they would they would do

drug work at request of people for money and whatever that is so so he tells them that he's got 200 kilos of cocaine that he's going to be bringing in on his go fast boat and he is an offload crew and these guys volunteer to do it and so this plan is kind of like building up at the same time, Limpia Casa is building up for takedown. And so at the same time, the television show America's Most Wanted is coming to interview me on my first case involving the Tortola stuff. And we didn't really get into that, but that guy is on the run. He broke out of jail. We had him in custody in Columbia. They broke him out of jail. They paid $4 million and broke him out of out of a maximum security prison in Medi in Columbia.

So he's on the run. So they're doing a special for FBI or America's Most Wanted on that case to feature him as a fugitive. At this point, he's a top 10 most wanted fugitive by both FBI and U.S. Customs, and he's sharing poster space with Osama bin Laden. So that tells you the level of his activity. And we had already, like we had so much cocaine on him,

like getting him in custody, we had already indicted i'd indict him in um in georgia in savannah georgia and uh like we and we're already taken off all his underlings like everybody else has been already prosecuted he's on the run so they want to feature him to see if we can get some traction and try to get this guy in custody so they tell us we're flying in the camera crew well they're coming in the same day that we're taken down limpia casa an arrest in, you know, 37 local, our federal cases and a handful of local ones as well. So we're organizing these two things at the same time. Well, Rick Rambo, he shows up in the island in the middle of this, right?

He transfers in on island. So he's only been there like two days. And immediately he's been thrown into the mix, like, hey, we got arrest 37 people, executed all these search warrants. At the same time I got this camera crew coming in to interview me for America's Most Mondand. We're bringing in 150 agents from out. outside to help execute these search warrants and arrest these guys. We're literally going to take over the entire neighborhood.

We've got a Black Hawk helicopter on standby that's going to be over the neighborhood to, you know, to help with this. Like, this is a big operation. So we're explaining all this to Rick. And all of a sudden, Joe stands up and he goes, hey, we've got to take down Beach Party. It's like when? He goes tomorrow, the morning after we take down Olympia Casa. So Beach Party was the offload of the 200 kilos. those for the dirty cop, right? So these three things, three major things are all going to happen

within 48 hours of each other. Well, not even 48 hours. And so, and there's no, there's no stop in it. Like the, like, he's, the source has got Joe's targets all spun up. And like, we've got to do it. So we got to manufacture 200 kilograms of fake cocaine. We got to arrest 37 plus people. and then a bunch of local people. And we've got to do the, we got to do, I got to do the interviews for America's Most Wanted, all within a very short period of time within, you know, less than 48 hours. So like, all right.

So the first one to go is Limpia Casa. And we had, um, the National Guard had set up like a temporary booking facility inside the U.S. Marshals like Sallyport garages where we can book these guys. And the U.S. marshals were going to be in charge of. all the booking. And their thought is, we'll be lucky if we get 50% in custody. And so the National Guard sets up these huge air conditioning units, which were way overpowered. It turned that

Sally Port into like an ice box. You could a hung meat in there. And they're going to do all the booking in there. And they're anticipating we're going to get at best, maybe 15 people in custody. So that's what they planned for. Well, we start executing arrest warrants. And by noon, we've got everybody in custody. So it's just a circus inside there trying to book everybody. Plus they got to go up to the judge for advisor rights. There's detention hearings going on the following morning. So this has already become like a cluster fuck. So the sleep deprivation of these three assignments starts with that. So it's like four o'clock in the morning. We start with that. By noon, we've got everybody in custody. And now we're gearing up for beach party the following morning. And so we've got to manufacture 200 kilograms of fake cocaine.

So I'm like, the office looks like a bomb's gone off. There's tactical gear everywhere. There's people sleeping under desk. They're sleeping on top of desk. There's agents that are flying out, you know, because they're done and they're going back to wherever they're from. It's just a mess. And at the same time, America's Most Wanting camera crew and producers show up in my office.

And I don't even know where to put them. So I was like, all right, let's try the conference room. We're like just looking for some space where they can set up cameras. So we go in the conference room, we open the door, not an exaggeration. I didn't embellish this at all. There's literally a pile of flour stacked up on the conference room table. And Tokars and like three other people are trying to figure out how they're going to manufacture 200 kilograms of fake cocaine using flour. And this is an impossible task.

It's not going to work. So the camera crew gets a glimpse of this and they're like, what the hell did we just witness? They probably thought it was cocaine, right? And so I was like, come, I'm put you in my office. So I put them in my office. I go back to the conference room. I was like, guys, that's never going to work. We've literally got like 12 hours to get this loaded into bales and put on boats.

So what we ended up doing is we go to lumber yard and we buy two by six lumber. We cut two by six lumber to the same size as kilograms of cocaine and start wrapping them in duct tape, right? And then we put them into burlap bags and make them look like bales. So the bales, the burlap bag shut, cover them in siloam light sticks. So it looks like they got air dropped. and then that's set. So I start doing the interviews with America's Most Wanted and I finish at like 11 o'clock at night, right?

Meanwhile, these guys are gearing up for beach party. They're establishing surveillance locations. They've loaded the undercover speedboat with the fake cocaine. And he's like a couple miles off ashore next to our Marine unit go fast boat waiting for the go-ahead signal. So I finish with the interviews. I do the interviews in America's Most Wanted, wearing only a suit on the top end. I got cargo shorts on the bottom end, right?

But they only shoot from like here on up, so it's perfectly fine. So I finish that, immediately switch into tactical gear, and then jump into a truck to keep in mind, Rick's driving the truck. This is his second day in the office. And I've got myself, another task force guy with me, and then Rick, Joe, Diaz, an FBI agent, and a couple other DEA agents, they've got a staging point along this dirt road leading down to the beach where this deserted beach where the undercover boat's going to come ashore. And the offload crew is going to take that load, move it into vans and then take it to what they think is going to be like a holding house for it. And so my position was with another task force guy and we're up on a hillside. We've got forward looking infrared, looking at the beach and night vision.

camera's looking at the beach and all of a sudden the target starts showing up one by one and so um and it's probably now it's probably two three o'clock in the morning when this starts happening so the targets show up we wait for all the targets to arrive before we send we radio to the to the marine unit and tell them to send in the undercover boat with our dirty our former dirty cop at the helm and 200 kilograms of fake cocaine loaded on the boat. So he shows up. They start unloading his boat, put it in their vehicles. And the plan is when we get half of the cocaine, the fake cocaine, off of the boat, we're supposed to give the bus signal. The guys that are Rick and the other guys Diaz that are on the roadside, they'll work their way down the roadside and they'll take him into

custody. And so half the, half of the fake cocaine goes off. We go ahead. and give the go signal, these guys start working their way down the, well, they wanted to start working their way down the roadway. But one of the guys has left the boat and he's a lookout. He's got a handheld radio in his hand. They put him in a lookout location right where these guys are at. And so these guys got to get rid of him before they can make it down and take off the load. So I'd give him the takedown signal and I don't get any reply. They can't reply because the guy's like literally next to him and so rick and diaz they come out of the bushes and they snatch this guy's up and put him down on the ground and they said if you make a sound you're dead

and uh the guy complies they leave him with another agent they work their way down the dirt road to the beach and they order everybody down to the ground we flip on the floodlights all shit hits the fan one guy is on the boat unloading bales he goes right off the back of the boat dives in the water and literally swims away and we got ended up getting him the following morning everybody else we get in custody so that case is done we drop these guys off to jail and by this time we were like we're exhausted this probably we've now been up for a good it's it's got to been close to 48 hours we're exhausted and uh We're driving back to the police state or to our, to the task force offices.

And we come up over this hillside and there's a roadblock, police roadblock in the middle of the road. And one of the guys that's in charge of the roadblock as a dirty cop who's a former target of ours, he goes and he does a standoff on the roadway with us. He's got his hand on his gun. And what he wanted us to do is advance the vehicle forward because he's, going to open fire on our vehicle. So now we're in like a standoff with this guy and he's ordering us out of the vehicle. And we basically told Rick he's a dirty cop and he's dangerous. That's the only information we could give and we couldn't give him the whole background of the case or anything.

And Rick has got his AR-15 and he says if that gun clears leather, I'm going full auto through the window through the windshield. And I was the same way. I was like, hell yeah. So we both, everybody removes their guns. And we're like, we can't step out of the vehicle. We can't move the vehicle. We can't do anything because anything he's going to look as a a furtive movement and he's looking for an excuse to fire. And so and you know, there's bad, there's been bad blood with this guy for a while. Like he learned the investigation we had on him and this guy, this guy is dangerous. So there's a sergeant there. She realizes what's going on and she gets in between him and us

and basically pulls him out of the roadway and we're able to leave without any gunfire. And that's how those 48 hours had ended. Now, but the story isn't done there. So before this dirty cop leaves, before he, we basically relocate him off island, he gives up another guy who becomes a source for us. So we're working him and this other source at the same time.

