Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - DEA Agent on Seizing El Chapo’s Millions & Hunting Maduro | Wesley Tabor

Starting point is 00:00:00 Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaiaa and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll.

Starting point is 00:00:22 So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. We took Nicholas Maduro, the president out of the country. He's sitting in his cell right now. Flores twins. He was working directly with El Chapo. We seized around $32 million. We missed $10 million in $1,000.

Starting point is 00:00:43 My mother eventually met a guy who was a convicted felon. He had been an alcoholic, in and out of juvenile, went to prison, got out of prison, escaped from prison, went back to prison. And then he got out of prison again, met my mother. And next thing you know, they're married. And he was my stepfather. He's actually the guy who raised me. Okay. So here I am.

Starting point is 00:01:06 Fast forward 20 years, right? And here I am a police officer. And then I became an agent and we'll get into that. But, you know, the basis for when I grew up was a felon who taught me right from wrong, not to lie to do the right thing. Always, you know, try to be the upstanding person. You want to be a cop. That's great.

Starting point is 00:01:23 Looking forward to you being a cop. And I hope you're going to be successful and everything. So, okay. So he wasn't a douchebag anymore. He just made some mistakes, went to prison. Yeah, he had his demons. I mean, don't get me wrong. He had his demons.

Starting point is 00:01:34 He was a very aggressive guy at times and things like that. At the end of his life, because he passed on back in 2005, at the end of his life, we came to an understanding of each other. The apologies were made and everything. You know, I accepted everything. He accepted it and he passed on and we were good with that, you know. But he's the one that, you know, no education. I think he went to fifth grade. And he was a carpenter and he worked his ass off for us.

Starting point is 00:02:00 us and sacrificed. Imagine taking on four or five kids. That's insane. Yeah, and he did that where my own father, who died in 2012, really had nothing to do with me at all. And he was a military me, you know, which was interesting. So that that was a unique aspect. Now, at one point, when our family, we had moved from Minnesota to the state of Maine. And in the state of Maine, if you've ever been to Maine, there's a lot of nothing. Okay. And we were up near Canada, northern Maine. And we had moved there at the prospect of a job for my stepfather. So we get there and there was supposed to be a house and houses like destroyed. So we had a makeshift bus that we lived in while we were there with, you know, five kids in this makeshift bus with my mom and my stepfather

Starting point is 00:02:50 and we're bathing in the river and things like that, you know, for a while. It was, it was pretty, it was pretty crazy. So, you know, but I mean, all those things help me so much of my life. Right. You know, don't take things for granted. Understand where you come from. Don't forget where you come from. You know, as a police officer later on when I became a police officer, I didn't look at a felon and say, oh, that guy's a total dirtbag.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Right. I looked at it as like, I wonder what happened with his life. I wonder how it went. You know, depends on the crime too, right? There's certain crimes that you're kind of like, this guy's mass murdering people or there's a racial element to it or something like, you know, or a, or a, or a sexual deviant crime or something like that, that you're kind of like, whoa, that's a different story. But for the most part, I understood from a young age that even people that get into problems in their life that's derived from some kind of negativity they had when they were young, carried it over,

Starting point is 00:03:40 and it seems to pass on the family. It didn't pass on to me. And that was my stepfather, right? And I first got into law enforcement, the idea of law enforcement as a police explorer in Minnesota with the state police. So they have an explorer program, which is like, it's part of the Boy Scouts. Yeah. And you learn how to be a policeman. I would put on a uniform without a gun, had a nightstick and handcuffs, the whole thing. I looked like this mini policeman.

Starting point is 00:04:05 I was like 13, 14 years old. And I'd ride around with a trooper at night. And it was pretty cool. I mean, the first time I went out, they're chasing a car, and I'm like, the lights are gone. And he told me if something really bad happens, you just need to stay in the car. Don't leave the car or duck down or whatever, you know. And I had no clue.

Starting point is 00:04:22 I was like waiting for something to happen. I wanted it to happen, right? Because you want the excitement at 13 years old. You don't understand the impact of the violence and things like that. But that kind of introduced me to it in that funny story. So the first time I understood power of a police officer was there was a car wreck. We arrived there. It was actually in the daytime.

Starting point is 00:04:43 I put on my little trooper hat. He has me out there. This wouldn't happen today. He has me out there directing traffic, slowing the trucks down because it was like a two-lane. lane and I was on the two lane slowing the cars down and I had this trooper hat on I'm 14 years old right but they can't really tell you're probably a big 14 I was pretty big that was pretty big by the time I'm 18 I'm 6 5 right so so I'm out there I'm 14 I'm like six foot right and this truck is coming at me and the smoke's like you know he's hauling and I stood out not in the road but

Starting point is 00:05:15 close to the road I put my hands like that and that guy slam the brakes on and went like this Like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Right. And I'm like, hearing I'm a little kid and this guy and this big truck is listening to what I say. Yeah. And I was like, interesting, very interesting. So that kind of understood like there was a power behind that uniform badge. What I didn't really understand was the responsibility behind that and that power and what you have to do.

Starting point is 00:05:39 And a lot of those things really came to me later on in my life. You know, I would see these people get arrested and they get in fights with the trooper. And the trooper's name was Desmond Pepin. a great guy, older guy, he's gone now. He passed on. Desmond Pepin actually has a Supreme Court case that he did some search or something with the Supreme Court and it got thrown out. But he was a great trooper. And so as I went, I moved again from Minnesota, went to Maine, back to Minnesota, back and forth a couple times. And finally, I graduate from high school. And I graduate from high school at the bottom of my class. Literally, there was 50 kids in the class. I was 48. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:18 I had like a D minus. Right. I didn't care about school. I was living for my senior year, I was living on my own. I had a car payment. I had rental payments. I had all these things that I had to pay and I was working two jobs in high school. So, you know, it wasn't like I get to get to go to prom, right?

Starting point is 00:06:38 I'm working. Yeah. That was my senior year. And so, and my family had moved south a little bit because my stepfather was traveling like two and a half hours to go to work. And it was killing him. So I said, you know what? I'm going to get out of high school and I'm going to go. I had met a girl from Florida and blonde-haired Florida type girl, right?

Starting point is 00:06:56 So I said, I'm going to Florida because Florida is where it's at. And in the state of Maine, there wasn't much going on. You can imagine, like loggers and dairy farms and things like that, which is great. If you want that life, I just didn't want that life. So I go to Florida, Tampa. I arrived just a little bit north of Tampa. And I'm living with this girl and her parents. and they're great.

Starting point is 00:07:19 They're great, right? And the mother actually tells me, she's like, what are you going to do with your life? You know, you're 18 years old. You barely made it out of, you know, high school. Algebra, I didn't even know what that was. I was like, what's algebra? You know, I just had zero skills.

Starting point is 00:07:35 I had no academic skills. I was just, all I had was strengthenability. I was in really good shape. I had been in martial arts and all these things. I really took up to it. she tried to get me into golfing. I'm like, I don't want golf. I wish I would have because now I could be golfing.

Starting point is 00:07:50 Right. And I'm not doing a lot of spinning sidekicks anymore, you know? And so she said, you need to go to school or something and try to get a job. And I said, well, I'm going to go to the police academy. I want to be a cop. Right. So I go to the police academy. And they're like before.

Starting point is 00:08:07 And they said, well, we have a class starting in like two weeks. You have to come on this date, whatever date it was. And it's first come for a serve. Wow. This is how it was in 1988, 89, in northern, well, northern Hernandez, southern citrus. Okay, that's in Hernandez County and Citrus County. There's Academy in Inverness. It's a very small academy.

Starting point is 00:08:30 It's still there. But at that time, 50 kids, 50 kids get in. And if you're number 51, you don't get in. Right. If you're number five, you're in. So they said, we open the doors at 7 a.m. be here. So I'm there at 3 a.m. I was going to say, so you stay the night in your car.

Starting point is 00:08:47 I'm there, dude. The night before and stay in the car. I'm in line, and there's like all these people, right? So we go in. I'm like, register, pay your hundred bucks. You're officially in the police academy. That's literally how it was. Wow.

Starting point is 00:08:59 Right. So in the police academy, we had, you name it, we had a guy that was in the 60s. He was going to be a public information officer for the sheriff, but he wanted to be certified. And all he did, his whole life was press, media and all that stuff, but he wanted to be for the sheriff. a new sheriff come because obviously every four years they elect a sheriff right so that guy was in there we had this other guy in there he was in there with his girlfriend he's sitting in the back row and she's taking notes with him like oh maybe she's maybe she's in the academy class too i mean she didn't have a uniform on she's just dressed in street clothes we had these like khakis on and patches

Starting point is 00:09:37 and all this stuff so after about a week and a half next thing you know he's gone and she's gone And I'm like, hey, whatever happened to so-and-so. They go, oh, he couldn't read her right. Yeah, that's why she was going to see. And she was taking the notes for him and verbally telling him what was going on. I was like, you have got to be kidding. The bar is low. The bar was very, very low, right?

Starting point is 00:09:58 For that. Now, they did have sponsorships where actually guys and gals would get hired by the sheriff's officer police department. And they would put you through. But I did a self-sponsor, right? Because here I am with no college, no nothing. And I'm in this academy class, it wasn't any better than the guy. I couldn't read it right.

Starting point is 00:10:13 You know, I mean, I could read it right. Yeah, most of the guys now have experience, like they have military experience or something. There's some kind of experience. You've got to have something, typically. And it doesn't have to be in that field. It could be, you know, it could be anything. It could be a manager of a McDonald's or you ran a hotel or whatever, you know. So I get out of the police academy.

Starting point is 00:10:34 I can't get a job to save my life because who's going to hire a 19-year-old kid with no college, no skills, no background, no resume, but he has a certificate, you know, that he passed his standards for a police certification. So I said, oh, man, you're right, I need to go back to school. So I went back to school, got my two year, got my four year eventually. And then I get- Is a certificate still good? Does it stay good, or do you have to- It's good? It's good. Up to, I believe it's eight years from the time. I got college and you still have your certificate. So I was fine. I was absolutely fine. While I was finished up my bachelor's degree, I actually was with the sheriff's So I had got hired in between that, and then I was working at the sheriff's office.

Starting point is 00:11:12 And the sheriff's office in Hernandez County was great at the time. Thomas Blindlander was a sheriff, great guy. So are you a deputy? I was a deputy sheriff. In the jail? No. Because a lot of times they'll make you work for like a year in the jail. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:28 Yeah. So in Hernandez County at the time, they had Corrections Corporation of America, which was just, you know, this company, you just bring in. You might know of it. I've been in a CCA. Okay. And it's just a business. And they're just contracting. It's on the cheap for the county, so they save money.

Starting point is 00:11:44 Yeah. So I didn't have to do that. I went right to the road. And, you know, when I was an explorer with the state police to shift to being a real deputy, it was total change, right? Total change. Because now I understood, like, oh, here I have a gun on my hip. I have this badge.

Starting point is 00:11:59 I understand what's going on. People are trying to kill me. The first time I ever had a major chase and people were shooting at me was like five months on the job. And I also realized at that time because we were chasing this guy. It's actually one of the first dash cams you can see. You can actually Google it. Spring Hill shootout. And 1990, I believe it was 1994, 1993. And it's a dash cam, the old school dash cams. And we're chasing at Camaro, the guy who was Seattle. And he came out of the house. They had flattened two of the tires on the car. He came out. I'm right there. I get in behind.

Starting point is 00:12:36 Swat team was surrounding the house before they got set up. The guy came out of the house and fled, right? The guy was super flat. We're chasing the car. He's shooting at us with a handgun out the window. And I'm like, wait a minute. This guy's actually shooting at us, right? And I was like, oh, kind of a wake-up call.

Starting point is 00:12:51 I'm 21, 22 years old, right? So he traffic crashes into a pole. And this is where it's kind of interesting because the SWAT team guys had jumped in a bunch of patrol cars. Okay. They all jump out. and they just start spraying this Camaro. It's a Camaro. I'm right there.

Starting point is 00:13:11 My car is getting hit with, you know, all this stuff. Are these ricochades? These are ricochets and bullets, right, that are hitting my car from these SWAT guys that are just going crazy. I'm like, bro, I'm right here. What are you doing?

Starting point is 00:13:26 And I remember rolling out, and I couldn't discharge the gun, right? I couldn't shoot because if I did, I was afraid I would hit them. And here are these. These guys with a lot more experience, just spraying and praying. And here I am going like, what the hell guys? You're going to freaking get me killed here.

Starting point is 00:13:42 And they actually gave me an award best dancer in a shootout afterwards. Like, we don't know how you didn't get hit. Right. So after the shootout, you know, I was a police officer at Hernandez County for five years, just over five years, almost six years. I mean, Wesley Chapel, by the way. Oh. Which is, I don't know if you know where Wesley Chapel. I know exactly where it's.

Starting point is 00:14:02 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're right next to the, I think it's Hernando, Passley, community college. Yes. That's where I got my two-year degree. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, back in what, 1990?

Starting point is 00:14:14 As a matter of it, the Zephyr Hills, you go down the 50, is that 50, 6? You go down it, the Zephyr Hills prison is there. Oh, it is? Yeah. I haven't seen that. Yeah, it's a, yeah, it's not, it's past Morse Bridge. It's basically where it dead ends. And there's a prison, Zephyr Hills.

Starting point is 00:14:37 Really? An actual state prison? I think it's a county. It says Zephyr Hills prison. It looks horrible, by the way. It looks horrible. It looks horrible. I mean, yeah, I know.

Starting point is 00:14:48 It looks like a 1970s school with just draped in concertino wire and fences. And I'm just like, it just looks, it's like it only looks like a prison because of, if you pull down all the stuff, I think, or all the wire. I think it's an elementary school. Right. But we had a guest here that they go in there and they do speeches and stuff too, right? Oh, really? Like talks and about reentry and, yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:17 Interesting. This was a couple weeks ago. But yeah, anyway, sorry, go ahead. So, you know, as a deputy sheriff, I'm arresting people, right? And I was super aggressive. I mean, super aggressive. Like, I would make three or four arrests a night. I was always looking for people with dope, looking for people with guns.

Starting point is 00:15:34 I went to the worst areas and I'd watch the cars, look for them to make mistakes, pull them over. I could just smell it. I'm allergic to marijuana. Okay. So if I smell weed, like, I start immediately just, and this is, remember, this is in the 90s, right? So at that time, like, if you had in your car, someone had a little bit of ganja in the

Starting point is 00:15:54 car, you're going to, you're going to jail. Yeah. That's just the way it was. Yeah, yeah. And if it's over like 20 grams at the time, there's a felony, believe it or not. Right. So I would get up to the car and talk to them and I'd start my eyes of water. I'd start sneezing almost.

Starting point is 00:16:08 I'm like, okay, this guy's, it was like my own little sniffer. You know what I mean? So I was taking people to jail left and right, chases, all kinds of stuff, right? So one time, I'll never forget. So when I was finishing up my degree while I was still a deputy sheriff, we go to the jail. And there's a tour for the students to see the jail. Like, this is the place you don't want to be, right? So we go to the jail and we walk in and it's kind of like a round or a tonne kind of thing with tears, right?

Starting point is 00:16:36 And you have like five tears in there. And all the guys are in their cells and you have a walkway around each one. But when you look, you can actually go on the top of your bunk and look down. And when they saw me, it was like I had probably put, I don't know, 40, 50 people in there or something. And they're all, they're like, Weber, I can kill you. Tabor. You, mother. Taver.

Starting point is 00:16:59 And at the time, I was kind of musly guy. My nickname in, like, the hood where I worked a lot was big arms. Right. So I had like 17 inch arm. I was really big guy. I was young, you know. And so they're like, big arms, you will fucking kill you. They're rattling the kid.

Starting point is 00:17:16 And I'm like, and the teachers looking at me like, dude, what have you done? You know? I said, I put a lot of these guys in jail. I said, I'm just going to go. I went back out. The CCA guys, because these guys too riled down. Yeah, what are you doing? They're going to start throwing piss cops and everything else.

Starting point is 00:17:30 The students are here. I said, yeah, so I left. And they all came out. The kids are looking at me like, what the hell you do? So it was pretty interesting, you know, to kind of see that. And it wasn't, you know, because I had met guys, a lot of guys that I had actually helped. You know, some of these guys, you know, I would see them in a bad situation. They'd have kids and everything else.

Starting point is 00:17:52 And I'm like, man, I'm not going to arrest this guy. Have a story. So one case. So we go to this house. where it's like this kid, like 16-year-old kid's unhinged. And he's unhinged because this girl doesn't want to be with him. And so he goes back to his house. The parents, he's destroying the house and stuff.

Starting point is 00:18:14 We get called. We go to the house. I get there on this kid. The parents are like, he's going to kill himself. He said he's going to kill himself. So I go and talk to the kid. And the kid's looking at me. He goes, I'm not going to self-harm.

Starting point is 00:18:27 I'm not going to. And he starts like quoting words from the statute. This kid read the law. And he understands because in Florida you have this thing called Baker Act. Yeah, yeah. If you have someone that can hurt themselves or they're unstable, hurt others or something, you put them into a 72-hour evaluation. This kid knew the book.

Starting point is 00:18:45 And he's like, no, I would never do that. I don't know what they're talking about. I didn't have enough at that juncture really to do a lot, right? So then I start talking to the parents again. And the parents are like, listen, he's very dangerous. He's going to do something to this girl, this girl that he's all distraught over. And if you don't do something, I don't know what's going to happen. So I go back and I'm like, I had a really bad feeling about this kid, really bad.

Starting point is 00:19:13 But he wasn't giving it to me. But the parents were kind of given it to me, right? So now I have two witnesses, their parents, they seem very lucid, good parents, they're concerned, kids unhinged. I go back to the kid and I'm like, listen, I know about this girl, you know. And he's like, what about her? And he clenches, you know, fuck her. And I'm like, oh, boy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:33 I'm like, I'm taking her. I mean, I'm taking him. Yeah, I'm fucking taking this guy. Something's up with this guy, right? Even though he won't tell me, I have the parents. So it's weak. Right. But in 1994.

Starting point is 00:19:43 Were their body cams? No, man, this is 90. I think he literally said, he said everything that he was supposed to say. I have all the evidence I need. I have all the evidence I need. Listen, I had the parents, right? Right. I had great witnesses.

Starting point is 00:19:53 But my lieutenant shows up. And he's like, I won't say, his name. I swear to Christ, I should have gave him a heart attack like 50 times. A great guy, great guy. And he's like, you can't, you get the guy's in back of your car, you're taking him. I said, yeah, I'm taking him. He goes, tell me what you got. And I told him, he goes, that's not, that's not enough. I said, it's fucking enough. I'm fucking taking. He goes, you're going to get me sued. You're going to get me sued and all this stuff, right? So I'm like, you know what, fucking let him sue me. Right. And I take him to jail. 72 hours. He gets out. Guess what he does.

Starting point is 00:20:25 He goes to the house, knocks on the door, the chick comes. He shoots her in the head and shoots himself on the porch. Fuck. Right. So what do I do? She got an extra 72 hours. I go back. I go back to lieutenant.

Starting point is 00:20:39 I'm like, oh, good thing I didn't take him. Oh, I did take him, didn't I? Well. Right. And he was just kind of looking at me, right? And this lieutenant's great. Don't get me wrong. He actually retired a higher rank.

Starting point is 00:20:52 Super great guy. And I was just young and aggressive. my hair was on fire and this guy's like worried about getting sued you know but it you know i wasn't doing anything crazier you know out of control but i was very aggressive so what sorry go ahead what's the marchman marsh how do you say it marchman act yeah that's more of a drug or alcohol issue okay but it's kind like the baker it's the same thing they held you for like seven few hours right yeah yeah it's more specific to drugs and alcohol and that way if you have a guy that's you know he's crashed out and he's got a kit and a needle and he's shooting when and he's like uh you know and you show up and he hides

Starting point is 00:21:31 everything but you happen to find the spoon that's burned you're like he looks messed up really messed up if you really want to you could probably marchman act him and say listen this guy see him he's really messed up i found paraphernalia i was concerned yeah he might overdose because we had in the last decade over 1.3 million people die from overdoses right and we still have who's that girl that was just overdosed in her apartment, some movie star woman, a blonde hair. Blanchek, who played the daughter and remember the tie-in. She just overdosed. Right?

Starting point is 00:22:02 So we have, you know, Phillips Seymour Hoffman. Remember when he passed away? You know, he had been clean for a while and then he just snapped, right? Because people cannot break free of this, these narcotics. Right. And so, and that leads me into why I went into the Drug Enforcement Administration to DEA. So as a cop, I saw these people just getting, you know, they were dying, they were getting shot in the head as a cop. I remember one time we showed up at this little corner of, we call it walk and don't walk.

Starting point is 00:22:35 And walk and don't walk. And it was basically a crack haven, right? So you have guys slinging dope all day, all night, right? So sometimes I just roll up really fast, hit my lights, open the door. Everyone would run. I shut my door, kill the lights, and drive away. Just to disrupt. Right.

Starting point is 00:22:49 Because I'm not going to go out and chase you. I'm not chasing 30 guys. Yeah, I'm not chasing 30 guys. Now, if I saw someone that was like, you know, really pissing me off, yeah, sometimes you would. And sometimes there's a little field into it. And sometimes we take the cars and chase him in the car because, you know, some of these kids are fast.

Starting point is 00:23:05 And this guy, one time we're chasing this one guy, he jumps out. And there's a ravine that's like 15 foot ravine. And we're chasing him. He didn't stop at the ravine. He tried to jump the ravine. He didn't make the, he falls face first into this. And it's all full of broken. like malt liquor bottles.

Starting point is 00:23:23 Okay. This is like the pit of death. It's bad. I get on my car. I'm like, and the kid's laying there in the water. The water's like six, eight inches, right?

Starting point is 00:23:31 He's laying face down. He's out. I'm like, so I had to jump down in the ravine, slide down, get this kid, you know, get the glass out of them

Starting point is 00:23:42 and make sure he's breathing, right? And I'm like, holy, he's like 15. 15, right? So he's slinging dope at 15 years old

Starting point is 00:23:50 that walk and don't walk. And then I said, who you staying with? He said, my grandma. I said, really? I'm going to go see your grandma. He was like, this kid slinging dope. No, call my grandma, no. He was just a kid.

Starting point is 00:24:03 Yeah. Right? He saw all these people making money. They gave him an opportunity and he said, I'm going to sling dope because that's what everyone in my hood is doing, slinging dope. That's the way we make money. That's the way I'm going to make money because I got no other way out. Well, you do have another way out, but you just don't realize it yet.

Starting point is 00:24:20 Yeah. Because even though I wasn't in the hood, I grew up with nothing. And even me, the kid that graduated last in his class, got a job, went to college, and persevered, right? And I was thinking all these things. And I pulled the kid up, another deputy. And we bring him to the grandma's house. And she starts beating him with a spoon right there, like smacking him, kicking him in the house.

Starting point is 00:24:40 And I told him, I said, if I see him out again, he's going to go jail next time. We didn't even take him to jail. We don't take him to jail. He's lucky to be alive, right? The guy falls down face first. grandma thanks me this kid i would see him he never went back on that corner again he wasn't slinging that i could see i was like oh okay maybe a little impact right right but i had seen other people in that same corner one time we got a call guy shot we go up and this guy he's buying

Starting point is 00:25:07 ten dollars worth of rock and sometimes they would just break off little pieces of soap yeah right or wax put him in a glistine bag and sell it well this guy had returned because they sold him some shit that he he this is like soap he was pissed and he shoots the guy in head shoots the guy the guy comes up to sell him leans forward oh boom oh yeah you're gonna sell me soap boom shoots him in the head with like a 32 caliber so we arrive and the kids kind of crawling still and i go who shot you he's like fuck you star man they call it star man because in florida we have the five point stars you know so he's like fuck you star man i'm like dude you shot in head, bro. Yeah. Fuck you. I don't need. I'm good. I'm like, you're not good. Ambulance came,

Starting point is 00:25:54 loaded him up. But this guy, he was older, he was more hardcore. And the contrast between that kid who would have ended up like this guy who was like 26, 27 or whatever, slinging dope for the last 10, 15 years of his life, right, since he was like 12, 13. That one kid that we actually brought to grandma, maybe we saved that kid from becoming that guy, right? So we saw both spectrums of what you know, the drug trade was doing. And that's why I got interested in DEA. And the first time I ever had a decent seizure, and I say decent, decent, it was five kilos of powder. Right. And I walk up to the car, there's two guys. And I'm looking in the car and you get so good at this, like I knew they had dope in the car. They didn't have because my nose wasn't clogging up. My eyes went watering. Right. Or at least I didn't,

Starting point is 00:26:44 I couldn't smell it. So I'm up there and I'm like, okay, so I get the licenses, I get the one guy out of the car. And then while he's out of the car, I walk up and start questioning the other guy, right? It's like, but I'm by myself. So the stories are not matching. We're going to my girlfriend's house. Oh, we're going to work. I'm like, okay, right.

