I Was an ICE Agent for 25 Years — Here's What They Don't Tell You | Eric Balliet
00:00 People will get killed on the U.S. side fairly regularly. Even still to this day? Yeah, it's a violent, it's a violent game. That's Eric Ballier. He spent over 25 years investigating dangerous drug cartels, helped capture El Chapo twice, and advised Homeland Security under both Obama and Trump. Today, he reveals what really happens behind the scenes at ICE,
00:21 the border, and inside some of the world's most powerful criminal organizations. I grew up in Syracuse, New York. of all places. Closer to here. Close to here. So as I was riding up from the city, it was like kind of taking me back. The trees are starting to change. And I haven't been back 10 years-ish.
00:45 So yeah, I grew up in Syracuse and then went out to southern Arizona. What was your upbringing like in your early childhood? So as typical middle class white America as you could get. So my dad was an accountant for Sears Roebuck and company when they were still around. My mom was a pediatric registered nurse. I have a younger sister. It was about four and a half years younger than me. Lived on a dead end street in a white colonial house.
01:18 Literally the golden retriever. It was the epitome of middle class suburbia in the 80s and 90s. Not a lot of diversity in the town I grew up in, a small town called Baldwin'sville, just outside of Syracuse. So good home, very conservative, conservative Catholic. I went to Catholic elementary school, served mass through high school. Like, it was very conservative upbringing. Were any of your family in law enforcement at all? No, none of them.
01:55 My uncle ran a liquor store outside of D.C. My dad was an only child. His mom and dad were in the trades, you know, in the 50s and stuff. They grew up outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, blue collar, hardworking people. So no law enforcement. Neither of my parents served in the military. Both of my grandfathers did. So, yeah, it did not come from a law enforcement lineage or, you know, legacy or anything like that.
02:30 Did you have any thoughts about law enforcement as a kid? Yeah, so my neighbor across the street was a deputy sheriff with the Anadaga County Sheriff's Department. And I'll admit, like, I was not a good student. Like, I just, hard to maintain focus, didn't really enjoy. school, you know, I'd see he had a, he had a bomb dog. So he would work, he was working midnight. So he'd leave 10, 11 o'clock at night, get back 6, 7 in the morning. And then he invited me on some ride-alongs as I was in high school. And I was like, yeah, man, let's do it. And it was super cool. Like, there's no bomb calls or anything. But he's responding to calls, taking calls,
03:14 doing traffic stops, backing up other deputies. And the, the night went by. Like next night It was like six in the morning, and we were like headed home. I was like, man, that's pretty cool, you know? Like, kept my attention. It was kind of like you didn't know what was coming next, that sort of stuff. So that's really, probably in my late high school years was where I was like, that might be, that might be an option. It was either that or I came, I remember sitting down with my parents.
03:41 Because I wanted, like, wanted to get out of Central New York, just see the country, the world, whatever. And I came really close to enlisting to the Marines. I remember sitting down with my mom and dad And being like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. And I didn't really understand it at the time But my mom broke down in the tears. And I was like, what are you like, you crying about?
04:01 She was like, then my dad was like, hey, look, when I was your age, like people were getting drafted to Vietnam. It's like a day, like, you know, friends of his like never came back. All like all that, that Vietnam era stuff. It was like, look, can you go to give college a try? We worked hard to set aside the funds and be able to provide that for you and your sister, give college a try. If it doesn't work out after a year, go do your thing, whatever,
04:27 and you'll have our complete support. I was like, I mean, that's a fair, in my mind, you know, being 18 at the time, I was like, that's a fair request. So, yeah, I went to college in Rochester, New York, didn't take that seriously either. Had a lot of fun. Somehow got through three years without, like I did get kicked. out of the dorms for for having keg. It wasn't so much the keg itself, but like this is the dumb,
04:57 the kind of dumb shit you do when you're young. It wasn't the keg. It got confiscated by campus security. They put it in the residential director's office. They were going to have like a disciplinary review to see if we could stay on campus or not. And I was like, it's a perfectly good full keg there. So somehow we picked the lock, stole it back. Took it up to one of our buddies room who lived in a different dorm.
05:25 They had two towers. And when campus security came looking for us, they asked us. We were like, yeah, go ahead, search the room, whatever. I didn't. We didn't do anything with it. Someone gave us up. We got kicked out of the dorms. My mom got that letter on Mother's Day of 96.
05:45 Broked out. Like, you know, you would have thought I was like the biggest disappointment ever. but um went back then lived in off-campus housing for a couple years was still trying to figure out like what like what am i going to like my i majored in accounting for a hot second hated it um so then i i switched my major to sociology because frankly it was like the the easiest one available um interned with the new york state police my senior year and that's really where i kind of got serious i was like all right i need to come like the party's winding down i got to figure life out here and i got to figure it out
06:23 quick but interned with the new york state police and that was really where i was like all right like kind of got my shit together and was like this is what i want to do um that was a great experience that troopers were super professional yes ma'am no sir like their gray press uniforms or patrol cars were immaculate and i was like yeah these guys are like these are squared away dudes um problem was like to get into their class, they were only running two academy classes a year, and the next two were filled, so it would be like almost like a year, year and a half before I could get in with them. And I was like, well, I need a job. So I applied to a bunch of other kind of just shotgun approach, no pun intended to departments. I just wanted out of,
07:06 out of central New York and just see different places. And the U.S. Border Patrol of all agencies called me first. I was like, hey, we can, we can offer you a job in no Dallas, Arizona. You'd start July, late July of 99. And I was graduating college in May. And I was like, oh, yeah, man, let's do it. Like, never been to Arizona, never even heard of Nogales. Looked on a map. And it was like, you know, half an inch away from Tucson. I had heard of Tucson. So, yeah, took the job with them, graduated in, yeah, May of 99, went to the academy in July. So I had, like, part of the summer to just kind of kick back. And, yeah, I was. you know, hang out with the crew for a few more weeks and then off to training. What did you know about Border Patrol or even the border or what was going on at the border at the border at that period of time? What was in the news? I didn't know a damn thing. I never even heard of the Border Patrol. So like, and that kind of shows you how sheltered of a life I lived.
08:08 I was attending at SUNY Brockport, which is a college outside of Rochester. I was attending a job fair with the state police, and I was helping man their booth. It was like a job fair for students. The booth next to us was the Border Patrol, and they had an office out of Buffalo. So they were there, and that was the first time I had even heard or seen them. But they showed this, like, kick-ass recruiting video. It was like dudes fast roping out of helicopters, like bundles of dope stacked, like floor to ceiling, on the range with M4s, riding ATVs.
08:46 And I was like, man, that shit looks fun, you know? I was like, we started talking and they were like, yeah, like you could test in Syracuse or Rochester and, you know, probably get sent, you know, California, Arizona, Texas, someplace like that, which was kind of okay with me because I was kind of looking for a change. But I didn't know anything about the Border Patrol. Do they tell you where you're going to be stationed before the Academy?
09:12 but after you're in? They told me where I would be going when they offered me the job. So I got a phone call and they said, hey, we're willing to offer you a position. It's in O'Gallis, Arizona. You would start on July 26th. And, you know, we needed an answer in the next 24 hours. That's all they give you. Yeah.
09:34 Yeah. So I was like, I didn't, I don't even think I, I don't even think I called them back. I think I just like accepted it on, on the spot. like right then and there. I remember like they used, my parents used to have like a map of the states up in our old, in our kitchen,
09:50 1980s like kind of house, right? And I remember like, okay, Arizona, Tucson, Nogales. I was like, cool. Let's, let's do it. What was the academy like? So the academy was, was actually more difficult than I thought.
10:07 And it was kind of for like the first time in my life where I was like, all right, like I need to take this stuff seriously. Like I'm getting paid. This is going to be my job. I had to learn Spanish. I had never had any formal firearms training. The physical training, the PT was like was legit. It wasn't like dudes dropped out. Like people would get so, there were a couple guys that would get so, they would work themselves up in a way where they would, we'd be in formation like marching over the PT building. And I remember one dude like puking over on the side because he just knew like the instructors were
10:42 just gonna we're gonna crush you if they saw like a little sign of weakness like some of the shit they said was funny um i don't know if it would fly 30 years later but like or 25 years later but at the time like like it was funny but they like south georgia in july we never had a black flag day which meant like it was too hot or humid to run we never there was never one day between July 26 and when we graduated when it was deemed too hot. We ran outside like all the time no matter, no matter what. You're probably hoping for one of those every day. Yeah.
11:19 And like on our runs back in, like you would see them like hoisting up the black flag. You're like, okay, great, cool. Like awesome. You think they did not hurt? Yeah, it was like four in the afternoon. They don't even have another PT class. There's not another PT session that day. So I mean, it was fun.
11:34 You learned a lot. You learned what it meant to, like, be in uniform, carry yourself. The other big thing was, like, boxing. They put people in a boxing ring. They wanted to make sure you could get hit and, like, know what it felt like, and then also, you know, fight through it. And, like, it was more intense than I thought it was going to be. Good training.
