Locked In with Ian Bick - How I Caught Child Predators as a Federal Agent | Jim Cole

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Jim Cole, a retired Supervisory Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and global expert on child exploitation and victim identification, sits down to reveal the untold truth about fighting child predators and digital crime. With nearly 35 years in law enforcement, Jim led major initiatives including founding the HSI Victim Identification Program, co-founding Project VIC to help identify and rescue thousands of children worldwide, and serving as Chair of the INTERPOL Specialists Group on Crimes Against Children. He now serves as Chief of Law Enforcement Enterprise & Technology at Operation Light Shine and partners with law enforcement, technology providers, and nonprofits to innovate how child exploitation investigations are handled. In this heart-breaking conversation with Ian Bick, Jim shares inside stories from real cases, the mental and emotional toll of this work, and why putting victims first changes everything in the fight against online predators. _____________________________________________ #TrueCrime #CrimeStories #UndercoverWork #LawEnforcement #CriminalInvestigation #DarkSideOfTheJob #RealLifeStories #FormerAgent _____________________________________________ Thank you to GOLD DROP SELTZERS for sponsoring this episode: Head to https://www.thedryoak.com/ and use promo code LOCKEDIN at checkout for 10% off your order. _____________________________________________ Connect with Jim Cole: http://www.operationlightshine.org _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 The Emotional Toll of Law Enforcement Work 01:10 Meet Jim Cole: Career in Law Enforcement 03:39 Childhood, Family, Military Service, and Values 10:57 Becoming a Police Officer and Early Training 16:13 Patrol Work, Street Policing, and Daily Challenges 20:07 Joining the Detective Division 23:48 Crime on Tribal Lands, Limited Resources, and Jurisdiction 28:34 Narcotics Investigations, Task Forces, and Drug Crimes 34:37 Shocking Violent Crimes and Career-Defining Cases 41:08 Federal Partnerships and Complex Investigations 46:27 Technology, the Private Sector, and a Shift in Perspective 50:33 Transitioning to Federal Law Enforcement 54:00 First Child Exploitation Investigations 59:29 Victim-Centered Cases and a Turning Point in His Career 01:04:43 Understanding Offenders and the Scope of Child Exploitation 01:10:53 Child Exploitation Statistics, Tips, and Resource Gaps 01:15:47 Law Enforcement Funding, Staffing, and Hard Realities 01:23:17 Types of Offenders, Grooming Tactics, and Warning Signs 01:29:02 Human Trafficking: Myths vs. Reality 01:35:06 Casework, Prevention, and the Role of Parents 01:40:13 Female Offenders and Rare but Shocking Cases 01:46:09 Mental Health, Burnout, and the Toughest Investigations 01:53:10 Retirement, Advocacy, and Final Reflections Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Kayak, got that right. I'd stood over lots of dead bodies, see people die, I've smelled the smells. I've heard the cries of parents. have done the death notifications, gone to all the autopsies, but nothing can prepare you for that. Now, you've dedicated your life to working penis crimes. How do you deal with that mentally, especially after retirement? The number one first offender-to-victum relationship was a father to a daughter.

It must be even hard to walk away from it and retire, knowing that there's so much evil still out there. Because you think you've seen everything. You think you've seen the depravity of humans, you know, this level in here. Jim Cole spent decades hunting child predators as a lot of people. a federal agent. In this episode, he breaks down real investigations, the dark realities of the job, and the emotional toll of working cases most people can ever handle. Jim, welcome to Lockin. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ian. Yeah, I appreciate you and Sonny, who we're going to hear on the next episode, who I'm interviewing

today, too, about his story. But tell the audience what you guys got going on with your show that's coming out. Yeah, so we're talking about, I mean, it's infant stages. We have haven't done anything, but, you know, we're talking about doing something together called the cop and the convict. We recently did a presentation on that. We had no idea how it was going to be received at a law enforcement conference, and it was just overwhelmingly positive. I mean, we had so many just law enforcement coming up to us. I just didn't know how they're going to resonate, right, with a convict. And so many law enforcement coming up afterward ago, like, that was fantastic. Like, thank you and thank you for the encouragement. And so, yeah, I think it'll be.

pretty cool. Yeah, he's great. There's anything like it out there. No, and he's got great energy, too. Yeah, awesome. I've noticed just interacting with law enforcement on LinkedIn, how receptive they are to former inmates. I think what they look for is like the rehabilitation aspect and what they're doing now. And I mean, you see, we're talking off camera about how many law enforcement officers or former ones I have on the show. Yeah. And they feel comfortable coming here and sitting down and talking. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you're like the nicest guy. Like, honestly, it's easy, right? Yeah, well, where do you grow up, Jim? So I grew up in central New York, just outside of Syracuse, New York. So I'm not, I'm not

unfamiliar with the snow you're about to have this weekend. It gives me a little, you know, but, and then I've lived all over. I've actually lived in Korea for a year with the military. I've lived on the West Coast for, in Hawaii, because I did, I did eight years active duty military before starting my civilian law enforcement career, but I was law enforcement in the Army for most of my time in the Army. And so I think it's given me a pretty, like, interesting perspective, having lived in so many places even overseas. My mom's side of the family is in Rochester.

Yeah. So I grew up going out that way. But you guys got more snow than out here. Yeah, you get all that lake effect snow, you know, off the Great Lakes. I mean, I can remember opening the door on occasion and just snow, right? And you have to bury or dig yourself out of it, you know, to the driveway to get to a car. Yeah. What was your upbringing like? I mean, it was really, my upbringing was pretty like a little bit like out of a sitcom of that era, right?

I never saw my parents fight. They, you know, I've got a brother. It's just the two of us. And we were a very close-knit, loving family. And so I, you know, I didn't understand. like people having difficult upbringings until I went into the army and you start talking to people who had horrific childhoods and the converse to, I would say I had a very happy childhood. Now, I was a nerd.

So I was like popular in school or anything like that. And that's probably like the extent of my difficulties growing up is, you know, I wasn't the popular kid in school. I got picked on bullied a little bit, nothing crazy. but, you know, but, and then I, you know, my father and mother were great role models, really great examples. My grandparents were great role models. And so I feel really fortunate.

They instilled a lot of values in me. And that really helped me with the law enforcement. Like, like, I didn't know I was going to go into law enforcement. As a kid, my, you know, my mom, she passed away now, but she would have told you, like, I want to be an ambulance driver. So I thought that was the coolest thing. You know, you see the ambulance go by with the lights and sirens. I want to do that. And like that stuck.

And then, of course, I did do that like a law enforcement officer and volunteering at our fire department and driving fire trucks and ambulances, you know, as a volunteer. But it was interesting because in my high school years, like the Apple, too, like you see, you get the Steve Jobs post was right. the Apple, too, was big, and it started to hit, like, the school. And I got really into, you know, the nerdy tech side of things. I was very interested. And so when I graduated high school, you know, my family wasn't, wasn't well off.

We never wanted for anything. But college, like tuition for college just was pretty tight. And so I ended up going into the military. and when I went to the recruiter, I was like, I want to do computers. And that wasn't really a thing at the time. And so he convinced me to do something working with computers, which was telecommunications. So I became a record telecommunications center operator. And back in the day, like the equipment, it was like out of Star Trek.

It was like these huge banks of computers with flashy lights. And we used to load the code into the computer from punch cards. So it would be this stack of punch cards. And you flip it, put in a hopper, you put this big steel plate over it. And that would load like, you know, the 36K code into the machine to process all the message traffic. And so it was a bit technical, but not exactly what I was looking for. But after joining the military, I went to basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I loved every minute of it.

I think a lot of people have difficulty with those types of environments. And it's like, and I was a scrawny kid. Like I was not a muscle. I was a scrawny, skinny kid. And so I wasn't like this physical specimen, but I could run. I was a long, lanky legs. I was a runner. And I could step it out, like in the military,

rook marching is a big thing. So I could ruck. I had trouble with push-ups because my arms are so long and getting all the way down and back up. And so that was probably the biggest thing I had a challenge with everything else. And I loved it. I just, it was like, this is cool.

It's like we're playing, you know, it was like a big game almost. And so I thrived basic. And then my first assignment was South Korea. So you talk about a big, you know, going from, I hadn't really been, you know, we went to Canada a couple times with Disney World, you know, but I'd really traveled hardly anything outside of that New York area.

And so next thing, I'm on this plane heading to the Republic of South Korea, and man, I didn't know what to expect. You know, I was like, what is this? And then getting there and getting, you know, you basically takes a week for you to get your actual assignment. And so I worked as a telecommunications center operator, support. the United States Forces Korea, kind of countrywide, and so portable communication centers that you could move around. And then, yeah, so it was a good experience, but I ended up meeting my first wife there,

who was actually my boss at the time, which is like, you know, forbidden. We got in trouble over that, and then I got moved off of her team. but um and um from there i end up getting assigned to the presidio of san francisco in california uh it's not it's not currently a military base anymore it actually closed down shortly after i left and but that was a pretty cool spot um because i worked for some of these big fancy like acronyms in terms but i worked for the u.s army information systems command um and uh we basically handled message traffic for all the components really up and down like the California area and what's called what's called the six U.S. Army area. And that's where my, that's where the law

enforcement piece comes in. So me and, you know, we're working. The comm center wasn't open 24 hours, seven days a week unless we were in a conflict. So like during Desert Storm when the Persian Gulf War, We went 24 hours for that whole stint and a little bit after, but otherwise we were usually running like five in the morning till, you know, 9 o'clock at night and Saturday, but not Sunday. And there was an espionage case going on that the Army Counterintelligence Office, the Presidio, was working. And all the reports would be sent and received through us.