Starting point is 00:27:03 And they have out-of-state plates and you're coming from, you know, Miami and you're doing whatever, right? So I get them both out of the car and I have them go up about 15 feet in front of the bumper of their vehicle. So as I'm there, I had got permission to do a search, verbal permission. I say, yeah, go ahead and search. I come around to the driver's side, and I see the carpet is a little bunched up. It's a newer car, and I'm like, that doesn't look great. So I start peeling back the trim and all that, and I pull up, there's a trap, right?

Starting point is 00:27:37 Or a clobo, a trap. It's a hidden compartment where they put dope, right? And I see kilos. I don't know what this. is, but I know it's dope. They both stand up and start walking toward me. Oh, that's not good. Dude, they're supposed to be running. They either accept it or run. Exactly, right? They come towards you? No. Exactly. I shut the door. I pulled my gun out. And I told, there were two of them coming at me like this, right? I told the one guy, I said, I'm going to kill you because I'm going to shoot you in the head.

Starting point is 00:28:04 And then I'm going to kick your ass because I can't fight two guys at once. Right. Right. And they both stopped. I said, so you got a choice. Get on your fucking knees. Or I'll fucking kill you. And then I'm going to beat your ass. And you're going to get charged with a felony homicide for what I had to do to that guy. Right. And they both got on their knees. Turn him around. I got some backup.

Starting point is 00:28:22 A trooper came back me up and took him to jail. That was the first time that I had a real dope seizure. It turned out to be like five kilos of coke. So I said, you know what? Listen, that's a lot of powder, but my buddy went to the FBI. He was on the SWAT team with me. I was on SWAT. And when he, I asked him, I said, do you like the FBI?

Starting point is 00:28:44 hate the feds, you know, it seems kind of like glamorous, you know? And he's like, yeah, it's a good agency, but I'm kind of bored, dude, to be honest with him, I'm like, when you're new, you get all the crap assignments, like he's, he's not seeing the good, the really good action stuff, right? He goes, but, but I know these guys like the DEA, I think you'd really like it. I said, oh, okay, so I started researching. I applied with DEA. It took about almost two years to get hired by them. The background, the poly, the psych, the, this, of that. It's like a huge process, dude. Like, I remember when I was in the room in Tampa, they have like these oral boards where you have like three guys that are there, senior agent,

Starting point is 00:29:25 supervisor, and then like another more senior agent. What did you call it an aura board? Oral board. Oral. Okay. Yeah. Oral. Okay. The aura is the aura with this guy? Yeah. The oral board. How do you feel about them? Well, that's what they kind of do. They want to feel you out, right? So I go in there. They know everything about you, right? They know if you're a cop, you're not a cop, military guy, whatever. So we're in there and they're peppering me with questions. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Starting point is 00:29:53 I'm answering everything. And I was married at this time then. So I had gotten married to my now ex-wife. And her father had an aneurysm when we were living out of state at one point. I hadn't moved out of state. And so we moved. And I was only at that one of the first. residents for a short time and they have a whole list of every place you lived you got a list

Starting point is 00:30:15 everywhere you've ever lived and the one guy goes he goes i see that uh you don't like to keep your you know feet on the ground too much and you're not very planted in one place i said why would you say that and he said well you know you were living in this town and you're only there like not even a year and you left and came back so do you have a problem maintaining like residents or a job or i said no actually because by baldenol had an an aneurysicum and he almost died and we had to go back home and take care of him because he's a vegetative state in a bed.

Starting point is 00:30:48 And the other two agents looked at him and they were just like, you're a douche, you're a dick. And then he goes, I don't have anything else. It worked out good. So then, you know, I'm in Detective Bureau at this point. This is two years down the road, right?

Starting point is 00:31:03 I get a phone call and they're like, hey, can you start in a week and a half in Quantico, whatever? And I'm like, yeah, you don't say know, back in 1997, 1998, it was hard to get these jobs. Right. When I say hard, you might have 20,000 people in the state of Florida trying to get a job with the DEA, and they might take maybe 40-50.

Starting point is 00:31:27 Okay. So it's very competitive. Right. You say no, they're going to, you're going to go somewhere else on the list $20,000, $20,000 down, right? So I say, of course, tell my sheriff, punch out. Next thing you know, line to Quantico. I'm in Quantico.

Starting point is 00:31:40 Quantico is where DEA's Academy is now, but back then we actually were in the FBI Academy. A lot of people don't know this. So it wasn't until like maybe 2000, 2001 that the DEA Academy became their own entity. And we shared a range with the FBI. So we're in there with the FBI. And this is where I saw, and my best friend that we were cops together, he was my SWAT commander, one of them. We had two. And he's in the FBI.

Starting point is 00:32:06 So I love the FBI. I have good friends in the FBI. Of course, there's some douchebags in the FBI, too, but there's just like any agency, any job, you're always going to have people that are just horrible and then the good ones, right? So we're in the academy. In my class is 50 people. We had a Shell executive that always wanted to be a DE agent, and he left being a petroleum executive for that. He shows up.

Starting point is 00:32:33 He shows up in this suit, like a $2,000 suit in these really nice oxfords and leather sole. And I'm like, dude, we're up, we got like a Kmart suit on. Like, this guy's like put together really well. I'm like, why would you give up a job that's paying you at the 250 or whatever and become a D.A. He goes, oh, I'm happy. Dude, this is it. This is what I want to do. This is so cool.

Starting point is 00:32:56 And so I was like, wow. And then we had another guy who was like a manager of a McDonald's. Right. And then we had one guy that's a great story. This guy, I won't say his name. He went to a very prestigious law school. I won't say which one. And we're in the back of the class because we're sitting.

Starting point is 00:33:17 Our names are alphabetical. Okay. And so his name was close to mine to Tabor. His name was close to mine. So he's sitting right next to me. And I was like, oh, hey, dude, how you doing everything? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I'm a, you know, I'm a whatever law grad.

Starting point is 00:33:31 School name, law grad. All right. Oh, congratulations, dude. That's great. Okay. So about three months in, I could not stand to sit next to this guy because every time I turned around, well, you know, I went to so-and-so at law school. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:33:48 He's been pushing that. And you want to know something else? Dushbag. You want to know something else? You know where I went to school? And he's like, no, where'd you go to school? St. Leo University. Right.

Starting point is 00:33:59 And he's like, St. Leo. So he never heard of it? He goes, no, that's a very small. school in St. Leo, Florida, just north of Tampa. Good school. It's a little regional school. I said, and I go, but it's not your law school, is it? But we're both sitting here. But we're both, that's exactly what I told him, but we're both sitting here, aren't we? And he looked at me. He never said it. He finally got the hint. I was like, dude, stop, you know, congratulations. That's great that you went there, but, you know, we're both sitting here going

Starting point is 00:34:29 through the same thing, right? So there was a great equalizer in the federal government, Because everyone had certain skills that they brought to the table. You think, what would a McDonald's manager have to do with whatever? You don't think that guy understands retail and business? Right. You don't think he understands when that business is pushing four or five million dollars a year through that McDonald's and how it moves and how you have employee relations, how you're doing HR, how you're doing all workers' comp and all these skills that he gets. You don't think that's going to be important later because it is, right? You don't have to be a cop.

Starting point is 00:35:02 We had a lot of military guys too. A lot of Marines, Army guys. We had, in DEA, you have everyone from Navy SEALs to SF to whatever, right? You just have the whole gamut. And then the cops like me, right? But I get out of Quantico and I go to my first duty station in the Midwest, St. Louisville Division. Okay. And this is in the craze of the 90s.

Starting point is 00:35:24 A lot of people might not understand. But back in, say, 1994, 95, 96, 97, the men. meth craze, the crank manufacturing, the people that were doing all these mobile labs hit the scene so bad, they had fires, trailer fires like every week. We had labs, I'll say, we had over 2,500, 2,600 labs alone in that field division a year. Now, 2,000, think about this. So 2,600 or so labs a year in that field division. That's a lot of labs. Okay. Some of them were a guy would take a shaker bottle with the blister packs of pseudoephedrine.

Starting point is 00:36:10 This is before it was controlled. Take all the blister, you know, separate the stuff, put it in the alkaline from, you know, from the battery, strip the battery and put that in there and shake it. Dry it and then then smoke it. Right. Right. Or shoot it or whatever they were doing. Yeah. And they would do whatever it took.

Starting point is 00:36:25 Some of them were underground, freaking, like they would take a, dig a huge, huge ditch, drive a bus into it. bury the bus, put a stove pipe up. Okay. And then they go in and cook. Funny story. So this era is all about... Killing, killing. That era was all about crank.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Everyone was doing crank. Mexicans started sending it up. The cartels started sending it up little by little by little. What area is this? This is in Iowa. Iowa. No, no, no. St. Louis Field Division is several states, including in Missouri,

Starting point is 00:37:02 Iowa. Did you say that? Did I miss that? No, I didn't say it. Okay. Just sorry. I didn't say it. Well, because when I think of, you know, when I think of ICE, I always think of, you know, Polk County.

Starting point is 00:37:15 You know what I'm saying? Okachobi. Like, it was huge in those areas. Yeah. Polk County used to be the capital of Florida. Oh, I told you. I've said that before. It used to be the capital of Florida.

Starting point is 00:37:25 So when I first got out of the academy, I actually came back to Tampa for about two or three weeks. No, two months. It was about two months before I went to my first duty station. So, you know, and we were always going to Polk County to buy crank. Yeah. Got to get some ice. Got to get some crank. We're buying this.

Starting point is 00:37:40 We're buying that, right? And these were smaller quantities, you know, a lot of people think like DE agents, you know, that are domestically, they're like, oh, my God, they're seasoned tons. No, they're not. They're going out in season five kilos, three kilos, methamphetamine. That seems like a lot. As pounds. That still seems like a lot. But later in my career.

Starting point is 00:38:02 I was, you know, involved with a group I had in Miami where we seized over, it was about 32 tons of Coke. Yeah, but I'm still saying like it's still a keel. That's a lot. That still seems like a lot. I understand in retrospect. Yeah. But that serves a lot of people.

Starting point is 00:38:20 That, not just that, well, you know what I'm thinking? Like, that'll get you a lot of time. Think about it. Yeah. Yeah. That, at least in the feds. Yeah, in the feds. That could be, that could be a 20-year sentence.

Starting point is 00:38:30 At 10 to 20-year sentence, unless you cooperate. Back in the day, crank, if you had 50 grams or more of crank in your possession, it would be a five-year charge. Okay. Prior drug conviction doubles it to 10 years. Oh, yeah. Okay. So then 50 to 500, you go over 500 grams. You're looking at 10-year, double it, 20.

Starting point is 00:38:54 That adds up really quick. And what that did was, and I talk about this great equalizer thing, it just wasn't what douchebags in the economy. academy that I were saying I went to so-and-so law school. Right. Right. It was actually in the street. Even if you weren't a good investigator in some fashion, when you're dealing with those kind of sentencing guidelines, when you would sit down with these guys and you say, hey, listen

Starting point is 00:39:14 to what I'm going to tell you, you're looking at 10 years for this. If you cooperate, I'll get with a prosecutor and I'll do my very best. I can't promise you. But I'll do my best to try to maybe get you, maybe the five and we'll work down from that. Maybe when you make an arrangement with a defense attorney, and the prosecutor, and we can put in a motion to do this, that.

Starting point is 00:39:34 Can't promise you it, but I'll go, I used to say this. I'll promise you this. I will do everything I can to help you get this sentence down if you do the right thing and help us. Right. We did it all the time.

Starting point is 00:39:46 And people say, I'm rat. You're going to be a rat, rat, rat, rat. You spend 20 years in prison, or you say, I'm going to come to Jesus and say, you know what, I'm going to help and save my life again.

Starting point is 00:39:58 Because you're talking, if you're a 40-year-old guy and you're cranked out, right? And your skin's falling apart and you just look like you have pizza face and your total mass. You're wrecked and yeah. You think you're going to live to your 65 or 70? You want to spend the next 20 of those years, the last years you have in prison? I don't think so.

Starting point is 00:40:16 No. Okay. And, you know, I remember we went to this one house. We were doing the search work. And we get to the house and it had been, they had like this preschool that was there, this woman was running a preschool. And that was one of the reasons. Is it a daycare or preschool?

Starting point is 00:40:34 Daycare. Okay. Preschool has to be like license. No, no, no. It's a daycare. Lots of people have daycares in their house. In their home, right? With the little playground.

Starting point is 00:40:42 They watch the neighbor. Daycare, daycare, right? So we see these kids out there playing and we have this guy who had flipped and he wants to cooperate and he says, you know, they're not moving a lot of weight, but have all these kids there. Yeah. And you know what they're doing when they, don't have any any of their crank they will take old containers spray them down a little bit put

Starting point is 00:41:04 them in the microwave and try to crystallize it and then scrape it with the razor blade to get enough to get high you know and that's the same microwave the kids are getting their food in right so we started working it so we found out that at some point they said why are we buying all this crank when we can make our own okay so they started cooking it in the garage now what we didn't know was at first The garage looked totally normal. You'd walk into the garage and it's like, oh, two bay detached garage. The house is here. And then we hit it and we realized we smell something.

Starting point is 00:41:38 And then we hear a fan in the back. There's a fake wall with a hidden door. We open the door. I peek in. It's just a cloud. It's just a cloud of smoke with a dude over a big glass like cylinder cooking off crank. And he has a gas mask on. and he looks at me and he goes

Starting point is 00:41:59 and I'm like no I'm serious I'm like I don't want to breathe this stuff right and I'm like get come here police whatever he's like and he just turns it keeps cooking like we weren't even there right so it's like so then one of the TFOs

Starting point is 00:42:17 guy's a madman good guy but a madman he runs to his car he's a clan lab guy clandescent laboratory investigator guy he gets a mask throws it on he runs in there just just clocks the guy grabs him by the feet drags about he's just like because you got to remember this stuff's dangerous oh yeah yeah he wasn't playing around yeah he's like i'm gonna knock this guy out i'm not fighting him i'm not going to have this thing you know break and explode and fire and everything else he went back in there's all kinds of guys have burn marks in in prison

Starting point is 00:42:53 there's all kinds of burn marks. They have guys burn marks on their face. Pete's got a burn mark. Pete has a burn mark on his arm. He was cooking? He was cooking. This is my buddy. He went to prison for actually got 40 years.

Starting point is 00:43:06 He ended up doing 26 years. Robert Mueller prosecuted him. No way. Yeah. What state? California. In San Francisco because Robert Mueller was a U.S. attorney in San Francisco at that time.

Starting point is 00:43:18 And when Robert Mueller was appointed to be FBI director, when he got in front of Congress and they were going through the whole process, he had three cases that you give that you're proud of. Yeah. Pete's was one of them. Really? Yeah. There were two FBI informants that were actually murdered on his case. Oh, wow.

Starting point is 00:43:40 Yeah. That's why you got 40 years. Yeah. So you mentioned these burns and all this stuff. Oh, there's guys. Yeah, they'll kill you. Blow up your whole house. Yeah, we had guys that we'd find them dead in the house.

Starting point is 00:43:52 house and the gas would be run out in the flame they'd be cooking they weren't using masks and they'd just fall over and die and then the gas would all burn out and it just sit there until someone found them yeah we had that all the time right that case that uh where we went to the house and the guy was cooking the dope in the back yeah burning it and it gave me the finger and all that stuff there was a guy this is right before i went to guatemal there was a guy in the house and he technically was in possession of some crank or proximity to it, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:44:25 And so this guy, I was just going to load everyone up. You know, we had enough take everyone to jail. And this guy was like something about this guy sitting on the couch when we went in, he was all handcuffed and stuff. And we, after we got the guy corralled from the back where he's cooking all the dope, you know, and we go back in. And he's like, dude, had this sad look on his face. He's probably close to 50 years old.

Starting point is 00:44:52 teeth are all black. The guy's a mess, right? He goes, please, I can't go to prison again. And the amount we had on him was like, we're talking a few grams, right? But Fed charge still, the guy's looking, he's going to look at years. Yeah, he's probably, his probably criminal record is off the- Oh, he had like three or four drug convictions. He was looking at probably five, six years, four, a few grams.

Starting point is 00:45:19 Right. Okay. Because that's how it rolled back then. Remember, people were dying from this stuff. There were fires. U.S. government spending so much. Senator Grassley of Ohio, he was the one that was behind all the legislation to push the sentencing guidelines up to try to say, don't do this. If you do, you're getting this much time, right?

Starting point is 00:45:38 This is how much you can it be getting. It's a lot worse than anything else. If you continue doing it, you're going to go to prison, blah, blah, blah. And they tried to do that as deterrent didn't work. No. With drugs, they don't care. They're thinking of right now this second, what do I need to do to get how to? Right.

Starting point is 00:45:52 So I look at this guy and I'm like, I felt bad, man. I actually felt bad. And I said, I tell you what, I said, you're going to work for me for a year. Okay? You're going to give me information, whatever. I'm not going to take you to jail. Oh, my God. Thank you, Jesus.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Oh, oh, sweet mother of God. Yeah, all this stuff. Mother Mary, just relax guy. Okay. Right. So he would pass me information for that year. He kept clean for a year. I didn't take him to jail.

Starting point is 00:46:23 And for the next three or four years after that, he would find me and he would send me Christmas cards. So I would get at the office, like literally, I'd open up a card. It'd be like, Agent Wes, man, life is good. I'm doing great. Thank you, Jim Bob. Right. And he would send him for years. I was like, when I went to Guatemala, because then I went to Guatemala, they would get it at the local office and forward it to me.

Starting point is 00:46:56 Hey, Jim Bob sending you a Christmas card. I'm like, oh, awesome, you know. And then it fell away over time. But that guy, I've never had, I've never had a doper that I've even worked with in any fashion sending me Christmas cards for years. And this guy, he would send me Christmas cards. So that was a win. For me, it seemed like a win. The guy, he wasn't back in jail.

Starting point is 00:47:18 He was free for how many years. years now. It was just that one time. That one time. You never know what that one time is going to do because he probably got multiple opportunities and just didn't do it. It's just that happened to be the time. He said,

Starting point is 00:47:29 fuck it. And I expected that he would just go right back the next week and I'd find him, you know, use the dope again and arrest him or something, right? So, but it worked out good. So, but one time I got a call,

Starting point is 00:47:39 everything was coming from California that started coming from Mexico. Yeah. When the cartels started realizing it was the Mesquo brothers at the time, a Mexican cartel, unheard of now. So they would send dope all the way up to Riverside. Riverside would work these cases really good. And what they would do is they would arrest the people, flip them. When you say flip, we're just making them. So, hey, come to Jesus, cooperate and do the right thing for yourself. They would cooperate. Or do 30 years. Or do 30 years. You know, listen, dude, I can't make you do it.

Starting point is 00:48:11 But if you want, I can help you, right? Okay. And then we would load up the bad guy's cars with 40, 50 pounds of crank. They would fly on a C-130 or C-5, the bad guys, the dope, the car, everyone to us. And this was in Iowa, right? At the time, they'd land. We'd take them out. We'd do a controlled delivery. We did it all the time. It's crazy. That's where I started seeing 50, 100, 200 pounds of crank at a time. That's a lot of product. Right. You're delivering, I don't understand. So these guys, So this guy, this guy, you arrest this guy. In Riverside, California. He says, I'm going to cooperate.

Starting point is 00:48:51 He arranges a flight to come in with, no, okay. He says, I have to deliver this in three days in Iowa. Okay. I have to be there from Riverside, California. If I'm not there, they're going to know and they're going to disappear. Okay. So we say, we're going to bring in Army C-130s or C-5s. We're going to load up a car.

Starting point is 00:49:11 Oh. Your car, because they might be tracking, you know, what license plate, what kind of car. They didn't have GPS and all this stuff back then, right? You didn't have cell phones and things like that. You had brick phones, the big, you see it on TV, the big brick phones. So we would load that all up with the National Guard and the agents from California would fly to us, land in Des Moines. We would take it all off, debrief the guy, set up the deal and say, and the guy would say, hey, you know what, I'm driving in tomorrow morning. I'll be there at 6am. Where am I meeting you? And they would give him an address. Right. So we'd have everything right.

Starting point is 00:49:45 And then we'd bring, quote, unquote, the dope to the location, which we wouldn't. We would have fake dope. And then we might put a few ounces of real narcotics in it. Just to say, as a representative sample, that we actually did deliver drugs for the legal basis of the offense. Right. So we would do a controlled delivery and bring it to the bad guys. And then it was just, they would come out. Hey, what's up, Chamo?

Starting point is 00:50:09 Boom, boom, boom. Take them down. And then that would be that. We did that all the time. we had one case it was 10 pounds of crane in a car 10 and the guy had guns and everything else this guy cooperated flipped highway patrol stopped him on a stop in iowa going across i80 and he wants to cooperate with the conduits is that one of the condoids is that one of the condoes it's the main conduit east to west across the whole country right so this guy stops and then this

Starting point is 00:50:36 trooper knew about the d a task force he called someone and said hey man i found with a dog we got 10 pounds of crack. Do you want it? We're like, does a bear shit in the woods? Of course I want it. So we show up. We do a delivery. We had to have this guy had to take delivery. Okay. He had to turn it over to the bad guy. So we had him leg shackled to the bottom of the car around the brake pedal and something else in the bottom of the car. So, but his hands were free. But we stripped the car of everything. And he was in a parking lot. Supposedly he's going to deliver this. to the bad guy, right? So, but he's shackled in.

Starting point is 00:51:16 He's just like this wave and he can't get out. Because when the guy comes to get the 10 pounds from him, we're taking him down, right? So we're waiting and waiting and waiting. And if you know anything about dope deal, you're going to be waiting a long time. We waited hours. They're not punctual.

Starting point is 00:51:29 He's not punctual, right? So it's not Swiss-trained material. So finally, the dude shows up. He rams the car, does all this crazy stuff. He ends up going to jail. But six of us. He rams the car? He rams one of the police cars when he tried to get away when he realized it was a set, like a setup.

Starting point is 00:51:47 Oh, okay. He tried to ram one of the cars. It turned into a big mess. Right. It was contained. He went to jail and everything else. And it was successful control delivery. But we were doing these things.

Starting point is 00:51:57 Like, for the first couple of years I was there, I was working, you know, I was working probably 75, 85 hours a week, just constantly work, work, work, doing these control deliveries. Because the place was on fire with crank. It was just out of control. And so, you know, after a while, I kind of got, I was like, there has to be a little bit more to this DEA thing. They're just working my ass off all day, like doing control deliveries of all this crank, right? So that's when I started looking at some of the overseas jobs. And the overseas job that I looked at at that time was in Guatemala. I didn't really want to go to Mexico at the time because Mexico was kind of a hot mess with all the methamphetamine, all the product that was going on, a lot of violence in the 90s and so forth.

Starting point is 00:52:38 And I said, well, you know, if I go there, it'd be great, but I had a family at the time. This is before I got divorced. And I had some kids as well. I had three kids. And I said, but if I go to Guatemala, it's a transit country. And the violence isn't quite as bad. And the living's good and the private schools are excellent. So I said, and they have English schools.

Starting point is 00:52:59 All these countries have American schools. Yeah. Okay. People don't realize this, but the American community is pretty much anywhere you got an embassy. They're going to have an American school. So I was like, that's going to be a good place to go. It's not quite as violent, but I'll still get a lot of good action. So when I go to Guatemala, first I go to language school, I had already been taking Spanish for a year before I went to language school.

Starting point is 00:53:21 So I went to language school. I did find language school. Came out speaking, gringo Spanish. I still speak with an accent. And so when I land in Guatemala, the whole office, everyone in the office comes to the airport to greet you. Okay, this is how it used to be done back then. So the boss, all the agents, the secretaries, everyone shows up. And there was probably about 12 people, 15 people at the office.

Starting point is 00:53:43 And they welcome you and get your bags and bring you to your temporary quarters that you're going to be before you get into your permanent housing. And that was a pretty cool impression that I had. These guys are all coming out at 7 o'clock at night. I'm arriving and they're all coming like, hey, you know, congratulations on the spot. Welcome to Guatemala. It's going to be great. We'll help you get your stuff. And we got to this TDI apartment or temporary duty apartment.

Starting point is 00:54:06 And it's stocked with food and drinks and all kinds of stuff for the kids. And I was just like, wow, it was pretty amazing stuff. That's the way that DEA really used to be back in the day. And that's why I joined DEA because I heard such great things about it. So we should start working. And cases overseas are not like you're working in the States because you are a guest. You are a guest in that country. You have no police powers in that country.