And they don't know that each other is cooperating. And so this guy was giving up a group over in St. Thomas that was involved in drug trafficking. And it's a big group. It's a big organization. That organization is also being worked by Joe. Well, all of us are working in it. He's up on wires. He's got tracking transponders on their boats and on their cars.

it's a big case. And a lot of it is dependent on the source who's really hanging himself out there by giving up information on this very violent organization. And at the same time, Rick and Diaz are working this other group that's tied to the St. Croix Trafficker

who's involved with this violent organization that's leaving bodies all over the island. So you've got these two very dangerous groups working at the same time and because they're both from the Virgin Islands, they are, they're maybe loosely affiliated. Like they, and it's entirely plausible that violent organization is working hand and head with the organization in St. Thomas. And so they, um, so we, we get, um, to the point where we actually buy cocaine from the lead target in the St. Thomas case. They, they, They let us walk a full kilogram of cocaine.

We paid, I think it was $12,000 or $13,000 for it. We get cocaine on the table on that guy. But we're also developing a case on him because he was involved in both human trafficking and drug trafficking. And there was a human trafficking venture that one of his vessels capsized and two people died. And so he's a solid target. He's a high value target for us. And we've set up surveillance at a Ritz Carlton.

brand new Ritz Carlton that's over in St. Thomas that's directly across the street or across the valley from the Target's house. So we can do surveillance from this suite at this Ritz Carlton. And we're up on wires. We're doing all sorts of stuff on that. At the same time, over in St. Croix, we're working this other very violent organization that's tied to this other trafficker. So, and these two things are kind of happening at the same time. So the first case to kind of to to really start going to overdrive is the case over in St. Thomas. That starts picking up speed really quickly because we're up on all these different surveillance.

At one point, we had a wire that was also a tracking transponder that was in the lead target's car truck, and it had gone down, like the main unit had failed on it. And it was hidden up in like underneath the plastic and the wheel well. It was hidden up and there. And so we need to change that device out. we need to replace it. And so the plan was to jump the guy's fence in the middle of the night, hit a wall around his house,

and then do it right there in the driveway. Well, myself and Diaz and Rambo go to do this, and this guy's got this dog that's like this big. That is just a little fucker would wake up the whole neighborhood. Like he's the loudest, unbelievably loud, right? And so we get over the fence and immediately he starts making noise

and we're like, this isn't going to work, you know, so we got to go. So we're kicking around ideas like, how do we get rid of this dog? Because we're not going to be able to do this unless we get rid of the dog. And so we call back to Joe, who's over in St. Croix. He's monitoring wires from over there. Well, we're the surveillance team in St. Thomas. And we said, we got this problem with this dog.

And he goes, all right, well, I'll send you something. Now, getting rid of dogs, like, are not getting rid of them, but dealing with dogs for covert entries was, like, not new to us. We would typically get, like, hot dogs. and we had a vial of Fenton Barbitol, volume. We'd inject hot dogs with Fenton Barbatol and throw them over the fence. They'd eat it. And then they would just go into Doggyland for a while

and we'd do what we need to do. We did that quite often. So we figured when he said he would send us something to deal with it, we figured that's what he was going to do. He was going to send us a syringe in Fenton Barbatol and we'd get hot dogs and do it. Well, we'd go to pick this thing up at the airport, this package up, and it's this long freaking case box.

And we open it up. up and it's got this tranquilizer rifle in it. And this thing is like for a dart and elephants. Honest to God, the dart is like the barb on this thing. It's made for something very large. Certainly not this dog. And I'm looking at it. I'm like, anywhere you hit the dog, you kill the dog.

Like the dog's not going to survive this. And so we call him back and he's like, dude, just do it. Just do it. And I'm like, dude, I don't have the heart to shoot this dog with this thing. Meanwhile, Diaz and Rambo are like, we'll fucking shoot it. We don't care, right? And I was like, no, we're not going to do it. because if we do, like, we're burned.

Like, we kill the dog. We're burned. And so Diaz is like, I'll snatch the dog up, throw it in a pillowcase, and we'll just take it away. And it was like, do, you're going to be chasing the dog all over the freaking yard? You're not going to, it's not going to work. So ultimately, they, they were trying to talk me into the tranquilizer gun. And they're like, let's just try it out and see how powerful it is. And I'm like, I think this is going to sound like a gunshot going off.

So we're in this suite at the Ritz Carlton brand new. Like we were probably the first tenants in that place, right? We set up the same box that came in against the wall in the living room, go back a few feet. We fire the dart and it sounds like a gunshot, right? And we fired it into the box thinking it'll stick in the box. It went right through the box, right through the drywall and stuck in a refrigerator in the kitchen. Right? So like absolutely no, we're not using that.

how we ended up doing it and then fixing the thing is the same source flew over it well no i take that back that's what we did the first time so how we ended up fixing the thing is we flew to miami went to a toyota dealership gave him the vint number for the vehicle and they cut us a new key and a key fob for it so we basically had a working key for the truck we waited for him for him to park it at the airport and we then took the vehicle put it one of our vehicles and replaced of it change the unit out and put it right back where we found it from and he never knew. So that's how we ended up fixing it. So that case is like spinning up.

And we were working with a prosecutor who was like, I would say definitely in the top three prosecutors I'd work with. Her name was Trish Salzbach. She since passed away. Wonderful woman. And one hell of a prosecutor. She was the type of prosecutor that she didn't try to tell agents how to work a case. you would bounce a question off of her and she'd tell you whether it was legally defendable

if what you were suggesting you were going to do was legally defendable. And so we bounce off the idea of like how do we take off our lead target and see if we can cooperate him without anybody else knowing in St. Thomas. And so the thought was we get him off island.

But how do you get him off island? You can't just bring him to the airport because people are going to see that, right? So the plan was I get on a go fast boat at like midnight. I go over to St. Thomas and I stay off, you know, not far off ashore, but, you know, close to shore. We also have a team to grab up our lead target. And so we send Diaz and Rambo and the case agent over to St. Thomas ahead of time. I'm left back in St. Croix with our Marine unit.

And when we get the green light, we head out to sea, work our way off, work our way to St. Thomas. And we stay, you know, probably half mile off ashore. And then we let those guys know, we're in position. You grab them when you can grab them. So it's now like 2 o'clock in the morning. They put a call into the lead target and they tell them one of your GoFast boats broke from the morning at the marina. And you need to come secure it. we then also had a team

we had a team that made that phone call and then when he leaves the house they box them in with their vehicles snatch them out of the vehicle throw them in a van and they drive them down to the to a deserted beach or it was actually a deserted dock

and they give me the go ahead and come in and I come in they throw them on the boat plus the takedown team they get on the boat the takedown team they get on the boat. The takedown team was Rambo, Rick Rambo, Diaz, and Joe, the case agent. And they get him on the boat. And the first indication of who we are and what we're there for is that's when that he gets it. Like up to that point, I'm sure he thought he was kidnapped, like he was going to get murdered.

And so I said, they said to him, I said, you've been indicted by a federal grand jury, we haven't worn for your arrest. and that's the first indication he gets is when he's aboard the boat and then we start heading out to sea. Now, Joe, the case agent, he loved boats, he hated the water. This guy could get seasick incredibly easy. And so he had called me by radio and he's like, if it's too rough, just let me know and we'll find some other way to do it. And I was like, no, it's fine. Meanwhile, we were getting our ass kicked the entire way to St. Thomas. was very rough. And so when we get off, we get out of offshore, we start, you know, rolling in

these rolling waves, you know, coming in and out and out. And we're just getting the crap kicked out of us again. And tow cars is immediately seasick, right? But he doesn't want the target to see that he's seasick. So he begins pulling his bulletproof vest away from his chest and starts vomiting into his bulletproof vest, right? And to tell you how rough the seas are, we broke the steering on the, on our go fast, and they were having to steer the boat using the throttles on the multiple engines in order to steer it. And then we're getting like slam it up against the center console of the boat over and over again and even getting knocked off our feet at times.

Well, Rick takes a hard hit and he goes up against the center console, comes back and keep in mind, we're just completely covered in, you know, we're getting blasted in the seawater, we're completely saturated. Every time we go over a wave, we're getting sea spray on us. and um and so Rick gets slammed up against the center console when he comes back he starts hearing this noise right

and then all of a sudden he starts feeling this burning in his crotch he had ruptured his pepper spray that was on his belt and now this it's blending with the salt water and running down his crotch all over his his man parts which is burning this shit out of him and he sucked it up too he didn't want the target to know that he was he didn't want to drop travel in front of the target.

So he sucks it up too. Meanwhile, he's getting like third degree burns from pepper spray that's in his crotch. So we make it back to St. Croix through all of this. And we begin debriefing him. And he cooperates. For two days, we debrief him.

And he gives up a lot. And then he eventually gets to the point where he's just like done. And about that same time, we already had the search warrants and arrest warrants for all his co-conspirators. So we're like, all right, we're done, we put them on a customs plane, we have to fly him back to St. Thomas,

because the law requires that we bring them to the closest magistrate. And that was the legal question for this U.S. attorney. Can we move them out of St. Thomas and move them over to St. Croix and then bring him back. So we grabbed him on a Friday night, so the closest available magistrate would be Monday morning in St. Thomas. And she said, I don't care how you do it in the route you take. You can bring them all around the world you want. You just have them back on Monday morning for that advisor rights in St. Thomas. And so that's what we did.

