Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was a Florida Dope Cop - Until the FBI & DEA Thought I Was Dirty | Michael Dilks

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

Michael Dilks served his country in the military before transitioning into law enforcement, joining the police force and later the Sheriff’s Department. As a member of a narcotics task force, he helped take down major operations, making high-stakes busts and battling the drug trade in Florida. But everything changed when he began to suspect that members of his own narcotics team might be crossing lines. His concerns eventually led to him becoming the focus of an FBI and DEA inquiry — a mistaken suspicion that cast a long shadow over the rest of his career. Even though he was never charged, living under that cloud changed everything. After two decades in law enforcement, Michael retired — but instead of staying silent, he turned to social media to finally tell his side of the story. #DopeCop #DEA #FBIInvestigation #TrueCrimeStories #LawEnforcement #PoliceInterview #FloridaStories #CriminalJustice Thank you to BLUECHEW & GLD for sponsoring this episode: BlueChew: Visit https://bluechew.com/ and use promo code LOCKEDIN at checkout to get your first month of BlueChew & pay five bucks for shipping. GLD: New customers get 50% Off AND a FREE chain with code LOCKEDIN at https://www.gld.com/ Connect with Michael Dilks: Instagram: @copvilleog Podcast Instagram: @the_antihero_podcast Website: www.copvilleog.com YouTube:www.youtube.com/@copvilleog 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 From Copville to Chaos – Meet Today’s Guest 01:23 Why He Took His Story to Podcasts & Social Media 03:44 Jersey Roots: Family, Struggles & Early Lessons 07:36 Childhood Trouble & Growing Up on the Edge 15:01 Military Route & The Jump Into Law Enforcement 25:00 First Years as a Florida Cop & Weed War Stories 37:01 Inside the Crack Epidemic & Rising Corruption 44:59 Life Undercover: Lies, Pressure & The Dark Side of Narcs 49:01 Questionable Tactics & When Things Started Feeling Wrong 50:27 Major Busts, High-Risk Raids & Dangerous Moments 54:45 When the Feds Came Knocking – Becoming a Suspect 01:00:00 False Accusations, Paranoia & Surviving a Federal Probe 01:12:04 Social Media Backlash, Department Politics & Enemies Within 01:18:17 Demotion, Internal Affairs & The Slow Career Collapse 01:26:10 The Steroid Scandal, Forced Resignation & The End of the Badge 01:37:40 Life After the Uniform: Family, Identity & Starting Over 01:41:16 Lessons Learned from the Rise, Corruption & Fallout Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I was getting close and they came after me. Now, when you're in a unit like this, is it kind of like what we're, we see in the movies. People that was brought in as a suspect, I believe was brought in for no other reason than the detective had beef with him. That's a really good bus story. My door knocked one day I was off and it was the DA, the FBI, and an analyst and came in my house and interviewed me for eight hours. Imagine spending your career putting drug dealers behind bars only to wake up one day and realize the FBI thinks you might be one of them. That's what happened to today's guest, Michael Dilks, a Florida narcotics cop who went from busting traffickers to being investigated by the

DEA and FBI, all based on suspicion. Mike, welcome to locked in. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate you having me, man. Really good stuff you're doing, and it's cool to be here. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's crazy how social media works.

You just reached out on Instagram and we were able to connect. Yeah, it's like fast. And it's funny, like, inmate, former cop. Like, it's just in the world, like how we end up connecting later on. I think it's good stuff

and it always good to get messages, stories. And like a success story like yours out is a good one. So I'm excited to be here. Yeah, those are my favorite episodes. I mean, the law enforcement ones because they're so different. Yeah, that'll be very different. Yeah, and the audience loves hearing the law enforcement ones, especially when you're being interviewed by someone that was in prison and is a criminal.

So it works out good. I bet it does, yeah. Plug in your podcast. Tell everyone what you got going on. I currently co-host the anti-hero podcast. That's on YouTube. And then our Instagram is at the underscore anti-hero underscore podcast. That is the big one.

That's myself and Tyler. We do primarily military first responder type podcast for cops. We help them, you know, with getting their stories out, getting out information. And then on my own, I run the Copville podcast, which no intention to bite off yours, but I called it locked up with Copville. That podcast started, and we'll talk about it, was due to being unfairly treated at the sheriff's office where I worked. And I started a meme page, Copville OG, which quickly blew up to over 100,000 followers, first time back to 70 after Instagram nuked me. But I used dark humor of the cop world to become funny or make it funny.

And then from there went, you know, I can probably use this to help some people and make a little difference. So at Copvillogy, at the anti-hero podcast. And then counterculture is our social media company, which assists other podcasts and people getting into this realm with some of the not making the mistakes we did, give them a little guidance, kind of like a social media advising agency. So that's the three big companies, Counterculture Inc, the anti-hero podcast, and Copville OG.

I like the logo. Yeah, I bit off of a little bit off of Grant Deft Auto, Vice City. That's what I was just thinking. My website, if you go to my website, copvillogu.com, you'll see it's a drop-down. But on the game case, if you remember, it had like the helicopter. I took cops and scenes from famous cops episodes and people that actually know. one of them was up here, the trooper that screamed and yelled at the kid about the marijuana, Matt Spina on the side of the road.

It was like, you better be in the original container. It made like national news on YouTube. I put him on the cover. I put another guy named Jordan Innes on the cover. I put Jerry Worms, who was the first cop on episode one, 1989 Broward County on the show Cops. I've been able to connect with all these guys. So I kind of bit off the Grand Theft Auto, but I used all like famous cops from history. And it's a pretty cool site, pretty cool logo, I think.

And it's been very successful. So I'm excited. We were just in California and Matt was like, I want to go see Santa Monica here where they, we're at Grand Theft Auto's just done. Yeah, so yeah, I've never been to Cali, but I'm working my way there with this, these connections kind of start leading you all over.

Like, I never thought I'd be sitting in Connecticut on a podcast, but here I am. You know what's funny about it just realized, too, every law enforcement officer that comes on the show always brings a backpack with them. I usually don't care. So here's one. So I might is for the opposite reason.

Most of them because they're carrying a gun and they're, I'm like a girl. I was like, oh, do I wear this shirt? Do I wear that shirt? And I always have my cogs ear with me. And literally, I only do this when I'm like out of town. Around town, I don't carry a backpack. But I can see where you would make that common,

they're usually a gun in there. I didn't bring my gun because I flew. But, um. Or they'll bring protein bars and stuff. Yeah, I'm, I'm cheating this time. I got a pork roll. I call pork roll for a pork roll sandwich before I came. And then, I don't think I have any protein bars in there this time.

I got peanut, cashews. Cachues. my go-to. What's a pork roll? Pork roll. Like Taylor ham they call it in Jersey, pork roll. It's like, dude, I can't believe you're that close. There's a big debate. Like half a Jersey calls it pork, it's like bad. Never heard of this. It's like, it's like

right above scrapple. It's like processed meat and it's really good and salty and we grew up on it in Jersey. And I moved to Florida and they have it at like Publix, which is our shop right or whatever supermarket you have. But when you come up to Jersey, you get like a pork roll and a bagel. It's just meat, cheese and bagel, but

They argue in Jersey. It's either pork roll or tailor ham. So I call it pork roll. But that's what happened. So you grew up in Jersey? I grew up, yeah, I was born in Suffolk County, New York. And I moved to South Jersey, right outside of Atlantic City when I was an infant. And I moved there until I was 17.

Then I moved to Florida when I was 17 in 1993. Why did your family decide to move? My mom was in the boom. My mom is a very success story, a very big success story as well. She started out as like a janitor-type person in a hospital. And back then, you could get jobs without going to college, like in all these scam of college now. And she actually became an ultrasound technician the old way,

which was just going to school and like going learning from your friend, like a training. So she became pretty big in Jersey as far as like one of the best echocardiogram and ultrasound people worked for all these doctors. And an opportunity came when the boom and where I ended up going, which was Vera Beach, Florida, old people, Florida. there was a boom of like influx of all you people up here we call you moving to florida they're taking over our you know little new york down there so there was a massive opportunity to make

almost the same money with about the half of cost of living so every year my mom would take us to disney and i would see disney every year she took us to i'm like wouldn't it be cool to live here with the lizards and the and the palm trees and all that so 1993 just before i was 17 my mom decided to take this big job opportunity in Florida, and we moved, and it was a good move. I mean, I enjoyed growing up in Jersey and that, but moved to a more conservative state and where I did a little bit better politically, I think, down there.

So, and that's why we moved. What about your dad? Was he in the picture? My dad was, yes, my dad passed away September 27, 2010, which is part of my story about where my life kind of turned a little bit. But he was there, he was a truck driver, and it was funny. He worked, he was a truck driver.

He wasn't in the mob. but he worked for Nikki Scarfo in Philly for one of the roll-off companies that one of these gangsters had. And I always remembered the phone would ring at like, you know, landline back then, 10, 11 o'clock at night, and these guys would call,

hey, Gordon, you know, can you come in? We need you to take a roll-off up to North Jersey. I'm pretty sure there's dead bodies in these dumpsters and my dad would do this. And my mom used to tell me they'd pay him cash. And she said, she had a grandfather clock in the house and she would hide the cash in there. And she's like, the phone to ring.

like twice a week for your dad because he didn't ask questions. He wasn't nosy. And they would just call your dad to go drive these trucks up to Jersey, drive back. And my dad never asked a question. And they never get. So I guess my dad was like quasi in the mob as a German-English guy, but didn't know anything, wasn't connected. But he drove trucks. And then he moved down to Florida.

He got really sick and had some heart issues and passed away at 54. How many siblings did you? I have one sister who is, I'm 49. She's 45. She's like five years, four years younger than me. Were you guys close growing up? Yeah, we're still close. We have a really close family.

My whole family kind of migrated from Jersey down to Florida, and we all moved, like, reestablished the family down there in Vier Beach. How would people have described you as a kid? ADD, class clown. I was really good at sports. I played a lot of sports, but I was always the kid that was really good, but didn't get a good enough grades to play. So in the small town, I played hockey, baseball.

That was pretty much my two really good sports. I was good, but I always robbed myself of being able to maybe make it to that next level by just, I think I was undiagnosed back then. You can see me now. I move. I was just undiagnosed ADD. They didn't have a thing for it back then. We were just bad kids. So they like hit us and said, go act right.

And I would say I'm the original ADD, ADHD kids from the early 80s that nobody knew what it was. So wild. I didn't get in trouble. but I was definitely, you knew I was around when I was around because I didn't shut up. What were some lessons your parents taught you? You know, and I used them in law enforcement was my mom was very big on just like introducing yourself

when you walk into a room, having good manners, being cordial to people. And that was, you know, I wasn't very religious. My grandma was the religious one that made me go to church in Sunday school, believe in God, and I always used God as an accountability, but I was a mama's boy and mom being Italian and Greek. I always kind of went with like, what would my mom think of what I'm doing right now?

And I transitioned that into law enforcement when I train new guys. Like, what would your mom think about what you're doing right now? So the lesson she taught me was mostly that. Be a good person. Have manners. Walk into a room, introduce yourself to people. Be friendly. Be cordial.

Be nice. Don't be taken advantage of, but just try to be a good human when you meet people. And, you know, you don't know what their life story is. And that was probably the most thing. As a mama's boy, I would say, like, that was what she instilled at me was manners. And I see it now. There's no such thing anymore in this world.