Starting point is 00:54:30 You're working with, in this case, we stood up the first one ever in Central America. and it's a sensitive investigative unit. So SIEUs. SIRs are vetted local policemen that work for the national police. And those vetted national policemen are polygraph, drug tested, vetted very, very well. They're brought into a crew and we work with them. And we're basically guiding them through investigations. Okay.

Starting point is 00:54:58 So if we had, which we did have a case, it was called Operation Titan. It was run out of a group in Miami, Operation Titan. Operation Titan was a huge case with Hezbollah and Lebanese traffickers, mixing with Colombian traffickers, and they were utilizing people in different parts of Central America, Latin America, to wash money. So you would get contracts to go get money from the traffickers, right? And the traffickers then would give you a percentage of the money that you're washing for them.

Starting point is 00:55:30 Just make it simple. So they would have meetings. with undercovers in Guatemala. And one of them is a good friend of mine. I'll call him Frank. Okay. That's not his name, but I'm calling him Frank. Frank could speak multiple languages.

Starting point is 00:55:45 You could speak Arabic, French, a little bit of Spanish. You could understand. And he would meet with the Colombians. And the Colombians were saying, okay, feeling them out. You want to move money. You want to wash money that's coming back to us. We want to feel you out first. We're not just going to give you, you know, we're talking.

Starting point is 00:56:04 $10 million or whatever, right? So they'll start slow with like one or two million. And then if you can wash that money and give them back to them, then you get your commission and go forward. Right. But then DEA has a program where we can do that. I won't get into all the details. It's kind of public information,

Starting point is 00:56:21 but I won't get too much into the minutia of it, where we can actually take that money, we can launder that money, and then we'll give it back to the drug dealers. They give us a commission. We do it again, do it again. And eventually,

Starting point is 00:56:31 when we get up to a bigger amount, we just take it all down and arrest the people. Right. You can read about it. You have credibility. You need your, yeah. And we're not talking 100 grand, 200 grand. We're talking millions.

Starting point is 00:56:43 Right. So these guys were meeting. I remember this one meeting we had where Frank, the undercover is going to meet them. Okay. Frank is at a hotel. And Frank does not have a gun. And at the time, it was a World Cup thing.

Starting point is 00:57:00 So it had a lot of security on the instance. of the hotel where they had magnetometers. I tried to give my gun, put it on an ankle. I said, just take this gun, put it on your ankle. He goes, I'm afraid they're going to get it on the magnetometer. I'll be good. I said, well, dude, we already scoped it out. We had our sensitive investigative unit.

Starting point is 00:57:17 We had people inside, like men and women officers that were like at the bar and eating and stuff like that, but they're really just covering the undercover who's meeting with the Colombian narcos. On the outside, because we had spotted this on our surveillance, we have about six or seven armed Colombian bodyguards with body armor and rifles inside of their suits. Like they're just standing there. We can see the butts of the gun or the barrel of the gun. You can see they have body armor.

Starting point is 00:57:46 And their job is, if something goes bad, they're going to come in and kill our undercover or whatever, right? So our job was to counter that. How are we getting counter that? So I told Frank, I said, listen, dude, if something goes bad, if it's going to hit the fan, you need to lay flat on your stomach because we're going to come in there and we're going to just kill everything that's standing. That's the way it's going to go. And he's like, yeah, okay, cool. And Frank had been a former military, I won't say what branch, former military, you know, blowing up, come back to life twice kind of guy.

Starting point is 00:58:20 You can't, you can't rattle this dude, right? So he's like, okay, cool, because he doesn't have a gun. So when the bullet starts flying, he has to be flat as he can. I made that extremely clear because we're just going to command everyone had rifles. So we're just going to, it's going to be messy because the guys with the body armor and their rifles, they have the same thing we have, right? Thankfully, that didn't happen. Thankfully, that first pickup, I think it was maybe $2 million or $2.5 million. We took the money.

Starting point is 00:58:47 We had to store all this money initially in the embassy. It's because we didn't want to fly it out and raise a bunch of flags with the government because we had kind of a permission from the government. but we didn't. I kind of like failed to do some briefings of certain people because I didn't want to grow up the case. All right. We did, but we didn't. Okay.

Starting point is 00:59:09 We could have, I could have done more. But I didn't because I didn't want to shut that in the case. We ended up over the period of about a month and a half. We did more pickups, more millions, more millions. Eventually, I would take these suitcases of money. We're talking monster suitcases. The big ones you see like at the airport, people shoving all the stuff in before they go back

Starting point is 00:59:30 to Columbus. Right. On Christmas, we had about 25 of those things, okay, full of, full of $100 bills, 50s, hundreds, whatever. We ended up, it was about $20 million that we had. I kept putting them in this one room that was our server room. Okay, the server room had our secure server. It had a combo lock on it as well as a key lock. But even beyond that, we just, I kept stacking, stacking, stacking, we ran out a room. We had suitcases filling this room. And they were to the, like, almost to the ceiling. It was like full of money. And I'm like, Jesus. And in every embassy, you have a Marine detachment that protects the classified of the embassy. The Marines are not

Starting point is 01:00:16 there to protect the people. They're there to protect classified. Okay. So these Marines can go anywhere they want inside an embassy, anywhere they want. They can go in our server room. All that money was there. So I told the detachment commander, sergeant, master sergeant, I said, do not go in that room, bro. Because if money comes up missing, he's like, what are you talking about? I said, we got like $20 million in this room, dude. He's like, what? I go, yeah, suitcases full of money. He goes, you can go in because you have the authority to. But if you do when something happens, and by the way, you're all being put on a list that you're going to have to testify if something pops up or there's going to be an investigation about the money.

Starting point is 01:00:58 he's like, no, no, we're not going. We're not going into room, right? So I put stickers. We had DEA evidence stickers, and if you break them, you can't repair them and things like that. Right. So I put like certain symbols or a sign or sign my name or whatever, and I put the sticker in there. Every time we put more suitcases and I have to put another sticker. And eventually that thing was full of stickers that were all fucked up.

Starting point is 01:01:20 Then we had to, you know. So when we go to fly it out, the SIEU is there, but I didn't tell them, even though even though they're very trustworthy, in fact, one guy that was running it was an American guy. He was a former Marine American guy. He had been a cop in Virginia, and he was our leader for the SIU. I didn't want to put him in a position where he had to lie or not say things to the team, but I just didn't want them to know how much money we're taking out of the country like 20 million bucks, right? 20, 25 million bucks, whatever it was. So we loaded up in cars, we're driving to the airport. We have the SIU with us. They're all surrounding it.

Starting point is 01:01:58 us in cars with machine guns and everything else, but they don't know what we have. And the commander pulls up and he's the American. He's an American Guatemalan guy. He just happened to be in Guatemala because his wife was Guatemalan. He was part Guatemalan. And he got out of the military and ended up, you know, being a police officer and eventually just said, I'm going to go back to Guatemala, and be home. He pulls up. He's like, what are we doing? I said, we just got a lot. of money here. So we're just going to get to the airport because we're already in motion. He's like, oh, check. He didn't care. He's like, Jack, gotcha. So then, you know, I had a machine gun in my, I'm driving with a machine gun here and because things go crazy in some of these countries.

Starting point is 01:02:43 You have people down there, the gangs and things like that. They will kill people over oranges. We had one guy who was, I think it was 40 oranges in a cart. This old man was selling oranges from a cart, like on the street. Yeah. And they went and shot him in the head and stole his orangees. challenges. This is the kind of environment you're in. I saw guys that would get off a bus. I'd be at a bus stop. I'd be in my government car, which was all like indiscreet. It didn't have any plates, government, or anything like that. We rolled kind of like locals, but it was a nicer car. And people get shot getting on or off the bus. And then sometimes the body would lay in the street. It might be there for like four or five hours before even anyone shows up to even do anything. And it's not an investigation. It's more of a cleanup. Yeah. This is the kind of environment you're in, right? So we finally get to the airport.

Starting point is 01:03:35 We get all the bags. We put them on two DEA aircraft because we needed two because it was too heavy. And then they took off and went to the U.S., stacked it up. And it was successful, you know, very successful. So that's the kind of cases that we're doing just with the money and the gravity of the situation in Guatemala, fugitive apprehensions. We had one guy. this guy was wanted for sex crimes against children.

Starting point is 01:04:02 And we don't work those crimes typically, right, unless it's part of a drug conspiracy or their kids or giving them narcotics or something like that. A lot of times we do have a cross between these kinds of crimes and drug crimes because they kind of go hand in hand. But in this case, well, it was the U.S. Marshals called and said, we've got to tip this guy's in this one zone. We don't know anything about Guatemala. And he talked to the regional security officer,

Starting point is 01:04:27 which are State Department cops that basically do the protecting of the embassy. And they said, people that are going to know this are DEA because we freaking knew everything in Guatemala. It was great. We were always out. We're always doing stuff. We had great cops. We worked with. And they came and said, we're looking for this dude in this part of the city.

Starting point is 01:04:45 He said, one second. We get on the phones. We talk to a cop. He goes, oh, yeah, yeah, hold on. He makes a couple phone calls. Oh, yeah. We know where which house he's in. So-and-so's sisters, cousins, brothers, friends, friends.

Starting point is 01:04:57 lives in that and they always talk about this gringo that's there and they show him we show him the picture yeah that's him within these marshals giving us the tip to get in the guy in custody was probably about 35 minutes okay it came into the arso we got it we made phone calls we started rolling and the cops we had the the siu guys the vetted guys but we also had a lot of other cops and we're like yeah, this guy's like, you know, a child offender guy, a child. Oh, yeah? You know, like, oh, yeah, okay. Let's hope he runs.

Starting point is 01:05:35 Kind of, no, no, no. We're going to take the guy alive. He's not reaching for a knife or, you know, they were a little depressed. They couldn't smoke the guy kind of thing. You had to kind of talk to him sometimes, you know, before you go do something. Like, no, we're taking the guy alive. Don't. I mean, if he really has a weapon and produces, yeah, it's different.

Starting point is 01:05:52 But we're not just going to do this to this guy. It doesn't work that way. So we all mount up in these cars, literally on the fly. Like one moment you're having a donut and coffee, and next minute, we're in the car, all these cops and pickup trucks because they all pile in the back of pickup trucks. That's how they roll in these countries, some of these guys. So we get to this barrio, which is just on a hillside

Starting point is 01:06:13 with these like little tenement-looking tin huts, basically, right? And this guy comes down off these steps that come down, and it's all washed out water. It's just nasty, dude. It's a really poor, poor area. I feel bad for the people living there because every time it rains, they're at risk of flash flooding. And it's just horrible. Their houses, they don't even have concrete floors.

Starting point is 01:06:36 It's just wood with sticks and, you know, this very thin sheet metal going around with a little roof. It's just very, very poor conditions. So this guy comes down, he goes, and it's just some dude in shorts and like a tank top thing. And the guy walked there, like, you know, do this thing. And he's like, he knew, this cop knows him. Yeah. And he, we all go up. Everyone has these rifles.

Starting point is 01:07:01 The whole town, they all go in their huts. So you see all the door shutting. Yeah. They're like, oh, this is not good. No, it's not good. We're going to get this guy. So he points to the place like this and he just takes off. And he goes into his hut, whatever, down the road and he shuts the door.

Starting point is 01:07:16 So these Guatemalan guys, and we had a prosecutor that came out, too. the prosecutor said we're going to administratively extradite him like on the fly right there's no process no judge we're just going to sign a paper so you get this guy we're just sending him out so the prosecutor's just sitting there like this so we at the bottom by the cars right so we go in the house the guy's in there with the girl we grab them handcuff him drag him out and he's speaking In Spanish, he sees us and we're like, hey, motherfucker, guess where you're going right now? He's like, fuck. I'm like, yeah, you're going to Miami, dude, because we got a warrant for you.

Starting point is 01:07:56 He's like, God damn it. So we drag them, throw them in the back of the pickup truck. On the way there, the fiscalia or the fiscal, the guy that's the equivalent of the prosecutor, signs a document, gives it to the U.S. Marshal. We arrive at the airport. We go the back way, and there's a private jet there, U.S. Marshal's jet. They could throw them on it. And he's like, thanks, guys.

Starting point is 01:08:20 That was great. All in about 35, 40 minutes. And we got the guy and they took off. Amazing work, right? So we get this guy as a child predator, you know, pervert guy, probably hurting kids in Guatemala too. But they don't have the same laws and structure we have. Everything's very different.

Starting point is 01:08:36 Yeah. Because in Guatemala, there are places in Guatemala. I didn't believe this until I saw it. And it's kind of related to what this thing. Why? No one would report this guy in Guatemala. In some of these little towns in Guatemala, I would be traveling throughout the whole country. And I would roll up on this little, like, cafe.

Starting point is 01:08:57 And I'd walk in with a couple of what we call FSNs, Porn Service National workers guys. They actually work with us in the office. They're drivers, their investigators. They help us. They're not the vetted unit guys, the SIU guys, who are their own entity that work with us. They're actually, these guys are more embedded with us in the office. But more for more for helping us logistically and kind of getting us place to place. They know the lay of the land better than we do.

Starting point is 01:09:22 And they know a lot of people. So they help us facilitate things we need logistically. So I remember one time I went this guy. And we go in and there's this old man. He's probably 66, 67 years old. He's pretty old guy. He's sitting with this like maybe 11 or 12 year old girl. And I'm like, oh, that's grandpa.

Starting point is 01:09:45 Yeah, right? Grandpa. Oh, no, dude. Oh, no. So we're getting our food or whatever. And he has the girl's hand. He's kissing her across the table. And I'm like,

Starting point is 01:09:58 right. Dude. I look at it. And I was like, that motherfucker. And I turned. And the guy, the FSS that was with me, grabbed my arm. He said, stop.

Starting point is 01:10:06 You want to fucking die? I'm like, oh, no. I'll fuck that guy up. He goes, you don't get it. This whole town will kill us. I was like, he goes, shut the fuck. Shut up. In Spanish, shut up.

Starting point is 01:10:19 And I was like, what the fuck? He goes, just get the food and let's go. And I'm like, really, bro? He goes, just fucking listen to me. So we go outside. We get in the car. He's like, go. So he goes, in that town, the parents can give permission to these young kids to go out

Starting point is 01:10:38 with these men who rent them basically for money. Right. Sometimes they're intermediate length relationship. Sometimes they're, sometimes they're, longer relationships. Sometimes it's a transactional relationship, but culturally, it's okay for them to do that. He said, if you wouldn't interfere, they will fucking, the whole town will come out and they'll fucking kill us all. Okay. And I was like, he's serious? He goes, yeah, I'm serious. And I saw on live TV while I was there. And as I learned more, as I was there,

Starting point is 01:11:08 I understood what was going on. If they caught someone that was a robber, for example, say a guy was robbing people or robbing a store or something like that, the whole town will come out and get that guy. Have you ever seen the movie Hell and High Water where they rob a bank and the whole town shooting at them and chasing their bank robbers? Watch the show. Okay. It's a TV. It's a movie. Hell or High Water, it's called.

Starting point is 01:11:36 Just like a spaghetti Western? No. It's a movie about two bank robbers, their brothers. And one is a felon. One's clean. but they're trying to save their homestead from the bank, basically robbing it for a moment, in a sense, knowing that they couldn't meet the terms of the loan and the typical, like, you know, little guy versus the big bank kind of thing. And they're robbing all these banks, the Midland banks in Midland, Texas. And because they don't have good cameras, it's kind of, it's not going to be a federal offense because you're not doing it.

Starting point is 01:12:09 They're not FDIC insured. There's all these elements to it the reason why they're doing it. But there's one scene where they go to the bank. and they get in a shootout, and then the whole fucking town comes out and start shooting at them. And they had the whole, all these trucks from the townspeople are chasing them. And this is what some of these towns in Guatemala were like. And you would see on the news, the national news in Guatemala. And they'd be in Spanish, of course.

Starting point is 01:12:35 And today, in Chichy Wanga, Wanga, whatever it was, we had so-and-so later identified to be so-and-so from El Salvador. and he decided he was going to rob this little store until the people caught him and they burned him alive on TV. Oh, and here's the footage. And they show it on live TV. The dude rolling around screaming, ah, on fire where they lit the guy on fire on live TV.

Starting point is 01:13:01 Okay, because they want everyone to see. You go to these little towns and you think you can mess with us. You're not messing with us. This is what you're going to get. That's what the guy was telling me when he said, shut up. Because this is what they're just what they. what they do in their town their parents are aware i had never heard or seen anything of it very very

Starting point is 01:13:20 valuable lesson for me right i had a sally at the at the medium at a coleman and his father was 45 when he was born and his mother i think was 13 or 14 she'd married him which she was he was mexican yeah and uh and he was like yeah he was like he's like he's like he's like he's like he's like it was he said That's in Mexico. He said what, you know, that's how it was. It was like, you know, you could be. He said he, he was good to my mom. He was in 45.

Starting point is 01:13:50 She was happy to be married to him at 13. He said she was, he said, get, they stay married? I think he died. The father died when he was probably when he was when the guy's name was Victor. But Victor was like, I want to say he was a teenager. His father died or something. But he said, yeah. But that's very, he said, that was very common.

Starting point is 01:14:07 He said, these little towns, he could tell you the little town he was in. He said, there's nothing there. And these girls, they can't take. their families can't take care of the girls. He said she was happy. Yeah. That's what he said she was happy. Well, these areas are so economically depressed, you know, and there's, there's no out. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:14:23 And this is Mexico. I'm assuming Mexico's a little bit, doing a little bit better than Guatemala, but who knows? Well, you know, there's some, listen, there's some really great things about Guatemala, Mexico, Central America, fantastic things about all. But what happens is when you have, you know, these, these gangs and these oppressed people and they look for an out and a gang, a Mara Savathruc or DCOcho, or whatever it might be, gang will say to you, hey, you know what, come over here. We'll take care of you. You'll be our family. And in turn, you have to do things for us. But we're going to be your new family. You're going to make money. You're going to have a good time. We'll make sure that you always have a roof over your head and food in your stomach. And they're like, you know, know what? Why don't I do it? And that's why they had such rampant crime with all these Latin gangs and all those things. And I saw it firsthand. And we had the same guy that grabbed my arm and said, shut up, we're going to fucking die, be quiet. He told me, we were talking about a story in a neighborhood near his where this, this was like you, you drive along this busy

Starting point is 01:15:30 street, but there's this little entry spot, only one entry spot to the community. And picture it like a rectangle, right? So you have a road. road going past a rectangle with a little door that comes in for your cars. Inside of that, picture it like a bowling alley, a rectangle with homes on the outer edges, right, around the rectangle. And then in the middle is like a bowling alley. Just kind of picture it that way. And these gangs, these Matasavatruc, or the 13s, MS-13s, they came in one day.

Starting point is 01:16:01 And this is what they would do in different areas. And they would knock on the door and they'd say, we're going to be back. tomorrow, if you don't give us money or this, we're going to take your daughter and we're going to rip your daughter or we're going to sell your daughter. We're going to do whatever we want. So you are going to pay the impuesto or the tax, right? And you're going to give it to us every month. We'll see you tomorrow. They go to the next house. Next house. Next house. So all of the men in this community that night, they got together and they're like, we're not going to allow it. When they come back, there are five or six people in this gang, which was a little clique, what they call clicks, little groups.

Starting point is 01:16:43 When they come back, we're going to fucking kill every one of them. Okay. The police aren't going to help them. Right. They're not going to. Okay. You can call them and be like, they haven't committed a crime. You think they're going to stick around?

Starting point is 01:16:54 You got a guy making, what, $40 a month? You think he's got to put himself out. And a lot of these local policemen, the bosses are on the take and they protect and they get money kicked back from the, from the. from the gangs and so forth, right? So in this case, he said, so this is what we're going to do, guys. We're going to take our cars. We're going to go to one end of the rectangle.

Starting point is 01:17:15 We're going to be at the end of that car. We're going to have like three of them on the bowling alley lined up, right? When they come in and they're walking down the street, we're going to fucking run them over. And then we're going to have other guys with machetes and whatever we have, we're going to fucking kill them. So we're going to let them come in, start rolling into the community, and then just fucking run them over.

Starting point is 01:17:34 So they're like, okay, cool. So all the men got together. and these guys showed up, and they're walking down the street, because there's no sidewalks. Like, it's just kind of like you have a house, a light pole, maybe a drainage thing or something like that. They had nowhere to fucking go, right? They'd have to climb a wall.

Starting point is 01:17:49 A lot of these walls were like 10 feet tall, and then Constantine wire on top or glass. Shards of glass was another one. They'd line it with the top of the walls with concrete, and then put big shards of glass. Yeah, so people would jump it. All the different angles, so they couldn't jump it, right? So these guys come in,

Starting point is 01:18:05 pedal to the metal back them up machete them and then they drug their bodies to the outside of the gate threw them out there and they sat there for four or five hours

Starting point is 01:18:17 until the police someone complained and then the police came and said do you see anything we didn't say anything and drag them away nothing happened so that's the environment some of these people have to live in

Starting point is 01:18:26 and you know it's a very tough environment and they have their own rules their own cultures just like we do in the United States but when you have a country that's that small. You know, Texas is bigger than Guatemala, right?

Starting point is 01:18:38 So when you have a country that small, but you still have divisions of society within that country, everything seems to be more magnified. And when you're not from that country, it's even more magnified because you're even super more sensitive or ignorant to what's happening. And those ignorances and lack of sensitivity to get you killed in those space.

Starting point is 01:18:57 So it was a great learning ground for me. Professionally and culturally, and my language got really good. I started teaching to, the FBI actually asked me to teach for them on migration, gangs and things like that, which I did in Mexico for them. And there was a whole program that I created in Guatemala. I said, I remember when I was watching TV one day, and these gangs were everywhere. I was always in the news.

Starting point is 01:19:25 They had just had a school, they have school buses that are basically public transportation all over. They call them chicken buses. And they paint them all these fancy colors and they put flashy stuff on them and people, it's like they're a greyhound. But it's used much more just to go from stop to stop locally so people can get to work. They can get groceries to do whatever. There's thousands of these chicken buses all over the place. And they're all decked out like kind of like weird paint and they have like silver rods coming out of them and tassels.

Starting point is 01:20:00 And it's it's like a work of art on these buses. Well, there was a real struggle of the government trying to get, this is before Bucle in Bucle in El Salvador. They got put in the state called prison, put all the gay members in jail. Now El Salvador is like one of the safest countries in all the world. I was going to ask about El Salvador what you thought about that. Yeah. So, you know, at that time they were struggling with it. Well, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Starting point is 01:20:24 And I used to go to El Salvador all the time. And it was very dangerous. More for when I came into Guatemala, the police were going to rob me. Okay. So when I would get to San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador at that time, it was just gangs controlled everything. I'd have to get with policemen that would come with me and then they would have their long guns and rifles and stuff so I wouldn't get jacked up, right? But then when I went back to the border, when I crossed into Guatemala, I always had to be worried about getting killed or kidnapped or whatever. Because remember, our cars didn't have diplomatic plates. So this one time I'm coming back from El Salvador, I was teaching. at a conference center on gangs because what I had done is put together a database for prison offenders that were gang members and for people that had been arrested with the Fiscalia or like their district attorney and I was collating all that information so we had because we knew that the gang members were coming to the U.S. committing crimes and when the heat got on

Starting point is 01:21:24 they flee back to their own countries but we didn't know who they really were right right Well, if I had the records from all of these different jails and prisons, and I had to set, my first was a data set that I had to set up, kind of like, let's test this out and see if it works, and then we'll expand it. And then we'll go over every country in Central America and do gangs. And then we'll spread to other kinds of crimes and other data sets that we can use. And we put that database in the U.S. Well, great program, right? well the FBI heard about it and came in and took it all from me in a matter of I'll never forget it because I was asked to brief DOJ in Guatemala Department Justice came down with prosecutors and FBI and they're

Starting point is 01:22:07 like getting briefers in the program it sounds really cool so I briefed it just what I'm doing and next thing you know like they go back to DC they say can you come up to DC in brief us we have some people in DC that want to hear the brief yeah sure I'm like excited because I love doing the job I enjoyed it you know wasn't something something I had to do. This was like something I wanted to do. It wasn't part of my normal job. This is something I took on. Right. So I go to D.C. brief it. Next thing you know, I get a cable and a phone call from the regional director in Mexico. Yeah, you know what, dude, we don't work gangs. We really don't give a shit about gangs. They're not moving dope. I'm like, actually they do, and they actually

Starting point is 01:22:45 protect. And you ever hear of the MA prisons and what they do and how they control things on the streets? and they're like, yeah, yeah, I don't give a fuck. Give it to the FBI. They got it from now on. So those guys, they all, the guy, I remember the guys too, because they all got promoted and they got all this accolades and stuff. And I'm just sitting there going, like, totally left out of the outside. But the good thing was, it did become a thing.