12:00 Our first day, our first, maybe second, first live day on the range, there was an accidental discharge. because we were, the academy was on the old naval base north of Charleston. And we were sitting, our class was sitting in the bleachers, the firearms instructors, it was our first day on the range. We did like a day of classroom, you know, gun safety stuff. The Charleston County or Charleston City, I don't know which it was. There was a SWAT team behind us.
12:28 There was a gravel road and then there was another range behind us. And they were training. And they were in the gravel road doing, um, emergency reload drills as if someone was on top of them, assaulting them, they, you know, fight and have to do some sort of emergency maneuvers with their, with their pistols. I remember one deputy showed up late and they had done like a full pat down prior to that where, you know, everybody's no live weapon, no ammunition, like knives, all that sort of stuff. Somebody showed up late.
13:01 We didn't think anything of it. So as we were sitting in the bleachers directly behind us, you hear this like pop. You know, like, oh, shit, that was a gunshot. And like the sergeant or commander, whoever was leading the training for them, like jumped off, started yelling and was real pissed off. And then like we kind of all turned around. And one deputy pointed at the other. It was like, hey, dude, you're bleeding. And he put his hand under his vest and he pulled his hand back and it was just bright red blood.
13:32 and the dude went down. And like all of us were just like, what just happened? One of the guys in our class was a former EMT. So he grabbed the, you know, there's a like a med bag at the range. He grabbed the med bag, went over and started working on, like working on the deputy, cutting his, cutting his uniform off. And when you see like the mask come, you're like, oh shit, this is not good. You could hear the ambulances coming in the distance.
13:59 They finally get there. called like dude lived they take him away he had a through and through that went under his under his vest clipped the lung and exited the other side so he had a collapsed lung but survived and then at the our academy graduation he pinned the badge on the board patrol agent in our class that provided the the medical the emergency first aid on the range that day so that was that was kind of cool how did it feel seeing that especially when you haven't even really started the job yet. I remember thinking like, holy shit, this is our first day and somebody's going to die. And then we didn't get on the range. Like that consumed that whole day of training. The next day we were back
14:42 out there. And then we had no idea what happened to the sheriff's deputy. We don't know if he lived, died or anything. And until the next day we get back on the range. And the instructor set us down. They're like, this is what happened. He's going to survive. He's going to be fine. And like, then went into like this is why firearm handling firearm safety double check double check all of these kind of protocols that get worked into that into that firearms training are so important so it was like a it was like a relief that we knew he survived but then like you know everybody was a little anxious like getting out on the firing range and like start putting rounds through paper because everybody you know it's still fresh in your mind um but we worked through it
15:28 you kind of luckily with no other catastrophic events for for the academy the time I was there. How much Spanish do you learn in that small short period of time? You learn a ton. So I had zero. I went into the U.S. Border Patrol knowing absolutely no Spanish. I took Latin of all things in school. And that's harder than Spanish. Right.
15:49 And I still, I couldn't, other than some common phrases in Latin, I couldn't tell you anything in Latin. But you have pretty close to like an emerge. They test you. So it's like there's like three kind of buckets, three levels of experience. So zero. And then kind of you know some and then you're a fluent Spanish speaker. So for us that knew no Spanish, like you're doing three to four hours a day of nothing but conversational Spanish. You're learning how to, you're learning vocabulary.
16:21 You're having tests. You're learning to conjugate verbs. You're learning police commands. All of that. stuff. And again, I took that seriously because if you fail a test, if you fail one of those, those markers along the way, like, you're out. So I was like, I'm not going to get kicked out of here because I can't learn Spanish. So the guy that lived next to me was a fluent Spanish speaker. And like even after hours, like I would just go to him like, hey, Gonzo, can you tell, like, test me
16:53 on vocabulary, ask me questions, like all that sort of stuff. So it was very immersive. And then even after you get out, you still have to pass a six-month and a 10-month Spanish proficiency exam. And if you fail one of those, then you're fired. So it was, like, it was intense, fun at the same time. And, you know, it's a perishable skill. I'm sure I was more efficient in it, you know, 25 years ago than I am. Now I could probably still hold my own.
17:26 but it's just that muscle memory of all the words, how to say it, what to say, how to understand it, what people are saying, like, even under their breath or, like, all the different dialects are slightly different, like Mexican Spanish versus Puerto Rican Spanish versus Colombian Spanish. It all, there's all little nuances to it. Is it still strict now in present world about training to learn Spanish? I would imagine so. I believe that the Border Patrol has eliminated.
17:56 some of their post-academy requirements and made those a little more lackadaisical. So I also know they did away with the boxing because somebody got hit in the head and had a brain aneurysm and died. Holy shit. So they've kind of tweaked it, I guess, over the years. Now, where do you go once you get out of the academy? me, where's day one? So day one, I reported back to Nogales, Arizona.
18:32 So, like, I had to find a place to live. I lived with two other classmates of mine, running a house. Like, it was measured in kilometers. It was like six or eight kilometers north of the border, like super close. And, yeah, you report to the station. And at the time, you know, Nogales Border Patrol Station in 99 had 500 plus. agents and like it was busy. There was always like there was always stuff,
19:02 like crazy stuff happening. And you're assigned to a field training, you're assigned to the field training unit, I think, for like four months. Or, you know, you rotate through field training officers. You ride with them for like two weeks at a time and they would evaluate you and figure out like, and they'd report back like, hey, this person squared away or this person doesn't carry themselves well. This person can't converse in Spanish.
19:25 this person can. And those, they call them C&Es, like conduct and evaluations. Those follow you as you move through like your probationary period. And if you get a number of negative C&Es, they can terminate, they can term you just for performance before you hit your, before you complete that field training assignment. I'm going to be honest, I'm not naturally a morning person, especially this time of year when you wake up and it's still pitch blackout.
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21:21 of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. drinkag1.com slash locked in. What was the first thing you saw that made you surprise that this goes on in America because you came from such a different environment? Rocks flying over the border fence when I was trying to turn on. They had like at the time they had these stadium lights. And at dusk you'd have to go get out of your car, like turn them on and they would just illuminate like the border wall.
21:51 And, you know, everybody's always like, hey, be careful, no situational awareness, know your surroundings, all this and that. And they had camera systems, so they could generally see if there were groups congregating on the Mexican side. But yeah, but one evening I was turning on the lights and you just hear this because the Mexican side is higher than the U.S. side. So there's a kind of a tactical advantage from that. I remember turning on the, going to turn on the lights, you know, there's like a bunch of switches
22:22 and different lights you got to flip on. And you just kind of hear, f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f-f. And then you're like, what's that? Those rocks? Because you can't really see them. But then you'd hear him like whack a car behind you or like bounce off a roof or hit something. You're like, oh, shit, I'm getting rocked. How often would people actually jump or climb over the wall back then?
22:44 Well, like multiple times every shift. You'd hit your air horn. You'd yell at them on the PA system. And, you know, most of the time they would crawl back. like climb back over or they would just like drop down and then just take off like try to take off running and then it was like a foot chase but you had to be careful of the rocks and like know where your backup was and the cameras would usually like walk in on someone if they're hiding in in the bushes or stuff like that would individuals back then have weapons or no not usually
23:13 no I mean did yeah the short answer is like yes but not in not on a regular basis You dealt more with like rockings or like people just trying to escape than people showing up with like AKs or guns or stuff like that. You would see that more with like the drug trafficking side of it versus the migrants just hopping over the fence and making a mad dash for it. No, say it was a migrant looking for a better life hopping over. What would happen to them when you'd catch them? So back then you'd catch them. you'd uh if they had they call it a credentialist it's like their little voter ID for for Mexico um you'd write basically all their biographical information down a transport van would show up
24:03 they'd take them they'd take them to this to the station if they didn't have any um prior criminal history in the u.s or any major if they weren't like they call them recidivist hits if they didn't have a ton of recidivist hits then they would just be processed for what they called voluntary return or VR. They would sign, hey, I'm willing to go back to Mexico, sign a piece of paper, get in another van, and they'd drive them right to the port of entry, open the door. They'd walk into Mexico. And that was that. How many of them do you think would stay behind and not want to go that route? Some of them might ask for, so if they were Mexican, 90 plus percent would just say, yeah, I'll voluntarily return, knowing that they're just, going to try again. And that was pretty well known.
24:53 If they were what they were called, like, other than Mexican, then they would get processed and they would be sent up to see an immigration judge. And then, like, once they were processed, and back then it was, like, called them detention DEOs, detention enforcement officers, put them in, like, an actual, like, huge, like, Greyhound-type bus. and bust them to immigration court. And we would never, you never really saw or heard what happened after that initial contact. Now, the Mexicans that were released and that would try to come back over again, would there be repercussions for them back then? Or is it the same process over?
25:36 Usually the same process. Unless you saw that they, they called them RC hits. If they had RC hits that were like 1520, then there was some officer and agent discretion. We could be like, all right, I'm going to set this person up for like formal deportation. They're going to go see a judge. They're going to, you know, go through that whole immigration process. It just kind of broke the cycle. I mean, it wasn't all that uncommon to arrest the same person like two or three times in a 24-hour period. That's crazy.
