Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Catching Whitey Bulger | Untold Stories From a Homicide Detective

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

Catching Whitey Bulger | Untold Stories From a Homicide Detective

The way we got involved in the whole Boston thing, the Winter Hill Gang, as they're called, was a murder of a guy named John Callahan. And Callahan was a Boston accountant who was tied up with Bulger and Flemy and that whole group. Can you give a little background on the Bulger gang or the Winter Hill gang, sorry. Right. So James Bulger, Whitey Bulger, was this big organized crime figure in Boston for many years and kind of grew up in that whole criminal element and ended up being a very powerful, I would say, kind of controlled a lot of Boston's neighborhoods

in the old style way, like a mafia type way, like extortion and all that kind of stuff. And it was very feared, he ordered murders and whatnot, and it was somewhat legendary in Boston, just if anybody that's lived in Boston for a while knows who he is. and and they they got their their claws into world high lie right because that's what it was all right so it was all they were they decided this would be a good opportunity to skim money and so they owned they bought not bought but they they they ran world high lie which was owned by a guy named

Roger Wheeler, who was a legit businessman in Oklahoma, multi-billionaire. And they were skimming all this money, and they were just doing all this stuff under his nose. And he finally got wind of it and decided, hey, man, this is, you know, there's something wrong here. I'm going to start auditing this and seeing, I don't want these people involved. The Connecticut, there's a Connecticut High Life Fronton also. And the Connecticut Gaming Commission was investigating Wheeler, and he's going, I don't know who these people are. I want them out.

So the pressure started coming in, and they tried to buy, we found this out many years later, they tried to buy World Highlight from Wheeler. He says, I'm not selling. This is my business. I'm not selling. And he ends up dead. He ends up being shot after he played a round of golf in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then a couple of other.

When you go out to his car or something, he gets shot? Well, to his car, he got shot in the car. And throughout this whole time, various people are getting killed in the Boston area. So Callahan, John Callahan was sent in by, this is before Wheeler's murder, Callahan was sent in by the Winter Hill group to run, to be the vice president of Miami Highline. And because he was a smart guy. He was a financially very smart guy. And when all this started happening after Wheeler got killed,

there was another guy named Brian Halloran who was, this would take a whole week of podcasting to tell you all the intricate details of this stuff. But Halloran was apparently approached to Wheeler and didn't want to. So he was a marked man. So they took him out as he was. was walking out of a bar in Boston. And, and so they felt, the group felt that Callahan was the weak link and would be the next to talk to the FBI, because the FBI was really heavily into this. And so Callahan is found dead in the trunk of his car at the Miami International

Airport. All right. So that's how our jurisdiction, that's how we ended up being, you know, working on this whole thing. The only they did in Miami was Callahan's and that was in 1982 and I came to homicide in 85 and there was a there was a RICO investigation on the whole group that that started in the 90s and during during the preliminary hearings up in Boston it came out Stephen Flemmy came out and said well we were informants for the FBI in Boston. He's talking about him and Whitey Bulger. And when that happened, all hell broke loose because the other defendants, primarily John Martyrano, who was their hitman, was appalled that these guys he had been working for for a couple of decades were working with the FBI the whole

time. Right. And he goes, I want to play ball. So that started a very long, arduous problem. process of bringing Martyrano on board. And, you know, there's several agencies involved. Whitey Bulger by now is a fugitive. Right. He's in the wind. Nobody knows where he's at. Well, we don't think anybody knows where he's at. And so we start, we start working with Marterano. It took a long time to get this plea deal done, but we took about a couple of years to get it done. But we got it done. It took 17 different jurisdictions to, to get on board, because there were these murders all around these different counties in Boston, and then you had Tulsa, Oklahoma, and then you had us.

And Oklahoma and Florida were the only ones who had the death penalty. So they wanted us on board in a big way because we provided a lot of leverage with the death penalty. And Martyrano told the whole story. I sat with other members of the task force, and we had a great group of guys that were, you know, headed up by there was a DEA agent and a and several Massachusetts state investigators that were on the task force and we sat with them and the federal prosecutors in the in the basement of the federal building in Boston and with Martyrano for a good three and a half four hours as he went through every single in detail including Callahan's how many murders are there there was I think he

confessed a 21 and we ended up the plea deal went I think the plea deal was for 17 of those I believe and something like that I may have a couple of those numbers a little off but without Martyrano we wouldn't have solved any of those and we probably would not have been able to charge

Bulger and Flemmy so at that point we could get warrants for Bulger and Flemmy and we charge them both and again Bulger was still nowhere to be found at that time so that's how that whole thing played out what did he get bulger no no i know oh martyano got a pretty sweet deal i

think it was something like 15 years he ended up serving three or four he's out for 17 pardon me for he pleaded for 17 murders yeah he got 15 years something something to that effect i'd have to look it up you can probably look it up and see the exact numbers but he's out he was on he was on 60 minutes you know 60 minutes i believe it was yeah they didn't a couple of things on him because he was friends with Ed Bradley. You know, the 60 Minutes guy, they went to high school together. If you haven't seen that episode, it's very good. And it starts off showing Marta Rano having a glass of wine with his family.

So he's living the life. So for the audience and for me, what happened to Wadi Boulger? Like, he's on the run? Whitey got caught. How many years? Was it 13 or 17 years later? Oh, he was on the run for? I forget what year he got caught, but I was already retired.

I was in Coleman, because I remember guys were coming up to me going, hey, did you hear Whitey Balls? I was like, no. And he actually was at, for a brief period. I think he actually went to one of the Coleman pins. Oh, really? Because, oh, God, what's his name? He played Jack Sparrow and Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp would want to meet with him. And the guards were walking around talking about how Johnny Depp was. was at the pin, and they would let Johnny Depp come into the pen and watch Bolger walk around because he wouldn't meet with him. Bulger wouldn't meet with him. So Depp would just sit there and they let him sit there and look at the cameras. They said he spent hours just watching him walk around the rec yard, walk through the hallways, walk. He wouldn't meet with him.

The best thing he could do is kind of try and get his mannerisms or whatever, putting, I guess, some emphasis into the character because he played him in the movie. Yeah. what movie black mass black mass yeah is and so the departed that has nothing to do with him or is it loosely based yeah loosely based but black black mask is a movie about why mass like a like a church mass yeah okay it's also a book by that name yeah yeah so he um yeah i mean eventually balder bulger gets you know he gets grabbed i don't i hate to say i love that the cops are pointing the guns at him and get on the ground get on the ground he's i'm wearing white pants i'm not getting on the

ground it's such an asshole yeah and they grab him and and he gets he goes to trial and they bring up the fact that he was working for the government and he insists that he wasn't working for the government because he knew he's going to prison for the rest of the life he didn't want to go as a rat right so he's the whole kind of kind of tries to prove disprove this theory that he's working with the Boston FBI and ends up getting found guilty of courts which nobody doubted

goes to prison gets whatever it is five life sentences or 40 years or whatever it is he's going to die in prison and he goes and they move him around

a little bit but eventually he goes to a prison and he's murdered somebody some a celly or somebody I forget who murdered

the guy's jumped him somewhere and they killed him so he was working with the FBI and then something else came out that was going to put him up

forever or how does that work. Well, do you want to say it? He compromised a couple of FBI agents, one in particular. Yeah. And it's an interesting story if you ever get a chance to read. It was a book called Deadly Alliance by Ralph Renali. Ralph, Ralph was a Boston Herald or Globe one of two. I think it was a Boston Harold reporter who wrote a very good book called Deadly Alliance. And it's all about how Whitey Bulger and John Conley, who was the FBI agent, grew up together in South, in South. Boston and and and and and how they you know how they later forged this this kind of professional

alliance with like you help me and I'll help you what what Connolly wanted because the focus was on the Italian mafia and and so you know he wanted he wanted Bulger to feed him information about Italian mobsters in Boston and in return for that the if the FBI was going to kind of look the other way on a lot of stuff. Yeah, and in some cases, tipped them off on things that were happening. It became more and more incestuous of a relationship to the point where, to the point where the prosecutors got enough evidence to charge John Conley. Yeah, where it became obvious that, and also, Bulger wasn't giving him anything.

Like, I mean, at least I've seen a couple documentaries, and even in the movie, it seems like, which I didn't read the book, that he's not really giving him good information, you know? Like, I don't know if he didn't have it or, you know what wrong about that? No, I think you're probably pretty close to it. From everything I've read and heard, Conley's supervisors were not overwhelmed by the stuff he was bringing in. Right.

And so the other agents, some of the other agents were like, this guy's full of shit. and they could see what was going on. And there was a great division in the Boston FBI office. There was kind of people that were on Conley's side and people that had wanted nothing to do with them. Right. And there was a program that Bulger was under, which was where the FBI had devised a program to work with informants. And so he kind of had him, he's an informant, and he's giving us this information.

so we're laying low on him because he's helping us and and but he's also giving him information and he's given bulger's kind of giving him kickbacks right like was it cash oh yeah they were good yeah he like there's you know it was it cash was it a lot of cash probably not but he's giving it doesn't matter what it is you know what I'm saying like you don't get a bottle of wine like you don't you can't I got a whole case of wine yeah but he's getting yeah he's but he's getting cases he's getting cash he's getting, you know. And the FBI agent, did he, he got locked up too? Oh, yeah.

You got locked up for murder. We charged him with, with Callahan's murder. Oh, okay. Yes, it's, yeah, it didn't work out for him. There's no sympathy for him, you know. And people are, and he's, he's giving him information about, like, hey, this person, this person's cooperating or this person may cooperate. And then Bulger, is that right?

And then he doesn't, he, didn't have killing like a woman? and he kills some kid. And it's like based on information that I believe was provided by the FBI agent. It's like you're getting people killed. They killed Stephen Flemmy's girlfriend. That's it. That's the, okay. Yeah.

You know, just horrific. And then he goes on the run. He kind of knows things are going sour. So he goes on the run. He's on the run. I don't know if it was 13 or 17 years. It was a long time. With his girlfriend.

Domestically or did he go international? Well, he ended up getting caught in L.A. Yeah. But there was a lot of... There were sightings everywhere. Oh, sightings, by the... I mean, we put them on America's Most Wanted. I remember that.

And there were thousands of leads coming in. You know, I saw an old guy with a Boston Red Sox cap walking in a bar. Yeah, he was big on the NRA. No, not NRA. What am I talking about, you know, he's giving money to the IRA, which, you know, they were kind of at, they were at war, not kind of a war. You know, there was whatever, they, whatever you want to call it, they were, they were, they he was helping raise money as in fact at one point he'd helped raise money didn't he and one of the ships with all these he had like a boat with a bunch of guns on it that they're sending over

there to ireland and he was involved in that got seized while he's on the run no no this is before but the point is is that it's not like hey it's not like some street guy who grew up in the projects and has never left the state of florida went on the run like he's probably not could go more than 50 miles or a few hundred miles. He may not even leave the state. I mean, Bulger could have gone to, he's been supplying weapons and money for the IRA. You know, he could have gone to Ireland. You know, people there may have helped him. Like, so he's, he could have been traveled. And there are things where people are saying, there were, you know, hey, I bank here. I know the guy. I've saw, you know, I'm, I've seen him go into my bank in, in London. You know, they've got cameras and

they check and, you know, so maybe he's traveling, whatever, but when they called him, they called him like 600,000 or 700,000 in cash. So he'd been just living off of this money left with, God knows how many millions. He's down to 70, or 700,000 or 600,000 in cash. They said there was guns throughout his whole apartment, you know. He had his girlfriend with him, a woman named Catherine Greig. And so one of the things I always felt was that we should look for Greig because I'm trying to put myself in their place, right? Like, all right, so we're living on the run.

We're hiding. Everybody needs certain things. Everybody needs food. And this was before the days when you could get food delivered as readily as you can today. Right. Because this is what, 10 years ago? When did you get called 10 years ago?

Probably, yeah. You know, these are, he's an older guy. You probably need medicine of some sort at some point in your life. So who's going to go out and do that? Probably her. Yeah. Because she's less recognizable. So we were looking for her.

She's a big dog person. You know, she apparently had her dogs with her. So we're looking at dog grooming places. I mean, we were really picking through everything. Would they end up getting a boob job or something? Was it meta? It was plastic. surgery how does she because they recognized her some no no i think the guy i think the guy

recognized somebody that lived in the same building right it was like a high-rise condo i think it was recognized him yeah oh him yeah oh i had thought i watched something where that's what i remember i had thought i watched something where they were they were going that they were they were like she had had somebody had given a tip or something that she'd had plastic surgery so they were hitting all the plastic surgeries. I mean, it's possible that that happened. I just don't remember that. But I do remember, because I remember they interviewed a woman who was in his building.

She was like, just, yeah, like a neighbor. I do remember that. I forget how, I'll have to look into it. But what's, yeah, I remember they, I just remember this is funny. When they went through his house, the FBI, when they came back and talked to him, they said, look, you know, I got a question for you. He, they said, you have soft. on all of these, so there were socks on these bottles, right, like a bottle, a bottle of water.

And there were socks that were pulled over them. I forgot this part. And so the detective said, you know, you've got like two dozen or a dozen pair of socks that are like this. What's with that? And he said, well, I buy my socks at the dollar store and they're too tight. So I put them over the bottles of water. And he goes, he says, he stretches them out, and then I wear him. And he goes, why would you, he goes, why would you, why wouldn't you just buy regular socks?

He is, because these are a dollar. And he goes, you have 700,000 in cash. And he goes, yeah, but that's got to last the rest of my life. You know what I'm saying? And he was like, okay, I get it. You know what I'm saying? Like, I just remember walking in. It's like, everything makes sense.

But what's that? Right. What's going on over here in the corner? And he's like, yeah, but I'm like, so obviously he had just lived off of God knows how much money he left with initially. And he was just living, and he knew him. He's living, he's in the 70s or something when they caught him. Oh, yeah, he was 76 or something like that. Yeah, he's, yeah, just looking at pictures. Yeah. I don't, I didn't think he was recognizable at all, like compared to the pictures that he left. Because he had that beard and throughout the rest of his life, you don't, you never see him

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Again, that's ghostbed.com slash Cox with the code Cox at the checkout to save a whopping 50% off sitewide. But yeah, like, so where were you, were you born in Miami? No, I was actually born in India. Okay. My mom was Indian. My dad was American. They went there. And I think their plan, I found out later, their plan was to live there.