Starting point is 01:23:09 It became a big database thing. And it really led to some good stuff. And more importantly, I think it's going to save lives and bring people to justice that commit heinous crimes in the U.S. and flee and so forth. So that's what I was that was a big win for me in Guatemala, even though it was kind of taken from me. But, you know, you talk about, you know, El Salvador and the MS-13 and all that stuff. At one point, I think they had hundreds of thousands of gang members, like 30% of the population or something was a gang member. And these guys, how savage they are, they will go to get that tax.

Starting point is 01:23:44 Remember that tax that I said in Guatemala? And they, and this is actually an example. sample that the president of El Salvador uses with this woman, they cut both of her hands off when she refused to give her money from her tortilla stand where she would make tortillas for people and sell them, okay? Or papousas, which is like a double layer tortilla with a filling inside of it, and they would kind of sandwich it and then cook it. And it was, they're delicious, dude. They used to buy them by the dozens and freeze them and keep them in my freezer. Excellent. And she refused to pay the four or five bucks a month or whatever because she was probably only making $12 or $15 a month.

Starting point is 01:24:22 And they chopped her hands off. They chopped her hands off. These people, these kinds, there's some people in this world. And I say this very lightly, have seen a lot of death in my time, a lot of death. Okay. There are some people in this world that need to die. And you heard you heard of it. I said, there are some people that just need killing.

Starting point is 01:24:43 They just do. There are people. Those that prison, that 100,000 man prison where he's just grabbing anybody that they think has a fucking gang affiliate. Yeah. And I'm thinking. And I was like, that's a great fuck. That's great. And they still do have due process.

Starting point is 01:25:01 We're just locking them up. And then we're going to figure it out later. And you know, you know, how you don't. And, you know, is that, you know, horrible for human rights? Yeah, sure. It's a violation of probably a violation of human rights because you don't really know if this guy's a gang member. But you know how you don't end up. there you don't have face tattoos you don't have gang fucking tattoos all over your fucking body

Starting point is 01:25:19 and you have a regular job working in a factory and you don't have to worry about ending up in a prison and then having to then having to go through the process of figuring out if you really are a dangerous gang member if you don't have that you're not covered in that you were working a regular job they didn't arrest those people right they arrested the people that look like gang members yeah and maybe that's maybe that's right maybe you quit a month before right give a fuck you'll figure we'll figure it out in the next two years right and that's exactly what he did yeah and there's 60,000 in prison and look what it did it totally transformed that entire country was it wrong for some people yeah okay well yeah you know tough have you seen the video

Starting point is 01:25:57 they they do one before and one after have you seen that video the what before they do a video of the of san salvador i've seen the ones are you talking about like the street scenes The street scene before and after. Of course, it's phenomenal. It's amazing. It's unbelievable. Yeah. And that guy's got like an 80%, 85%, you know, I'm, I'm, what I was more shocked about the percent, the, um, approval rating was that it wasn't 100% like, who are these jazz?

Starting point is 01:26:23 Who's this, who are these, what's this 14% assholes that think it's wrong? Right. The fuck out of here. Well, this must have been your baby daddy that was robbing other people, but you were getting a little piece of it. You're upset about it. Right. Come on, man. stop. Yeah, it's crazy. And I actually talk about it in the book that I wrote on it.

Starting point is 01:26:42 And one of the things I talk about is, is it this book? Infiltrate America, yeah. Shameless plug. Shameless plug. But I'm, I wasn't even going to say the name because I wasn't going to shameless plug it. But since you did, yeah, infiltrate America. There's nothing wrong with that. So, there's nothing wrong with that. But what I did is in the book, I just wanted you to understand the basics of things. I didn't get into minutia. I didn't go too crazy. Who studies about gangs? Who knows about gangs? No one knew anything until Trent Aragua. out and they're like, what's going on with that? We had a problem going way back into the 80s with MS-13 and 18th Street and all these other gangs, right?

Starting point is 01:27:14 We have Texas Syndicate. Now we have all these different gangs, right, Tangle Blast and so forth to Texas primarily, they've been spread out now. But we have a gang problem in the U.S. And so, you know, people don't realize that in El Salvador, when we were sending these gang members that were legally in the U.S., we're sending them there to be housed, oh, man, you know, there was an outrage. we dear that. Oh, these poor people, these poor this, poor that. I'm like, they have no idea how violent and what these people will do if you want to call them people. Some of them are. Some of

Starting point is 01:27:47 them are. And I met guys. I met gang members that had kind of rescinded their membership and left and fled. And they were getting tattoo removals from their face with lasers. And I sat down with this one guy one time at a gang center, rehabilitative gang center. Because I really think some of these people they need and out, you have to provide that out to them because they're not going to get it. You say, well, they could go work at a factory. Yes and no. Some of these places are so deprived that there's no option. When you're born, you're in the gang. You're getting a tattoo at eight years old, right? It's tough to kind of break that cycle if you don't have an out. It's not the United States. So you have to kind of look at it from different lens. But then again, you still have the plumbers

Starting point is 01:28:31 and carpenters that are not gang members. They found their way out, right? So a lot of life circumstance can come into that, but this guy that I had spoken with, I just sat with him, and he had been at MS-13, he'd killed dozens of people, killed, chopped them up, right? And he would tell me, I mean, I killed a lot of people. You know, we robbed and killed, and I did every kind of thing I can. He said, but I have to, I have to forgive myself. I have to move on. I have to regain my self-esteem because what I was doing was just through fear, through this panic and fear that we would place on people. He said, and I became a real animal.

Starting point is 01:29:08 He said, I don't want that anymore. I want to actually do good. I want to, that's why I'm here. He's hiding. He's in hiding because they're going to kill him. You can't just leave the gang. You're going to kill you. And he had all these white patches on his face, like the laser burns.

Starting point is 01:29:21 Yeah. White laser burns on the face because the technology, this was like 2006, 2005, something like that. And they would burn all these tattoos. And a lot of these guys will have them on their eyelids, inside of their lips. You name it. They got it, right? And he was having them slowly removed one by one with doctors that were doing it for free. So they would have these dermatologists and these plastic surgeons doing this stuff for free

Starting point is 01:29:44 with these programs that were funded. Some of the money actually came from the U.S. Try to fund it. And in talking with him, I understood as going back to when I was a kid with my stepdad. You know, everything that I had been through always recycled back to that stuff. And I was like, man, this guy, he's no different than me or you or whatever. And he grew up in this life. And he chose it.

Starting point is 01:30:10 He chose it. I don't know the specifics of the circumstance. But he chose to shoot and hack up these people and kill these people, all this stuff. But he also chose to leave it. And he's risking his life to leave it. I don't know how the opportunity presented itself to him. But he had that opportunity. He grabbed for it.

Starting point is 01:30:28 Right. So I write about that in the book a little bit because it's so easy for us. And I am not a liberal, like crazy, like, free them all. That's not me at all. Yeah. At all. But there is an aspect of that where you kind of look at it and you say, someone needs to have a sense of hope. Someone needs to provide in some sense.

Starting point is 01:30:49 And I'm not the wizard here. I'm not the man behind the curtain. I don't understand how this is going to work. But we have to give opportunities to people. And we do that through YMCA, Police Athletic League. We do that. Salvation Army does it with free. free drug rehabilitation programs across the whole country. And they're one of the, they're one of the

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Starting point is 01:32:29 You just see the stores and they're selling clothing. Well, that's how they pay for all these things. It's absolutely free. Housing, food, everything. That's where all those donations go. So we have those programs.

Starting point is 01:32:40 But, you know, this isn't, we're not just vapor locked in the United States anymore or everything is global, right? All these narcotics. Look at the f***ing all coming from China into Mexico, into the U.S., killing us by the millions, right? Over a decade.

Starting point is 01:32:54 If it's not pharmaceutical companies, companies killing us like they did in the 90s, you know, with all these pain pills, then we got f***in all. What's next? Right? Synthetic drugs that are going to be coming out, even more synthetic drugs. So, listen, I don't have all the answers. I don't know what's going to happen, you know, in the future. The baton has been passed. I'm not a cop anymore. I'm not an agent anymore. That's for the next generation to figure out. But we are not ever going to arrest our way into sanity in this country. It's not going to happen. Are there places for people that need to be in jail? Yes. Are there

Starting point is 01:33:25 Are there people that need to go to the electric chair? Yes, you know. But is that, are these the only two buckets we're looking at? I don't think so. I think we really have to look in how we design our justice system. And I'm not saying change the model and base of what we have with Blackstones, you know, the theory and what we have that came from England and all of our procedures and protocols and laws and so forth. But we have to look at how we're handing out punishment and what we can do. to change it. If we don't, we're just going to be doomed to keep doing what we're doing now is

Starting point is 01:33:59 locking up millions of people a year, some who never lifted a finger against anyone or committed fraud, for example. Right. So, but to get back to Guatemala, so I wrapped up my time in Guatemala and I went to Chicago. I had been divorced now, so my kids were in Chicago and that's why I went Chicago. There's a saying in DEA, if you're not from Chicago, don't go to Chicago. So true, right? I just didn't belong there. I had just been through a divorce. My ex-wife took my kids there.

Starting point is 01:34:32 I hadn't seen my kids. I was cleaned out. Alamone and child support. I was broke. So I go to Chicago. Big city work, right? Big city work. And I'm talking, you know,

Starting point is 01:34:44 you have Jay and Margarita Flores. I was just going to say, did you know who Jay? Do you know who the Flores brothers are? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I've talked to Jay. Many, many times.

Starting point is 01:34:54 Yeah. He's always saying he's going to come on the program. He's not. But he's always saying he's going to. Yeah. Yeah. I talked to J2, surprisingly, after you hear all the stories that I'm going to tell you. But basically, we were a very nice guy.

Starting point is 01:35:08 Yeah, yeah. Very nice guy. You know, you would never think you'd talk to him. You're like, the fuck out of here. It was a long time ago. He hasn't done, you know, he hasn't committed to crimes. But they also weren't, they weren't killers. You know what I'm saying?

Starting point is 01:35:20 They, well, maybe they were. Okay. Well, I'm not saying he was a killer. Yeah. I'm not saying that, but people were killed, unfortunately, around him as a result of maybe what he's doing. But it's not like he was ordering the hits on it. Yeah, he wasn't El Maw. What's his name?

Starting point is 01:35:35 Is it Muccio? In, uh, fuck, it. Like, he wasn't El Chapo. He wasn't Mayo. He wasn't. He was working directly with El Chapo. I know, but I'm saying he wasn't ordering that I know, like, hey, he wasn't enforcing grab these 10, these family members and kill their children because the father ripped me off.

Starting point is 01:35:57 Yeah. And for the audience, who are the Flores twins? What are they mostly known for? So the Flores twins, you can look them up, Margarito and J. Flores were some of the biggest narcotics traffickers in the United States. And this is going back to like 2006, 2008, 2009, a little bit before, a little bit after. but that was the years I was there in 2007 to 2010 till mid-2010. And these guys were moving tons of powder, H. We worked primarily.

Starting point is 01:36:31 I say I was a group supervisor. I'd promoted to go there. So I had a bunch of Chicago cops, a few agents, and we were dedicated to seizing money. All we're doing is ripping money. That's all we're doing is ripping their money. We seized around $32 million, $33 million in the two and a half years I was there. So we would get a tip, maybe an informant tip or some other tip, it would come in and say, hey, we got a stash house.

Starting point is 01:37:00 This stash house looking at, you know, it's a single story at South Side and say Cicero. Cicero is a very heavy Mexican-Latino area. Okay, Chicago is the second largest Mexican population in the United States behind Los Angeles. So it's a heavy concentration of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals. A lot of be legal. So we would set up on the house. We wouldn't just go do what's called knock and talk. When you do a knock and talk, you would, they'd come to the door and you say, hey, how you doing?

Starting point is 01:37:37 Hey, my name is so-and-so. You might have we come in and look for dope and drugs? and money and guns and things like that. And they were like, sure, come on in. Now, that's not what we were doing, even though we did that sometimes. A lot of times. But first, we want to get an idea of what's happening at the house. So we would set up on the house.

Starting point is 01:37:54 So you might have a house on a block. And this is pretty dense populated areas, Cicero. I don't know how many people are there. So you have a city of 70 million or 70,000, 60,000 people in this little area. And these are all homes from the 1950s. So they're small little single resident homes, two or three bedrooms, one bathroom kind of home. We would sit up and we would see people, number one, we'd look at the house, a lot of security cameras. If we saw a lot of security cameras on a house that was worth about $70,000, we're like, what's going on here?

Starting point is 01:38:27 They're protecting their valuables? Yeah. Yeah, their valuables are cash or dope, right? Right. So. Because if they had real, if they had legitimate money, they wouldn't be living in this neighborhood. And they wouldn't have, you know, 20 cameras. You know, four in their garage and, you know, 18 around the house and all this other stuff.

Starting point is 01:38:43 So we would watch it and oftentimes we would see a person would come with a bag, heavy bag, like a duffel bag. Walk into the house, come out without duffel bag, go. We'd tail that guy to see where he's going. We'd watch him. Maybe he's meeting people, getting other little bags. And then eventually when he get enough little bags, he'd put him in a big bag and bring it back to that house. Right. So what happens is these people are all, when they leave the house, they're doing what's called pickups.

Starting point is 01:39:12 They're picking up small amounts of money from people that own money because they fronted or they gave them on consignment. They gave them the dope, whether it's H or powder or whatever it might be. They're giving them, crank, whatever it might be, then they have to pay them back. And then they collated in one spot. In that spot, they have to count it. And then they have to send the money to a place that's going to be doing the transportation because that money's going back to Mexico. Right.

Starting point is 01:39:41 Okay. Or it's going to California or it's going wherever it's got to go because you've got to pay off the Mexican cartel. So our goal was to identify every piece of it if we could, right? And I'll tell you this one story. So we're sitting up on this house and we have good information. There's going to be maybe two to three million dollars in there. the house, right? And this is all Jane, Margarito, Flores is dope, money. Okay. So we know we're

Starting point is 01:40:11 on the right cruise, right? But we don't have all the details because it's so hard. He has such a huge labyrinth of things that he was doing at the time. And he was pretty good. His people were pretty good at protecting themselves and using safeguards and things like that to kind of stave off law enforcement. But we're pretty good. We're DEA. Right? So we're pretty good. So we are setting up on this guy and he's going all over town, this one guy. And he's doing the pickups, getting a little bit of money, going back to the house when he gets enough, fills up the bags, goes in, boom, boom, boom, boom. While the third or fourth trip, he comes out, we said, when he gets the next trip and he goes in, we're taking it down.

Starting point is 01:40:53 So he goes, he drops off a couple duffel bags. We take him out. He meets with some people. So now we have a team of agents. We have helicopter, 20 guys. And this dude that left the house meeting with the other doper, they have no clue we're watching them. But we got like 40 people on them in the helicopter and everything, right? And the guy he meets with goes somewhere. So we're like, take that guy away. See where he's going. Let's see what he's doing. Turns out he was doing nothing. Okay. He was just going, whatever. The guy that had dropped off the bags, the big bags, he drove out in the middle of nowhere. Myself and another guy, a task force officer, followed him, way out into suburbs.

Starting point is 01:41:38 And then we come up this hill, this whining road. It's residential, but the homes are like acre lots and stuff, half acre lots of things. I'm like, why is this guy going? We've never come out here before. He comes over hill. He comes to this garage with four or five large bay doors and tractor trailers in them. And I'm like, and he goes in there. He goes and talks to someone.

Starting point is 01:42:02 He's in there, right? I take out my binoculars. It's just me and this task force guy. And I'm looking through my binoculars, and I see they're fabricating traps. They're fabricating voids and space inside these trucks to put dope and money to transport either north and south, whatever it might be, right? They're manufacturing all of these traps in like five rigs. It's fucking huge operation, man.

Starting point is 01:42:27 I've never seen anything like it. And I saw a lot of shit. And I'm like, this is incredible. So I tell the task force guy, I go, hey, we got to stay here and we got to take this down. We need more people. He's like, fuck that. No. I'm going back to the Buck and Money House.

Starting point is 01:42:46 And I'm like, bro, no. You know, you got to stay here with me. I'm going to be alone. He's like, fuck this. He's pissed. He throws his radio down and he takes off. Now, luckily, I had called and got some people coming. He took off back to the money house.

Starting point is 01:43:01 And I'm like, what the fuck is this guy doing, man? You know, my spidey senses were going off. Like, what is he so worried about the money for? This is a huge operation. Like, we take down this trap operation. It's like 15 dudes in there fabricating full-time every day traps and rigs. You know how big that is? It's big.

Starting point is 01:43:22 Now, what I didn't know that I found out later was they actually had another trap shop just down the road for cars, little cars, passenger cars. I missed it. I didn't see it. I mean, what could I do? Well, the guy just, he went to the wrong thing. He just went to the one place, right? So that guy takes off. More people come. We go and take it down. And these guys are all illegal. Everyone's fucking illegal from Mexico. And they're all running, scrambling, grabbing people, handcuffing them and stuff. And I just remember looking at these traps in the car. And they were enough just, you know, suitcases of money. I knew I had seen millions and millions of dollars already.

Starting point is 01:43:59 We had seized millions and millions of dollars out of Jay and J. Flores' houses, his stash houses. Right. Like $32 million, dude, that was going to Chapel Guzman, right? Supposed to go to Chapel Guzman. Right. He took it off. It became Uncle Sugar's money, Uncle Sam. So I was really proud.

Starting point is 01:44:17 I'm like, wow, this is so cool that we got this. Anyone could go out and get money. Anyone could go out and get dope. We took down a trap operation. You just don't hear about it a lot. There are guys that dedicate their whole law enforcement career to traps, literally, okay? And I'll tell you, if you don't have experience with trap stuff, like these were sophisticated traps that were built into the rigs. And we missed, I found out later how we missed it out of Jay's truck, one of his trucks.

Starting point is 01:44:47 We missed $10 million in airfoil on the truck. You know the airfoils, that little curve thing that keeps the wind going over the trailer on top of it. the tractor trailer. Okay? They had a trap inside of the airfoil. We had done surveillance on it earlier.

Starting point is 01:45:01 This is before the take down the trap house. We had done surveillance on a warehouse where we knew there was supposed to be a money transaction moving a big rig. And we saw the big rig come out,

Starting point is 01:45:11 but it was fucking totally when we stopped it, totally empty. Everything was empty. We had a canine. We were drilling holes in the roof because the canine was alerting on the roof.

Starting point is 01:45:22 Right. Because the airfoil. Right. And we didn't drill the airfall. We missed $10 million in the airfall that night. Big lesson learned because we had cameras that were fiber optic. We drill a hole and put a camera in. If we just would have went on top of the rig, it was a genius design, by the way.

Starting point is 01:45:39 But they'll never get away with that again because that's the first place I always checked after that was airfall. Okay. And so, I remember, and Jay and I had that discussion on a phone one time. He was kind of chuckling. I'm like, you, motherfucker. I was like, dude, because we see. I think it was $7 million that same night. So we would have had a $17 million seizure that day if I would have got the airfall.

Starting point is 01:46:02 So that one was tough to take. I wrote a story about a guy named Carrie Woolsey. And he said the first time, he was selling, he was just selling wood. And then a little at a time. And they were fronting it. There was a Mexican that was, you know, it's so funny, you talk to him. And anything I read about him was all cartel, Carl's Charles,

Starting point is 01:46:25 he was like, just this Mexican guy, you know? Yeah. It was always like, it was just a, and I'm like, he's like,

Starting point is 01:46:30 you keep talking about a cartel. I'm like, well, that's because the articles, all of your discovery, everybody's, you, you know,

Starting point is 01:46:37 you were dealing with the, the cartel. He's like, he was just some Mexican. Yeah. But he said one, he kept fronting it, you know,

Starting point is 01:46:43 if it was, you know, 50 pounds, then it was a hundred. Then he was like, he said, then one day the guy shows up at our, he said, which he said at the house I was storing it.

Starting point is 01:46:53 I'm like, the stash house? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah. Well, a guy lived there. Like, okay, that's just your broke buddy that you gave a thousand dollars a month to pay his rent allowed you to keep the stuff there because you don't want to keep it at your house. And he said, he pulled up in an RV.

Starting point is 01:47:10 And the guy gets out and he's like, hey, what's up? He said, here, you want the stuff? He's like, yeah, come on. He said, see, can you find it? He said, look around. He's like, what do you mean? He starts looking in the cabinets. He's like, there's nothing in the cabinets.

Starting point is 01:47:20 He said, I look everywhere and we're like, where is it, bro? Like, he's supposed to drop off like 100 pounds or something. And he looks at him, he's like, you know, you can't find it. He said, here, he walks over the radio. Yeah. And he said he turns the radio. He clicks something. And then he pushes in the next dial.

Starting point is 01:47:35 Yeah. And he said, all of a sudden, he said, and a little square of the carpet. He said, it's carpet. The whole thing's carpet, but just a little square in the carpet. He's like, like when it went down, you couldn't even see him. It was seamless. Yeah. He said it suddenly comes up because it only came up about this much.

Starting point is 01:47:53 Yeah. And it was on a little hydraulic. Just enough to get it. Just enough to pull his hand and the guy pulls out the, it was a black, all wrapped in tape and everything. But he said it had a, but it was connected to with a little, like, just like six inches of rope. He said, it's one long rope. It runs through all of them. He said he pulls it out and he pulls the next one out and he pulls the next one out.

Starting point is 01:48:17 And it's like, it's like 800. or a thousand pounds of whatever, you know, of, and this is all just- channel in there with the rope. Yeah, just one. And he's like, he's like, they're ripping it off or cutting it off and handing it, and hand it and hand in it. And he said, if we get in there, we start piling it up and piling it in before, you know, the kitchen table's full, this is full.

Starting point is 01:48:37 He's like, you can't imagine how much stuff they had stuck inside of this RV that you could not find. He said, and when he turned that switch and it went back down, he said, and he just kind of rubbed the carpet. He said, you couldn't see anything. He said, you'd never know that they'd taken this night, this 1980s style shitty trailer and just done something with just raised the, raise it up this much. And it just, he said, but you realize how much space that is. Right. And he was like, you'd never find this. You'd never find this. I mean, that's what these guys were doing, man. And then commercial trucks. Yeah. Then there's that big, there was a big case where they arrested the guy who was making

Starting point is 01:49:19 the traps. You know, where he was saying, like, I have no, people are bringing me vehicles and saying they want a trap, but I don't know if they're going to keep their valuables. I don't know what it is. And they are, of course, the government saying, you knew it was for drugs. And he's saying, I didn't know it's for drugs.

Starting point is 01:49:36 He goes to trial, he loses. Yeah, right. I forget what he got. You know, because they had him involved in a conspiracy. He's like, I've never seen drugs. What are you talking about? It doesn't matter. You knew damn well what was going.

Starting point is 01:49:46 Of course, they get a few guys on there. He said, no, he knew what he was doing. It's kind of hard to say I didn't know. Yeah. Oh, I just thought people who these guys are branded. They have this little, they just wanted a little trap. I don't know if he's going to keep his wetting there. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:49:59 It's for groceries. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's they're extremely inventive. And of course, they have so much money. Yeah. They have so much money. Yeah. You know, so you have enough money.

Starting point is 01:50:12 You can get all kinds of people. It's like the tunnel systems that, that, that, you know, if, if you you can spend half a million dollars on a tunnel system or a million or two million dollars on a tunnel system because you only need it to work for a month for a month you're running so much you've made so much money on that thing it doesn't matter if they catch it within a month or two months it doesn't matter if you're doing 10 of these and they catch eight of them you only need two to function for six months to a year to pay everything back and then some and if it can go a few years it's way it's even more even worth there even more money i mean we seized tens of millions and

Starting point is 01:50:49 it was just a drop in a bucket yeah we're probably probably seasoned me 30% 20% in that so these guys were making you know uh just toll toll money yeah and uh you know we we were we were so busy this is how busy we were so we would have i would get a phone call because i was a boss hey we have three tons of marijuana do you want the case to do a controlled delivery I'm like no time for that you know like I'm not dealing with three tons of marijuana

Starting point is 01:51:22 what are I going to do with three tons of weed dude well we seize it blah blah I was like give it to someone else I don't have time for that shit you know and then I tell I told my ASEC one time my first AISC one time and he's like wow Jesus Christ

Starting point is 01:51:36 we could have got a stat on it at least you could have just taken it from and stated it I'm like, we'll have time for that, you know, because everything was a stat, statistic. Oh, yeah. So you seized three tons of weed. Well, who cares? But for him, he wanted all the stats. Yeah, yeah, it looks good.