People just pop down and get on their phone. They don't acknowledge you. And it kind of drives me crazy. I noticed, like, an apartment building, no one says hello. No. You don't even know your neighbor. Like me. I live in a subdivision with mostly old people,

but because of the new world, I'm like, I don't know who that guy is. Like where I grew up in Jersey, I could walk in somebody's house, four, five, six, seven, five, six, seven houses. down just walk right in the front door oh michael you're here you want to drink yeah give me a drink and i don't know who the guy is across the street now like i've never seen him and he don't talk to me i don't talk to him so it's a it's a different world it's a weird world when we travel down south

though they're a lot nicer like in north carolina or tennessee or any of those areas you guys up here just kind of rude it's a different world yeah it's the worst when you get the people that are aggris at the starbucks line or duncan line or anything like that great i heard like i said i've only been here since friday today's sunday and yeah i've heard yeah my fucking way and this and i'm I'm up north again. I can tell. Oh, you normally live in Florida? I live in Florida. I'm full-time resident. I come up here for live shows and travel and still have relatives up here.

So I know right when I'm in Philly, New York, when you start to hear the people like look at you like you're an idiot for just existing. Fellas, if your performance lately has been giving buffering wheel more than HD playback, it might be time to upgrade. Blue-chew's tablets are like giving your lower half a LinkedIn premium account. suddenly he's confident, assertive, and ready to network aggressively. Blue Chew is the original brand offering chewable tablets for better sex. Better with a capital B like your partner saying, you did what last night, but the good kind. Let me tell you, I took one of Blue Chew's tablets and my junk got promoted from backup dancer to lead singer with a Vegas residency.

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Just use promo code locked in at checkout and pay five bucks for shipping. That's it. Join Blue Chew's mission to upgrade humanity one thrust at a time. Head to BluCoo.com for details and safety info. And big thanks to Blue Chew for sponsoring the podcast. Did you ever have a moment in your childhood or teenage years where you could have got in trouble, but you didn't? Oh, yeah.

We used to ride four wheels and run from the cops all the time. And I say Jersey, everybody thinks like, hey, Forget about it, Jersey Shore. I grew up in the sticks. I grew up in South Jersey, cornfields, tomato plant. Like, we were right close to Atlantic City, but where I was.

So ironically, the guy I did it with became a cop as well. And I never, never, never. If I played cops and robbers, I played the robber. I never in a million years, ever, ever wanted to be a cop, thought about being a cop. Never crossed my mind.

But there were times when one of my earliest memories of a cop was, you know, you guys have inspection up here. And for people who don't have it, They inspect your car, make sure it's up to their standard to extort money from you as the government. But my dad ran from the cops. So I'm in the car. I remember we drove by.

He didn't have an inspection sticker. He takes off in an old Nova and just flees from the police. I'm like kindergarten, first grade. He beat it. He got to the house, pulled backyard in the car. The cop car went by. And I'm like, I don't know what just happened. But it seems kind of wild.

And I started running from the cops on four wheels. I didn't do anything bad. But I ran from the cops, drove four wheels around. if I would have ever been stopped. And then the close I came, when I moved to Florida, I was walking home one night from a restaurant. I worked at two beers in my pocket, one of my hand. I'm probably 17 or 18.

Cop drives by. I see him and I'm like, oh, shit. And I take all three beers and I throw them into bushes. Guy turns around, pulls up. Jack White, black guy, cop walks over to me. He's like, what did you just do? I said, I threw three bears in the bushes. He's like, go get him.

So I went and got him. And I was literally like 100 yards from my front door. He made me pour him out and walked home. They were strict, and I didn't know this until later. I worked for that same agency, how strict they were about possession of alcohol by a minor, but he let me go. Had I gotten arrested that day at an 18-year-old guy, I would have never been a cop. And I ended up working with him at the same department years later,

still see him all the time. He's old and retired, but had he have arrested me, I may have been able to navigate that, but probably not. It would have been a very minor offense, but I was close enough to the age of, you know, an adult that I probably would never have become a cop had that have happened or about I got arrested. Did you think about that moment later on? Oh, yeah.

I tell that story all the time. And that's where I say, like, you don't know, and people may not like me, but I think I've done society pretty well throughout my career. My life would have been completely different. May I have ended up a criminal. May I have ended up who knows where. Who knows what would have happened. I think I joined the United States Army shortly after that.

I gave three years to them, 23 years as a cop. So I gave society 26 years, but that could have changed my entire. I'm so bad that if I sit at a light and catch a red light and don't make it, I think, man, what would have happened if I got through that light? So I'm very bad about it. But yes, that could have potentially changed kids, wife. Life could have gone completely. Who knows?

So, yeah, that was a big moment for me. And that's where I kind of used that empathy when I deal with young kids to go, do I really want to ruin this kid's life over a beer or some little bit of marijuana or something like that's going to change this? kid's life. To me it's just a stat or to a cop, it's just a stat. But to this kid, it could be the difference in being successful or being unsuccessful. Do you think some cops lose sight of that? I think a lot of them do. And I am here, you can hear me say this. I think it's the administration and the higher ups within the agency that cause cops to lose that. They take discretion away from

cops. There's hidden quotas. There's pressure to do things like make minor arrest. And I know in Vera Beach where I grew up, it was very prevalent and still is, that maybe they don't lose sight of it, but there's a tough line where do you, you work for the people. My version of what a cop is, you work for the people. You don't work for the government. You don't work for an agency.

You should support the people. So you should always do what's best for the people of your community. What happens is though administration puts so much heat on you and you have to have a paycheck and you get broke because you wanna buy the big truck when you get hired, you wanna live that life, style that I think they lose track of the Constitution and who they work for and they're influenced

by the policies and the agency. Yes, they lose track that that could be you, man, or that could be your son who just needed a little break on two grams of marijuana or driving recklessly a little bit. You know, teach them the lesson. And I will tell you, in my history, usually counseling somebody and letting them go is way more effective than handing them a $200 speeding ticket and letting them go without any counseling like like troopers there's your ticket and it's like this motherfucking nasty or hey man do you know what i have to i'd have to call your mom right now because you're speeding you wrap yourself around a telephone pole and you die and now i got to go to your house and tell your mom and sister and dad that you're dead is that what you want to do like oh man i

i never thought of that so just trying to use lessons and like i think explaining and being now if they're an asshole or they're not receptive to that. But I think trying to reach people as a human first is always the best approach. I've never once gotten a warning by a state trooper ever. You want to hear it funny? I got one all the way here. Really? And I thought I was going to get a ticket.

So I got pulled over just as I merged on the I-95 in Florida. FHP is bad. They're bad about tickets and not 10 seconds into my trip to all the way up here. I'm glancing down on my phone. I look down, I'm going 92. And I look over and I see him in the media and I'm like, as soon as I saw the car back up to come, I'm like, well, I know the drill I've been doing this my whole life. I just shot to the right, stop the car, license and everything out. And I said, he gets up to the car.

And I don't know if they, like you said, I don't know if they piss in their fucking coffee or something to go through trooper school. He walks up and he's like, license registration insurance. I'm like, hey, dude. I'm like, I apologize. I'm like, I just retired from this county that we're in 23 years. I'm like, I'm going to Philly for a show. And off he goes, doesn't even let me finish. And I'm like, well, this is going to be a bad start to the vacation trip.

And he walks back. And I knew based on the time in the car when I saw the door back come back, he couldn't have written me a ticket. Even with the printers, I'm like, I didn't get a ticket. Now I see him get out with just my license. And I'm like, cool, I got a warning. And I had, I'm a conspiracy guy now. So I'd started recording.

I'm like, they don't have body cams. FHP doesn't have body cams. So I hit record. And he walks back up. and he's obviously writing me a warning, and I tried to explain to him what I do. I'm like, hey, man, I run this pretty big page, Codville, we advocate for slow it down.

And he just walks away mid-sentence, and I'm like, what the fuck? And I think, like, if I pulled a cop, hey, where are you from? Oh, what'd you do, 23 years? Even if you're not a cop, if you have a cool story, like, oh, my, you know, I'm hurry into my grandma, I'm hurry in here.

Hey, what do you know? Let's talk about it. This dude was like a machine. You only let you off, though, because you're a cop. Maybe. I don't know. 100%. No, I have a family.

Finally, my wife got a ticket a couple years ago going to Disney as a cop. My wife is a cop as well. She's a cop? My wife is a cop. Still? Still? Yeah. And we'll get into how much affects her, what I, my show.

But we were going to Disney in April of 2023 and she got a fuck dude, dude was just as nasty, walk right up to the car. I had a gun in the car. He doesn't know me from Adam. And I'm like, hey, dude, I got a gun right here. He's like, grabs the light. The same thing just walks away. I'm like, if somebody told me the gun in the car, I would at least address it as a cop. walk back up.

She got a ticket? Whole thing, dude. And she said she was a cop or now. I'd both, yes, both of us said, I'm a cop. And what had happened was a trooper had just got killed maybe five nights earlier in our county. And I was like, hey, dude, you know, I'm sorry to hear about your buddy that was killed. We were on that. I was actually involved in the manhunt for the bad guy.

That dude didn't give two shits and just stroked her a ticket and walked away. And I was like. Wasn't there a viral video of like a Florida sheriff or something that just got fired? because she said, I'm the sheriff of this county or something when she was getting a speeding ticket. I don't know if she got, it wasn't the sheriff, but there have been several viral videos in Florida where and I go after them where they pull rank and I think it's improper. Tell me who you are. We're all, looking for a little help. I know if you could pull the, we're all looking for a little help when we get pulled over. We're all, we don't know. I've never once pulled it. That's what I'm saying. I would be like,

hey, man, I run a podcast, dude. But there are, I don't know that there's a sheriff, but probably when I think sheriff, I think the elected sheriff. But yes, there are videos of there was a chief. You're talking about the chief. Yes. On the golf card. Yep. Yep.

There is. And she pulled her rank and she ended up in really hot water. I think it was because of the way she said it. It was the tone. Yeah. It could have been said different. But here up there, the problem is up here, all you do is hold your badge out the window in the Northeast and the cop just turns his lights off and keeps going.

Yeah. Here's the PBA card. Yes. Yeah. Down in Florida, that's not the case. They want to, I don't know, they're pissing in their, I'm telling you, they're they're pissing in their, they're, they're pissing their coffee. And they have this, this hard on for like, fucking with other cops.

And I say that where cops should not break the law. I agree with you. We shouldn't do the thing, but we all speed. We all do dumb stuff. It's like everybody wants a warning. It's almost like being a cop in Florida. It's like worse than just being a regular person because they like, it's like they set out. I've been pulled over.

I had got pulled me in uniform. And he was screaming at me. In West Palm, I was going to a class. I was going fast. I was going like 96 and a, I was cooking. but he ran up to the car with the radar gun in his hand not his gun his gun I'm a bad guy and he's screaming at me and I'm in full uniform going to a class I had to drive an hour each way to this class and I'm like bro I'm sorry like yeah I'm late I'm speeding like you want to write me a ticket right and I get all my stuff out I was so mad

I dropped my like wallet I got the like the metal wallet all my IDs go everywhere and then he just get out of here and walk and like walked away and I'm like what do we just do he was like in an unmarked and everybody knows him he's like uh he's like a he's like a he's like a he's like a Indian male in an unmarked white Mustang. And when I got to the school and I got pulled over, that's all I said. And they go, I bet it was that asshole in the white Mustang. And I'm like, it sure was.

