Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - NYC Cop Takes Down an International Smuggling Kingpin

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

NYC Cop Takes Down an International Smuggling Kingpin

If you don't come with our money, your family, you, you're all gone. You don't understand the reach we have. We're all over the world. And if you hit the piece of wood just right on a corner, it would open. And inside it was a heat-sealed plastic container with one ounce of 95 to 97% pure he. You can make about 100,000 off it. I'm sending you a package with 20 to 25 statues three times a week. You start doing a math.

That's a lot of money. This kid was hooked up. with the main source of supply of the drugs who was in Thailand. And he was the guy that was going to cooperate. And we get driven up to North Hong Kong, to near the China border, to a housing project. I'm unarmed. He's unarmed.

Walk into the building, takes us up. On the way up, I tell Keith in the elevator, Keith, I got a kid at home and a pregnant wife. No matter what happens here, we're getting out of here. I don't care if I have to throw somebody out of window, stomp on their throat, I'm getting out of here. You understand that? went upstairs turn the recorder on rang the bell

guy opens the door with a gun in his waistband I was like I'm fucked I'm dead I'm dead I'm in the middle of nowhere they're never going to find my body Hey this is Matt Cox And I am here with Dan Murphy And we just met him at PodFet No wait we met him at we're at crime con

And we just met him at crime con I'm not even to redo that we just met Dan at CrimeCon and he is the co-host of a podcast called Gold Shield with Tom Smith and he is a retired New York City detective detective I'm getting so much right and we're gonna we're gonna hear his story so check out the interview like nobody expects me to be professional yeah it's fine we leave in all kinds of flubs because it's like hey yeah this is not slick. It's just a couple of knock on. You want to see professional. Get Netflix. This is YouTube. It's free. You're on YouTube. Yeah. So, so. You see, the me or some guy lighting up his farts. Which one do you want to watch? I mean. So anyway, were you, let's start at the

beginning. Yeah. Were you, were you born in New York? Yeah, I was born in Queens. Okay. Were your parents in law enforcement? No. My father was a Marine. He did eight years in Marine Corps, a Korean War veteran, and my mother was a secretary. Both of them were the parents, with the children of Irish immigrants. And my father actually didn't finish high school until I was about six. When he got out of the Marines, he finally went back to finish high school. He joined at 17 to go fight in a war because his brother was a Marine also, and he was shot over in Korea and missing in action. And so he just jumped up and ran to the recruiting station.

And that's how it was back in those days. days, early 50s, but um, that's back when people love their country. Yeah. Thank you. Amen. But he, um, he instilled a lot of good things to me. My uncle was a member of the New York City Police Department. He was very influential in my life. As a matter of fact, my father was a serious alcoholic and we had a ruptured, I'll call it, family life. And as a result, I spent a lot of time my aunt and uncle's house in Brooklyn. And he was a great, great guy. He did end up in 39 years with the police department. Um, and he knew, everybody. And I didn't really even think I wanted to go into it, but he was just such a positive

influence. And when I was about 18, I had no idea what I was doing. I went to Queens College, took communications classes. I had a radio show. I thought that would be something fun to do. You thought you had a radio show? I had a radio show in college. Oh, okay. Yeah, I was a DJ, played records, you know, knucklehead, thinking I could be a broadcaster with this accent, right? I used doing. You know, the plural of you is use in my. neighborhood. So I was going to be on the radio. Yeah. Yeah, how's you doing? This is a country station in Nebraska. Nice to meet you. Nobody was going to listen to me. I realized soon that my career in radio was going to go up and down and be done in an hour. So I didn't know what I wanted to do.