So they would type up these reports. They would bring them to us. would run them through an optical scan unit, which was this, like, you know, you really think about it now, but back then it was this massive piece of equipment. And that would translate it into, like, because it's all encrypted, into the encrypted code, then it would get sent back to the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Command back at, which was at Fort Meade, Maryland. And they're typing up the surveillance reports and the different things that they're doing, was like a spy novel. I remember me and one of my buddies, Davis, that we worked together,

we would like go on shift and just go straight to those messages because we want to catch up. You know, if we've been off for a couple days or whatever, just like what's been happening? And I remember one day after I thought to myself, whoa, I want to do this. I don't want to read about it. And so one day when one of their folks came to pick up or drop off message traffic, I say, hey, how did you get your job? He's like, actually, we're recruiting right now. It's good timing. And you have a top secret SCI clearance. So that's like half the battle right there because it's required for this job field.

He's like, you know, you're kind of like what we're looking for as long as everything else is clean. And so he gave me a phone number and a name to call. And I went through that process. And it was a lengthy process. But I ended up getting accepted. And then from Presillo, San Francisco, I went to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. down there along the southwest border. And that's where the U.S. Army Intelligence School is.

And went to the Army Counterintelligence Basic Agents course to become a counterintelligence agent. And again, loved it. Loved every minute of that. You know, we were learning how to do surveillance and interview people and spy tradecraft. And although at the same time being told you're not. 007, but then teaching certain things and dead drops and brush passes and all these things that are used in the espionage world, but then also how to investigate those things when it's a

U.S. soldier or even an Army civilian who's engaged in that activity, how to put on briefings to teach people what to look for so they can report when they're suspicious of somebody who might be engaged in that activity and learning different, like, you know, spy cases like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hazen out of the FBI and Robert Hansen and just studying those cases and how they, they happened and all culminating in a big kind of exercise. And yeah, I just loved every minute of it. And then from there, I went to Hawaii. And Hawaii was a great assignment. because there's a there's a pretty significant foreign intelligence service threat there, specifically from the Pacific, you know, or Asia Pacific realm, right?

We're, there's, there's a lot of military installations in the Hawaiian island chain and in even the bigger area. With like every single Department of Defense component has, you know, from radar sites to bases, There's, you know, every service component. There's has really large bases there just because of its strategic location to the Pacific Rim. And so you have Pearl Harbor, you know, you had Connoe Marine Corps. There's lots of Army installations, Air Force installations. And so that was a really good assignment because it really got to put into practice a lot of things that we had learned. But at the same time, we were supporting what we call the warfighter, which is the,

You know, the green suitors army guys that, you know, and so one month, you might be out, you know, rucking and in the field in camos, carrying 50 pounds on your back with infantry. And then the next week, you're in civilian clothes doing surveillance in Maui. And it just kind of how it went. And so it was a really cool assignment. And some of my best friends to this day came from that assignment. Because we just all, we were very tight-knit. We went through a lot together.

We deployed a lot. We were all over the Pacific Rim nations, the Philippines, to Australia, to Thailand, to Korea. And so that, it's a very bonding-like experience. For a time, we had some bad management, which bonds you even more because you're all feeling the, I don't know, the stresses of that bad management and how it could be. And so you tend to bond more and rail against that a little bit. And so that was, you know, it was a great experience. Went from there to Fort Lewis, Washington.

And again, as a counterintelligence agent, and that's where I got out. That's where all the conflicts were over, the Cold War had stopped. and the Cold War was a big part of Army counterintelligence, like the mission was the Cold War. So when the wall came down, the Cold War really changed, and we really saw that a lot of the activity, you know, from the 80s and early 90s started stemming, the military started to draw down on what the different intelligence components were doing, what Army Counterintelligence was doing. and I kind of saw the writing on the wall, like the funding and the opportunities were slowly drying up, and I said it's time to move on. I'm coming up on my eight years, and I'm not going to reenlist, and I'm going to get out.

And my wife at the time was from a Native American reservation in Oregon. And there, police that we get the local newspaper and the police department had put in an advertising. for a detective and for patrol. And so I applied for a detective. I wasn't really interested in being patrol because I was, I'd been an investigator for five years working complex criminal investigations and all the training and everything. I was like, patrol, that's not for me. So I applied for the investigative job and I got a call from a patrol sergeant and you said,

that job announcement is because they had to. It's just part of like policy to post it. but they already had someone in mind, like you're not going to get that job because it really, even though it doesn't state this announcement, it requires three years of patrol experience to get that job. It's internal. He said, but do you want to put, like I looked at your resume. It's very impressive.

Would you like to put in for the patrol position? So I said, yeah, sure, why not? And so I got hired as a patrol officer. And, you know, we were just talking a minute ago, like, it's really hard to predict your future at certain points in your. your life, but things that happen that maybe you didn't want to happen but really shape you for the better, right? And that experience in patrol was absolutely necessary. And I could look back on it. And even when I was in it, it wasn't necessarily what my aspiration was, but that experience was

incredibly helpful to be and form like my law enforcement kind of, you know, career and success going forward. And so, but here I am. I'm a white dude, you know, on, you know, a Native American reservation. So I'm a minority. And I'm going to, I'm getting tested and challenged, right? Like, not only by community members, but also by my fellow law enforcement, right? And, and I really gained a lot respect for the Native American people having that experience and just some of the difficulties that exist and some of the lack of hope that is on Native American reservations and working with the community. And I had decided very early, I said, I am going to be incorruptible and I am going

to treat everyone fairly. and I'm going to go out of my way to be kind of like strict but fair. And it ended up serving me really well because your reputation spreads very quickly. And as people have experiences with you and you treat them fairly, even in difficult circumstances, then that spreads. And then people start to realize like, oh, you can trust that guy. And, you know, and then there's there were reputations of other cops like I would never crooked like whatever right and so um i i i did um about two years on patrol and then the detectives

came to me and said hey normally it takes three years but we've you know we've been watching you and we've been you know your reports and your actions on scene you take cases a little further than most patrol because of your background so we're going we have a position opening and we're going to put in a waiver if you're interested to be a detective. And I said, yes. So I went over and became a detective. I started in just general crime. So that's mostly fraud and nonviolent. And then you become a support player. Like if there's a homicide, you're not going to be the lead detective. You're going to, you know, you're going to help with the case, but you're a support role player. And so I started doing that. And it's another thing I should mention.

So the population of the reservation was roughly 3,500 people. Now, most cities in America are towns, really in America, they have 3,500 people, on average, are going to have one police officer per thousand, a city under 20,000, especially at this time. and this is in the early 90s. And so by that math, it's going to be three and a half police officers. This episode is brought to you by Netflix. The Four Seasons is back for Season 2, starring Tina Faye, Will Forte, Coleman Domingo, Marco Calvani, Carrie Kenny Silver, and Erica Henningson. After a difficult year, your favorite group of friends continues their tradition of vacationing together,

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Wow. What's the half? What's that? What's the half? I was a part-time domestic violence position that was through a grant that basically that detective only worked part-time, you know, 20 hours a week, specifically on domestic violence issues. And so because there was, unfortunately, because of some of things I already mentioned about the lack of hope and the just the, like the feeling of, of hopelessness about being able to control your own destiny and change your own destiny and feeling like you're just always being held down, that leads to a lot of issues, right?

It leads to systemic drug use, systemic alcohol use. It leads to like a lot of broken family issues. The families are very tight-knit, but there's also a lot of dysfunction. And so it just that then leads, spills over into critical incidents, violent incidents. Unfortunately, lots of fatality accidents. It leads a lot of DUI, like as patrol, you know, lots of driving on the influence. And the way that the legal system was on that particular reservation, it's a particular type of reservation. It's a sovereign nation called a 638 reservation. So what it means is they're self-governing. So they have a whole tribal government, much like a city would have a city government. And that means they have a tribal police department. And they have a jail.

They have a, you know, a correctional facility. The correctional facility had like 30 some correctional officers held, I want to say, you know, roughly 180 people, juvenile wing, female, male. but you could only, under the tribal code, you could only charge or sentence someone to 364 days. So if it was a felony, it either was the lowest felony sentence you ever saw because it would automatically become a misdemeanor if it didn't get accepted federally. And so one of the things that was really good for me career-wise about that, was as a detective, we started prosecuting a ton of cases in the federal system, even though I was a local jurisdiction.

I was what's called an FBI task force officer pretty much the whole time I was a detective on the reservation. And so that leads to complex, like from general crime, then to narcotics, which was probably the funnest time of my career. because like narcotics is just you're I don't know it's hard it's like you're just kind of running and gunning which I know that sounds a little but but like the drug problem is is huge everywhere and in that one of the other things about that was it was a multi jurisdictional task for it's called the code team the central organ drug enforcement team and so being on code instead of just being on the reservation where I was doing the general crimes now my jurisdiction is a I think it was like 19 counties. So it was a huge area in Central Oregon, and we were all over it. And it was a multi-jurisdictional task force.

So I'm now working shoulder to shoulder with, you know, everywhere from DEA all the way down to just the city and county, you know, county detectives that are throughout these 19 counties and all the cities in between. And so we were a big team because of how many jurisdictions were in that. And, you know, it was a lot of go-getters. Like that nobody was lazy. So everybody's working, which means we're doing three, four search warrants a week. We're doing undercover. You know, I saw the episode with Jennifer Eskew and talking about undercover. And so I've done, you know, that and mostly on narcotic side of the house during that time.

And, you know, doing street-level deals to, you know, mid-level deals and doing, you know, what we call rips. and even taking money, like, you know, the ill-gotten proceeds in and all that stuff. And it's just, it's like the adrenaline high. She talked about that too, right? It's like you're getting those adrenaline dumps and you become a bit of an adrenaline junkie, right? You're like, when's the next stop? When's the next search warrant? And you're in, you know, where, you know, I loved running a RAM.