But my dad couldn't acclimate to the environment and whatever. He just kept getting sick. And so they came back here when I was 10 months, almost. almost a year old, about 11 months old. They didn't have much money. They had to get on a freighter. During those days, you could get on a freighter for $25 or something to go across the ocean. And I arrived here on New Year's Day, 1959, in New York.

Oh, okay. But settled in Miami because my mom got a job teaching in Miami. What did your dad do? My dad was an artist and a boat builder. He did copper sculpture, and he built sailboats. His love was sailing, and he worked with his hands. It's, you know, he did, the guy could do anything with his hands. And so with him being an artist and my mom being a teacher, life wasn't entirely extravagant.

Right. You know, so we lived a pretty humble life in South Miami, they had a little house, and that's where I grew up. So, I mean, did you, you know, growing up, did you want to be a police officer or? No, that was never in the cards for me. I didn't have any police officers in the family. My grandfather was a military man. I'm very proud of that. He was in the Swedish Royal Guard.

I'm half Swedish, by the way. Well, you're all over the place. Yeah, man, I'm an endangered species for sure. But he was the only person, really, that had any kind of connection to law enforcement, and it really wasn't in America. So I grew up, wanted to be, I was a typical American kid. I wanted to play football. I played the guitar and, you know, I had a band when I was in 15, 16 years old playing music.

And I didn't get interested in law enforcement until I was about 19. How did that, I mean, how did that come about to you? It was really kind of a strange experience. I was literally, I was a music major. And I was studying for a music theory exam with a good buddy of mine who's a bass player, very successful musician now. and we're sitting in his room studying all this stuff and I hear I hear some weird radio thing what is that and he says it's a police scanner I listened to the police calls so he showed it to me he was just interested in it he was just you know he was a geek that way or he's interested

in that kind of stuff and and so you know and I said well do you understand what they're saying yeah I kind of picked it up I've learned by listening and at that very moment some red lights him flashing through his window and we look out the window and a metro police car has pulled someone over across the street. And I'm watching this officer pick up the mic and talk and we're hearing them over my buddy's scanner. Right. And I'm like, I was mesmerized. I'm going, this is, this is cool as shit, you know? Like, this is amazing. What year is this? We're talking 1977, okay, 1976, probably 1976, 77. And so I thought, this is really interesting.

And I loved the whole, the communications, and there's just the efficiency and all that kind of stuff was really cool. And so I signed up for an observer ride. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I went and rode with, I did actually three observer rides within the space of six months or so. And, you know, with each one, I got more and more interested in the whole thing. And the officers I rode with were really good, and they explained a lot of stuff. And before you know it, I changed my major to criminal justice. And I wanted to do that.

I wanted to go into police work. My parents were not thrilled. No? No. They wanted you to be a musician? They wanted me to be a writer. I had been writing since I was a kid. I always just loved to write.

I had a couple of great teachers that, you know, I got a love of words and a love of writing from them in elementary school. And so I just wrote. I wrote about anything and everything. They said, no, you need to be a writer. Don't go into police work. And we'll send you to journalism school and all this stuff. And your dad's, your dad's a, I mean, your dad's an artist. Right.

They're both from liberal arts. Yeah. Yeah. They were just, they were just like, they were appalled. They were in tears. Really? Oh, yeah. They were not, they were not happy.

And I said, I said, look, my mind's made up. This is what I want to do. And they said, well, mark our words. writing is going to surface in your life one day. And they were right about that. Right. I mean, did you, did you keep writing as an officer? I did. I mean, not as much because you're busy, but whenever I had an interesting call, for example, in uniform, I would go home and write some notes in a notebook about it. Okay. And, you know, I wrote a couple of articles. I never got them published. I would show them to friends or whatever. I wrote for my own enjoyment. And I guess it was

probably, you know, therapeutic in some way. And then when I got to homicide, of course, the stories became much more compelling, and much more complex. And I did the same thing. I wrote down and, you know, by the time I was getting ready to retire, I'd started thinking about, you know, I got to do something with these, with all these notes and these stories. I got to, I think I should probably write a book. Right. But it took years before I finally sat down and started. And a good eight years before I finished. Wow. I mean, it was an often on, it was off right.

So I would put it down for months and then pick it back up. And then when I thought it was ready, it wasn't. And so there's rewriting. Anybody that's written anything, like you know, you got to rewrite, revise, edit. Oh, yeah. And that happened a number of times. Yeah, I wrote my book probably three times, you know. And it did, it took about, it took a, it took a,

It took over a year, but then again, I had a lot more time on my hands than you did. I was working full time when I was teaching and all this stuff. So, I mean, so once you, what do you do? You go to the police academy first, right? Do you get hired first and then go to the police academy? You go to the police guy and you wait. So you get hired and they back then and even now, it's more prevalent now, they want you to pay your way through the academy.

So I put in a bunch of applications to about seven. seven or eight different police departments. So we have a lot of jurisdictions and a lot of different agencies down there. And I get called, most everybody had a hiring freeze at that time. In 78, 79, I get called by this little city called Opelaca in Northwest Day, you're familiar with it. And they said, listen, we want to interview you and so on. So I went through the process and they said, all right, look, we want to hire you.

Are you willing to pay your way through the academy? I said, I really don't have that much money. And they said, all right, we'll pay. The negotiations was fierce. Yeah, right. So that was a pretty quick process. And then I started the academy in July of 1979, graduated five and a half months later in December, and hit the road, hit the ground running because by that time, Miami was changing a lot. And a lot of stuff was happening.

It was no longer this sleepy little town, you know. Right. So, I mean, what do you do? start in the jail or no no this is a small city agency municipal agency so i started in uniform patrol okay so yeah that would be like the sheriffs they typically start the deputies don't right but right but my even miami dade was different that way they were the only department that didn't do that so miami dade has its own corrections agency that handles the jail okay all the other sheriff's departments around florida they do that so what are you first you're like a traffic no just regular patrol

handling calls and going to, you know, getting dispatched to calls and going out on patrol. How, I mean, how long is it until you start with like homicide or did you go through different phases or were you aiming for homicide? Did you want, once you entered, did you want to go to homicide or how would that work? That took a little while. So I, when I first started in uniform, you know, I'm running from call to call. I'm enjoying working uniform and, and it's busy. and it's exciting when you're 21 years old, that shit's exciting. Yeah.

And so it wasn't until I spent a year in Opelaca. And then Opelaca had some corruption problems, and they changed their police chief. We had a great police chief. The guy that hired me was terrific. His name was Ruben Greenberg. He became legendary in law enforcement. He went to Charleston, South Carolina,

and pretty much turned their city around. And when Greenberg left, the department started going, downhill. And I got out and about one third of the department left. I went to, went to greener pastures. It was it, it was just because of the corruption, they didn't want anything to do with it? It was, it was, the city hall was corrupt. Right. And it trickled down into the police department. I wouldn't say that the people I worked with were corrupt, but they hired a yes man. They didn't like Greenberg because Greenberg was a very independent thinking guy. Right. And they hired a yes, man who did whatever the city hall wanted. And they started promoting people just out of the blue

without tests, without announcements. Nothing. We showed up one day. People were wearing corporal stripes. Like, when did we get a corporal's rank? Well, yesterday I decided to make these people corporals. And so it just, it just was an environment I didn't want to be in anymore. So I left and went to another department, North Miami Police Department, which was right next door. Right. And, and quite a different neighborhood, you know, quieter. Most of the city was a little quieter. The west part of North Miami was a little rough. But the rest of the department was, you know, citizens waving to you

and not throwing bottles and rocks at you. So it was different. Opelaca was a rough town. So I spent two years there, but before I left North Miami, one night I'm on a homicide scene. I get dispatched to a shooting at a Publix, right, Publix's grocery. And this man been walking out with his groceries, gets robbed in the parking lot. They shoot and kill him. And he didn't even put up a fight from the witnesses said.

He had $80 in his pocket. And I'm watching the detectives work, right? The homicide detectives come and they're talking to me and they're talking to the witnesses. And I started thinking, man, what a challenge that is. There probably isn't a bigger challenge in police work than trying to solve the death of another human being. and I decided that's that's what I want to do now North Miami Miami didn't have an opportunity to work homicide their detectives handled pretty much mainstream stuff burglaries and thefts and things like that so I thought that the best place I could go would be the county Dade County it was a much much bigger department we're talking well over 3,000 sworn at that time and and a lot going on too there's a lot going on you had a lot of different districts you could work, lots of different specialized investigative units you could work. And so I went to the county, 1982. I still had to kind of prove myself or at least do my time in

uniform. And I did a couple of years and actually three years in uniform there. I was a field training officer for a while training other officers or coming out of the academy and interviewed with homicide, waited until they had an opening. And 1988, They called me up and said, come on over. So that's when I went to homicide. And what do you do? Do you work under somebody for a while? They kind of show you the...

Yeah, you're working on a squad. So we were all, it was a squad concept, right? So we had like four detectives and a supervisor with each squad. And we had, I don't know, eight, nine squads in the unit, more than that. But, yeah, they give you a senior detective that's pretty much kind of mentoring you and watching how you're working and progressing and kind of reporting back to the sergeant as to when he's ready to handle his own homicides and that sort of thing and when you're new you're getting you know you're getting all the decomposed bodies and you're getting all the nasty stuff that you know

because that's just the right of passage there okay you know you're going to they want to make sure you can handle that and deal with it and and do the job well and make sure you can write a good report and you've got the stamina right to to work and that's that physical stamina and emotional stamina to work there to what was like one of the first ones or first cases you went on and it doesn't have to be the exact first but the first kind of one that stands out I guess my first well you know there was a lot of them but because you handle you handle not only homicides so you're working you're working suicides accidental so when you're new you're not given a homicide yet you're working with your team on when somebody else is the lead, but you're not given the job as lead

investigator on a case yet. So you're working on all the suicides, accidentals, and things like that. There was, there was a, well, turned out to be a natural death, a woman that died in her bathtub, and she had been there for two months. The house had been closed up, and there was no air conditioning. Well, how, I mean, look, call me, and, and, and whatever you're imagining. And whatever you're imagining it was a hundred times worse yeah i mean how do you go too much like she didn't have she old like nobody she's an old lady nobody you know her family was nowhere to be found and and and and she apparently slipped and fell on the bathtub and because she was nude she was probably getting ready to take a shower or whatever hit her head whatever it was and you know it's horrific and and you know

when when you're when you're working a scene the policy the policy on a deceased person is is the person cannot be transported to the morgue with any jewelry on. Well, guess who has to take it off? That's the detective's job. So, you know, this was one of those things where... We'll get Colby to do that. You hold your breath. I don't do it.

You hold your breath and you're running there and take off the earrings. You come out and put them in a bag and go, and you hold your breath again and go in and get the necklace. And it's nasty work. It's, you know, everything you see in Hollywood, it's all glamorous and all this but let me tell you something you're you know the first time you're doing that or standing knee deep in a dumpster looking for a gun all that glamour goes away pretty quick um so I mean what happens because we actually we in we interviewed you don't remember

her name do you do you remember the woman she the cleanup this woman who's a professional she was a police officer for a few years you know like two, two, three, four years. And then she started, she's like, the problem is, is that, you know, you somebody would, there'd be a suicide or something. And they take the body away. And then you're leaving. And the family's like, well, what do we do about the mess and this whole thing? And they're like, oh, that's on your, that's on your, that's on you. Like that, she's like, what they were, she, they were telling them like, well, that's, you have to clean it up. That's up to you. And she's like, so then I started offering a service. And she said, then the

service started getting bigger and bigger. She said, technically, you're not supposed to recommend anybody. That's what she was saying. She said, but I started offering a service on the side, and then it started getting bigger and bigger. And then eventually the department came to her and said, listen, you're doing this on the side. You can't do that. Either stop doing that or this.

And she said, but by that point, I was like, I'm making way more money doing this. Brilliant idea. Right. And what I don't do, she start that and it did super well. then she started franchising it. So she teaches how to get like certifications and how to go about doing this and do it in a, in a, not just going in a janitorial way, but kind of like documenting everything, almost like a, like as if it's like the police would come in. You know, you're documenting everything. You're photographing everything.

You're, you know, you're doing all of that so that to kind of cover everything. But she, boy, it was horrible. I think that got demonetized. Yeah, Laura Spalding. Laura Spalding, super interesting. And which you absolutely, no doubt you'd have to have this, a great sense of humor. I mean, she was very funny, very, you know, and she was, and we were, I think at one point we were joking around, and she's like, I would never joke around like this and I would never

behave this way, but, but, you know, you have to have a sense of humor, you know, for certain things. You have to be able to laugh or you'd be in tears all the time. But yeah, yeah, it's so I can only imagine how horrible. horrible it is after or that she's showing up when the body's gone right yeah and and people would ask us the same question and there were two or three professional cleaning companies in in south florida that that did that kind of stuff and they were gotten used to it but that's a that's a great that's a brilliant idea on her part yeah i just kidding i just no i mean you and then whoever

you're hiring you there's not many people that are going to want to do that yeah i don't know if we asked her that we should have asked her what the turnover was. You know what I'm saying? And how much she's paying her employees? That would be interesting. Yeah. Nobody's going to, well, I was going to say nobody's going to work minimum wage, but the guys in the wagon that we used to call the wagon,

which is the medical examiner's wagon that picked up the bodies. Those guys made minimum wage. They did, they, and, you know, a lot of them were hired right off the, you know, right off the street. They were homeless and, you know, so. We've interviewed a few, um, Are they, what is it? They do the autopsies?

Medical examiners. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, they're both fainted. Like, both of the ones that one video did, really. Yeah, both did well. He goes on Nancy Grace or something like that.

You remember his name? He's an older guy. Michael, Michael Bodden, that guy from New York? I think the medical examiner, the female medical examiner, I want to say was from New York. You know, I can't get you both their names real quick. No, we worked with some. great medical examiners, and we had to go, the lead investigators had to go to the autopsies on their homicides. That was our policy, too. I know. I've seen the movies and how it

works. I know exactly how it works. In all the movies, they kind of, they show up and they, you know what I'm saying? I was wondering if that's true. You know, they're, you know, look under the fingernails. Like, yeah, I don't, detectives, just stand over there. Like, I know what I'm doing. Yeah. Joseph Morgan and Barbara Butcher are the two names. Never heard of either one of them. Butcher's a great name for a medical examiner. Right. Right. Both, wow. Wow. Both over 100,000. And yeah, those are, those are two videos that, you know, when they were posted, you didn't do what, didn't do, yeah, weren't super, but boy, they were both interesting. She was great, by the way. She was great. Very, she was very, she was very, I want to see if you. You've got, you've got one of our former ones up, up this way. See her? she was very forthcoming you know very like she talked about like she talked about she she's so funny

said it the way my dad did she's like she's like oh i was a drunk she's like i was a i'm a drunk she's like i mean i'm in aa now i'm a recovery she's but i was a drunk and i mean just very you know a lot of people that go to a older people like they they just put it out there they don't sugarcoat it she didn't sugarcoat anything she was great yeah she anyway but i actually think she works with Patricia Cornwell. That name sounds familiar. She writes about a medical, her main character is a medical examiner. Yeah.