And like, they're crazy about it. Like I get speeding is important. It's important to enforce a law. But when you throw officer safety out the window and like just get so wrapped up in speeding tickets, that set you up for a viral video where you're getting killed. So like, there has to be a little bit of like, you have to keep your tactics and that and you're cool.

And this guy was nuts. Before you graduate high school, what were you thinking career-wise? I know you said you'd run the military, but was that always a plan? No. So the funny how I ended up in that situation was I was 18 years old and I'm working odd jobs. I'm at like the hospital working in like the kitchen. I dropped out and got my GED. Odd jobs.

My mom's there and I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I started thinking military because I'm like, I always had that in my head like everybody should join the military and just give something to the country. And I wasn't raised that way. I wasn't raised very patriotic. I just thought like basic working family. I should do that. Well, I'm playing softball in like a men's league.

My mom got me in with these doctors. I'm smoking weed before the games. Like, you know, dumb 18-year-old kid. Somebody comes up to me one day says, hey, man, how do you like playing softball with the chief of police? And I'm like, what? And they're like, Jim on your team is the chief of the Bear Beach Police Department. I'm like, bro, I'm blazing in the car before these softball games.

Like, what are you talking about? So I'm like, well, I got to say, stopped doing that. So I stopped doing that. And I think I was working at like a car dealership and detailing cars. I'm going nowhere. And I went up to him and I'm like, hey man, like, here's the chief. Like, you know, he's like, oh, he'd make a great cop. He seemed like a really good kid. And I think about it, I had, I could dunk a basketball. And like two days before my interview to be a cop, I got my finger caught in the chain basketball net. So I walk into this interview, GED, no education. And I got like a sling and my fingers all jacked up. and I went through the interview to be hired

and thank God I didn't get hired. They were like, no, you're not really what we're looking for. But if you go in the military for a few years and come back, we'll hire you. So I was like, cool. I literally left and without telling my mom, I contacted the Army recruiter. I drove to Miami in March of 96

and signed a contract without even telling her and I left like three weeks later to join the military. And I figured if I go do this, there'll be a job waiting for me when I get back. So I joined the United States Army It's 11 Bravo airborne infantry. And, I mean, I did all that cool stuff, jumped airplanes, but they held their word.

When I got out, they hired me. Do you think it was integral to your career to join the military and have that experience? I, again, think everybody should. And yes, so what that, that grew me up. Dumb, dope, smoking kid, smoking weed. I wasn't some maniac. I hate marijuana. Matter of fact, I'll tell you the story, I got,

I had no idea those THC, drinks exist. I don't know if they have my beer. Oh yeah, yep. They do, yeah. Bro, I went to know a gas station about four months ago, and I bought one. I thought it was an energy drink. And it was 20 milligrams of Delta 8. Oh, man. I didn't make it home before I was convinced the feds were back after me. And I'm like looking around. I'm like, that SB has been following me for a long time. I went home and I walked around my house for four to half hours pacing, looking out the window, paranoid because I had no idea what was that, what that drink was and what was happening to me. Don't they keep them in a separate aisle,

Nope. In Florida, dude, it's wide open. We sell alcohol around the open. It's a wild west down there. So that's the way we story. But I was kind of like a dose smoking kid. I thought, let me go grow up. So I joined United States Army. And yes, I grew up fast. I obviously basic training, Fort Benning. Infantry is the, you know, the top tier MOS in the military, your bullet catcher. and it matured me and it grew me up and it taught me responsibility. It taught me accountability. It taught me you have to make your bed every day. And that is the greatest, that's the most proud thing I ever done.

You're not only agree with the government. I work for the people. So serving the people. I'm willing to die for the people. And that three years in the military was the segue, I think, to the rest of my life. And it was very important to me. Yo, let me show you something real quick.

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I hope to see you guys rep in it. Why do you think you were so set on becoming a cop after the military? I wasn't. I just wanted a job. I still at that point had never dreamed of, I didn't know what cops did. I had no idea. I didn't watch cop shows. I just said, I'm getting out of the Army.

I have no career. And they promised me a job. And it was like, I'm just going to do what's next. So, and I think throughout my career that helped me, not being the guy, because you know, the old knock on cops as you were the guy bullied in high school and you became a cop. I wasn't. I was just a regular dude. But I just wanted a job, you know, so I went in.

I got hired as a dispatcher waiting to go to the police academy. And I started there in 99, worked for a while, went through the police academy. and I graduated and worked my first patrol shift in April, the day Delaunhart died. April, no, February 15th, 2001 was my very first patrol shift. I watched Dailenhardt crash at the Daytona 500, and I worked four to 12, and that was my first shift. So I wasn't dead set on it. It was just like kind of like riding the wave. I'm a young kid, and I got a daughter by that point.

I had a daughter at one kid in the military. Like, it's a job. It's decent money. It's got good, well, the sales pitches, the great retire. the brotherhood that doesn't exist, and then the benefits and all that. They suck in with those, you know, we're going to take care of the rest of your life.

You're going to be one of us. Was it good pay back then? No, for the time, yeah, I guess it was. Florida, I started it at like $32,000 a year, $31,000 a year. Pretty good for Florida. Yeah, it was good. I took a pay cut when I went to insurance a lot of years later, but yeah, it was benefits,

health insurance, retirement. You know, this agency didn't have take-home cars, but it was, you know, it was good money, good status job. And then, you know, I want to help people. You know, you get to go out and help people. So it was cool. I mean, like I said, never once in my life woke up like, I want to be a cop, even going through that whole becoming a cop.

I just kind of went with the flow of what life was kind of dealing me. And were you married to your current wife now? That was my first wife. I had four children with my first wife. And we were together from 1990. five and we divorced in 2009. I had all four children with her. I'm only four children.

Good relationship with her still. Everything's cordial, but that was my first wife. Did you have to take a polygraph test? Oh, yeah. So you passed it for a woman? I met it to smoking weed. Really? Yeah, you can still, dude, now guys,

I work with guys who've gotten DUIs on duty, gone out for a few years and worked their way back through. I've actually interviewed a guy that got a DUI as a cop, and he switched to a different department. No, there's two of them that work for the still work, where we work, one's a captain. And we have one guy, got arrested for domestic violence.

He still works there. Back then, smoking weed was kind of, even now. So I guess Jersey cops can smoke weed now because of the, but in Florida, they waived it now. But when I was, throughout my life,

it was a two year thing. You had to have two years clean of smoking marijuana, and then you can apply. But when I started, there wasn't even like a window. So I admitted, I admitted on my application.

I smoked marijuana. But I had those three years of military to clean me, kind of a clean, like three years, United States Army, You're drug tested like fucking twice a month in the military. So is it a misdemeanor you could get?

And then you still stay on the force? Yeah, you can't be silent. Yeah, and you can't have it. And you can't have any misdemeanors that involve, like, credibility issues, like lying, any type of fabrication. But you can smoke weed. A lot of guys have speeding ticket issues. A lot of guys have some guys have DUIs.

And they, um, they wave that as long as, you know, now they take fucking anybody. So it's scary. Now they're kind of desperate to get on. Yeah. The floor is a disaster. You see literally billboards everywhere for law and correctional officers. They're waving down there in Florida. They're waving psychs and physicals.

You may have to take a psychiatric test or a physical. So they're giving bonuses. How did it feel then to arrest people for weed if you used weed yourself? So, well, I guess I guess the easiest way I could say it was I wasn't a huge weed arrest person and I didn't make many, but it's still the law. So I broke the law. I smoked weed. I joined the army.

I stopped doing it. And then I took an oath to not do that ever again. And the statute was pretty clear. So I guess the way I look at in my head, and I like how you ask that, because you're right. But it's just like speeding to me. We're all going to speed tomorrow. You're going to speed.

But you don't want to get stopped for speeding, but you're going to do it. And the cop, we all cop speed. So I looked at it like, I have not done that in X amount of years. I would never do it again. And now I have a job that says, you have to tell people they can't do this. And it's not like people don't know they're not allowed.

My dad smoked weed. My dad took me my whole life until he died. So it was kind of like, well, what do you want? I go, I asked my dad. So it's, it's a weird part of the world. But I took out that that was my job and there was a stupid book that all these rules and they paid me to enforce them. But you know what's interesting about what you just said is that kind of ties into second

chances for a guy that gets out of prison. Yeah. You know, that's what he did in the past. and he's a new person now if they're actually honoring that. And I'm an advocate for that. And I love that. The problem is we see guys arrested 19, 20, 27 times, and they're not making a difference.

But, I mean, as we get further, I actually got a text message we could talk about later from somebody that arrested years ago that just contacted me recently due to social media and we'll talk about the interesting things he had to say about life then and life now. So there are a lot of success stories. And as we get into the, you know,

narcotics work I did and all that. Part of my goal was not that you just, there's guys you want to put in jail, like shit bags, guys that beat their wives and guys who do really bad things of children. Like, you want them to rot in hell. But I was very discretionary when it came to drugs and marijuana.

I didn't, I didn't like it. I mean, it was a segue to get in cars and smell marijuana, but if all they had was a little bit of marijuana, I had no problem with it. But the first agency I worked for was very, very strict. You have to write. a ticket out of traffic crash.

I'm like, so this dude just rolled a stop sign, gets in a crash, his insurance is going up. He's having the worst day of his life. Oh, by the way, here's a $176 ticket for careless driving. And I refuse to do it, and I got in trouble all the time. I went to the sheriff's office. They took that it was all discretionary. And I never wrote another ticket out of traffic accident in the next 20 years.

I think the biggest problem right now with like marijuana too is you could be in Connecticut and you can smoke weed. And then if you go to Florida, you can't smoke weed. Well, we have dispensaries now. Oh, is it recreation? It's right at the, it's right there. Because it failed the last election. It failed and then it, it is now you can have a card and now we have hemp.

And now as a cop, when I walk up to your car, I have to dispel all your opportunities to produce a reason why your car would smell like weed before we can even get to it. So if you have a marijuana card, we're done. You can smell like weed. If you have, if it's hemp, which we can't tell the difference between hemp and weed anyway, we're done. So there was just a big ruling in Florida where I just read that. Yeah, we have to go through those steps before we can get to. And I'll be honest with you. You know, that's, that was kind of overused.

Like, hey, man, I smell weed in this car. I'm not going to lie to you that. The cops don't do that. But that kind of puts a little rain on that. And, you know, I looked at weed like it was a lot of people that smoked weed, did a lot of other things. But there was a lot of people that smoked weed. So it was like kind of guilty by association.

We used weed to get in cars and guys are trafficking in cocaine and fentanyl. You really want fentanyl out. dealers off the street. But, you know, the 50-year-old dad of three that goes, you know, takes his kids to school every morning, does nothing wrong, works at the factory down the road that smokes some weed in his free time, is he really the guy we need to take to jail? Like, I didn't agree with that. Never will, never did.

And you can go, I'll be an open book to my entire career of arrest. You will not see some cheese dick marijuana arrest on that. It's either pounds and pounds and pounds that they're obviously, we're selling it or they really earned it. Like they're selling crack, but the only thing I could catch him with that day was weed, and I know they're selling crack, so they're not taking the ride. But regular old Johnny, you know, Johnny citizen ride out, he's not going to jail for marijuana.