So, you know, going up, bang, bang, bang, search warrant. And, you know, boom, we're kind of knocking the door in and then going in and, you know, doing our thing. And, you know, one time me and my buddy, Frank Kerr, he was from one of the sheriff's offices. And he and I were the number one and two at the door. And we happened to hit this place, an apartment where the dealer had just gotten in his shipment. So he's bagging it. He's cutting it and bagging it all up, right? So he's got piles of cocaine on the table and some methamphetamine and he's bagging it all out and we hit the thing. And so what does he do? He basically takes his hand and he swipes the

cocaine and that there's just this powder in the air and we're covered in it. Right? And it's like all over my face. I remember like my nose and my tongue going numb and I'd never used a drug. You know, the whole scared straight and the you know this is your brain on drugs it worked on me and my and I was one of those kids that like I never wanted to disappoint my parents and so that really kept me very straight and there like I never even smoked a cigarette right in my entire life to this day and so um so I'd never use drugs now here I am exposed and it's in my eyes it's in my nose it's in my mouth and of course course we had to chase through this guy. Of course, we catch him and we get him cuffed. And now we're like,

what do we do now? So now it's like, oh, you got to go to the hospital. This is an exposure thing, you know. And, and I'm like, I don't understand what people, I don't understand the why. It tastes horrible. It's like very chemical. Like, and if you know how the drugs are cut and made, it's like people putting that in their body is just like, whew, right? It's, it's crazy. But, um, But that was a lot of, you know, again, just running gun and all over the place. And then I was promoted from narcotics to violent crime. So that was standing over a lot of dead bodies. And just from various mechanisms, it's not always a homicide, right?

It could be a suicide. It could be a natural causes that you just don't know. So if it's any unattended death, which means there's not a medical professional that attended the death, means we're going to investigate it, kind of like, you know, is it a homicide? And so, and unfortunately, on the reservation, suicide is, you know, it's a, it's a thing. I mean, it's, again, because of all the reasons we already talked about. So, you know, I have seen people die. I mean, just in the horrific, you know, and then some accidental deaths, like we had eight or nine years old and him and his sister were fighting over the remote control for TV after school and

mom and dad weren't home and so he not realizing it was loaded went and got a loaded gun and I'm not just like not just like a pistol he got a 30 out six rifle and he literally blew his sister's head off and one of the worst crime scene I mean just horrific and now you're like the loss of life, like the tragic loss of life, right? This young girl, like she was, um, whole life ahead of her and, and, and now, but not only is she gone, this kid, like, like, who committed the act as an eight or nine year old.

Like, now he's got to live with that for the rest of his life. I mean, and then the parents and the guilt, like, there's like so much. And then the whole, you know, this is, this is in the early, 90s. So we're talking about like the gun control stuff and on the reservation there are guns everywhere, right? Everybody haunts, everybody. And so

that was really hard case to deal with. What happens to the kid? Some family court stuff. Like, you know, he's not going to jail or anything, but primarily just to get him like forced into counseling and those types of things. So there's at least some supervision. But it's not like a conviction

or anything like that, it's really to put them into the mandatory counseling pieces and family court stuff. But the system, as you know, is imperfect. And back then, were they going after the parents? So, you know, we put, we put all the facts together. We present to prosecutors, right? Like, law enforcement doesn't really make long-term charging decisions. We might make short-term charging decisions, but that's always going to be reviewed by a prosecutor to really make the final decisions on whether someone gets charged and with what and you know all that so we just we're fact finders we put all the facts together and we send that over to prosecutor's office i don't think they charge the parents uh in that i think they felt like i think the prosecutor felt like

they had suffered enough like like putting the dad in jail wasn't going to help the family right and and and like he's now going to lock up gun like you know so punitive like what you know um but we did do a big information campaign about securing guns right and and use that a little bit as like this is why um and so you know but like i had had another horrible case that um actually this is a police family right so one of our patrol sergeants, his wife left their very young child, they think he was three, in a hundred-degree car all day while she was at work because she got mad at him because he didn't want to go to daycare.

He threw a fit. And so she's like, well, fine, then you stay in the car. And so she made him curl up in the wheel, the back wheel well, so nobody would see him. And the temperatures in the car got over 100. to 50 degrees direct sunlight and when she left work and went out there she realized that he was dead she drove him to a river um that wasn't very far away and she tried to revive him in the cold water of course he was he was long dead and um and so like that case is another one of those cases that just like this tragic loss of life for really no good reason right like there's so

Those type of tragedies, like, we're just, you know, and I don't want to, I want to over-inflate, like, there's some really great people in, you know, on the reservation. And there's some wonderful, like, leaders and family folks. But these situations, unfortunately, were just, you know, too commonplace, you know. And I remember, like, I got talking about. to stand in over dead bodies. Yeah, I just, I really did. I tired of, like, the 3 a.m. call out.

And then, you know, responding to another scene that somebody shot, somebody's killed, somebody stabbed, whatever, you know. And, and it's, I don't know, it's interesting, like one of the homicide cases that I, was the lead detective for. And actually got, like, a word from the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI. And in this particular case, we had two, we had one very severe beating, like beat into a coma.

I think to this day has not come out of the coma and is likely deceased at this point. And then in a ravine, two kids just, you know, running around in a ravine came across a dead body, went up, told their parents, and then I was the duty detective, so I'm out. and then we're processing these outdoor scenes that happen very close to each other. We don't know if they're related or not. Turns out they weren't. But one was a bad drug deal that they beat the get, you know, he tried to rip them off. And so two guys beat the living crap out of him and left them for dead.

And the other one was a revenge killing by a 17-year-old kid who was revenging the death of his grandfather generationally. and the way that that went down is his grandfather actually died of cirrhosis of the liver but had been stabbed in a bar fight by the now deceased guy in the ravine with an ice pick like 25 years like and when they did the autopsy on his grandfather they basically said that the wound like it contributed to the cirrhosis of the liver because his liver had already been lacerated by the ice pick stabbing from whenever. So in his mind, that guy killed his grandfather, even though it was technically natural causes. And so he plotted this guy's death, waited for the opportunity, found that guy drunk

sitting outside of a house, used the opportunity to get him drunker, then assault him and then have a friend, they drug him down, they throw him down to a ravine. And then he cut the dude's head off with a Gerber utility knife. I mean, imagine that. Crazy. And then stomped the head almost flat. And then a bunch of post-mortal wounds to the, like it was, there was a lot of anger in that killing. And so we're out there and now it's raining. And we're trying to carry, you know, we processed the scene. We get all our photographs, do everything in the dark and the rain. We got him in the body bag.

We're trying to bring him up the slope of the ravine. And because of all the people going up and down, it's now big mudslick. And so it's like something out of the movies. We're trying to muscle this body bag with this person in it up this ravine. And we're slip sliding and we're covered in mud. And it was a shit show is what it was. It was absolute, right?

But those were just like, like, how the reservation was. And like that case gets solved because of really, really good detective work by a team of, not by, I say about me, but by a team of detectives that we're out there doing the neighborhood canvases. Like we just call that boot, the boots on the ground type stuff that solves cases. And you, you know, every day we start with, hey, this is what we're going to do today on this case. We're going to canvas this neighborhood. We have to go talk to this person. We heard from this other person that maybe somebody knows something about it, you know, yada, yada. And just doing neighborhood canvas with an interview of the guys of the suspect's girlfriend.

He wasn't a suspect at the time. But she tells detectives, you know, her truth. He told detectives he's with her the whole time. So that's his alibi. But he didn't tell her to tell us that. So when one of our detects her, she's like, oh, no he I didn't see him all night and then so now it's like oh we have a lie and that lie is just what cre like so then it's like calling him in like really nailing down like when did he leave where

which way did he go did you have any communication with him whatsoever when's the next time you saw him you know yada yada um and then going to him and him not knowing that that's happened so he continues the lie and doubles down on the lie. Oh yeah, I was with her. You know, yada yada. I slept next where I never left. I got up to go to the bathroom. Like those kind of things,

which is all lie. And so that's, you know, eventually what corrects that case to cause us to really look at him and then start to put all the pieces together. And then his co-accomplice couldn't live with. So when we contact him, it didn't take much for him to be like,

yeah, I got to, I got to get to stop my chest. Like, you know, and so that's kind of, yeah. So in a case like that, are you guys bringing in the feds? Well, we kind of are the feds because we're FBI TFOs, but the FBI is working right alongside of us, right? So on Native American reservations, most of them, the federal government has jurisdiction. It's called the special maritime jurisdiction of the federal government.

And so as it relates to felonies, the FBI and the federal government in general has jurisdiction. So, but as a FBI, TFO, I have the exact same authority as an FBI agent. So I don't necessarily have to have, like, an FBI agent alongside me. I can, I can act just like an FBI agent. But they do respond and, you know, and they're very, like, I would argue that the FBI agents that work in what's called Indian country, that's like the technical term, are going to be better FBI agents than most because they worked some real crime. They worked, like, they worked some real, like, street level.