And I remember being at a family barbecue where my uncle said, why don't you take the police test? It's 1982. They're given a test. And I was like, police test. I hadn't thought about it. I really didn't. I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I ended up taking. a test doing very well on it got hired and really liked it it was fun to me it was it was an adventure was exciting new york city in 1984 when i got hired was you know a city i out of control right subways were a mess drugs everywhere um so to me that was my adventure it was excitement i liked it it was a lot of fun okay did you i mean did you janet graduating college well i i well i finished high school went to queen's college for a couple of years i ended up getting

hired from the police department by the police department when I was 21 before I finished end up going back to get my degree. Okay. So you started as what, like a, um, just a patrolman. Yeah, that's why you all start. You do your six months in the academy and you learn all the basics and then you come out and I was assigned to, uh, what is now a trendy area, Bushwick, Williamsburg section, Greenpoint in Brooklyn, you know, lofts are all worth money. But back in 1984, I can describe it as a heroin infested shit hole. If I'm allowed to sing a shithole on your podcast because that's what it was was a dump you walk down the street you're stepping on the envelopes and then the glass scenes and the um and the needles and stuff and junkies hanging out like this in the hallway it was it was just that kind of a place right so i learned a lot very quickly how long were you were you um you know a patrolman well i did my six months training there and then i got assigned to a precinct and that was the west harleum 30th precinct which was at the time very busy little shop and went from there or another patrol unit.

I did about three and a half, four years in uniform before I went to what's called the Manhattan Warrant Squad. And that's looking for fugitives. So I was looking for felons, people who had skip bail, people who had jumped out on their trial or whatever. And a lot of drug dealers, some murderers, people like that. But that was interesting work because now I'm doing detective kind of work. And I'm working in jeans. I'm dressed in any way I want to. Waking people up at 6 o'clock in the morning in their beds and dragging them.

down to court. All kinds of crazy stuff. People hide. It's funny. I used to laugh. People say, oh, this guy went on the lamb. Half the guys I look for went on the lamb like two blocks down. Right.

Because that's their whole world, this little neighborhood. So I'm hiding front of police in the next apartment building. It really didn't take a genius to find them. And I had people, I had two guys once in a refrigerator hiding from me. And I went in the apartment. The same refrigerator? The two of them are. It was a big refrigerator.

refrigerator these two guys were small and they're holding each other and I heard something inside it and I opened it I'm like you guys would have died you can't push open that door from the inside it has that seal and I'm like you're welcome number one number two put your hands behind your back you're under arrest but is this just you or do you have a partner no with a partner oh I was gonna say that oh yeah no no New York City don't go hunting people who want it for felonies by yourself it's not a smart move right but uh had a lot of great experiences with that that was my god that was fun you want to hear old story yeah funny running run a podcast. I'll tell you a story.

Guy that I work with had a warrant on a guy who skipped out during the middle of his trial. The trial was for robbing a bar and shooting the bartender in the face with a shotgun during the commission of the robbery. This guy's family put up a house. He sees it's going bad during the trial. He decides, you know, the wind is my place. I'm going to get out of here. He comes the next day. He's supposed to be in the courtroom. The judge sees the defendant's gone. He says, yeah, warrant for him, get him now. So it came over to our office, go find this guy. We're looking for him.

We can't find him. He bolted town. Well, my partner had to investigate everything he could. He looks through some really old paperwork in the docket files at the courthouse, and he finds a phone number associated with a family member in Connecticut. Picks up the phone, calls it. Who answers? Our hero.

He says, yeah, this is detective, whatever. Listen, don't hang up. Here's what happened in the case. And he's, he's, what, what? Here's what happened in the case. The bartender, the witness himself has now wanted. He bolted. He's not testifying.

The judge is willing to get rid of this case if you'll come down and pay $250 fine for possession of the unlicensed shotgun on Monday morning at 9 o'clock with a money. You got a get a money order. You get a pen? He's writing all this stuff down. Monday morning comes. We think he's not coming. He's like, yeah, okay, be it or whatever. Monday morning comes.

We had made an arrest at about 6.30, 7.30. We come down to the courthouse. We had a special office there. We bring our guy in and there's a guy sitting there wearing a tuxedo. Our hero went and got his hair, jerry curled, rented a tuxedo, and had green patent leather shoes on. He's sitting there waiting for us and he's waving his money. I got my money order.