So she works with her. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the author. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, horrific job. Horrible. So, I mean, how long did you, were you running around doing the natural deaths until? So I, probably four months, four or five months maybe.

It didn't seem very long. It wasn't that bad. Okay. I was going to say, then they get a couple of new guys. And then they give you, they give you, you're ready to handle your first, be the lead in your first one, so. Do you remember what that was? Oh, yeah.

What was that? I'll never forget that one. That was a, there was a domestic guy, guy suspected his wife of cheating. He's drinking, getting pissed off and waiting for her to come home. And when she comes home, they start fighting. And eventually he grabbed a 25 auto from the, from the closet and shot her. and shot first first shot missed her and hit the water bed so we were working in about six inches of water in there but but that was that that case stood out to me a lot not just because it was

my first one but senseless they had him they had him in custody you know right away the uniform people got there and and and so they said all right he's over at the district four substation so you know i'm the lead i'm going to go interview him and i'm you know i'm still new in homicide is my first case and I'm giving myself a pep talk like, okay, I've got to get a confession here. You know, I'm going to start to think. It sounds cut and dry. Thinking about, thinking about what I'm going to say to him and how I'm going to work this guy and I open the door to the interview room and he sticks out his hand and I stuck out my hand. I said, hey, I'm Detective Nyberg and he goes, I'm Benjamin and I shot my wife. So a lot of the cases we had, you know, you just shook your head and

you go, how can somebody get to that point? And really so many people, that commit murders are not hardened criminals. They're just regular idiots that just don't know how to handle their emotions and, you know, they get drugs and alcohol and then their emotions and everything boils over. And they don't know how to handle things that you and I can handle without even thinking of hurting somebody. Yeah. I mean, I'm just going to divorce my wife, you know what I'm saying?

Or whatever it is. Yeah, I was going to say in that situation, it's like, look, this is, you know, adios. Whatever. You want to go cheat, go cheat. But there's just some people that just cannot handle that kind of stress and our prisons are full of them, as you probably know. I mean, were there any other better thought out, you know, homicides where they actually, you know, really took their time and thought the whole thing out that comes to mind where it was like, wow, he really put some time and thought into this. A few, yeah, a few.

I think those obviously are harder to solve. there's a couple that have been unsolved to this day that I can think of. There was one that kind of is thrown to my side because the widow of the victim became a friend over the years. We talked so many times. Right. She's not walking away and forgetting she's talking to constantly. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So there's an interesting side story to that. But the guy was a co-owner of a heavy equipment company. so they leased out cranes and heavy equipment to construction companies and he's found in his office trailers so they're they've got a large work site where you know the people run on the company have trailers that they're uses offices he's found in the trailer with a gunshot wound to the back of the head 25 auto one shot and very little evidence we interviewed everybody in that company we interviewed everybody that guy knew several times over sometimes and And nobody knew and nobody was telling.

And then his business partner, that was the co-owner of the business, started acting strange, saying some bizarre stuff to some of the other people in the company. And long story short, we were pretty sure he was a guy. But we had never had enough probable cause to charge him. We could never get enough evidence to put the company. He just never, he never, he never, even had to give an alibi. I mean, he wasn't there, right?

So we know that because he wasn't, he wasn't there. Even the other employees that he wasn't around during the time. So he either slipped in unnoticed or he hired somebody to do it. Right. And what he was trying to do was take over the business. So, but that was unsuccessful. And the wife is, or the widows now calling you saying, hey. The wife was calling, the wife was calling every day for about two or three weeks.

What's going on with the case? have you found? And you know, you can understand that, right? This is her husband. They've been married, I don't know, 25 years or so at that time. And then the calls would taper off on she called maybe once every couple of weeks and then once a month. The happened on May 1st, 1986. I got a call from her every May 1st for 32 years. Jesus. And, but it was a pleasant call. It wasn't something that, you know, I dreaded. We talked. She wasn't abusive. No, no, not even. We talked. It got to the point where we didn't even talk about the murder. By that time, she knew about my kids. I know about her kids. We sent each other Christmas cards. I mean, she was a very, very nice old lady. And she

passed away about a year and a half ago. I didn't get the call on May 1st. And I contacted her daughter on Facebook. And she goes, yeah, mom passed away. So what do you do once you've gone through all the leads, you've gone there, you talk to everything, everybody, there's no clear path to follow. What do you do? You just, you just hope that at some point the shooter gets caught or somebody that knows more gets to a point where they will reach out and that's pretty much it. Like it's a cold case and then you just keep a tabs on and hope. You do exactly that. And at that time in homicide, you're getting other cases too. So you're not just, you know, nobody waits for you to finish one and pick up another. You're getting,

they're coming in fast and furious. Right. So we were handling, our unit was handling 30 to 32 homicides a month. That's pretty much one a day. And on top of that, the suicides and accidentals, you know, that's a steady flow coming in as well. So, you know, you got 55 detectives to handle all that stuff. And, and so we, we were working a lot of hours. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say it takes a lot to go, especially if there's no immediate, nobody immediately that you can say this is definitely the person and, you know, he was there, or he was caught or we pretty much know this. Then you have to start knocking on doors and calling relatives and checking cell phones and doing all that.

So that takes a lot of manpower. What I'm wondering is how often, how often the cold cases, something, you know, it's been five years, kind of like the same case, but in this case, you know, somebody, people reach out to you or like we talked about before we started where you know you get a letter from some book some guy in prison you know how often does that happen where it's like it's cold case we've done everything then five years later you get a letter come see me come see me at coleman i my celly just told me this he killed the guy or something like that yeah it does happen so with with cold cases we had a lot of cold cases in our files so and and towards the end of my career i worked on our cold case squad so

know exactly how we used to do things. We didn't have to go picking and choosing cases. There was usually a lead coming in. Or we might have sometimes even a retired detective call up and say, you know, this case always bothered me. See what you can do with it. See if anybody knows anything. And the passage of time can sometimes help. Usually in the first, you know, the classic thing, the first 48 hours, if you don't solve it, you know, you're never going to solve it. Not necessarily true. It's ideal, right, that you try and get the case solved that early, but it's not always like that. And later on, what happens is relationships change. People get divorced. Business businesses fall apart. People get people that weren't willing to talk 10 years ago

might suddenly be willing to talk. Right. And so you capitalize on that. Can you think of anywhere you Did you, was there a time you went, you got up something from like a prison or something like we were talking about that led to an arrest or what other? Sure. Yeah, we had one. This was a very high profile case. And anybody that was in Miami back in the 70s and 80s will remember a guy named Anthony Abraham. He was a big car dealer, very wealthy businessman. Had Anthony Abraham Chevrolet. Everybody knew where that was. The advertisements were all over the place. And his wife, Genevieve Abraham, has found shot to death in an apartment with two of their close friends. Mr. Abraham wasn't around, but they're all three, and they're elderly people. They were all, you know, in their 70s. And they're all found shot to death. And nobody knows what's going on.

This case went cold. It was worked very, very hard because obviously it was a super high profile case, right? Everybody was shocked at this thing happening. And there were all kinds of theories being thrown around about Abraham being involved in some Lebanese organized crime or something like that. He was a Lebanese family. Nine years goes by. And I'm on the cold case squad. It's 1993.

And we get a call from this guy who says, I can help you close the Abraham case. And we're a little skeptical. And, well, how do you know? And he starts just explaining things and talking about people. And he goes, I don't want to talk too much on the. phone let's meet in person and don't come looking like a detective so we dressed down we met him at a denny's and and he starts talking about things that only somebody that would be on the scene would know right because there are certain things you don't want to just reveal to the public for that very

reason did holdbacks or something like that right so so he says he was all told this by his cousin or whatever so he was kind of distantly related to the to the murderers there was two guys and it was a robbery. And anyway, very long story short, he led us to some people that were, that were, had moved up to Orlando. One of the shooters lived in Orlando. And we worked the case very hard. We ended up going up to Orlando talking to this guy and he confessed and gave up the other guy. And so we ended up arresting both of them for first degree and getting convictions. So the guy that called us, His name was Ralph. We asked him, we said, you've been sitting on this information for a long time.

Like, what changed and made you suddenly want to call us? And he goes, well, I've been holding this in for a long time. He says, I got into a very bad car accident, and I was in a coma for 11 days. When I came out of the coma, I realized that God let me live so I could tell this story. How well? It's something you see in the movies. Yeah. And it was true.

I mean, the whole thing about the car accident and everything was true. Yeah. And sure enough, that was the deal. And that closed one of the biggest cases we ever had. I was just with a phone call. Just decided one day, that little bit of information. And the guy who did the murders, like he just confessed right away. How was that, how that conversation goes?

The first guy did. We knocked on his door. He lived outside of Orlando. had a wife and a little daughter, and he came to the door, and we identified ourselves. We said, hey, we're from Miami-Dade Police Homicide. We would like to talk to you. And he looked down at the floor for a couple seconds, and he looked back at us, and he said, I knew this day would come. Oh, geez. And we knew that we were close to the end zone there.

Um, I mean, was he the main shooter? No, the other guy was the main shooter. this guy was kind of the tag along the other guy was the kind of the big brother you're going to do what I say type thing and orchestrated this robbery

and the couple that were friends with the Abraham's the husband was the landlord of the building and he was an old school guy would walk around and collect rent in cash and walk around with rolls of cash and

the shooter the main guy lived in building and saw them and decided I'm going to rip them off that's what happened you're going to come with me and they just executed these these three people so one of those it was a horrible case yeah i was going to say like you would think that someone who's a cold-blooded killer wouldn't have you know whatever you know nine years later wouldn't be riddled with guilt but sounds like the guy that you knocked on the first door yeah why'd you go to him first just because we knew he was the weaker link okay we just knew that and because ralph had told us that as well the other guy was actually when we identified who it was and found where he was sitting in prison on

another murder yeah um hmm anything no oh no i'm just thinking about it yeah yeah no like when you go to when you meet that guy at denny's is are you like recording that conversation no or just kind of like no there was two of us sitting with him and one of us was sitting at a table a little further away just in case there was anything funky going on we just wanted to make sure

we were protected so and that first guy you just think he felt it kind of just ate away at him yeah

and did he get less time than the other guy oh you're talking about the other shooter yes they both they both ended up

they both ended up with life oh wow yeah so he just so and they both but he but he's

he says he admitted it, and I'm sure he ropes the other guy in. He still got life. He also admits to putting a gun to Ms. Abraham's head and shooting her. This woman was sitting in a chair. Oh, I thought, I thought you, well, I thought, I mean, yeah, I mean, he was, he was the weak link in terms of, he said, I really didn't want to do it, but I felt compelled to do it. He didn't try, he didn't try to say, I was coerced into doing it. He never went that route. You know, he said, I know what I did was wrong. It was horrible, you know, I felt guilt for a long time, you know, but I felt like I needed to do what, what this guy said, so.

I still feel like, I still wouldn't have given him a little. I still like, because without, without that confession, I probably don't have anything. Well, we had, we had, we had, this, that wasn't the only evidence we had. Okay. The main guy you talked to that had gotten out of the coma, he'd given you enough to probably proceed without these guys. Yeah. Okay. No, I mean, that's certainly. certainly helped a great deal. Yeah. And nothing happens to the Denny's guy, right? No, Ralph wasn't involved at all. Yeah, he just kind of had new, no. Was Mr. Abrams still around? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. So that's good. So he has a little bit of, I say, closure. Maybe I'm not sure how much closure that is. I think there's such a thing. There's some people that don't believe in that,

but I've worked with enough victims' families to know that it's, it is important to them to see somebody go to prison. It is. It has, it doesn't bring anybody back. It doesn't. It doesn't, doesn't do anything like that, but at least they feel like there's some sense of justice for them, right? Yeah, I mean, to me, I would, I, I'm not positive about the, the, I would want to want to know, you know what I'm saying? To me, like, what, why? What happened? Like, and then here's what's even worse is that, like, that's so fucking senseless. You know what I'm saying? Like, what did you get? Right. Would you get five grand? Three grand? Do you get 20? Like, come on. Like, You don't have to get anybody for that. You could have put a mask on, come in, grab the money. They're

old, they're not going to, you got a gun, like, you know, exactly right, you know, and then guess what? And then nobody's, you know, you're only going to look for these guys for a little bit, you know, if I just, if I have a mask on and I grab the money, doesn't even matter from another robbery. Right. Even if you're brutal about it, it doesn't matter. Nobody died, you know, because the difference between going to being investigated by homicide detectives and regular, you know, just a robbery is that, you, those robberies are just constant. You're, you're, you're, probably never, you're going to be, they're going to look into it. They're going to follow some leads and that's it. Nobody's getting into going into a coma coming out and set nine years later

saying, I have to unburden myself because I know about a robbery, you know, so, but, but, you know, but homicide like, you know, it's, it's horrific. So, yeah, that's just stupid. By the way, I was wondering, like, did you get, you got married? Are you married this whole time? You're, yeah. Okay. That was my first marriage. So it was rough. It, you know, that, you know, that, whole life probably contributed to the demise of that marriage. Right. To some extent. Because you're getting a call at 11 o'clock at night or one in the morning.

You've got to get a big go. Yeah. And then you're going for days, right? Sometimes you're working for, for the hours are ungodly. Right. And, you know, you're working maybe till three or four o'clock. Let's say if you're on the day shift and you catch a call, you catch a, 9.30 in the morning. And it starts picking up steam.

Things are happening. You're getting witnesses, whatever. You're working until three in the morning. You come home, collapse for four hours, get dressed to go back to work. And that happened a lot, and it happened frequently. So there were times, you know, when my boys were growing up that, you know, I probably should have been there a lot of times and wasn't. So that didn't help.

Yeah, I was going to say we've interviewed a few homicide detectives, and all of them are like, you know, the problem is, is you're working a case. Like you're just gone. could be gone for, you know, four or five days. So he's like, and it doesn't, it doesn't, he's like, you know, your wife doesn't want to put up with that. He's like, it's okay for, for a few months.