And I think it, I think it makes you a better investigator. And the FBI agents that I worked with on the reservation were top-notch, like, very good. So was it not, like, in the movies where the reservations are very hesitant to call in, like, say, the feds to cases? I wouldn't. Ours was not that way. We always, like, any time we had a felony, we would contact the FBI office. Like, and again, we were working with these folks. The office was very small.

only at one point it was a three-person office that grew to like a six-person office over time and seven years I was there. So it's a very, so you're working with the same people like you get to, they become partners, right? They become, I mean, you know, one of the agents I worked, a tremendous amount of case, two agents actually, Gary Samuel and Eric Barnhart. Gary was a legend in the FBI, worked Indian country almost his entire career. And it was really good at it. He was one of my mentor. Like, I learned so much from that guy, um, going over, um, and being a detective. And so, you know, I mean, he's long retired now, but like, Gary was just, and then Eric Barnhart was, um, the FBI agent who like came in, got a sign to that office, didn't know, you know, like,

out of the academy, like, okay, you know, I guess I'm working Indian country. And so he and I, you know, became, you know, again, like partners, worked like so many cases, like, like, you know, Like, you know, out in the woods searching for guns, you know, that the bag, you know, that we're using a crime and then pitched and, you know, at the landfill looking for evident, like all kinds of, you know, crazy stories. And so, but I don't think every reservation has the same relationship, right? Different, just like communities, reservations are not, you can't paint them all with the same brush. And so you've got nuanced relationships that are either going to be good, bad, or sometimes just tolerative of each other.

But I would say that on the reservation I worked at, the relationship with the FBI was very good. And we saw them as partners and they saw us as partners. This episode is brought to you by Gold Drop Seltzers. And this is one I actually drink. I'm sober, but I still like having something in my hand that feels like part of the moment. not an afterthought. Gold drop fits perfectly. Gold drop celtars are clean, crisp, and refreshing.

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And even like as a counter intelligence agent, like I was the guy who like we were, I was like, we got to get laptops. laptops are a thing. Like, these portable computers, now back then they were like that thick and, you know, but we have to get laptops so we can use them to communicate with each other through textual messaging. And we can, and I actually worked with Motorola to develop a way to connect the radio,

like the, you know, the handheld radio to the laptop with an adapter through some communications ports that you could type short messages on the laptop and then transmit them over the radio to another radio and then onto another laptop. And then even at the police department,

like after a while, I realized, like, our records management system is terrible. We need to do something that gives us more insight into, like, patterns and activities of crime, and so we know where to put resources and those kind of things. And so I've always been that way, but, you know, I flirted with it a little bit, but probably not seriously. What do you think teenage you would have thought about you kicking down doors and, you know,

being on these task force and stuff at that part? It's a great question, you know. Because you were the nerd in high school. Yeah, yeah. I don't think teenage me would have ever pictured it, right? It wouldn't have been something that was like that I would have consciously thought about, right? And so it's definitely like, oh, in hindsight, looking back, But, um, but, but yeah, like, I, I don't think for sure we would have, I would have saw myself doing that.

But then when I started doing it, doing it, it was all very natural. And it, and it, it clicked with me. And, and I, you know, I just, I really, I loved my job. I loved, like, everything about it, just about, I mean, there's certain, there's, you know, like any job. there's certain things that are a pain or whatever. There's certain things sometimes like the way the court deals with a case, you know, scratching your head, you know. I had a terrible domestic violence case where the woman was beat really badly. But the defendant, she was not a tribal member and the defendant was a tribal member. And the jury was full of, like, it's hard to, like in a town of 3,500,

how do you see the jury that doesn't know everybody and all their business? And so they acquitted him, even though the evidence of, I mean, it was a massive travesty of justice. And I remember walking away, second-guessing myself, like, wow, if this, like, because I was pretty altruistic. And I thought, like, I was naive to some of the realities of the world and just thought, well, justice will always prevail. And the truth will always, well, those are great for movies, but that's not real life, unfortunately. And so those were hard lessons. and then I was like, well, what could I have done differently to impact this to a more positive outcome and a more like, like reasonable outcome, like within the primers of justice?

And I remember one of the things that shaped my policing early on was the Rodney King beating. I remember watching that and being horrified by it and being and thinking to myself, I am going to, because I, you know, I get the adrenaline, right? I get like, you know, and I get the tunnel vision when something's happened in like a pursuit. I got lots and lots of pursuits. And I get all that, but you have to be in control and you're supposed to be the good guy. And so I remember saying to myself, like, kind of consciously, like, I will always treat people with dignity and respect within the use of force. continuum. And I will always operate as if there's a helicopter, follow me around,

videotaping me everywhere I do. And it served me really, really well. And one of the things about on the reservation was I became, like when I worked narcotics, I had a lot of informants because they trusted, they kind of actually looked at me like he's actually better to go to because he doesn't have all that familial BS. And he's not going to gossip about it to, right, because some of the other police officers have come from, you know, the families on the reservation can be very polarizing.

And there are family beefs that go back generations that surprisingly are held on to over long periods of time. And so I didn't have any of that, right? even though I was in, I was married into the tribe with my wife, I wasn't, her and her family weren't all that terribly close. And so it wasn't like I had any of those things pulling me one direction or another trying to influence me. And so I was able to just really be just fair, you know, and treat. This episode is brought to you by Redfin.

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Someone on DIPOP wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop where taste recognizes taste. People fairly. And that just helped me out a lot. In that case you were just describing, do you find yourself now or even after that stint in that career thinking about those types of cases or the ones that had those successful, we got justice outcomes?

Yeah, I do think probably more about the cases that didn't, and that kind of in my next stage of my career going federal, I think about some of those cases, like, often, if you will. And so I would end up becoming the supervisor of detectives, the investigations division commander, supervising the detective division and all of its personnel. And then after a couple years, the FBI agents I worked for like, you got to go Fed, you got to go Fed, you've reached as high as you, you know, you're not going to be the chief. And I didn't really want to be the chief. That's a very political job.

And so I started applying to federal positions with everybody. I mean, you name it, federal agency. I wasn't being discriminatory. I was applying to them all. And then 9-11 happened. And so now we're, you know, 2001. And 9-11 happens. And, you know, it's late 2001.

So now we're getting into 2002. And a lot of the federal agencies that, you know, it was tough to get on federally before that. It was, there just weren't that many positions that were open. And they would get, you know, I mean, an FBI agent opening would get 40 some thousand applicants. And so you really had to stand out in a crowd. And back then they were like looking for languages. And they were looking for, you know, a lot of highbrow, you know, academic.

you know, accolades and those things, which I didn't have. And so I wasn't getting, I wasn't getting any traction. And then 9-11 happened and everything changed because now they wanted people with like just police experience. And that I had in spades at this point. And so that got me a lot of traction and I ended up getting on with the United States Custom Service. A little known agency that no, but, but one of the, like, like honestly one of the best agencies. and the U.S. Customs Service, the Office of Investigations, the special agents, what I would call a small but scrappy group of investigators that had really wide authorities, like the same authority as the FBI pretty much.

The only thing they really didn't have within our authority was the counterintelligence intelligence side, the national security stuff except for one exception. and again, terrorism, except for one exception. And so we were primarily focused on transnational crime, things that moved over borders, but not people. Like it wasn't immigration, it wasn't any of that. And so I came over, and it was my first week in the office, and I'm waiting to go to, I had already been through the first part of the Federal Academy, because when I was, on the res we send the detectives through that.

It's called the Criminal Investigator Training Program at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Gwinkgo, Georgia. So it'd already been through that. So I only needed to go through the U.S. customs portion of it. And so they were waiting. There was like a few weeks until there was a class graduating out of CITP starting what was called CIS that I would join. And so I'm in the office.

And my, I'm in early, I'm getting, there early. I'm trying to impress. I'm getting there early. And I hear my boss, my new boss, down the hallway, and he's cursing. And he's clearly having a, something's not going right. And there's not many people in the office. So I kind of work my way down the office. I peer my head around. I'm like, everything. I'm like, any boss? And he's like, oh, this fucking, you know, this computer and, you know, that, da-da-da-da-da. Every time, I'm like, okay, what's going on? Well, he, we had just, the agency had just switched to Microsoft Word from Word Perfect. And, and, and, and, and, And he is looking at, he's trying to format a memo.

And every time he enter, everything he was trying to center and justify, would just left justify. That was the problem. And so I sat down and I fixed it for him. And he's like, oh, you're a technology guy. Because I fixed a word document, right? I'm like, well, if fixing a word document makes me a technology guy, well, sure, I'm your Huckleberry. But I am.

I am. And he's like, well, all of this. And I'm just going to say what he said. Like, we don't like to use this terminology, and I'll explain why in a minute, but he's like, all this child porn is going online now. Because prior to the advent of the Internet and not just the advent of it, but the public connectivity to the Internet and the ability to send and receive data and files, child depictions, like images and videos of child abuse, child sexual abuse, were in magazines and tapes, and then optical media like CDs and DVDs. It wasn't so easy to transmit those types of files, but it was all moving in that direction.

And he was like, I need somebody like, you know, younger technology to start, you know, Ben, the guy who's been working this crime type for a long time. Like, he's a absolute wizard at this. But all this is moving on line, he's going to retire in like nine months. So I need somebody to take that over. I had no idea what any of this meant. Like, I'd never seen an image or video of child sexual abuse material in my life. I'd stood over lots of dead bodies and see people die.

I've smelled the smells. I've, you know, I've heard the cries of parents. have done the death notifications, I've done all that. I've gone to all the autopsies. But nothing can prepare you for that. And so when Ben came in, Dale went to Ben, he said, hey, Jim's going to be the new Ben. And I need you to teach him everything you know, mentor him. And, you know, and Ben was awesome.

He's like, yep. And so, but Ben was like, can he handle it? And so he's like, come on. He doesn't prep me at all. He said, come on. He walks me down to this room with a computer in it, which was a digital evidence review room. And he grabs the computer and he sits down at it for a minute and he pulls up a couple video files. And then he makes some large screen.

