Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - CIA Spy Launders Millions for the Cartel (How It Works)

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

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free of charge. BetMGEMGEMP operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. And I was approached by CIA and asked if I would be interested in doing a special program, which ended up leading to me working with a couple of the cartels down in Mexico. Well, the problem was my program was exposed, and the officers that were in it were put on the dark web. I always knew that I wanted to do the military, and then the intelligence service stuff I was just fascinated with as a kid. I probably read every book about CIA or the NSA or whatever that was. out there at the time. But I wasn't, I was never really getting into a lot of trouble. I was kind of

like the do-gitty boy. And I went to private school for a religious school up until I got kicked out in the 10th grade. Why'd you get kicked out? Because I helped somebody cheat on a test. I actually broke in and stole a test for a buddy of mine who was failing and gave it to him. And this genius decided he was going to get all the questions right on it. Like he's going from zero to hero, you know, like just gets them perfect. And so he gets pulled aside. And they ask like, oh, you know, we think something's up here. And he's like, oh, yeah, you know, I did this.

Matthew helped me. Did this for me. Like, yeah, he didn't hold out very long. So they were done with me. So I went over to the public school, which there is quite a big difference between. Well, okay. What do you mean? It was.

I just mean like gang violence. There. You know, it's like a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer or something, you know, dangerous minds all the time. Metal detectors, people, you know, get shot in the parking lot fights every single day kind of thing. But you graduated? Yep. Graduated. So I went to college first, and then I joined the Navy in 2006.

Okay. Would you get your degree? Cryptology. Okay. And then you, the Navy. Pete was in the Navy. like all of like a year or two my buddy p yeah yeah he uh and he went to some specialized school or they wanted him to go to specialized school for cryptology um and he was I think he was assigned

a sub that he was going to be on and he or was he assigned as a yeah a lot of them do but he twisted his knee skateboarding and then they had to do knee surgery on him and then he had to be off for like six months or something he was had to be off the knee so he's on either laying on the couch or on crutches and then just as they cleared him uh and he was going to go back and go back to school and everything uh he went skateboarding again and he twisted it again and they were going to fix it again. And he said, now I can't do the six months again. I can't do it. So he got like a honorable discharge. Okay. Like a medical discharge. Yeah. But if you hear him tell the story, it's, it was, he's got a way of saying it that it's 100% true that I was, he took the class or

the schedule, the tests. It's got top 1%. They said, oh, you need to go into cryptology. And they assigned him a sub. And while he's in school, he's like, and while I was, he has a way of saying it. So it makes it sound like he was active duty. You know, I had an injury. I, you know, was injured. And then after several surgeries, I got a medical discharge. And so when he says it, even to another, another military person, they were there like, wow, you know, thank you for your service.

Like it sounds legit. Like you heard his knee getting bin Laden or something. Right. Not like you were an idiot kid who fucking kept skateboarding when they told you not to right after the surgery. Like that's not how it sounds. And it's that they're like because in their mind, he spent time on the sub as the cryptologist guy and he injured himself during a Cold War, you know.

The hunt for Red October. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like, that's not what happened. And he's like, everything. I said is true. Like, it's misleading. It's true. It's all true, though. I'm like, it is true. But yeah. Yeah, the school's actually here in Pensacola. Oh, is it? Yeah, it's at Corey Station. I don't think he ever made it to the school. Okay. He didn't make it to the school. Yeah, so it's, it's like right down the road from Naval Air Station, Pensacola, which is where, I mean, it's one of the biggest

bases that we have. Right. And when I was leaving, coming to the school, I didn't know, like, because it's a classified school. Like, I had no idea what. I had no idea, what was going to happen. And they put you on a bus from the airport in Florida and Pensacola. And they're taking everybody out to NAS Pensacola, the air station. And then the bus driver says, you know, hedger, don't get off the bus. Everybody else get off the bus. And in the military, you never want to be like in a special situation where you're like the only guy doing something.

And then says, no, I'm taking you to another place, drives down the road. And it goes from like NASPensicola is beautiful. it's well taken care of. It's where they do the fighter pilot stuff. And this rickety little base, which is called Corey Station, the Naval Center for Information Dominance is what it was called. And it's got like grass growing up through the concrete. There's like screen doors, you know, like just a completely different vibe over there.

And that's where you got dropped off. That's right. You didn't think that they're calling me out because they're giving me a metal. No, I didn't think so. They're giving me a metal. Everybody looked at you like they call your name. name of the old, everybody looks at you, you go, well, maybe it's a metal. Yeah. No, well, I got there the day before Thanksgiving and everybody was gone. They were on leave,

where they had like an adopt a sailor program where you could go out in town and eat with a family that gives you some food. And so I go to the chow hall. I'm the only person in there. There's no Thanksgiving type stuff. It's just like hamburgers and regular chow food. So I sit down and this lady who's one of the cooks comes over and she's like, you can't sit. here you're not high enough ranking. I'm the only person in this entire place on Thanksgiving by myself. I have to tell you about a game-changing product that you have to use before a night out of drinking. It's called pre-alcohol by Zbiotics. This probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was engineered by Ph.D. microbiologists to break down acetaldehyde, an unwanted byproduct of

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questions ask. Head to zbiotics.com slash true. Use code T-R-U-E for 15% off your first order. Zbiotics is a partner of mine. And so like, okay, move like five chairs over. She's like, that's, that's better. I was like, oh, this is going to be a fun four years. So what was that training like? Yeah, so initially I thought it was going to be more of like what we refer to as human intelligence or humans. And it's all signal stuff. And so I thought I was going to be, you know, learning all these spy skills and dead drops and stuff like that. And it's more, you know, intercepting phone calls, analyzing stuff like that for the phones. And so it's a lot of technical training.

A lot of people that fail out, it's for academic reasons. It's not really like a physically grueling school. And they do all the services together, even the Coast Guard. So you're mixed with all the different branches there at the same time. But I think it's probably one of the more relaxed as far as like a military school, but it's pretty high academically on difficulty. So what is? You're listening to intercepts?

Well, you're listening to like two guys having a conversation and that they might be talking about a bomb? They like. Yeah. Yeah, so this training, everybody gets split. A lot of people do the sub stuff or they'll go on a ship and they'll try to intercept, you know, cell phone calls and stuff like that. Some of us, which is what happened to me, gets selected by the NSA and go over and work on a civilian billet for the NSA, which is what I did. A civilian what? A billet.

So in the military, you've got like different billets or assignments. Okay. And at the NSA, usually they're civilians. So they're like a government service 10, like a GS-10 is their rank or a GS-15, which would be like a colonel in the military. But the NSA had a special program where they would take military people and assign them to these government service civilian positions at NSA. And so I didn't have like a military command as much that I reported to. It was the civilians over there. And I was lucky I got sent to Hawaii to do it for NSA Hawaii.

but a lot of people get stuck on those submarines coming out like your buddy. No, he never was never on a sub. He was never. And you know what if he was here? He'd be like shaking his head like, yeah, yeah. No, no, not like, yeah. So it's dangerous. You can hurt your knee on a place like that.

I was going to say, you know how it is? It's a skateboard on a sub. Man, I've heard some crazy. I've never even taken a tour of a sub or a ship. I was probably the worst sailor in the history of the Navy. So I still don't understand what you're doing. Yeah, so assigned NSA for the full four years of my enlistment. The first thing I'm doing in Hawaii is working in an office that does what we call

ComSec monitoring. We would basically listen to people that had security clearances from the United States overseas, say they were in Afghanistan or Iraq or at a U.S. embassy or something like that, when they would call home and talk to their wife or their girlfriend or whatever. To make sure that they're not sending a. giving confidential information or something like that. Bingo. Yeah.

So we basically, it was pretty boring, but one thing that was good about it is in order to listen for all the things, people aren't supposed to be saying. You have to be told all of those things. Right. And so at a very young age, I was exposed to a lot of sensitive information just so I could monitor it. But there's a lot of listening to phone sex is what that turns out to be. How long does this go on? Does it tell you, do you get transferred to another, do you get moved around or you stay there the whole four years just listening to these? No, I wanted to get out of that office as soon as possible.

And so I went- Does it suck? Or does it? It's boring. Yeah, you're just sitting there all day, you know, with your headphones on listening to people, talk to their wife. Yeah. You know, it gets a little old. And so I went and talked to the leadership and said, I want to take a deployment and ended up getting selected for a deployment to Afghanistan, Pakistan. which was a joint NSA-CIA deployment schedule.

And so I spent maybe the next nine months going through all of these different schools to qualify to be able to go out to Afghanistan. And I mean, that was everything from like offensive driving schools to shooting stuff to more cell phone-based targeting. Because one of the things that we were primarily used for was to create what we call targeting packages on high value targets.

So like high ranking Al Qaeda members, members of the Haqqaeda network at the time or something like that. And so we would watch the phones to establish what we refer to as their pattern of life, you know, where they go to sleep, what time they usually turn the phone off when they're going to see the mistress

just to make opportunities for us to either go, you know, capture or kill that target. Yeah, he likes to eat at this or drink at this coffee shop and he goes here twice a week. Yeah. Or he, this is one, location, he's here pretty much every day he goes to get coffee in this one location. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, because a lot of those guys were moving, right? They would have different houses for a month or two, and then they would move to try to, you know, keep us from being able to catch them. And so we would use their phone traffic to anticipate, you know, where they're going to be and stuff like that. They swap phones a lot. Yeah.

But so for the phone, you probably already know this, but there's like three parts to it that we track. One is the IMEI, which is the handset. the actual hands set, the MZ, which is the SIM card, and then the phone number, the MSISDN. And so these things are all independent. And what these guys would do is they'd get together, they'd take their SIM cards out,

and they'd swap them with each other, thinking that they'd change the phone up. But all it did was just tell us another person in there. Right. Yeah, so I think that back then, this is 2008, the lack of understanding from our targets of how phones worked, was the primary way we were catching people for sure.