We debriefed them all weekend, brought him back to St. Thomas on that Monday morning. But at 4 o'clock on that Monday morning, we grabbed up everybody else. We executed all the storage warrants. And Rick and I went to that Target's house, and we met Fluffy for the first time. And I don't know if you have the ability to add photographs. If you do, I'll send you a photograph of Fluffy and Rick. So we arrest everybody else, and we take that case down. So while that case is going on, while we're investigating that case, we're also investigating this violent crime organization in St. Croix that's connected to another trafficker.

And things start to get hairy because the source that is cooperating on the case in St. Thomas, he was originally, just like the dirty police officer, the plan was he would relocate on the day of the take. He relocated off island. And everything up into that point indicated that he was going to. But at the last minute, he recants and he says, I'm going to stay on Ireland. We told him it's not safe. You got to go. And he said, as long as I stay in St. Croix, I'm fine. He says, I'm very aware of my surroundings.

I know everybody here. I'll be fine. Well, I get a phone call one night from chief of detectives over at the Virgin Islands Police Department. I said, hey, do you know a guy by this name? and I played, I was like, I'm not sure what's going on. They go, he's just been murdered. And so I said, all right, I'll be down. So I start calling the case agent, and I said, your source just got gunned down.

And so we all go on the scene, and his vehicle, he was just like a block away from his house. He's with his girlfriend, his car, and they turn on the last street, and there's either one or more people there with high power rifles, AK-47s, You know, something firing 7.62 rounds, and they opened up on his vehicle. And he gets shot multiple times. He's dead on the scene. His girlfriend had been shot as well, but she survived. And there was not a single brass casing left on the scene. They were using brass catchers on the weapons, so they left no shell casings for ballistic comparison.

So normally we can look at the firing pins impressions on a casing and tie that to a weapon. We had no ability to do that because they left no shell casings behind. And so that source is gone. And the case is in somewhat a jeopardy, but the U.S. attorney's office is like, we'll still proceed. We still have enough to proceed. So that case is like in,

that case is still moving forward. These guys are still incarcerated, but the source has been murdered. And the suspicion is the same violent organization in St. Croix that's connected to this other drug trafficker is the one that carried this thing out. And so we are trying to, trying to like jointly work this case with VIPD, but there's no like, there's no cooperation

of information. There's no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't talk to us and give us information. They wouldn't let us into the case files. So we're providing them information, but nothing's coming back. So at about the same time, or maybe a little bit before, a police officer goes missing in St. Croix. And the information is that he's been killed by the same organization. And again, we're not getting information about this. Like, it's, it's very, there's sketchy information about it. And this organization now is like, you can't tell like where corruption stops and fear begins, because people are, are deathly afraid of this violent organization. So no one wants to target them or anything that they're involved in, except for

our group. So we got a group of, a very small group of guys. And we're targeting this organization. But like the police department is like hands off. So these guys are involved at this point with dozens of probably dozens of homicides, some of which like they left a ski mask behind with DNA on it that matched their primary target. And they won't they won't touch it. And the prosecutor's off won't touch it. And quite frankly, the U.S. Attorney's office doesn't even want to touch it.

And so people are playing jurisdiction. And they're like, this is a local jury. jurisdiction, the U.S. Attorney's Office is saying the local guys are likely saying, no, it's federal jurisdiction. And no one's bringing a case forward because people are just deathly afraid of this group who's now rumored to not only have killed a bunch of bad guys, but also a Virgin Islands police officer who was innocent. And so, and meanwhile, we're over there actively targeting these guys. And we began executing search warrants on primary targets house, like the drug traffickers house, and getting cash seizures and everything else we've

seen that's tied to this big trafficking organizations. And so this is no longer a covert investigation. We're overtly going after these guys. Well, the one trafficker had, he had been involved in a, he had, he had a compound. There's no other way to describe it. His house was a compound. There was a wall that went completely around the house with electronic fence in the front. And once you entered into that compound, like, the jig is up. He had camera systems around the house. You couldn't do anything. If he had a vehicle or a boat secured in the compound, there's no getting to it. Like, not covertly anyways. Well, we got lucky, and he had obtained a boat, I believe over in St. Thomas, and he didn't yet have a trailer for it. So he was keeping it on a

mooring about a mile off of shore in Frederickstead. And we had done. And we had information that he was trying to obtain a trailer so he could get it in the compound and secure it. And so we knew the clock was ticking. And so Rick and Diaz applied for a covert entry warrant so we could put

a tracking transponder on the boat. And we had to do it before it was out of the water. Once it was in the compound, it was game over. We wouldn't get a it was over. And so we, so the thing is like, it's a mile off ashore and

we had a rigid inflatable boat that we carried down to this deserted beach at like 2 o'clock in the morning brought it down on a trailer and then we had to carry it across the sand put it in the water I was the install guy they put me to do the installation on the boat and so he had he had Joe at the helm DEA agent he had Diaz and Rick they were they were my gunmen

So Diaz and Rick, well, all of us, we were armed with so much firearms and ammunition that if any of us had fallen overboard, we'd have gone straight to the bottom and never been seen of again. I mean, we were armed to the teeth, right? Because we knew what we were up against. And so we get aboard the boat, we shoot out to sea, we end up going a good mile and a half off ashore. We loop back around and come in and back of the boat so no one could see us approaching it. And it's like 2 o'clock in the morning. They dropped me off and then they go, I'm left alone on this, this, this. boat and they go they go back out to sea and i've got radio com with them and i begin installing the

transmitter i get the transmitter installed they come back they pick me back up we go back a half mile out to see we come back into the location where we're going to load the boat back up and call it called it night so we uh we're carrying this boat and just kind of picture this it's like three three 30 in the morning we're all dressed in black tactical gear we've got enough firearms and ammunition to start a little war and we're carrying this rigid inflatable up the speech in the morning and all sudden a VIPD unit pulls up and throws a spotlight on us and we're like fuck and so Joe goes are we burned and I looked at the officers and I go I don't know and he's like are they dirty and I go

aside from the people carrying this boat I have no fucking idea you know and so we're all standing there kind of like deer in the headlights and they look at us for a minute and then the light goes out and they keep on driving and I was like to this day I have no idea like if they said they were into something that we don't know what it was we don't know the extent of the damage that was done but the one thing I do know is we are now overtly investigating a very very dangerous organization and we just got burnt just a mile away from one of their boats. And so if they had said something, someone can easily do the math, right? And so things, there's this, I don't know how to describe it. There's

this atmosphere that kind of like we, like, we are hanging ourselves way out there and we have no backup. This is a small group of guys. And if shit hits the fan, backup is maybe in the U.S. mainland if we need to get like a whole crew of people to help back us up. Like locally, I don't know to the extent either, again, by either public corruption or just fear of what sort of support we're going to get. So it is definitely, and like I said, by this point, I had arrested 14 of my own police officers. So it's definitely starting to feel like a very dangerous environment for everybody. And things are starting to get, progressively worse.

And so the next thing that kind of happens is I get a call from Diaz one night. He was out with his wife and two kids. And he says, we just got followed.

And he goes, I don't know what they're up to. He says, we were definitely followed. He says, I was making multiple turns that didn't make any sense. And they stayed on us.

They were trying to close the gap. He goes, I sped up and eventually they tailed off and they left us. Then what happens is I get a call from the guys over in Tortola and they go, there's a contract out in your life. And I said, who took the contract out? He says, it's been taken out of Columbia and it's probably, it's going to be the same guys that you were investigating that were involved in the Tortola shootout that you seized all

the assets from. And he said, he said, that's who ultimately took. the contract out. They've got two hitmen that they've brought in from Columbia. They're Columbia Nationals. They're in Tortola now. He says, we're trying to identify him. Their plan is to kill one of us over here and then go over to St. Croix and they're going to kill you. And I said, okay, I said, don't tell anybody else this information. So I told my group, but I didn't tell anybody in VIPD. I didn't tell the DEA supervisor. There was a contract on me because I didn't know how they'd react. And I told him, I said, you better get on these guys because I don't want to get killed.

and so and so they say yeah we're working on it so they call me back a couple days later and they go we just took them into custody and they said their fingerprints match fingerprints left in the van with the 1,200 kilos back in June of 96 so that load back in 96 the same two Colombians that they've just grabbed their fingerprints were in that van so they charge them on the 1,200 kilos in the shooting of the police officer back. back in 96 and Tortola. And so for the moment, it looks like that I'm safe, right? And so Stein kind of ticks on.

And a couple weeks later, they call me up and they go, you're not going to believe this. He said they were transporting those two guys in a prison van. My name is McKenzie, and I started to go fund me for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal, autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to. to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills.

So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed. we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com.

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Book now at Fiji Airways.com or contact your local travel agent. Conditions apply. They got roadblocked, guys jumped out of a vehicle with high-powered rifles, and they broke them out of jail. So this actually happens, like the stuff we see in movies, it does happen in real life. Yeah, and that was the second breakout. So we didn't really get into, they broke those two guys out, and they are to the wind. They somehow get them off island, and we never hear, well, I wouldn't say we never hear from them again. We did hear from them again.