26:07 Yeah. Now, what would a typical shift look like for you when you were first starting out? So the Border Patrol could be an awesome place to work. and it could also absolutely suck. So back then they had this strategy. It was called like hold the line or something, but they were basically what we called X's. So there were designated points directly on the border
26:29 where they tried to use high visibility for deterrence of people jumping over the fence and stuff like that. And you would sit in a vehicle for eight to 10 hours and you couldn't move. unless it was like something like officer safety wise. And when you were a new guy, if someone called in sick, you were, guess where you were going? They didn't care if it was your second, third, fourth day on an X in a row. So I sat on the, what really where I was like, all right, I'm done with the Border Patrol,
27:07 was when I sat for the third shift in a row on the same X. So that's 30 hours that we worked 10-hour shifts. 30 hours in like a piece of shit Bronco or a Ford Expedition covered in tobacco spit, sunflower seeds, one Mexican station, no AC. And they would have these cages around them. So like you weren't even, you were expected to withstand the rocking. So if like rocks were bouncing off your cage, like you just sat there. And they would send other units to kind of disperse the crowds or whatever. But you would just hear rocks just bang, bang, bang.
27:43 How do you pass the time? Some guys went and got like advanced degrees, law degrees. I was not going to go back to college. So I was like, I'm going to look for jobs. And that's what I did. So how long were you in Border Patrol at that point when you started looking? I probably about a year and a half where I just was like, I am not sure I can see myself doing this for the next, you know, 24 years.
28:13 I wanted to get into kind of the criminal investigative side of federal agencies. So, yeah, I started researching what agencies were hiring and kind of they all have different tests that they administer. I started studying for treasury agencies. What were your top ones aside from the treasury? Or was it all treasury? So back then, this was pre-9-11. Like U.S. Customs Service was in the treasury. ATF was a Treasury agency, Secret Service was a Treasury agency.
28:47 So, and the Marshals had a very similar test that the Treasury agencies used. So they used to have this exam called a Treasury Enforcement Agency exam or TEA exam. So I just started studying for that and seeing what agencies were hiring. It wasn't like hell-bent on going to one or the other. I was like, okay, basically, basically the same strategy that got me in the Border Patrol, hey, whoever calls first, was what I was looking for to get out of the Border Patrol. Now, all those organizations aren't under the Treasury anymore? Correct.
29:19 So when DHS was formed in the Act, the Homeland Security Act came in 2002, the department was formed in 2003. It shuffled ATF to the Justice Department, and it shuffled Secret Service and customs into what is now DHS. And it kind of broke parts of customs up between what is now customs and border protection and what is also immigration and customs enforcement. So I know that's a lot. Now where do you end up? So I ended up getting hired by U.S. Customs, as a special agent with the U.S. Customs Service. My first day in the office was Monday, September 10th, 2001. And I was sworn in on Tuesday morning, September 11th, 2001.
30:08 Wow. And then by the time I got out of the academy, shortly after I got out of the academy in early 2002, the Homeland Security Act had passed. And they created DHS and ICE was kind of the byproduct of that Homeland Security Act. So I ended up as a special agent with what is now ICE. And did they call it ICE at that point or not yet? So the first iteration of it was. was called the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And my understanding is the FBI didn't like that because there's only one bureau.
30:47 So they dropped the bureau part, kept the ICE part, immigration and customs enforcement. And that's where most of the special or all of the special agents from U.S. customs ended up as a result of the creation of DHS. Do you think 24 or 25 years ago anyone could predict where it's at today? No, no, no. And a lot of people I talk to, you know, shake their head about it. If I'm being candid, like, they're just like, how did we end up here? And, you know, I think it's time that Congress probably takes a look at the intent of the Homeland Security Act and what the Department of Homeland Security is currently doing. I mean, it's never been tweaked since its creation.
31:38 So I do think, you know, there's an argument to be had to really look at the structure. Is it keeping America safe? Is it doing what it was intended to do, which was to prevent another 9-11? I think if you kind of look at why it was stood up, why it was created, and its mission set in 2026. Those are pretty far apart. So now take us to the early days when you first started what that was like. Yeah, so I got assigned to a federal task force made up of DEA, ICE, and FBI agents.
32:25 And it was the mission set was international drug trafficking. along the U.S. Arizona border and to pool and combine resources to really try to identify and disrupt and dismantle the most prolific trafficking organizations operating in that area of responsibility. It was a blast man. Like I was so, I was thankful with the opportunity. And then I made real quick friends with a lot of the DEA agents who, I was in, see, I was 24 at the time. So there were a bunch of newer DEA agents about the same age, mid-20s, and like you kind of have that, like, kick-ass, take names mentality.
33:16 So anytime that DEA had something going on, whether it was a wire, whether it was a buy-buss, search warrant, surveillance, you name it. And they needed people or needed an extra, you know, set of eyes and a gun. I was like, let's do it, man. what he got going. It was so much fun. Back then, was there anything specific ICE could do that the other agencies couldn't? Not really because it was a shit show during that merger period.
33:42 When you were trying to, they were trying to figure out like how do you take the old INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, their special agents and the U.S. Customs Service special agents, how do you mash them together and come up with a mission set, leadership, command structure, comms, you know, continuity of case management, evidence, you name it. Like, it was such a disaster. And granted, it was a big undertaking, but, like, the execution of it was left a lot to be desired.
34:18 So for the better part of two years, everybody operated basically as, like they were prior to 9-11. So the INS guys still did their thing on the immigration side and the customs agents still focused on what they knew how to do and what their expertise was on money laundering, drug smuggling, stuff like that. So, you know, the first two years when I was at DEA, like, it was just, like, you were just having, like, having fun. You're working your own cases and you're helping other agents with theirs, like jumping out of vans, 30 kilo buy busts. stuff like that. It was a blast. What was the main drug you guys had to worry about? So you could, somebody told me once, like, in the early 2000s in Tucson, like, you could
35:10 swing a golf club and hit four to 500 pounds of weed. Like, it was everywhere. So marijuana, cocaine were, like, the two big things. And I made really a career out of sitting in a Home Depot party. lot because as I was helping DEA and the bureau with like their search warrants and stuff that they had going on like all you kept seeing were all we kept finding were these like discarded boxes of and it would just say contractor stretch wrap and it was like that it was like industrial size saran wrap that and wood grain patterned contact paper that you'd put in like your kitchen cabinets like that was everywhere if if
35:58 If we did a, if we hit a cash, like a money drop, like a couple hundred grand, like we'd find the stretch wrap and contact paper. You'd hit, you know, you'd help DEA with something and they'd hit a cocaine stash house, have 20 to 40 keys, and you'd find both of those things. So I was like, dude, wherever this stuff is, like, who's buying it? So it just happened that sometime in early 03, I bought my first house. I went to Home Depot to buy paint Because I was going to change some of the wall colors
36:30 I was walking through Home Depot In the paint department And I looked down And there was this palette About three feet high And it had white and blue Contractor stretch wrap boxes Hundreds of them
36:42 And I was like no shit Like It's that simple And I remember that following week I went into Home Depot And I was just kind of meandering through And this lady came up She's like, hey, can I help you with anything?
36:57 I was like, hey, I got a question. Like, I told her who I was and who I worked for. And I was like, this stuff right here. And she kind of smirked. I'm like, how many boxes to a palette? She's like, 150. I was like, okay. I was like, how many feet to a box?
37:15 She's like, a thousand. And she's like, I'm like, how long will this, how long will this last? And she's like, that? And then she pointed up, she's like, that. that. So two shelves above, they had two more pallets. And she's like, that'll last us somewhere between like a week to a week and a half. I was like, dude, that's like three, at least 300,000 feet of shrink wrap. And she's like, I know why you're asking. And she's like, I'm just telling you, you're not wrong. And I was like, okay, thank you. I went out and sat my ass. I didn't have,
37:52 I didn't have an informant. I didn't have a wire. I didn't have anything. I just sat my ass in a Home Depot parking lot with a set of binos at one end of the parking lot and just watched for hours. And then you just start seeing people. Cowboy hats. They're not moving companies. They're not painting companies.
38:12 You know, they go buy 10 boxes, 10,000 feet of stretch wrap, put it in a Sonora-plated, you know, tricked out F-150. I'm just like, wherever that truck parks is a stash house. So they're not discreet about it at all. Not then. Shopping carts. I guess because there's no Amazon either. Yeah. And like it was literally like shooting fish in a barrel.
38:35 And it did a few things. Number one, it taught me what criminal behavior looked like versus legitimate normal behavior. And it also taught me. like surveillance, like how to do surveillance. You get burned, you lose people. I learned foot surveillance. I learned vehicle surveillance. Learned all these different techniques,
39:02 reverse eyes, handoffs, all this other sort of stuff, just by trial and error. And it was like, it was so much fun, and we see so much dope, mostly marijuana and cocaine and a shitload of cash from just sitting in Home Depot parking lots. When I was in prison, the only chain I was worried about was the one they might put on me.