I mean, my wife, my first wife was a lunatic, but that was another story. So, so that, that was a bad combination, right? A homicide detective and a lunatic, not good. So I, I think one of the things, as my boys were getting older, I was starting to miss out on some things. And I didn't want to be that dad that was like this absentee dad. and and so I ended up there was an opportunity to go to cold case cold case was you're still in homicide but you're working seven to three you got weekends off okay and and very rarely where you

get called out we got called out when it was something big and they needed extra extra manpower right got called out but for the most part we never got called out and and working overtime was not necessarily in necessity so my overtime was cut back but my kids were now they were going to boy scouts they were they were playing the league football and stuff I was able to get involved in that stuff and be part of that so that was that was worth that was worth it you know that was important to me I didn't want to sacrifice that how long did you work cold cases I work cold case from 92 to the end of my career 14 years so I did 22 years in homicide altogether

Well, I mean, are there any specific cases that stand out? Well, that one I was telling you about Anthony Abraham's wife, right, that that triple murder, that was one that we did. I was working on Whitey Bulger during that, during a cold case, okay? There was a little girl that disappeared, a little six-year-old girl that disappeared in Miami, and that was handled by the regular squad, but it became so massive a case that they ended up giving it to cold case. and we worked that exclusively for two or three years. How did that work out? Well, it worked out.

I mean, we ended up charging her right before I retired. And then I went back after retirement and testified in the trial. Who'd you charge it? We charged the caretaker. It was a crazy story, a very complicated story, but this little girl was in foster care for two women. And what the state of Florida didn't know at the time was that this woman, the main person in this thing, her name was Geraldine Graham. She was a fraud artist, and she had been defrauding people her whole life.

And she used her position as a foster parent to defraud people as well. And the kid disappears at one point. And to make matters worse, as we started to investigate the disappearance, we find out that DCF, which is Division of Children and Families, they're assigned to every foster case. They have an investigator assigned to every foster case. And those investigators have to go once a month to each house and do a monthly, you know, everything okay type of thing. And it just so happened that the woman assigned to this case was also a fraudster. Just so happened, right? She was, she was fudging all her reports.

She wasn't showing up and she was saying she was. She was working two jobs. She was a substitute teacher. Nobody knew. The state of Florida didn't know. And she was, she was basically double-dipping and, and just completely shirking her duties as a DCF investigator. So, so our first step was, you know, well, let's talk to the DCF investigator, and that's when we found all this out. So that made matters worse.

How do you find that out? How did you, I mean, how did that? Just talking to, talking to her supervisors and everything and say, let's see her monthly thing, right? And you look at them. And then she ended up confessing to that. But if she's fludging them, how do you know that you go and check one or two of them out or something? And then suddenly the whole thing unravels. You make two phone calls and, you know, I've been seeing this woman in six months.

Exactly. Really? Because I got six reports that say something's wrong. So that made it tougher, right? Because what Gerland Graham said was, oh, DCF came and took the child. They took her. They needed to do some tests and things like that and they took her. DCF doesn't do that.

Right. All right. The only time DCF will take a child is if there's an obvious danger to the child that, you know, living in some sort of hazardous condition. People are laying around with needles in their arms. Then they'll take the kid. But so we knew that that was, that was BS. And then this woman was telling all kinds of people different stories.

Her story kept changing. So, so it was a very lengthy investigation. And we ended up being, being able to charge her with, with aggravated child abuse. But we never found her body. You never found her body? You never found her body. So you couldn't charge her with the murder? Well, we could have.

They just chose not to. But we just didn't have quite enough for the murder. I think they did upgrade it to murder at some point, trying to remember. But anyway, the jury convicted her of aggravated child abuse. And she died in prison. I was going to say, did you ever, it's just reminding me of this. And I probably shouldn't laugh at things like this. But you said fraudster.

There was a woman, I don't know where this was. God, I hate telling stories. I don't know anything. I can't remember the details, but I do remember this. Because one I'd seen, I've seen two documentaries on it. And one was like a 15-minute part of the documentary. And one was like a whole hour on this woman. One was a fraudster.

She kept, like, she would meet a man. And then she would go to hit, let, you know, they get drunk at the bar. They go back to his place. And then she'd, like, steal his checkbook or something. Or she'd get him so drunk. She'd dope him up and get him to where. he passes out, and then she go through and look through his stuff and steal a bunch of stuff. And eventually she gets caught for this once, gets to, gets in trouble, goes to jail, gets out, does it again.

Like, this is her M.O. But she's getting older. You know, it's harder and harder to get a guy drunk and bring him home and steal his stuff and go use his credit cards while he's passed out or whatever she's doing. Eventually, she ends up how she ended up managing to get into a really large house with tons of rooms. I don't know that she owned the house. She may have. But somehow I know that she cons her way into getting this house and she starts running a rooming house. So she specialized in like kind of like taking care of old people or people that had mental problems, really people that got social security.

And then so you put your mom with her to live in the room and oh, I'm going to take care of her. And it's funny thing was too. She was probably in her, I think she was in her late 40s or early 50s, but she was. would tell people she was in her 60s. Like she'd literally like tell them she's like 20 years older than she was, which was weird. She could pull that off. She looked like she'd had a rough life. Gain their trust easier.

Right. She's a little old lady. Oh, I love. I help them and I this. And so they're living in this room. And eventually what she would do is get them to sign over their social security deposits or checks or whatever. and she would sign their name, deposit the checks, or they would direct deposit or she would get control over their account. And then one day the relative, a relative, you know,

and you know how often your family's coming by. Some people are getting dropped off and she knows that the daughter lives in New York. Yeah. And comes once every six months or calls once a month, you know, or doesn't call at all. And the mother's abusive to her. Or so, So it's not hard to get on the phone when she calls. Everybody uses the same phone and say, oh, I try to get her on the phone. She didn't want to talk to you. She's upset with you. Whatever.

So this goes on. So what happens is these people start disappearing. So some people, some family members are showing up. Where's my mom? I've been calling. I want to see her. Where is she? But, you know, we're talking about this goes on for like a decade.

She's got a dozen people's social securities going to her, and they're gone. Now, she had different stories, but the problem was, too, she didn't stick with the same story. I hate a sloppy fraudster, by the way. That was Gerland. You know, like one person she's telling this to, another person, the cops, she's telling this to, a social worker she's telling this to. It's like, stick with the story. They disappeared, you know, or, but it was like, oh, no, I see her every once while. She's on the streets.

I give her food. And the other one is, oh, I haven't seen her any. year, but you're deposit, we can tell the checks are being deposited. And that's how it eventually comes unraveled is where they start figuring out, you've got a bunch of checks going to you, either as their caregiver or going into your account or they're showing up here. And because their family knows, like, well, I know how we can track her down. She gets social security. And they check with social security. And they go, check still going here. It's getting cashed. So she was killing these people and bearing them in the backyard. And eventually, the backyard got full.

Stonishing. And then she had another guy who had a, I think he had, he was on SSD. I don't know if he had a mental condition or if he was just, you know, whatever, something was wrong, bad, back, whatever the case may be. He was a big guy. And eventually they, they, they, it came unraveled because they put somebody in a box. then went and they couldn't bury him because the guy wasn't able to dig a hole and they just left the box. So at this point, now you're just dropping the bodies off. Well, one of the bodies comes back and the whole thing kind of comes unraveled. And then they, I don't think they even necessarily suspected her, or they did suspect her,

but they weren't charging her yet. She hasn't been arrested. And so they're digging in the backyard or something, or they questioned her something. And she literally talks to him and they let her go. Like she walks down the street because she's like late 60, 70 years old, a little old lady. She's really 50. They think she's 70.

She walks off and bolts. Anyway, they catch her eventually. Where did this happen? I got to see this. You know what it was on? It was on a TV. The last one I saw, because I saw two different docks on it, The last one was on a show called Worst Roommate Ever.

I've heard of that show. It was a, um, so. That's, that's an interesting story. Yeah. She sounds like the same kind of personality as Gerald Graham. I mean, she was doing, sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I got to find this for you. Sorry.

That's her. Yeah. That's her. What's her name? Text that to me. You got to watch this. The story's behind the worst roommate ever, Netflix. Netflix, okay.

She's just one episode. My life, I love it. Dorothy P-U-E-N-T-E. Puente. Yeah, Puente. You got a little in Miami to know how to pronounce that. Yeah. The trailer's got two million views on.

I got to see this. Yeah, see me the trailer, and I'll shoot it too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, so Jeryl was doing something similar, not quite, you know, like that, like killing people. She killed the little girl, but. She would go into the poor neighborhoods, like a poor black neighborhood and set up a church. And she would change her name. She called herself Pastor Cartwright.

And so that, you know, we're going to give out free meals, you know, because we have this help from the federal government and we're going to give you all free meals. All you got to do is sign your name and your social security number and your date of birth. And they were just ripping these people on. What a horrible person. Unbelievable. So one of the things I did. This is horrible. Don't judge me, by the way.

Okay. I've met a lot of people that did them way worse than you. When I was on the run for three years. And when I was on the run, you know, like I was making synthetic identities. You know what that is, right? And I would, and I actually figured out how to go into the DMV and get them to issue me IDs, you know, in the name of the synthetic identity. I couldn't get a driver's license, but I could get an ID. Or I would just make them.

Right. Well, once I was on the run, I have to have a driver's license, right? Like, they're looking for Matt Cox, and I can't get a driver's license in synthetic identities name. So I started, you know, first I put ads in newspapers and people are calling to apply for loans. And I'm just getting their information that way.

The problem was, is I talked to one or two people who had actually lost their licenses before for, like, DUIs, and I thought, I don't want to be driving around with someone's driver's license in South Carolina. And this guy's lost his license in Florida. and, of course, they're going to know when they run my license, like, hey, this guy has got a suspended license. Right. Because they'll suspend them everywhere at that time because they have the hub system because there's certain things, they're just letting everybody know. So what I started doing was I thought I need to be able to get people, get a driver's license in people's names that aren't using them.

So I started surveying homeless people. So it's horrible. So, okay. So I make a survey form and I go out to homeless people and I said, hey, I'm, a statistical surveyor, doing surveys for the Salvation Army to try and determine where we replace our next homeless facility. And it pays 20, of course, they're like, I'm not interested. I go, no, no, it pays $20 cash right now. And they'd be like, $20 cash. I go, yeah, and I show them the money, put it back in my pocket. And they go, yeah, what do you need? Like name, date of birth,

social security number. Mother's made name. You ever registered a vote? You ever been on how to passport? What states have you had ID? Like all things you should never answer. And just be like, okay, here's 20 bucks, thank you very much. And I leave. And then I'd just go online and I'd order their birth certificate. And then, you know, their social security card, there, you know, I'd get that information in. And then I'd go into a state where they didn't have a driver's license.

And I'd order, like, their- Get a driver's license, right. You know, I order a copy of their, certified copy of their high school transcripts, you know. And then you just, you just walk in and you say, hey, I, here's my voter's registration. Here's my source certificate. I'm not black anymore, but yeah. I'm not kidding. You know what's funny?

It was hard to find because at that point, I was in my early 30s. You know how hard it is to find a white guy in his early 30s that's homeless? Like, that's a lot of driving around. Come to Miami. I was going on a couple of hours. I mean, that was driving around a lot. Yeah. But yeah.

So the church thing, that's, I mean, I thought I'm giving her kudos or anything. I'm just saying that's not bad. No, you know, it's just, it's amazing. the motivations of people, right? And that's what I think was one of the biggest lessons in law enforcement that you learned is people's motivations and how they work out problems and how they, how resourceful. I mean, that's resourceful.

It's illegal, but it's resourceful as hell, right? There was a kid that before I went to homicide, I worked briefly on a surveillance squad. So we would come in at night. We would find out where certain crimes were happening, like there was a whole spate of auto thefts happening in this particular neighborhood, right? And so we would see where they were happening and we would set up, you know, we'd get on rooftops and there'd be somebody down in a car and we'd be on point-to-point radios and, hey, there's a guy walking.

And we caught dozens of people doing shit like that, right? Stealing cars, doing burglaries. Right. And so there was all these cars being stolen from driveways. and nobody could figure out who it was that the auto theft guys were scratching their heads and they said, hey, we could use it a little extra manpower or whatever. So we're doing a surveillance out there

where most of these thefts are happening. We figured whoever's doing this lives nearby. And we see this kid, like a 13, 14-year-old kid crawling underneath a fence and hopping on a bike and we stopped him. It's like two in the morning. we stopped him and we started talking to him and he confessed to steal on all these cars so we said well how did how did you do it so he said he would go in and this was complicated you know he would go in

and he would keep trying doors he would find new cars he would find find cars that had the paper tag on so he knew they were brand new right and and if the door was open fine if not he would use a coat hanger this is back in the 80s right but the GM cars were really easy to get into to okay we had we had a we had another 13 year old kid show us how to do it like how we did it in like five seconds so so this kid would with this kid would get into the new car open up the glove box and and take the invoice out usually people would you know buy a new car they stick the sales invoice and everything somehow he learned that on a sales invoice of an automobile back then anyway there was something called a key number and so he would next morning he would take that he would

he would call up the dealership and he would say hi this is mr murphy and i i totally forgot to get a spare key for my wife and oh yeah mr murphy i'm gonna send my kid down on his bike to pick it up and he'd go down there and he'd give him a key is my dad call i was supposed to pick up a key and he'd go and he'd steal the car and he'd drive it around and just joyrot it and return it or dump it somewhere i mean that we had a couple of them that were actually returned back to the driveway that's yeah that did the motivation for that all of that to like he's not even making money he's not he's not stripping these things and selling the parts or anything he's just driving around that's yeah that's that is this kid's probably a CEO so i was going to say he's he's i wonder

what he went on to do he's either in prison right now or he's running a 500 yeah 500 company yeah yeah i got the might lead off to something i saw a title about cowboys is there a story that involves that? Oh, yeah, there's lots of stories that involve that. Well, it's no secret what happened in Miami in the early 80s. We had this tsunami of coming into the country from the Colombian cartels. And it changed the face of South Florida completely, right? It really did.