Right. I was going to say I had a guy who I read his wire transcripts. You know, the judge gives you like, you can listen to this guy for 60 days. And then every time they have to keep going back to the judge and explain what we learned, why we want to extend the wire, obviously there's different types of wire. And they're not doing what you're doing. They're just listening to calls. These are the local cops listening to the calls. Yeah.

But they would switch up the phone. And so sometimes the guy would get a new phone. And if you're listening to multiple phone lines, he's either calling his buddies from the new phone or actually from the old phone saying, hey, I got a new phone number. Right. I'm switching up phones. Here's my new phone number. It's like, oh, okay, good. What's that?

Genius. And then you have to go back to the judge. Say, hey, he got a new phone number. Here's what he said. Can we? Oh, yeah. And the judge is like, fucking, yeah, of course. You could just extend it from there on.

You know, now. But yeah, they're not. They're not, you know, rocket scientists, right? Like they're, they're, they're, I was loved that one, I was, I had watched a documentary like 20 years ago or something. I forget what it was. It might have actually been a law and order episode where that they're talking about a wire. And they're like, yeah, these guys, it's not hard to figure out what they're saying. Like they would say, you know, you got the canoles.

Yeah, I got the canoles. You got the bullets for the canoles. Yeah, I got the bullets for the canoles. Okay. You know. Yeah. What are you doing? Same stuff.

These guys would, you know, use different fruits. stuff. They would call an operation of wedding, you know, or something like that. I have my, I have a guy I wrote a book for called a Douglas Dodd. And his buddy would call him up and be like, man, I need four blueberries. And I need, you know, you know, six large, you know, six, you know, big green apples or something. He's like, what do we? Are we farmers? Like, what the fuck? We need to talk about this. Yeah. They'll never figured this out. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So there's a lot of that. It was a lot of establishing the locations of the phones as well.

So like we had a major counterintelligence issue and we didn't know where it was coming from. We had the routes that a bunch of the infantry units were going to be taking were being told ahead of time to the Taliban and then they'd go bury an IED on the side of the road and they just always knew where it was going to be. And so one of the things that we did is we looked at what we call an area pool. So it shows each phone is like a dot on a map, basically. And what we saw was that a lot of the Taliban guys that were planning these bombs were making phone calls to people whose phones

whose phones kept popping up on the U.S. bases, right? So those were the people that were leaking the information. They were actually interpreters. I was going to say, these aren't these like, these aren't servicemen. No, these like local interpreters. We've hired to do stuff. Some of them we even give a partial security clearance to interpret what's going to be classified information. But yeah, so these guys were just listening to the, you know, brief, hey, we're going to go take this road tomorrow and then they'd leak that information out.

Then they go put an IED on the road or something, right? Yeah. Or at least they know where you're going to be and they can set up a like an ambush. Ambush, thank you. Oh, I can't want to say sabotage. But anyway, ambush. Yeah. But they just weren't smart enough to walk.

off base or wait till they were in town to make the phone calls and that's how we were able to determine did you so i want to watch this doc it's coming out about the the musad setting up the beepers yeah fucking in fucking genius bro i mean like i don't even know how they apparently got all the way to the manufacturer or something and started the manufacturer so they were running it yeah Yeah, so they had that company for almost 15 years. They were running that company. That's a, that's a smart operate. Yeah.

That's the long game, right? And then they, do you know, you've heard about this, Colby? So the Israelis, so this was, this was, uh, was it Hamas that they did it with. Okay. And they, so they're infiltrating Hamas, but what they're doing is these guys are communicating through beepers, even now, right? Just codes and beepers and stuff, right? There are no cell phones because they know the cell phones are easy to track, right? But they're buying these beepers.

And, you know, there's only one or two manufacturers of beepers. You know, who the fucks are using a beeper? And then, and then, of course, it's a very limited location where you're going, right? Like this is the Gaza Strip or something. Anyway. And so they put explosive devices in the beepers. And so they've sent them out and they're being distributed to Hamas's swapping out beepers and they know these guys are getting these beepers and we've put devices.

I don't know exactly the logistics, but we've got explosive devices in these beepers. And they get to a point where they're like, okay, I don't know what the number is, but it was, it was a, it was, it wasn't like three beepers. We're talking about it's 40 something. Yeah, I was going to say it's 40 or 50 beepers. Yeah. You got 40 beepers with Hamas leadership. You know, maybe some are drivers.

Who knows? But with people within the organization. And at one point, they go, I say, we should just fucking, they send a code. Okay, zero, zero seven, you know. And it's, you know, it's 007, you know, license to kill. And just they just, boom. They all just fucking beep, beep, beep. And these guys pick them, boom, they just blow up.

They're blowing heads off, hands off, blowing people's hips off. They're, you know, just a boom. 40 of them. I don't know how many died, but sure there was a lot of people lost some fingers, you know. It was super effective. Yeah, a chunk of people died. I mean, there was a good, good size explosion. I mean, just think of like, you know, the Intel officer over at Mossad who's got the idea for the SOP.

He's like, you know what? We should become the exclusive beeper provider to Hezbollah. And then, you know, that way 15 years from now, if we need to take out a three dozen of them. Yeah, we'll be set. But, you know, what's funny is that it is one of those ideas that in, you know, in hindsight, is like fucking brilliant. But I have a feeling it landed with a thud. You know, you go and you pitch it and they're like, what?

What the fuck are you talking about? Like, like, who the fuck? Like, that's the, you want to still, how long do you? You know how long that would take? Yeah, well, I mean, how long are we, we hunted Nazis for 40 years. We're still looking for fucking bullboys. Oh, and you know they were making fun of this guy all the way up until it worked. They're like, oh, it's a beeper boy.

Yeah. Great idea. Yeah. And then one day, boom. And now he's probably running the fucking. in place. It's like, hey, Tom. Yeah.

Sir. Beeper boy here. You'll be losing that office in the corner, by the way. You'll be in the bullpen. But I'll bet you that was the same. It was the same kind of thing that the guy walked in and said, I walked into the board room and said, I got an idea. Yeah.

What's the idea? We should bottle water. Bottle and what? Yeah. And sell it. You, okay. You walk me through this. You want to bottle water.

Yeah, in plastic bottles and sell it. Who's buying it? Just regular people. Regular people drink tap water. Why wouldn't they, we're in the United States. You can drink the tap water. No, no, but you know, we'll say it's from Zephyr Hills like it. We'll get spring water.

It's better for it. It tastes different? No. What do you want to sell this for? I'd like a dollar or something. More than soda? You want to sell water for more than soda. Yeah.

We'll just put a mountain picture on the side. Yeah. Yeah. I think this can work. Okay, we got to start talking about our hiring practices here. How did we, how did Jimmy get in the room? First of all, who let Jimmy in the room to how many places did he pitch that till somebody said, you know, we got a bunch of plastic bottles laying around. Maybe we should give it a try. We made all those bottles that got canceled. We have 100,000. Maybe we should stick them in some 7-Elevens. We'll put the picture on it. Where do you want to get this to water? Let's go with spring water. There's a spring in Zephyr Hills. We're Zephyr Hills. Florida. We'll put a picture. Zephyr Hill's spring water. We'll make it sound special. And then eventually we'll just get tap water. We'll sell them tap water.

We'll filter it or something. And somebody said, this is the dumbest fucking thing. I'm going to lose my job over this. And instead, it became a billion dollar business because, you know, Todd had an idea that sounded ridiculous. That's the beeper idea. That's most ideas, really. Beeper boy and Waterboy are running.

Yeah. Running the ship now. that's the Elon Musk thing, honestly. It's the, I want to have an electric car. Okay, this has been tried. It doesn't work. There's no stations. Well, we'll build the stations.

You'll build, you have any fucking idea what you're talking about? No, we'll build a massive amount of these stations. Like, you're delusional. That's never going to happen. You'd have to get all the manufacturers together. No, I don't think so. I think that we can do this. You know, and everybody laughed at him.

Everybody thought it was a joke. And, you know, five, ten years later. You can't buy a Tesla right now. Hey, we should have these things driving themselves. Are you fucking insane? You can't buy a Tesla right now. The guy's a fucking trillionaire. Have you done the auto drive with this?

No, I'm trying to get Colby to do it. I'm going to see how it works on Colby first. Yeah, we need some of that. You know what I'm saying? You sit in Colby to see how it goes well. Yeah, I'm planning on. I'm wanting to do it. I'm just waiting.

Who knows what I'm waiting for? Waiting for my current car to break down and then force me, force my hand. Yeah. You got to give them a second time on the kinks out of an idea like that. But they're, you know, they're saying like, what is it, eight times is your eight, eight times safer and this and then they, plus I'm in the car. If there's an accident, I'm probably hitting a pedestrian. I'm okay.

Right. I'm in the car. That's all that matters. I'm sorry about, you know, little Timmy, but the Tesla wasn't quick enough to catch him. You're in Afghanistan. And how long are you there? So it's only a six-month deployment. So you went nine months for all the training for a six-month deployment?

Yeah. Jeez. Yeah. Some of it was cool, though. I mean, some of it's the training that, you know, when you're a little kid, you're always like, oh, that'd be awesome to do it. Yeah. So I enjoyed that part of it. I just feel like law, it law, I feel like it's like being a soldier, like law enforcement.

It's like 1% excitement, 99% of filling out paperwork and just downtime, just, oh, my God. And then suddenly there's something. happening and it's exciting for you know there's 30 minutes or 45 minutes of excitement and then it's like oh my god back to the back to fill it out now and not even worse now I have to fill out paperwork about what just happened yeah so yeah that's that's spot on but yeah so we're doing counterterrorism ops mostly over there and then this counterintelligence thing I just mentioned to you becomes a huge huge deal and so I was pulled aside to work on that specifically and made all these connections in the counterintelligence world. And so when I'm sent back, they don't send me

back to the NSA unit. I get reassigned to an organization that doesn't exist anymore, but it was called a foreign counterintelligence activity. And they were essentially responsible for running operations against foreign intelligence services like North Korea. Okay. Ron's Intel service. So that completely changed what I was doing at that point. Right. No more listening to servicemen. talk dirty to their wives. So, and so what are those? So you're, you're focusing on, on tracking people within, you know, Iran or? Yeah, we're mostly looking for what foreign case officers, what intelligence officers from Iran or say, Office 35 in North Korea, we're trying to get U.S. service people to spy for North Korea or things like that. Right. And so traditional,

like, defensive counterintelligence, you're trying to catch the. spy. You're trying to catch the U.S. person that's selling classified information. In this case, we were going after the actual foreign intelligence officers who were targeting us. So it's what we call offensive counterintelligence. And so what is that? You're listening for phone calls, for emails. This is still? No, predominantly the way they do it is what's called the double agent activity. So they take people and fake them. Let's say we've got a U.S. service member that they recruit and it's going to go on vacation to Vietnam. And they say, hey, while you're over there, I want you to go to the North Korean embassy and I want you to volunteer to spy for them.