One guy got killed in a, one of those Colombians got killed in Columbia in Bogota and a traffic accident. The other guy whose nickname was Stab, by the way. Stab was never seen from again. And so all this is going on. And at the same time, we're beginning prosecution on the case in the Southern District of Georgia on these main guys. And so I said it was a second breakout. So the first one was the primary target in that same case with the 1,200 kilos. And that wasn't all.

I mean, we had 6,000 kilos on that group as well. on a on a on a on a it's another it's this a very long story but um there was a freighter that these guys had purchased to run cocaine in and it was it was intercepted i learned of it uh man i don't know how much time we got here man this this could go on for a while but the the freighter was intercepted out of information that i received during the search warrants back in 98 and the coast guard boarded the ship and they had retrofitted the ship with like a switch they could flip the switch and begin sinking the ship and so and there was no way once that was flipped there was no way to stop it basically so they were trying to pump water out but it was flowing in quicker than they

could pump it out they ended up cooperating with Cuba and Cuba allowed them to bring it in the Cuban waters and let it sink on a reef and they recovered the 6,000 kilos which we also charged in the case so all this um all this was pending at the time that there was a contract taken out on me and so and the one guy had like I said they broke him out of we had him once in custody in meddy in Colombia then they broke him out of jail and then he went on the run again we did the america's most wanted feature on him but we ended up grabbing him a second time this time in venezuela and we this This time we didn't really ask for permission.

The Venezuelan said he was in the legal, he was illegally in the country, and so they allowed us to basically kidnap him out of the country. So we grabbed him, and we didn't, we skipped right past the Virgin Islands. We flew him on a customs or an FBI plane directly from Venezuela to the Southern District of Georgia, and there he sat in prison. So all that's going on. Meanwhile, shit is hitting a fan in the Virgin Islands. there's contracts being taken on my life.

There's something weird going on with Diaz getting followed. And then Rick also gets an incident where we had another dirty police officer who we knew was connected to that same organization, the violent end of the organization, not even the drug trafficking in the organization. And he was friends with these guys. We'd catch him on surveillance all the time

hanging out with these guys. And these guys were notorious. Like everybody knew that these guys, These were bad people. And so Rick goes home one day and he's getting followed. It's the same sort of thing like Diaz. And then when he gets to his house, that same dirty police officer is set up at his,

in the parking lot outside of his condo. And so we're like, all right, shit's getting weird. Well, flash forward. Like, you knew something was coming, like you could feel it. Even from the time the source was murdered, like you knew like something was built like we were building up to something and he would even like the source gets murdered then there's the contract that's put on a me that looks like it gets foiled then there's the attempt to follow Diaz the attempt to follow Rick there's this dirty cop who we

know is connecting the organization all these things are happening but it's like there's not enough to go on. And so the organization well kind of what ends up happening is both Rick and I were very close to Diaz's kids.

They're practically like our kids. And I guess his son was probably seven, eight years old. His daughter was maybe six at the time. And we would we'd hang out with them all the time. The kids, we'd take a beach and stuff like that.

We had been out repelling with his son earlier that day. And the family, they owned a business. It was called chicken shack. It's still there to this day. Best chicken on the island. If you ever go to St. Croix, you need to go to chicken shack.

It's really become a landmark. And he ran it with his father, the chicken shack with his father. And after we went repelling with his son, we dropped him off in the afternoon or early evening to his father at Chicken Check to the family business, went home, and there's the son had fallen asleep in the father's, the grandfather's pickup truck, his grandfather's pickup truck.

And so Diaz, who was assigned to the task force, gave his keys for his vehicle to his father and said, I'll take your truck, you take my truck. and so Diaz drove his son home and his father was on his way to his house and his truck he's driving down the road and a pickup truck

speeds up and then passes him and when he gets side by side with him there's guys with high power rifles pitch in the back of the perched in the back of the pickup truck they opened fire on Diaz's truck and they put like 50 rounds through the windshield and his father's hit. And so I get a call maybe 11 o'clock at night and it's Diaz on the phone and he says, my dad's been hit.

And I said, have you been hit? And there's a pause on the phone. And I thought he had been shot for sure. And I yelled back, have you been hit? And he says, no, but I don't think my dad's going to make it. And I said, where are you? And he says, I'm heading to the hospital. And I said, I'm on the way.

So I get in a vehicle and I shoot down the hillside from my house, start heading to the hospital. And I'm calling everybody on the way. And so by the time I get there, everybody's arriving at the same time. Diaz is standing in the hallway with his wife, his two kids, and they're in there in a trauma, trauma bay working on his dad. And I said how bad. He says he's been hit multiple times. The chest, the face, arms, he's been hit multiple times. He says he's lost a ton of blood.

Before I go there, I stop by the scene and I see the truck. And the words that leave my mouth is no one will survive this. Like it was so riddle with bullet holes, there's no chance that he would have survived. And had that been his son in that seat, no chance. A lot of those rounds passed through that door where his son would have been. and so at this point like all shit has hit the fan this has gotten real really quick and so we're fighting with DEA management we need to get Diaz and his family out of here because there's obviously an active contract on them and like there's no leads whatsoever about who's done this it's like how does a vehicle just disappear we had a great description of the vehicle I think we even had some video footage of it but the vehicle on an 87 square mile island has disappeared and so like there's no information flowing and the same sort of lack of cooperation we felt when the source got got killed were the same things going on with diaz's dad like we're the ipD detectives are not coopering with us we have no

access to case files we don't know what they know we're feeding information to them they're not feeding anything back we're fighting with d a management they've got to get dia's out of here and finally they agree and they they put dia they put dia his wife and his two kids on a dna flight and they fly him out. So he goes up to the states and he's he remained stateside for several months while we're trying to unpack

all this. Well at the same time we're actively now because all shit has at the fan we've dropped everything. All the other cases were working none of it matters anymore and we're solely working on this one case

and and so there was like Like, we knew that violent organization was going to be like our target. And we're actively working wires. We're doing, we're throwing all the stops. We've got guys that are detained over in Puerto Rico at a detention center. And there's like a wreck area where people are allowed to go out.

And we've got wires in that wreck area. We're trying to hear anything we can, any indication. And during one of those wires, we get indication that there's contracts on Joe and there's also a contract on a Rick. And DEA goes, you're done, you're out of here. And so, like, overnight, they're not even allowed to pack. They're just put on a flight and they are gone. And so now I'm basically, it's myself and the task force with a handful of other DEA agents that are left over. And we're trying to unravel this.

And we're, they bring in some other DEA agents to try to help out. with any sort of casework they can. And we're actively working this thing, but it's like spinning our wheels. We're not getting crap for information. And so at this point, like, we're not sure, like, what is this going to look like in the end, right? And so I had taken some time off,

and I had flown to North Carolina. And I was just, my mind was like, I don't know if I'm going to stay. I don't know if I'm going to go. I don't know what I'm going to do. And I was still communicating. came with Diaz, obviously, because at this point he's my brother, and Rick as well. You know, Rick had been there for two years at this point. So Rick and I were like brothers as well and still

are to this day. And I get a call and they say, hey, where are you right now? And I was like, you know where I am. I'm in North Carolina. And they go, hmm, so-and-so has been murdered. I go, who? It's one of the lead targets. That's the lead target and the drug trafficking end of it. he's been murdered i said who murdered him you go we don't know they kidnapped him in the middle of the night took him to a remote part of the island they tortured him for a while and then they killed him we got his body but no suspect was like well good riddance to him and then a couple weeks later another lead target he's been murdered too and these like one by one these guys start getting pecked off. And of course, rumors are floating that these are being carried out by the task force,

you know, in retaliation for Diaz's father being shot. And we never saw the sense in trying to, like, dispel the rumors because, you know, if people thought we were crazy enough to start killing people, then they'd probably leave us alone. So one by one, some of these lead targets getting, start getting pecked off. And then the remaining ones, they like go into hiding. And the organization that once was is no more. The drug trafficking part of it,

the money part of it is gone. That lead target is gone. So the source of revenue for the whole organization has dried up. And then the violent part of it, some of their lead targets have been killed. And then other ones have like one of them had left island he was just he was just done and and so that's kind of like

um how that organization has fallen and then i continue to work drug cases in the years that followed um and at at some point a new governor comes into office and says i need a new um i need someone to head up my executive security team And Diaz says, Diaz gets approached by the governor and says, you're interested? And Diaz says, yeah. So he leaves the task force too. And I continue to work drug cases. And, you know, I kind of had lost my, I don't know, like a little bit of my energy for those high-level cases.

But I still have, like, I still have the drive and I still have the knowledge to do them. So I continue to work cases. And some of the original players that were there during that whole era are still there. including the resident agent in charge. One of the guys who was a case agent at the time becomes a resident agent in charge. He was a case agent when Diaz, his father was shot. He comes to a resident agent in charge.

So we continue to work cases. Diaz has gone over to the governor's security detail. The threat on him appears to be kind of not, you know, has kind of left because these guys have been, a lot of them have been murdered. but there are two main targets in this thing that are still out there. One of them is relocated up to Georgia. The other one's kind of in hiding.