And our rate went through the roof. We didn't know who Griselda Blanco was. Blanco was until much later. I want to say much later a couple of years of investigation it took and so we're running around handle all these Colombian related murders most of them are being

unsolved because nobody's talking we don't know who's connected to who anyway much later after we identified her and arrested everybody I get notified by a sergeant he wants me to look at a police

report. So now let me jump back to about 1981. I'm working in the North Miami Police Department and I'm working in uniform. And a buddy of mine that had just come to work for us from Pennsylvania had come to dinner. And he hadn't even bought his own car yet. So I'm taking him back home back to his apartment. We're driving up South Dixie Highway in Miami and we're driving through a major intersection there at Lejeune Road in South Dixie. And we start hearing all these gunshots like multiple gunfire around us and we're i'm like sinking down in the seat not knowing where this is coming from and and as we pass the intersection the gunfire stops and we look back and we see this mercedes sitting in the southbound lane left-hand turn lane of lejeune

and we drive we make a u-turn come back around get our guns out we come out to up to the car and the the passenger is he's just riddled like multiple, probably got like 25 gunshot wounds. And the, the driver had been running across the street. He's covered in glass and blood, but he's unharmed. So we grab him, and he says somebody drove up next to the car and opened up, which the car was completely machine gunned. Right. And so we call the city of Miami police, and they come out and they take our statements and whatnot, and then we leave.

so fast forward about 20 years and sergeant l singleton comes over to me in the office and he drops this report on my desk and he says do you remember this case and it's that shooting yeah said sure i remember that case so if i would have been driving a little faster i'm out of taking a bullet in my car and he goes well the guy that did that murder uh his name is george a yala he's in he's in the office he's Griseldo Grisel de Blanco's hit man and and he's working for us now. He's cooperating. So, so I went and met him and we started when he's telling us all these murders. He's like Mardi, he's given up all these things, right?

Right. And so it was interesting working with him, the guy that potentially almost shot me. And, uh, but that was that was kind of the beginning of the end for. for Grissel de Blanco's thing. And was she already in prison by this point? No, Rivey, this nickname was Rivey, this guy. He helped put her in prison. I mean, she got caught out in L.A. on some cases, and then we extradited her to Miami.

Al and I actually went to the airport and picked her up. So I met her. I didn't talk to her or anything like that. Right. But we took her back to the office and then, you know, the feds took her to the airport. and extradited her to Columbia, which was, that was the end for her. Yeah. But you were saying the interesting thing about working with him and I interrupted you. No, I'm just saying that it was ironic that, you know, that I almost, you know, my car almost got

shot up by this guy at the intersection and we ended up working with him. And he was, he was a very mild-mannered, just a pretty smart guy, you know, spoke well, had the gift of gab. And, and he, he was about the second or third hitman that I talked to. Martyrano was the other one. And they're very business-like people. They're not, you know, drilling maniacs like, you know, people think. Yeah, I know. I mean, I would like the guys, I was in a medium security prison for about three years.

And then they moved me to a low. But while I was at the medium, it was funny, it was always, you always hear about the, you know, it's the quiet guy sitting in the corner you have to worry about, not the loud mouth. I mean, the guys that I would meet that were just, you know, super nice. Hey, how are you doing? You're very polite, you know, very played cards, kept to themselves. And, you know, and then you somebody would, you know, you'd say hi to the guy or whatever and talk to him.

And somebody would be like, you know, why he's here. I'm like, yeah, I don't know. I don't know why. And they'd be like, you know, he killed six people, right? I'm like, really. Or, you know, he was a Columbia hitman when he was in his teens. And then they extradited him to the United States. It's like the guy that was the altar boy in the prison, who was like 35 years old or 40 years old, was, and this is that Coleman had been extradited from Columbia and was a hit man for like Pablo Escobar or somebody and had killed like 30 people.

When he was like 18, 19, 20, and when he was like 19 years old, they grabbed him. somehow another that he got extradited to the United States, I want to say it was a prisoner exchange that at one point, Colombia, was having a hard time keeping these guys in prison or something, and they actually had some kind of an exchange or something. And I could be wrong. That might have been Mexico. But anyway, yeah, somehow or another, he ended up, he's in the United States. And, you know, I remember he didn't speak English.

He didn't speak English. But, I mean, he's working at his own old work. Didn't want to learn English because he said these people kidnapped me from my country. I'm not going to learn their language. Okay, whatever. But he was always very nice, very polite. Everybody said, oh, he's the nicest guy. He's killed 30 people, but he's a real nice guy.

Yeah. So I get it. You know, when I was told you about the one guy, they called him Old Man Jim. Yeah, he would paint it all the time, super quiet, very nice. He had been, the story with this guy was, because I used to see him all the time. I'd help him with his paintings and his stuff. Hey, I'll let me carry that, Jim. And he was like 70-something, you know, some odd years old.

I remember a buddy of mine came up to me and he said, you like Jim. I said, yeah, he's all right. He's nice, you know. He's like, yeah, he said, and he is nice. He said, but he said, but you know why Jim's here, right? And I was like, no. I said, no, he said, so he's here on a drug. I think he was there on a drug charge, I think.

It could be wrong. But I think it was in a federal prison for a drug charge. He said, but he was also serving a prison. in the state of Florida at the same time, you know, they're running concurrent, but he's doing it in the Fed for multiple murders. And he's like he had, he's been, he was tried multiple times, you know, arrested, tried, and they just couldn't seem to get him. Eventually they do. But, and one of the big cases was back like in the one to say in the 70s, he had been arrested and he was held in a little county jail. And back then, you know, they weren't as secure as they are now, right?

So Ted Bundy escaped from two of them. Oh, God, ridiculous. So this guy, old man, Jim, who's not an old man at the time, he waits until he gets his witness list. And he escapes. And about a year later, he comes back to the prison, I mean, to the jail and says, hey, I think you guys are looking for me. And they go, oh, yeah. And they grab him. And he was only like a month or so away from, the first time from being going to trial.

Right. So they grab him and they go, okay, so now they have to scramble, kind of put it back together. Like, hey, let's go ahead and we're going to take this guy to trial. They start looking for the witnesses. These two witnesses were found dead. These two witnesses. We don't know where they are. You know, this witness looks like that she may have committed suicide.

This witness, like, it's like there's like, and I forget it, whether it was four or six, whatever. But everybody's deceased. And they waited. It was like three to six more months. Because they kept asking for a continuance, for a continuance of crediting to it. And finally they said, we got to drop the charges. And he walks out. He eventually does get picked up on other murders and other things.

But nicest guy. Niceest guy. Well, Mardiano, like, you know, we had pleasant talks. I mean, you know, he was the kind of guy that, you know, you could sit and have a beer with and watch a game. He wasn't really any threat to you unless, you know, you've done something that would endanger the Winter Hill gang. Then he's a threat. Yeah. Yeah, it was the same thing I would say about, like, the, you know, like this guy, we called him Red Bull.

I was always, it's like, you know, Red Bull, you know, nice guy. I wouldn't invest with him. He was, you know, he was there for fraud, you know, for taking people's investments and then defrauding them out of him. It was like, wouldn't invest with them, but great to eat dinner with. Super funny, very personable. Love spending time with him. Do not lend him any money. Right, right.

Yeah. It's funny because in prison, like, you have to really compartmentalize, you know, what you're, people are. Oh, I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. Great guy. You know, don't let him watch your kids. You know, very funny. He's always very personable, always willing to give you some coffee, but, you know, not exactly the guy you want to hang out with too much. But yeah, there's all kinds of different, you know, this guy, don't let him invest your money. This guy, don't let him babysit your kids. This guy, don't let him, don't give him the key of your house or let him know where you live. Yeah. You were talking about frauds. It reminded me of a case we had. It was an unusual case.

this British businessman was murdered. And it actually started off as a missing person's case. In Miami? Yeah. Okay. So the wife calls from England and says, my husband went down there to, you know, look into a business that he's invested in.

This guy was a big investor talking about investments. And he hasn't called and he usually calls us every day. And, you know, the missing persons people were saying, hey, you know. It's Miami. Miami, maybe he met somebody and, you know, not trying to, whatever it was, right? So without disrespecting her, they're trying to tell her, you know, relax. But after a while, it looked like, you know, it's about a month.

So we're looking into this. Missing persons comes to us. And so it turns out that this guy was investing in a business called Bolden Products. So we're looking into that. And this took, I think we worked on this for three years. years. What's Bolden Products? Right. So Bolden Products was two people. It was a guy named Alex Lucio and a woman named Maggie Carr. And there's a documentary about this case too. I forget the name of it. And this was right before Operation Desert Storm. So it was during Operation Desert Shield.

And this guy had the idea that we're going to manufacture surgical equipment, surgical gowns, hospital, you know, stuff that medical people will need in the field in the Middle East. And he, this guy had a natural gift of gab and was able to get a lot of investors excited about this idea. This is a very viable thing, right? So there, people are, people are plunking down 50,000 here, 200,000 here. Bates, I think, was in the British man, was named Howard Bates. I think he was into them for almost a half million. But what was happening, and it took a while to figure this out, is this was just turned out to be a massive fraud.

There's no gowns, there's no medical equipment. He was showing people, they rented a warehouse and they had it full of boxes, they're all empty. And so they were bringing these people in, look, we're shipping this stuff to Iraq and Saudi Arabia and this and that. So we start looking into these folks and we think that they had something to do with them

Because he had been getting suspicious about what's happening with the investment. Where are the returns? Why aren't we doing A, B, and C? And he wasn't getting any good answers. And we found the hotel where he had supposedly checked into, according to the family, they let us look at their video. And sure enough, there he is in the lobby shaking hands with Alex Lucio. So we know Lucio met him there on a particular day.

And he just had to start working backwards from there, interviewing people. And again, the body now has still not been found. We don't know where this guy is. And after speaking to some people in North Carolina where there was another aspect of the business there, this woman in North Carolina pretty much breaks the case where it says this is all bullshit, this is all the big fraud, et cetera, et cetera. So who is she?

She was like the warehouse manager. Oh, okay. And she says, there's nothing, there's nothing in these boxes. And this is what it's all about, right? So I think she gave us a statement that was something to the effect of Alex Lucio told her that Bates was getting suspicious and that they were going to have to do something and take him out. So she's just a manager? You're going to tell your manager? Like, this is just.

I think there was a little bit more than a relationship than just a manager. She means somehow or another possibly in on it or they're also dating or something. They were together. Okay. And she's getting scared. They were sleeping together. And I think that they had broken up. And so, again, you know, relationships.

Yeah. We're always looking for relationships. And if they've changed, we're going to pounce on that. Right. There's nothing better than a scorned ex-wife or ex-girlfriend for us. Yeah. So anyway, we end up, we had to go to court and have a judge declare Bates legally dead. And that's not an easy thing to do.

You have to show the court that all the reasonable explanations have been, have already been, you know, exhausted. That there's no other reasonable explanation except that this person is dead somewhere. Right. And so we did. We got them legally declared legally dead. We got warrants for Lucio and Maggie Carr. But what happened was Maggie Carr went to her ex-boyfriend. This is like something out of a bad fairy tale.

This guy worshipped Maggie and would do anything for her, literally. Right. And as she got him to hide behind a door when Bates walked in and shoot him in the back of the head, this guy didn't even have a traffic ticket on his record. When we found him, he was working for a gas company on Miami Beach and literally in a ditch digging a ditch. a little hard hat on and and and and and and and and confess months earlier he had was

executing people for his girlfriend executed that one guy yeah so so they all went they all went they all went to prison including uh uh what's his name wayne wayne merced was his name kind of a little bit of a dullard but and and and just very gullible when it came to maggie and she you know it was literally one of those things where if you love me you'll do this right and you did it you did it filled up the warehouse is bought so one time i bought a house so i don't know if you do anything about real estate but i do okay so you know if it's if you buy an investment property you can get maybe 70 80 percent loan to value but if it's owner occupied you can get like 95 percent and the house is going for like 250,000

and I'm refinancing it. So I need the appraiser to come look at the house, and the appraiser needs to say it's owner-occupied. Well, you buy the house, it's empty. Right. So we went to, it was a super, super cheap, almost like a dollar store, but not, but it's an upgrade. And we went and bought the cheapest.

Did we buy the couch? Could have read it it too, right? Oh, you know, we tried. We went to Badcock. We went to Badcock and filled out a badcock thing and we're trying to get them to rent us stuff. They wouldn't even run the application and they were going to call us back and they were busy with this. Like we waited a few hours. I was like, man, forget this. So we ended up, we ended up buying some furniture, cheap furniture. But, you know, look like if you, you know, the kind that's really hard, like you realize, like, if you sit on this too much, like in six months, it's falling apart. But you didn't need it for that long. I don't need it that long. So you take it out, you get it there, you sit it down, we went and got a big box. We went to, like, there used to be Circuit City, went to Circuit City, got a bunch of boxes for TVs. I remember we, some of them, we flipped inside out, like you cut them and re-put them together and retaped them because they had stuff for electronics. And when he comes in, I don't want him to see 15 boxes for TVs.

It's like, this is odd. But one of the boxes I remember he grabbed was, it was for like a huge, huge big screen TV. I mean, the box was like five foot by six foot. Anyway, we got a guy. We actually stopped some guys at like Home Depot and got them to go pick up boxes with us and bring. We told them we're moving. Right, right.

Tons of boxes. This pitched all day. Unded the unfolded the boxes, taped them up, put bricks inside some of the boxes. Because, you know, they're just, you could kind of tell they're empty. Stacked them up. We're throwing stuff in the boxes. we're grabbing like even like like not garbage but like tree limbs like anything heavy we can throw in the boxes it was you know cutting we're doing all kinds of so we have tons of boxes in the

corner we have a couple of chairs we had a box spring and mattress upstairs in the bedroom that we had put we went and bought cheap stuff to throw over the you know to make it look like a bed was in there I mean all kinds of stuff so when the appraiser comes through he's listen I'm I've never been so nervous. Like, everything's empty. You can't lean on a box. You can't do anything. We got some bar stoles. We got, but there's boxes everywhere. And he walks through. And we were like, I was like, yeah, I just bought the house, still moving stuff in. This is that. He's like, oh, okay. I said, are you living here yet? I said, no, no, I'm living here. I've been living here for a couple days now. I know he wants, if you, I don't want to dare say not, you mean, not occupied. He takes everything. And I remember he looks, he looked at the

TV box. And I've never been. I don't get nervous till. No, I mean, I get. I get. nervous, but this wasn't a closed call, but for a second it felt like he looked at the big screen TV and he goes, he was a nice TV like that and I went, yeah, yeah. And I'm thinking and he looked at and he went, what is that

and he kind of goes up to the box and I mean, I was like, oh no, yeah. Oh, no, yeah. Oh, my don't touch the box, don't touch the box. And he goes, man, that's like a, you know, that's like, whatever, that's a 60, that's a 60 inch nice, turns around walks over, starts filling out paperwork, you know, I'm holding the, helping a measure

Like, I got to get you out of here. Anyway, I get the appraisal lining up bar like, I don't know, 7, 800,000 on that house. So, but yeah, I could see it. So the filling up the boxes to create the illusion. Sure. There was a, it was funny. Do you remember Zach told us about this guy? He was a buddy of mine who was in jail with a guy who did green credits.