Right. But we're actually controlling them the whole time. And so this actually happened during when the Marine Corps was coming into Iraq. I think General Tommy Franks exposed this in his book. But we had somebody that was supposedly spying for the Iraqi army for years. and years and years and years. And then right when we're getting ready to come in with the Marine Corps, the double agent supplied them with a false invasion map that showed us coming from a different direction. Right. And it was supposedly Saddam believed it so much that even when he

had field reports that that's not the direction they're coming in. Yeah, he was like, no, that's a fake. I trust this information. So that's kind of the general idea of the kind of stuff that they did at that that's when um germany the nazis and world war two started invade during operation barbosa they start invading uh russia or the soviet union and they go to stalin and stalin days go by he won't believe it no we have we have a pact what are you talking about they were and they're like no they're coming they're go he's like absolutely not and then when he finally does realize it he's fucked up so bad for so long and they're so deep into russia the soviet union and he uh he has a mental breakdown for like three or four days.

Like he just kind of like falls apart. Like he can't fathom that he's made this big of a blunder. And then of course he blames a bunch of generals and has them executed. And it says, yeah, it was actually you guys fault. We've been telling you the whole time. It's very Russian. Line them up. It's very Russian.

And then, yeah, then it changed. But still, it's funny. They just would not be. It was the same thing when, when the Nazis invaded a, uh, They invaded a France. They went through the Ardon forest. And they kept getting reports from their pilots saying there is a huge line of tanks and vehicles down this shitty road and going through the forest that's back. There was a huge traffic jam.

And they're like, I'm telling these are these are the Germans coming in. They're like, the generals are going. going nobody would possibly invade through there because it's virtually impossible to travel through the, I want to say it's the Ardon, the forest. You can't do it. You know, that's not how they're coming. For days, they got for like two days, the pilots were like, but I saw it. Like, there's like six of us who are reporting this would not believe them.

How fucking foolish is that? Well, I mean, if you've seen the new movie Operation Mincemate, this has come out in the past couple years. But this is a similar thing where before the invasion of Normandy, we, well, the Brits took the body of a dead soldier. They stuck the plans. Yeah. Yeah. I think plans. Yeah. It's so funny, World War II, the amount of stories are so, the things that happened during World War II are so outrageous. If it wasn't true, you would not believe it. I mean, it really is, you know, truth is stranger than fiction. They had, so I want to say it was patent.

So I think it was Patton who basically, was it Patton or was it MacArthur? Anyway, one of those, one of the two of them. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

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And that's where they thought that if you're going to invade France, this is where you're going to invade from. It's so close. And so they put like Patton or I don't forget which one it was. was, but they put him in charge of that army. And there was an army there. And so when, when Hitler hears this, he's like, of course, everybody thought they were going to fire this guy. They're going to face his best general. One of his best general, was they going to fire him because he got to an argument with the guy? Absolutely not. And of course, he put him in here. This is going to be where the

invasion is. We've all, we've known that. Yeah. Well, it's actually a complete fake army. You heard this, right? They blew up, they made fake tanks, blow up tanks. They have big, Balloon tanks, balloon, everything is fake. Fake people, fake everything. So they've got this massive military, they got fake airplanes. They're made of balsam wood. They've got this huge area where you've got,

it looks like a 100,000 man army is there. And it's literally 95% fake tanks, fake trucks, fake airplanes, fake military. guys. And the reason they did have some people there is they had to move stuff around. Yeah. So when they could look at it, they could see that stuff's being moved around. Brilliant. And these things are, are insane looking some of the stuff that they were, they were building. Some of these tanks, like they would have a whole tank and they'd have some guy walk over. You look at it and you're like, oh, that's a tank. And the guy would walk over and pick up the tank and walk off with it. Got this big old

tank. Yeah, I think they weren't that big. People who were like artists to make these things. Yeah, yeah. They put a lot of effort into it. Oh, yeah, huge, but much cheaper than, than, than, having to supply and run 100,000 men. But it was extremely convincing. The other, what is the other one? At some point, this always killed me at some point. And we'll get back to this. Sorry, but this one always kills me because it's one of those things.

It's like, that's a fucking Hollywood script. There's no way that happened. Mussolini is overthrown. So in Italy, he's overthrown and they put him in prison. and they put them in prison in this very remote prison at the top of like a little mountain. So it's this prison up here. So it's really remote. They said, we're going to put them up here because there's no way to get to him.

There's only one shitty road all the way up. And it's easily, it's, it's the prison's fortified. It's easy to pick people off trying to come up this road. We'll put them up here. That's great. So Hitler says, okay, we need a, we're going to, we got to, we got to seize. We got to, we got to grab Mussolini and put them. back in power. Like, no, no, he lost power. He's in prison. Yeah, I understand what's happening.

So how are we going to get him? So they come to him and they've got a paratroopers come to him and say, listen, we can design, we can redesign our shoots so that we can guide them. This is where, you know, it used to be just a big, piggish parachutes. Like, we can actually redesign them so that we can actually use levers to design them so we can kind of come in and land in certain spots. And we've been playing with this, but we haven't done it actually done anything with it. And he says, well, let's do that. They in the middle of the night drop like three dozen paratroopers out of planes that sail down and land on the roofs of the prison and they kill all the guards and take over the prison, free Mussolini. And then the military comes in and they go drive all the way into, I don't know

what the capital is, Rome or whatever. They drive all the way in and they put him back into power. I don't know if it's, I'm probably wrong, but wherever the capital of, they put him back into power and now Mussolini's back in power. Like that's a script. Like you, what is, that's just, that's out of, that's out of Hollywood. You're going to fly him in, break him out of prison and put him back in power and take the country over again.

Yeah, it took all about a week. That's how World War II was. It's insane. There's so many of these crazy stories. You know who, Hess has. Hess was basically like the vice president of Germany. Hess was desperate to get Hitler to negotiate with the British. But Churchill refused to negotiate with Hitler.

And everybody thought it was because of they were like, you know, if we could just go to him and just talk to him and explain. And of course, you know, because Hitler didn't really want to try and invade England. He thought it was going to be a pain in the ass. And he actually respected the British and really felt like, hey, we'll just keep them as, we just don't want them fighting with us. Hess, who's never flown, didn't know how to fly, teaches himself how to fly, never jumped out of an airplane, gets a parachute.

And in the middle of the foggy night, he gets into a plane that he has rigged with extra fuel tank so he can fly into England in the fog and ditch his airplane and jump out of the airplane in the fog. He lands in a field. He's grabbed by a local, they have like the local councils who are kind of just regular guys like farmers who happen to have a shotgun. You're now a part of the military. He finds him. He takes him, he arrests him. When he lands, he thinks he wants to meet with like there's some aristocracy person that he knows that he wants to meet with. That's right. That's right. The Duke of Essex or something. I don't know who he is. But he wants to meet with because he's like if I talk to him he'll get me an audience with Churchill anyway the farmer

grabs him brings him inside you know sits him down gives him tea because he's English and they have tea and they wait for the local military to show up they grab Hess they bring him they put him in jail it's some famous jail I forget it's the tower of whatever they put him in jail Churchill never acknowledges they do eventually like a couple days later they put it in the paper that they had captured him. But this is this is basically like the vice president of the United States flying into North Korea to have a conversation with Kim Jong-il, or Un, sorry. That's that's, it's the equivalent. And you think, well, that would never happen. Matt, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. No, no. That's the kind of stupid shit that happened during World War II.

Yeah, it was a Tuesday. Yeah, that was nothing. There's so much insanity that happens out there that we don't even think about. It is, you know what is? The, the, the, um, breaking, uh, Mussolini out of that prison, it's the equivalent of, uh, grabbing, was it, Madora? Mm-hmm. In the middle of the night, we're going to drop all these guys. Only they did it back in like 1942. Yeah.

That's how, that's insane with no certain, nothing. You've got nothing. You don't have any, you don't have night vision. You don't got shit. These guys did it was just like, fuck it. Let's try it. Try it. I'm fucking trying that shit.

There's no fucking night vision. There's no, we just figured out how these parachutes, how to guide a parachute, we're not even sure yet. Yeah. It's a great book on this called The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Really? Yeah. About what is basically the predecessor to the special operations executive over there. And now they're like modern intelligence service and where we trace our roots to as well.

It's a fascinating book. I wonder how much. insanity happens that you never hear about. I remember the Musad was in that hotel and they killed some terrorists and they had them, but they didn't, I guess, were they not realized there's like fucking 5,000 cameras in this hotel? And they capture everything they're doing, but you're like, the operation is. And I mean, it's, we're talking about fake masks, fake clothes going into, going into changing, going into bathrooms and changing in the stall and coming out as a different person.

Of course, they figure it out because they're like, well, this person never went in the last 24 hours. He never went in. This guy and they walked in wearing slacks on a white shirt. Somebody walked out 20 minutes or 10 minutes later in a trench coat. Well, we've been watching this video for the last 24 hours of video. No guy and no, this guy never walked in. And the guy in the white shirt never walked out. So it's the same guy.