Starting point is 01:51:52 It looks good. I didn't give a shit about that because we're running and gunning every freaking day of the week, man. I worked so much. When you're doing these surveillance operations, you have to understand. You're getting in your car. You aren't going home for like a week or three or four days sometimes. You're in your car. You're pissing on the side.

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Starting point is 01:53:37 exclusions apply. See sight for details. You'll meet with another agent and you say, I got to sleep for two hours. You sleep in the car. He stays awake and then you rotate because you're just going. Sometimes I remember we would get in the car. This wasn't Chicago. It was another place. We would get in the car and we'd leave Des Moines, Iowa and then wake up in St. Louis, you know, like three days later. You're like, what the hell am I doing? You know, just living on coffee. So that's the way it was because, you know, the guys that were running the dope, they had, they had the money, They had the time. They didn't have to worry about a job.

Starting point is 01:54:09 All those different things, you know, and that was their job. Our job was to follow them. So it's kind of like this mutual existence where we had a codependency on each other. But, you know, so Chicago was great. You know, we had guys that were getting chopped up and people, they were going to, people would go to collect dope money and zip tie the whole family and then shoot them in the back of the head. We had corrupt cops that were actually working with drug dealers. I'll tell you, remember that one task force officer?

Starting point is 01:54:38 I told you about got mad through the radio. Wanted to go to the money house? I remember, I went back to my ASAC that day after we seized, you know, whatever it was, $5 million, $7 million that day or three and a half or whatever it was. And I said, something's up with this guy, man. I don't like that because why was he so worried about the money house? Right. And then about a month and a half later or so, I heard he got arrested.

Starting point is 01:54:59 A state trooper saw him on a traffic stop with money, and he took like a bundle, like 10 or 20, 20 grand is stuck in front of his pants. The trooper saw it, grabbed them and arrested him on the spot. So that guy... He figured this is an opportunity to... That's what he was doing. Yeah. Yep.

Starting point is 01:55:15 And I made it clear because, you know, big city police work. You're not, not everyone's going to be clean. Yeah. Right. In fact, the guy on my task force is going to federal prison for a bribery case of some fashion. A guy was on my task force. And I remember I had a discussion with him and another guy because there were some,

Starting point is 01:55:34 some activities that I didn't like that looked bad. It wasn't illegal. They didn't commit a crime, right? But it smelled bad. I didn't like it. I won't get into details. And I remember I said, we're going to have a cup of coffee and went across the street. If I catch you guys doing something, if you, if you, if I catch you stealing, if I catch you doing anything that's criminal, I'll fucking arrest you myself.

Starting point is 01:55:57 So that's fucking crystal clear. They were cops on our task force, right? I said, so if you think you're going to get away with that, I will fucking shit down your throats. Just so you know that, make it very clear. And they hated me. And that's good. Right.

Starting point is 01:56:11 Because I don't want, I don't want corrupt cops liking. Now, could I prove it? No. But I had been around at this point. I'd been a cop almost six years. I was a DE agent this time for, what, 12, 13 years. Right. I knew what I was talking about.

Starting point is 01:56:28 I knew what I was looking at, even though I was going through a horrible time. It was very tough adjusting to working as new supervisor, not seeing my kids, financially, I was broke. It's a really tough time. But one thing I made it crystal clear was, if you think that for any second of the day that I'm going to allow any of this to go on underneath my watch, my watch, it's not going to happen. And they hated me for it. And that's okay. And I remember we had one situation where I got a call from one of the lead agents.

Starting point is 01:57:01 he was at a house and I was doing paperwork or something like that. Like, hey, we're going to see some money on this house. You might want to come out. I'm like, okay, cool. So I jump on my car, red lights, siren, down the highway on the, you know, to get to these places, Chicago traffic's horrible. You've been to Chicago, I'm sure. It's just terrible, right?

Starting point is 01:57:20 So I'm on the breakdown lane just like, woo, woo, woo, woo, trying to get to this house. So I get there and I come into the front of the house. And it's, like I said, single story, basement, 1950s, Cicero kind of home, you know, old school 50s working class kind of home that turned into kind of like the hood, right?

Starting point is 01:57:40 So I roll into the house and there's an agent, he's standing there, pacing back and forth. I said, why the fuck is everyone? Because all the cop, well, unmarked cars were outside. He goes, they're downstairs. What do you mean they're downstairs? Downstairs.

Starting point is 01:58:01 And I'm like, why aren't you downstairs? downstairs I like what the fuck dude so I opened the doors I'm walking down the stairs there's a pile of money on the floor and there's like

Starting point is 01:58:15 six cops standing around and they're all looking at each other and like it took me like 20 minutes to get there so by the time they got in got the money I mean they might have been standing there for like maybe five six minutes or something I like

Starting point is 01:58:29 and the one guy the one cop I'll never fucking forget this guy He turns, he puts his hand on his gun and he looks at me. But the look he gave me was like, you fucker. Like, he had that look like, you're fucking me out of my money. Right. This is my interpretation, obviously, right? But you know when you've been doing this stuff for a long time, what's he have his gun on for?

Starting point is 01:58:57 I was like, what do you get to shoot me? Right. And he just takes his hand off at God. Like, give me the fucking money bags. Right. What are the money bags? policy is when you have money like that, you immediately put it, you photograph it, you have witnesses, you put it in a bag with a serialized self-seal. And you seal that bag. And then the

Starting point is 01:59:16 guy signed that bag, the two witnesses. And then two people have to stay with that bag. You seal it immediately. You don't wait around. They don't shoot the shit. You think they're waiting to see which of the first guy says, which one of you guys? How much are we taking? You guys are going to say, fuck it, let's grab this much. How much are we taking? Or maybe not. I don't know. But when that guy turned to me and put his hand on his gun and I'm looking, you know,

Starting point is 01:59:42 and why were they doing? What were they doing? You don't have to go around in a circle around a bunch of money. Yeah. Right. Job, dude. Let's go grab the bag. You know exactly what.

Starting point is 01:59:52 Okay. Why isn't anyone searching the rest of the house now securing the house, get a search warrant. Why isn't anyone outside the house posting up? because when you're at these homes, perfect case in a case in New York was they were inside the home searching, the wiretaps at the DEA headquarters in the local headquarters,

Starting point is 02:00:14 they were like, do you want us to go get our money back? And the boss is like, no, let it go. We can go. We got enough people. They're like, no, no, no, let it go. So I learned a lesson in that. when you have those phone calls coming in, just because your cops in a house

Starting point is 02:00:31 doesn't mean they're not going to come in and try to take their money back. You're taking millions of dollars, millions. Okay? If you don't think that your life's in jeopardy when you're doing these operations, they are in jeopardy. If you don't watch your ass,

Starting point is 02:00:43 you'll end up dead. Okay? So why weren't, we always posted people outside, front and back. So you have a heads up if people are coming down the street. You get a marked unit there with the lights on.

Starting point is 02:00:53 You get whatever you can to show a presence, a force, right? And they weren't doing it. and I didn't like it. Now, could I prove it? Right. Did I believe it? Yes.

Starting point is 02:01:03 So the cop that was at the very top, he just wanted nothing to do with it. He was like, I'm not going to be down there. That's right. I know what these guys are thinking. I don't want anything to do with that. That's right. And he didn't want to tell you, I think these guys are about to rip off this money or these are fucked up.

Starting point is 02:01:16 He just was like downstairs. He didn't have the balls to confront him. Right. Because. Listen, these are the guys that are kind of backing you up at times, too. You know, look at the, what is it, the, is it, shit. What was the movie, Serpico? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:01:33 You know, at the end, it goes in the door, these guys don't have to fight. It doesn't take much to get your partner killed if you just step, you just don't have, just, you just have to be a little bit slower than you really could have been, and he gets killed. This is me. I'd rather be fucking dead than to surrender my fucking honor to a bunch of shit bags that want to take money. because that taking of that money is a betrayal to the public trust. It's a betrayal to yourself. It's a betrayal to your family and everyone else around you.

Starting point is 02:02:03 That's how seriously I take that. So you want to fucking kill me? Kill me. And I made it clear to all of them. I made it clear. Everyone knew, especially those two guys, the one that's going to Fed prison, like I said, I don't have any concrete evidence of anything that he did wrong. I just had a hunch.

Starting point is 02:02:21 There's nothing there, right? But I made it clear to them. see something, you will go to fucking jail and I'll put the handcuffs on you myself. Okay? I didn't care. I still don't care. Okay. I've taken my chances this long. I've successfully

Starting point is 02:02:36 I've done a lot of shit. And so, and I can always look in the mirror and say, you know what? That guy that you're looking at, he never took a fucking penny. Okay. I never took a penny. I did this job because I wanted to go out and do good things and fun things

Starting point is 02:02:54 and enjoying myself. I wanted the action. And that's exactly what I did. And Chicago was a big part of that. And it was a good experience. And I'm not painting all these cops is corrupt. That's not what I'm doing at all. Because there were great cops there, right?

Starting point is 02:03:06 But there's a handful or a few here and there that you're going to run into that you might suspect that could be corrupt, right? And I ran into that. But I didn't run from it. I fucking took it head on and made a declaration and put the flag right there and said, cross it and see what happens. Were you there when the Flores brothers went down or when they were cooperating? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:30 So we had two groups in DEA that were investigating this. We had a big meeting. Who's going to take on the case of the twins and who's doing the money? We ripped all the money. The case, we did pretty much everything. But we went to a meeting and there was a little bit of funny business that went on at the ASAC level, which is, I was a group supervisor. So you have agent group supervisor ASAC. And the other group won out because of some funny business that was going on. So they were

Starting point is 02:04:03 allowed to go get Jay and arrest them. To be honest with, I didn't give a shit. I just wanted to, you seen the movie heat. For me, the action is the juice. I just wanted the action. I just wanted to go out and get these guys. Were they big? Was it a big case? Yes. But we were doing just as important ripping the money and all the things that were going to be used eventually. for the case anyway. So when they were arrested, I'll never forget this is great. And now, you can talk to Jay. You'll contest this. It's a friendly contest between us, him and I. So I hear all this music, like, I hear all this Mexican music, like Banda. And I'm like, what hell is that? It started around from my office. The cells in the DEA office at, I think it was

Starting point is 02:04:47 on 19th floor, 18, 19th, 19th, 4. Yeah, 19th floor. They were right down from my office. We have these cells. We bring people in, process them, and before we bring them to the Uris Marshalls in the courthouse. Okay. So I hear all this music, and I'm like, what the fuck is that?

Starting point is 02:05:03 So I come around and I see all these agents outside of the room. I'm like, what's going on guys? And they're like, oh, we got the floor as twins with their family. I'm like, with their family. They're in the whole, now everyone knows that he was cooperating. Right. And the story's already out. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 02:05:21 So I'm like, the fuck. So I opened the door and I walk in and there's Jay and his wife and the kids and everyone's there. And I'm like, to me, and I said this to Jay and he's like, I don't have enough party. We're just visiting my family. Well, to me, it looked like a goddamn party with tacos and everything else, right? And I'm like, dude, that looks like a fucking party to me. It looked like a party.

Starting point is 02:05:48 Music and food and you're all laughing. But when I walked in, I know he has to remember this. And I've never asked him this, but I might ask him this. Do you remember when I came in that day? I think he does remember because he was so pissed off that I said, it's a party. You're just partying. So I walk in, I'm looking.

Starting point is 02:06:04 I'm like, what the fuck is this? Like, might as well have balloons and beach chairs. It wasn't that bad. But you get the point. So, and I'm like, oh, fuck. And I look at the other agents and they just kind of look down like, oh, yeah, they're just visiting family because they're cooperating. So they wanted to bring family in and have everything good. It was all blessed off by prosecution. Yeah. You know, just, you know, so they had a little bit of hope.

Starting point is 02:06:29 You just didn't know that. Yeah, I didn't know what's going on with that because I'm not working that side of the case. So I walk out and the agents are all looking at him and like, gee, what the fuck. But yeah, so they worked on that case, but really they used the whole host of dozens of money seizures that we made. And you know how we got all this money, how we seized all this money to begin with, right? So there's an operation we called green machine, green machine. So we had a very smart task force officer, a lieutenant, and we had another agent. They were partners. And they were in my group. And these guys noticed that every time they had small money seizures or these little money seizures, they would have all these money counting machines, like dozens of them or sometimes maybe

Starting point is 02:07:16 three or four, sometimes 10, whatever, all junked up in the backyard or out by the garbage. And they're like, oh, these fucking money machines, they're all broken. They're all used so much. They broke. So he said, where are they buying these machines? So they started, what's the name, what's the name brand of this machine? What do you get it? Oh, you get it at Sam's Club and Walmart. Oh, let me say, they contacted Walmart. Hey, if we send you a subpoena, can you give us all the people that have bought money machines in a 20 mile radius from the store. Sure. We'll give you everything. Walmart keeps everything. And I mean everything. Okay. So they send a subpoena, which basically, in essence, requires them to provide the information, right, and not disclose it. So it's all legal.

Starting point is 02:08:05 And they get the list. And they go through the list of 200 clients that purchased the green machines or the money counters. And they run them in DEA database called NADIS. They run it. Hmm. Well, we have 10 hits out of 200 of previous DEA cases where these guys show up. Maybe they're showed up on surveillance. Maybe they showed up on an arrest.

Starting point is 02:08:28 Maybe they showed up, whatever. An informer talked about them, but they're there. We have 10 people. And then you run a criminal history. Oh, trafficking narcotics. Oh, stolen car. Oh, false documentation, whatever it might be. And then you do some more database stuff, and you whittle it down to where you get maybe the top four or five.

Starting point is 02:08:49 And then you go out and do surveillance. Where do they live? What do they drive? And then you start seeing houses with all kinds of cameras around them. And you see guys getting out with duffel bags. And that's how they put the case together on J. Okay. So one of the ways they put the case together on J.

Starting point is 02:09:05 There's other things. Obviously, I can't get into it. But something as simple as a green machine or the money counters gave them away. Right. Now, subsequent to that, Walmart, the prosecution and OIG said, Office of an Inspector General came in and said, oh, you can't do these administrative subpoenas for that. That's going beyond the scope of what an administrative subpoena is because you have a subpoena from the judge, a court that says hand that over. And then DEA had their own subpoena power, right, called administrative subpoena. Okay. So they said that's going beyond the scope of what the administrative subpoena is requiring. So you have to, stop so the whole program went away but it was a great program what lasted and it caught a lot of bad guys money right so like the u.s attorney has the subpoena power right just they can do anything yeah he doesn't have to go to a judge he just right you just go in and say hey look here's what we think's going on we really like to look at his bank account yeah okay yeah they can do that too uh because certain records

Starting point is 02:10:03 do go beyond the scope of an administrative subpoena like we can't get tax records and bank records right but we can say who was the owner of that account yeah you had to go to a judge and explain why, here's why. A prosecutor. He's running a laundromat that is doing extremely well. Yeah, it's like 20 million a year. Nobody ever goes in the line. And the machines are all broken. Right. And his electric bill's $200 a month. Something's not right here. So that was the experience in Chicago. And Chicago was awesome. I mean, I enjoyed it, even though

Starting point is 02:10:34 I had moments of a lot of personal stress at that time, we all go through personal stress moments where you're just being crushed and then dealing with some of the things I had to deal with in Chicago. But overall, the people were great. My boss, his name Scott Ando, he was an ASAC. Fantastic dude. That guy saved my life. He had been through divorce, a couple, I think.

Starting point is 02:10:53 And he just, he knew, like, how hard it was for me to function and how it was broke. He's always buying me lunch. I mean, I was fucking broke, dude. I mean, literally, like, Dairy Queen with, like, quarters in my pocket kind of thing because I was paying so much, you know, to my ex-wife and the child support. So it's just crushing me, right? And then moving to a new city, trying to afford to live and all these things, just crazy, right? So I told him, I said, man, I'm getting crushed, dude.

Starting point is 02:11:20 I can barely make my small mortgage. I was living in Indiana. I had an hour commute. Just had to live far away from the city to afford it. I said, man, I need to go back overseas to be able to live. And so he goes, ah, well, maybe there's something, you know, I was looking. I said, yeah, there's something in Caracas, spent as well. Crocus Venezuela was heating up.

Starting point is 02:11:42 Hugo Chavez, the crazy dictator at Venezuela. He goes, oh, it's funny. I just had drinks with the regional director in Colombia that covers that spot like two weeks ago at the IDEC conference, International Drug Enforcement Conference. It was like in Turkey or something like that. He goes, let me call him. We're at lunch.

Starting point is 02:11:59 He picks up the phone. Hey, Jay. Jay Bergman. Hey, I got a guy. Let's go to Caracas. He goes, yeah, he goes, yeah, he good. He's a New Yorker. Jay Bergman is a New Yorker.

Starting point is 02:12:09 He's been overseas so long. He's not a New Yorker anymore. He lives with the EA. Now he works for the State Department, but he's lived most of his life in foreign countries for the governor. And he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's a kid's name? A kid named Wes.

Starting point is 02:12:24 Never heard of him. Okay, whatever. So I'm like, yeah, he hasn't heard of me, but he's going to hear about me. God damn. So he said, send me his resume. If you vouch for him, we'll hook him up. He goes, okay, thanks, Jay.

Starting point is 02:12:38 Scott, my buddy Scott, my boss, hangs up the phone. He goes, ah, you'll probably get the job. Not a lot of people want to go to Caracas. It's real dangerous. I know. That's why I want to go. It's supposed to be like... Do you make more money by going to?

Starting point is 02:12:50 Is that why you wanted to go there? Because you're saying you're in debt. So what, like, I'll go here because that's going to be a bump for something, right? So what happens is when you go overseas, your housing's provided. You get a car and your gas is provided. you get tax-free income up to a certain amount, and then you get other pay that's tax-free, you get danger pay and hazard pay and all these other pays

Starting point is 02:13:16 that come on because it's actually fucking dangerous, right? So they're paying you for that danger, which most guys like in the government doing this kind of work, they don't mind the danger. I didn't look at it as life-threatening, even though it was very life-threatening. I didn't look at it. It was a way for me to go make the extra money

Starting point is 02:13:37 and have much more fun in that kind of environment. So you're talking like now a senior agent that's living overseas, their package is probably worth about $350 a year, maybe even more. If you have kids, if you have kids and each... Now you're breaking even. Yeah, well, you're breaking even, but your kids go to private school paid for. So it might be a $45, $50,000 school bill at the private school, the American school, paid for.

Starting point is 02:14:05 It's paid for. Right. So, you know, if you have three kids, that could be 150 grand a year. A senior agent now is making a buck 90. Then your tax breaks, housing, car, all of that. Your differential pay, if you live in a certain place, you get another 10%, 10%, 15%, that might be differential or has. Might be another 20%. So it adds up to a lot of money.

Starting point is 02:14:30 Right. You know, all in, $350, $400,000 a year. Yeah. You can really make a lot of money. you didn't have if you're not divorced yeah you say if you didn't have kids in the wife you'd be a millionaire four years five years you lived recently yeah we got guys that they would go down they were they were you know they were on the first wife they didn't have the practice wife scenario and you know and they would buy a house in montana with land and back then it you know say 15 years ago it might be you know they bought it for

Starting point is 02:14:56 150 grand paid it off in a six or seven year tour right now it's worth a million bucks or more you know whitefish montana right so they had a lot of guys doing it that because they had the extra money and they're like instead of not paying anything, I'm going to pay a mortgage on something else and triple the payments every month and just pay off another piece of property somewhere else. It was really good. But they're tradeoffs. You're not in the United States. You're dealing with scenarios that, you know, when I was, when I went to Caracas, when I left Chicago, I did get that job. I would go to Caracas. I had two contracts on my other to kill me eventually, right? So, and, you know, the office had been down from 30 agents to,

Starting point is 02:15:40 it was me, another agent, another agent eventually came down, and I had three admin staff. So it went from like a 35-person office to like three or four people. So the office, after it had been decimated, because the government there knew that we were onto them. Venezuela turned into assessable You had what's called the Cartel de los Soles, which is the cartel of the sons. Because they named it that because on the appellate of the uniform, they had little sons, like little emblem, sun emblems, instead of stars. Like our generals have stars. Theirs have little sons, okay?

Starting point is 02:16:21 Cartel de los Soles. So what had happened is when Hugo Chavez took over in 1998, he became president. He had done a coup before when the jail got out. a lot of mile early for good behavior. He gets out. He gets elected. Then he's like, okay, dudes, I'm going to turn this into a socialistic country. Socialistic revolution is going to take place. Everyone's going to have whatever they want. Free house, refrigerator, washer dryer. And what that turned into was just pure dictatorship. That's where most of these goes. You know, when you have these, especially in Latin America, we have so many examples from the people that know the most.

Starting point is 02:16:58 Cuba, Nicaragua. Nicaragua just said they're not going to have a election. this year, right? So the Sandinista's the whole Cuban revolution, not Cuban, the whole communist revolution in Nicaragua has gotten to the point now where you have a dictatorship, you know, with the Nicaragua and later there. So that's what Ugo Chavez was doing back in the late 90s, and it had digressed so bad that B.E.A. was seeing all these drug movements coming through the country, and they had realized that it was the government itself moving all the dope and the product from Columbia, because Colombia in this hemisphere, the Western Hemisphere, is the king of Koka, right? So all the powder, all the H, everything that moves out of Columbia,

Starting point is 02:17:45 about at one point, about 70% of that was coming through Venezuela. Why? Because it was a permissible environment to let the dope come through. And not only was it, admissible, it was active participation. And the top level generals, including the president, Hugo Chavez, hated the gringoes. They hated the Yankees. They called us Yankees. And so what they wanted to do was, and this was kind of like their unofficial, secondary and tertiary reason to flood the country with dope was, destroy the social fabric and make the downfall of the United States happen. How can we do that? Well, we're not big enough to really, you know, bury them. But if we flood them with lots of drugs and destroy their youth, we can have a real negative impact on the country.

Starting point is 02:18:29 And meanwhile, we're going to invite Iran, Cuba, we're going to invite Syria, we're going to invite Lebanese Hezbollah, we're going to put training camps for terrorists in Venezuela. Oh, we're also going to have UAV factories, you know, drone factories in Venezuela. And we're going to start laundering money. And we're going to take in gangs. And we're going to harbor a few from around the world. So everything, the various, they did in Venezuela. And DEA was on them, because we used to have a very big office, like I said there, but that now was down to a small group. And basically, from what I heard it was, let's just keep the lights on. Okay. Well, I don't want to just keep the lights on. I want to go down and actually do something, right? So that was my job to go

Starting point is 02:19:17 down there and actually do something, my boss, Jay Bergman. Jay Bergman has Jewish ancestry. So one of the things that we always say in DEA is, who's your rabbi? J.A. ended up eventually being one of my rabbis. What's a rabbi in DEA language? Someone that goes to bat for you, someone that helps you, someone that's got your back, okay? But we just called it, who's your rabbi? It was just a slang that we used for it. It was a very good term in DEA.

Starting point is 02:19:47 Some people might say, well, my God, what would you say? Who's your rabbi? Is that? Seems like a slander. Not at all. They do that in New York, too. New York. That's where it came from. Yeah. That's exactly where it came from, NYPD.

Starting point is 02:19:58 Yeah. Because a lot of things at DEA in 1973, in July 1st, 1973, when DEA was graded, they went to NYPD, and they modeled a lot of the stuff from NYPD, including inspectors and the badges and all that stuff. So that's where that came from. So Jay Bergman was my boss. Remember, the guy in Chicago, Scott Ando, and made the phone call to that guy, Jay Bergman. So Jay Bergman talked to me when I,

Starting point is 02:20:24 I went down there. He said, hey, you know, see what you can do, but it's very dangerous down there. It's this. I'm going to try to get as many people as I came in locked up. And when we lock them up and they come to the United States, if we can get them to the United States, on an extradition, which they hadn't had an extradition for like seven or eight years before I got there. Okay. But our system, and you would know this, and other people listening will know this, our system dependent upon different people and witnesses that we build the case. And the more witnesses you have, the more credibility of those witnesses have, and the more cross-pollinization of information that they can corroborate for the case is what counts.

Starting point is 02:21:07 So I was like, if I can get down there and I can get multiple people arrested and somehow get them extradited to the U.S., think of all the witnesses we're going to have. And that's exactly what I did. So I went down there, started meeting with all these people you see in the news now, not all of them, but a lot of them that are indicted. Because Venezuela, obviously people know. Venezuela is where we took Nicholas Maduro, the president of the country, Delta Force went in, snatched him and brought him to New York. He's sitting in his cell right now, which this has never really been done. The closest thing we had to this was Noriega.