Not in my world. I remember we used to carry the bottle of axe and spray it in the car and on ourselves. And even now, like, if the place smells like weed because someone smoked in here, I'm always like, oh, I don't want, like, I don't want to get in trouble, but it's like, it's legal here, you know? So, yes, you're good. Yeah. Yeah, it's legal.

Like I said, it's pretty much legal everywhere now. So where do you go next at when you start, like to go to a certain division? I started Vero and my, ironically, my very first call as a cop is an arm robbery. And I'm like, this is it, dude. Dude gets robbed for a cell phone. I literally leave the station from that first call and I'm in a foot pursuit with three black males that robbed a dude for a cell phone and we catch two of the three. And I'm just like, all right, this is it.

This is neat. That wasn't with the job ended up being. But so I get into Vera Beach Police Department. I quickly realized that it is a one step above security. It is a small, rich town that they don't want crime. They don't want to acknowledge there's crime. They don't want us chasing bad guys. We're going to like a medical calls.

Like somebody falls and scrapes their knee. We're sending the police because we're, we're here for everybody. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Like, this is stupid. And it is so micromanaged that like the chief is involved in like, traffic parking lot crashes. He's interjecting his opinion. There's no rank.

It's just, it's like a dictatorship in that building. And I'm like, bro, I can't do this. And I'm listening and I'm scanning. I'm ever to hear the big bad sheriff's office over there, which is,

you know, they're policing 250,000 people. They're working 20, 25 guys a day, and they're pursuing cars and their dogs are biting people. And they got robberies and shootings. And I'm like, I'm listening to this and I'm like, I got to get into this.

And I took a liking to narcotics, not weed. This was a crack epidemic when I started in 2001, two, three, four, crack is just rampant. And you go to houses and, you know, a long guy comes out and his entire lawn business is stolen out of his trailer. His house has been broken into when his daughter is terrified to go back into her house because some piece of shit broke in and took everything out of the house. I'm like, the reason they're doing this is to smoke crack. So I started going, I'm going to go after crack users and crack dealers. But the city didn't want that.

They're like, no, we don't do that here. So I worked to the city from 01 to 04 in December of 04. I went to the sheriff's office and immediately went to the hood area and just dudes, white dudes pulling in, trading their cars for drugs. It's just chaos at this point. It's before the cell phone era so they can't call ahead. They can't meet at the gas. They're just driving through the hood hoping to make, like you see on cops in the old days

where the guys are just driving around and I'm immediately like this, this is my fix. This is what I want to do. This is it. So I do that for about a year and a half, and then I ended up getting transferred into like undercover task force narcotics work. With the Sheriff's Department. With the Sheriff's Office.

And this is where kind of things, now I know all the corruption and nonsense that was going on in that world with the cops and the bad guys, but I'm a naive five, six year cop at that point. So I get sworn into like DA Task Force. I'm in this, I got this DA status. And we're starting to work like high end wire, tap investigations and I quickly see that how's the best way to segue this crack dealers

high-end crack dealers are on flight logs with rich white affluent people who own big misses in town and when we get to that level of the investigation we don't talk about that anymore those guys are like untouchable we're just going to focus on these black dudes that are selling crack And I had a partner, Paul Muborn. He did 20 years, United States Army as a first sergeant. He passed away last year, and then 20 years was a cop. And he was a victim of that where he uncovered that it wasn't, he uncovered the Wizard of Oz. The Wizard of Oz behind the screen wasn't these black dudes selling drugs.

The guys going to South America bringing it back to our community. And I started to see that those guys were protected. Like we couldn't get the investigation to that next level because those guys were contractors and big wigs in town. and you couldn't talk about that. And that's where I think my career took a little turn where I was getting close and they came after me. Who do you think it was protecting them, the city officials or the federal officials?

No, the locals. There were some scumbag, local guys that, like when they say the brotherhood, and I talk about this, I was influenced to do not illegal things, but like we get issued by money. So I'm a dope cop. I give you, you get $5 to $100 if you got to pay an informant,

if you got to go do a crack deal, organized. This money is like the gospel, though. You have to have every pound he counter for. You can't out, you can't be out giving your girlfriend money. You can't be out spending it. But little things where like the supervisor of the unit would go, hey, the girls, the work of the sheriff's office, they both need windbreakers. Mike, take you buy money and just go buy them to windbreakers. And I'm like, it doesn't seem like we're supposed to use it for that. But okay, I'm a young guy. I don't know. It must be okay. I go do it. And then I get to my receipt phase where I have to write my receipt. They're like, just put it down as an informant.

payment and I'm like I like we can't do that but you just like any abusive relationship like where wife is abused or something you can't really you're in a position where you can't really question it so you're like okay I guess this is okay I'll just do it and then he collects it and he turns it in and you get your new five hundred dollars that's gone and when you see something is my it seems very minor but that hindsight now that was 2006 seven eight nine like what 15 18 20 years ago now I realized that it was it was it It's kind of like when in the movies where Denzel Washington gets in the training day,

he tells a new guy, go do this, it's okay. Go do this, it's okay. Next thing he's in a fucking drug house with a bunch of drug deal. I never got that far. But I could see where those little things, and that leads me to question, if this guy is in charge of the drug unit and he's willing to turn a blind eye, even to something as silly as jackets for females that needed them, what else is he willing to do? And there was always rumors and people saying, like, this guy's a cruel.

You're working for a bunch of crooks. They're in bed with criminals. And you don't want to believe that. But now I do believe it. Now, when you're in a unit like this, is it kind of like what we see in the movies where, you know, you guys are plain-closed officers. You kind of are your own team.

We have a separate building, separate buildings. I mean, did you watch that Ben of Thieves? It's kind of like those crews. Yeah, it is. We were going to off. We had rental car contract with Enterprise. I have a different car every day of the week. We just had a running.

Every guy had a card that walked in Enterprise and said, I need a different car. I'm burned on surveillance. We're in a separate office. We're wearing jeans, t-shirt, badge underneath, gun. We are untouchable, unaccountable,

unaccountable, just mercenaries of whatever we want to do. And that's where your character has to be extremely strong. And I've been accused of everything from being, like the FBI and DIA investigated me, all these things. And I will tell you that

if I did all those things, a lot of people will say, you'd think I would come on a podcast or I would go start my own podcast and put my face out for everybody to see and go, man, there's a guy that was crooked. I have no problem doing it because my conscience is clean.

But I saw, I can't prove anything those guys did, but I know that based on what a lot of people said they did, saying it alone, I would never say somebody's guilty, but combined with the behavior I saw and the willy-nilly on little things like, even if it's 50 bucks or buy money, that type of behavior then leads me to believe you're willing to take a $1,000 payoff.

You're willing to take a $5,000 payoff to just give information or turn information over, which is some of the great things I was accused of that I didn't do. But I believe those people, maybe I was getting close to them in an investigation and I became the target of an investigation that I didn't find out about for years later.

but it definitely is like the movies. It's very, there's a lot of wild shit that goes on. So do you think those units, if they have good character, can be effective from bat and crime? Absolutely, you need them. You have to have them, but there has to be, you have to be one of the most, you have to have super integrity.

And I, you know what? People can say whatever they fucking want. When I got investigated, the FBI and DA went behind my back and interviewed all my informants and my best informant was a female. And of course, what was the first question they asked her? Did you ever fuck them? And she laughed.

And she pointed it at the wall and she goes, all my kids are black. She's like, he's a great-looking dude, but I like black guys. And that chick and I put nine people together in prison for the rest of their life for drug trafficking and bad, bad people that cause a lot of people to overdose and die,

but I never crossed that line. But the first thing everybody accuses you of when you come in dark undercover is you're banging all your informants, you're breaking the law. I now know that those guys were. And I don't mean that I saw it like I was involved, like I'm part of it.

they were a generation before me. So they were doing this shit in the late 80s, early 90s, late 2000s. Some of these guys were around long enough. By the time I got in in 0-607, there was enough social media accountability that you couldn't just be reckless. But when I heard people tell me that about these guys

that had like weird, maybe illegitimate children that were running around and all these, I go, now it makes, especially now, now it makes sense that, you know, I walk into a grocery store and I have a guy going to go. you know so-and-so was crooked right like yeah you're right and he goes that dude planted drugs on me and i'm like you know 10 years before my time i go i believe you like i wouldn't have believed you

10 years ago i believe they did i believe they did so it is like the movies but you have to be now the problem is just like the rodney king beatings and all those stuff that affected us as cops forever that's not i don't believe that's happening still some places yes i think it was way more rampant back then, but I don't think most of your drug units are crooked nowadays. I don't think cops are as crooked as everybody makes them out to be. And maybe their soul is crooked and their mind is crooked, but there's so many checks and balances in social media and cameras and people around, I just don't think they're doing like Michael Dowd. Like, they're not doing Michael Dowd type stuff anymore. There probably is a few, but there were probably 50 Michael Dowds or 100 Michael

Dow's when he was doing it. I don't think that's the case anymore. Yeah, there's too much, too many people looking, too many whistleblowers. There is. you would get smoked. And it's too easy to track evidence and all the technologies come along. Crack a Cayman Jack Margarita with real lime, blue agave nectar, and real margarita taste. Taste your escape.

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Restrictions apply. But I do believe it was going on and I believe it was going on in my agency. So aside from the jacket incident, when was the first time you really felt uneasy about something that was going on in your unit? We worked a wiretap and one of the people that was brought in as a suspect, I believe was brought in for no other reason than the detective had beef with him. Like his brother was selling massive amounts of cocaine and we had we're on a wiretap and the brother of the main target was, he wasn't innocent, but let's say you and I are trafficking cocaine massively. And your brother goes once a month or once every three months, his buddy calls and goes,

I know your brother's moving that shit, man. Let me help me out. And he would, like, connect them. That's it. Is he guilty? Yes. Did we need to be on his phone? No.

And I saw that happen. And I was like, why the fuck are we bringing this guy in on the case? Like, he's not, I'm listening to these phone calls. I hear the calls. I'm, we're listening. I'm like, he's fucking,

he doesn't talk about drugs. And I think that was a personal vendetta against that guy to rope him in. And of course, he got the, very least. I don't even know why I got convicted, but he broke the law. He broke the law. He definitely facilitated narcotics deals. But I was like, man, we got guys moving 20, 30 kilos and making trips all over and we got a connection in Haiti and worried about some dude that like facilitates a drug deal. When we're working this massive federal case, I just didn't like it. But again,

I'm so young and new and naive that it's like, who are you going to go tell your career, your life? It's like, and I, again, I guess you call me hypocritical, but I just, it's like, it's like, a domestic violence victim that isn't ready to say my husband beats me. Like I can't get the words out of my mouth yet. And I'm too scared to say anything. So that's kind of what I was seeing was like uneasy. Is he guilty? Yes.

But did he really need to be brought into the case? I would say no. Couldn't you have just switched units? Couldn't you have gone to a different team if you felt? Yes. And but again, yes. Absolutely. Your easy answer is yes.

But you're in that lifestyle. You're making a difference. I'm putting people in prison that belong. and it's like he ended up getting transferred out not too long later. The guy that I'm talking about that was in charge of that part, but he ended up getting put in a really wild eye

where he got caught with drugs and narcotics in his car. He kept his job ironically, but yes, you could. The easy answer is yes, and I would now, if I could go back to 2020, 2010, Mike and give anybody advice that's listening or any cops and I do this on my own platform, the days of turning a blind eye to bad administration or bad cops is over, you have to speak up.