But they put the whole thing together and you think the only reason you even know the operation. happened this like 10 years ago the only reason you know more like more like 10 or 15 years ago the only reason is because of surveillance cameras how many of those things go on today that we don't know about it's a fluke they caught that on surveillance absolutely right because there's how many operations are happening on a daily basis that we never have any idea about yeah I think it would blow people's mind to know the extent of it they're It reminds me of, you remember the Novichuk thing where the Russians sent two guys over to London to kill that former KGB officer, sprayed the perfume on his door handle that had a nerve agent Novichuk in it? Oh, wait.

Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about the one where they had the umbrella, where they pierced. That was a different one. He was a journalist. Yeah, yeah. This is a former KGB officer who they were trying to assassinate with this Novichuk thing, which they hid in this perfume box. model and then walked by the guy's front door and sprayed it, you know, on the handle. But when they were researching who these two Russian intelligence operatives were, they were able to actually,

there was a newspaper, I think, in Germany that was able to find his like high school graduation picture, like when he was back in Russia. Right. And he had done a mistake, which we call pocket litter. So when he went from Russia to the UK, he took a taxi cab from, from a Russian military base to the airport, and he had the receipt from the taxi trip still on him at one point. But even when the Brits, and London is probably one of the most surveilled cities in the world, it was even difficult for them to piece it back together for the whole operation. What about the Saudi Arabia cutting that fucking journalist up, chopping them up and bring them out in bags?

Khashoggi. You hear that, O'Bee? fucking the what was it the the prince of is it Saudi Arabia what's the Mohammed bin Salman yeah is he a prince or what is he he's running the place right yeah yeah yeah he's I don't want to say president crown prince so he's running Saudi Arabia well there's a journalist that's in New York where was it somewhere in the US right yeah he was somewhere in the US correspondent and he's basically writing negative articles about the about the prince he's writing a bunch of negative articles. He's been doing it for a while. And the prince isn't happy about it.

And so he basically puts a, hey, we need to grab this guy and kill him, get rid of him. So at some point, he want, the journalist wants to get married and they say, yeah, that's fine. You just have to come to the embassy, fill out some paperwork and you can get married. So he goes to the embassy. They say, I'll go to talk to you real quick in this back room. He walks in the back room, a couple of, a couple of, they know he's coming within a certain period of time. A couple of security officers are there and they sit down and they look at them and they say, you know, you're not leaving here. You know, you know that. And they end up killing him right then. They then, they fly someone in that is used, that has experienced cutting up bodies, I assume on someone. I may be getting botching this. But they chop him up. Yeah. And they bring him out of the embassy in different parcels. So you have surveillance of him walking in, never leaving. And of course, the Saudi Prince is like, yeah, I don't know what happened. I don't know what happened.

They're like, well, we know that there's an order that you had said you wanted him killed. And certain people were flown in knowing he was going to be there and flown out. And then we have people walking around like the city, dismembering or whatever, however they got rid of the body. Yeah, they did dismember him. Yeah. I don't know if they walked around, but they did something where people are going out and going in. to the park and putting him pieces of him in different places. And that may be, I may be getting that wrong.

But I thought that they actually threw him away in places. And they got rid of his body somehow. Did they bring it back to Saudi or something? I don't know. I felt like there were parts of him leaving. Like they walked him out slowly over the next day or so. His wife, by the way, or his fiancé is flip it out because she knows he went in. And they knew it was dicey going in.

But this is one of those things that like, that happens. It happens. And there's nothing you can do about it. And even if you said, no, no, you killed this guy and we know you killed this guy and you ordered this guy. Yeah. But he was on, he was walked into an embassy, which is essentially Saudi territory. Right.

And so anything we do in that embassy to our own, our own citizen is none of your fucking business. Well, you could maybe get us for disposed. of a body, but who are you going to get? Because the people that may or may not be involved aren't even in the country anymore. Well, they're also, you know, when they're sending people to do this, they're sending them on diplomatic passports, right? So they've got diplomatic immunity for their actions as well. So typically, you know, the worst thing that happens to somebody on a dip passport is they just

get P&G'd from the country. They just can't come back. Yeah, just don't come back. Fucking insane. The shit that's happening. But the average person just is oblivious, right? They're just kind of, I don't even know this shit's happening. So for everyone that is like, oh, we found this out and we can we can expose it.

How many of those are happening and you just, it happens. It's flawless. Nobody finds out. Or maybe there's, we, the suspicion, something's not right, but you don't have video evidence. You don't really have enough. And it just never makes the news. And okay. I mean, you're talking about a world that lives by our failures or known, our successes or not.

Right. And I think that it would surprise. people how often intelligent services are doing these very, very aggressive things. Just a couple years ago, we saw the... Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager.

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He was kind of on the lamb after committing a homicide. He was running from the Canadian authorities. And the Iranians recruit this guy for $300,000 in Bitcoin to go over to Maryland and try to conduct an assassination. of Iranian that was living in Maryland. And this is just, that's an amazingly aggressive intelligence operation. Right. It's a risk doing here, but it happens way more than people think. Right.

And so what they did the, like the CIA figured it out or and they stopped it? Or did it really happen? Did it go through? No, I didn't go through. So the U.S. law enforcement agency, I don't know which one it was, was probably the FBI. They were able to get access to the encrypted chat messages where they were discussing like, hey, go do this. Here's your money. All that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's funny. Like every once in a while, you'll hear something. They'll give it, it's literally 30 seconds,

maybe a minute and a half where the news will cover. Oh, the FBI just arrested, you know, 14, you know, members of the whatever of, you know, Hamas, you know, in Washington that were, that possibly may be involved in a plot to kill President Trump. And then that's it. You never hear anything else about that they never come. But if they fuck up, you hear nothing but, you know, you hear nothing but how the two CIA agents got drunk in, you know, in in South America and got caught using their credit card to pay for prostitutes. You hear about that for three weeks straight. Sure.

But when they crack fucking 30 guys trying to kill the president, it gets a minute and a half coverage. You never maybe, not the New York Times, but maybe the post or somebody covers it. You get a 200-word article a week later and then maybe another one a month later. And then you never hear about it again. But if somebody, but if it got pulled off and there was an assassination attempt on a president they liked. It would be front page for the next three weeks about how badly the CIA or FBI fucked up and how did they miss this. Oh, of course. Of course. And this actually happened with the same Iranian guy that I was talking about. So he also hired somebody else here to try to

assassinate John Bolton. So this is a U.S. politician. And I think, you know, almost nobody's heard of this story. I mean, you can find it out there. But yeah, you're right. It got like five seconds and they're like, you know, now onto the weather. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's talking about how Trump stopped all these hurricanes coming in since he renamed the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. Nobody's talking about that.

He stopped, shut that down. I love those TikToks where they say, I don't say that. That was hilarious. Oh, yeah. So apparently now, because they changed the, the, uh, the Lake Ontario, they'll be no more drownings. Of course, yeah. He signed an order.

He's like, it's an executive order. Now it's the, it's Lake America and there will be no more drowning. That's awesome. Oh my God. Yeah. It's too good. Yeah. So what happens after you go?

So you do six months. Yep. Six months. I come back to that unit. I told you about the foreign counterintelligence activity. and I spent my last basically two years in the military working with that group. And then as I'm getting out, so that group was very, I'd be careful here, they're very connected with certain programs for CIA.

It was a military program that had agency connections. And so because of that, I kind of ended up on their radar a little bit. And I was approached by CIA as I was getting out of the military and asked if I would be interested in doing a special program with them going forward. And that started the next 13 years of my life after that. What's the special program? How do they, how do they, how do they approach you? They call you in a room or do they, is it like a one day you're in the men's room at a toilet and the guy says, I'd like to talk to you alone. Yeah. Yeah, you just see like a foot slip under the stall next to you. No, so because I was working with this unit and I already had a security clinic,

I was approached inside what we call a skiff where all the classified stuff goes on. They sent somebody out. I was in Hawaii. They came and met me in the office where I was working, and then we went out to lunch and just talked over lunch about what it would be. It's not very exciting. No, I wish I could jazz that up a little bit. Like my way.

Yeah, there were no bathroom times associated with it. At least not that I could talk about it. To do the knob and pushed a tile and a wall opened up. Then we went to the Kona silence. Yeah. Yeah, well, so this is what usually we call the normal way to join going in through the front door. And most, I would say, I can't say the real number, but a very large percentage of intelligence officers that work for CIA are on diplomatic cover, like we just talked about for the Saudis. And so I was asked if I would participate in a program that was commercial cover instead.

And so sometimes the pipeline can be the same. For me, it was very different. I was actually trained solo after that instead of going to the farm. The farm is where the CIA trains their agents, right? Or officer. Is it officers? Officers. Officers.

Case officers, operation officers. Okay. And so I volunteered for this program. I finished up my time in Hawaii, packed up, went to training, and then the rest was kind of all from there. But again, this is now an 11-month training program. I'm going to. So, I mean, over the course of my career, the amount of time I've spent just going to training courses is ludicrous. So what was that? What is that assignment? Yeah. So for my program, they specifically conducted the training around the types of operations that I would be asked to do.

And without going into too much detail, the main thing that my office was attempting to do is by technology from countries that don't like us very much. That we're developing, let's say, a country that we're not friends with is developing a new communications device with an encryption on it that we don't know yet, that they're going to use on an airplane or something like that. We would conduct operations to try to get a hold of that equipment, bring it back to the United States for testing and things like that. And so the type of training that goes into it ended up actually having,

a lot to do with what I did later on, which was pose as a money launderer, because in order to buy stuff like that overseas, you can't just whip out the U.S. Treasury's credit card. If you're paying some Iranian general on the side to leak some technology to you, you can't just say like, oh, you know, where do you want this deposited? So you have to move in what we call a covert finance operation. You have to move that money over there in a way that they can't trace it back and say this came from the United States or that guy's going to get, you know, he's going to get whacked for helping us.

Right. We don't want that to happen because now you got a good guy in place, right, that you can use again. Yeah. Especially if he gets away with it. Then he becomes in bold and he's like, oh, shit, let's, it might be a, must might be a retirement plan. Yeah.

The people that we have that are our friends overseas are, that's probably some of the most sensitive information that we have is their, their identities. Because once you get somebody, you're right. And then it's bad for business if the people you're working with start getting killed. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so you've got the reputation to consider. But it's also just the right thing to do.