Starting point is 02:21:42 Noriega was in Panama. He was a general. He really wasn't the president per se, but he was the commandante. and all that stuff. But that was the closest thing we had, and that was going back, what, to 96 or whatever it was, when they got Manuel Noriega out. Okay?

Starting point is 02:22:00 Might have even been 89, sorry, 1988. Operation Jascas. So, but when I went down there, Hugo Chavez was probably... That wasn't nearly as strategic as an operation, the Noriega thing. No, not at all. No, Noriega was like,

Starting point is 02:22:15 let's send a bunch of SF and seals and a bunch of guys down. there. We're going to shoot it out and get it. This Delta Force operation was extremely targeted. And I know because myself and my other partners that there were like three or four of us working together, we actually participated in providing Delta Force intelligence, D.A. and Delta Force intelligence for that operation. And it wasn't passive passing of information. It was actually, I can't get into it because of some obligations I have. I can't talk about it. but this wasn't passive passing of intelligence.

Starting point is 02:22:50 This was being tasked, providing information, being told the information is good, and giving us more information over a period of months. This was not a simple like, you know, oh, yeah, I helped catch Maduro. Well, there's a lot of ways to help catch a fugitive. And one of the biggest factors in this kind of scenario is providing a base of intelligence that's going to be comprehensive enough that when these guys go in, they know everything they possibly can know so there's no surprises because the littlest thing could get someone killed in these kind of operations and luckily this one worked very well and very

Starting point is 02:23:25 proud that we did it um but that's all i'll say about it because i can't talk about but uh but going back to when i was there ugo chavez he was the president he was the dictator and i just went out and started working with different people that i had on the ground i can't get into it too much but to set up arrests that were happening in the country. Okay? And during that time, there were about eight or nine different individuals that we got out on extradition to New York,

Starting point is 02:23:55 to Florida, to, I believe, Jersey and Washington, D.C. as well. So those people were great witnesses, and they kind of helped put things together. But we didn't have the type of deep, kind of rooted,

Starting point is 02:24:13 we're going to get this guy out of office. It just wasn't there at that time. So we were making great strides and getting people out and get a lot of great intelligence in Venezuela, but no one had the real fortitude to say, we're going to take this, you know, bull by the horns and do what President Trump did. We just didn't have it back then. But we were still doing our job. And then Hugo Chavez got cancer and died, and that's when Nicholas Maduro took over. Okay. Now, the story, a lot of people don't understand about Nicholas Maduro. It's not like he was some Harvard grad or, you know, the pinnacle of success and achievement in the country of Venezuela. He was a bus driver. Then he became the bus driver

Starting point is 02:24:50 union boss. And then he got into politics. Then he got into the vice presidency and the presidency. So this guy, he's not the brightest bulb in the pack. You can see that when DEA brought him to New York after the operation. Like he's saying like, happy New Year and hello and things like all these weird like random things, you know. And it didn't help that DEA was taking. I think they were like thousands of selfies. Like everyone's getting a selfie. Like, right. Come on. What are we doing here, guys? We're gonna selfie with Maduro. I mean, we're at DEA agents. We don't do that kind of stuff. And we had, you know, the head of the DEA was actually there. Like selfie on the stairs, selfie on the plane, selfie on the, it was like,

Starting point is 02:25:32 it was a little overkill. But everyone saw Nicholas Maduro in the, you know, the track suit. And it was just, you know, it was kind of very strange. It was kind of like fifth dimension stuff. So, but when I was there, he was just the vice president. But I was dealing with a myriad of all the Cartel de Losolas guys, Tarek Alessimei and Nester Reveral and all these people that are indicted that were the generals and in charge of what they were doing. And, you know, at one point, you know, they had actually put a contract on my life. Well, I was there, so I had to leave country.

Starting point is 02:26:08 And it was funny. So when you have a contract on your life and they're going to kill you, you know, You'd think, you know, you'd be scared and all this other stuff, right? And I'm like, whatever, you know, I'm like, oh, okay, what do I have to do? Where do you want to go? I was like, I'll go to Hawaii. Let me go to Hawaii. I may go to Hawaii.

Starting point is 02:26:27 Okay, cool. We'll get you your plane tickets. So I had to go to the U.S. first, change airlines, kind of do a little funny business. And then to make sure I'm not, like, being followed, right? And then go to Hawaii. I spent three weeks in Hawaii in a hotel, like, wander around, the big island, doing all this stuff. like paid for by Uncle Sugar. And I'm like, but I was miserable, man.

Starting point is 02:26:49 All I could think about was getting back to Caracas and working the whole time. I just wanted to get back. And I was just so miserable. I remember it wasn't like, I don't even remember the three weeks. Like, I'm like, it just sucks. You know, here I'm at this one hotel with a waterfall and all the seafood and sound just like miserable. I just couldn't wait to get back. And so, and before I.

Starting point is 02:27:14 I had left, I was so worried they weren't going to let me go back that the way the wording of the teletype or the cable, when we have to write the information, the way it was kind of worded was very dumb down. It didn't seem like it was really like they were going to kill me kind of thing. But it's kind of difficult because I got called into the deputy chief admission was there. He was the acting ambassador along with the head of security, regional security. and they were like, yeah, we got these things that are kind of lining up that they're going to try whack you. So you have to go away for a while.

Starting point is 02:27:49 But it worked out great, and they let me back. So everything kind of calmed down after the three weeks. And I came back and they're like, and they moved me. So I had been one house. They moved me close to the embassy. So I couldn't be far away. I had to be close to the embassy. I was like, ah, whatever, that's fine.

Starting point is 02:28:04 I don't care. I was never home. I was always working. So I remember it was. 2011, no, 2012, the summer of 2012, we had been doing all these arrest ops. And I had this one where this person kept coming into the country getting arrested and then she'd pay off the cops and get out. I was freaking livid, man. And so I get a phone call from Miami one day.

Starting point is 02:28:38 They're like, we got her. We got her. I'm like, you got what? She's under arrest. And I'm like, that's not how shit works. Okay. Like, whenever you have, this is how protocol is, you don't mess with protocol. Whenever you have someone that's wanted in the country and say you're in Miami and you have a wanted in Venezuela.

Starting point is 02:28:56 You have to talk to the boss in Venezuela. You just don't go do your own thing and then tell the boss in Venezuela. That's not how it works. You don't know what he's doing down there. You don't know what could, you could be putting him at risk, you could other agents, whatever. So this guy is like, yeah, we could. guy, I go, no, you don't. Because you know what she's going to do? She's going to pay off 100,000, 200,000, whatever in Venezuela and Bolivars, their money, which is, you know,

Starting point is 02:29:21 $500 is a fortune down there. Right. And she's going to give them $100,000 and walk. No, it's not going to happen. I go, yeah, it's going to happen, dude. He goes, well, I have her at this one house or whatever. I said, where is this house? I looked it up. I was like, fuck, I need to go out there. I need them to know that I know she's there, and maybe they won't take the payoff. Maybe they'll feel like, oh, shit, this DEA guy. So I jump in the car, and I had a gun. I was like, I threw the gun in my, and Jay Bergman, my boss at the time, I wasn't authorized to carry a gun. He's like, fuck it, carry a gun.

Starting point is 02:29:59 I don't care. Carry. They kick you out of country. That's fine. I'll take care of my rabbi. So, because he knew, like, I don't want you to be in stuck somewhere. And then you're at the mercy of someone. They're going to kidnap you and torture you and everything else.

Starting point is 02:30:12 At least you have a gun. You know, maybe you have a fighting chance, right? Through my gun on. I go out to this house. Dude, this neighborhood. Picture like something from home alone. These homes in Caracas, these trees, like there's no walls. It's a really nice area.

Starting point is 02:30:29 No walls with Constantine wire. Everything is just super quiet. I mean, dead silence. And I get out, I'm like, man, there's no. cars here, there's no people. That's the house. All the shades were drawn. It was a white house, one-story white house, a front porch with like a stoop. And I start walking up to the house. And I'm like, man, this doesn't feel good. My phone rings. So I pick up the phone. The guy in Spanish, if you want to live, get the fuck out of here now. And I'm like,

Starting point is 02:31:02 what? If you want to live, leave now. Click. This is the safe house where they have her? at? This is, I don't know what this is where they have her at. But this is an American, the Americans have her. No, no, the Miami guys called to say, our contacts in Caracas arrested her and have her in a house. She was a money person for the Zeta cartel. Okay. Okay. She was doing business with Colombians in Venezuela and she was from Mexico. She was a Zeta. Zetas or Mexico? Yeah, or Mexico. But, Remember, they're all connected because they all want the product from Columbia. They're growing it and bring it up.

Starting point is 02:31:42 Exactly. So she was the money person to go broker the accounts, get the money, earn all that out. And so Miami was chasing her, but they thought, we'll have our people pick her up down there. We don't need the office in Caracas. So when I'm walking up, the phone rings, like I said, he tells me twice. I'm telling you, leave. If you want to live, leave. And I knew I had like five, six seconds.

Starting point is 02:32:09 seconds to make that decision and leap or I was going to fuck I had I was going to die I was like I something was up I just stopped turned went back to my car and drove away and I called the guy in Miami I'm like you dumbass this is what's going on and she paid away and left but that's okay because I said all right I'm going to get this chick so working with another couple informants I said okay we'll we'll have this when this person comes down I'll get word when I know where she's at, this cop's going to arrest her, okay? But the cop won't have an option to let her go or be forced to let her go, because why? I had a contact with the news channel, and they had a camera.

Starting point is 02:32:55 And I said, you need to wait here on the corner of this street. When I tell you to turn the camera on and go live, he goes, I just can't do that. You know, I said, trust me, you're going to thank me later. So he's like, you're not going to tell me who. it is. Nope. Not telling me anything. You just have to trust me. So he's sitting on the corner and this person shows up and the cops get a call to get her or whatever, right? So while the cops arrive, I send in the reporter. He goes live and they're filming it and they're like, oh, shit, this is on live TV. If she gets away, we have no option. Right. So I'm,

Starting point is 02:33:35 I get the phone call and I'm running from the embassy to get down. down there because I want to show my face because remember the generals and all these guys are all getting a piece of the action right so they they're like shit we're on camera they have a live big ass camera like filming them and they're like they don't know what to do like what the hell's going on so they bring them to the police station and I show up at the police station and the general the general he must have known I was coming or whatever because he came out the front set opens the door for and he's looking at me like you son of a bitch he had that kind of gritty grin on his face.

Starting point is 02:34:12 And I was like, hey, I heard you guys. I saw it on TV. What a great. He's like, he's looking at me like, yeah, okay, asshole. So I was like, so anyway, we ended up getting her extradited to the U.S. And then when we were doing the extradition, the reporter, the only way I could really repay him back, I said, do you want to come to the extradition? He goes, what do you mean?

Starting point is 02:34:36 I said, come on. So he gets in the car. He meets me outside. the airport side area we're doing the extradition. I put a DEA jacket on him. He's like, what the fuck? He said put out of your cameras in a bag. He's like, yeah?

Starting point is 02:34:49 So we go through security. He's in a DEA jacket. He goes through the magnetometer and I'm like, ah, we're DEA, whatever. He walks out onto the tarmac. I said, get in the plane, DEA plane. I said, when we come on with her, take our pictures, and that's exactly what he did. So the pictures I had today

Starting point is 02:35:06 from that reporter. He's like, I can't believe you got me in here to do this. This is fantastic. How quickly was the extradition? This happened maybe, maybe three weeks after, two and a half weeks after.

Starting point is 02:35:22 Okay. And then we had to get him out. So I had to take the jacket off of him and had to get him to a fence and throw him over the fence at the airport. And he was so happy. He would contact me for weeks.

Starting point is 02:35:35 That was so awesome. I can't believe I got to do it. I was like, great, man. I appreciate you doing what you did. We wouldn't have got her if you didn't do what you did. He's like, man, I can't pay you back. He didn't want money. He didn't want lunch.

Starting point is 02:35:48 He didn't want a bottle of whiskey. That was more than enough for him to be like, wow, that was awesome. So anyway. But those were the kind of things. There's a lot more I won't get into. But those kind of things is what I was doing. It's very unique kind of things. Why even be down there?

Starting point is 02:36:05 I mean, the whole system is so fucking corrupt. You're not making it. You can't really think you're making it a fucking difference. No. Because there's, even if you grab that woman, you bring her back. There's,

Starting point is 02:36:15 there's a thousand other women ready to take her place. The government's not supporting. Yeah. Isn't in support of any of this. They're not trying to, they're, they're, it's like in Mexico.

Starting point is 02:36:25 It's so overwhelmingly fucking corrupt the whole system. They're just like they're just letting the DEA be down there to satisfy the Americans to make them feel like maybe they're making a difference, but the truth is the same people who are saying, yeah, we, of course you can come down here. They're also, they're all taking bribes. Like, they're all on the, while they're talking to you to your face behind your back, they're arranging or allowing, you know, transport ships to come in and boats and, and, and, tunnels to be dug and cars to go across the board.

Starting point is 02:37:00 Like, they're allowing all these things to function because. Well, I look at it this way. Like, what supports do you? play? None. What do you do for your past time? I paint. Okay.

Starting point is 02:37:13 I write books. Painting and writing, you enjoy writing book. You actually enjoy it. Like, you look forward to sitting down and writing. Absolutely, yeah. I look forward to doing these operations. Remember the movie Heat?

Starting point is 02:37:26 Yeah, I know. I know. It was all about I wanted these experiences. I wanted to do these things. I'm saying, I understand for you, what I'm saying in, in, you know, on a micro level, that's what you like, about a macro level, how does that, how do you really stop that? We're never going to stop it.

Starting point is 02:37:43 Yeah. So why not figure out some way to. Here's my analogy. Regulate it. If you could regulate it or something, you could. How do you regulate H? How do you regulate crack? I understand, but there are, there are equivalents to that already.

Starting point is 02:37:59 Like, let's face it, that, you know, I'd say, you know, has a legitimate, like, it's a legitimate drug. like, oh, it's a, no, no, it's a, it's a, it was, it's a surgical, it's a legitimate drug, right? Same thing with, you know, the, uh, opiates, you know, there's a legitimate mean, or need for opiates. Like, you know, can you, I'm saying you can, you know, ecstasy, you know, those type of things if you could, so the problem is you come in with the pharmaceuticals and then they, they, they make it so that it's safe. safer, safer, and then those things come in and, or if you said the pharmaceuticals, go ahead and let's just go, we're going to manufacture it. So at least you know you're taking 30 milligrams, you know, you know what it is.

Starting point is 02:38:47 And you're taking it. The problem is they're doing that with marijuana, but then it gets expensive. It's like, well, why is this? How is this expensive? This should be super cheap. It's almost like, I don't know, you have to have, you have to be able to do it in a way that it's extremely inexpensive. And then because what happens is then there's no reason for the cartels to be involved in it

Starting point is 02:39:11 because it's so inexpensive. And you can buy it at any pharmacy anywhere in the United States. And they're like, you know, so you end up with, I understand, well, you have a lot more drug addicts. I'm not sure if you would have more drug addicts. And two, then the prisons wouldn't be filled with these guys. And what you could do is take all that money and dump it into education. and free rehabilitative or rehabs. And then you probably empty out.

Starting point is 02:39:39 The prisons end up, 70% of the prisons would be empty. Like that seems like a model that is it perfect? Well, no, there's not going to be a perfect solution. There's no perfect solution. But what's happening right now is it certainly isn't working. And because this is how the cartels make so much money,

Starting point is 02:39:59 it's funding cartels. Like if they had no way to make money, I mean, they would try and they'd shift to kidnapping. They already have. Right. I mean, they'd shift more to all of those things. But at some point, at some point, really at some point,

Starting point is 02:40:17 you just have to go with the, with the El Salvador model and just going and just fucking start building massive prisons. Unless you want to just scoop these guys up and start executing them in the streets. Well, interesting. So I remember I was having a discussion with someone over a medium, a certain technological medium. And the person was a former SF guy.

Starting point is 02:40:40 Okay. And we're talking about what's going on with the military being utilized to counter drug cartels. Right. And he said to me, he said, you had your turn. Now it's our turn. And I said, well. I had my turn under color of law. Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not sure.

Starting point is 02:41:03 This is not the same ground rules. You can go in and kill people. Yeah. I just couldn't go in and kill people. If I could just summarily go and kill people, number one, we tried that in Afghanistan and Iraq, didn't work. Didn't work. You can't kill your way out of these solutions.

Starting point is 02:41:18 You can make a pretty good damaging impact, but you're never going to kill them. Is Latin America the same as the Middle East? No. They don't have the same mindset. They don't have a, some of these Mexican cartels, they do have that mindset. And we saw that when Chapito, Chapo's son, was cornered in Cinaloa.

Starting point is 02:41:37 Right. And they said, we will destroy this whole town and kill everyone here if you don't let Chapito go. Right. Remember this? And the president said, let him go. Yeah. Remember?

Starting point is 02:41:47 Yeah. So those are the asymmetrical kind of like avenues that these cartels will take. But getting back to your point about in the United States, and I already talked about this a little bit. I talk about in the gang book as well, talking about gangs, you know, we have to look at doing things in a different way because we can't keep locking up a million people a year on drug offenses and they just get out and they go back and get out and go back. It's just a vicious cycle. Now, we're also, we have the need to protect the citizens of the country. We have to enable people to walk freely about on their day to be safe.

Starting point is 02:42:30 When you look at, for example, narcotics, drugs, and alcohol, alcohol is probably one of the most abused drugs in the world. And it's how many tens of thousands of people are killed by DUIs every year. So when you talk about legalization, we're not only talking about public health, but we're talking about dangers. So we took public health, you might take money away from the judicial system. The penal system might say, oh, we're saving tons of money, but the health consequences of legalization of that drug is probably going to be opened up. The aperture is going to be open on that while you close the aperture on the justice system. And then you have public safety and things like that, which we already know there's an uptick

Starting point is 02:43:12 with marijuana. When you have marijuana and people are high on marijuana, they're driving, it's harder to prove in court, but we're seeing more incidences of people that are being involved in these severe accidents under the influence of a marijuana, probably polydrug, right? We're using more than just marijuana, but that's one of the factors in it. So it's a very difficult, very difficult thing.

Starting point is 02:43:35 I think we should try to establish some kind of model somewhere in some state somehow and see how it works. And I'm not talking about free needles in Seattle. I'm not decriminalization. How long did that work in, like, Portland? I think it worked for maybe a year, not even. And they're like, oh, shit, we have to stop. this, right? So if you look at New York, they do have, in essence, it's basically a decriminalization

Starting point is 02:44:01 for certain things because they just don't make the arrests on it. Go to California, they decriminalized anything under, in essence, $900 for retail theft. People walk in and steal things all day long. It's a total shit show. And that's the analogy that I'm getting to right now. And the analogy of this is, do we just allow us to continue? Do we allow child abuse to continue? Do we allow child abuse to continue? you? Will we ever stop it? No, we won't. But do we fight against it? Yes. So there's a balance, this is how I view it. There's a balance between fighting something that you're concerned about, finding something that's hurt in our society, fighting someone that's taken lives, and eradicating it. So sometimes, you know, and they always say, oh, we've got to put our tongue, our toes and fingers

Starting point is 02:44:47 all in the dam that's leaking, right? And I think we have all in right now. The leaks are abundant. have enough, you know, fingers and toes and whatever to plug the dam. And I would like to see something happen. I don't know how that's going to happen, but, you know, they have the one pill kills thing, which is, which is a good program, but it's not enough. It's kind of like just say no, Nancy Reagan, have to just say no. You just, it doesn't, slogans aren't going to save lives. Right. What saves lives, and you mentioned this is the education at a young level, a young age, and you have to have a mentorship program to go with that, and that costs money. So while we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons and bombs and all this other stuff, and we look at, you know,

Starting point is 02:45:36 the futility of what that yields, because what's it given us, right? You know, and look at Iran right right now, you know, and I understand the need to do things we had to do in Iran. It's a very complex situation. But we need more investment in our youth in this country. When was the last time you saw a real push of funding in some of the inner cities in this country, whether it be Houston, whether it be Chicago, whether it be in New York, whether it be San Francisco. We just don't see it. It's not a priority. You've seen these TikToks of the teachers coming out and just they're fucking just in tears crying that like I have a, I teach 12th grade and half my class can't read. You know, they can't spell they can't read they can't I mean they've just they're like in there and they're they're

Starting point is 02:46:22 being we're being told basically to kind of like graduate them like push them through or yeah she's like or or they just fail you're gonna fail we're gonna fail half the fucking we're gonna fail half the 12th grade because they just these guys just cannot read yeah and in in Sweden they gave because it's Sweden so it's like South Carolina size of South Carolina um you know they gave the in all um of their um of their um middle schoolers, they gave them iPads. And I think three or four years later, they tested them and all of their, all of their reading and across the board, respect to everything, I mean, we're talking about like math, everything had dropped dramatically.

Starting point is 02:47:06 So instead of going up because of these devices, they dropped them. They went and took them away and all of them shot back up. Really? Yeah, they were so dependent and the ease at which these computers do are doing, everything for you, you just stop reading. Yeah. You know, so it's super complex. It is complex because you would think, because think about what they did, they thought that,

Starting point is 02:47:26 that's a good thing. You gave them all iPads. That's going to help them study and this and they're using it for school. Yeah. The opposite effect. Who would think that that would have the opposite effect? Probably playing games on it and not, you know, or cheating on it or not cheating. Or it reads to you or it helps.

Starting point is 02:47:41 Yeah. Listen, the only reason I can write is because I use word. Yeah. Because I don't, I can't spell for anything. Right. I come close and it, boom, as a result, you know what? I can, I don't even have to learn how to try and spell. I just have to come close.

Starting point is 02:47:57 So you would think it would say, oh, it corrected you. Now you know the correct way. No, now I know that it comes close, that I just have to come close. And that, you know. Yeah, makes sense. And it doesn't stop me from writing books because luckily I can, I can, I can, in prison when I write a book, I just go and give it to all the smart guys and have them read it. And they go, oh, you misspelled this.

Starting point is 02:48:17 word, oh, you misspelled this word, I just correct it. Right. So, yeah, it's funny because you would think that the iPad situation would have had the opposite. And that's what they thought, oh, it's really going to. But here's the thing. Someone did a model to try that out, right? Probably, I'm assuming.

Starting point is 02:48:33 So what models do we have in the, I don't know this answer, but, I mean, something to look at. What models do we have that are going to be this cursor, you know, cursory effect that's going to change what we're doing? Where are we going to live and learn on it? And the slogans and campaigns are great and, you know, Ful Free America. And a lot of these that we have will send some high-level government personnel who gives a speech.

Starting point is 02:48:58 Do you think a 16-year-old kid gives two dams about what someone in our government is saying? Right. No. Where do we have? And we had some of these programs in Vegas where they had, who's the Judas priest. I think it was Judas Priest guy. He was the lead singer. Rob Helfer.

Starting point is 02:49:21 And they had the magician, David, he levitates and does all that stuff. No. But they had all these people, right? And some of them were very well known to the youth communities, right? Some of them aren't because they're getting a little bit older. But where are all these celebrities, okay, that are mourning for all the, deaths and all that, why don't they come out and say, let's do something together where we have real influencers at that, that reach that age group? Where are they all? Where are all the commercials?

Starting point is 02:49:58 We're all the PSAs. I'm not seeing, maybe I'm missing them. You tell me, where are they all? No, they don't exist. That's my point. So in our country, these kids are dying. And not only dying physically, but mentally, emotionally, they're becoming distant. You know, the family units, broken up, all these different problems that are affecting. So someone has to start something. I don't know how it's going to happen. I know there's some really great people that have, you know, lofty ideas of what they want to do. I know the former head of SOD, Derek Maltz, he's a true believer. He's a hard charger. He's trying everything akin to get this awareness and get these, you know, these kids save lives and things like that. The people out there doing it. But it needs to be

Starting point is 02:50:42 done at a greater scale. And here's the, here's the key concept. If you don't have funding, all you're doing is dreaming. Right? If you don't have funding, all you're doing is dreaming. Because in this age, you have to have money to make it happen. And we just have to allocate it. So what happened after you? So, why come back?

Starting point is 02:51:05 Yeah, I came back. Venezuela. How long are you there for? I stayed there for a total of two and a half years. And then the summer of 2012, like August, 2012, I had taken two-week leave. And when I went to come back, they're like, we don't want you back. They were canceling your visa.

Starting point is 02:51:23 So they didn't want me back because Venezuela hated me. They wanted to kill me. I was getting these arrests and doing all this funny stuff. And luckily, they were doing the extraditions. They were trying to fight like this consensus among the world that they weren't do anything. There's a lot of things behind the scenes I won't get into how we kind of manipulated and did some things so that they felt like they had to do more and all that.