We're not seeing him at all anymore. And so I'm kind of like, I'm feeling a lot like I'm the last surviving, like, OG in the task force. And so, at least for VIPD. And so, but at this point, you know, I've really, like, I've learned how to work cases and I know kind of where our strengths and weaknesses are, and I've got like this knowledge on how to do things that I've acquired over my career that I don't want to go to waste, but there is a part of me that's kind of like,

I felt like we didn't have the support of the police department. We definitely didn't have the support of the police department. We didn't, in the U.S. Attorney's Office, was lacking as well. And there was also this huge problem that existed since the start, is that you just never knew what was going to happen and when you tried to prosecute a case in the Virgin Islands. And so I think that, I wouldn't say that I didn't have the motivation, but I was very, I was very cautious on trying to go after cases

where I didn't see a venue off island. And for like the first time in my career, like lower-end cases started to get interesting to me, right? And I could apply this knowledge that I had that I gained during the larger cases into the lower stuff. and so I had worked this one source, a female source, and she was good. She certainly wasn't as good as the guy who would pull his own teeth, but she was pretty good. But she was giving me a lower-end stuff, and she told me about an indoor marijuana grow.

And we voided, like, the only time we were doing anything marijuana-related is like if we needed a break. We would do marijuana eradication, and growing marijuana during that time frame was like a national pastime on the island. And so we would get a helicopter and go out there and just rake havoc. And we could get 10,000 plants and sometimes in like one day. Because it seemed like everybody was growing a small marijuana field in their backyard, you know. And so we did some of those cases, but usually it was only if we were trying to get to something else. And she gave me a target who was out in the rainforest. And he was just, he was a mope.

And he was really shitty at growing weed. But he had like this shack next to his house. and I got a covert entry warrant to break into the shack and install cameras in it. And so we go, uh, so kind of the layout of it is the houses,

you'd have to like come off on the main road. You kind of go down over the, under this, like on this ravine. Then you go back up to the house. The shack was more on the opposite side of the ravine from the roadway, but it was in it kind of toward the house. And it was just surrounded by like mango trees. and so one night zero dark 30

like I was embarrassed to do it because I was using a bunch of assets to go after this guy who was just like super low end right but we we go in there pick the lock we install hammers in this thing and we start monitoring this guy tending to his plans and immediately when I walk in I was like the guy's a total amateur

like he he didn't have enough like actual grow lights he had the place kind of marginally air-conditioned, but he was trying to make up with, for the lack of grow lights by using like street lights, actual street lights, which is just burning the shit out of the plants. But somehow, I don't know how, but somehow the plants were still growing,

and he had like a couple hundred plants in there. And so I did that case, which was fun. And then that same source ends up giving me kind of a middle level guy who came from a very prominent family in the Virgin Islands and she'd give me information that he was involved in drug trafficking

but his son was also involved in murders and so I started I started targeting that guy and asking a search warrant on that guy and he had family members that were tied in the Virgin Islands government too which put me deeper into like the bad graces of a lot of people in the Virgin Islands government. And then I was, we were still working the information on Diaz's father shooting,

but it had kind of like hit like a dead end. Like we weren't getting any cooperation from the police department. They weren't sharing any case files information with us. We were providing information to them, but there was no exchange. It was just a very one-way street. And likewise, we began looking at this torture, murder, and dismemberment of this Virgin Islands police officer by that same violent organization. And FBI had cooperated a source in that who was present when it happened. And what she said was she was dating one of these violent crime guys.

And she said she got a call from him in the middle of the night and said, I'm coming to pick you up. I need help with something. And they, they, he picked her up and he brought her to this, um, abandoned building that was on the east end of the island, along the south shore on the east end. And, uh, they went down this like two-track road that was just heavy, heavily overgrown in like what we call guinea grass, this like five foot tall grass. they eventually got to the point where there was another vehicle and they stopped in the road and he says come with me

he led her down the dirt road to this small building that used to be a generator building and she could see light from in the building and when she went in she saw this police officer and he was handcuffed to this pole that went in the center of the room and she says um he was stripped down to his underwear and he was on his knees and he was pleading for his life and the two lead targets in our violent organization who had not been murdered yet were there with him and he was he was pleading for his life and saying he wouldn't say anything eventually a guy pulls out a gun and he puts up his hand and the guy shoots him through his hand and at that point it was though he knew he was going to die eventually she shot him the the gang member

shot him in the head and killed him and so she like runs out of the building she's terrified she's she's she doesn't know like she knew her boyfriend was bad I don't think she understood the extent of how bad he was

and she didn't learn until the following day that this was a police officer she actually saw his picture in the paper and recognized him. And so the reason they had brought her there is they wanted her to clean up the blood because they were going to cut up his body and get rid of it. And so she had gotten sick. She threw up. And her boyfriend had told her, you either get it together, you're going to end up like him. And so she did like a really lousy job, but did her best to try to clean up the blood after they dismembered him. And so that source immediately fled. the island and after several months, she couldn't live with it anymore, and she went and told FBI

about it. And so the information came back, and we went to the location that she said, and if you understand this building and where it was, there's no way anybody would have firsthand knowledge of the layout of that building unless they had actually been there, and you would never even know the building was there if you were just passing the road. It was like so overly, overly grown in foliage that there's just no way you would have known it was there. And so she, and she described it to the T. The pole in the middle of everything was, was perfect. And so we were pushing the U.S. Attorney's Office to do a case on this, and no one thought we had enough. And so we were pushing even local prosecutors, and again, even with an eyewitness, they believed that we

didn't have enough. Or perhaps they were just scared and didn't want to do it. And so that case was like just lingering out there. And this is the same group of guys that were involved, according to information, involved in the shooting of the Tempton Diaz's life that led to his father being shot. And so we, again, we're kind of like at a standstill with that. And I began working other cases and slowly other cases start like taking up time. Those cases never, the case on the murder of the police officer and the shooting of Diaz's dad, they never really went away. They were still lingering out there,

but they continued for years afterwards, and people were just spinning their wheels, and it was starting to, they were getting to be cold cases at this point. And so they were getting harder, and the other problem with it is we had no cooperation, no collaboration between the VIPD detectives and us. So we didn't know what they had, they wouldn't share case files with us.

So we really couldn't do a lot. And so I had received information on a group of guys that were involved in multi-kilogram loads out of St. Martin. So they would go over on a boat. They had a go-fast boat, and they also had a smaller, like, run-around boat. they'd go over there pick up loads bring them back and they were selling kilogram loads and and so I had uh I had applied for a track and transponder on one of their boats and uh so we he kept it in a yard was a fenced in yard on a trailer and we said all right well we're back to this again dealing with a dog because there's a dog tied to the back of the boat so um we go there again to a

o'clock in the morning is Diaz and I we jump the wall get in the yard immediately the dog goes ape shit right it's like all right we're going to have to deal with this dog so we we end up um getting we use a night vision video camera and we film the entire boat the layout of it wherever all the wiring harnesses are while the dog's going ape shit in the yard waking up the whole neighborhood we're in and out in like 30 seconds before anybody comes out and sees us there we get the the intelligence and the information we need to install a transponder on the boat so we can we can track it and uh so then we go back to this vet used to give us vials of fenton barbitol we get fenton barbital and start injecting hot dogs and we we go there in the middle of night and start feeding this dog uh hot dogs full of bent

fent and barbital and the plan is we go in at like two o'clock in the morning we dope the dog we leave come back like an hour and a half later after it has a chance of chance to to kick in and then do the install. So we put a surveillance team, a counter surveillance team on the opposite side of the roadway of this guy's house. And they're like, they're in gilly suits and they're literally like stuck into a bush. It's like it's a manicured yard, you know, with low, you know, just regular grass. But then there's a bush in there. And that's the only cover they have is they're in that bush. They've got a flur camera. And our plan is we're going to go jump the fence. I climb aboard the boat.

Diaz will provide cover and as well as the counter surveillance team on the opposite side. So we get there, dog is asleep. Drugs are working. Get aboard the boat. Pull out the transponder. Figure out how I'm going to wire it into the boat's wiring harness and the dog wakes up. Dogs going apes shit. Like as though the drugs aren't doing anything for him.

Like I don't know how he fought it off, but the dog's going ape shit. So right then Counter surveillance comes over my earpiece And goes you got to get out right now And I go And I thought they were talking about just the dog Well what I didn't know is the drug trafficker And come out of the house

And so he's he's got a flashlight And he's shining in the yard but not near the boat So I look up and I kind of like sideways my head off From below the deck And I see him and he's pointed He's looking the opposite direction And so I jump off the boat and I joined Diaz and we we tear ass jump the fence I'm sure he saw us but I don't think

he knew what he saw like I for all he knew someone was stealing parts off the boat he didn't really know so we run down the street to a neutral location and get prone down in the grass and then our counter surveillance team was supposed to join us there if shit hits the fan well they're nowhere to we found they couldn't get out they decided that if they left there that would burn the surveillance and so they're pinned down there and they're going to wait for this guy to go to sleep Well, the guy doesn't go sleep right away. In fact, other traffickers that are associated to them start showing up and everybody's searching the yard with flashlight.

And we're like, it's only a matter of time. Like our counter surveillance team is going to get burnt, right? So we're like, we're kicking around ideas. Like, how do we get them out of here if they get burnt? And so we're like, we should just roll in and grab them, throw them in a van and we'll go. Because at this point, we figure, you know, it's over. And all of a sudden they come on the radio and they said, hold tight. It's starting to calm down.