A lot of these people are taking massive, massive risks with their life to, you know, fight a regime that they think, you know, is bad. So you got to protect those people for sure. How long does that go on? I mean, did you, what, did you ever see? Firefox with Clint Eastwood? No. Are you serious? You've never seen Firefox?

No, I got to watch this. Bro, and it's, I think it's free on YouTube. I think it's free. Well, I don't know. I have premium, YouTube premium. I get a lot of free shit. But yeah, Clint Eastwood is, this is in the middle of the Cold War, by the way.

And the Soviets have designed a I don't know what are we on now fourth or fifth generation fighters I think five yeah so they've they've got like a fifth or six generation fighter like it's so far advanced that and it everything about it

like it literally reads your mind like it's you can fire missiles and it not all kinds of stuff and it was so funny is that it's got like I don't know if it's it's got guns and stuff like it's got dog fighting capability, stuff that really is silly. Like, it sounded good in the book.

Yeah. But truth is, you don't need that anymore. But either way, they've come up with this amazing prototype. They've got two of them. And they've got a pipeline of scientists that, of course, hate the Soviet Union. But they work for them. They're trapped there, and they work for them on base. But they have a pipeline, and they come up with the idea that we can get an American pilot, sneak him into the Soviet Union as, you know, as like a businessman.

They already have a cover where they've had a guy that's gone, been going back and forth, doing business with Soviet factories. Like he buys, I don't know, some kind of textiles or something, he buys something. So he's been back and forth, back and forth, look similar, tall. He's like, he has to be like six foot two. And he has to be a pilot. Okay. And so they, but we can sneak him into the country.

He just has to lose his tail because they have KGB agents. It was a KGB back then following him. And then we can get him into the base to steal the plane. And it's such, and it's so funny because so, so Clint Eastwood's character is a helicopter pilot, but he also, he flies planes. He flies everything, right? And of course, he was in Vietnam and he's got PTSD. And so, you know, they've got all these flashbacks.

And, you know, it's, I hate that shit. It's horrible. But the point is, is that he has these, it's, you know, it's these, like, he's retired and they have to go to him and they beg him to come in. He's not going to do it. Yeah. You know, it's just, it's the reluctant hero. Yeah.

What was so funny is when they're explaining the plan to him, he's basically saying, so basically you're coming to me because I'm capable of flying the plane. but really there's lots of capable people. Really, it's because I'm six foot three and I fit into the flight outfit. Yes. You fit in the, and you're the almost the exact size of their pilot. You fit into the fucking outfit. And that's why we're getting in there.

And they do. Of course, they get him in there. Several people die. There's some shootouts that gets away. He gets in there. He steals the plane. Their plane takes off after him. There's a shootout.

They have to refuel in, you know, Greenland or something to. or Iceland, I don't know where it is, but it's a fucking great movie. But it's the same thing. They come up with the technology and they're like, well, can we get the plans? Can we get this? They're like, no, they're under lock a key. You know, the scientists can't get a hold of them. It's too much.

They're like, you have a better chance of actually just stealing the plane, the stealing the plans. Yeah. And they're like, is that possible? And then the Soviets as they're tracking them, realizing like, these fuckers stole our plane. Like they still and it's but you know as they're kind of freaking out over the whole thing and trying to shoot them out of the sky And intercept them all kinds of different ways they're trying that the plane is just too advanced Is that they're they're they're furious can you believe they've done this and he's like

Given the same circumstances were reversed he's like wouldn't we yeah like how upset can we be When we have done the same thing like it's Pretty fucking, it's bold. It's insane, but let's face it, if we start mass producing these planes, they don't have a fucking shot. I have to watch this. I can't believe I've never heard of this. It is, I watched it about two, three months ago. I made Jess watch it.

Poor Jess. I make her watch all kinds of shit, but the whole time she's just like, this guy will not watch a Hallmark movie, but I'm having to watch espionage movies about a country that, fell before I was born. She'll say something about, you know, Russia or so. I'll be like, well, it was a Soviet Union at that time. She's like, Soviet Union is like, you're talking about the Nazi party or something. Like, this is so old. Like, well, I was terrified when I was growing up.

It was the Cold War. It was the evil empire. That's right. What a great name. Yeah, the evil empire. Yeah. Miss it. We need some good villains, you know.

We need some. Good. Yeah, Kim Jong-un or whatever. He's not good. He's not scary. He's a chubby little Chinese-looking guy or Asian-looking guy. I'm not worried about that guy. So their main group that we were going against was called Office 35. It's like one of their more advanced intelligence groups. Right. And these guys, their budgets would be terrible in places. Sometimes they'd have like five operatives. They'd share a hotel room to like save money. in there somewhere. If you sleep hot at night, you know how disruptive that can be. When you're not resting well, everything else feels harder. Your focus, your mood, even your recovery. Ghostbed is here to help you fix that. They've spent decades perfecting how to build a bed that's comfortable, durable, and designed to actually help you rest. Every ghost bed mattress features premier

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just doing like all of these weird things to try to save money. But another thing they would do is they would start like selling dope to try to fund their own intelligence operations wherever they were or get into some other kind of crime just to fund their operation while they were overseas. Well, aren't they doing also? Don't they have an entire division that set up just like running scams to steal like Bitcoin? And like one of the other cyber stuff. The Lazarus group.

Didn't they hit like $800 million or something in Bitcoin or something? They never did it at all. They got like 40 million worth of it. They got stopped. But either way, they're actively, they've got an active division of North Koreans that are running operations simply to steal money for the administration or whatever the government for whatever you want to call them. Yeah, 100%. So, I mean, it's just so countered to how we would do things over here. And, you know, when they're tight, they're like, hey, why don't you guys go hack some people's Bitcoin accounts?

We'll get the budget going around here again. And just a wild approach that they have to. Someone's got to pay for these Mercedes and stuff that we're buying and shipping over. Do you see the clip of him recently where one of his guys hits him with a snowball? No. Oh, it's hilarious. It basically says, like, this guy's, family is cooked for generations.

Oh, I was going to kill ever. I was just thinking to myself like, forget about me. My wife and children and grandchild, everybody's being dragged out of their house right now. Yeah. I mean, it looks like it's one of those publicity stunts, right, to where he goes out and he'll do like a military thing where he scores like, you know, he can shoot a rifle 10,000 miles and he gets a bullseye. And so it's, it looks like they're about to do this. Hey, look how normal we are. We're going to throw some snowballs.

Yeah. And then the attaché or whoever next to him, just right in the side of the head and he's not expecting it. I don't know if it's a real video. I sure hope it is, but his reaction's amazing. Oh, my God. They just announced that they no longer are planning on reunifying with South Korea, that South Korea is its own country and North Korea. is its own country because they've always maintained that South Korea is a part of North Korea

and that their goal is unification, you know, under North Korean, obviously, dominance or the government. And he just, so your whole life you've been told this is the goal of our existence. And now he's like, no, now we're not doing that. We're done with that. Never mind. Yeah. So, but they worship him like he's a god. Oh, yeah. Just a God.

Like, they are so overwhelmingly just brainwashed. I mean, they've got songs about how he doesn't have like bodily functions the way a normal person is. You know, it's just wild. Wild. Do you think that people believe it? Do you think like the, I think there's some. I think a good, a bulk, the bulk of people believe it. Yeah, I think that there's an economic,

divide that below it they all believe it and then you know some of the people that have gotten to travel outside you know they they know what's up a little bit but the north koreans are pretty classic with uh you got to leave your family back there if you're going to take an overseas assignment yeah for them you know we're gonna have a wife if you don't come back if you don't come back we're killing everybody in your or we're sending them to die and in and of hard labor you know and they'll freeze to death and they'll not they're not already kind of starving to death but I love there was a whole province, kind of an area of North Korea where, you know, because they're shorter because they have such poor nutrition. And so there was one area that was really the whole area, because a lot of these people, 99% of the people just don't leave, ever leave their towns.

And so they had the kind of the, not I don't want to say inbreeding, but the gene pool was small. And so they were getting shorter and shorter. So he up and moved them to other areas. So the gene, they would intermixed with the gene pool of those areas and have taller people because this one area you went into, everybody was so short. Like, no, I understand there's, I understand this is an area of 140,000 people. We're going to have to go ahead and divide them up and disperse them among the taller parts of the population. Didn't happen to my family. I was going to say, where was that for me?

Yeah, exactly. We were stuck in my town. But it's just, it's, you know, you hear the things that happen. You're just like, they have the special haircuts. There's only like five haircuts you can have. And if any, nobody can have a haircut, the same as Kim Jong-un. And if you're, and it's like, these are like, these are executable offenses. You get executed for it.

Yeah, don't mess around with the. No, don't fuck around. No. They have an extraordinary blindness problem over there as well. Really? Yeah. It's like rampant. There's a lot of, I think like foreign aid groups years ago that were trying to like petition like,

hey, can we at least come in here and try to treat, you know, some of the blindness? Yeah. But, no, they're wild. I mean, like hiring prostitutes overseas to kill people for them. Oh, yeah. What about the two girls that killed his brother? That's exactly what I was thinking of. Yeah.

So his brother was. was able to travel. But his brother was a rival for, you know, the, what am I saying? The presidency? What would you, what is it? What is he the top dog spot to run the country? Oh, his party. Yeah, his party.

So he's, he's kind of a like he could end up running. I mean, he killed his own uncle, right? Oh, yeah. That whole family is just so, Bob. Yeah. So, you know, I don't want my brother to eventually try and make a play for my job. So I'm going to have him executed. but I don't want it to happen here.

So as he's traveling on a false passport, right, he would travel. Like, you know, these guys don't, I don't have to stay here. And I can get a fake passport. I can travel anywhere. So he's traveling. As he's traveling, they hire these two artists to do like a, it's like an art. I forget what they call it where it's a performative art where you're videoing it. and they go through the airport and one of them walks up and swipes his face, I think.