You know, green credit. So if you're, let's say you're a some company that pollutes, you know, you pollute the air somehow. your factory puts off so much you have you have to pay you get green credits right so you have to go hire a company that does something positive for the environment like like collects plastic bottles or something do you remember this well so he was he had a guy that opened a company that had multiple contracts and he's like like one of the things they did and he had a big warehouse one of the things he did was like collected plastic bottles or something and he recycled them okay and then the other thing was like they planted trees or something he's like and periodically they would get he got audited like

three times and like five years or something and he's like literally he said they would write him a letter saying hey we're going to be at your place next Thursday and he'd run out and he'd rent a bunch of what do you call it uh what are the things that they move stuff you know the forklifts and he'd get boxes and he'd rent products, and he'd hire a bunch of guys to just move stuff around so that when the auditor showed up, they would show up and walk around, oh, you got this, he's on the palace, and they're all, you know, they got vix, this screen wrapped up around a bunch of empty boxes on pallets, and just a complete, at least three times he was audited. The guy ended up, I forget what it was, it was five million or 12 million.

It was an outrageous amount of money that he had gotten in credits for doing, you know, these green projects that he never did. And he passed three audits. Just so happened that some cop that lived in his neighborhood kept seeing, like, driving by his house going, what is this guy do? He's got two Ferraris. What does this guy, like, and kind of like knew the guy, knew he was like an idiot. Like, what is this idiot doing? He's got to be illegal. So the cop starts looking into it and ends up finding out what he's doing and then ends up talking to somebody saying, listen, I know this guy. He's making. He's making. it's a ton of money. Whatever it is, it's illegal. And whatever, that started, ended up starting

something that led to the investigation, led to this whole scam unraveling. Like, somebody showed up one day just to talk to them or something, and they didn't send a letter. Yeah. And the warehouses are empty. And, you know, there's nobody working. And there's no forklifts. And there's no. But, yeah, people can get creative. Yeah. You just need some time. You can't just pop up on them. Right. It all unravels if you just pop up on them. Right. Sorry. No, no, I love it. I love it.

It's great stuff. It's quite a variety of cases, right? So back in the early to mid-80s, I think we were handling mostly drug-related stuff. Right. But you're always, you've always got the domestic, the stuff happening too. But every once in a while, there's a case that pops up that is so unusual. And so there was a lot of, by 1986, there was a lot of pressure, law enforcement pressure on the East coast and it was all focused on cocaine and what was also happening we that I don't think law

enforcement really paid much attention to was the good old boys were we're still running marijuana you know on the other side right and staying away from the main channels right and they were getting creative with it but anyway so one day in 86 I get a case out in the Everglades on one of these levee roads, right? So you've got all these canals, these major canals out there, probably almost, almost down to Monroe County line, if you're familiar with that area. So, so it's down, it's, it's down where Dade County turns into pretty much Everglades area. Okay. And, and it's off, it's off US1 where if you're driving down on the Keys. So one of these levee roads, just a dirt road, next to a canal, there's a crashed airplane.

And it's a Piper, Navajo, twin-engine airplane. Just perfect for about 300 yards north of the airplane is a body. This was found by one of the, what's it called, Florida Water Management, South Florida Water Management District. They go out and they test the canals, right? They do water samples and they test. the depth of the canals and all that stuff. So he finds the plane and then, you know, he smells something bad

and he's walking around and finds this body covered with branches. And the body is partially headless. Like the body is, the head's been obliterated. It's gone. There's just a stump sticking up. Bodies decomposed probably two or three days. I'm surprised the gators

didn't get it. And we figured that maybe the head, maybe the gator's got his head. We didn't know. Right. But, but the branches were not that disturbed you know what i mean like it wasn't like when you fall from this do you figure fall from the sky no no no the branches somebody put the branches on them oh okay question so so we didn't know what the story was he had a belt buckle that said pratt whitney aircraft and they make airplane engines yeah yeah so we figured the guy was either a pilot

or had something to do with the airplane itself i mean there's no way there's no houses out there there's nothing, you know, if you're near an airplane, you're connected to that airplane somehow. How far is he from the airplane? 300 yards. So did he crash the airplane and start walking, or were there two of them, or I wonder? We went through all those questions. We think that he was present when the plane crashed, was either killed or died during the plane

crash, and the other people that survived it carried him over there. and far enough away from the plane where they thought maybe he wouldn't be found. Right. He got found. So we're looking at the body and he's got a spray can off, deep woods off, and some cigarettes.

And we figured maybe he's out here as an offloader helping bring the plane in, waiting for the plane to come in. Right. Who knows? So we're getting all this information. He's got no idea. on him. The back of his head where where the neck is looks like red hairs and then we check

the pubic hairs, they're red. So he's a redhead. We know that much. It's a ginger. He's a ginger as they call him. And so we had an FAA investigator could they come out on all these things too. So this FAA guy says, hey, I know of a redheaded pilot that's a smuggler named Danny O'Neill. And so, okay, fine. So we tracked down Danny O'Neill. he's alive and well. So it's not Danny O'Neill. We did talk to him anyway. Right.

Went and interviewed him. But so we made some flyers and we put a picture of the belt buckle on there and a description of this guy. And we posted it at Tamiami Airport and several other airfields around and places where, you know, pilots and airplane mechanics and people like that might, might go. And one day I got a call from this man. I think this is my son. I haven't heard from him in a while.

He usually calls me every week. We get together. I haven't heard from him in a long time. He's an airplane mechanic, and he's a redhead. And I said, what's his name? And he tells me his name. It was an old high school friend of mine. Really?

Yeah. So we used to go out together and hang out. We used to go plinking together with our guns. We used to go, three or four of us used to go out and shoot and have barbecues and just do that kind of stuff. And so that was a little bit of a shocker. And so I eventually, I eventually, you know, uncovered who was involved. And he was, he was, he was the guy. He was actually trained by the U.S. Army to set up clandestine airstrips.

So he did that in the Army, got out and joined his buddies from high school. They were all into the same high school. Right. And, and joined this little smuggling group. And he was getting paid $10,000 of land. to help them land the plane and offload and that. So we ended up. So how did he die?

So that was still mysterious. From the evidence on the scene, it looked like the airplane didn't negotiate the road that well. And that could have been weather, and it also could be, because there was kind of a gradual right turn to this thing. And for whatever reason, they went off the beaten road, the main road, one of the wings hit a small tree and the plane spun around 180 degrees. I think during that whole thing, the victim tried to get out of the way and didn't. I think he got hit by the wing.

At the time, Joseph Davis was the medical examiner for Miami-Dade County. He was world-renowned medical examiner doctor and really a great guy. And I asked him if he would look at it and he looked at it and he agreed with me. I was hit by probably the leading edge of the wing when the plane was spinning around. It is head. And hit his head and obliterated his head. And all we found were a couple of pieces of the jawbone out there.

So, yeah, probably critters got the rest of it. Right. So that was a strange case and we spent a lot of time on it. We couldn't, we identified who owned the airplane, and but we couldn't quite get enough to say who was actually flying the plane at the time and they had burned the inside of the plane so there was there were no drugs inside the plane so but we knew they were smuggling just from people we talked to yeah and from their past so so that was that was a that one kind of stuck out right i was able to charge the guy

with he falsely registered the airplane which was insanely easy to do back then I mean, you could register an airplane in a false name. Nobody really investigated it. You could just call up and say, I'm Barack Obama and I own this plane. Okay, great. And, you know, the plane's registered in your name. So, yeah, what does that carry? Well, we charge him with a third degree felony in the state of Florida.

Well, he also didn't try and kill him. You know what I mean? Like, it's not like a murder. It's an accident. It's not like a murder. You know, years after I retired, I thought about the case a lot. I used to think about Harry was his name. Harry was a good guy, actually.

It was a fun guy to be around. And then I thought of that group and I thought, you know, these guys weren't out robbing people or raping people. And I thought of what a chaotic, tragic thing for them that must have been. They were all friends. And so that's part of a plot of a novel I'm working on. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say. I've kind of included that in, I'm weaving it into a bigger scheme in a book that I'm working on. I was going to say the amount of absolute, yeah, like when that whips around and boom, now you're sitting in the plane that's now, you know, stationary, you know, after the landing and the 180 and you look over and your buddies laid out missing his head and your plane's filled with marijuana like that must have been pure panic. you know like depending on how many guys are even in a plane might be one guy or two guys right plus it's filled with marijuana 600 pounds of marijuana or something because those planes don't carry much oh no that that plane could carry almost almost 2,000 pounds oh okay that's a piper navajo with a and what they would do is they would take the seats out and so they would have they would have a big big cargo space what's the little one that they the one that they like piper like a cherokee like a type or cherokee and then like a two-seater with a little bit of a big cargo space what's the little bit of a

space in the back yeah that is but but the Navajo is a bigger it's a bigger airplane with I think seats six or eight still you know you're right I must have been absolute just panic and then you think they land in the middle of the night or something or I think so okay yeah so I was wondering about like you're working cold cases right and you went to work you were working cold cases you said in 82 started in 82 well no I started in homicide I started homicide And then I went to coal case in 92. So how, like, when DNA came on the scene, I mean, how, like, how did that change, you know, cold cases? Like, because almost every cold case I see is, you know, 90% of them are, and we had the DNA, you know.

It changed, it changed things a lot. It changed things when I was working active cases when I was on a regular squad. Right. You know, I was kind of lucky to live through that transition where. you know, worked a lot of cases where there was no such thing. We didn't know what DNA was. Right. Didn't have cell phones either.

It was a different world, right? Yeah. But, yeah, because we didn't, we didn't see DNA come on the scene until about 88. And we really didn't use it until about 89, 88, 89. Even then you needed a huge sample. You needed a drop of blood about the size of a dime. Right. Right.

Minimum. But I mean, now it's like, you picked up the dead skin cell. Yeah. And now you're getting off of one dead skin cell. And I've got, I've got a profile that tells me your male, your blue-eyed, your Scandinavian, whatever. Yeah. So it's incredible. So what happened was in the early 90s, we got a federal grant, I think just about every police department did, to go back and get old pre-DNA cases and run them through DNA. So our lab got very, very busy doing that. And they came to us and they said, you know, what cases do you want to run?

And so we picked a few. And one of them was a case I'd worked on. I wasn't the lead, but I was on that squad and I was on the scene. There was a guy was found beaten to death in a motel room. Horrible, like very, very dramatic scene. There was blood everywhere. Somebody had taken the pedestal from one of these big wooden tables. and just wailed on this guy.

And there were four empty cans, four empty beer cans on another table near the TV there in that room, small, small hotel room. And we had no idea who this guy was, or we knew who he was. He worked in the garment industry. He had just arrived from Texas. So that made it very difficult because nobody knew him. He had just arrived he was going to start a new job and he hadn't even found a place to live yet. That's why he was staying in the motel. There was nothing to indicate on the scene who was there, like what, you know, who the killer might have been or what the motive might have been.

So we took those beer cans. This was 1986 or seven. So we ran those beer cans through for fingerprints. didn't get anything. Stuck them in a plastic bag, took them to the property room like everything else. Case goes cold. So when we got this grant,

I said, let's pick this case up and run everything through for DNA. 17 years later that we did this, and they found, they got a DNA profile off the lip of one of the beer cans, right, right off the rim, male profile. So we put it into CODIS, right? Kodas is the national index, and we get a hit. It took a year, but we got a hit of a guy sitting in

prison up in Illinois, who was a burglar. And one of the things we started researching him, we were able to track back his activities and his travels and put him in Miami at the time of the murder. And we also identified a girlfriend of his. And we, we identified a girlfriend of his. And we interviewed the girlfriend, two girlfriends actually we talked to. We also researched, he was sitting in prison in Illinois for like nine different burglaries. So we started pulling all the reports on those and reading them. And he had an interesting MO on a lot of these, on a lot of these burglaries. He liked to bring a six pack of beer with him.

He took joy in breaking into somebody's house and sitting there and drinking a beer. So I kind of explained the beer cans and explained why we didn't find any of the victim's DNA on the beer cans, only this guy. Yeah. And we were able to eventually charge him on that murder. So it was interesting. Did he confess or did he say? No, well, one of the things that helped us out was we went and talked to him. My partner and I went up to the prison in Illinois, a place called Big Muddy, Big Muddy Correctional.

Institute is right near the Mississippi River there in southern Illinois. And he agreed to sit with us and talk to us. And when we started talking to him about this murder, he says, we told him, we said, we've got your DNA on the scene. Right. That's all we told him. We got your DNA on the scene. We didn't tell him exactly where. And he said, ah, you guys are full of shit. I'm not talking to you. And he calls for one of the correctional officers to take him. Right. And that was the end of interview about a week later we got a call from the from the correctional institute from one of their lieutenants he said hey this guy that you interviewed went back and started blabbing to one of his cellmates and the cellmate said that he said that Miami-day detectives came up and accused him of being

on a homicide scene because they had his DNA on a beer can we never mentioned a beer can so that's when we knew we had you know we had them yeah definitely we got the right guy and and and so you know The case fell apart, though. It was kind of sad. We had a witness in Chicago where he used to live that this is an ex-girlfriend. So this guy, our subject, had the word perdoneme, tattooed on his chest. And in Spanish, that means, I'm sorry. So when we went to interview her, we said, hey, what's the story with the perdonome on his chest?

why did he have that she goes yeah i asked him about that he said it's because he did something really bad to somebody in miami so that's just one little brick that you can use in your in your case right she got murdered and in some stupid gang thing up there had nothing to do with our case so we lost her um and and case never went to trial that's that's not a good DNA one This, he didn't got, we need a DNA one where you grab the guy. They go, I God, you got me. We had a couple of those. I mean, in cold case, I don't think we had a lot of those.