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41:03 And, you know, I'm like, man, I hope they're not, I hope they don't run heat. I hope they don't run a ton of counter surveillance. And I hope they go close. So him and I swapped off and it went into that subdivision. and it pulled down a street and I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna take the shot. So I gave him like 30 seconds
41:22 and I pulled down the street and I'm like, I'm like skiing both sides I'm like, where'd he go? Because he wasn't on, I'm like, he disappeared. And the houses are so close together. So I was like, shit. And as I was driving down the street, I just happened to look
41:35 and I see the garage door about halfway close and I saw the sedan in the garage. So I was like, oh, sweet. Counted the houses from the corner the guy that was with me, his name was John, he was like, dude, that's a stash house without question. I was like, all right, so like, I'm probably a few months out of the academy at this point. I'm like, he's like, let's get the group out here.
41:59 We call her supervisor. He sends dudes out. One of the guys, his name was Angel, who's a Spanish-speaking agent. So him and I go to the front door, and we're just like, we're all marked up. and we're just like, hey, let's just knock and talk to the, knock it. We call it a knock talk. Hey, let's just knock and see if anybody answers. And usually one of two things happens. Either people go asses and elbows out the back, or like they answer the door. So these guys like answer the door and one of them was one of the guys from Home Depot.
42:34 You could immediately smell the weed. And you looked in the house, there's not a, there's not a TV, there's not a chair, sofa. or anything. So, like, at that point, they kind of knew the gig was up. And the dude signed, like, the consent form with Angel to let us go in. He was, yeah, when my other buddies is here, called him out. He came out. We walked in back bedroom, actually where the second guy came from. All there is is an air mattress, 550 pounds of weed, and a silver smith in Westland.
43:07 And that was the first Home Depot load. You're never worried they're going to just start shooting at you. when you go up to those houses like that. I mean, you're all like, as you approach it, it's always, you're like, you're watching windows, you're watching doors, you're looking for movement, all that sort of stuff. Like, without a search warrant, like, having your, like, rolling up with arm with an M4 or something like that, like you're not, you're going to get the case tossed on a coercion defense. So you try to keep it as low key as possible.
43:36 Like, understanding like, okay, I can see, can I see the front door? Do I see curtains move in in a window, stuff like that. But if you let that into your mindset, then you're going to be apprehensive about everything. All of your senses are heightened, but you're not hyper-aggressive about it. Right. Like if the dudes fled out the back, we had a plan for that. If nobody answered the door, okay, pack up and go home. somebody answers and they don't give consent.
44:12 Can we smell the dope? Would we have enough probable cause for a search warrant? Stuff like that. Those are the thoughts going through your head. But yeah, as soon as someone opens the door, like, you know, normally there's an agent talking and then like one observing, like a contact person. Like if shit goes sideways, that's probably going to be your guy that acts first. Now, if they open the door, don't give consent, but you can't smell anything or see anything. What do you do?
44:38 Shit out look. Do you try to case it more or no? You can. But normally by that time, like you've kind of tip, you've kind of shown your cards, right? So, like, there's been a bunch of times nobody answers. People tell you, like, fuck off. Like, you can't come in my house. And if you don't have a search warrant, you're like, okay, pack up and, you know,
45:00 note the, maybe the plate and the vehicle, the address, who owns it, all that stuff, and reports and move on. Now, these stash houses, are they? rented by a normal law-abiding landlord, or are these all owned by cartels or other organizations? We didn't find a ton of, like, complicit owners. They were almost exclusively rentals because they didn't want to subject a house to a forfeiture allegation. So they would find, like, a female, an older male to rent the house or put the utilities in their name, and then, like, they would just give the keys to the to the traffickers.
45:38 And, you know, the worst that happened, like, they pay the rent. And if the house, the house gets its door cracked in, then, like, they just stop paying and move on and move on to the next one. It was constantly, like, a whack-a-mole game of stash houses. Does the government pay the landlord when you guys kick in a door or no? So the, the, they can file was called a federal tort claim. Like, if there's damage done. Our responsibility when we execute a search warrant is to leave it in a,
46:05 similar condition to what we found it. So if a door gets blown off its hinge, we would secure that. We have to secure the property. So like if a window gets broke, we put plywood over the window. If a door can't be like relocked, we put plywood over the door and secure it. Then, then it's up to essentially the owner or whoever has standing to file a claim to say, hey, like you guys used, you guys broke my door and it's going to cost me 200 bucks to fix it. Most people, you know, just put a new door on. We don't necessarily see the torque claims for property damage. Now as an agent, are you the one, like, drilling the plywood onto the window?
46:48 Yeah, for sure. So we usually, when we were executing search warrants, you'd always have that. You'd have, like, sheets of plywood, like, in one of the support vehicles or the van. And like, yeah, if the tactical team did like a break and rake on a window and busted it out, like, you go up there and drill it into the siding. Same thing with the door. I feel like that's something you just never see, like on TV or the news. Yeah. They don't see the agents.
47:17 And if they use chemical munitions, like CS gas or something like that, you have to decontaminate the property, like air it out, fans, like all that good stuff. So it's not like, you know, you're not just closing all that, all that gas in. Yeah, what does a smoke bomb or tear gas do to a house? So it lingers for a while. So normally they would do that on barricaded situations. They would try to make sure everybody came out. But yeah, if they deploy gas, like you have to, you have to decon that property to a point where it's, you know, people can walk through it. So normally you're airing it out for a few hours, running fans, and then boarding everything up.
48:00 Now, when you bust that stash house, does it lead to a larger investigation? Do you guys start tracking the money, the individuals, all of that, or is it just that's it and off to the next one? So in my early days, it was off to the next one because I viewed it as like, like, this was fun. And it was a little bit of like, catch me if you can type thing. Like they're doing their thing, we're doing ours, and it's, and that was the mentality. But like, candidly, that gets old. And it also, you're like, dude, I could kick doors in all day, every day. And like, you're not, like, the dude, the people who are really profiting from it are nowhere near that stash house in Tucson or Phoenix or wherever it is.
48:47 So it was a good foundation. But then you got to the point where I was like, all right, like, there's got to be more to this. There's got to be more in-depth strategy. There has to be like, it's clear that people we were arrested and we're, you know, the stash house guards are low-level people. Like, they get paid like 500 bucks to go sit at a house and, you know, they'll be told, hey, there's a car coming or there's a car leaving, you know,
49:13 put 10 kilos in this car, put 400 pounds in that van, that sort of stuff. Like they're no they're they're consequential in the grand scheme of things. So it's like, okay, like how do you, how do you up your game? How do you figure out you take those lower level busts and make them into something more significant?
49:35 That's where like, that's where the comms and the finances come in. So like these drug trafficking networks rely on like a whole host of infrastructure. I mean, the transportation, the housing, the distribution, the supplies, the financial aspect, and the comms. The comms and the finances will almost always give you everything else. You can't run an organization at that scale and not communicate and not have access to liquid funds, whether that's for corruption, whether that's for security. in houses, buying cars, buying planes. And as we went up, as I advanced in my career,
50:24 it kind of did a little bit more in-depth strategies. Like, it really became evident that comms and money will give you everything else. If you can, if you focus on those two, everything else falls in, everything else falls with it. How do you discover that, though? How does that come across your desk? So you got to, you got to know what to look for. and how to look for it. So, you know, and on the communication side, technology advances far faster than federal law, law enforcement policy, and the ability of law enforcement to kind of keep tabs with it.
51:04 Like when I first started, burner phones was what they used. You could go to a, like, boost or T-Mobile. Every carrier had a prepay phone where you could just throw in you didn't need ID, just bought the phone and paid for the minutes. And that was kind of the first way where, but they were still tangent digit numbers. People were still calling each other. Informants are huge. Like they'll give, if you can, if I can get a phone number from somebody, now I can kind of
51:36 map out who that person talks to, the people that they talk to, who do they talk to, like trickle it down. So normally informants would be the first thing. Sometimes people would slip up and put a phone number on a rental agreement or if they booked a flight or if they did other things. But back in those days, it was largely 10-digit phone numbers. And you had to be quick because any load that was taken down or someone was arrested, they would just dump their phone, get a new one. Like anybody that had seen the wire, like the Baltimore show, like 100% accurate. Like, dump it.
52:17 Then they went to Nextels. Nextels were like were a thing. The walkie talkies, yeah. And then after that, they, you know, they went to chat apps. BlackBerry Messenger was huge. There was even in the mid-2000s, these networks had scouts. So about a hundred of them from the border up through probably like 50, 60 miles north of the border. And when I say Scouts, these were these were dudes that would live in caves in southern Arizona,
52:54 like when it's 100 plus out for like two weeks at a time, and they would communicate over encrypted radios. They would put illicit repeaters throughout the mountains all the way down in the northern Sonora. And they could talk. And their only job was to watch out for law enforcement in their, area. So border patrol, CBP helicopters, like all that sort of stuff. And they're just
53:22 calling out the movement of law enforcement for 70 to 90 miles. It was a relay like they would hand off. It's almost like air traffic controllers. They're like, all right, they'd give a location. Okay, I got him. He's over here. They'd pass it all the way along.