I think they sprayed something in his face. Yeah, sprayed something, a chemical in his face. And he's fine. And she walks off and the other one comes and sprays him again. But it's a different chemical. And the reaction between the two is a poison. And so as he's trying to wipe it off, he's mixing it. And he goes in the bathroom and he dies.

Yeah. The girls have no idea what. they've done. Didn't they think they were auditioning for some kind of, like, hey, here's what he's a part of it and you have to go and you have to this and some kind of a prank show or something? Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was sorry, I was saying performative art or something.

But yeah, some kind of prank show or something where we need you to do, but the guy's in on it and they kill them. They have no idea. Yeah, I think he was coming out of the Maldives at the time, but yeah, they thought they were part of this prank show. How insane is it a fucking, like, see what's saying Colby, like you, do you ever hear about that. It's insane, though. Like, that's one of those things that here's what we can do. Here's what I'm thinking. You want to take them out? Here's what I'm thinking we do. Yeah.

I know this guy in the lab. Here's what he told me the other day. But it's the same kind of thing. If you were to go and shake someone's hand and then go to shake the next person's hand, now the difference is that second person you shake his hand, he's probably, he's going to die too. Yeah. So somebody's dying. But the spray is great because there's no connection. between the girls the girls are going to make it yeah they both survived right oh yeah they survived they arrested them but then after interrogating them they both realized like they don't they don't know what they did they have no these women have no clue so uh yeah it's insanity it's insane so so these guys are stealing to to make a living you know to stay to stay uh afloat they're saving their

poo in North Korea for a fertilizer. You've poo in a bag and put it outside. The poo guy comes and gets it. And they mix it up in the fertilizer. I think that guy that threw the snowball Adam is about to be there next collector of that. Yeah. You're now on poo patrol, buddy. So what did you do then? What happened then? Sorry, man. I keep going off. I get excited. I get excited, Colby. Yeah, so this now is just entering this period where I'm facilitating getting

our money overseas so we can buy all of these sensitive technologies and bring them back. And I mean, some of the plans that we come up with to get a hold of stuff like this is just like makes me believe in America again. We have some really

smart people coming up with some of these ideas. I'll share one of them. I can't say what the country was, but we needed to get a device across, we wanted to get it all the way across the country. And the device was going to listen to all the cell phone traffic around it. And so we can't get into the country. We're trying to think, how do we, you know, put this thing together? And then we had the idea of, well, let's use a car to mask it. And so let's say the country is here in the middle. We're over here. We pick a country on the other side and we make a fake buyer for this

like classic car and order it, everything. We use the car to mask putting extra batteries to keep this device going the whole time. And then we put it on a train that's got to go across the country that we're targeting and then to this one where the guy's going to buy it. But it makes it successfully all the way across and it's sitting in port getting ready to go to the in country and we realized that it could just sit there for a while we were getting bills basically for this thing like staying in port for too long and then they came up with the idea of well let's just cancel the order and do like a return to sender sends it all the way back across the country and got everything again so i mean there's really like you know innovative people that come up with

some of these ideas for these operations but what kind of traffic they're just getting just random traffic they're not targeting and then they get the information maybe they've picked up something useful maybe they haven't or are they or is it just to see what you can get if you get like what is the purpose of that yeah so well let's say somebody on the train no it's the places that the train goes by so let's say it goes really close to a military installation in this country you know now we're able to listen in on the activity that they've got going on there or something so this this specific train uh went by some really interesting interesting places that we were interested in trying to figure out what they were talking about there, who was there.

Yeah, I, I just, it's so funny. My wife will turn off Siri. She didn't want to listening to her or Alexa. What's the one that's in your house? Alexa. Alexa, she'll turn off Alexa. I'll walk in and usually it's lit up and it's off and I'm like, what? And she's like, I don't know.

She's listening. She's always listening. And I'm like, okay, so what? What do you? And then I was talking to chat the other day and I left it on. And just came downstairs to open up to let the dog out and was talking to the dog. And it said, she said something like, what are you doing? You're just being a bad boy.

You're bad. You know, what are you? You know, come back here. Come back here. She's yelling. And it says, and it realized. he's talking to the dog and it says, oh, wow, he's being a bad boy, isn't he? Or something like something like, oh, my God.

Like my computer sitting over there. She's like, it's listening to us. I'm like, I can't left it on. I'm sorry. She's like, oh, I said, what are you talking about? And he said, oh, are you done with, I thought you were talking about. Are you done with me? And she's like, yes, I'm done.

And she's like, I said, what is the problem? What's the big deal? Like, we're not doing anything. I get it. but we're not doing anything. Right. Which is horrible because I know, you know, either way, you shouldn't want anybody. You should be, I don't want anybody to listen to what's happening or whatever.

I get it. But she gets really upset in her mind. She's creating these scenarios. Black helicopters are following us. Right. I mean, having been somebody who is listening to this type of stuff, you know, the idea that, so there's definitely a separation between data that's collected and data that's analyzed, right? So, like, just because there's this huge.

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Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com. Taking the man hours to actually listen to all this stuff is just ludicrous, right? Like, we just don't have enough people to be spying on people for no reason, right? How close is it to eliminating your position where you can just have AI listen to everything and categorize it? I mean, I think that AI is super helpful.

I mean, even machine learning, which, you know, the government has had for quite a bit of time, just being able to flag keywords and stuff like that has always been helpful. I don't know. I think that, you know, even chat has been seen. scaring me a little bit lately. So I teach money laundering to law enforcement now for the charity that I that I work for. And I ask it, hey, you know, I use it kind of like Google and say, hey, what's new in the money laundering world? What's going on? And I'll ask it to say, like, hey, what are some really interesting money laundering schemes that have been in the news

or in the court system lately? And it gave me this one where it said the Sinaloa cartel was using these charity sites for mentally handicapped children to do like those children that were attending to launder their money through this process. I was like, I've never even heard of this. How like, how do I not know about this scheme? And I asked it, I was like, can you give me the research behind it? And it was like, oh, no, I just thought of that, right?

Like, it's suggested to me. I was like, so in this, you know, AI hallucination, it's like, but where your AI brain went was mentally handicapped kids being used for money laundering? Like, it's a little scary. It'll come up with some. You go dark. It'll come up with stuff.

When I was researching a book and asking for look to look for stuff, you have to be very specific. Now, I need you to pull this information from existing articles about this. Because you just, I would randomly said, hey, I need to know during this date in this period, are there any murder? Were there any murders? And it started coming up with a double murder. And it told me all about it.

And I was like, where did you get the information? it was like, no, no, I just came up with the information. Yeah. You know, did you want me to find actual more? Yeah. We're doing research here, you know? Like, I need real evidence here. I need real, I need to be able to put in the back of the book where this information came from.

And so I was like, this is getting to be a problem. Like, it does. It starts getting imaginative. So when you're trying to acquire this foreign technology or devices, whatever, Is there, was there ever a point when one of those, those foreign agencies suspected that you were, that you were working for the Americans? So I don't know if they suspected I was necessarily working for the Americans, but there was definitely a suspicion in general.

And the way we found out was actually through listening to the phone conversations of this foreign service. And what happened was they used a woman. who was an intelligence officer for this foreign country, to call up a private investigator in the United States, say that she was my fiancé, and that I traveled internationally all the time. We were about to get married,

and she wanted to know if I was cheating on her when I was in the United States before we got married. Nice. Yeah, so they basically got a low-level surveillance capability on me when I would come back to the States. But because we had heard this phone call, we knew it was about to happen. And so the idea was, well, let's just make it look like you're not an intelligence officer.

Let's make it look like you're just in the criminal world. Like you, you know, you're doing naughty stuff, but it's not like government level. Right. So like the lesser two evils. And so I was given a list of certain bars to go hang out at. So when this guy was following me, I would go hang out in these places that we knew were affiliated with organized crime. in the United States. And it worked like gangbusters. He ended up calling her back and saying, like, look, I don't think this guy's cheating on you. I do think that he's a criminal, though.

You might want to run. And that's exactly what we wanted him to think. But during this time, when I'm hanging out at these places, which was months just to fade this problem off, I ended up making friends with a guy, had no idea who he was. And in my world, you have to write up what we call contact reports all the time. If you get to know somebody, you have to write it up. And so I write this report up and my boss pulls me aside later. We have a personal meeting and he says, hey, this person you've been talking to is like one of the top 10 people in this transnational organized crime group that law enforcement's been looking at for a super long time. And so we want to know if you'll do essentially a liaison where I'm,

helping out law enforcement. And we were all for it because we thought, wow, that's super good cover for me. You know, if I'm actually hanging out with these real people, then nobody's going to think that I work for U.S. intelligence. Yeah, it's just supporting your legend, right? Exactly. Exactly. And this was, you know, impossible to get this good because of how high ranking this guy was. And so we shifted a little bit towards me trying to ingratiate myself in the criminal world. and specifically that I could launder money for them.

So we were kind of killing 12 birds with one stone here. I was getting good cover. And we were also able to start getting some intelligence gathered on the money movement for this group, which ended up leading to me working with a couple of the cartels down in Mexico and getting exposure to their money pipelines and things like that. What do they think? First of all, how do you have broached this subject? of, oh, by the way, I can launder your money, any criminal proceeds. Yeah, great question.

So you obviously never want to bring it up, right, just directly because they're going to say, wow, this guy can't keep his mouth shut. Right. We want to do dirt with this guy, you know? And so I would just leak small things in conversations about how I had to go do this financial thing or I had to go do that. I would never say, I got to break off from you guys and go launder some money real quick. It was always, I'm going to go down to Nevis.

or I'm going to go to Belize. I got to set something up for somebody. Or I got to, you know, go work with this bank over in Luxembourg because, you know, there's being a pain right now. And just leak enough stuff out that they're like. They started going like, what do you do? Yeah. What do you?