But I know that in regular rotation squads, they had a lot of DNA cases. I was going to tell you were talking. I was going to tell you something. Oh, we had a good robbery with DNA. Oh, okay. Well, real quick, go ahead. I was going to say we interviewed, or I interviewed, it was a remote. moat funny you remember the black kid

god this kid was so funny remember he said his his brother got caught they did a robbery no this is a pawn shop they break in the pawn shop and I think oh no they they were gonna yeah they did they robbed the pawn shop

and then they were leaving and they had stolen a car they were leaving and his brother was like they were like what do we're doing now he's like oh we gotta go burn the car he's like listen you guys I'm done and he gets out and he's walking down the street he's a black kid and he said and he said he got pulled over by the cops and he confesses to everything and i said what they pull him over for he said he's just walking or why they grab him

he's just walking down the street and i remember he is he says you know walking being black he's walking well black he said he grabs him and he tells he said like they know about the pawn shop down the street he said he confesses he goes my brother tells on everybody but me and i was like you got that he's like yeah but one of the things he i want to say wasn't it him that he said they were breaking into houses he would I want to say it was breakfast yeah he well any meal yeah he would this was funny because he was big on selling guns and so he would he said I would he would watch people and people would tell him like hey there's a cop in my neighborhood and so he would figure they'd figure out when the cop worked he was and you got to

figure out like when the cop works and when his wife works and realize what figure out what that window is here so I would we'd wait for him to leave for you for the wife to leave. We know the kids are in school or whatever. He was, and I'd go break in. He goes, because cops have guns. And he goes, so I'd go through the whole house. I'd find the guns.

He was, but I also know I've got like six hours. And he said, so, you know, I'd open the refrigerator and I'd look in. And, you know, he's like, you know, I'm hungry. So he's like, I cook myself a meal, have a meal, take the guns. And I was like, bro, I was like, this is bad. And he's, the whole time he's telling me this. He's laughing. And I'm like, bro, I said, this is bad.

This is bad. This is why they, this is why these guys really. really despise you. He's like, I know, I know what's wrong, but you know, I'm hungry. And I, you know, he was, you know, he laughed the whole, I mean, you know, unrepentant, right, but a great storyteller. But yeah, same thing. It's like in that strange, like this guy like to sit down and have a beer and somebody's out, like, it's just odd. Yeah. Why would you cook a meal? It's like, it's like a, it's almost like a victory thing, right? It's like, I guess it's like eating your enemy after they, like the Chinese did or whatever. So.

You haven't heard that, but yeah, I don't like that. No, I read a story. Okay. I read a story written by a guy that was captured during World War II and by the Japanese. And they're hungry too. And they were and, you know, he was. And so there's all this shooting going on and then some soldiers come and open up. He was literally in a bamboo, like in underground with a bamboo thing on the top.

And all the shooting and screaming going on and they open it up and they bring him and his buddy out and their Chinese soldiers. they've killed the Japanese guys and they were barbecuing them. So, yeah, you know, victory. A little victory dancer. But anyway. You were going to say. I was going to talk to you about a DNA case.

So we got a, one of the first DNA cases we did was there was this very posh, upscale mall in Coral Gables that had just opened. And on the first floor it was a mayor's jewelers. right the big mayor's jewelry store um these guys come in and there was a security guard off to the left as you enter shot and killed him instantly and then they went to they went to the um they went to the display case and one of them held the other the employees at gunpoint the other one started shooting into the display case and and then they smashed it up enough where they could push their hands

in and take the Rolexes, and they got a whole mess of Rolexes out of there. But at the same time, they cut their hands. And so there was like these little blood drops laying around. And you think why, you know, why this sounds like a very inefficient way to do things. Right. But when we watch the, when we watched the security video, one of the video cameras, I guess it wasn't position right, but they had, they showed everybody from the waist down entering the store. So you saw subject number one go in two feet go in subject number two goes in and the third subject is carrying a bag and that subject stops right he's the last one in he stops turns around and runs the other way oh he had the he had the materials to break he had sledgehammers right and when he saw the security

guy get shot he said i'm done nothing about this yeah yeah so we ended up catching him and that was exactly you know so catching him you caught we caught him but you caught the guy with a bag or you caught the guy well we found their car somebody called and found a car abandoned with some ski masks in it the other two guys they're all three wearing ski masks okay and can ask a question yeah so my understanding is this that there's three guys going in somebody shoots the guard one guy turns around and runs this is so he runs before they break into the thing so how's it his blood how's it the guy that runs off blood it's not okay that's what i'm not understanding right so you were saying the guy that ran off we got his blood but he never even walked in this door no no no we didn't

get his blood um what happened i think what happened was there was an informant that turned us on to this guy but at the same time at the same time that that was happening we had we had the DNA off the scene and we also somebody called in and said that their car was abandoned in coconut grove and we found We found the car, ski masks who were in the back seat, and we got DNA off the inside of the ski mask as well. So one of them, I think one or two of them, had a criminal pass for a robbery or something like that, and that's how we identified them. Once again, like, why shoot the car? Like what, like you walked in, you've got a gun, the guy is going to comply. He's not going to, he's not going to, you know, he's, I'm not dying for, for, you know, man.

or, you know, jeweler, like you're insured, you'll get it, whatever, you'll be fine. I'm getting paid $12 an hour. I'm just going to get on the ground. Yep. Take my sidearm, you know. Yeah, people are just idiots. And you're under so much more scrutiny. Well, so I have a question for you.

Like, when, you know, when you came here, was there, were there certain things you wanted to cover? Yeah. So one thought that I had about the book was, I think almost all cops will tell you that law enforcement is misunderstood. And it's, not to sound like, oh, poor us, right? We chose the profession. Right. But there's so much about the work that is not known, really.

The public has a lot of misperceptions because of Hollywood. But there's also things that are never portrayed at all in Hollywood. And there's things that we did that people have no idea. When we were talking about decomposed bodies. Yeah, we had to take the jewelry off. We had to do the next to kin notifications, which is probably one of the most difficult things in the world to do is to knock on somebody's door at 2 in the morning

and they have no idea why you're there and you've got to tell them that their 19-year-old honor student just got killed in the robbery. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. You know, something like that. Right. It's hard. It's very, very hard.

But you also have to return, you have to return the property to them, which is after the initial shock of your loved one is dead, when they see that jewelry, that wristwatch, that ring that they're familiar with, it's extra tough. And so there's kind of this weird bond that forms between homicide detectives and next of kin. But talk about decomposed bodies. You know, you take this stuff off a body and it's got nasty smelling.

skin, foul-looking shit dripping off of it. And we had a tradition. It wasn't really a policy, but it was a tradition that we cleaned that stuff. Right. We did it. We didn't have maids or housekeepers to do that. You would go into the men's room sometimes and you would see guys, detective standing at the sink with toothbrushes scrubbing that stuff clean.

And it was just, it was a matter of, Respect. Yeah, I can't can't hand this over to this person. There's no way in the world you could do it. How could you do that? It's bad enough that you're there telling them the worst news they'll ever hear, right? And so I think that was kind of emblematic of what motivated us to work these cases, especially the truly innocent victims. And I say that because a lot of our victims weren't truly innocent.

They were involved in something. And then, you know, they were a factor in their own demise, right? Right. But when we saw somebody just murdered in a robbery in their home, you know, a woman's coming back from Publix and, you know, her body's on the kitchen floor. There's blood everywhere and the groceries are spilled. And you look at that and you go, shit, that's my wife. That's my sister.

That's my mother. Didn't do anything to bring this on themselves. Just happened to cross past the wrong person. And so we felt. tremendous obligation to to close that case like we just you know we would work around the clock we probably would if they would have said hey you're not making overtime on this case we would say fine we're going to we'll work right continue working it and and so one of the things about the book was it's not just a collection of stories but it's it also it also portrays I hope

what it was like for us to work those cases, right? What it was like as a human being working on the cases of other human beings being murdered. Like this emotionally and personally how it affected us. And so I tried to put that viewpoint in there and make it more relatable to the average person reading it going, yeah, I understand that. so i have a question did you do you is it just like this is you know chapter three and it's on you know this homicide or do you is it like a memoir where you weave your story as it kind of you know in as these cases come up and develop and then you kind of weave your your story into your life or is it just chapter one is on this chapter two is on this chapter three is on this no it's it's more it's

more the former, what you said is the weaving into, weaving in my personal stories. So I actually, there's actually a lot of flashbacks in there to my child. And that, and that kind of happened accidentally as I was writing. I was going to write about the first badge that I encountered and then the first tie that I encountered and then the first gun because the book is badge, tie, and gun, life and death journeys of I'm a detective. So as I'm writing about the first badge, I thought, you know, I'm going to write about my badge being pinned on at the ceremony when we graduated the police academy. Then I remembered, where did I first see a police badge?

I was like eight years old. A policeman stopped me because he thought I threw something at his car. It was an incident that happened when I was walking home from school. And so I described that first. in italics as a flashback and then I go to the to the modern badge story and then when I went to chapter two I thought wait a minute there's something for my childhood that is significant to this too and it turned out to become a theme for the whole book was there's things that lessons I learned as a kid or things that happened to me as a kid that were kind of ironically similar to things that happened to me as an adult

And I don't know if I'm explaining that well, but that's how I tried to tie it in. So a particular chapter might open with one of those flashbacks to my childhood and then go into the story of the homicide or whatever it was. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like we talked earlier, like when you said, you know, like rewriting your book. Yeah. Like the first version of my book starts off with me like my first fraud and then just continues like. kind of like that.

And so the first, when I gave it to my literary agent, he read it and he came back and he said, this is, I'm sitting in a prison visitation room. And I said, because I'm thinking he's coming back wanting to represent me. And he comes back and I said, what did you think about the book? So we talked for a little bit first. And then I was like, well, what did you think of the book? Like, let's get to it, you know. And he said, I'm assuming you, you liked it.

You came back. You want to represent me. goes, amazing story. And I was like, oh, okay. I was like, great, great. He said, yeah, he said, it's got to be completely rewritten. And I went, what? He said, at the end of this book, when you get sentenced to 26 years, he said, I thought, fuck him. He had it coming. And I was like, huh? That's not what I wanted to hear. And I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, yeah, he's like, he said that luckily I know a lot about you already, because he knew my brother-in-law. So He was like, and I know that that's not who you are.

You make yourself sound like this complete psychopath that was just this master fraudster who, you know, and goes through the whole thing. He said, I know that's not exactly true because I know about, he starts telling me about my childhood. Right. And he's like, and I need to weave that in here. He's said, I'm going to send you a book on how to write a memoir. Like, oh, my God. And he's like, what, are you busy? You know, it is like brutal.

A lot of appointments this week. emails me the book actually ended up reading like three books on how to write a memoir and i start to realize like oh wow like there is all this stuff in your childhood that is you know that is reflective in your adulthood really what book is that i'd love to read that what do you mean i never read that are you like honestly you this is thing i've always been and i get asked this all the time here's what i remember about the book it's about 90 pages long it was written by a woman that had written like three other memoirs. And so she thought a lot of herself.

And it had a sailboat on the front of it. And I cannot remember for the, so it wasn't a book that my literal agents at me. It was a book that another inmate came to me and gave me. And I read it, and he asked me if he could let somebody else read it because he was going to write a memoir too. And I let him read it, and I never got it back. I was I was going to say I was I was interviewed by the Atlantic magazine when I got out of prison and they were the same thing they were like what was the book and I was like I would love to know what the book was but what was great about it was she gave all these examples about writing a memoir and I remember one of them she said she had already written one memoir by the time she wrote or two memoirs by the time she had like written this book and she said my first memoir I

I talk a lot about being a kid. She goes, and I remember making the reference that, you know, there's the, the old joke, you know, I walk to hill, I walk to school, you know, three miles both ways, you know, uphill, both ways, right? And she says, but the truth is, she said, I actually, my bus stop was about three miles away. I had to walk three miles every day. She's like at the age of seven or eight years old, both ways to the bus stop. And she said, the funny thing is, I talk about that in the book, you know, I mention to that. said, but I was in my late 30s and my husband and I took a trip across country and we happened to be going to be close to the home I grew up in. And I said, let's drive by. And she said, we

drove by the house. And she said, and I got to where the bus stop was. And she said, it wasn't quarter a mile away from the house. You know, she said, but to me as a child, that walk was grueling. And I talked about how much I hated the walk. And I lay in bed the next day and no it was snowing and I had to walk that, how long was she, but she wasn't three miles. It was a quarter of a mile. You could see my house from the bus stop, you know. So, but she gives all of these things about being, you know, growing up super hungry with her family and knowing how important food was and how important, you know, savings were and how she has all these little things. And, and so when I got older and I met this boy and this is the reason that I chose not to do this because this and why I was

shopping at thrifting. Even though I was making money, I knew it. wasn't going to last and, you know, that kind of thing. So she had all these examples, and one of the big examples was she's, even if you don't think that those things in your childhood affected you, she said, you need to look for them. Wow. And put those things down, whether you believe it or not, because she was talking about how, like, nobody believes those things affected you. Nobody thinks about them again. You've never once thought back about the time that whatever, your mother left and maybe did never come home or came home the next morning or, you know, these little, things that you don't look back and think about because you never talk about them again,

but you need to look and see how they could have affected you. And she said, I think you'll find that those things that once you think about them, they did affect you. And I, listen, man, I sat there for writing that, rewriting that memoir, tears in my eyes thinking about my childhood. Yeah. And all those things that I never allowed myself to think about. You know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean. Right. So that's why I was wondering. So, Yeah, so I know I rewrote that whole book, gave it back to him. And then, of course, I got edits and I had to rewrite it again. And yeah, there was just tons of little tiny things that were perfect, just like you.

You get these flashbacks. You weave them into, why did I behave this way? Maybe it's because, you know, and the only thing I can think of is when I was a little kid and my father said this and this and this. And you realize that. And then you write it in and then somebody reads it. And, you know, they love, you know, they're like, they're like, bro. Wow. There's a, there's one little snippet.

I'll give you from there when my mother was brought up very religiously. My dad was completely anti-religious. So they forged some sort of compromise somewhere. You know, but, and so I wasn't brought up heavily religious. But I asked my mom one day, I was a little kid, I said, does God have a sense of humor? I don't know where I got that from. Does God have a sense of humor? She goes, yes, I believe he has a sense of humor because we have a sense of humor and she gives me this explanation.

So I'm handling this case in 1985 my first actual unsolved case because the first ones they give you are what the, you know, CBA's closed by arrest. In other words, subject is already known, Benjamin. Hi, I'm Benjamin. I shot my wife. Read this on the scene. So after you've done a couple of those, then they'll give you a who done it, right? One that's unsolved, you've got to solve it. And so this one was, you know, this businessman from El Salvador, he owned a luxury furniture store, Italian leather furniture store up in North Miami. And he's coming out of his business one night after having a meeting with his two associates. It gets robbed and shot in the chest and killed. And the other two guys were apparently accosted and roughed up by these dudes.