And so it must have taken. It was almost light out. Like, and if it got light, it was over. Like, they had cover, but it wasn't so good that if it was daylight, they would have been seen. And so it was right before, like, daylight had hit. And they go, come get us. We're on the way to the neutral location. And so we get them out.

Transponder, we decide we cannot try it there at that location anymore. It's a couple weeks goes by. and then we get a break and he moves this boat to a mechanics yard to have some work done on it and the mechanic had dogs too but the dogs were friendly and it was a fenced-in yard I jumped the fence when the mechanic's not around still have an active order to get the transponder on make friends with the dogs get the transponder on the boat now belongs to us so anywhere that boat goes in the world we know where it's going to be at any given time so this is like a major break in the case.

Well, the, um, we get a call at the same time from Puerto Rico, DEA and Puerto Rico. They said, hey, do you know a couple of drug traffickers by this name,

these names? And I said, yeah, we just got a transponder on their boat. And they said, they're willing to sell us 10 kilos of cocaine right now. And I was like, oh, shit.

Like all this work and we're going to do a, basically a buy bust, right? And I was like, well, I'd say if we can get put, put 10 kilos on the table. we just do it. And so they, they were willing to indict the case. That was the other advantage.

They were willing to indict the case in Puerto Rico. So if we had done the case, we were, by this point, the U.S. Attorney's Office was about, about had it with us doing jurisdiction outside the Virgin Islands. They needed cases in order to support, you know, to support their existence. And so they, they weren't, we had to really have to come up with a good excuse in order to bring a case off island. But because these guys were coming from Puerto Rico and the negotiations were done in Puerto Rico, So they had venue over there. And so we, again, we're in gilly suits. We're at a surveillance location in the bushes.

And they send over two undercovers and negotiate for 10 kilos of cocaine at a bar that we're doing surveillance on. And we grab these guys when they pull out a duffel bag with 10 kilos on it. So we take these guys down. So then we're like, all right, well, all ends well, you know, that's the end of that. And so I was like, you know, I don't think that's the end of that. There's two guys in this. These guys were running multi-kilos. They had to have a whole another organization.

So I fly over to Puerto Rico to the federal detention center there, and I start listening to their prison calls. And these guys are talking about, they're talking to, there's three main guys that are involved. They were tip. They started off as street-level dealers, but they had kind of moved up. One guy's the crack cook.

He's like, his main thing is cooking crack. There's another guy who's, he's involved in all these guys are involved in a whole bunch of stuff they've been involved in homicides they involved in lots of gun stuff but it's it's mostly cocaine powder and crack um some marijuana too the one guy was trying to go like full time be a rastafarian and he was trying to get away from like any of the violent stuff and selling crack but he'd still do it like he wasn't he wasn't fully involved with salasi i yet like he was he was uh he was still on the fence when it came to peer pressure from his buddies. And so these guys were like they ran kind of a street level

distribution center, but they were actively cooking crack. And the lead guy was, he was involved in kilos of crack. And so I said, all right, well, these are good targets. So I used the calls from the guys that were grabbed and went over to Puerto Rico to get me up on a wire on two guys' phones. It was two of the main guys. There was the third guy I wanted, but we didn't have, we didn't have enough to get on their phone. And at this point, the U.S. Attorney's Office, they were like, these wire things, we don't have anybody that's an expert in it. And Department of Justice has these expert wire writers. And so we're going to, we're going to go ahead and use this DOJ person to write the wire.

So the, and now keep in mind, while all this is going on, that's, case that I was my first case in the task force is still got residual things going on and one of the things that was going on was um a few years earlier I tried to seize a boat that belonged to one of the drug traffickers who didn't get indicted in that case and um and we we couldn't get it when we went to go get it the boat was the engines were taken apart and it was like it didn't make sense it was more of a liability and it was an asset at this point so we decided to leave it it. Well, the boat was back up and running and it was in really good shape and it was a it was a go fast boat. And this honestly was not my motivation to do this. I wanted that asset from the

start, but the boat had history. And the reason the boat had history is there's a rapper, a New York rapper, and I will not say his name, but he is a household name as is his wife, who allegedly was involved in cocaine trafficking in the 90s before his rap career took off and he became a billionaire and one of his first rap videos was filmed on that boat in the Virgin Islands. You can still find it online.

I'll tell you who it is afterwards. I think I figured it out. Okay. So that boat had history because of that. And so, and honestly, that wasn't why I wanted the boat. It was like I wanted that boat from the start. So we had gotten information that it was still out there. And it was now up and running.

So we hatch a plan in the middle of all these other things that are going on to go over to St. Thomas and grab the boat while it's in the water. So we go over and the plans were going to hotware, the Ogun and Hotware the boat. We're going to bring it back to St. Croix. And it had these high performance engines in it, inboard, outboard engines. He was using it for racing and stuff too. And we go over there, we hot water the boat, and we bring it, we secure it, take it out where it is, we secure it, and that asset is out there. We've got it in the systems, the U.S. Marshals is keeping track of that asset.

And we had problems like finding a place to put it, because there was other boats that were seized by the task force. And if they stayed in marinas, guys would light them on fire because they figured if I can't have it no one's going to have it so the drug traffickers would burn their own boats rather than let us have it and there was even one guy that we were trying to find his his BMW and he hired someone with a backhoe and buried that back buried that BMW so no one could get no one could seize it true story anyways so um the uh so we got the boat and secured it and a couple months goes by and i get a call from someone and it's like it's one of these calls that you're like did that just happen is like

and he goes, hey, this is so-and-so with the State Department, right? And I want to talk to you about this boat that he seized. He starts asking all these questions about the boat. And I said, he's asking me, you know, like, is it in good shape? You know, he's not asking me like the size of it or anything like that. He's got pictures of it and everything like that. And I was like, hey, what does the State Department want with this boat? And they're like, because he wanted it.

He said the State Department's interested in it. And I said, what do they want it for? And he gives me this bullshit excuse about how they're thinking about Senate, I don't want to say like Nigeria or something like that in case there's like civil unrest they can get Americans out. I was like, dude, this is a go fast boat. You can put like maybe four people on it comfortably. It's a race boat. That doesn't even, the story doesn't even make sense.

And he's like, yeah, yeah, you're probably right. It's fine. And we hang up. And I was like, there's no way that's guys with the State Department. I was thinking it's got to be an intelligence agency, right? And so I have like this tracking sheet like that keeps track of where assets are like same week. It disappears off the tracking sheet. So I call the marshals.

I go, hey, what happened to the boat? And they're like some guys showed up. They had all the right paperwork. They took it. And I was like, who were they with? And they said, we don't know. They were just government agency. They had everything they needed.

It had a vehicle to tow it. And they took it. So it just disappeared, never to be seen from again. So never knew where that boat went. So, so that was that was going on. And then meanwhile, I'm, I start working these wire cases on this group that's affiliated to the group that's now been shipped off to Puerto Rico to stand trial. And these guys were like, hands down the most, I don't know how to describe it. They were just like clueless.

They were, they were like, they had no concern apparently. of law enforcement because normally when you're on a wire, like they won't, they don't say, obviously they don't say cocaine. They don't say kilos. They don't, everything's coated, right? Except with exception to these guys. These guys were just like wide open. They were just like, they would say kilos. They would say ounces. They would say cocaine. They would, like, they would say crack. I'm going to my sister's house to cook rocks. Like, it was insane. And I'm like, is this for real? Like this? And so we had just gotten this new DEA agent in. And he had, I don't know which office he came from.

I think it was Omaha. And he's like, what is wrong with these guys? Like, these guys have never been touched. And I was like, apparently not. And so we're like getting all the, and you got to be very selective, especially in a wire like this. You don't want to like react to everything you get

because then they're going to figure out you're on a wire and they're going to dump the phone. And the person that they sent from DOJ to write the wire, we had, we had effectively referred to her as the Dragon Lady. She was extremely good, but she was a very purpose-built machine. She had no personality at all. She would ask you to do something, and you better have it in like right now. She had no patience at all.

She was very short lady, and she was extremely good at what she did, but she was very, very high maintenance. So like we, I was a full-time job dealing with her, and you don't just write a wire and get up on it. It's not, and judge signs that you get up on it. It doesn't work that way. You have to do these reports every, I think it's 15 or 30 days to the judge. You have to detail pertinent calls. You have to detail non-pertenant calls. And when you're up on a wire, you listen to it.

Call picks up. You determine if it's pertinent or not. If it's not pertinent, you do what's called minimize. You shut off the pertinent part of it. So you can't hear it anymore. And then you're able to periodically spot check and see if they're still talking about something. that's non-purtinent or they've started talking about drug talk or something related to your investigation, then you can listen again. So there's a whole process of that. It's called minimization.