And then he steps back and he turns the volume up. And he's like, here you go. This is what it is. And I remember standing there before it, like just before it starts going, okay what am I about to see like like kind of the the butterflies coming up right because you know we have a saying you can't unring the bell once that bell is wrong once you've seen it you've seen it there's no going back and so I'm stand there and of course he finds like what we one of those things that we would call the worst of the worst right because he's trying to give me something extreme to see am I going to

curl up in the fetal position on the floor right or am I going to walk out of the room and then he's like well you're not the right person for this and i remember in my brain saying i don't know what i'm about to see but i can handle it and i am not going to show any weakness and so it was just very stoic i didn't want to i didn't want to give off any type of of tell that it was bothering me i didn't want to give up i would just like try to be straight-faced and not emotive and i watched these two videos and i listened and he said And after the last one and I didn't move, he turns it off. He says, okay, you'll do.

And that was it. Like, that was my introduction into the crime type. And then we just started working cases. And over the, at the time, I was taught to work those cases from a very offender-focused kind of investigative methodology and digital forensic methodology. And these cases are technology cases, right? we're seizing data from offenders. And that's where the evidence is, right?

And it's images and its videos of the worst thing you can even imagine, right? As it relates to children being sexually assaulted, raped on image and video. And I'm talking about infants, toddlers. Like, I think people, when they hear, when you watch a news story and they hear the term child pornography, I think the public, almost as a protective measure, actually, they minimize what that term means and they minimize it to be like, oh, it's like teenagers in their underwear. This is not what we're talking about. We are talking about, you know, like the most horrific things that you could do to a child that are being filmed or, or, you know, photographed

for like-minded individual's pleasure. And so, we're getting these leads in, but what we were doing is we're getting the lead, we're working the lead up, and generally speaking, it's going to get us to a residential, you know, it's going to be an IP address, especially back then. We're then going to do a subpoena to the internet service provider, the Comcast, or whoever it is, and then that IP address is going to give us, well, who is that, what residence was that IP assigned to on the date and time that the activity occurred? And so, and then who's the subscriber? It's not always your offender, right?

It could be, it could be someone who lived in the house. Sometimes it was even a neighbor who was stealing Wi-Fi from, you know, because it was open. And so, but it's going to get us to a location. And then that's going to give us the probable cause to execute a search warrant at that location to figure out who is actually who's behind the key we call it who's behind the keyboard right and making the the the criminal you know engaging in the criminal act so um we were very offender focused we were getting the lead we're doing a search warrant we're going in we're trying to figure

out who our offender is we're seizing the data we're going back and we're using technological methodologies that help automate some of that search using, and the best way I can describe it, is like digital fingerprints, right? So every file on a computer can be uniquely kind of identified through a digital fingerprint by running an algorithm. And as long as you run the same algorithm over, then that becomes a standard, right? And so now I can populate a list of files that I have seen that I, in my experience, know meet the statutory definition by the federal statute of child pornography or child sexual abuse material. And so now I can make a list and all I got to do is run that list across in the digital forensics landscape and it will pull out

the files for me that match the list. The problem with that methodology is you will never find anything new because by the very nature of it being in the list, someone's seen it and put it in the list. It's old. And so what was happening is we were engaged, I mean, that's a simplified way of, we weren't, we just weren't, there was not a lot of incentive for law enforcement to dig into the data deeply to find new victims. And we didn't think that way. We were like, well, those new victims are somewhere else. They're overseas or they're, they're not my offender. And that was really the wrong way of doing that. And so a very particular case happened that's in our community, the folks that work

this crime type, I hate to call it famous, but it's like very well known. And I was partnered about a year after I came on and started doing the job and really learned it, and then Ben retired, I recruited one of my best friends who was a detective out at the reservation with me, was former Army CID. agent, really sharp, great guy, and one of my best friends today, Josh Finley. And so he and I became a partnership, and we worked these cases together. And we had a case come in that just completely flipped everything, it just completely flipped everything because two really awesome investigators out of the Toronto Police Service in Canada had kept seizing these files of the same victim.

and said, is anybody looking for her? Like, instead of going after the guys are just in possession of this or trading it, how do we get to the guy who made it? And how do we get to her? And that was kind of no. I mean, it doesn't, it sounds like such a, such a obvious thing to do. But we didn't think in that way at the time. We're taught to do it.

And everybody kind of, you know, it's easy to get shoved into the box kind of thinking and not, right? And so I remember when that case came in and these guys, we got on the phone with them and they were like, hey, you know, we're trying to find this girl. And we found all these clues in the background of the video that lead us to Portland, Oregon. So there's a fast food restaurant that's only in the area. There's only 59 locations in the greater Portland area. That's it. That's in one of the non-abuse images because non-abuse images can be almost as important or more important than the, as long as you can associate them to the abuse. abuse images because offenders are less careful with non-abuse images because there's nothing illegal

in the image. But if you can, if it's the same victim, then the clues can be amazing. And in this case, that was that was the case. And so, and then there was another thing, she was wearing a sweatshirt that was sold by a department store that was in, just in the Pacific Northwest. And so that led us to start looking for this child. And we did really crazy, like we, there's like in one of the videos of her, she's speaking, but the audio is so bad, it barely, you can't hear it, right? So we're like, well, what can we, so we go to the school of the deaf. We're like, hey, can you lip read what she's saying? And maybe there's a clue in there if you can lip read what they're saying. So they went, they, they, they were incredible. They helped us out. They gave us basically their best

interpretation of what she was saying. And we did stuff like we started, we had facial images of her, but this is way before facial recognition technology. And so we went and pulled yearbooks from every middle school in the greater Portland, thousands of yearbooks through the greater Portland metro area and beyond. And we had yearbook parties where we just go in through the yearbooks looking for any child that remotely look like her sticking a sticky note on it. And then our analyst grabbing the name and the information and running all that down so then we could go contact that family and see if it's her.

I did a body anomaly diagram of the victim plotting every mole mark scar on her body. And then there was a distinct mole pattern on her arm. And so we started going to different group homes where girls would be that might be runaway and those kind of things and just saying, hey, we just want to look at the arms of the girls. to see if this mole pattern exists because, you know, what we know is that children who are subjected to this type of abuse may be chronic runaways or run away from home or be troubled. And so, you know, it's a shot. It's a long shot, but it's a shot. And so those are kind of things that we were doing to try to find her.

And then meeting her and her family and then them hearing about all the things that we had done and how it impacted them. They couldn't believe that strangers put that amount of effort into trying to help her. And so it impacted me profoundly. I mean, really, I don't think I can relay how much of an impact that had on me. And it would actually, it's the reason I'm sitting here today with you, that I have any kind of platform whatsoever in this space because that case caused me to go and rework the way that we worked investigations

and completely changed that, like it was a complete paradigm shift to be more victim-focused versus offender-focused. Because when we were offender-focused, we were just going in, we're pulling out these files, and they're going to get five years in federal prison, right? I mean, you know, you were probably in with folks that we had arrested, but honestly,

because they were all my age. I got classified as one. Yeah. There was a lot of guys in my age or in their mid-20s or 30s. And you meet them and they talk to you normally and they say, oh, I just accidentally downloaded one photo. That's a favorite world. Never true.

Yeah. I remember, you know, just talking to guys. I actually had a guest on my show who was sold that like pipe dream about that being true. I'm like, dude, there's no way, you know, because then there would be so many people would, that could happen to, like spam. or whatever. These people are, so if you want to explain it, what actually is going on. Yeah, absolutely.

So, and I can't tell you how many times we heard this excuse, like, oh, is pop-up ads for child pornography. And like, no, that's not a thing. Like, that's not a thing, right? It was a virus. The virus did it. It was another really, oh, I got a virus in it. And it made me look at, no, that's not how this works, right?

And it's like, we'd always say because these guys are collectors. And so they would, they would download it on their. computer, and then they would usually put it over some storage by. So it would be on a thumb drive, a hard drive, optical media. It depends on the era, right? Because I worked, I worked this crime type basically from the early, early, late 19s, early 2000s, where it was just coming online all the way through and all the iterations in between. We'll talk about one of the major iterations in a minute, but it's the way it works is they're they're seeking it out because they have a proclivity for that material. Now, we did have cases. I'll give you the best case scenario that's going to be

like the most minimal culpability, right? The best case scenario, minimal culpability are what I would call porn addicts. These are people that have addictive personalities that started with, you know, usually regular pornography. And then it slowly, it doesn't do as much, it doesn't satiate them. And then they're moving on to something more hardcore. And then there's this, you can kind of watch this ramp happen over time

where they just get into worse and worse and worse. So then they're getting into bestiality and then violence and all the things and weird fetishes and all the stuff. But then eventually it doesn't, and then they cross that line of legal, because all that other stuff is generally legal, but then it doesn't do it for them anymore.

And it's the thrill of it being illegal. It's not necessarily that, like I hear a lot like these pedophiles, right? Well, they're not pedophiles, okay? They're extreme porn addicts that ended up down that road and dinted that rabble hole that got there, right? But their seizures, when we look at them, it's really obvious. because they have all, you can see the journey. You can see the whole trajectory of where they started and where they ended.

And so, yes, did they commit federal violations because the possession is illegal? The downloading is illegal, what we call the receipt. The transmission is illegal. And those are generally speaking what those people are going to be culpable for. And those are five-year mandatory minimum sentences. And so the receipt and distribution, not possess. Possession has no mandatory minimum. But I never really had a case where we only had possession and we didn't have the receipt.