53:38 And these dudes would live in caves. When I say like caves, I'm talking about like a cave on the side of a mountain with like a five-gallon, water jug, some canned food, like blankets, and they'd build these little hootches that they would live in for two weeks at a time. And they were usually in pairs. And they'd, you know, one would sleep, one would keep an eye out. They would use car batteries and they'd have a solar, like a solar panel that would recharge their handheld batteries. And then every two weeks, like,
54:16 someone would drive by, would come down the route, they would jump in and someone else would jump out. And they just did this nonstop. And this is all just to protect the route or to... So as, yeah, as they were smuggling, I mean, at the time it was largely marijuana, but what we found out was cocaine, heroin, meth would be co-mingled with these stolen trucks, Tahoe, Suburbans, whatever. you know, 2,000 pounds of weed and 300 keys of some hard narcotic. And the drivers of those loads have a radio. And they're listening to the scouts that are telling them where to go. Hey, you got Border Patrol two miles ahead, go left, hide here.
55:00 Okay, it's clear, get back on. And it was like they were just guiding them through the desert up into kind of like the suburbs, south suburbs of Phoenix almost. Now, you guys couldn't get to the guys. in the mountains because they're on the Mexican side? No, this is on the U.S. side. Oh, the mounds are on the U.S. Yeah, this is well.
55:19 So from the border, probably a solid 50 miles north into Arizona. For years, they controlled the high ground. So once you find out about that, can't you guys just go in there and? It's like, so Border Patrol tried that. State and local law enforcement tried that. The problem is, it's like you've got 50 different lookout. points with manned with roughly two scouts at each location. They see you coming.
55:50 They run down the backside of the mountain. Or if you actually do grab one, they're so low level. And if they admit, they're like, yeah, we scout. You have no, like charging them was tough. And then you basically had a, it took so much manpower to basically like, you had to own that, that mountain top. You had to have a perimeter. You had to like either dudes fast roping off hawks or like sneaking up and stuff like that.
56:17 It was for one guy. Now they probably have drones and stuff. Yeah. And so the scouting, like they had that down. They had that down to a science. They got so sophisticated on their comms that they would use rolling code, which is an encryption key, that every time you kind of key it, it changes the encryption.
56:40 You can intercept it, but it's. it's so intensely manpower, it's not even like worth it. And they got to the point because they had all these illicit repeaters that would, that would magnify the radio signals. If someone, if a scout did get arrested and his radio was seized by law enforcement, they would just redo what they call an over-the-air re-key. We as feds would do over-the-air re-keys. And they would do this from like Caborka Sonora or Sonoma to Sonora.
57:11 And they would just, they'd be like, all right, we're re-keying everybody's radio. And they would do a re-key. So even if you cracked into that radio, like within hours, it was essentially just a brick. You'd turn it on and all you hear it is like the garbled squelching. You would never hear any comms because they've already re-keyed it. Was it easy to get drugs across the border at that point in time? Yeah, we were so far behind. I mean, it was, they were so efficient.
57:40 so efficient because they had they had the network down they had I mean those the scouts on the high points like like made their made their passage so much easier like they they could literally you could have a board patrol agent be a couple hundred yards away and they have a camo cover that they would pull over the truck and it would just disappear into the sonorn desert like I mean They moved so much dope, so quickly for years. When I say, like, when you talk about marijuana, I debriefed one source, and I was like, what's the most you ever smuggled
58:21 in a 24-hour period? It was like 30 trucks. Each truck is about 2,000 pounds. 60,000 pounds of weed in a single, like, shot. They would move 100 keys. They would do like 100. pounds of heroin, 100 keys of coke in like every third load of weed. And maybe they would lose a couple of year to the hard drugs. We were intercepting their phones, had cameras on our stash houses,
59:01 pinging the driver's phones, and court ordered trackers on the load vehicles, and we still couldn't catch them. Like, they were that good. When you hit like a large amount of money or drugs, does that even make any impact on them? Not in a single, not a single action. So like a law enforcement seizure is like an output from law enforcement, but it's not an outcome. What I mean by that is, like, yes, it's a snapshot of law enforcement activity for a day, but it doesn't dictate the outcome to how that organization operates.
59:38 they built in they build in losses they build in arrest they build in deaths all to their to their business plan so like we sees i don't know something like 75 tons of weed in one single case and took down i think we indicted 9091 92 other other members did a massive 800 agent law enforcement take down in less than two weeks, they were operating at the same scale and capacity that they had been before. And these are all cartels? All part of the factions of the Sinaloa. That are just hiring American like organizations or soldiers.
01:00:23 A lot of them, so that you have a plaza boss, right? So you've seen narcos like they use a plaza system, which is basically a corridor along the U.S. Mexico border. So there's a boss that that reports to like the chopin. and Mayo's of the world, and he's responsible for everything that goes on in his plaza. The more dope they move that they get across successfully, the more dope that Mayo and Chappo would others send them because they're like, all right, these guys have a good success rate. So they're, and then they're free to structure their plaza as they see fit.
01:00:59 So you would have, most of the dudes we encountered were, you had American purchasers and American consumers. But a lot of the core smuggling networks were based out of, were based from Mexican nationals who would come over for two to four months at a time, smuggle dope, go back, and just bounce back and forth across the border. When it gets into like the Phoenix and Tucson's, then you would have out-of-state buyers, you know, that would come from New York, Atlanta, and they would try to, you know, it's kind of like the Costco model. The more dope that they could buy, the better price per pound or price per kilo that they could get. And then their margins are higher when they would truck it to distribution points, Chicago, Atlanta, New York,
01:01:51 Charlotte, you name it. Like, they came from all over. Oh, yeah, going. No, I say the smugglers themselves, they there was always like a little bit of a distrust. So the smuggling groups were largely people from a certain plaza or a certain stretch of border. So when we were talking about like that 75 ton case, all of those were from, all of the members of that organization were from two towns, either Caborka Sonora or Sonaita Sonora. Because they knew everybody, they knew each other. There was like a level of trust and familiarity. So it's like, all right, you know, this is going to be our crew and then the plaza boss essentially ran it were they just training smugglers from a young age because it's got to take some skill set uh if you took out a large amount of the smugglers and
01:02:44 more replace it they have some ready to go or on standby or how does that work yeah so they're all they're all expendable even the bosses so you would are yeah there'd be teenagers that would be driving, you know, 2,500 pound weed loads or 300 kilo coke loads. Most of them were younger males, I'd say, between 18 and 25. I mean, it is a young person's game. When you got in, but they were expendable. If someone got caught, killed, whatever, they were replaced, like, the next day. like there was no shortage of of manpower.
01:03:32 I think you got to look at like opportunities that exist in those border towns for people. Like, you know, what else are you going to do where you can make, you know, $1,000 a day? Probably not a whole lot. What about violence on the American side? Was there that or? Yeah, there was a guy. His last name was Ortiz.
01:03:55 he was pulling in Casa Grande is a little city south kind of in between Tucson and Phoenix but 11 o'clock at night he's pulling into he's pulling into his driveway Chevy and Paula pulls up you know kind of
01:04:11 driver's side to driver's side seven rounds through seven rounds in him he's dead like before the car kind of comes to a stop killed immediately um
01:04:24 they thought he He was a cooperator because he had been stopped by law enforcement like a couple weeks prior. He wasn't. Yeah, people get killed on the U.S. side fairly regularly. Even still to this day? Yeah. Yeah, it's a violent, it's a violent game. Yeah, yeah, still to this day.
01:04:49 There would be, and it was hard. It was so violent because you had, you had ripped crews. that would go out looking for stash houses. So these are kind of U.S.-based gang crews. And they'd look for a weed house, a Coke house, whatever, and they would try to rip it off. And, you know, those stash house guards are armed. And, like, they're not going to just go quietly.
01:05:14 So you would have shootouts in suburban Phoenix neighborhoods. You'd have shootouts in Tucson. You'd have rolling gun battles, like, up I-10 in that time period. So, yeah, it was violent across the board. And then, you know, introduced in Mexico was on even a whole other level. Like, they would find bodies in the desert, like, fairly regularly. Would they be violent towards law enforcement? Generally speaking, no.
01:05:44 They would try to escape. They would, they would haul ass. And if they couldn't get away, most of the. dopers would just would surrender. You know, I'm not saying that's, that's not always the case, but the majority of the time, they would not try to shoot it out if they knew, like, that was law enforcement. So there was a couple, there was, I remember like a Chandler police detective, like an undercover, got killed in one of those home invasion things.