And if you don't want to do it, contact me. And I'll do the legwork. I'll do the public records request, and we'll go after that bad guy and get rid of them. But yeah, your easy answer is, and I should have. Before we move on to finding out about your investigation, give us a really good bus story that you took place in. I guess that so my big case,

I guess my big claim of fame case was, I did the first RICO case in history of Ineuro County, racketeering case. You see Rico and the mouth. and the gangsters and it happens but I put together um we had guys that were killing people they were there were some poison they were selling crack they were and I was able to write my first wiretap and infiltrated a massive drug um network and I started in March of 2009 it was my first case on my own where me and another guy wrote the wiretaps and got um the ability to listen

to three different guys phones and then we were picking off the small Alzheimer's that we're buying, but we were moving ourselves up where a little case in Virab Beach, Florida led to the feds getting involved and that half of it went to Haiti and the other half was in Mexico to the point they were taking semi-trucks and boats off coming into the country with massive amounts of narcotics. That started with a $20 crack deal in Verbeach, Florida. So like it lasted a year and in April 7th, it was, I'll never do the day, April 7th, 2010, we did this massive multi-agency take-guess. down where we arrested like 120 people over like three days, TSA agents, government employees,

former cops, but just took off this message. So that was probably my big case where, you know, you see here the war on drugs. There's no, obviously you're never going to kill the war on drugs, but these guys were killing people. And I looked at it like, I'm making a difference to the mom that lost her daughter to narcotics. And I'm at least putting that guy away. Although not for that case, I'm putting him away for something. So one of the defendants got three life sentences. One got 25 years.

Another one got life. And then we spun it to the feds. And I have no idea from that point how far that case went into the federal government and what they were able to do with it from there. But at the end of the day, my justification was bad guys selling poison to the community and killing people. That's why I wanted to put them in jail. In your experience, these individuals that sell the drugs that have poison in it that kill people, do they just not have a heart? Do they not have feelings and they really prioritize money over people?

Yeah. Money is, um, and they're, they're, they gaslight you so bad that they, I'm the bad guy. It was scary. Like, I never forget to take down day of that case when we took the main guy down, Chris Brown, Christopher Rudolph Brown, I was, I'm scared of two people, three people. two of them I never have to worry about again Christopher Brown Randy Brown no relation two life sentences three life sentence and Demerience Odom

who got he gets out in 2032 he's in the feds those three people I believe will try to kill me two of them fortunately can't ever get out and one can't but they have no soul they have no soul I'm the problem I'm the bad guy I put them in jail

and um I was where I realized all that was I was um I'd come out of the drug union, I went back to patrol, and I stopped a guy in the hood on a bike. And he looked at my name. He said, Dilks? I said, yeah, he's Michael Dilks? I said, yes, sir.

He goes, ooh, Randy Brown is going to kill you. And I said, Randy Brown's never going out of prison. He goes, Michael Dilks, you better hope he doesn't. He sits in that block every day. He knows your kids' names. He knows your wife's name. He knows your mama's name. And if that man ever gets out of prison, he talks about it from sunup to sundown, how he's going to kill you.

I believe you would. Unfortunately, he's in prison arrest. of his life from two life sentences and DJ Odom gets out and same scenario where I had I had no idea he'd been came back from the feds for a state case and I brought a warrant into the back of the jail and when I looked over in the holding cell DJ Odom's faces against the glass and he's staring at me I'm like I went over to the booking guy and I was like I don't care if this building catches on fire that door does not open until I'm out of this jail and he looked at me as I said I'm telling you I will not have a gun in the jail I said I will go back out

and get my gun that door does not open and I remember looking at him and but um you know they don't they don't have a soul it's my fault they sold drugs it's my fault I arrested them it's my fault that I did what I did and um the Chris Brown was when I arrested him and I walked in he was laying on the ground and handcuffs he looked over his shoulder he goes you live five houses down on the right and we were we were five houses away from my mom's house that just happened to be where we arrested him. He knew where I lived. And I'm like, mother fuck, man. Like, that's a scary thing to think those guys are doing counter surveillance on us. They know where we live. And that was my, that was my big case. Those guys, but in that I learned a lot of like, they're doing as much

research on us as we are on them. It's scary. How did you find out you're under investigation? So how did I find out was under investigation? I'm very transparent. I was, I went through, My dad died in 2010. I started hanging out with a couple guys that I probably shouldn't have. One guy had been arrested for possession of cocaine, and one guy had been, I guess, arrested for some type of drug thing. I was a raging alcoholic at this point. 2010, my dad dies.

My mom, there's a syndrome where your mom, I forget what it's called, where it's like your mom, I became my dad to my mom. My mom never has to this day has remarried. I foreclosed my wife leaves me or divorced and I'm an alcoholic and I'm a wreck and I always wish somebody would have either arrested me for DUI because I'll tell you I drove drunk quite often. They should have just pulled me over and put me in jail and I made it but that would have saved my life short term. I was hanging out with some guys I shouldn't have been hanging out with and the rumors started

around town that I was involved that one guy was growing marijuana I guess allegedly all I did was go to bars with these dudes it was like an outlet we went to bars we drank we went to some strip clubs um everybody always told me to play the card that i was working them as informants but i have too much character to make that lie up they definitely gave me a ton of information it led to a lot of arrests but i was a lost soul and i was hanging out people that shouldn't have and at some point one of the guys told somebody that he was hanging out with me and his buddy was an informant for the feds and went to the feds and says, you got a crooked copies hanging out with this guy

and need to look into him. I guess my version of this is what I told you before, the same guy that asked me to buy the jackets, I had a meeting one day in narcotics. And I was, I knew of two guys, one of them you know, Jason Vulturebeck, I think he's reached out to you with the federal prison. Me and Jason are now friends after all this shook out.

Jason Vodgerbeck and Zach Rose were the first. two pioneers of pill mills in Indian River County. Jason used to traffic cocaine big time, and he'll tell you he actually paid people to watch me. He was most scared of me. He thought I was going to get him and get his operation. So that's a side note to this. I was in a meeting with a bunch of people that weren't,

shouldn't have been in the meeting. They weren't sworn in like we were. They weren't drug narcotic detectives. They weren't. There were soft people in the agency that shouldn't have been in. and I had information that Zach Rose was laundering his pill mill money through a tanning salon that his mom owned

and the informant working was the female was telling you about my A1. She calls me. She said, dude, we're shipping 50, 60, 80,000 dollars a week, sometimes twice a week from here in this little tanning salon to all these places where Zach has these pill mills and all this shit. And I'm like, holy fuck.

So I'm like, I'm on the cusp of this. Like, this is good. I told that guy. The one guy went to his office, I said, dude, I'm on, I'm on to something. We go into a meeting. He's like, Mike, tell us about that case you're in. And I'm like, no.

He's like, no, no, he needs to, and there's all civilians in there. There's like an analyst and this other detain. I'm like, we don't talk about this stuff in front of people. No, no, no, no. He, like, made me. So I'm like, okay, I'm like, this guy is doing this. What I just told you, he's traveling.

There's a bit of, my phone rings, not 20 minutes after that meeting, and it's the girl. And we had never, the female informant, we had never had a problem. We worked together for 10 years. You motherfucker. And I'm like, what? She's like, you fucking after 10 years broke the fucking rule.

And I'm like, what are you talking about? She says, a fucking detective just showed up over here at this tanning salon. And I know exactly who it was. Silver car, brown pants, blue shirt, because he was wearing that in the meeting I was in. And he drove over there and told the fucking mom everything I just talked about in the meeting, tipped her son off. and I went, holy fuck, nobody did anything about it. Nobody said anything about it.

What did they do? They came after me. And that is my, that's why I believe I was targeted was, this dude knows too much. This dude is onto something. He's onto the corruption. And next thing you know, they go after me for hanging out with these dudes and launch this massive federal investigation on me.

And I didn't even know it. The reason I started finding out about it where I would go to bars and stuff And dudes are like, you're going to get indicted. You know, they had like not, didn't run a good investigation because people in the community were being interviewed and talked about it. But I didn't do anything wrong. Did I do stuff wrong that probably policy wise? Yeah, should I been hanging out with these dudes?

Should I have been doing, hanging out with them and going to strip club? No, I shouldn't have. But the level of what they were trying to say that I was involved in marijuana grows. I was planning to rob drug dealers like this shit was just wild what they were saying about me. And we'll talk about it in detail, but the end result was not even an internal affairs investigation. I was not indicted. I wasn't even questioned by the agency. It just went away.

Who was the investigators? I assume, because I've never been able to pull it. Yousef, Hofstra. I don't know if you know his name. He was investigated by the feds as well. He was a cop that killed somebody off duty, got his job at. He knows. He's like, dude, you need to fucking go get the paperwork and look at it.

I just never bothered looking into it. I don't know if it exists. But it was allegedly the DA and FBI. Why I know that is eventually my door knocked one day I was off and it was the DA, the FBI, and an analyst and came in my house and interviewed me for eight hours. About everything. And I did not request a lawyer. I was like, no, I don't need a lawyer.

Like, you guys come on in? Oh, so that confirmed that the DEA and the FBI were investigating you. Yes, yeah. That was like 2014. That was three years after they investigated me because the pill mill case I was involved in with this massive pill mill. I guess the problem was one of the, one of the main players, and I was I confirmed that before I just to make sure I got this right

what Zach Rose was in with Votrbeck they were the two main guys there's jail recording phone calls that Jason Votcherbeck provided to me where Jack Rze tells him I will do anything to not go to prison and part of anything is I will lie and say Dilks was giving me information and I will take him down to get us out of this trouble and I was dating a girl that that Zach knew. And I guess I didn't know this at the time

and it's been all confirmed in court. The girl I was dating was going through my fucking phone and being paid by Zach. And Zach's plan was to get enough information and then flip it that I was giving him. Because the feds didn't care if my girlfriend was giving him information. That wasn't juicy enough.

He was basically trying to cut a deal with the feds and if I can get my dirty, can I get off of this? And he was trying, you know, he ended up going for a long time and they all got commuted at some point by Biden. But, and this isn't my out. This isn't my speculation. This is coming from one of the dudes involved in the case. Jason Votrabeck was involved in all this.

He sent me jail calls. He sent me documents. That was Zach's plan. Zach's plan was to frame me as a dirty cop. And that would have been juicy enough for the feds to cut him some type of deal. So he took the stand in like Jacksonville against my knowledge and testified that I was like a crooked cop. He was getting information from me. He was paying me.

I'd love to see the money because I was running out of gas twice a week. I was so broke at that point in my life. I was down in the dumps. but that was how, like, and I was getting spilled back in the community because this was all being talked about and I had no idea. So I'm hearing like little bits and pieces

you're gonna get indicted. I'm like, I didn't fucking do anything to get indicted. Like I don't know what you guys are talking about. So eventually they came and interviewed me and they had the binders and they, before that though, which I didn't know and I knew later was they did a controlled phone call.

They did a controlled meet and they did a controlled meet where they tried to, they shouldn't, and I remember these days, they showed me pictures. and one of the pictures was one of the guys I was hanging out with that I shouldn't have been and I think they thought I was gonna call him

right after that meeting and go oh my god, dude, so they showed me a picture of the guy, I go yeah, it's Beau. They're like, who is he? I said, he grows marijuana. Allegedly, he probably, he's easy. I said he lives, I gave him the address. He lives right over there.