Yeah, it doesn't sound like a regular, you know, finance guy kind of thing. And then they put it together and then eventually approached me and said, hey, would you be interested in helping us, you know, move some stuff from A to Z? And that was kind of it. And is this actual, like, physical cash that they are moving? So instead of, I didn't do much of like the bulk cash smuggling. Right. Mine would be more so like the layering phase where, I mean, now are things like a cash for

crypto swap in the beginning. So we got really heavily into crypto early on when I was doing it. But no, not so much the placement of it. I would kind of take over when the money had to be distanced from a. original source and then like the integration phases and stuff too but I've been a part of a few bulk cash smuggling things but not generally so you have to like move money like they've got you know two million dollars that they need to they need to move it out of these accounts so you move it to Romania and some guys move it from one bank you move it from one bank to another then you

whatever, you disperse it to multiple accounts, then those multiple corporations decide to buy services in this business, which is owned by one of these cartel members, and now that money's, now it's washed and these guys own, they buy real estate or they buy, you know, land that then they have another construction company that's funded by what looks like a bank for a loan to build something. They build something. They end up owning a fucking luxury. luxury hotel in, um, in, uh, Acapoco that Americans can now, and now it looks completely legit. It looks like some banks lent him some money.

It looks like, uh, this construction company did the construction work, looks like. And all that money came from banks. So it's just completely walked at this point. Yeah, exactly. So they would do the, the first parts. Like let's say they had a strip club and they were co-mingling cash, right? They're taking legitimate money. Then they're taking, let's say they're dope cash.

or whatever, and they're feathering it in, co-mingling it. And then at that point is when I would take over and move it, just like you said. And sometimes, I mean, we would even use like foreign court systems to trick them into moving the money for us. So one of the big plays would be, let's say the money is in the United States, we wanted to go to Mexico. So you take a company in the United States and a company in Mexico that supposedly have nothing to do with each other.

But we actually secretly own both companies. And then we set up a trade deal where I'm going to send you a few million dollars worth of something up in the United States and you're going to pay me down in Mexico. Well, what they would do is they would get a third country, let's say Canada or Switzerland, to play like the arbiter of this deal and hold the money in escrow during the trade deal. well, all you have to do is default on the payment. And then you sue yourself in that Canadian court. The Canadian court says, nope, you do have to pay them.

You do have to pay this company in Mexico, all this money. And oh, by the way, don't just send it directly to them. You have to pay the court's fines. And then the Canadian government is going to send the money down to Mexico. Right. And pay off this lawsuit debt. Those additional layers. Yeah, exactly.

The money is just one example of doing that. But like you said, a lot of it would end up in these loan back schemes where they're bringing the money back in in the form of real estate investment. And then they're either living off of the rent or the lease of the real estate or borrowing again against that to get the money back. I had met a lawyer in prison who had accepted money from somebody. I'd forget exactly what happened, but he had accepted money from somebody. and then then they contact him said they didn't need his services and asked him to wire the money to uh so first he tried to wire the money back the account of the account and so then they said oh that account that corporation has been dissolved mail it here and then he's like okay so he's

like i just you know same guy i'm talking the same guy he said so i mail it to the other but i think it was he got hit for money laundering and he acted like i had no idea and and probably you could have got away with that once. But this had happened over the course of a year. It happened like four times. And so because it's so, it had happened so often, he went to trial and lost and got hit for money laundering and was doing like 10 years or something. I forget it was like, wasn't even, it was, I want to say it was maybe a million dollars. But, yeah, they were just, so they're using him to launder the money. And he said, of course, he's like, I had no idea. You know, I did know it had happened several times, but I was, I'd only been in practice a few years. I didn't know how

this happened. I'm doing, you know, it wasn't an unreasonable amount of money. Yeah. You know, I have lots of money in my accounts. I didn't touch the money. My whole concern was commingling. It wasn't money laundering. I didn't even know this was a money, a possibility of money laundering. So that's what he was saying. Whether that's true or not, who fucking knows. But either way, the jury didn't believe him. And he ended up going to, uh, he ended up going to, uh, jail. for whatever, five or 10 years. That's where I met him. Yeah, I know law firms are pretty big on spreading that scheme around to look for

because they'll use those I-O-L-T-A accounts, right? So it's basically like a account where they keep the deposit, the retainer from the client, but it's masked under attorney-client privilege. Right. Right. And then, yeah, the idea is, oh, let's go do this case. And then here's, you know, 500,000 bucks for the retainer to go do this case. And then a week later, never mind.

don't actually want to see that person could have my money back. Right. But like you point out, it's always got to be exiting to a different place than the deposit came in from or to a different name. Right. And then supposedly, if they go and ask the attorney, he can't tell anything. He's like, I can't tell you where I'm sorry. You know, and then they can't push too much because they're like, yeah, it's attorney

client privilege. We can't force him to. We have to prove that he knew. Yeah. So at some point, I guess after the third or fourth time, they, they were like, yeah, no. You can't hide behind attorney, client privilege. at this point you've done this four times last year yeah and this guy's having the same problem each time that the company closed down he's got to right my buddy's dad had worked for Bank of america

and at some point he was retiring from Bank of America and i don't know what the reason you know what he did he was the vice you know Bank of America has got like 10,000 vice presidents right yeah so he was like the vice president of uh ATM in this region or something. I don't know. But he was high up. And so he took his took like an early retirement, took his pension,

a chunk of his pension money and cash. And because he was in his mid to late 50s and decided he was going to buy, I'm pretty sure I'm winging some of this. This was a long time ago. So it's when I was in my, I was in my late 18, no, I was in my early 20.

And he bought, he went out and he was what wanted to buy business because he still got 10, 15 years worth of, you know, working, uh, uh, uh, lifespan behind him. He said, I can't work till he at least 65 or 70, right? So he retires, takes a chunk, takes a nice night, let it's a little chunk of money, goes out and he finds a laundromat. And he looks at the books of the laundromat and it's doing amazing. And the guy's like, yeah, you know, he's got like this loan. He's like, wow, this is this is amazing and so he pays him cash offer let's say and i don't even know what the what how much it was if it's 200 or 300 000 i don't know but let's say it's 200 000 gives them 200 000 guys says thank you very much and leaves and uh man people are not coming in like it they're coming in but they're not he's not making nearly what he thought so after a couple

months, he realizes the staff must be robbed, must be, must be theft. New owner, they don't respect him. He fires a staff, hires some more people, a couple more months, still not doing well. Starts working the hours himself. Fires those guys, starts working the hours himself. And after six months, he realizes there's no fucking way. Like, I'm breaking even. I'm working the hours and I'm breaking even. Yeah. This is bad. And I don't know if. he makes it an entire year, but he goes, let's say, a year. And then he, he goes through all of his savings really just goes under and ends up claiming bankruptcy. And the place closes, claims bankruptcy and just like, fuck, this was horrible. Guys, books were perfect, too, by the way. He just couldn't

make it run. He just couldn't do it. And about three years later, that guy that sold in a laundromat turns out he'd sold like 15 or 20 laundry mats over the last like five or six years. And what he was doing was he was laundering local drug dealers money through the laundromats. Yeah. And that gave him the ability to run a ton of cash through the laundry mat. And because I think he had like an accountant background, he was able to prepare these amazing books, pay taxes on them. And then the way he was, his exit strategy was after three years, I can sell this business. So I'm doing it for five or 10% of the drug proceeds and I'm making a couple hundred thousand when I sell the business to some poor unsuspecting sucker.

And he did it and he had made like a couple million dollars over the course of six years or something that they just said, these are all cash deals because not just that. Because I remember Bill's dad was like, I don't see how I can not. I don't want to be in the laundry business, but the guy is selling this. It's such a great deal for the amount of money it's making. I'd be a fool not to buy it. Yeah. You know, he could sell this for $350,000. He's selling it for $200.

His reasoning was I would have to finance it, part of it. And it's in a bad, these aren't in great areas. and people don't want to be in this business. And so I'm just taking $200,000. And I'll just give me $200,000. Of course, it's not. And it was great as that money's laundered also because this guy's buying your business. So it's perfect $200,000.

I pay his taxes on it. He did great. But eventually somebody, some drug dealer got busted. They watched the guy for six months, sent a couple other drug dealers his way. The guy just got cracked in the head and lost everything. How he made it the six or seven years is shot. shocking with low-level drug dealers. These are not, this was not a sophisticated operation where he's dealing a professional.

He's dealing with drug dealers. Yeah. That's a long run for that. It is. I've seen a guy do a similar thing with gas stations, and then he would take the ATM machines there and load them with the dope cash. Oh, okay. So that when it's dispensed, the ATM company says, like, okay, that money went out.

And then the ATM company would wire him the money that he was owed. He just put that in the bank. Yeah, so you just take it straight off the street, sticking in the ATM and people didn't know they were taken out, you know, bills that were from drug proceeds. Shocking. They're clever people out there. Yeah.

Yeah. Once you're working for those guys and they say, hey, you're thinking, we're thinking maybe you could do something for us. Yeah. Who are those guys? What's happening? So these would be like the business representatives of, two of the cartels down in Mexico, right? So, I mean, you know, this is Ozarks. You're talking to,

what's the name of the guy on Ozark? So you're talking to kind of Jason Bateman, the guy that's out there saying, well, he's actually doing the money laundry, but you're talking to a version of him that's saying, hey, can you? Yeah. Yeah. So I'd say more of like a business representative than like sitting down with El Chapo, you know, directly saying that's more of a movie version of how that world works, but a lot of the people that I interacted with for them, they weren't like street, you know, kind of guys. They were more like business people. One of the guys that they had working for them already actually used to be an Ivy League tax professor in the United States and had kind of, you know, broke bad and gone down there to work for him. But he's not like,

you know, doesn't have like tattoos on his face or, you know, this imposing person or anything. It was more of a, just came off like a business guy. And so they're asking you to launder the money and you have a variety of ways. But you're really tracking the money the whole time. Exactly. So you can be pretty cocky. You'd be pretty like, oh, I can make, don't worry about it. I can make this happen.

I know what's going on. Well, and because I have, you know, the U.S. government's resources, I became, it was easy for me to compete with other people in the potential money launder pool because. it always worked, you know, when I was doing it. And the timelines could be a lot quicker than other groups could do it, right? Because there's all these money laundering as a service crews out there who work with everybody from terrorist groups to cartels to whatever.