Like, how do you possess if you didn't receive it? Now, the difference is we have to prove the receipt, but that's very easy to do. So these guys are getting five years in federal prison for that crime. And I would say that they're culpably, like they're not actually necessarily attracted to children sexually, they were attracted to the taboo, illegal nature, the thrill of that, some doing something wrong that's illegal, and that extreme pornography, right? But then the offenders, and you figure that out and we're like, I'm not really interested in expending the resources on those folks, to be honest, right? But then there are a significant number. And like the scale

of this crime is what shocks so many people. And I'll get into that in a minute. Because I think another thing people think is, well, you know, it's like one guy here and it can't be that prolific. And unfortunately, it's a crazy prolific crime. And so the, generally speaking, the people that we're putting into federal prison are going to be people who are sexually attracted to children and they're trying to satiate that need. And there's also a big misperception that this is about money. Because it's not about money. Now, it can be monetized. Like, people will take advantage of the market, per se, and try to monetize it.

But at the end of the day, the demand side of that is not about money. It's about these, I hate to even put it this way, but the only context I can think that would make sense to most people is they trade these images and videos like baseball cards. And so it's not about the monetary value. is they want something new, or they get obsessed with a particular victim and they want more material of that victim, right? And so, and we call these, we call the, um, the collection, if you will, that relates to one victim, generally speaking, we call that a series, all right? So that's a series of child sexual abuse material. And usually, not 100%, there's no, there's not a hard and fast rule, usually a series is centered around.

It's the same victim that's being depicted in the series. So we would oftentimes see these offenders. They wouldn't have adult pornography. They wouldn't have, you know, some of the hardcore. They just have, you know, images of what they're attracted to with children. And that runs the gamut, too. They're offenders who, you know, pedophilia is a specific psychological diagnosis. It's an overused term because people kind of paint, oh, it's pedophile, right? But pedophile, like,

specifically means that their sexual attraction is to a prepubescent minor, all right? So that's a minor who does not show yet any post-secondary sexual characteristics, right? There's no pubic hair, there's no breast development for a female, there's no hip development for a female, you know, there's no musculature developed for a male. And so, so that's kind of, that's pedophilia, right? So,

so, but there are then hebo-files, which are that pubescent range, the teen, then there's folks that are, you know, interested in adolescence. And,

but the largest category by far is the pedophile. Because the number, out of all the cases that I worked, now were hundreds of these cases. I mean, me and my buddy Josh trying to figure out the other day, we kind of ventured on probably somewhere in a thousand plus, but definitely in the hundreds.

And so the number one kind of first offender to victim relationship was a father to a daughter. That's the other big misperception. There's all the stranger danger. It's not really, like

I'm not saying there's no stranger danger because there obviously is. But the number one relationship, like if you think about a child and an offender wanting to have a hands-on offense against a child, they need to have access, right? And so if they don't have physical access, they can't physically abuse the child. And so what's the best, I mean, being a family member is one of the best ways to have physical access to the victim. and, you know, people hear about the term grooming, right? That's a big term, but very few people understand grooming. When they think about grooming, they think about just the offender grooming the victim.

But I will tell you that my experience is that is obviously happening. Like offenders are grooming victims, but even more so they're grooming the adults that surround that victim to never believe that they would be an offender. even more than they're grooming the child because the child actually is subjected to the offense. And if the offender, for lack of a better term, is doing their job right, no, none of the adults will. And so what happens is, and I'll talk about a particular case, like I had this 35-year school teacher counselor in an elementary school that had one of the largest collections, personal collections of child sexual abuse material, and one of the oldest collections. So he had 53, three ring binders of printed CSAM that he printed on an inkjet printer. This is, and I'm talking about 2005, right?

Inkjet printers were not fast. And then he had taken images of his own penis and his face and he interjected them into the CSAM along with photos of kids from his school. he had every form of tape that you could have from 8mm to VHS to beta to all of that and then he had all the optical media CD DVD the floppy disc and then it was an advent where he was a stage in where he was now downloading directly to his computer and storing it on the hard drive and that's how he got caught his computer stopped working he took it into the geek squad at Best Buy and the Best Buy technician just after getting the computer going, looked at a couple folders on the desktop to make sure everything was working and found CSAM material and called us. And so that's how we got involved with that case. But what happened was this teacher had groomed every other teacher and parent in the school. And they were defending him.

And we can't show them the material. Right? It's illegal. So it's not like I can go in the school and put up a PowerPoint that's like, well, this is what he had. I can describe it to some degree, but we ended up having to pull all the teachers in and kind of give them a bit of a briefing as much as we could. But we got so much hate that can't be him. You got the wrong guy. This was a virus. You know, we're hearing all these things.

I'm like, you don't, like, you don't understand. man. He was, he was deep, deep, deep into this. He is sexually, he's a danger to children. And he's around children all day long. And they were getting teachers going, oh, Mr. Canuten was the greatest. He, he would volunteer to stay with the kids after school from troubled home. And I'm like, well, yeah, of course he did. And I remember at his sentencing, because he ended up pleading guilty. Most offenders do. He pleads guilty,

but we have a sentencing hearing. And at his sentencing hearing, they brought in these fellow teacher character witnesses who were just talking about what a wonderful human being he was. And I know the secret. Like, I've seen the skeletons in the closet, all.

And they're just talking about what a great guy is. I remember that's when it dawned on me. I'm watching this one teacher. Lovely lady. Like, like, I would want her to be my kid's teacher. But she got groomed. And I remember as she's talking about him in such a almost hero worship way, but all the great things he did and how he could never be him.

And I remember it, that's when it literally clicked in that moment. I was like, oh, you got groomed. And it was like a light bulb. Sorry. It was like a light bulb. And I was like, yeah, grooming is way more complicated than I ever thought about. out, but this is like, this is like the way grooming actually occurs because, and, you know, I mean, you hear it, victims don't disclose because of, like, people don't believe, because

they get groomed by the offenders not to. And the offenders are working hard to make sure that the adults that are around kids would never believe it's them. And if a kid were to, they could just kind of. they can gaslight it. They can gaslight that kid. They can gaslight anyone who would believe to not believing and not reporting and not calling the police and just handling it inside the family. Or, you know, I mean, you're going to hear from Sonny about his specific experience with that.

And that's the reality of the world. Like, you'd want to think, oh, if a kid says I'm being abused by an adult that we would. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa. Whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon.

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Jared Fogel and all of them. Yeah. They're likable people. They're clean cut. Like the Olympics coach. Yeah. But then in federal prison, you see these guys that are labeled like the child molesters and the pedophiles. They're these creepy guys that fit that image. But these other guys that do the really horrific things are don't come off that way.

It's very strange. And look, some of them, some of them fit the stereotype, right? I've had cases where it's like, oh, yeah. Like, I looked at the driver's license photo and, you know, it's like it's just a stereotypical, right, chomo, right? But what's interesting is I've arrested executives, I've arrested priests, I've arrested Bible study leaders, I've arrested police officers. I've, I even, you know, one of the worst cases that I had personally was a fellow investigator that worked this crime type, who yeah who was the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing and and none of even you know he groomed us I mean I was I felt victim to that too because when it came out what he did I was in disbelief I was like

no way it can't be like I've worked cases with him he was a dogged like you know he said all the right things and then it caused me to really have to reflect back like wow how how how did we not see it Because now knowing what we know, but he also knew what not to do and how to be careful. And it was a victim that came, eventually a victim came forward. But it was many victims in before that happened. So back then, does there have to be tips? It's not like now where there's actual, I guess, software to track these types of things. No, I mean, the cases to, like a lot of the cases that we worked were because of electronic service provider,

automated systems searching for material and then flagging that. And it goes into what's called a cyber tip line with the National Center for Missing Exploited Children. That's the central, that's the U.S. Central Clearing House for child sexual abuse material and these crimes, the online crimes against children. And so as the central clearinghouse, the cybertips come into them, and then they get triaged in a certain way, and then they come out to the, the, the, appropriate law enforcement. The problem is the scale of the problem. The scale of the problem is out of control.

And just to see, like, so last year, 2025, there were over 21 million tips. 21 million. And that's actually down because of certain things, because Facebook moved to end-to-end encryption on certain platforms. So now we're not getting those tips. So that's actually down from the year before, which don't quote me on this, but I think it was 38 million in 2024. And so, but we don't have, I mean, if you think about that,

even at the 21 million, the lesser, right, there are 61 internet crimes against children task forces across the United States. And then you have the FBI and you have HSI. There's the only other two agencies that work this crime type at the federal level. And so kind of the estimated number of personnel in the United States devoted to working that crime type is just a few thousand people. There's no way to get to 21 million leads. It's not possible. It's just it's not possible.

And so what that means is because of the scale. And then I'll give you another number that will blow your mind is as a central repository, and they became the central repository, for that material in particular in 2002, in September of 2002. Since September of 2002, they have amassed over 460 million images and videos of child exploited material, submitted to them either by electronic service providers who are not mandated to submit, by the way. So, like, Apple doesn't submit anything. They just don't.

They don't search for it on their platform. and the only time that Apple submits, because the law requires them only to submit at the point they become aware of it, but they're not required to search for it. So the only time they become aware of it is when a user says, oh, my God, you know, someone tried to share this with me and I report it on a platform. They submit like 400 a year-ish. Meanwhile, Facebook is on the opposite end of the spectrum. They kind of over-smit, but they do search the platforms. Now that they've employed end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger, on WhatsApp, all those leads are gone. So now you're only going to get a lead from Facebook if it's something that's in like a group or on a page.