I'm like, if you go talk to him, he'll probably fold, he's a pussy. That's the guy I was supposedly working with. And I'm like, if I was working with this guy, and I didn't, I never, I never, the worst thing I did on my fucking mother, who I just told you how much I care about my mother, the worst thing I did was hang out with those I shouldn't hang out with

and I drove drunk a lot because I was an alcoholic. So do you think they were investigating your whole team or just, no, no, originally it was the whole team. I confirmed that originally they thought the whole team's crooked. And then when I guess they started to look into the team, they narrowed it down to just Mike is crooked. Did anyone on your team get arrested? No, there was never even a charge filed on anybody.

Nothing ever came of it. No internal affairs investigation. Not even an internal affairs investigation. Just your suspicions that some of your team was crooked. That part they never looked into. They looked into me. And then they investigated me and they presented the case to the sheriff's office. And the sheriff's office investigator said there's no probable cause you can do anything.

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assistance assistance switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. And then it went away. And it didn't resurface until 2024. So let's talk about the day that came to your house. Yep, absolutely. Tell us about that. So I'm Door Knox and it's DA. that I worked for when I was in the task force,

a guy that now I think it was an FBI agent from what I remember, because I didn't even care, and it was an analyst. And they came in and I said, come on in. I'm like, you guys want to sit at the table? My mom's right here. My mom's boy, I'm like, mom can sit and listen to all this. Like, come on in.

No, let's go in your room. So at the time, because I was having such a great life, I lived in my mom's garage. But it was built until like you got out here. It was very nice. I had a big room painting New York Giants. I was a giant fan. I had a big TV.

And I said, come on in. And I'll never forget the formal investigation I was in one of those gaming chairs that you like sit on the floor and can rock back and forth in. And I'm looking up at analyst, DA, FBI and binders and binders. And they just, off we went for about seven hours. And I was like, they questioned the trips to Miami. I'm like, no, the guy said, I shot my gun out the window or some wild shit. And what I looked at is like, like the Zach Rose thing. If you tell the feds, I'm getting information third party by a girlfriend, they're like, well, the cops not.

If you tell the feds, I'm getting information from a cop, who it's a better story. So it was a lot of fabrication in these accusations. Like, I'm like, I shot my gun out the window. Oh, they were doing cocaine in fronty. I'm like, no, they weren't doing it. Like what? I was like, I went to strip clubs.

I definitely took the drives. It was only like twice too. And I'm like, yeah, but to side note it, they only interviewed, there's three of us in the car. And you're not a cop, right? You've never been a cop. If there's three people in a car and somebody accuses somebody of something. How many people of those would you interview? All three? They never interviewed

one guy. Or they did, and they didn't like what the guy had to say because he would have told him the truth, which I didn't do anything wrong. Never to the, and he ended up passing away, he had to overdose and he died, but never was there one document of interviewing the third guy in the car, which I always found odd. Like if I have three suspects in a car, any good defense attorney would go, you only interviewed two one other guy in the car with my client where's the interview with the third guy this is the feds so i always wondered he either told him the truth and they didn't like the truth or they just didn't bother because they didn't want but anyway so they come in and it's just an eight-hour day they're going through all this stuff the two of the main things they were hung up on were the ride to miami did i shoot my gun out the window i'm like absolutely not did i concoct or was i in the going to rob jason vulture back and i'm like you guys are fucking insane Like insane. Like, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm barely, like, no, no.

And then the girl I was dating was connected to a doctor. And I had fucked my backup. And I went to the doctor and she gave me a prescription for, and if you know anything about, I don't know how knowledgeable you are pills, but the pill mill cases were the 30 milligram heavy heteroxies with the fucking Xanax and then whatever, that third drug, they were killing people.

They were giving, I got a prescription for 10, 350, Tylenol Lord tap, basic fucking pain meds. You can't even eject them. You can't sell them. They're worth a dollar. I was fucked up. I believe wholeheartedly

that I didn't know this at the time. It was before E. Trace took over and there was like the monitoring. When I needed the second prescription, I believe my girlfriend probably because she was the nurse for the doctor, just called it in. So they were hung up that the doctor

during the second prescription was at a concert in Atlanta. And I was like, I am telling you that the doctor authorized me to get a prescription. it was re-upped. I don't know how that happened. I went to a pharmacy and I bought it.

I paid it. I picked it up. They were convinced that I was hooked on pills and I was selling it. I'm like, these are $3 pills. Like if I sold the whole prescription, and I got two of them. I got one, two, and never got another one. But the way they tried to twist this with everything else was like I was trafficking

drugs and selling drugs. I'm like, are we in the right planet? Like, do you guys understand? I was too knowledgeable in narcotics and how am I in my history to go this doesn't even make sense that's like me trying to traffic Coca-Cola

like we can buy it at the store there's no value to it so that was the two main things that were hung up during the whole interview and I was like bro I'm like I didn't lawyer up like I'm an open book you have my bank accounts obviously you had my phone records you have my rumor I still just don't know

rumors where they were tapped my phone so then you would think over however many months you would have something to charge me with. They left that day. And the last thing I said to them were, do I need to notify the agency that you guys were here? No, we'll take care of it. Okay. I went back to work.

And I never heard about this again until 20, 24. Did word get around your department that you're under investigation? All over town. Talk about miserable, man. You know, my dad dies. I'm an alcoholic. I'm going through it. And now everybody's walking around town saying, I'm a crooked cop.

and again, DUI, I drove drunk a lot during that time. I actually stopped drinking after all that and went years and got in shape and started lifting. But yes, it was all over town that I was getting indicted and I was going to federal prison

and I was a crooked cop and that's tough, man. That's tough. That's tough to deal with. That's tough to be labeled even 13, 14 years later. It doesn't come up as much but it's like anything else.

It's like you tainted my name. I always faulted them for putting me in charge of such large cases in a small town where I had to go to school with these guys. I knew these guys. They knew where I live. So yeah, I was labeled as the crooked cop that never was even disciplined one single second for anything that ever happened.

It must have been tough to do your job. It was. I went back to patrol. They bounced me on narcotics. I went back to patrol in 2012, 2013. I still had to go through. So at that time, we were investigating like nine pill mills in multiple states. And I was the wiretap.

I wrote half the wires. So I had a four-day suppression hearing and a four-day deposition with like 19 attorneys and 19 defendants. I always assumed that was in like 2013 or 40. I always waited for the, we got you. What about all this federal investigation?

I sat through four days and when I didn't get asked about it, I was like, what fucking planet am I on? What planet? But at the end of the day, a reporter walked up to me in the hallway and said any comment that you about you were possibly under federal investigation. I was like, no, I don't mean comment.

And that was the only time I ever addressed. And one of the attorneys walked up to me before the four-day deposition said, there's rumors about you. He's like, I'm not going to ask anything about that. So rest assured, rest easy. We're not going in that. We're going into the case and we're diving into it. So I was like, okay.

I never thought another word about it. So what happens in 2024? Well, let's back up. because if you want you want to jump to that and we'll jump back there you can tell us you go in order okay so let's go in order i come out nothing happens and and um you ever heard him up you never heard my ticto story right so 2020 TikTok is very popular covid's hitting and i am remarried to a female who has an affair with her boss and i go through a midlife crisis i'm 42 43 years old i get on ticot And at the time, the current sheriff is running for sheriff.

I'm his best friend. I was best man at his wedding. I end up in the Daily Mail as racist because in the background of one of my TikToks is a rap song that has the N-word in it. And everybody's racist, right? So I end up on international news. Not the cool news like Channel 5 local. I end up in the tabloid world of like BT, MTV, Daily Mail.

I'm getting death threats from Turkey and Romania. Japan that I'm a racist. So that happens and I go through this whole thing where again, I'm back in the news. I'm suspended. I'm a disgrace cop. All that happened in reality was I got the basic discipline, which is a letter of counseling. But I was removed from SWAT for six months and I lost my ability to be a field training officer. The reason I say that is I was best friends with the guy who ended up winning the election. So he wins the election. I go through this TikTok nonsense. since it all goes away. Still a joke, though, I get hammered over it.

It's the most cringe thing. I don't even care about the federal investigation at all. It's the TikTok that makes me cringe the most that I was so distraught from going through the trauma of my wife's affair and, like, being emasculated that I reached out to Fat Trailer Park Girls on TikTok and was getting my feed of, like, my, my, from girl, from, like, fat women on Snapchat.

I mean, naked pictures and shit, because I was going through it, dude. I don't know if you've ever been cheated on or had an, you know, some of having an affair. It's tough. It's tough to go through. And the only thing keeping me alive was this stupid person I pretended I was on TikTok. Everybody says I'm hypocritical because I hold such high accountability now on TikTok ops.

I look at it like kind of like you. You went to prison. You changed your life. And now I'm sure you like, you try to advocate for people not to go to prison. I advocate for people not to do TikTok because I know that you're not focused on your job. You're focused on internet fame. and therefore you're going to get killed or you're going to be lax at work

because you're too focused on social media stardom. So was it the first wife or the second wife? It was my second wife. So I'm married three times. I'm married to my third wife now. So that's the mid-like crisis. That was the, I'm 39 and she's 23.

That was the great idea. Oh, there is where you went wrong right there. Yeah, the young, you know. So that's the middle wife. And so off we go. So now I'm like good friends with the sheriff. That DEA stuff is, always somewhere in the background,

but nobody really talks about it. I go through, um, he takes over and I believe intentionally, they promote, like he promotes all his people because he's the new sheriff. He takes over. I get passed over.

I'm his best friend. Very, very hard on me to go. My best friend's in charge. And I didn't want special treatment. I knew I deserved it though. I watched my wife now get promoted. I was dating her at the time. I watch all these younger officers,

All these guys make sergeant, all the stuff I wanted. And I'm like, passed over. I got promoted at the end of that year. I deserved it. I got promoted. I got passed over. I think I got penalized early in the year because he didn't want to say, oh, I'm friends with Mike. I'll give him promotion.

I go on and I go into street crimes and I'm doing all this crazy cool shit. At some point, he has a massive affair that rocks the agency. And one of his staple statements when he got sworn in, he rented the old Dodgers baseball field where the Dodgers were for spring training in Viro Beach. He brought in other agencies to police, and he had the entire sheriff's office at once in one place because it's impossible. Somebody has to work. And he said on the field, if you commit adultery and you cheat on your wife, that is no

different than breaking the oath of the Constitution and swearing in. Well, he has an affair. And it rocks the town because it's with a fireman's wife and it's crazy. So I'm stuck in the middle of this now. I'm his best friend. I'm getting guys walking up to me like the dude, the chick's husband walking up to me like sandwich shops screaming at me. I'm actually friends with him now,

but screaming at me, you're that piece of shit's friend. The community's divided, this, this and this and this and this. So that's when I started to look at this guy and go, amen, this isn't good.

Now I'm not going to fall in front of an affair. I get it. People make mistakes. But at the crossroads in the middle of all that, he, I call him an ostrich. He buries his head in the sand because he doesn't want to deal with it.

He started to change. And he went from chasing cars, putting bad guys in jail, surrounded by SWAT guys that are making, we're doing critical stuff, we're really pushing this agency to be in good shape.

He implemented like this huge physical fitness standard to he can't even handle the stress of the people being mad about the physical fitness standard. So he starts to go the other way and surrounds himself with the yes men. all the guys that are telling them, no man, this place is great.