Starting point is 02:51:48 I won't get into that. But the bottom line is, even though they were temporary wins and there were things that didn't stop the flow of anything, they were good wins for the U.S. government. And I think in the end, there were some token aspects of that made slight little tiny changes, microchanges for certain things. And so, and it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing the job there. So when I left, I had to do my headquarters tour because when you're a boss, you got to go

Starting point is 02:52:14 headquarters after a certain amount of time. Didn't want to do that. So Jay Bergman arranged for me to go work with the CIA. So I did a year in Virginia. And then after that year, I did some things training-wise. Then I was not a CIA officer. Yeah, yeah. I'm a DEA agent, just going to be embedded with them.

Starting point is 02:52:36 Yeah, but they need information or somebody to give. They need a law enforcement officer that can be there, that they can work. and obtain certain things because CIA officers don't have any jurisdictions in the United States. Oh, okay. So it was a great way for me to get my headquarters time and a great way for them to kind of utilize a DEA agent, too, to help them do some things. But, you know, the agency is very, very fickle. It's a very different. And a lot of agency people hate DEA.

Starting point is 02:53:06 And a lot of DEA hate CIA. There's a real abrasion that exists there between the two, even though DEA was kind of formed in some. part. George Bush made the big push for DEA, even though Nixon started the whole thing. Elvis Presley even got a DEA badge when it started. But Bush pushed for our Quantico existence in the academy and all that stuff. And, you know, Bush contributed a lot to the CIA. Obviously, he was, you know, had the CIA for a while. So a lot of things about the DEA are very similar to the CIA. And a lot of things are extremely different. So, but it creates a lot of problems in foreign environments when DEA is trying to operate and CIA's trying to operate because we have a lot of crossover in certain things. Their job is to spy, right? To spy on

Starting point is 02:53:59 governments to get information to feed the intelligence to the United States. DEAs is not to spy on governments. Dea's is to investigate, apprehend, and stop the flow of narcotics, but the jobs oftentimes will kind of intersect in a sense in the same kind of manner how we do things. I'll do a, for example, I'll do a dead drop. I won't tell how I do a dead drop. But a dead drop is where you leave something for someone. They pick it up. They tell you a signal, then you go get it.

Starting point is 02:54:27 And then it's kind of, you never meet them, but you're exchanging information. Yeah. And it's coded. You have a variety of things I won't get into. I do that, the DEA way. And then CIA will do it their way. And if I do my DEA way, their CIA way, they're going to look at like I'm an idiot, but it works just as good. But they have ways they do things and I have ways that I do my whatever.

Starting point is 02:54:51 It's just a very different animal. And it's very hard for a DEA guy to kind of adapt into that, very, very hard. And the CIA, you will see a lot of people that just, they eat their own really bad, especially in the CIA headquarters. Those poor guys and gals, man, they just eat each other up sometimes. It's kind of scary. And DEA has that as well, but I think because CIA is so much bigger, it's just amplified. Because we both have our issues and we both have our great aspects, right? So, but I went to Bogota, Columbia after that.

Starting point is 02:55:24 And in Bogota, Columbia, I was just assigned to CIA doing counter narcotics and some other things. I won't talk about anything with CIA for that, but I did that for two more years in the country of Columbia. I loved it. Loved it. I was all over the, all over the country. I got to know every aspect of that country. It was fantastic. So I left Bogota and I go to Miami. And so my headquarters tour is done. So I don't have to do headquarters again. I'm like, thank God I don't have to go to that place. So I go to Miami and we start working maritime cases. And I say maritime cases. We seized upwards of what, 32 metric tons of Coke.

Starting point is 02:56:08 32 metric tons. I got a picture of me sitting on like 23 tons of powder on a coast guard ship. And what we did it, we worked with Columbia identifying the major traffickers on the North Coast or the Pacific side or whatever. And we had a couple cartels we were watching. Some were going Ecuadorian cartel. Another one was Columbia cartel. I won't get into too much the information.

Starting point is 02:56:35 But they were launching GoFast vessels, what we call GoFast vessels, what we call GoFest. Fest vessels, which are like 25-foot, 30-foot boats with, you saw them when you were blowing them up. Four or five engines in the back. Yeah, yeah. And they're hauling ass. They're fast. And you got maybe a ton or two worth of powder on the boat.

Starting point is 02:56:53 And you'll have maybe three, four, five, six guys, depending. Sometimes those little go fasts will go out and rendezvous with a mother, what they call a mothership. Mother ship will refuel them and they'll keep going. So we would identify the crews. we would task or send the intelligence of what we had to the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard has cutters and frigates that are out there hunting these boats. Okay.

Starting point is 02:57:19 It ebbs and flows depending on the Pacific side, Atlantic side, whatever Caribbean, but they always have assets there to do whatever we need to do. And so over the course of about a year and a half, we seized about 32 tons of powder and 120 guys we arrested. Okay. So when you fast forward to what happened recently with all the stuff, people are saying, these are just fishermen and all that. No, they're not. Okay. This is not fishermen people.

Starting point is 02:57:47 You look so stupid when these guys are saying. It was bad. How do you know they're not? Because there's six fucking engines on the back of the boat. They're going 100 miles an hour. Do you see the tarp covering or the bundles? Yeah, of course. That's called.

Starting point is 02:57:59 That's called powder. That's bait. Yeah. And I would be on the news, CNN, And I remember I was on one roundtable with, I think it was MSNBC. And the person, they had an opposing figure. And they were like, is that a poor fisherman or something? And I was like, no, they're not fishermen.

Starting point is 02:58:20 Right. These are dope. So that's what I did in Miami. I had a great group of guys. This was probably the best group of guys as a supervisor that I could ever. I still talk to them all today. They were all pretty much senior guys. Had one young kid.

Starting point is 02:58:40 Now he's a supervisor. And we were just, and I say killing. I mean, killing it. And I remember I put in, we got, it's a vice presidential award for maritime operations. We got that award. We all went, several of us went to D.C. and took the award. It was a really good time. It was good recognition for them.

Starting point is 02:58:58 I remember we had put in for what's called the Administrators Award. And we had 32 tons. 32 tons, 120 people, I think it was, I don't know, four or five hundred wire tabs. It was outrageous stats, statistics that the government likes, right? We got beat out by a case.

Starting point is 02:59:15 I think it was in Kentucky or Tennessee for like 10 pounds of meth. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. Because the boss that I had at the time really wasn't pushing our stuff. He didn't give a fuck, to be honest with you. He was a good guy.

Starting point is 02:59:31 He was a decent guy. We didn't get along at all. he was just kind of a dick sometimes. And he was mad because he wasn't getting promoted and he just didn't care. And the bosses where the other case was in Tennessee or Kentucky pushed. Right. So even though we're absolutely breaking records, absolutely crushing it, we didn't get that administrative award, which I wanted those guys to get.

Starting point is 02:59:53 Not for me. It's for them. They're the ones that did the work. I was a boss. You know, what was I doing? Approving shit, right? So my time and the agent had come and gone. So it's about them.

Starting point is 03:00:04 But so, yeah, so that was Miami. We're just doing maritime cases constantly, you know. A couple cases here and there. Some, you know, we had some in the hood that were. We had one. The guy was selling a myriad of drugs, everything from ecstasy to crank to Coke, whatever. And he had a stripper pole in his living room and all the girls, he had strippers day

Starting point is 03:00:25 and night. And remember at the search warrant, you know, a couple of the cops were on the polls a few times. I should have took a selfie on a pole. It would have been great. But we had cases like that, too. But for the most part, it was just big international shipping. And that was a great thing.

Starting point is 03:00:42 But then I got a call from a buddy of mine. He said, hey, why don't you come up to D.C.? I got a deputy job for you. You can promote from 14 to a 15. You'll only be here a little while. We'll send you out to the field. And you'll have a boss job somewhere. So I went to the money laundering section in headquarters.

Starting point is 03:01:01 I was there about four months. And when I first got there, it was great, good people, great people. I just hate headquarters. No, no one really wants to be in headquarters for the most part because it's all paperwork. It's just boring. You don't get action. Right. You know?

Starting point is 03:01:17 And I'm there for a month. And the deputy chief operations comes down. And he goes in my boss's office and shuts the door. And I'm like, like, I'm the number two of that unit and I'm not in there. So it's kind of weird, right? I'm like, what the fuck? And then the door opens, Tabor. Oh, shit.

Starting point is 03:01:36 So I walk in, I walk in his office, the deputy chief operations, right? He's controlling, like, basically the world. The chief operations, he controls some stuff, but really the hard work, it's like the higher you go, the less you're really working toward doing stuff. It's more of the macro policy stuff, right? Okay. And assignment and all that. The deputy chief operations at that time handled all foreign and all domestic, and all the

Starting point is 03:02:00 taskings kind of went through him, the hard work. was done through him and then it went to the to the chief operations so the deputy chief he calls he goes i want you to be my horseholder a horseholder is an exo like you're the exo like the assistant and i was like man horseholder jobs exo jobs you're working a lot and my boss was in was he was he was he was i call him a psychopath i love the death every guy five a m 9.30 p.m. 5am, 9.30 p.m. That's what he was doing, like, day and night. And I was like, I knew I was going to be working long, long hours. But I did it. I did it. And I learned a lot. It was really good experience. You get to see everything across the whole world, what we're doing.

Starting point is 03:02:54 not only, you know, when I was in the money laundering section, we had payments to informants. We had, remember the money laundering activity that I told you about. We did all that. We did all the policy on that. We had guys writing policy. So I was watching how they were creating and writing policy on money laundering. We had other programs. It was just a lot.

Starting point is 03:03:16 But when I went to Deputy Chief Operations to XO, I just saw the whole world what we're doing across the whole world. And it was like, wow, that's a lot. It's a lot of stuff. But still, I just want to get out of there. So after about four months, I got an opportunity to go to L.A. I thought, I'll never work at the West Coast. I'll go to L.A. Oh, I was so miserable.

Starting point is 03:03:35 I took the job. I was an ASAC in L.A. I did not fit one bit in Los Angeles. It's a very different animal you've been to L.A. L.A. is great. It's kind of like, for me, for the agency, D.E.A., you know, If you're not from Chicago, don't go to Chicago. If you're not from L.A., don't go to L.A.

Starting point is 03:03:57 That's kind of how I looked at it. Most of the people in L.A. are from L.A. Or they're West Coast guys, Utah, maybe there's San Diego or Portland or whatever. A lot of those guys, unless they're brand-new agents, most of the higher-level guys or group supervisors and stuff like that, they're all from there. I wasn't digging.

Starting point is 03:04:19 I didn't really get along with my sack. The first sack that brought me there, I got along with him. He was great. He retired. And then the second one, I just didn't really get along with him. We didn't see eye to eye. He had me doing things that I didn't agree with. Nothing criminal or it was just like, you know, we had one case where we had, we were trying to get an informant into a group to do a certain activity. And the first opportunity after six months to get the person in to do it, he wanted us to like take it down, like take down whatever we were doing at that month. I'm like, if we do that, we're going to destroy the informant and possibly get the informant killed. And our case is not going to go anywhere.

Starting point is 03:05:01 He's like, you know, I'm the boss. You're going to do what I say. I'm like, okay. So I went down and told the guys, they're all like, what? Like orders. So they did it. And then sure of shit, they were going to kill the informant. We had to put the informant write up a threat cable and do all these, all these things.

Starting point is 03:05:17 I went to his office. I said, they're going to kill her. And he was, you know, I was like, whatever, dude. I just didn't get along with the guy. And that's when I, you know, I just said, you know what? I need to retire, man. I'm not feeling it. It was just miserable.

Starting point is 03:05:35 Just admin work, signing memos, you know. One cool aspect was it. I had met one of the producers for Narcos, the show Narcos. And I was helping her, she would call questions. sometimes like, hey, I got a question about what kind of weapons or what kind of vests or whatever, whatever. Can you help? Yeah, sure, of course.

Starting point is 03:05:59 And then I met when I would go on temporary duty sometimes, I would go by the sets and see her and see the actors and see the filming and stuff like that. And I got interested in how can I do some of this stuff? How can I get on and do like commentary on TV? So that's where that all came from, which now I do, you know, whether it's Fox or Newsmax or whatever it is, whoever contact. me. But in 2020, when I finally decided to retire, just before I had retired, I had this situation between the CIA and FBI and us. We had a guy, this was one of the biggest reasons

Starting point is 03:06:40 why I left. I couldn't deal with this. We had an FBI guy on one of my groups. It was what's called Strike Force. We had Secret Service. FBI, Marshall, some U.S. prosecutor was assigned to us, and we were all working different various cases with that group, right? So the FBI guy had been approached by a CIA guy that wasn't in the group. He was just CIA somewhere. That CIA guy said, D.A. is not giving us what we want on target X, right, this person that we want to get. And can you help us out? He's like, sure. Well, it doesn't work that way. Okay. There are certain people that are on a list that can view information, judicial information that's protected. CIA ain't on that list. Right. Okay. And the FBI guy,

Starting point is 03:07:42 maybe he can get on that list or he has access if he gets in our computer systems and searches the databases and gets it. So he can go in and get it and then give it to the CIA, but you have to fill out forms to do that. There's all kinds of violations here that he's committing. Yeah, he's circumventing. He's circumventing everything, but he's committing policy violations,

Starting point is 03:07:59 which are problematic. Okay. So my guy comes to me from another group that has a case on Mr. X, okay? And he's like, hey, he's coming in tonight. We're going to go approach him at the airport, take him off the plane, see if we can flip them. I'm like, that's fantastic.

Starting point is 03:08:16 yeah, it's great. So they go to the airport. When they open up the plane door, they said, oh, that guy, he's gone. There were two other agents came and took him out the other way. And they just took them. So I'm like, what? So they call me. And they're like, hey, dude, an FBI guy from your strike force. And another agent, CIA case officers are officers. They're not agents. he said, this CIA guy said he was a federal agent. Well, you can't say you're a federal agent.

Starting point is 03:08:53 That's a crime. He's a CIA officer. He has zero jurisdiction in the United States. Right. Okay. So, but he's with an FBI guy. The FBI can do it, right? Right, right.

Starting point is 03:09:03 Man, I was hot, dude. I was hot. So a guy in my own, my own channels was screwing over a guy in another group. that he was supposed to be assisting, but he's in a different group. So you have the FBI guy in this group screwing over another agent that actually has the case on this guy.

Starting point is 03:09:24 Right. This FBI agent, all he had was access. He didn't have the case. He was just approached by the CIA guy to help screw over the DEA guy because DEA guy wasn't giving him information because he didn't have any merit to have it. Right.

Starting point is 03:09:37 You follow me? Yeah. So when I found out, I got on the phone and I called that agent. Remember, he works underneath my lineage, right, in the group. He's an FBI guy. He doesn't work for me, but he's in a group that I am the commander of.

Starting point is 03:09:53 Right. I'm actually the commander of the strike force. I called him. I found out where their hotel was. I said, if you don't let those guys in, because we found out what a hotel they went in. And I told my guy, I said, stay outside. I'll call you back. If you don't let him in, I'm going to come there personally.

Starting point is 03:10:09 I'm going to kick the door in. I'm going to arrest you in that CIA guy. he's like, he said, let me call my boss, I'll call you back. He hangs up. I said, you get like five minutes, dude. When I get there, I'm going to fucking kick the door in, and I'm going to arrest you because now you're obstructing an investigation.

Starting point is 03:10:29 You're obstructing it. You have no right to even be involved in this case. But the CIA guy is bringing you, and he doesn't have a right to do this. This isn't how we do business, right? I mean, does it make sense? Yeah. So his ASAT calls me. He goes, are you threatened arrest my guys?

Starting point is 03:10:43 I go, yeah, you're fucking right at him. I said, you know what they did? And I told him, he's like, oh, shit. Really? I go, yeah, really. So then my sack calls me, the first sack, not the second one. He's like, are you threatening to arrest FBI? Yep.

Starting point is 03:10:58 He's like, dude, what the fuck are you doing? I said, you know what they did? I told him. He's like, shit. He goes, hold on, I'll call you back. So then I get a call from the ASAC, FBI ASAC. He's like, they're going to let you in the room. your guys in the room to debrief them with us.

Starting point is 03:11:15 Oh, how generous of you, dude. How generous of you, right? So they went in and talked to him, and then we had a big meeting. The FBI sack came over in my sack, and I was unapologetic. I'm like, listen, I really don't care. You know, if you're going to,

Starting point is 03:11:31 this is how you're going to do business, nothing happened to. Nothing, nothing whatsoever. In fact, I went down to strike force and the FBI guys, they're smiling at me like, like a kid. It's like a fifth grader. He's like a 34-year-old kid.

Starting point is 03:11:44 Right. You know, he's new in the FBI. He has no clue. Like, you know, like, you're going to be a good agent or are you going to treat people like this? See how far that gets you after a few years of being in the FBI, right? And then that sack from the FBI, they basically put everything underneath the table. But that sack of the FBI got severely disciplined because she was taking tickets from people to go to the World Series game in L.A., which is a big no-no. You cannot $5,000 tickets.

Starting point is 03:12:12 Right. So she got disciplined. So I was like, oh, okay, well, karma does exist. But in 2020, I had had enough. I'm like, you know what? This is not the same DEA. Being in ASAC is not that great. I mean, I had wonderful people working for me.

Starting point is 03:12:27 It was great to see good cases and all that stuff. But it just wasn't me anymore. I didn't want to deal with it. So how long had you been with the agency? I had been the agency almost 23 years. Oh, okay. and then a cop six. But then so, so, the day, the day, March of 2020, the very day I was eligible, I walked out,

Starting point is 03:12:52 got in the car and just said, you know what I'm going to drive to Montana. Eligible to retire? Yeah. You got to wait. You got to have 20 years at 50 or 25 years at any age. Yeah. So I said, I'm going to, I'm just going to go. And this was right in the middle of COVID, too.

Starting point is 03:13:08 So it was a total mess. COVID in L.A. was horrible. And I drove to Montana. I stayed in Montana a few months. And then I made my way back to the Midwest with my mother. I was living in Minnesota at the time. Finally, I made my way back to Florida. And I became a cop again. And it was crazy. Yeah, I was a lieutenant over counterterrorism for Hard Rock, which it was. Hard Rock is owned by the Seminole Indian tribe. So it's a nation, right? Yeah. So I was, yeah, I used to drive up. I used to drive up here all the time because I had nine properties that we were doing Homeland Security or counterterrorism and Homeland Security efforts.

Starting point is 03:13:50 Because those venues have a lot of people, a lot of terrorist stuff and things like that. So I did that for about a year. And then after I did that for a year, I just took about a year off because I really didn't really retire. I'm still not retired. But then eventually I said, well, geez, you know what? A buddy mine from the agency called me, CIA. He said, hey, I have a global director job with a company out of Madrid, Spain. Do you want to work?

Starting point is 03:14:18 I was like, yeah, sure. So I did that for a year. That was all over the world doing executive protection, threat assessment, intelligence, things like that. I did that for about a year, but it was really tiring. I was all over the world. I was like, I don't want to live like this. I've already done this for the last 25 years or whatever. So I said, well, let me leave that job.

Starting point is 03:14:38 And then because I had six years in the Florida retirement system, if I went back for another year or so, I got a second half pension. So I went back and I worked for the stay as a fraud investigator. And I did insurance fraud, workers comp fraud, stuff like that for about a year and a half. And then once I got that pension, I was like, man, I can just retire whenever I want, but I didn't know what I was going to do. And then an opportunity presented to work as another director of security for a very large company. I won't talk about that company doing executive protection and some other stuff for that company. And that's what I've been doing now for the last two years going on, three years. And it's been great.

Starting point is 03:15:20 I enjoy it. I don't want to retire. I'm not ready to retire. I do have a question about the informants and who makes up informants and what do they get paid. Like, what's the benefit to being an informant, you know, how does that work? So you have to look at what class of informant, right? So I won't get into the labeling of the classes, but what I will say is you have people that want to cooperate to get time off.

Starting point is 03:15:48 Of course. Okay. Then you have people that just want to cooperate to help their predator day. Right. So you might have someone that's, say, they're from Cuba, and they work for the Cuban government and they're stationed in Miami. Right. And they say, you know what,

Starting point is 03:16:04 screw Cuba. I know that they're moving so much dope through there in the money and I know their accounts are. I want my country back. I'm going to come for the Patriot and I'm going to say,

Starting point is 03:16:14 I'm going to do this. I don't want money. I don't want anything. I'm going to give you this to get my country back. You have those people that do that all the time. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:16:22 Then you have revenge ones. My ex did this and I'm going to screw him over. Here's all of his information. And then you'll have financial gain guys. that say, I'm in a very good place positioned well to provide all this information, and you're going to have to pay me for my services.

Starting point is 03:16:39 And we can do all of those. But you have to be extremely exact in how you document it, what you do. You just don't take an informant's word. You have to get something that's going to cooperate that. So we have technology to do the cooperation, whether it's voice video, all these different things. There's just a variety of things that I won't get into to, look at the veracity of a person's statements and what they're doing in totally, right? And that's

Starting point is 03:17:06 the important thing because how am I going to trust an informant just based on his word? I can't do that. I have to have things that are going to back that up. And that's one of the things in court and the process is that U.S. attorneys and every U.S. attorney has a different way of doing it in a sense. I mean, there are protocols and standards, but they'll let certain things come and go, right? You look at like Donnie Brascoe, for example, right? Yeah, a movie. When he was out on his own doing all that stuff, that's like out there. That's like out there that a lot of that stuff wouldn't be allowed today. A lot of the undercover stuff you're seeing is more short term undercovers where they're going

Starting point is 03:17:42 a meeting. Then they go home to their family. They just have fake everything, right? And they have a different identity, right? But they're not embedded with someone for like three years into mafia. They don't really do that as much anymore. Right. So it's a very different if that answers your question.

Starting point is 03:17:59 Well, no, I was thinking about like someone who goes. goes to the DEA and says, I've, you know, been arrested a couple times. Currently, you know, I'm selling drugs. But, you know, I know eventually I'm going to get caught. I'm going to end up with a 20-year sentence here. You know, and maybe I can cooperate at that time and end up doing, you know, seven years on 20 or something.

Starting point is 03:18:23 You know, maybe I get my, maybe I get a 5K1. Maybe I get a Rule 35, whatever. Yeah. But instead, what I'm thinking is why don't I start cooperating now? Yeah. You know, and then you guys pay me. So I had met a guy in Coleman who this guy was, this was a black guy. He was funny.

Starting point is 03:18:47 He literally was calling his, I don't know if it was FBI or DEA, but he would call, I think it was FBI. He would call him and he put money on his books. and he said, oh, yeah, he'll put, he'll put a couple hundred bucks. Every time I call him, I'll call him once every two, three weeks. Yeah. And he puts a couple hundred bucks on the books because he knows I'm only going to be here for six months or a year. And I'm going to get out and I'm going to continue to work with him. He said, I've been working for this guy for fucking five or six years now.

Starting point is 03:19:13 Yeah. And, of course, the first time he did it, he had been arrested in a drug conspiracy. And he cooperated. And he got out within a year or so. He probably should have done 10 years, but he testified to trial and stuff. Yeah. And he changed his areas, he said. And then he said, I, he said, but you know, I sell drugs.

Starting point is 03:19:31 He's like, I'm selling drugs. He said, but then I would come across like some guys that are like, they're selling some drugs, but they're also like, hey, man, do you want, you know, you want to buy like an AK-47? And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, I do want to buy an AK-47. How did you guess? Right. And he's like, you know what? He said, you know, where is it? Oh, it's here, boom.

Starting point is 03:19:50 He's like, how much do you want for it? Okay, cool. fuck, can you hold it for like, hold it for me for like a week or so? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, can you get any more weapons? And they're like, yeah, bro, this is what we do. We buy them here. We bring them up to New York or whatever it is.

Starting point is 03:20:03 You know, he was like, cool, cool. So then he goes back and he calls the FBI agent and says, hey, these guys are doing this. And he's like, holy shit. Yeah. And so he works with him to start buying weapons from these guys. And then they bust seven or eight people in a thing. And he's like, they bust them. He's like, you know, and they'll bust me with them.

Starting point is 03:20:21 or maybe they bust all of them separately, but I've been wearing a wire. And then, so he would do this, and he'd been doing it for whatever, years. And he said, every once in a while, though, I'll get busted. He said, I'm still selling it. He's, they're always telling me like, you know,

Starting point is 03:20:37 hey, don't do anything. He says, you know, so I don't have a fucking job. He knows I don't have a job. He knows I'm selling this. I'm selling that. And he said, and every once in a while, he said, if I'll get busted in some, you know, with a bunch of other guys.