You have to understand the process. So we're running this wire. And by this time, you know, it's not like just the task force guys. DEA is like they're bringing in assets to help us monitor this stuff. And we have, we have contract monitors that have come in for it. And we're up on these two phones. And it, like I said, it's just, it's just off the chain. And so we eventually, like, all right, we got to start getting some drugs on the table because we've got these great calls. We don't want to burn the wire, but we've got to start finding creative ways of getting drugs on the table,

otherwise we're not going to have a chargeable case. So we take this new DEA agent that comes in from Omaha, and we get information that this one guy goes to a sister's house and cook crack, right, in a microwave he has at his sister's house. There's like a little room off side, out of the garage, like a storage room, his microwave and he cooks crack. And so the plan is,

next time we learn that he's going to the sister's house, we're going to take this DEA agent, put him in a VIPD vehicle and uniform. He's going to pull him over in a traffic stop. He's going to seize the drugs and money he's got on him and then tell him to go. So he's going to believe this drug dealer is going to believe that he just got robbed by the police.

and which is a plausible scenario in the Virgin Islands, right? And this is a way that we can get drugs on the table without exposing the investigation, the DEA investigation, because this DEA agent's unknown. And he's a Viet, he's half Vietnamese, half American. And so he kind of, I mean, not really, but maybe to someone that didn't know better might have looked like a Puerto Rican.

We thought it was hilarious because they thought he was a Puerto Rican. So he goes there, he cooks, And his thing is he would take these crack cookies and he'd put him in like the gas, like, you know, the gas flap on your car. You know, the, he would open it up, kind of put him in there and then close it and kind of lock it in place. So if he got pulled over and the car got searched, he figured they would never look in the gas cap. And so, or the gas hatch or whatever you call it. And so he pulls him over and he searches the guy's car, no one it's not in there. And the last thing he does before he leaves is he pops the thing on it and the crack falls out.

And he takes the crack and he puts it in his pocket. He goes, that's mine now. Get the fuck out of here. And the guy's like, what? He's like, you heard me. Get the fuck out of here. And he goes, give me back my money. And he goes, here.

And he had like a wad of cash he had taken from him. He gives him like $5. And he goes, go play the lottery. Now get the fuck out of here. And the guy's like, what? And so he gets in the unit, drives away, leaves the guy with all this crap from in the car, just left on the roadway.

And so we're just waiting. We're waiting. All of a sudden, that, target calls that just got traffic stop calls the other target that we're also on a wire on and the conversations like this he goes i just got robbed by the motherfucking police and do we are we are laughing our asses off in the wire room we're like this worked perfectly right and so they're telling that one drug trafficker is telling the other draft trafficker to go to the police station and report them to internal affairs right and uh he goes who was it like

because they know most of the cops. And he goes, I don't know, I've never seen him before. He's some Puerto Rican dude. And so they had no idea it was us, right? So that's like the first seizure in the case. We get drugs on the table. So there's this third guy who's, we got basically three primary targets.

The third guy is like he's, he's, we can't get up on a wire on him. We can't even, like, he has a phone and he would get like prepaid phones and dump them. He's pretty smart. And he doesn't say a lot on the wire. Like he would call the other guys and he would talk in code, but they understood it. But what saved us is then they would get on the phone and say, hey, so-and-so just called me.

He told me we need to move this here or whatever. So we were learning like what this guy was saying through the two guys that were on the phones on. And so he says, he calls the guy one day and he tells him, I need you to find. And he gives the name of a guy. and that was a known cooker for crack. And so our one target, the same one that we had traffic stopped, begins looking for this guy who's the cooker. And he says, like hours go by.

And this is like on a Saturday. And he says, once you find them, call me, I'm going to get a room. And we knew that they would cook crack in hotel rooms. Like if it was a big cook, They would just rent a hotel room or a condo and use the kitchen in the condo to cook crack. And then they would just be done with it in a few hours after the crack was cooked.

So on a Saturday, everybody's on surveillance looking for the hotel room and trying to figure out who this guy is trying to find, the cooker he's trying to find. So he eventually, he finds the cooker and he calls back the target and he says, I got him. And he goes, good.

Bring him down to the room and pick up two, big boxes of baking soda on the way, right? Crack has three ingredients. Water, cocaine, baking soda, right? So we're like, all right, they're definitely cooking crack. So we figure out which hotel the room they're at. We set up surveillance on it. And so there's three guys in the room. Surveillance detects three guys in the room, but our primary target we're up on the wire, he drops the guy off, and he goes. So he's no longer there. So I make a decision, because we're not jeopardizing the two guys were on wires on, we're going to take them when they come out.

We're going to just go ahead and grab them. So we get a search warrant for the room by a telephonic search warrant from the judge. And we wait. All of the guys, not the primary target, he's still left in the room in the condo. The two guys come out. One guy's carrying a bag, like a big ass bag. And they get in the vehicle. We box them in, pull them out of the vehicle.

and the bag contains crack. It's a lot. It's like a kilogram of crack. And so the one guy, who's our primary target, we haven't been able to get a wire on, he comes out and he sees us, sees that we've grabbed the two guys. He takes off running.

I take off running after him. He goes bolting through this parking lot, and it's been raining, and I get an opportunity to grab them, and I tackle him into a rental vehicle and dent the shit out of the fender, in the hood. Like we, like we went, we hit the fender, went sliding across the hood, end up on the pavement, hit the ground, and immediately he takes off and he's running again. So I get up and I'm

running after him again. Another agent, the Omaha agent, he's with me in the chase. He gets to this fence line like that's leading down to the bench, to the beach rather, and he goes over the fence. The DEA agent, he follows him. I being the more experienced guy, open the fence that's on and I walked through instead of scaling the fence, right? So that becomes like the source of a lot of entertainment from here on because they, these two guys took the time to jump over this fence, like scale this fence where I just open the thing and walk through, right? So we chase him a couple hundred feet down the beach, tackle them on the beach and get him

into custody. He had been throwing crack the entire way. So we're falling like the breadcrumbs of crack he's been thrown along the way. You know, good size crack cookies that they've been cooking in this hotel room plus what's in the car. So we get those guys into custody. And so now, like, the wire case kind of like starts to pick up. Like we've got now a very large drug seizure on them.

These guys are going to go away for a while. So it's like, yeah, if we get burned at this point in the wire, not a big deal, right? And so we go and we, we, we figure, we know that the one guy who was cooking at his sister's house, he had guns at the house. He mentions it on the wire. He had guns. He had police bulletproof vests. And he had police clothing, which we kind of did the math where that stuff came from. Like someone in the inside, obviously, had given it to him.

And so we decided we're going to execute a search warrant at his sister's house. And so we get a search warrant. We go in there. we get the guns we get the bulletproof vest we get ski mask and we get the police clothing and then we take the microwave

that's he's been using to cook crack because the whole thing is like crack has been cooking in there and popping and shit it's just crusted and crack the inside of the microwave so it becomes a drug within itself right

so we grab those things and then we go and we rest his sister and we put the sister in the back of one of our units and we let her keep her cell phone. So she calls her brother, we do this deliberately, she calls her brother and says, they executed a search warrant

at my house, and I'm under arrest. And he goes, what did they get? And she, he goes, I don't know, they said guns and vests, and he goes, I got four kilos of coke there. He goes, do they get the cocaine? She goes, I don't know

about the cocaine. And she's like, all right, I'm going. So he's going to make a run to the sister's house, try to get cocaine. There's four kilos of Coke there. We didn't even find, right? And so because we were there for specific things, right? The things that we knew about. We didn't know about the four kilos until then.

So now I'm on the phone and on the radio and I'm like, everybody get back to the sister's house, right? And it's a race, right? So we're going lights and sirens, blaring, hauling ass across the island to get back to the sister's houses to secure it before. he gets there and gets the four kilos out. So we pass him on the way to the sister's house in the neighborhood. Like he was just like a minute away from the sister's house when we blow past him. We get to the sister's house to secure the house, get another search warrant. We get the four

kilograms of cocaine. So while this is going on, his world is falling apart, right? He gets on the phone with his girlfriend. He goes, get my safe, get my guns, take it all in the backyard and get rid of it. And so she's like, I'm doing laundry. And he's yelling in the phone, get that fucking shit and get it out of the house. He goes, police are coming there now. And he says, then go to my mom's house and get that shit out of that house there. And so we're like, go to the sisters, go to his girlfriend's house or to his mom's house and his house and secure that, right? He goes, I'm on the way.

So one of the guys in the task force, they're the first to arrive. And he tells them the instructions that he gives to his girlfriend. is to take everything and throw it over the fence into like a wooded area in the back so it's not on the property right and so we but the girlfriend is a dits right and so we pull into the driveway and she's in the mom lives on the property in one house he's got another house that's off to the side it's all on the same property right and so we pull into the the driveway and the mom is seated in the girlfriend's vehicle. The girl is in the driver's seat.

She's got the car in reverse when we pull in. The mom has got a safe sitting on her lap, and the girl is sitting on the guns. She never threw the shit away. She was going to drive it away, I guess. So she gets grabbed, and mom, we arrest mom too. And then we do the same thing. We leave them in the back of a police car with their cell phones.

And what do they do? They call up, tell them, hey, we just got arrested. And he's freaking out. And so like his world has now, we've gotten everything from him. And so then we just started executing like more search warrants. And because at this point, we're no longer a covert investigation. We're completely overt. Like, they know we're on them, right?