01:06:23 they didn't know he was, they didn't know he was a cop. So if they know your police, like, the chase is going to be on, the likelihood of them, like, shooting it out with you, um, fairly low, but like you just, you get some dude that's all like tweaked out, like, you, you can't be sure how they're going to, they're going to react. Was ICE just focused on the drug smugglers or also the human smugglers too? The human smugglers as well. And this is where it's interesting because we ran a lengthy series of wire intercepts into human smugglers in southern Arizona. And what we found was they were an extension of the drug cartel. So these, these net, they're more networks like than like a cartel. Cartel, you think like you got
01:07:15 Chappel Guzman at the pinnacle, right? He's given all these orders. It's much more linear than vertical. So, but they're all affiliates. So you'd have these human smuggling organizations, like their job is to get people across the border from all over the globe, get them into the United States. They're not smuggling drugs. That's another, that's another division. But what they, what they do have to do is pay the plaza boss for using his corridor and pay almost like a quota at a per person basis for everybody that they smuggle. So the network writ large, the enterprise, like they're taxing a human smuggler, say $500 a person. If that human smuggler is moving, I mean, back in the mid-2000s, it wasn't uncommon for human smuggling organizations
01:08:07 to move 1,000 people a week. So 1,000 times 500, you know, you're talking, what, 50 grand? 50 grand a week to the Plaza Boss as passive revenue for the human smuggling. And if they wanted to smuggle people on the same route that they were smuggling dope, the Plaza Boss would step in and either give like a red light green light. Yeah, you can or no, you can't. And everything was fairly copacetic as long as the money changed hands. And like I remember we would get intercepted calls from, the main human smuggler in Mexico saying, hey, I owe the man 12 grand for this week.
01:08:49 Like, when are you going to have the money? And the coyotes on the U.S. side would be like, hey, we're waiting for six more to pay, aliens to pay. And then we'll send the money to you. And he'd be like, he gave me two days. Like, you know I can't be late. And like they're, as long as the money changed hands, things went fine. It's when people disobeyed orders. and the coyotes decided they're going to smuggle people
01:09:17 when they were told they can't. That's when people died. If people withheld money, people died. And like there was a legitimate, like, taxing system, smugglers and drug smugglers and human smugglers alike. So while they operated kind of different divisions, they used the same general routes, same kind of general infrastructure,
01:09:43 The same financial systems, whether it was like, you know, Western Union or, you know, cash or whatever. And the money just kind of flowed similar to like a traditional organized crime. Like they had a kick that they had to pay the Plaza Boss. And if they didn't, you know, they might be given a little bit of grace, but not much. What was harder to smuggle back then? Drugs or people? So both came, both would be smuggled essentially the same. manners. They had two different, two different ways. The drugs could move through the port of entry. So like deep
01:10:19 concealment in vehicles, like elaborate traps, stuff like that. Or they could kind of do the desert route that I talked about where they would be like on the outskirts of a town. The humans would do the same thing. They could either be moved through the desert or they could be moved with or smuggled with false docks through the port of entry. The port of entry costs a little bit more on a per person, basis than the smuggling route, but both were fairly effective and they would, they would pay attention to what the inspectors were doing at the port. And if they found, you know, people were just kind of being lazy or waving people through, they'd be like, all right, get 10 imposters. They'd give them, you know, fake docs, legit docs, but, you know, kind of like your old fake IDs
01:11:07 when you try to get in bars and get through the port. Yeah. Yeah, some of them would make them. Some of them, would be caught, some of them would get through, but they're getting paid no matter what. When they are caught, is it the same process, like when you were in Border Patrol, the same system you were explaining before, or is it different? Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you could make like a fraud charge, but that's a lot of work on a single scope case. So more times than not, they would just be processed for removal. And then notated that they were like an imposter, use the fake, you know, B1, B2 visa card or a fake permanent resident alien card, things like that.
01:11:48 So two different ways, but very similar as far as like the structure and routing goes. Why do you think America was so far behind and having that part of the border secure? I think there was, I think there was a little bit of either like a willful blindness to how pervasive the problem was. So you don't know, well, you don't know. And, like, I got into, like, very heated discussions with the Border Patrol
01:12:22 when we were running a lot of these cases. Because I don't think, to some degree, they had a clue at how bad they were being beat. Not by any of their own, it wasn't really their fault, but like they would be pissed or they'd be in somewhat denial be like hey they're moving they're moving 20 trucks a day and every fourth one has at least 100 keys of coke and heroin on it they'd be like there's no way um but then when you start like putting dope on tables
01:12:56 all of a sudden like you have to address the elephant in the room's like oh shit yeah we i guess they are um that happened on the alien side too and there was a Especially when it came to, like, foreign nationals from adversarial countries, not necessarily like terrorists, but you would, these organizations would smuggle a lot of Chinese nationals. So you have a counterintelligence threat there. You have a national security issue. And there was a tremendous amount of money. So, like, a Chinese national, even in 2010 timeframe, would pay $203,000.
01:13:38 $25 grand to a Mexico. I don't know what they would pay from China to Mexico, but from Mexico to the U.S., they're paying $25,000. Wow. And they would smuggle like a group of 10 in a day. And the difference was they got the white glove treatment. So the coyotes were notorious when people fell ill or got hurt or just got dehydrated. That desert is brutal.
01:14:03 They would just leave them. And more times than not, they would succumb to the elements. happened dozens if not hundreds of times every summer in Arizona. I remember one call where we get an intercept and the coyotes talking to our main smuggler in Arizona and he's like, hey, I've got 10 Chinese up here and this woman isn't refuses to go any further. And the lady was like, what do you mean? You can tell the coyotes getting frustrated.
01:14:36 He's like, I don't know what she's saying. She just sat down and started crying and she won't move. And we're going to miss our ride. And they're up at the top of this kind of mountain area. And she's like, hold on. And she talks to someone in the background. She comes back on the line and is like, don't leave her. You need to carry her.
01:14:55 And the guy's like, carry her. She's like, yeah, don't leave her. You need a carrier. You can tell the dude's like, he's like, okay, received. And he carried her down the mountain. anybody else, if they were Mexican, Guatemalan, would have been left on that, on that mountain to die. But he carried her and got all of them down, you know, at 25 grand apiece, that's 250,000 in one afternoon. So they got, there was a difference in how they treated nationalities that they were smuggling.
01:15:30 Do you think the cartel would have taken business from, say, a terrorist? I don't think on a enterprise level, they would because they are savvy enough to understand the pressure that would come as a result of that from U.S. law enforcement. Now, what you can't be sure of is, like, what I mentioned, that individual who is part of the network and decides like they're going to make a ton of money on their own, I think the risk is real for like that independent, like, thought to kick in. and someone sees the opportunity that's all monetized and monetary driven, and they take the, they take it. Now, the risk to the U.S. is the same. And then if that's ever found out, then, I mean, that person is absolutely dead. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think on an enterprise level, these networks want to be involved in smuggling suspect or known terrorists. But I think at an individual level, like, there is a risk there. So as long as human smuggling still exists,
01:16:35 then that risk will always be there too for the U.S. It just hasn't, I don't think there's been a case where that's happened yet. There hasn't been a case where, um, like the bomb, like a bomb has gone off or terrorist act, but there have been known and suspected terrorists encountered in,
01:16:54 like the southwest border regions for sure. There was a case not too long ago. And when you, like, when you think of like, like foreign terror organizations, right? You're thinking like Al Qaeda, ISIS, stuff like that. But there were 25 Chinese nationals apprehended by the Coast Guard, I think this past summer, like a stone's throw from Key Biscayne, Florida in a vessel.
01:17:20 There are not a ton of human smugglers that have the sophistication capability and logistics to get people from the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere into the Caribbean. and then from the Caribbean to mainland Florida. And that, when I worked for Secretary J. Johnson, that was one of his concerns, is that there would be radicalized individuals in the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, wherever else, that could make it to the U.S. mainland fairly quickly and undetected and take out or, you know, conduct a terrorist attack. on U.S. soil. So yeah, as long as human smuggling exists, that risk is absolutely real.
01:18:08 How many years did was there that level of human smuggling that you witnessed along with the drug, like how prevalent it was coming in, how serious it was? How many years did that go on for? So I would say, so I got there in 99 and I went to D.C. in at the end of 2014. And so for that 15-year period that I could say conclusively, like there was that scale between the drugs and the humans going. So do you think that's why we're at where we're at today? I'm not sure how we got to today. So, you know, when I was in O'Gallis, and things do change, right? So U.S. policy on marijuana shifted.
01:19:00 So a lot of that, a lot of that marijuana smuggling has, is pretty much non-existent now. But what you saw was that these networks didn't just dry up with, with that revenue. So they swit, they, they doubled down and started, you know, going full blown on industrial methamphetamine production. fentanyl started hitting the scene and they started producing that there was obviously a connection between precursors chemicals out of china you know there's been a large organized crime chinese organized crime presence in china going back or in mexico going back years um so like they they just they do adapt now they have become more sophisticated like you mentioned earlier, like drones are a thing. They're still using tunnels. They're probably not using the desert routes to the level they were, you know, up until 2014. But they're going to, they're resourceful.
01:20:14 They're going to figure out a way to get that product to market as long as there is a demand for cheap labor and illicit substances. Are most ICE agents doing that type of work? The ones we see on TV now and in the news now, are they usually doing the type of work you're describing? Most were, yes. Yeah, before they were brought into what they do now. Correct. Yeah. So ICE and HSI is kind of like the investigative side of that.