Starting point is 03:20:51 or whatever, and he'll come in and he'll talk to those guys, and they'll say, okay, look, we're going to drop him from the indictment or whatever. Because he said, because I'm still working with them on another case. He's then I get reprimanded. And he was on, he was in prison for, I don't know what it was. He ended up getting like two years or maybe it was 18 months or something. And he was going to do six months. They're going to send him to a halfway house. He's like, and then I'm going to go right back.

Starting point is 03:21:20 to doing what I was doing. He's like, but they're paying me. They're paying me for seizures. They're paying me X amount of dollars a week just to be getting information. That's what I'm wondering about. So with DEA, I can't speak for what the FBI is doing. With DEA, if you have a guy that is knowingly participating in some kind of drug-structured conspiracy. Right.

Starting point is 03:21:46 Okay. Or maybe not even a conspiracy. Maybe he's just whatever providing or states. statute laws or something like that. You're not allowed to just sign him up. We can't, we can't sign him up as important, knowing that he's committing crimes. No, he was always, they were always telling him, you can't do this. He's like, but I don't have a job. He's like, they know. That's what he was saying. Well, it's kind of like, you know, when you go in the basement of a house and there's five, six cops around bags of money, you know, money. Nobody says anything,

Starting point is 03:22:15 but, you know, right? So you can have something like that where you're like, hmm, We are paying this guy, so he does have money coming in, and we tell them, too, you have to pay taxes with it. They sign it. That they have to pay taxes with that money. So if you're paying him, you know he has income coming in, but it may not be enough to actually be sufficient to support him and his family, right? But we've had cases. I'll tell you about a case we had in Miami. A guy, great informant, was doing all kinds of stuff. We found out he was moving his own dope loads out of the Eastpac. And, we determined that, you know, we have enough to show that this guy's dirty. Even though he was doing a great job, getting us loads on the other guys, we actually flew, I think it was New York, and we arrested him. We arrested him on federal charges. So even though he was our informant, we still had him arrested. Right.

Starting point is 03:23:08 Okay. So with DEA, there's no passing. There's no. Now, if you have a national security case where it might be something that reaches national security where it's so gravely important and you know the guy is, you know, selling teeners of crank or something, which that guy's not going to be a position to do a national security case. Right. But if something, I'm trying to draw an equivalency here in some fashion, maybe something could

Starting point is 03:23:34 be done with prosecution to, like, get him out of that or to provide him some exclusion, legal exclusion in that case or something like that. We've had these kind of cases before where a guy wanted. to work, but he had charges. We had to sneak him into the country, arraign him, and then get him back out of the country and put him. And he was allowed to work for us while he was out of country, still under arraignment. Yeah. Okay. That guy that I was telling you about, he had, he was working with the agent. He got busted on another case. They didn't throw it away. They didn't get rid of it. They, that's why he was in. They just kind of smoothed it over so he continued working. Well, no, no,

Starting point is 03:24:18 in prison with me. Well, they're waiting for him to get out. That's what I'm saying. He got sentenced on, he got sentenced on the, like, let's say he was working through the FBI, DEA busts him. Yeah. Like they might say, throw some good words in there. He still had to come to prison.

Starting point is 03:24:33 Yeah. Because that's why he's telling me all. There's no free passes like that. And he's like, and the FBI guy is sending me money and I'm calling him. And when I get out, he's like, I am going back to work for them again. Right. So they weren't, they didn't, when he got busted by the DEA, they didn't. go in and say, hey, drop that case.

Starting point is 03:24:50 No, no, you're doing the fucking, you're not going to do the five years. You're probably should have got. We'll get it down to 18 months. Right. You'll do six months or whatever. Exactly. But it also kind of looks good. And he just, that was just his life.

Starting point is 03:25:03 Listen, this guy, obviously he didn't have a plan. But this guy, he told me he had done gun cases. He'd done drug cases. He'd done all kinds of different cases that he would. work, but he's still coming other crimes. And I was just like, I was fascinated. And I was fascinated that the agent was sending him money. And I'll tell you another one.

Starting point is 03:25:32 Then I'll let you go. Because I love this story. Yeah. This is why I love this story. No, I live this stuff. Yeah. I get it. But I, this, so there was a guy, Scott, I've tried so hard to get this fucker to come on the show.

Starting point is 03:25:48 And he says he'll come on. come on all the time. Yeah, you know, I'll be in the area in. Is he a former FBI guy? No, no, this is a guy, an inmate. Inmate. Inmate. And he's, you know, always good looking guy, six foot, you know, no homo, six foot tall. I don't know what the deal is, but he's like half Asian, half American. And he was connected with a group of Asian guys. And there was something about cars or something high in cars. But anyway, it was a drug conspiracy. he ends up going to jail. I want to say he got 10 years. I'm never positive on the actual time.

Starting point is 03:26:27 But I think it was like 10 years. So he goes to jail for 10 years. Well, let's throw it back. Prior to this, when he's just in the drug conspiracy, he had been dating a chick that he called the Puerto Rican princess. Colby's heard this story at least twice. And he would tell you he's like, this is the horrible. this is horrible what happened.

Starting point is 03:26:49 He's dating this chick. He's good looking. She's gorgeous. They're dating. They're living together. He's like, and she ends up having this friend who's the hottest fucking thing walking. And I start fucking the friend. Oh, no.

Starting point is 03:27:02 He said, and it's so horrible what I did. He said, I literally, he said, one day, she comes home and he's cleaned out the apartment. And he's moved in with her. friend. He said, all of her friends were my friends, who are also guys that are connected somehow to this conspiracy. So she didn't just lose her boyfriend in a day. All of her friends. She lost her best friend and all of her friends that are connected to me and are staying with me. You know, it's kind of an Asian group. And she, and he said, so she was so devastated by it, she up and moved. I want to say she was in, let's say it was Miami. I don't remember.

Starting point is 03:27:46 remember with she moves like back fucking you know back west somewhere she's just devastated he's like and i've always felt bad about this so this is the story he's telling me while we're sitting in his cell with his celly and you know and i was like oh you're a scumbag you know and we're laughing he's like right he said so he's like no i agree i agree i said how long did the new chick stick around he's i dated her about a year he said and then we all got busted oh and he said uh and she stuck around he is about three months about three months while he was incarcerated. And then eventually he pleads guilty. They all pled guilty and all got like 10 years.

Starting point is 03:28:21 Some guys got 20, whatever. So he gets 10 years and he'd been locked up. Let's say he'd been locked up. Two years, maybe three? Not quite three years. Let's say, let's say two years. And I could be off on the, I never remember exactly what the numbers are.

Starting point is 03:28:39 But what happened was he'd gotten, so when you get a visitation, somebody wants to come visit you. they have to send in a form. You don't know this is happening. When they're added to your visitation list, you get notified. Typically, I've had people show up. I'm going to visitation, and I walk in thinking my mom came to see me and it's not.

Starting point is 03:28:59 It's my buddy Danny. I didn't even know he's sending a form. What are he doing here? So pretty sure that like a day before or something, he had just gotten a notification. Might have been that day. It might have been why he was telling me the story. He had gotten a visitation. for him and he's like she just got added to my visitation for him. It's like, holy shit. And he's like,

Starting point is 03:29:20 yeah. So he's going to call her or whatever. So within a day or two, she shows up. She shows up to visitation, goes into visitation and he says, you know, holy shit. And she's crying. And she's like, this is the Puerto Rican princess. She had found out. She'd called somebody. This is now, it's been like three years since he, a year after getting dumped. Two years after being locked up. She calls and she called some friend of a friend and found out he'd been arrested, got 10 years. She's devastated again. She puts in a visitation form, comes to see him, he goes in, sits down, and she says, because I think she'd moved back to Miami. And she says, he says, what's going on?

Starting point is 03:30:06 He's like, I'm so sorry about what I did you. It was so wrong. She's like, I know it was horrible. She's like, you're the love of my life, though. And I want this to work. And he's like, want this to work. I got eight more fucking years of prison. Even if with good time, I got six and a half years.

Starting point is 03:30:21 And she says, I know a friend of mine that knows that has done something similar to this before. And she said, she knows a DE agent. I've already talked to the DEA agent. And he told me that I can work your sentence off by doing a third party rule 35. And he's like, this is a guy. can cooperate. He's like, what? And she's like, yeah, listen. The prosecution allows it. Right. She says, listen, I, there's a guy who's a drug dealer, a big time drug dealer. He likes me. He's, he wants to take me out. He wants to be with me. He's

Starting point is 03:31:00 always flirting with me. I've always kind of blown him off because I know he does. He's a drug dealer. He's a big time drug dealer. She's like, I can get close to this guy. And the DEA agent said, I can set him up and you'll get the credit. And he's like, no. This is what he tells me. He comes back to Sally. He's like, I told her no. We're all like, it's really me and this guy, DeGeronimo, who was his celly. DeGeronimo, he's a tattoo artist and he's in and out of prison.

Starting point is 03:31:30 Of course, we're a couple of white guys. He's half Asian. He looks like a white guy. And so we're sitting there like, bro, like I'm saying, what are you doing? Fucking have her do it. And DeGeronimo is like, oh, don't do it. it. That's not right. Like, shut the fuck up. You're, you know, you see, these are your third time in prison. You're a fucking retard. You're, you know what I'm saying? So I'm telling him, you know, bro, you should do it. No, I told her not to do it. Told her not to do it. And then like a week or two later, she comes back, visits them again. He's like, bro, she's like, she's saying she's going through with it. She's saying they've already talked to DEA agent, talked to the U.S. attorney. She's already gone on, started hanging out with this guy. The truth is hanging out with this guy means you're dating this guy. You're fucking this guy.

Starting point is 03:32:14 She's going to hang out. She's going to become this guy's girlfriend. He's infatuated with her. Start seeing him. I would say, I don't know what it was. It was. He told me, he didn't really keep me in the loop as much as DeGeronimo did. Telling me, oh, that chick, she's still seeing him.

Starting point is 03:32:36 What's going on? He's like, oh, no, she's doing it. She's going through. But, you know, Scott's not really telling me much. I would say, I want to say a year later. might have been 18 months. The year seems short. Probably, maybe it was 18 months later.

Starting point is 03:32:52 One day I'm in their cell and Scott is there. And it's quiet. Like I walk in usually say, hey, what's going on? And they're like, hey, what's up? They're not finishing a conversation. Remember, you walked up, Colby and I kind of finished up. Let's wrap up. I walk in the thing, what's going on?

Starting point is 03:33:12 I'm going on. there. And I went, what's going on? And DeGeronoma, and I'm like, hey, what's going on? We talk for a minute. And you could tell. And DeGeronima goes, just fucking tell him, bro. And he goes, fuck, shut the fuck up.

Starting point is 03:33:25 And he's like, come on. He's going to fuck. He knows what's up. It's, he Cox is cold. Come on, bro. And he goes, fuck. And I go, what's going on? And I look at him.

Starting point is 03:33:33 I'm like, what's happening? Because I've kind of forgotten about it. I know what's happening, but I'm kind of keeping. And he says, he is fucking, he is a Puerto Rican princess. he said, those guys got busted six months ago. They pled guilty. And this guy is being, his sentence was reduced. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:33:50 And he's headed to like a halfway house. He's, it's been reduced so much. Now, he's, now at this point, he's been locked up three, let's say three and a half years. But it got reduced so much they had put him in. He's going to like a halfway house. And I may be off, huh? What happened to her? She's fine.

Starting point is 03:34:06 She busted these guys. Oh, yeah, she's fine. She busted it. She did a bunch of controlled buys. literally busted him with like a busload, I mean, like a, a shipload of fucking drugs. And these guys, of course,

Starting point is 03:34:19 they all turn over, roll over on each other. She's been wired up multiple times. So these guys are just done. They just played guilty immediately. And he gets the cooperation, and he goes to like, immediately to a halfway house.

Starting point is 03:34:33 And I was like, holy shit. He's like, yeah, bro, she fucking came through. She this, she that, you know, I told her not to. I know, you're a stand-up guy. and he left and he now lives in Texas.

Starting point is 03:34:46 With her? No. What a dick. What do you do? Of course he dumped her. Of course he dumped her. And I even told him because I, you know what I got out, I got out, I got out maybe eight or nine years later.

Starting point is 03:35:00 And I actually, he saw me on some show I had done, some podcast and contacted me on on on Facebook. Yeah. And I was like, bro, he's like, yeah, bro, I'm married. He's showing me pictures of him and his fucking three kids and everything. He's showing me pictures and everything. And I'm like, oh, wow, bro. I go, is that the Puerto Rican princess?

Starting point is 03:35:21 Because the girl looks, you know, Hispanic and she's very attractive. And I was like, is that her? He's like, nah, bro, that didn't work out. I'm like, wow. After what she did. That's, man. That's loves it. I hope he gave her at least a year.

Starting point is 03:35:36 I know. I feel bad. bro, don't, don't, don't, don't do that. Don't do that, you know. Horrible. For what she got him out of? Right. But I mean, you know, what's so funny is I've told that story before and then they've made

Starting point is 03:35:48 shorts about it, right? Like these guys, they'll cut them up and make shorts. And then they'll be 20% of the comments will be like, that doesn't happen. That's not true. Absolutely. They got much tougher on doing that third part cooperation than before. But it can still be done if you get a prosecutor that says, okay. Oh, this was this was 10, this was 20 years ago.

Starting point is 03:36:13 Oh, yeah, that was day and night. Yeah. Yeah. And I know they got more strict on it because there were actually guys that were paying. And there were lawyers that were involved that would pay an informant to sign up for a guy in prison and set people up. Now, the feds didn't know about the lawyer paying. No, no, no. That was a separate thing.

Starting point is 03:36:34 No, of course, that's what happens. Ultimately, it gets busted. Right. And then, of course, some guy who is paying the lawyer to kind of work on this transaction, once he, if he doesn't get, because there's no guarantee. Yeah, right. Because this guy might, he might bust a whole bunch of guys. The judge determines it. Right. Well, the U.S. attorney has to, has to put in for the- Makes a recommendation. Correct. If the judge doesn't sign, it doesn't happen. Well, but usually they'll follow the recommendation. Yes, usually do. 99% of time. But let's face it, at some point, this guy, let's say this guy inside has paid some

Starting point is 03:37:05 lawyer $100,000. He gave this guy 50 grand. He busts a bunch of guys. And then suddenly the U.S. attorney says, yeah, well, I don't really see a connection. I'm not going to recommend this guy gets five years off his sentence. Now this guy's saying, oh, hell no. I paid you 100 grand. Well, I told you it wasn't a guarantee. I don't give a fuck. Right. I gave you 100 grand. Do you see what I'm saying? So then. And that's why they don't do it that. Yeah, exactly. That's why it's got to be super, super important. super legit national security stuff something and then these guys the payments of course the payments completely uh uh that that's you know they try and fight it and say it's not illegal but yeah

Starting point is 03:37:47 there's nothing but technically it's not it doesn't seem you know seems technically yeah seems questionable at best but anyway i i want to tell you that story because i always thought the port rican princess that son of a gun so funny old scott i'm not gonna say scott's last name she even came back to him. Oh, Mike, can you imagine you devastating? And he, he was, he didn't, to his credit, he didn't try and sugarcoat it. Like, yeah, bro, wasn't really working out anyway. And we followed all he didn't say that. He was like, it was horrible because she was such a good girl. And I, and she was such a good. Wasn't that horrible. Yeah. You know, he, like he didn't. Did it twice. Oh, God, I know, right? You know. Twice. Twice. Twice. Twice. This shit.

Starting point is 03:38:35 chick was i mean she's a trooper now the fact that he was in jail that that's a that's a pretty big push to you know i mean what do you got to do what to get him out you almost have to take that someone's offering oh of course what's funny is that he got out i'm not going to say what he does yeah don't have i said what he does no okay but listen here the thing he's very successful like he got out straightened his life up got he's very very successful he was in his early very successful he was in his early 21, probably 21, 22, when all this thing, this happened. And he was with a group of Asian, you know, kind of, I hate to say gang. It was a gang, you know, but it probably would be a gang. And it was a group of Asian guys that he had kind of grown up with. And but he,

Starting point is 03:39:25 what he does now is really kind of amazing. And he's made a ton of money doing it. And he's got this amazing, phenomenal life now. And I like to believe that the. Puerto Rican princess is out there and she found her prince charming and maybe you could take care of her a little bit on the back end maybe maybe she maybe she married the DEA agent maybe she did maybe she should come on here and tell her story right that would be a great and then you tell the story then all of a sudden she walks in that would be awesome she walks behind that so what's like after yeah yeah do the whole so have you ever seen her again Puerto Rican princess never seen her again she walks in I had read an article.

Starting point is 03:40:06 Have you ever heard of Don Diva magazine? No. Oh, my God. It's all the black guys read it in prison. Oh, really? Don Diva? Don Diva. Because it talks about all the, it covers, it's a lot of rap stuff, but it covers like, you know, informants, you know, because they're always concerned about the form of informants and drug dealers.

Starting point is 03:40:25 I'll write an op-ed and send it to them. Yeah. And so, listen, it was, it was, they were. they were exposing like so many high level kind of informants that they stopped letting it come into the magazine. I mean, I start coming into the prison. But actually, it wasn't,

Starting point is 03:40:47 was it in Don Deep? I read an article. I don't know if it was in Don Deva or was it in, I don't know why I want to say wired. It couldn't have been wired. Anyway, I don't think it was Rolling Stone. It was one of these magazines.

Starting point is 03:40:59 It was kind of like a true crime article. And it was a girl. a black girl who was going to college, she was dating a drug dealer, he ended up going to, he got arrested, goes to trial, got 20 years.

Starting point is 03:41:10 He tries to get her to do a rule, third party rule 35. And goes to the U.S. attorney, US attorney says this guy went to, I mean, he went to trial. I'm not giving him anything.

Starting point is 03:41:20 I'm sorry, that's not going to happen. Good luck. Right. So the DEA, but the DEA agent that she'd been speaking with said, look, you're in college. You know,

Starting point is 03:41:30 you've never been arrested. You have extreme credibility. And she was great because he said she actually, one, you're going to college. Two, she could turn on the home girl, you know. And I think they even said she had like a gold tooth. And they said she could talk like a complete, you know, white suburban middle class girl. And she could also talk like she was raising the project. And she's going to college.

Starting point is 03:42:00 they would fly her around. And I never forget this. This is one of the quotes was they said, the great thing about her is that she'll fly her in. She'll go into the projects and buy dope. They said, and all the dope boys want to fuck her. So all of their concern about, is this a cop or not, goes out the window. Yeah, they're interested in her.

Starting point is 03:42:25 Yeah, she pulls up. She throws a little ghetto slang in there. She smiles with the tooth. She's hot. And they're like, oh, hell no, sell her. Sell, sell, sell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they sell to her.

Starting point is 03:42:35 She'd make three, four buys on someone. Yeah. And then, you know, they put her in a hotel. Yeah. Stays there for a week. Makes 1,500, 2,000, whatever it is in a week, flies back. And they, she'd been doing this for years. And she was basically doing that through throughout or throughout college.

Starting point is 03:42:58 This was her school. Right. And they said, the great thing about her is she'd never been arrested. They said, so usually the informants, if we have to put them on the stand, they have to disclose. Yeah, I've been arrested three times. I've done this before. With her, nothing. Nothing.

Starting point is 03:43:14 You ever been arrested? No. Yeah. You ever do this? No. What do you do? I go to, I'm a professional informant and I go to college. I'm, you know, I'm a senior at such and such.

Starting point is 03:43:25 And they're like, holy jeet. Like, they believe her. Inpeccable. Well, she was, that's an impeccable. Yeah. And they're verifying everything, too, with audio video and all this other surveillance. Right. So it's lock solid.

Starting point is 03:43:36 But I remember reading that article in, I was in prison when I read that. I just can't remember if it was Don Diva or if it was, it couldn't have been white, but I know it was a Rolling Stone. Might have been Esquire. It seems like an Esquire. But it was really interesting. So I'm always interested in these guys that, because I'll be, I'll get contacted by guys that are like in the middle of a drug conspiracy. And they're like, people are getting busted. I don't know what to do.

Starting point is 03:44:04 And I'm always like, listen, go get an attorney right now. If you cannot afford an attorney, you can contact the federal defender program and explain to them what's happening and tell them you want them to assign you an attorney, which they will. Yeah. And for them to go with you to speak with the DEA agent. They didn't have money. Right. I call the public defender. Hey, talk to this guy.

Starting point is 03:44:31 Right. Just so you know, our case is solid. If I told him, like, our case is solid, they were like, shit. Yeah, we got it all. He wants to cooperate. He'd call me like half hour later. Bring him in. Okay.

Starting point is 03:44:43 We work a deal. Boom, boom, boom, boom. He had the council. He had the, he'd go before the judge. Yeah. The judge would appoint them the council. You know, because, you know, they would work a better deal. And they haven't.

Starting point is 03:44:52 Here's a whole thing. These guys that every once in a while have caught, and this is probably, let's say five times in the last three years. You know, I'm telling them you, I'm not saying you're going to get busted. Even you're going to be eventually one of these guys is going to mention you. But you know you're involved with all these guys that are getting busted. You know that they're building a case right now. Now is your best opportunity to go in because right now you're not really anywhere on paper.

Starting point is 03:45:20 And you can still make it before. Right. Yeah. Better to be a witness than a defendant. You may be able to stop yourself from being added to the indictment and help them with the case. And now you're just a witness. Guys don't get that, though. No, no, because in their mind, they think, well, maybe.

Starting point is 03:45:40 They're not going to get me. The difference between maybe and them getting you is 15 years. Like, what are you doing? You know what's coming down. Yeah. All these officials in Venezuela that are indicted and they're hoping they don't get wrapped up and brought to the U.S. I'm telling you, and I'm going to tell them right now on the show, you're coming to the U.S. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:46:00 You have indictments. You're going to get lit up. It's going to happen. Yeah. You know, and these guys, the best thing they could do is reach out and get a good lawyer and line that path before they actually have to take it. Yeah. And you get, listen, depending on what you know, you might have an, get an amazing deal. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:46:18 I know. So. people to. I won't say his name. But there's one lawyer that he's a former federal prosecutor in New York. He's now in Miami. When people come and people will do that, they're like, hey, can you help me get whatever? Like, okay, let's see if you're real. Let's see what your case is. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Then I bring him to a lawyer. The lawyer then evaluates and says, okay, because I just don't get people a lawyer right away because it might be ridiculous. It might be, you know, might be some guy just bullshitting, right? But then when the lawyer gets him, then the lawyer will be like, oh,

Starting point is 03:46:55 okay, let's work on this. Let's do what we need to do. So that happens all the time. Perfectly legal, nothing wrong with it. It all goes through legal channels. Yeah. You're a fool if you think, like you said, you're going to risk 10, 15 years or are you going to try to help yourself? Right. Good luck. Yeah. And if you go in before you've, before anything, nobody around you, it's better for you to go in, get the lawyer, go talk to, do, E-E-A, FBI, whoever's busting these guys. Because at this point, none of your homeboys know that you're in this position yet. So you're in an amazing position now.

Starting point is 03:47:38 Any weakness of their case, they can send, one, you might be able to clear it up just with a phone, or just by debriefing. You also may be able to clear it up by going in with a wire. Right. You know, and that puts you in a phenomenal position. I don't know why these guys hesitate to do that. Especially in the Fed system? They're scared. They're hoping they're not going to get indicted.

Starting point is 03:48:01 They're hoping that they're going to skate by. And that's just such fullness. Yeah. Not in the Fed system. No. Do you have resources. The guys are smart. They've got guys out there that are just dedicated.

Starting point is 03:48:13 They don't sleep. Yeah. It's going to happen. You know. If it's a serious, serious crime, go talk to a lawyer. Yeah. Get ahead of it. Where can people find you?

Starting point is 03:48:24 So really simple. you want to read my book, Infiltrate America, Blood Routes, and the Rise of Latin America Gains. Just go to infiltrateamerica.com. It's also on Amazon or Wesleytaber.com. And then I do things for like police departments. I speak to cops and talk about things, you know, in the job and things like that. And I have a real interest in working for, with nonprofits and this drug rehabilitation and strategy and things like that. So I'm getting into some of that stuff just to try to help America's youth and to kind of shift what we talked about as far as, you know, with gangs and crime and drugs and rehabilitation and prison sentencing and all this stuff. It's something I'm really

Starting point is 03:49:05 interested in. Hey, you guys. I really appreciate you watching. Do me a favor, hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so get notified of videos just like this. Also, we are going to leave all of the links to the book and the website in the description box. So you can go there. And if you want to, You know, if you want to follow West, if you want to buy the book, anything, check it out. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. See ya.

Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - DEA Agent on Seizing El Chapo’s Millions & Hunting Maduro | Wesley Tabor

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