And I'm going, bro, you're fucking up. Like there was a group of us going, dude, you're fucking this up. Like, you have an opportunity to be the greatest sheriff ever. So we started to drift apart. And as we drifted apart, I started to be very honest with him

and tell him, that's a terrible promotion, that's a bad deal, this is bad, and we start to not become friends anymore. And in November of 2021, I make an arrest. I love being in the news just so you know. I make an arrest, and there is a lot of discrepancies from people about whether they agree with the arrest I made or not.

And now that I'm on podcast and everything, you like throwing old men on the jail. Really easy arrest. I get in a pursuit with a meth head. We pull into his driveway. I'm fighting with him. I did a lot of tactical things wrong. I shouldn't ran up to the car. I got sucked in.

But the mom and dad come out. These aren't mom and dad, Joe Q. Sinison, very nice people. These are calling me. I'm big guy, steroid freak. your head like they're screaming at me and I had arrested this kid prior to that one of the things that really like caught my attention was the kid yelling as I'm trying to fight with him this is the same guy this is the same guy that arrested me so I'm thinking man this kid's talked about me to

his parents could there be some violence the dad and mom are interfering they're calling me names or screaming there's a halo law in Florida now that would be an easy arrest on them but in florida you still can't obstruct an arrest and they were long story short after the kids cure this guy won't shut up he keeps running his mouth running his mouth the dad and he's not when i say dad he's not old man he's in his fucking 50s i'm 49 he's like 52 53 he's giving us this he's doing this and i'm just like bro go in the fucking house so the last thing i say to him before i go hands on with him is just go in the house we have a crime scene in the front yard and he gives me to fuck you so from about 20 feet away i said you're going to jail dude obstruction you're done i pull my handcuffs up

another terrible tactical error you never pull your handcuffs out until you got the guy under control. I go over, he resists. By the grace of God, I had learned Jiu-Jitsu, which my opinion, Jiu-J-J-J-J is one of the most important things in law enforcement, so you don't see us beating people with that stupid stick and punching people. He is subdued and arrested without a single strike, because I'm convinced of how to punch him or hit him, I'd be in prison.

He's nothing. The only thing is the old, you're choking me. I did a cross-face, across-his face because he was resisting, cleared of all that. internally, without any complaint from the citizens, somebody files a complaint against me within the agency to review that arrest. And it is drug out for six months. During that six months,

and I don't know how much you know about law enforcement, if you would think a guy was under a massive investigation, administrative leave, sent home, I'm a patrol sergeant on SWAT on the U.S. Marshal task force making murder arrest tracking high high risk fugitives during the whole six months i've never relieved of duty never taken off the street they end up charging me with code ethics violation that basically said i'm so dangerous to the community that i need to be dealt with because i might like hurt people um illegal use of force choke deadly force completely unfounded by an expert

and conduct on me coming, you'll catch all. And they fucking demote me. And that was when that was it, with me and the sheriff. I'm like, bro, I've never asked this man for a favor. I let Carl Anderson runs a podcast where I gave him the entire file. I gave him the I file, the video and all that. Independent. I said, destroy it.

I gave it to my everybody. Everybody saw it. And the highest amount of discipline I've ever heard from a normal person was maybe have suspended you eight hours, maybe. Most high 90s, so I would have give you a letter counseling and said, bro, you got a little wild, but I didn't hurt them. I didn't hit them. I didn't. There was probable cause.

I get demoted. I believe, this is why I'm coming back to the DA thing, there was a hearing coming up that I didn't know about where they were going to attack my character 10 years later to try to get the case thrown out because of now the attorneys had all that DEA investigation. I believe the yes men around the sheriff went, this dude's your former best friend, he's a sergeant, we have got to get him away from that role as a sergeant and your agency, because there's another election coming up. This guy's up for reelection,

and I'm not supporting him. We got to get this guy demoted or make him look bad because if this hearing comes out that he did all this stuff 10 years ago and he's your friend, you're done. So that was my opinion about why that IA was so crooked. It's still, I can bring you, if you ever interested one day, you come to Florida, you want to do a follow-up, I can give you every internal affairs investigation that resulted in discipline of more than suspension. That other people demoted were a guy who committed a crime who stole money from the agency and all he got was demoted.

And the other guy mentioned that had the drugs in his car. All this stuff, he didn't even get fucking as much discipline as me. and another guy sexually assaulted a woman, kept his job, he's now made it back to a lieutenant. When I say sexually assaulted in a raper, but he groped a woman, stalked her and her husband, a good old boy system, demoted him, and he's back higher ranked than he was during that.

Those are the only two other people I can tell you that got demoted. Those are the type of crimes they committed. I got demoted for arresting a guy and taking a guy to jail, doing my job, not extracurricular stuff. And I believe it was because that DEA stuff was coming back around and they wanted to be ahead of it that he's not a sergeant anymore for the agency he's just a regular old detective so they demoted me so do you take the demotion or do you

yeah well here's what here's the caveat our unions down there aren't like up here there's no such thing we have no unions i wanted to fight it and i am adamant i've shown it to experts i'm like i want to fight it what they did was this illegal as shit my i got promoted december 27th the 2021 the incident it was November 17th of 2022. The IA was filed, stay with me, the IA is filed January 5th of 2023. It's over a year of my promotion, which means I'm not on probation anymore.

They go, even though you were served in January, it happened in November, so you're now back on probation and you didn't make probation. So they demoted me for not making probation and demoted me for the offenses. Without the demotion for probation, I can go to a five-man board, bring in two of my guys, bring in two of their guys,

and have a massive hearing in the public eye. They eliminated my ability to have that hearing by demoting me for probation. And it was illegal. And where I know it's illegal is we had a guy that sexually assaulted a woman and was let go, and they didn't go back to debunk. It happened while he was on probation. They didn't go back and demote him. They just fired him at his current rate.

And he got all his money paid out as a woman. as a lieutenant instead of being demoted. So that was specific to me. And they went back and eliminated my ability to have any type of hearing. I was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. So do you stay with the department?

Yeah, well, yeah, they demote me into, they robbed, this is 20, 23. They demote me and they stick me in the real-time crime center's detective. They strip, they leave me on SWAT. And this is like, I guess to sleep better at night, they leave me on SWAT, but I don't patrol the street anymore.

I'm a street cop, dude. I'm a street cop. They remove me from patrol on the street. I'm now what I call an offensive coordinator. I sit in a crime center and watch TV and watch body cam and like call. I'm just, they basically just robbed me in my career. And I go sit in this office and I'm like,

I'm demoted. At the time, it was before we our new pay scale kicked in. So I took a, I went from 79 back down to 63,000. So I lose like 15 grand in pay. I lose the ability to work like all the overtime and I'm banished to a desk. And now I'm just like,

Like the mental, and this is a lot on my platform, when guys say their mental health is problem at work, normally it's what I just told you. It's not the dead body. It's not the dead baby. It's not the dead kid. It's not the horrendous accident they saw. We know we're going to encounter that as cops.

We're prepared to see a dead baby. You're never prepared for an internal fucking like they do to these guys. And now in my platform, I get hundreds of these messages a month that I got screwed for no reason. No, I vet them. There's guys that did get screwed for a reason. I'm very honest with them. But I know that there are hundreds of officers in this country that have dealt with what I dealt with that are targeted for some political or outside reason.

And unfortunately, there's just nothing to do about it. So I just get stuck. I sit in this office for a couple of years. And January of 24, I get the subpoena that I have to go back to court. And now they did Brady. material. Now, I'm not Brady list. I want to be very clear about this. I was never put on a Brady list. Never. I can still go to court and test if I was never removed or anything. People hear Brady and they automatically think, and I'm sure you know this from being in prison. Brady just means

we want all the material for the case. But they have a hearing where they basically try to discredit me and attack me because, dude, now the case is 12 years old and it's still not gone to trial for this pill mill. I have no idea what the fuck is going on, how you let that happen. but this case is still going 12 years later and I'm getting drug back into court and what they did was well now we got this crooked cop we're just going to go in front of the judge

and lay all this out and I had to go to court now and answer all those questions of all the stuff we just talked about in an actual court setting and I think that's why I got demoted was let's make sure if that comes out bad oh he's a demoted piece of shit cop they didn't want the publicity they didn't want a decorated sergeant with the sheriff's who's best friends with the sheriff

they wanted yeah we knew he was a bag. What's the difference between butter and butter made from real California dairy? It's the real California farm families behind it. Real people. Real care. Real intention. Why? Because real matters. So whether you're pouring milk, melting cheese, or just grabbing one more spoonful of yogurt. Keep it real. Look for the seal. Real California milk by real California farm families. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly

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Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this. promotion. Stop cutting me off. We demoted him. He's a monster on the street.

Unfortunately, again, nothing ever came of it. So the optics of the case or the optics they thought would come from that case is why they made the decisions to push you out. Twice. Once they thought the optics were going to be bad on the demotion. And when it made the news, I got hundreds of calls that went, what did you get demoted for? I'm like, you saw the video you tell me. They're like, I've seen your captain do worse things. Hit people with flashlights.

I'm like, yeah, I have too. nobody could understand why i got calls from people i didn't know in the community that said i can't believe you got in trouble for this i'm like hey man here i am and then that optic went bad for them and then the optics of me going back to court so i get called into court i get subpoenaed and i get asked about everything we just talked about trips to miami and at this point i knew i was going to retire i knew i was they didn't know that i had started copville and i was making all this money and i had this meme page so everybody jokes like tyler my co-host jokes that admin created the biggest nightmare for them,

which is Copville, who now goes after admin, because from the demotion, I started Copville as just a jokey meme page. And next thing I know, I'm making six figures and merchandise sales and sponsors because I have this massive meme page. I didn't tell anybody. I kept it completely secret.

So all the while they're fucking me. I'm like, boy, there's going to be a day where I come out from behind this page, man, and they're not going to know it's me. So I get called into court to testify about everything we just talked about. They go page by page. Isn't it true?

You went to Miami. Yep. Did you do drug? No, I didn't do drugs. Do you shoot your gun? No, I didn't shoot my gun. Isn't it true? And one of the funniest parts of the hearing were, because at this point, I don't

give a fuck anymore. And I was very comfortable on the stand because I testified. If you talk to your average cop, they'd probably testify four or five times in their career. I've testified hundreds in all those pill cases and all those life cases. I walk into court. It's no different than me and you right now. I'm super comfortable.

So they started asking me. One of the questions I asked me was, he's like, you hang out with these guys. I'm like, yeah, but I'm like, we're at a strip club. Well, what does that mean? I was like, have you been a script club, sir? He's like, no, I said, I don't go to the strip club to hang out with men. Like, I went to hang out with women. So I spent a lot of time in the back with like girls and they're looking at me like, this fucking cop is saying this. I'm like, at this point, I'm like, I don't give a fuck anymore. I'm quitting soon anyway. So I'm like, reckless in there. I'm like, making jokes of the whole stuff. I'm like, this is a joke. I'm like,

this. So they bring in the guy that made all the allegations. They bring in the girl that lived with me and she admitted that she was being paid by this guy but she said Mike didn't know about it Mike had no idea so when the hearing was over the statewide prosecutor sent there she's like you did fine she's like you're not ready to listen to my world she's like we're going forward with this case so the case is actually I called her it's still going it's still in like appeals but she had no problem with it never made the paper never made the news again because it was just nothing to it but it's always kind of lived in the world so the the the the attorney attorney that pushed with the sheriff for my use of force eye where I got demoted then sent out I guess a document to all the attorneys in town like basically saying tilis is a piece of shit make sure you guys know he's got this I went to several more depositions nobody ever brought it up nobody I think it's one of those things like there's not a stitch of evidence to say I did anything wrong and you're telling what's the old saying the fed's going to die to ham sandwich this ham sandwich made the whole investigation and the

the internal affairs investigation, never indicted, never heard another word about it. And I got, I live the rest of my life with that asterisk next to my name that I'm some fucking crook. And there's no, there's no proof I did anything wrong. And your wife still works for that department? That's a whole other dynamic. Yeah, because I've now publicly, I'm going to be, I'll show you how transparent I am. I've done steroids. I don't, I don't look big now, but I have, and I did. And there's a lot of cops that do steroids. I'm not going to lie. And how I ended up leaving was, I'm buried in that office, I'm in that thing.