And you're always competing over how fast can you launder the money? What's the percentage that you're doing to move it? And then how often does something go wrong with their money? And so, I mean, one of the things that kind of pushed our, method out of it was the Chinese coming in here and saying, we'll do it for one percent or less with the cartel bulk cash. Because how do you even compete with that? Right. And so, but before that, it wouldn't have been, you know, that outrageous to charge seven, eight percent for moving the money for them now because the Chinese, the game is completely different.

Yeah, Pete used to say that they were doing, well, what are they? buying, they were buying heavy equipment or something in California. Like they'd buy the heavy equipment and then they'd ship it down there and then they could sell the heavy equipment and that they've got their monies completely laundered. Yeah. One that they were doing right when I was leaving was the carbon credits. Oh, okay. Yeah.

So they would take, let's say money sitting in a bank in Belize. they'd create a LDC over there, which is like their version of an LLC. And then they would say it's an investment company. Yeah. But then they would invest it in like forestry preservation in South America. They'd buy up all this land. And then they would get these offset credits for a carbon credit. And then they could trade those around and move them around.

It's like actual value. But it would never be, it's not a direct repatriation of the money. they're basically paying off the debt for these carbon credits. And instead of having to hide everywhere, they're kind of, you know, getting their picture in the paper with the mayor for being the person that saved the rainforest. Right. Where you'd see, you've been tracking the Ryan Wedding case at all. Ryan, no, what is that?

So this was a guy who was a Canadian Olympic snowboarder. Oh, okay. ended up moving tons of white up into Canada for Sinaloa. And he just, I think it was six months ago or so, they got him in Mexico and brought him back for trial. Right. But they saw, you know, some of the ways he was laundering his money was he had a gold guy, like, that owned a jewelry store up in Canada. And then there was this ex-Italian special forces guy who was buying up all of these like super rare Ducatis and motorists. cycles for him.

And then he would just take loans out against, you know, these, it's got a $13 million Mercedes that he would take loans back out on. But I think that trials going on right now. Snowboarder to snowking. What is, so what are the Chinese doing that, that this is Chinese organized crime, right? right that they came in and they um and by the way so if you're doing this what are you charging and where's that money going so like a bonus not to me yeah no i don't get to keep any of it no no that stays in the the operational pipeline for them so but it you know it's if you can do that

against a group it's almost like this guerrilla warfare thing where your adversary in it is funding your operations against them right at some point so yeah um but what is what are you guys charging three percent two per five percent i mean it would range depending on how much the money was so there would be like tiers you know if it's between a hundred grand and a million you know we're up at seven eight percent if it's a million to to five million we're down at four and a half percent if it's you know 10 million or above you know we're getting you know below three percent maybe so it's just tiered based on how much each load of the money would be. Yeah, the problem is if it's, if it's a low dollar amount, you can do it like the real estate. You know, it's easy to do it

the real estate, but you get to a point where it's like, oh, it's $3 million. You're like, okay, I can't, I can't hide this by buy, by flipping houses. No, no, no, no. And one of the things that was, it wasn't a problem. It was a blessing was at the time, cryptocurrency was just going through the roof. And so sometimes you could be. let's say you've got the money for a couple of months where you're laundering it. Let's say it's a six-month cycle. And you're keeping it in a cryptocurrency form for three of those months. You might triple the money that you're moving back then.

And so that was another thing. And this is like the most U.S. government thing ever. But if an operation is costing too much, it's really simple to go back and ask for more money to do it. Right. If it's accidentally making money like that, people are like, oh, we don't know what to do. Like, how do you send it back? Like, where does it go? Luckily, we were allowed to kind of keep it in the operational pot. But it's actually a bigger problem when you're making money than when you're losing money doing the government side of it. Right. Yeah, I was going to say they, it's funny, they want to spend every bit of money they have so they can justify asking for. a larger budget next year. Right.

So if you actually say, no, no, we actually have a whole, we have about $15 million left over, but you don't understand what happened. They're like, oh, we can give you $15 million less this this year. Exactly. This physical budget. Oh, no. Yeah. The fluke might not happen again.

Yeah. No chief wants to have that conversation. You always got to get rid of it. But no, the Chinese, when they came in, I think a lot of people aren't aware of how entrenched Chinese organized crime is. with the cartels and specifically how connected the Chinese government is to their criminal groups, right? It's not like here. They're very entwined with their criminal organizations overseas. And specifically, you know, with their, how they're treating the FETI problem here, it's definitely

something that the Chinese government, not just Chinese criminals are participating in. They're definitely aware of it. Yeah, they're aware of it. we know that, you know, for the plants that manufacture the precursor chemicals over there, that they'll give them like a no tax deal. And so to say like, oh, you know, we're not really complicit with this. But any of the companies that are making this, we just don't charge them tax. We're not paying them. You know, we just don't charge them tax to do it.

It's a little, it's a thin cover. And they're making so much of it. There's no domestic reason for them to have this much. And even the export. And let's face it, you're just killing America. It's not, you're not really hurting yourself. No, they're giving us our version of the opium wars right now. Yeah.

Do you know about the opium war? Opium. Opium wars? I thought opioids. Is that what it is? It is. It is. It's opium.

The painkillers back in the day. That's what I was thinking. Right. But it's that there was actually a war between Britain is Britain, right? That's right. Britain and China about opium. They outlawed it because it was such a problem. They outlawed it.

And Britain went to war because they were making so much money selling opium to China. They actually went to war over it. Say, no, you're going to open up your ports again and allow us to keep selling this or we'll go to war. And they actually had a war over it until they finally just opened it up. And in China for a long time was just this massive drug addict or a drug addicted. din and the British were making tons of money from these guys from them it was actually a fucking war fought over it yeah then we saw a lot of it come here through um when the chinese were coming to san francisco and places like that they yeah they had opium dins right yeah yeah yeah so

how did you get out of doing that did any of these people get brought down or you guys just bringing in money making money and you just kept it going let's just keep you this right thing running Well, so, I mean, we're not law enforcement organization or I don't even work there anymore, but, you know, the information was passed to law enforcement. I can't comment on anything that's ongoing with those organizations. But I will say that we got an amazing level of fidelity on how they were moving their money and where it's at that, and I'm sure is contributing to how we're trying to tackle the problem now. And then, but how long did you do this for? I mean, 13 years. If you don't work for them now. No, no, no. I've been out for almost three years now.

So what did you, why did you get out? What did you? Yeah. So long story short, my program was exposed and the officers that were in it were put on the dark web. And so we had somebody that leaked to a foreign government that the program existed and that we had a special relationship with the U.S. driver's license, like certain DMVs. There are a couple DMVs in the country that were allowing us to get our cover docs from the DMV because there had been a problem with sequential passports being used at the State Department level before. And so what we were doing instead of asking the State Department, hey, this guy's an intelligence officer, he needs a passport and this alias.

We would go to the DMV level and then take a Social Security card and just apply for a passport, like a normal person, so that we could cover the program better. Well, the problem was we ended up with a bunch of different driver's license. I think I had over the course of my time, 41, different driver's license. And so once this foreign government found out about that, they hacked all the DMVs in the United States, and they looked for duplicate biometric hits on faces. And then they were able to determine, oh, this guy's got, you know, 40 different drivers. license. This is probably an issue. So they were able to drill down on the program. And then they leaked

all this information. So now if I was going to go through an airport in a country that hates us, my face would pop on me, my passport, and then it would hit on all these other identities. And so that was basically the end of the road for me because I can't work in a country where, you know, under alias anymore. Okay. And so now you're, a manager of an alber? They wouldn't take me, you know? They looked at the resume and like, yeah, I don't think this is true. No, so I'm super fortunate now that I'm getting to do something that I always hoped I would get to be a part of when I was in.

You know, to backtrack a little bit, when I was in Afghanistan and Pakistan, one of the things I noticed was that I could empathize with even the people that were our enemies. from it, you know, and that if I was born in Kabul and raised in a certain way, then, you know, maybe I would have ended up in the Taliban, too. And I saw that even in the criminal world as well, that I could relate to people. I could say, like, yeah, it makes sense why this person is doing what they're doing. They're not an evil person. They're just, you know, making this decision. And the only thing that was always black and white to me was people that hurt children and trafficking. there's just no way to say like, yeah, that's okay under any circumstance whatsoever. And so after I got out, I was really fortunate to meet a guy who founded the charity I'm at now.

His name is Jess Larson and his wife, Stephanie. It's called the Child Rescue Association of North America, and it focuses on bringing kids out of sex trafficking. And they put me in charge of what we're calling the Child Rescue University. where we take donor money and we go train law enforcement, myself, some other former CIA officers, some Tier 1 special operations guys, and we help teach law enforcement how to take down the networks

that are targeting children and trafficking children and how to approach it more in the same way that we would have taken out a terrorist group rather than just trying to take one child at a time. We're trying to dismantle it. the organizations that profit from it. Okay, so how long have you been doing this? Three years, the whole three years?

No, so I just came on about 90 days ago. So first three months in. Before that, I was training law enforcement mostly in money laundering and organized crime stuff. But now it's so much more, I still enjoy doing that because that's part of what we do. But it's more so to equip them with the trade craft or skills that law enforcement officers

typically wouldn't be exposed to so that they can, you know, focus more on the child side of it. And I think I think the numbers around like, it's like 12 hours total training in a law enforcement person's career that they usually get on trafficking. So it's, I mean, it's almost nothing. And so a lot of times when we go in, we're the first exposure that they have on how these networks work, how they make money from it, how they handle their money from it, even just explaining the economics of a trafficking network to them is usually something new. So what do you have? Links to the charity.

Do you have socials and stuff that you want? Yeah, I've got links to the charity. I've got an Instagram page where I break down a different money laundering scheme every week and explain to people how it actually works and stuff. But mostly, yeah, to Child Rescue University. Dot org or Child Rescue Association. Hey, you guys. Thank you very much for watching the video.

Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button at the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. We're going to place all of Matthews links in the description box. So you can go there, click on there, shoot over to the website, check out his social medias. Really do appreciate you guys watching. Thank you very much. Please don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell. Share the video.

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