But the guys continue to talk on their phones. Like they, they never stop. The one guy who we've arrested now, his sister, his girlfriend and his mom, he still continues to talk on the phone. And they're like telling him, like, dump your phone. like you got to dump your phone but he's like yeah yeah i'm going to dump it but then he would just keep talking and there's no there's no discipline at all when he's on the phone he just kept he just kept talking and kept giving us more evidence and so this went on for a good couple more months and we

continue to execute search warrants every opportunity we get and we're just racking up exhibits and then eventually it's like all right i think we've done enough we've got enough evidence and we we took everybody down so so that case was like that case had happened and um And so all that is pending trial. I'm still working some kind of lower-end cases. And then what happens is I execute this one search warrant, and it's on a, it's on this guy who's, he's got family connected into the Virgin Islands government.

We won't go into more detail than that. But, and his son's involved in multiple homicides. And he's another one of these guys that are, kind of like, I think people are afraid of them. And so, like, he's involved in all sorts of different things, homicide, stolen property, all drugs, all sorts of things. But he's one of these guys that skated by and no one's gone after him. And I execute that search warrant. And we're, we're in the office processing paperwork and evidence. And Diaz walks in. And he's, of course, She's assigned to the governor by this time.

And he says, hey, I need a favor. And I said, what? He goes, governor needs a new chief of police. And I was like, absolutely no. It's like, I don't want anything to do with that. And I go, you got to be crazy. And he's like, I know. He goes, but there are good officers in there.

And he's trying to sell me on this idea. And I'm like, absolutely not. and I go, you know, we're still doing cases here. We got some, I mean, I don't, we don't have, we don't have a Rambo anymore. We don't have a Joe anymore. We don't have ideas anymore. But we got some good guys. And we're working cases and we're doing some good work.

And it's like, I don't have any intention of going over there again. If I could avoid that place for the rest of my career, I got a few years left before I can retire. I said, I just want to finish up my time here and go. And I certainly don't want to go back. to a place where I'm going to be working next to people that I formally investigated. And so he's like, well, think about it. And so I was like, there's nothing to think about, Dee. I'm not doing it.

And so we kind of, you know, he leaves. I don't hear anything else about it for a while. And then it's kind of a funny story. So I had, I was living in this apartment that was. in the rainforest, right? And there would be stray things that wandered in the yard every once in a while. And there were, like, there was goats that

wandered in one time. There was, there was, there was a chicken that was that had wandered into the yard in the morning and it was like, fucking wait, every morning the thing would wake me up, right? And so I was on like this capture or kill mission to get rid of this chicken and I'm in the bushes looking for it and I get a phone call from Diaz. And I had

previously asked him about, hey, help me help me get this chicken, right? And so I look at my phone, caller ID, and it's Diaz. And I go, I answer the phone. I said, hey, when are you going to get your ass up here and help me murder this fucking thing? And it's the governor on the phone.

He was using Diaz's phone. And he says, is this Sergeant Howell? I said, and I immediately realize who it is. And I was like, oh, yes, sir. I said, I got a chicken problem. Diaz is supposed to help me with, right?

And so he's like, oh, yeah. He goes, he says, no problem, no problem. The governor was like really cool. And he's like, he's like, listen. He goes, things aren't working out with the current deputy chief. He goes, he goes, would I like, you know, Dia says great things about you. I've been following your career.

Would you be interested in taking it? And I said, honestly, governor, I said, you know, I'm a criminal investigator. I go, that's my thing. I go, I'm not an administrative guy. And I said, I really am, I'm not. I'm not the right person for the job. He says, well, do me favor. He says, don't say yes or no.

and he says just just think about it and I was like I said I'll think about it but I can tell you that my my answer is not going to change and so he says all right he says well I appreciate your time he goes you need a thing you know have Diaz give you know my number and and I'd love to talk to you about it so we hang up the phone and I was like all right I dodge the bullet right of course I called Dia's back and I'm like dick next time you could

give me a heads up and don't give my name to the governor anymore. And in fairness to Diaz, he didn't. And governor, governor approached Diaz because he knew Diaz and I were tight, but the governor had come up with my name all on his own. And so, like 20 minutes later, I get a phone call from the police commissioner. And he goes, he, and I answered the phone. I said, hey, sir, how are you? And he goes, Deputy Chief. And I was like, no. I was like, oh, shit. So now he's involved in it. And I was like, not interested. I'm not the right guy for the job. And then he said something that kind of like chills down my spine. He goes, if you don't accept the position, there's no

guarantee you're going to stay where you're at. He goes, we're always looking for detectives over in the Investigation Bureau. And I'm like, holy shit. If I were to go over there, that would be like, like, that would be bad. You know, because these are the same people we've been fighting with over Diaz's father shooting, over the, you know, the other investigations of the, you know, the other investigations that they won't cooperate with the source being murdered. I mean, so I wanted nothing to do with that. And so I was like, sir, I really appreciate it, but I don't think I'm the right guy for this job.

And so we hang up the phone and I was like, I think I dodged the bullet. Like maybe I dodged the bullet. And then I really begin to think I've dodged the bullet because I don't hear anything for a couple of weeks. And then one morning, I get a call like early in the morning and I don't recognize the number on my phone. and I answer it and they go, hey, deputy chief, this is so-and-so, I'm the public information officer for the police department.

I just wanted to say congratulations on your appointment and I look forward to working with you. And like there hadn't been like very little conversation in between the whole chicken fiasco and the conversation with the commissioner. There was rumblings. There was little things here and there. I would occasionally get like a little indication that they were interested. but certainly nothing like imminent right and i was like so i said to her i go i'm not sure i understand what we're talking about and i hadn't heard anything for a few weeks so i figured it was over and and i go i'm not sure what we're talking about and she goes your appointment was

released to the newspapers last night by government house and it's in the papers today and i was like can i call you back and she's like sure and i hang up the phone and immediately jump in my car I go down to a store front page of the paper. I've been appointed to the deputy chief position. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. And so I call the commissioner, and I'm like, commissioner, what is going on? He goes, you're going to be great. He goes, you know, just do what you do.

And, you know, I want you to get everybody working together and as a team. And I'm just like, oh, I'm like dying inside. And I'm like, so I go down to police headquarters. orders that day and as I'm walking through the parking lot I see the dirty cop who followed Rambo was doing surveillance on Rambo and was hanging around with those guys in the parking lot talking to another dirty cop who was a target of our investigation and they look at me and give me this hard stare and I gave him a hard stare back and a nod and I'm like this is gonna be a fucking nightmare and so

So I go into the deputy chief position. Memorial Day weekend is almost here and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, total wine and more is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzer for the cooler. And with everything that goes into summer, it's nice knowing you're getting the lowest prices. Total Wine and More, your Memorial Day made easy. Shop Total Wine and More in store or online.

Spirits not sold in Virginia, North Carolina. Drink responsibly, must be 21. And, like, that's where the story starts to get kind of crazy. And I don't know how much further we can go into that part of it. Yeah. Well, Chris, you've lived quite a crazy life. Yeah. Insane.

Yeah. It's been an interesting ride. Does it feel weird being back in the United States? So it does and it has been a very difficult adjustment. I can't get into the circumstances what brought me back here. But the only thing I can say right now is that my career there ended violently. We can say that. And it is no longer safe for me to be there.

and there's part of me that loves the Virgin Islands and always will. I love that place. And it's difficult not to be back there at times. But, and I grew to love the culture there, the ocean there, a lot of people there. And so it was a big pill to swallow to leave. but it had to happen. So I am in a different place now, and that will always be a part of my life,

but it's also a part of my life that's over. What do you do now? How do you spend your days? I won't get into that. I can't really get into that, but I stay busy for sure. I've written three books about my time, there in the Virgin Islands and I'm currently looking for a publisher and I think it's a great

series I'm really I don't profess to be a great writer but I'm a pretty good storyteller and I mean we've really just kind of the tip of the iceberg is what we've talked about today and and there's a lot more to this story that some of which is just hysterical you know that it kind of crosses the the gamut of everything that a good story is and you know I I I I can't emphasize enough the brotherhood that I established with those guys down there, that, you know, most of which are no longer there. And, you know, I'll always consider them family. And, you know, I don't, I've said this before, you know, this isn't an indictment

on the Virgin Islands Police Department. It has a lot of problems. But there are some outstanding young men and women down there that I am happy to call my brothers and sisters. But it's, like I said, it's a part of my life that's now over. Well, we'll have those links to your books in the description of this episode. I'm sure there's going to be people even more fascinated in checking out more of those stories. Yeah. Well, I've got to get a publisher first. Do you already have the first three published, though?

No, I don't have. No. Okay. They're not published. They're written, but not published. Okay. Well, once they do get published, we'll have them in the episode. Make sure you send them to me once to get published and we'll get those out there. But I appreciate you coming on the show today and talking for three hours. You make my job easy, but you're such a good story teller. Yeah, yeah. And it's hard to, it's hard to, it's hard to summarize this in three hours. I mean, we've really, like I said, it's the tip of the iceberg.

And some of this stuff is just, it's hysterical stuff. Some of it is really serious stuff as we've talked about. and, you know, it was a great portion of my life. I have no regrets about it, even though it ended so horribly. But, yeah, it will always be a part of me for sure. Absolutely. Well, thank you again. Thank you for having me.

Of course.