01:20:48 So ICE is broken into ERO, which is enforcement removal operations, which in theory handle the administrative and civil immigration side of it. And then Homeland Security Investigations, which is where I came from, handles like the criminal investigative networks, criminal investigative work. And what HSI really is is a anti-sumgling agency. So they're experts on and they focus on the illicit movement of people and goods into and out of the U.S. And that's really the core work.
01:21:24 Anything that crosses a border real or virtual, like a virtual border too. So they're big in the cyber arena as well. So it takes a lot of years to develop those skill sets, training, real world experience, kind of like what I talked about. And it's not necessarily a plug-in play because they don't know civil immigration world like the ERO officers do. just the same that the ERO officers don't know the criminal investigative world. So there's been, in my opinion, a strategic misstep in kind of like, okay, you're going to, you were working on international money laundering for the last 10 years.
01:22:07 Now you're doing civil immigration with ERO or you're doing voter fraud or daycare fraud or some of these other things. Those are all, all those crime types, while valid, like do take a number of years. to understand the elements of the crime, the methodologies, to investigate them, and be effective and efficient in producing cases that will withstand judicial scrutiny. You know, you want to present a case that if it goes to a jury, you have a high probability of securing a conviction. It takes a lot of time to develop those skill sets. I feel like what they're doing now with HSI in particular is like a Jack of All Trades Masters of None
01:22:49 or Swiss Army knife. right, where it's like, oh, like one of my good friends, instrumental for the last 14 years. He helped do the Chapo case in 2014, the recapture in 2016, testified at his trial in Brooklyn. Ovidio and Joaquin Jr., his two sons, got stateside because of him. And all of it, at a moment's notice, he was like, you got to be up in Minneapolis. You're working daycare fraud now, which I'm not, you know, the validity of the daycare fraud I can't really speak to you because I never saw any of that. But this is a guy who has done more investigative work that has crippled or denned Cina Loa's capacity as an organization. And you think it's that simple to just say, hey, you're good at these international drug cases.
01:23:49 so you must be good at doing fraud. Like, it doesn't work that way. But say you take a guy like that and put him on to daycare fraud. Who then takes the drug investigations over? Nobody. So do you think it's just turning a blind eye to that? Yeah, or you end up back. Now you've got to work six months to get back to even.
01:24:11 So he, you know, he goes up to Minneapolis for 90 or 120 days. But then, like, he's sent back and he has to. pick up where he left off, but that was four months ago, and things change. So now he has to figure out, like, what's happened in the last four months. He's going to work like another three months just to get back to even. So to answer your question, like those cases just sit. Nothing happens. Now, there's all this media about when, you know, one of the heads of the snake gets taken off the map, like an El Chapo. Does it really have any effect on anything? I mean, here we are years later since he was taken down.
01:24:48 So we caught, we, we did the case. We cracked, we got him in 2014 and again in 2016. A group of HSI agents, a group of DEA and, and marshals. Like, how I would equate it is you take the kingpin, but you leave the kingdom. You don't, you arrest the kingpin, but you haven't dismantled the kingdom. So that king, that, all that infrastructure still. exists for someone else to step in and almost like it's a speed bump. You know, so to answer your question, when we were in Brooklyn and I was sitting a little
01:25:30 further from Chappo than you and I are sitting now, his organization had already moved on years prior. They plan for that. They assume Choppo, Mayo, Mancho, you take your pick. Like, they're going to get captured. They're going to get killed. Those are, that's just part of the game, really. And they have succession plans in place.
01:25:55 Or there's going to be a civil war, which you're kind of seeing over the last couple of years with, you know, Miles kids duking it out with the remaining two of Chapo's sons and stuff like that. Someone will take the helm, but they're still smuggling dope all the while. So yeah, like the way I would see it is great to take the kingpin off. But you've got to dismantle the kingdom. If you don't dismantle the kingdom, like in another, it's just a matter of days or weeks until there's another king. Is there any way to dismantle the kingdom? Finances and comms.
01:26:33 Like those two infrastructure pieces, everything else falls. And I think the other thing that people are, like, they're starting to wake up to is these networks do not operate at the scale and the capacity that they do without the corrupting nature. So the corruption piece allows, you know, N.O. Mayo to get into his mid-70s before he's ever even seen by U.S. law enforcement. Right. So as people start looking at the finances and they see where that money is going to government officials outside the states, but also officials inside the states.
01:27:15 And we're not immune to this. And there was an example, there's been multiple examples just in Arizona about that. So the most egregious one was an HSI special agent who was also the human source custodian for all of the confidential informants in Nogales. It was arrested and convicted of selling law enforcement data to members of Oregon, Mexican, organized crime in Mexico. It's almost, it's hard to measure who died as a result of that. But I will guarantee you that in all likelihood people did. In fact, the brother of the agent who testified against her was shot and killed in Mexico.
01:28:08 And that's like, and I might take some flack for Aaron Dury laundry. She got 30 months. for doing that amount of damage. Like, it's inconceivable. That's one example. So it's inconceivable to me that these organizations can last as long as they do, operate at the capacity and the scale at which they do without corrupt officials, not just in Mexico, but in the U.S., Canada, any place that they operate.
01:28:43 And the amount of, they have the disposable income to throw obscene amounts of, money. There's been Border Patrol agents. There's been HSI agents. There was a, I think a DEA, a couple DEA guys have gotten jammed up in with it. And that's just what comes to light through through criminal charging. But like if the U.S. government focused on the corruptive nature of these organizations, it would drastically diminish their safety net. Do you think banks and other major corporations turn a blind eye to it because of the money aspect? I mean, if a bank has millions of dollars going through that they suspect of money laundering, they're still making money off of that individual or organization?
01:29:25 So the short answer is yes. And there's been some major banks that have, so there were like know your customer laws that were enacted where like you and I just can't walk into a bank with 50 grand, 100 grand, whatever it is in cash and deposit it. Like the bank is supposed to, maybe they take that money, but then they're supposed to notify like the government, hey, this looked, this, this customer normally doesn't do this. There have been some cases where major financial institutions have been indicted, have paid astronomical, like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars in fees or penalties.
01:30:08 I'm not in the banking world, but that could be a calculation on like, okay, so we got to pay out 30 million bucks, but, you know, we made 100. then it's a good business decision. So August of 26, the FinCEN, the Financial Network, Criminal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department, put out a report that between 2023 and 2025, they flagged $5 billion of suspected human smuggling proceeds. And they have jurisdiction over U.S. financial institutions. So $5 billion, human smuggling over three years. I mean, I ran the numbers, and if my New York public school math holds, that's like 180 plus grand an hour. Every hour of every day for three years straight.
01:30:57 There is no way HSI, IRS, Secret Service combined came anywhere close to seizing $5 billion. And that's a conservative estimate, right? So that's what hits U.S. banks. That's not cash. That's not crypto. So that's just what hits U.S. banks, $5 billion, three years. So why do you think it's not being cracked down on to that level? I mean, manpower for one.
01:31:28 And unwinding those intricate, complex financial networks, like, that's a skill set in of itself. I mean, that's like borderline financial accounting. You know, you're issuing grand jury subpoenas. is you're, you know, you're doing all this, this reconstruction of money flows. It's laborious. It takes a long time. It's very in depth. And, you know, frankly, if you're an HSI agent and you start going down that road and then you get sent to, you know, do civil immigration enforcement, by the time you get back, those accounts could be closed. They could switch up and you're back to
01:32:08 square one. So there's less people looking for that criminal activity. How does it make you feel as an agent, you know, knowing that it's a never-ending battle in that regard? And especially now even with the civil immigration enforcement, how it's being taken away from catching or dismantling these organizations at the higher level? I mean, it's disheartening. Early on in my career, Like you were thinking like you do a takedown, you'd have a seizure, make a couple, make a couple fairly high level arrests. And you're thinking like, shit, I'm like, I'm winning. You're not winning. You're keeping things in check.
01:32:51 You're doing your part to kind of hold, it's good to hold, you have to hold people. There has to be enforcement, right? But you're also keeping these organizations in check. And that's what I found out was more of the job. Like you're keeping them from metastasizing. You're keeping them from growing in power, influence, wealth to the extent that you can. But you should not be under the expectation that you're going to defeat them. It took a lot of years for that to kick in.
01:33:28 And really it was in, and I did write about this, it was sitting in Brooklyn. New York, when the marshals led Chapo into the, to the courtroom, like, I had done high-level stuff. We had been in his, we had intercepted his inner circle, we captured him twice, all this stuff, right? And he walks into the courtroom, and I was so underwhelmed. He's clean-shaven, his hair is combed, he doesn't have the kind of bushy mustache. He looks out of place.
01:34:00 He's looking around. He sees Emma. He kind of gives her a cheapest wave. And I remember being, like, disappointed in myself. I'm like, because I kind of had like the jitters, right? And I was like, that's the guy. That's the guy that the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars chasing around. He should absolutely, he got the sentence he deserved.