They said, yeah, man, it was these three black guys. guys. And, you know, they tell us this whole story. So we go out scouring the neighborhood for the robbers. We're looking at all the robbers that, you know, are known in the area. And for a better part of three weeks, we got nothing. And it's my first unsolved. So I'm like, shit, I got to solve this thing. I hope we get a break. Well, we end up getting a break. And the details of that are in the story. I won't go through all the details. all the witnesses were drug addicts, horrible drug addicts, okay? And so they didn't know one day from the next.

All they were interested in was getting, get their next hit on a pipe. They were free basing. Back then, they called it free basing, the predecessor to crack cocaine. Right. And so they were terrible on the stand. So we had three guys charged, one flipped, right? and then ended up recanting. So all three of them went to trial.

The shooter gets found not guilty. The other guy who was the next most culpable is a hung jury. They can't come to a decision. And the third guy gets convicted. He was the only guy that didn't carry a gun. He gets convicted because we had his confession. Right. So I'm sick to my stomach.

I mean, this guy, the victim was from a nice family. He was going back to El Salvador for his son's 10th birthday and never made it. So I'm just feeling horrible about this. And then one day my sergeant comes over to me, he says, hey, I've got some news for you. He goes, Tucker, who was our shooter, he was in Opelaca plane with a gun and accidentally shot himself in the head. He's dead. He says, the other guy, a month later, a month later, the other guy that the hung jury was on went down south and robbed a gas station gas station

owner shot him four times he's paralyzed for life and my partner looked at me and goes there's a god yeah justice and he's got a sense of humor all right so have you had any remember like remarkable or anything that comes in mind like an interrogation room like someone's trying to tell you story to give you a story, have you had any, like, characters that are, like, trying to spin you in one way or another? I mean, lots of those, lots of people that basically are lying and, you know, telling different stories and changing their story. And, you know, there's just, you have to approach each person a little differently. If somebody is, if somebody's not a hardened criminal that's been doing this over and over again, that's been to prison and gone out and, you know, they're back on the street. those are the hardest ones to get to confess.

They've been in interview rooms before and whatnot. So it's the what they call the more mainstream kind of people that you can tap into their emotions. Those are the ones that you're going to have a better chance to get a confession from. But yeah, I mean, that's a whole, that's the art side of police work. You know, the science part is the DNA

and all the forensics and all that. But the artistic part is sitting there with somebody who has no intention to telling you the truth and getting them to tell you the truth. And it's hard sometimes. But it's fulfilling when that happens, right? We interviewed Detective Anderson, and he's a detective that was a part of, I want to say, New Orleans, 48 hours. No, he lives in Alabama now. Oh, does it? Yeah.

Maybe it was Alabama. I think it's okay maybe we was in 48 hours Alabama I could be wrong so I'm wrong a lot but he was funny because we at one time we were so we were talking and he said he had interviewed this guy and he said because we're talking about 48 hours just in general he's you know they edit it they do this they do that you they have to try and take you know a three hour interview and condense it into a few minutes and he and because I said you know I think I said something like Did one of them ever stand out or one of it? He's like, man, this one that really irritated me.

I said, well, I said, well, because he said, the guy was, I go in and I say, man, I know this, I know this, we've got this, we've got, like he said, I just lay it out. And the guy's like, man, you got me fucked up, man, you, you're crazy. Like, I ain't going to prison. Like, I'm too pretty to go to prison. Like, look at me. He starts giving him all these, you know, he's, he's, I ain't got nothing. You ain't got, I mean, you know, playing the Billy Badass. Like, you ain't got nothing.

Take me back to my cell. tell me, like, oh, you ain't got, you know, real just street. He's a street guy, you know, and he's like, he was all irritated. Just telling the story, you could see how irritated was. So I'm like, okay, okay. So he leaves, right? Like, we take him back to Zelle. He's like, and they cut the interview.

Like, that's the part that goes in there. He said, they didn't talk about the part where three days later, we're getting the phone call. I want to cooperate. I want to talk. And when I bring them back in and he's crying. in and I wasn't the shooter. It was Billy. He, you know, and he's like, they didn't put any of that in. He's like, oh, that made me mad. I was like, so. No, so funny shit happens in interview rooms. I mean, I'm interviewing this one guy. I forget what kind of case it was. And, and I was telling him,

I said, look, you know, I do this for a living. You're full of shit. I can tell you're lying. Don't, don't give me this bullshit. And this guy goes, Detective Nyberg, I'm almost positive. I'm telling you the truth. So, you know, you get some of those. But yeah, it's, it's really, it's really a trip, you know, through, through human behavior and into the human mind, right, when you're working these cases. You know, I could talk about the value jet crash. We handled that, you know, we worked on that. So that was, oh, man. So that was 1996. There was a plane that was leaving from Miami to Atlanta. And it ended up coming back. It was catching on fire. There was something in the baggage compartment that caught on fire. They tried to return.

They didn't make it. Fire burned through all the hydraulic lines in the plane. The plane nose dived into the Everglades, 111 people. And that was, we got sent out to that. Almost everybody in homicide was out there, are basically collecting fragments. of people. Everything was just shredded. The plane, the people, everything. That was an amazing experience and I wrote about that in a book too. Did they, did they rebuild? I mean, I don't think you, but the FAA, did they rebuild the entire plane? They did. They had a wire mockup of it. It was a DC-9. And so FAA was out there in their airboats. We were, this was out in the middle of the Everglades. So we, we had our airboats. We were going out in picking up,

body parts. And whenever we found an airplane part, we would stick a colored flag. I think it was either red or blue flag in the muck. And that meant for the FAA to come get that. And they did the same for body parts for us. So it was about a month and a half operation. It was like completely obliterated. Completely. It's not like it was like, it was like. No, no, no. The plane was shredded. Yeah. Like shredded. And they're, why are they getting, why are they getting the plane parts? Obviously, to clean up, but like what else? Just to clean up. They had to try and reconstruct the crash.

They were going to know what went wrong. Is this a problem? Initially, they didn't know. It took a while for them to find out what exactly happened. So it was important for them to get as many parts as possible and put all those parts on that wire frame and look for things like scorch marks or anything that might give them a clue. And as a detective, are you trying to identify who these people

are. We did. There was, you know, there's, you know, there's, you know, there's luggage and ID floating around out there. There's hands and feet floating. There's just, and we ended up, we ended up identifying everybody. But we're just, we're out there. Basically, it's a recovery. Part of it is a recovery process. We're recovering the body parts. But we were also looking for the black box, which we found. And any oxygen canisters, which we found a bunch of, because that was what caused the fire. Right. Those were stored improperly in the baggage compartment.

They weren't supposed to be there at all. And when the plane got up to a certain altitude, they popped open. And that stuff's coming out of there like a thousand degrees Fahrenheit and just turned the baggage compartment into a bonfire. And there was no hope for that plane. I was wondering this earlier, Matt, Marcus Schrenker. airplane guy right yeah how did he get caught i know what the airplane didn't make it to the ocean but how he he he had bailed out yeah before it landed or before it crashed you know when he bailed out

of the plane he thought it was going to go out over the ocean it ran out of fuel because the door you know because he had opened the door and jumped out so it was never able to go back up to yeah but how he physically get caught i know the plane didn't make it's the ocean and a crash, but, like, what do you do? Well, he jumped out very close to where he had parked his motorcycle in a storage unit. So he gets on his motorcycle. He stays a night in a hotel. He then drives, and he goes to a K-O-A campground.

And he rents a little camp area, and he stays there. And by this point, they know he's, they found the plane, not in the golf where he thought it was going to go to and disappear. They find the plane. they find out that the windshield has not imploded, like he said, called in a distress signal. Oh, I'm going down. I'm going down. And it ends up landing in like a swampy area instead of going out in the Gulf.

And so they know right now, they immediately know something's wrong. He's the guy, the guy jumped out. He was, they very quickly realized he's tried to fake his own death. So he's reading the newspaper articles about it, about him trying to we're looking for. This is not, doesn't look right. The windshield's impact is completely intact. Nothing's wrong. Something's wrong.

And he ends up sending an email to a friend of his that runs a newspaper in his hometown or where he lives. So it's basically saying, the guy was a pathological liar, basically saying like, you know, just trying to cover the whole thing. No, the windshield imploded. and I was losing, you know, a hyposity or something, like a lack of, lack of oxygen set in. And I was kind of hypoxia. Thank you. But he jumped out.

Do you have a parachute? Yeah, yeah, at 3,500 feet. He was trying to fake his own death. So he jumped out low and set the autopilot to go back up. But because the door opened, the plane just couldn't make it back up. You know, it was not pressurized. doors open, drag, and it ran out of fuel. It burned off too much fuel.

And a few miles short of the Gulf, it runs out of fuel and goes into a wooded area. Anyway, so he's still lying. In the email, you're lying. You weren't up high enough to lack oxygen and get confused. And it's just bullshit. Anyway, and he says this whole thing trying to basically say how sorry he is. He still doesn't take a responsibility for anything for ripping off all of his investors. and he emails this guy, well, that guy contacts the U.S. Marshals.

The U.S. Marshals start looking for him. They track back back to a K-O-A campgrounds, but apparently they use some kind of a system. All of them use the same systems. They know he's at one of these. And in the meantime, he tries to, according to him, completely lie, by the way, because he told me this is untrue, that if you read any newspaper articles, they'll tell you he tried to commit suicide. He didn't try and commit it. He cuts his wrist a couple of times, superficial bullshit wounds, and then chakes the blood, he's bleeding as much as he can, rubs it all around the tent, rubs it on the outside of the tent, he's laying around, and he doesn't pay his bill, which is common for Marcus.

And the owner comes out after 12 o'clock, you're supposed to be leaving or pay your pay another day, goes out and walks up and sees blood on the tent. You can see. It's clearly something's, it's blood or something. Who knows? And he goes, hey, I use 10 or 10 feet ways. And hey, listen, you're going to stay or. And he's like, I'm going to stay. Oh, come up there in a little bit and turn and pay the next. Give me a little bit. He's like, okay. Now, he's trying to act all weak and everything. Like, oh, come. But the truth is, you haven't lost enough blood. Anyway, and it's faking it. He's faking a suicide because he knows he's going to get arrested. And it's purely for simple. He's screwed up faking his death, and he's going to try and do it again. Right. Yeah. He's going to, he's going to. Fake the suicide and get sympathy and maybe get baked corrected instead of getting arrested. And that's what he's hoping for.

Like, oh, I didn't know. And then he, then his plan was to blame everything on his wife. Yeah, he's a good guy. So what happens is the guy, so the guy at the K-O-A is, sees the blood and he calls the local sheriff's department and says, listen, got this guy here. and this is what there's like I think it's blood there's like blood I think he may have done something I don't know and they're like what does he look like and he explains to him what he looks like and they say well what's he what's he driving and he's driving a motorcycle he's on a motorcycle he's six with tall brown air and he's like yeah yeah and they're like okay he's like we know who that is yeah it's our d b cooper yeah we're coming right now and so they immediately they immediately um drive out there and surround him and and they grab him and pull him out of out and he's all, oh, and they bring him to the hospital for a few days, and he's fine. And yeah, he ends up. So that's how they called him. Just stupidity. I mean, he, he, you know, he wanted to get caught. He thought he was going to be able to say he had some mental, then he

started saying he had bipolar disorder, and it wasn't his fault. And it was, you know, a view of undiagnosed bipolar disorder. And not that everybody doesn't say that there's, there probably is with the bipolar order, but that's not why you stole these people's money. Honey, you stole a week for greed. Yeah, he's a piece of garbage that I wrote a book about. You've been doing a lot of writing. Yeah, I had a little time on my hands. Yeah, you did.

So I figured that's what I would do in prison. Everybody else was playing volleyball, handball, you know, soccer, you know, baseball. And, you know, I didn't want to, you know, learn horticulture or how to drywall or do any of that. I didn't want to learn how to play the guitar. I'm never going to be a musician. So you wrote good for you. Yeah, I wrote my memoir and then it turned into another guy's memoir, and then that turned into somebody else's memoir,

and then that turned into another memoir. And then I just started writing true crime stories, and I switched to just, I'm just going to write your story. Because what ends up, what I realized, what ends up happening when you write a memoir, is those people you write the memoir about, suddenly start thinking that they wrote the memoir. And you didn't write any of this.

And I know I put your name on it. Right. And I know we talked and we wrote a thorough 80-page outline. You're calling it my memoir, right? Yeah, but now you're pitching it as your memoir and now you're, you know, and it's like this isn't, this doesn't, with Matthew Cox is not just, it's not as good as, you know, by Matthew Cox. And the other thing I realized, too, is I did that because I initially I did that the first few books because I felt like they were telling me their story. And I also wanted to build sympathy. Right. Like, you want to, it's, you tend, it's easy. If you're listening to me tell my story, it's easy to turn this person into a sympathetic character.

Yeah. Because people empathize with them. They can tell what's going on in their head. And then as I became a better, probably a better writer, I realized that, one, I needed more control of, of my work, you know. And two, I found ways to do that without having to have the subject tell, to have, without having it be in first person. I could do that just through the interviews, you know, to a degree, maybe not perfectly. And then there are some people who write a story about it. It's like, you're just not a sympathetic person in general. Like, you know, so there's no reason to create this sympathy for you. It doesn't exist. He's going to tell it like it is.

Right. And that, that'd be Marcus Schrenker. That was the first one that I just wrote his story. That's this guy with the plane. With the plane. Yeah, he was, it was famous. I'm going to have to check that out. During 2000.

This was during 2008. I vaguely remember something like that. So people can find, basically, people can find your book on Amazon. right so on amazon it's it's it's it's it's an ebook right candle and it's or on paperback whatever you want if you're in south florida you can get it at books and books okay and gables and you're working on on doing an audible right now is that right that and i've written two novels that i'm working on finishing one is it a common a common lead or a common main character or just two separate stories okay yeah and they're available no they're not

They're not published yet. Oh, okay. I'm still, they're in process. Okay. Well, we'll put the links in the description and, and anybody can click on the link and they'll go straight to Amazon. So we'll put that in the description box. Okay. So one, I appreciate you coming.

Thank you. Hey, you guys. I appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. Leave me a comment. Share the video because sharing the video really does help with the algorithm.

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And I really do appreciate it. Thank you very much. See ya.