You're not going to get the messenger stuff anymore. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, and we're way under-resourced. you know the u.s government spends over 40 billion dollars a year on the counter drug war 40 billion right we've spent trillions on the counter drug war

in the 50 years that that war has been going on in the converse to this problem of the one that that directly impacts our children our most vulnerable people it's about 250 million it's the the it just it's shameful it's like it's incredibly shameful so um it's yeah i just don't think people like they don't understand like the scale of this problem how under-resourced it is and how

it i think everybody assumes like oh well of course the police are doing this right of course the police are protecting our kids i i would like why would you think anything else right? But the reality is that's not necessarily the case. Is law enforcement, because they don't get specific funding often for this crime type, then they end up funding the things that the community is calling them about, right? It's the burglaries, the car thefts, you know. It's like, look, I'm not going to name the department, but people could probably guess. But like, one of the major cities in the United States and one of the biggest

kind of footprints of a metropolitan area in the United States, there are four detectives that work crimes against children and there are over 80 who work vehicle theft. It doesn't make sense. What are we doing?

Right? Like what do we like it just it's and the reason for that is is when someone's car gets stolen there's a report into police and there's there and there's a lot of a happening, especially in the bigger cities. And so it's a pain point. And the only way to fix the pain point that the public is asking them to do is to throw resources at the problem. But people are

not calling police chiefs and sheriffs and saying, hey, how many human trafficking cases are you, did you guys work? Or I think there's a human trafficking rate. Like, it's an underworld kind of thing. It's more quiet. And the everyday average person isn't going to. to see or know that it's going on. So it's the offenders who know what's going on, but they're not going to call the police department to report on themselves. So there's a lack of exposure to the crime,

which means that reports don't go into law enforcement, which means resources don't get put to the problem. Now, do you see this happening overseas just as bad? Yeah, so this is a global issue. And another thing to kind of talk about real quick is like, you know, the term human trafficking and the term child exploitation because there are two different things, but they often get bungled up under human trafficking,

and people think of human trafficking as like a border problem, right? Like, oh, this is like, you know, only, you know, human trafficking is not happening in, you know, in Danbury, Connecticut. It's happening along the southwest border, and it's foreign nationals that are being trafficked. And I can tell you, like, that's not the case. Not that there isn't trafficking that happens that way. But the vast majority of trafficking in the United States happening U.S. citizens with U.S. system victims right here in these bedroom communities. Yeah, I had an FBI agent that said he worked a human trafficking case right in Richfield in this town.

And this is a small town with a population of 30,000 people that has a low crime rate. Yeah, no, absolutely. And human trafficking has to meet certain parameters to be human trafficking. And generally speaking, like without getting into all the nuances, generally speaking, trafficking is more. money motivated. Now, there can be other motivations and things, but generally speaking, there is a trafficker who is trying to financially profit off of the trafficking of a victim to, you know, to a customer, to a John who's interested in that. And so, and then if we get into like child sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, um, it, it's, it's, it's,

not easy to engage, so because we put a lot of resources into trying to protect children, right? And, and in the realm of like, if, it's kind of weird because sometimes even the criminals have a moral or ethical line that they won't cross. So trafficking a young child is very difficult. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But usually when we're talking about like the five-year-old, or the 10-year-old or whatever being trafficked, it's a parent that's trafficking that child, and oftentimes it's for drugs. And I think you heard Jennifer talk about that,

her experience with that, she's there to buy drugs and guns, and then this lady is trafficking her own kids, right? And that is the primary scenario of younger child trafficking. Teenagers that are trafficked, it can be that, but there's a whole other world because teenagers are more mobile. They're more independent. They tend to rebel against authority and parents and those kind of things.

So then they can be more susceptible to trafficking. But what it isn't, it isn't the white van kidnapping the kid at the playground or at the Target Park and Lot or any of that. It's just those are massive myths that just don't really happen. in a four-year period between, and these numbers are slightly old, but in a four-year period, and I think the numbers were from 2014 to 2018, the number of actual stranger abductions of kids was about 366 across the whole country, right? That's less than 100 a year.

And most, a lot of those, because parental abductions are not included. in that number, most kids that are kidnapped, it's a parental abduction. Because one parent has been stripped of custody and it's like, I don't care what the court said. I'm going to go take my kid. And we worked a number of those cases and those oftentimes result in the Amber Alerts that you see there's oftentimes parental abductions. Now, the other piece of this is everybody thinks human trafficking is abductions and kidnappings. It's not because so if you kidnap, let's say you kid, like, abduct off the street or off the porch or off the backyard or whatever it is, a child. The law enforcement response to that will be massive. It's one of the areas where we

will resource that very well because we know that that child or that kidnapping victim is is in absolute danger and we probably got about 48 hours before they're dead. And it's, it's, I've never had a trafficking case. Not one trafficking case has been a kidnapping. Where you find kidnappings is when an offender, right, the, let's get back to the pedophile for a minute and just use that as an example, where the pedophile has, has spiraled and plan, they usually plan and they usually have fixated on a victim. And then their goal, they have fantasies about sexual acts with that child. And it is now motivated them to act out on the fantasy

and try to make that a reality. And all they want to do is satiate the need. And once they do, that child's life is in grave danger because the way to get rid of that evidence is to murder the child. And so, but they're never going to sell the child. The risk behind that is massive. And in today's day and age, I think we see less and less of those because of technology, right? If there's a stranger abduction now, the amount of resources, so it's not just going to be left to one agency. So obviously the agency who has jurisdiction, you know, if it happened in the city of Danbury, then the Danbury Police Department, but then the county, the state, the Connecticut state police, and I don't know if Connecticut has a separate bureau of investigations or not,

but if there's a state bureau of investigations there, but then the FBI, the FBI has a child abduction response team. That is a nationwide team that responds anytime there's a child abduction. and the local FBI office will just make a call back to headquarters and say we need the cart team out here. And they will be mobilized in an hour. They will be on a plane and move into that location. They will set up a command post and they will bring dogs. They will bring ground penetrating radar. They will help.

There's a whole playbook in a binder. Now it's all digital that basically is like follow these steps, do these things. You will get the media. We'll have facial pictures of that kid out all over the media. But the other thing that you're going to do that generally is going to result in capturing the person is we're going to pull video surveillance from every single source possible. And in today's day and Hage, there's video cameras everywhere. Just ring cameras on the front of homes now capture so much that they're going to be pulling the traffic cams. They're going to pull in the ATM cameras, the convenience store cameras, the neighborhood cameras, like anything.

within 10 miles of where the abduction occurred, they're going to be pulling the cameras to look for anything remotely. And if we have a, you know, if there's a vehicle description, if there's a person description, then that's just going to, right. And so the amount of risk that is now there for those type of activities are part of the reason that they don't happen as much as they did at one time. There was kind of a spate of those types of things. But, and that's back in the, like, you know, the Adam Walsh murder, which is what started. That's the reason Nick MEC exists today when Adam Walsh was kidnapped at a Walmart, right, when his parents basically took their eyes off him for a few minutes and then went into the

aisle and he was gone. And then he vanished out of thin there. There were no, like there were no technology didn't exist back then. And also the law enforcement response was horrible. And Adam was, again, an offender satiated. their need and then murdered him within 48 hours. And so there was kind of a spate of those cases because the law enforcement response was so disjointed and bad. There was lack of communication. But now it's a very different environment. And so it's very difficult to pull something like that

off. And so that alone is a deterrent. But it's so the difference between kidnapping and child exploitation, They're different crimes. There are some connective tissues between those crimes, but it's not like what people think, and it's definitely not kidnappings and abductions. And I'm not saying that parents shouldn't be vigilant about those issues because that's one of the deterrent. The reason they're not happening is because parents are vigilant.

So I'm not advocating for like, oh, don't worry about kidnappings and abductions. I think you need to be vigilant. I think you need to be on your guard. I think you need your teacher kids. actually how to be the hard target, right? That's another thing is sometimes parents rely too heavily on shielding their kids from the bad things that might happen and they try to be the buffer to not, but parents can't be there 100% of the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So one of the, one of the best things that parents can do to keep their kids safe is to harden the target at an age

appropriate level and allow children to one feel that you're a safe place to go because children don't disclose because they don't think they'll be believed and they don't think they'll be trusted. And so one of the things that parents really have to convey their kids is I will love you. And if you come to me about, I will not be mad at you. Right. I will not, you know, and I am a safe place to come. and I'm not going to scream and yell at you because you disclose something bad that happened to you because what offenders do is they weaponize the abuse.

They weaponize the fear, shame, and guilt, right? That's what offenders do. That's part of that grooming process is to weaponize fear, shame, and guilt. Both fear, shame, and guilt of the victims themselves, but also the fear, shame, and guilt is particularly within families. because a lot of times some of the motivators for families to have kids just be quiet is the fear and the shame of that like, well, I don't, if I report this to police, then it's going to get out. And then like everybody, all my neighbors are going to know. And it's like, and it's crazy that people would think that way, but it's a real, it's a, it's a heavy motivator not to report. And just basically to shuffle it all under the rug within the family.

And we see those cases all the time where something came out long before we, you know, are in the house doing a search warrant and trying to safeguard a kid. How often are you seeing female offenders? It's getting more and more, you know, I'm just, so Operation Light Shine, now that I'm retired, right? I retired in 2023 and then went over to a nonprofit that basically what we do is we fund. the law enforcement, and try to fill the gap that the government's not funding. And so we pay for detective positions, the laptops, the software, the digital forensics examiners and software and hardware and all those things, training, et cetera. And I was just, we're just at one of the police departments that we work with in Mill, Tennessee. And they have a case involving a female

offender that is both a child sexual abuse material case and a human trafficking case. Because a mom is basically pimping out her daughter. It has been for a very long time. But I mean, kind of since she was 11, is pimping her out for money. But creating CSAM of her to then get the customers interested to then engage in the trafficking environment. And so that's like one of those cases that definitely has those connective tissues between the two things. But it's, you know, so there's a female offender that's wholly, like not male, like there's not a male that's running that event. It's wholly the female. And I've seen it, you know, in some cases, like we had a great case. One of my good friends, Kevin Laws,

and he wrote a book called Hunter of the Damned, where he covers this case. pretty implicitly in the book. And he's talking to a female offender actually out of Canada in an undercover. He didn't believe it was like when the first just all textual, he's like, well, they're telling me their female, there's no way. Like the way they're talking about abusing, like the way that they were talking about it, he's like, there's no way this is a female. And then they got on to a live chat together.