01:34:22 But by that point, like, they had moved on. They're like, well, little guy's got, got, got. and life continued. The drugs continue. And the thing that hit me, so I'm a huge fan of the show The Wire. And when you look at the last kind of scene from the Wire where Jimmy McNulty is sitting on a bridge,
01:34:49 parks his car on a bridge, and he's looking over. And it shows like the next generation of street dealers, everybody's kind of moved up a level, and everything continues. That's what it felt like. It's like he's sitting in jail. We're sitting here at his trial.
01:35:07 And while like that's a proud moment, that's an accomplishment, that's a win. Like life went on. The network went on. So I really, and that's part of the reason why I retired where it was just like I did my part. We kept things in check to the extent that we could. And, you know, maybe that is the job. But it also hit me that as long as there is a demand for cheap labor and the U.S. immigration laws are not conducive to supplying that labor at the wages that U.S. employers are willing to pay, then someone will or an organization will step up and bridge that gap. And they will smuggle people in.
01:35:52 It will be exploitive, exploitative in nature. And the same thing on the drug side. Like as long as marijuana, you probably walk down the street to a dispensary right now, right? People that got sentenced to 25 years, 30 years in jail that I was working probably don't even get charged in 2026 for that same crime. But now you've got fentanyl that, I mean, I got three kids. It's the most lethal drug that I've ever seen in my 50 years. So my point being, like, as long as there's that demand, there's going to be an illicit organization that steps up and tries to meet it. I don't know what the fix is.
01:36:35 If you really want to dismantle them from an enforcement side, finances and communication will bring down an organization. Do you think of marijuana was never legalized in states we wouldn't have the fentanyl issue? That's a good question. I think, in my professional opinion, the opioid epidemic is a symptom of kind of that over-prescribing of legal opioids, your percocets, your vicodins, things like that. And these networks seized on that. They were like, hey, like, the U.S. like, the U.S. like, their painkillers. They like their opioids. So I think what you're seeing from an opioid epidemic stance is symptomatic of years of over-prescribing kind of those. I mean, there's been shows where, you know, there were lines around certain clinics to get scripts for Vicodin and Percocet and all that sort of stuff. And it's extremely addictive. So while I don't think, There's the intent from these networks to kill the users.
01:37:51 There is the intent to make people addicted because now you have a repeat customer. So I think that is more of an outcome. I think they doubled down on it when they saw it and marijuana kind of became decriminalized. That's when you really started to see kind of the fentanyl, carofentanyl, there's derivatives, really flood the streets. And it was along those lines where, like, that opioid epidemic, the prescription of opioids really came to light. What do you think is the public's biggest misconception about ICE agents? There are good people. I worked with men and women that risk their lives for me and I risked my life for them.
01:38:42 Ice cannot get out of its own way, though. Like, I want to be clear about that. The people I worked with, the people that I led, the men and women that I led, and who I took doors with, do not operate in the current state that you see on television. I think the masks are absolutely terrible. I think the anonymity goes against every grain of what U.S. federal law enforcement stands for. people will say oh like you didn't work in that environment like I did
01:39:20 second it's like all the dot then you hear about the doxine while there's doxying okay then you now you have that agency has more money than they know what to do with you stand up a threat division a full
01:39:36 division that looks at and pursues valid threats against ICE personnel And you arrest and hold people that threaten to kill or maim or do whatever accountable. I don't think that the doxing is a sufficient reason for the balaclava's and the masks. I think it's a, I think the erosion of public trust is going to take years. I mean, years, if it can ever be regained.
01:40:10 I think their tactics. This is not like the vehicle. maneuvers and all that sort of stuff, never how we trained. And I was, like myself and another SRT agent were injured, April 1st, 2008 in a hostage rescue involving vehicles. And we had briefed, trained, prepared, and it still went sideways. He got hit and still can't, to this day, can't stand up or sit down for any prolonged periods of time since retired. I got hit, but superficial. He took the brunt of it. And that was after, like, We were trained for that.
01:40:46 Like how they engage the public with vehicles, how they engage the public with masks leaves a lot to be desired. I worry about the vetting. So, like 2001, when a lot of the guys and women that I came up with, like, you're like you are vetted to the teeth. You're like put through the ringer. I think you're going to end up with a misconduct and corruption issue. as a result of this mass hiring that's going to plague the agency and not bode well for the American public because the hired decision you make they make today is a 20 to 25 year commitment. And if you're cutting corners on, I mean, the wrong people have been hired when they've been
01:41:34 vetted, right? Kind of the source custodian I talked about. She was she was at one point vetted and still went sideways. But now, like, I think you're going to have a massive misconduct. conduct and corruption issue for potential corruption issues for years to come. There are solid men and women who are empathetic and know how to operate within the confines of the Constitution and the amendments and policies and rules and regulation. And it's not, that's not everybody that you see on TV. I also think the public doesn't understand the side of ICE that you just
01:42:11 explained in this interview today too. Most people wouldn't even understand. that. Right. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not, you hear ice and it is synonymous with immigration. That's it. Right. Like, there is no like, oh, like, a faction of ice caught chopo. A faction of ice did the R. Kelly case and the P. Diddy case and, you know, like a whole host of other, like, you had a colleague of mine, Jim on your show who saved hundreds, if not thousands of kids from just abhorrent sexual abuse, like, is one of the best guys I've known and as a parent, like, love him for the work he does. But you never think of those types of investigations and efforts when you hear ICE.
01:43:00 And that's ICE's own, and DHS's own doing. They, like, they do nothing to help their public perception. Like, they do nothing to, like, there's never been, like, oh, we made a mistake. stake or maybe we shouldn't do this or like they just cannot get out of their own way at this point and I don't know why. They should go on more, you know, platforms and podcasts. What I found too is that the higher ups at those types of organizations don't really do press or podcasts.
01:43:28 Like you see presidential campaigns or senators and stuff. They hit the mainstream podcasts. But the guys running departments and the woman running departments kind of avoid that. Like you don't see the Department of Justice director or whatever sitting down and having a podcast talking about the issues. Yeah. And so then you're left to, and I mean, look, the good work that the agency does doesn't make the headlines. The back, like their screw ups absolutely do.
01:44:00 And frankly, they should. But they do nothing to kind of highlight the fact that like they're, the men and women are doing good work that has nothing to do with civil immigration. It's been, it's been a multi-disciplined agency has been boiled down to one crime type, and that's immigration. And that's the agencies and department's own doing. How long was your career in total? 25 years. 25 years and five days. You look so young.
01:44:31 I retired five days after I became eligible. Wow. Yeah. What have you been able to do since retiring? So your priority should. shift, right? So I had accomplished more than I ever thought I had a great career and got to do some amazingly cool things and worked with phenomenal people. My dad died. I turned 50 in three months. My dad was dead at 50. I have three young girls, oldest being 12. So when I became eligible, I'm like,
01:45:07 it was almost like, cool, I did that. I had a great run, did everything. accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish, now it's time to be present husband and father. That's really kind of what drives me today. It's not taking the necessary risks that I heard, you know, maybe pushing the envelope like I did when I was young. And yeah, because you get you get one crack at this life, right? And, you know, I want to be there for the girls. I want to show them what a principled, responsible adult male figure looks like. So when they get older, maybe they don't make some of the mistakes that I made when I was a kid.
01:45:52 And they're confident enough that, you know, they're at a party and some fentanyl-laced substances getting tossed around that they have the character to pass on that. And I would not be the, I would not be able to do that with the pace at which I ran for so many years in, in working cases. I worked in the private sector for a bit, which was, which was great. But left that earlier this year. And right now it's like, drop my girls off, pick them up, met swim meets, my volleyball games, take them fishing, like, all that stuff, man. And it's, it's, uh, it's rewarding. And if, if I drop dead tomorrow, my only hope is that they have, like, those core memories of me that will kind of guide them as they, as they grow and mature.
01:46:49 So I want to be, like, I just want to be around, be present, you know. And you wrote a book? I did. I wrote a book. Yeah. Um, Kingpins and coyotes, which is kind of what we talked about today. Kingpins being the drug stuff, coyotes being the human smuggling stuff. And a lot of life events kind of talk about my my dad's death. You know, I was 23. He was 50.
01:47:10 My sister was 19. So like a little bit, like a mixture of life, leadership operations, and kind of a realization of what kind of that world, that underworld looks like. So it was a, I found it to be a very therapeutic process. I'm not an over-emotional guy, but when I was writing about, like, going through my dad's death, like I got, I mean, there'll be 26 years on Friday. And I got choked up, you know, because it just takes you back to that.
01:47:44 And then it also puts things in perspective where I'm now his age, a parent of my own, and stuff like that. So your priorities shift, your meaning, the mission, and what you find gratification in doing shifts. The work will always be a part of me, but it's not like definitive of who I am as a person. Well, Eric, I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show today. This has been great.
01:48:12 I appreciate it. Appreciate it. All you do. You got some awesome shows. Yeah. And I'm glad to have you a part of it. Thanks. Thank you.
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