And one of the guys that, you know, was doing steroids gets into domestic with his wife. And she basically goes to the station and goes, these two guys, I know they're doing steroids. So I'm on FMLA, which is for anybody who doesn't know, Florida Medical, or Federal Medical Leave Act, I'm out, which means I can't get called into work. I'm out.

And they call me. And they're like, hey, you got to, I need you to come in. And I'm like, how fuck do I get to come in? I can be in Europe right now. I don't have to go in, but you're still conditions as a cop. Even somebody at that point that has been screwed so many times,

you still, you work for the man and you're scared to buck the system. So I'm like, I drive in. And they hand me this drug form that might as well been written on this tissue that says you have a random drug test. And I'm like, I have a random drug test. I'm like, I'm on FMLA.

I don't have to do this. And I'm like, you're telling me this is random. And they hand me this paper that is like, almost written in like crayon that says drug test. So a normal protocol for random drug test is, okay, I get the form and I drive down to the clinic. Piss and I sign it, the clinic signs it, and I go back.

So I'm like, let's go. I was like, I'll go take it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. We're going with you. And I'm like, okay. I'm like, you're going with me. And then I look at the form and I see handwritten in the top form, a box that says steroids.

And I'm like, I know what happened. And I've not done it in them quite a while, but having done the research, I knew the half-life on one of the substances I was taking was like nine months. I'm like, this is gonna be a bang, bang play at first base.

I'm like, I don't know if I'm gonna, so, but I'm like, you know what? Kind of like, uh, there's like a cartoon or movie where they're like, today's the day. I think it's like a Pixar movie. I was gonna leave December 20th, I'm sorry, December 4th of 2020, 24. I had made up the mind.

I was quitting. Oh, and I didn't even cover that. The reason I was quitting was, um, The sheriff had an election August 20th of a month earlier. There was an election August 20th. He lost. He won.

I supported Milo Thornton, who was his rival. Tuesday, there was an election. I walk into Monday and I get a call and it's, hey, can you come in the captain's office? Something like this ought to be good. I walk in and they slide a memo across a desk and I'm like, pick it up and it says, you are hereby removed from SWAT. You are transferred as a deputy to corrections deputy. in the jail.

I don't know what that means to you, but that is like the death sentence. I'm not certified to work in the jail. I'm not a certified corrections officer. They basically went, you voted for the other guy. Fuck you. Took away SWAT,

which I worked my entire life to get to, took away my status as a law enforcement officer. That means now I don't have a take-home car. I can't work overtime. And I'm now unarmed in the very jail where I've put thousands of people. And I made the decision that day, I went home I'm done I was out on a workers cop I tore my knee for the third time I left

meniscus so I was like I'm going home they're like what do you mean I'm like I'm gonna use my sick time to stay home on light duty not work and I went home to my wife and I said my 20 years is up in December 4th of 2020 this year I'm resigning moving off my life and I get a pension I just get a um slightly um less pension so I was like I'm done well then the drug test comes along and I So I go take it. I'm like, you know what? I go in the back and the black lady's like, hey, you know there's a steroid. I'm like, yeah.

She's like, they called ahead. It wasn't random. They called ahead three days earlier. They spent like fucking eight grand to have all these tests. And I'm like, all right. Like, although I'm a very, I'm a very accountable guy. Although it was all fucking bullshit what they did, I made the decision to use antibiotic steroids.

That's nobody else's fault in my own. I took the test. I went home when I was, I told me all I said, this is it? And for the record, my wife does not know what I do. I had to break it to her that. I'm like, hey, I might have dabbled in some testosterone or some things I shouldn't have. And of course, that didn't go over very well.

But I said, I got to own it. I did it. I'm quitting. I said, we'll be fine. I have all this other income. And I typed a letter. And I said, effective today at 5 p.m. I resign.

So you don't get your pension then? I do. No, I get everything. I get everything. No, nothing changed. So the steroids didn't affect it or anything. No, because they would, they would need, by the time they got to the other guy's test results, he ended up staying and running it. I'm like, bro, you did the shit like three weeks ago.

Like, I did it like nine months ago. I'm like, you're going to fail, dude. But he was just in that month. And it ended up, he ended up failing the test. And it took like nine weeks for them to go through because he had a prescription for testosterone. So that tested positive. Then they had to send it off to a second lab to see if there was any additional substances. So I just said before they can do all that.

to me, I'm going to own it. I'm going to resign. So my pension's fine. I have a, my certificate for law enforcement says, resign, not under investigation. I'm completely free and clear. And I actually collect my first pension check, October 31st. I waited a year to collect it, and I collect my first pension check. So I know you are, like, even ask me about marijuana in the beginning.

You're going to, I'm sure one of your questions is going to be like, isn't it very hypocritical of you to do steroids and work as a cop? and I would answer yes, but every sports here you have has dabbled in some type of substance and it's all illegal to them too. I guess my defense to that is not that I'm better than you or I shouldn't be, but I got in very good shape and I was very effective for the community

by being in good shape to perform my job. Yeah, I was just talking to someone that said even the military doesn't test for steroids. Nobody cares, dude. I'm the first person in history of the inner county sheriff's office to be tested for steroids, and it was an agenda. because they don't want to know how many got.

And that was the other thing is I didn't want to stay. And I could have stayed. I might have got in trouble. I don't think they would have, well, with the climate, they would have fired me in a real sheriff's office. I could have a drug problem. I'm addicted to steroids. I need help.

And I probably could erode like the, like, the, like, EAPE employee systems, but I never wanted to go on internal affairs investigation and have them ask me, who else is on steroids? because I'm not going to tell on everybody. So what does your wife think about what you do now? She is the most, she's a female cop and, you know, how that whole Dom is, a whole take on cops is like females shouldn't be cops.

She's one of the few that trains very hard, does Jiu-Jitsu and all that. She's in a very awkward place that I work, you know, I go after the agency that she worked for. To not dive too deep, all I can say is she's big on accountability. And if the agency does something they shouldn't do, they shouldn't do it. And if I do something I shouldn't do, I shouldn't do it. And she's very much people should be held accountable. And if the agency's doing things they shouldn't do, stop doing it.

If you shouldn't be doing X, Y, Z, if you should be treating people fairly, treat them fairly. So without diving too deep into her thoughts, she obviously knows the optics of where she's at. My daughter works there too. My daughter's a copter. Corrections, deputy. So it's like I have two relatives that still work. there. That's funny. And, you know, I would hope they would keep the beef with me and not target them. I think they've already started on my wife a little bit. I would hope they don't target my daughter

because I am very straightforward. I don't, I go after another of their family members. I don't go after their kids. I just say what you guys are doing is wrong. So it's a weird, it's a weird thing. Like, you know, for her to work there still. And your wife's got to come on the show when she retires. Yes. You won't. You won't. You won't. You will hear what I am the I joked about this last night at our live show and I say this a lot The only worst thing than being a cop is being married to a cop because now I know I know what she's going through and the stress of the job But she is Very very different than me. She's very

She's very intelligent. She's very smart and she has very Good take something and you would enjoy it you would enjoy talking about you guys the same age? I'm still slightly older I'm 49. She's 43 so we're closed you know it's not the 25 year old And that's a whole other story in itself because we were actually enemies at one point in our lives. Who are you and that? It was so commonly known in the sheriff's office that we hated each other at one point

that when I told my friend that we were dating, he made me FaceTime. He just thought I was lying. He's like, you have to FaceTime me and show me you're dating her. And we ended up being married. And she, you know, she is big on accountability. And she actually molded me. That's why it's like to lose what I lost

when I lost it was when I was most accountable. I live with a woman who breathes accountability. And when I didn't get promoted, she didn't let me kick the can and go, poor me. She said, motherfucker, you didn't get promoted. You shut your mouth. You go back to work. You work hard and you get promoted next time.

One of her big statements is every day's an interview. So if you go into work and don't act like you deserve the position because you didn't get it, they're going to go look at him. Look at what he's doing. He's acting like a baby. So she's big on. on every day's an interview and statistics. What is the other one?

Average is for statistics. She believes that average is garbage. You should be the standard. She's ready for work an hour early. She's home late. She's always available. She is the epitome of do the right thing cop. And she molded me.

I'll tell you, she molded me into being more trained, being in jiu-jitsu, being better at firearms and being accountable for like wearing your vest. And she's a big advocate for cops wearing their vest. Down in Florida, everybody just takes it off

because it's too hot. and it's the worst thing a cop could do. So, but yeah, it's a weird optic sometimes being, so outspoken against my agency while she works there. What do you think is the biggest life lesson you take away from your career? The biggest life's lesson I've taken away from my career. That's a great question. Doing, doing the right thing, no matter what, is very important.

And when I say that, I mean, buying those jackets was probably the wrong thing to do. not speaking up about those jackets back then was the wrong thing not was was was would have been the right thing to do not saying holding a level of accountability to yourself that don't not like don't allow the pension and the two biggest things I hear of cop's mouth is but I need a paycheck and I need a pension that doesn't mean you fold man and and and in a lot of guys that come to me and say man you got to come after my agency I got this guy my agency that's a crook he's a piece of garbage. I say to them, have you said anything yet? Well, I can't. I respect it a little bit,

but if we all sit back like you, you're here to bring stuff out. A guy like you is needed to go, I'm going to bring out these stories to the world needs to hear these things. Same thing in your job. If you see bad things and you've got people doing the wrong thing, say something. So the biggest life lesson I learned in law enforcement is, and in my life is not everybody's, not everybody's your friend. I came out of 23 years of law enforcement and I can count on one hand guys that are really my friend not the guys I went

and guess what they are not the guys I went drinking with not the guys I partied with not the guys I went on vacation with it's the dude that we work together we respected each other and if I had an issue I could call him Christian Matheson is my best friend

he has I've been on maybe one trip with him in 23 years but if I call Christian Matheson right now from this phone he's going to answer and he's going to help me, he's going to provide solutions, and he's going to be there for me, he's going to go, you're a fucking asshole for making TikToks. Not sugar-coded.

So that is probably at the end of 23 years where you hear Thin Blue Line, Brotherhood, we're all on the same team. We're not. That building is toxic. Remember that you work for the people of the community. Do the right thing for them. Be blessed that if you end up with one or two good friends.

and don't try to be friends with everybody. It's not good optics in law enforcement. Care about your family, care about your close friends, and do what's right. Mike, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Yeah, it was a pleasure, man. It was awesome meeting you, man. Thank you so much.

Yeah, definitely.