And she is a female. He's like, oh, like he got off the call. He got off the undercover. And we're all out there. like he's doing the other cover and we're out there and he gets off the call and he like looks at us and he's like it really is a girl and um in that particular case she started engaging in like a romantic relationship with him as his undercover persona so much so that she was like oh i'm going to move to the states i'm going to come be with you and then i want you to get me pregnant then i want

she just start abusing the kid from birth? That was her, and that was all her. It was like 100% her. And we had never seen any, generally speaking, when I saw females that were engaged, there was a dominating male presence that was driving that. Or it was one of those, the teacher cases with the, you know, the teacher who's engaged in a romantic relationship with a student, which there's rarely like a dominate, you know, male fetus usually. But those are, they're, those are a different type of case. This one, everything about her is like what we would normally deal with a male, but it was just a female.

And so she did, she, we ran this big undercover thing. She came into the United States. We met her at the airport. She thought he was meeting her that all this conversation, She brought sea sand material with her across international lines. And then we arrested that we arrested him and her so that she didn't know that he had set her a basic. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here.

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Eye drops and work all day to prevent the release of histamines that cause itchy allergy eyes. And the winner by knockout is Padaday. Padiday. Bring it on. I mean that he wasn't undercover. And yeah, and she ended up getting really significant time in federal prison. Have you watched that show? I think it's on Hulu or HBO of the group of girls. And I think there's a couple guys that go under or they have this house that they work out of and they work with police to catch child predators.

I haven't seen it yet. I've heard there's been a few people and I need to watch it. They filmed some episodes in Connecticut, like with local cops and stuff. I think they just work with state level or city level. Yeah. But it's a really interesting show. and they dress themselves as young adults and they go in and do this. I've done that a bunch of times.

I'm not usually the one dressed as like the young adult, but we would often use police officers who look young. Sometimes there was a time where we would use like cadets, but we generally speaking don't do that anymore. But yeah, and do a lot of those things. And so I've done that a number of times in my career, those type of sting operations. Now, how does that work?

Is it considered entrapment? Like if you're texting the person? No, so we're very careful, right? So, I mean, we're trained not to engage in entrapment. So basically, the way that it works is you wouldn't, you wouldn't get somebody involved in something that they wouldn't already do. So you're not forcing them to do anything. What you're doing is leaving doors open to do whatever the crime is, but they have to walk through the door. You can't pull them through the door. You can't force them to do it. So entrapment is basically when you're, you're going to be. You your actions, your something that you did in an undercover capacity would cause a person to do something they normally otherwise would not do. And so law enforcement is heavily trained not to entrap somebody. So very, I hear people say entrapment all the time. You probably heard it. I'm sure you heard convicts. Oh, I was entrapped. Well, you wouldn't be, if you are actually entrapped, there is a whole, there's a court test for entrapment, right?

There's a whole series of, the words alluding me right now, but there's a litmus test for entrapment. And if you were entrapped, your defense attorney is going to be all over that. And that means any evidence that was gathered due to entrapment is not admissible against you. And so, and likely, you know, we're going to need that evidence to convict somebody so you wouldn't end up in federal prison at all if that were the case. And even if you were entrapped, I'm sure that you were doing something illegal to get to that point. Some people are curious or some people, you know, but again, I have not seen a case, again, because of the training and because, and there's also like prosecutorial supervision with a lot of the stuff. like the prosecutors, they're going to look at it and go, well, this is entrapment. I'm not even going to file charges, right?

It'll never even make it that far. But, you know, we're so trained. It's a big part of any undercover training is entrapment. That you just, I just really don't, I hear it alleged way more than I see an actual alley. And most of it's because people don't understand what entrapment is. Some people automatically like, well, if there was an undercover involved that provided a thing, then that's entrapment.

that's not the case. Now, you've dedicated your life to working the, you know, he and his crimes. How do you deal with that mentally, especially after retirement? Yeah, that's a great question. So we don't do a great job protecting our folks who do these crimes. Like, we just don't. Now, we do better. Like, I think we continually gradually and getting better at it. But what I see is oftentimes, like, when budgets get cut, it's like one of the first things to go. Because operationally, you know, like we're usually statutory mandated to do certain operationally, but not statutory mandated to provide mental health care for this, right? So it varies per agency, but like for me, I was never a person who, like, internalized

the, like, the material I was seeing. So I know people who have suffered like the flashbacks, right? Like the invasive thoughts in their heads, right? Where some of the material they have seen sticks with them and then it pops into their head, they can't control it. Right. And that's, I'm glad that doesn't happen to me because even imagining that happening would be horrible. And there's something about my ability, and there's others like me, but like I've talked to psychologists about this. There's something about my ability to be resilient and the way that I process the material as evidence versus internalize it that allows me to do that.

Now, there are different, like one of the worst cases I ever worked, and again, very well known in the community of folks that do this was a case where the offender was an Australian out of the Philippines who, um, just one of the most horrendous offenders, you know, in a case we've ever worked, yet you should murder a child. But he had recruited some Filipino women who had infants and had brought infants in, and then they physically tortured these infants on camera. And I will never forget the day that so, and we don't really get through the latter part of the career, but one of the things that that original case did, it led me to creating that whole methodology, which then got me noticed at our headquarters and I was asked to come back and start

our victim identification program and laboratory at our cyber crime center in the D.C. Metropolitan Area to basically do victim, you know, stand up a whole victim identity, holistic victim identification program for the whole agency on a global scale. And so I went in and started that program. And so one of the ways that that works is Interpol, like the famous Interpol that everybody talks about that doesn't do half the stuff that you see in the movies. Like they don't really have law enforcement like full, awesome law. They're not going into countries with guns and doing raids, right? They're a collaboration and information sharing organization.

So they maintain a database at Interpol. of child abuse material purely for the purpose of global victim identification. And so that portal investigators like myself, usually at national level, are remoting into that system and we're working on cases as a collective, right, from several different countries. And to give you an idea of this, there's only about 50 people that do that in the entire world. So it was a very, it was a very, it was. like a very elite group of folks that do that. And so I was very, very fortunate to be one of those

people. And so we're all working on this case. And I remember when it was first encountered by law enforcement, right? There's a point where it gets released in the wild and law enforcement's coming across it in some way, shape, or form. And then they're uploading it into this. And I remember a Danish colleague who found it on a darknet board sent me a mess. message and said, hey, I just uploaded this new series. It's awful. You really need to, you need to be prepared. And I'm like, because I've seen everything. And I'm just like, whoa, this has got to be bad. Like if he's saying that, because he's seen everything, this really must be bad. And so I remember logging in to the system and going to the series and pulling it all

down down down all download it to my local machine and then playing the first video was an adult woman abusing like a three week old infant and i with violence not just touching not just but with horrific violence i remember having to push back i i have this i have this 56 000 dollar computer array with with like hollywood five thousand dollar monitor so that the color correction is per-so we know when we say it's blue it's blue we say and super high resolution and a tablet and all these things I remember pushing back from it and and stopping it and having to turn away and just being like like honestly like what the fuck because you think you've seen everything you think you've seen the depravity of humans

at a you know this level and here and I also knew that based on the way they had filmed it, it was going to be incredibly hard to solve. It was going to be incredibly hard for us as a collective to identify and rescue that child. Because the person who was creating it was obviously versed on the things that we would key in on to do that. but it launched an international manhunt for that group and woman hunt. I mean, we were trying to identify the females, him, and the children. There was more than one child that ends up in more as it comes out. But it did take a number of months before we were able to safeguard those children.

And like I said, one child was killed. as a result of the abuse and the torture. That's crazy. Yeah. I'm sure it also helps fuel you to continue on and keep going in a way. It does. It must be even hard to walk away from it and retire, knowing that there's so much evil still out there.

It doesn't stop when you walk away from the job. It does not. Absolutely. And, you know, retiring was definitely a bittersweet. you know, thing. And I'm now engaged just in a different way that I think I can be more helpful because I felt like within side government, I'd done everything that I could do to, to help with this issue and, you know, within my agency, but also on a global front. I mean, I was really fortunate to serve as the Interpol, the chair of the Interpol specialist group on crimes against children,

which is the international body, just, you know, working on several initiatives to help with these investigations and just really safeguard more kids. And I served in that position from 2019 right up until I retired. And you have to be law enforcement. So when I retired, I was also stepping down from that. But I was also very encouraged by my colleagues around the globe who do this work so selflessly, the sacrifices they make, the things that they have to see. But although it's incredibly difficult, the reward is when you safeguard a child. It's impossible to articulate that feeling because you have to experience it to understand it. But it is, it's an incredible warmth when a child is safeguarded from a horrific situation and found and recovered.

And, you know, whether it be their father, whether it be an uncle, whether it be a babysitter, a clergy, whatever, when they are put on a path toward healing, then that's worth everything that we subject ourselves to that's negative, you know, yeah. Jim, I appreciate you coming on the show today, and I appreciate everything you've done for the country as a whole and sharing your journey with us today. I appreciate you. Like, I didn't come on here to, like, say,

hey, look at Jim Cole. I came on here because the public needs to know that this is happening, and they need to know that we have to do more to impact this. So I would encourage the public out there who's watching this, contact your Congress folks, contact your state legislators, your federal legislators, your chiefs of police, your sheriffs, and just advocate for more work to be done to protect kids. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.