What happened is during his trial, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 12 by the half to 25 years. His lawyer couldn't get in touch from him because he didn't have a number, so he didn't know. So he believed our crap. Right. He went and got a money order and showed up for court. So we said, excuse me one second.

We walked out in the hallway and pissed ourselves laughing. Went back in and said, yeah, we'll just walk into the courtroom, no problem. So we took him back up to the courtroom and he's like, yeah, this is good. We said, listen, it's procedure. We just have to put cuffs on you. Okay, no problem. Cuff him, bring him in the courtroom, give the court paperwork to the court officers and said goodbye and ran from the courthouse because the second he found out, I'm sure he lost his mind. Well, Your Honor, I have my $250 money order.

I'm supposed to go free today. Judge, oh, no. That's that was happening. No, you owe the state 12 and a half to 25. Remanded, get on a bus. You're going upstate. How could you be that stupid? Mike, I still marvel at, but people believe what they want to believe, right?

They hear what they want to hear. We used to arrest people by appointment. You know what? Come in at 3 o'clock on Monday. I just need to interview you. need to get a statement from you. I understand you're at the scene of this fight. Somebody said it was a robbery. You might be a witness. Maybe you can help me. I'm probably, I just want to close it out. If you come in, you should take 15 minutes of your time. Meanwhile, I got three people

identifying the guy as doing the robbery. And I know we did it. Right. Okay, good. So what does he thinking when I'm on the phone with them? Well, if they really were going to arrest me, they would have come and got me. Right. Maybe I can get out of this called hope. Right. Maybe I can bullshit my way out of this. I can walk out the door. Well, Knucklehead walks in the door at 3 o'clock. Sit them down. Thanks for coming in. I appreciate it. I understand you were at the scene. You saw this fight go down and see, yeah, I was there. What happened? Yeah, this happened. Yeah, this happened. Okay, great.

Do me a favor. Come in this other room with me. Hold this piece of paper up in front of you with these other guys. I swear to God. And they're like, okay, they hold it up. They're in line up. And they're like, okay. And they get picked out. Do me a favor. Sit in the cell? Just sit in a cell for a minute. a cell door, start typing up the arrest reports and the guy looks at, excuse me, any other prisoners that are sitting there. Am I under arrest? They all start cracking up. No, we put innocent people in the cell. You just got identified in the lineup. You put yourself at the scene, which is all I needed you to do. And now you're under arrest. That's how it works. Man, you

tricked me. Yeah, I did. I'm allowed to. Yeah, I was going to say the, uh, I love the, well, you know, they're just the cops. They can't lie to you. What? Oh, yeah. Like, If you're buying drugs or somebody in a narcotic situation. You have to tell me if you're a police officer. No, I'm not. Okay, we're good. Yeah, we're good. It's a, let them believe that.

It's funny. Right. I used to call them one-celled organisms. We had a lot of funny, a lot of funny times with people who are so stupid. Thank God they're stupid because, honestly, it was just, it was easier to get the stupid ones, but it was, it made for good laughs. We used to ask them questions like, we'll do an IQ test, writing out the arrest report. IQ test, yeah. Name three presidents.

I probably had five people in my whole career that could name three presidents, Washington, Lincoln, and that other guy. Well, that guy we got now. They wouldn't know it. Because they're street people. They're very smart in what they do, but they don't know anything about the real world. Do you ever see that guy that goes to New York City and he does TikToks? And he stops for random people and he's like, hey, can, you know, how many, you know, how many states are there? Yeah.

And they're like, uh, man, I'm not good with that. And they're like, okay, just guess. just and they'll be like 30 and he's like right right well there are 30 but there's 20 more partially right they just this one after another they're though was the um can you tell me what country the great wall of china is in man i don't know great wall of china i don't and they'll say great wall of china i don't know it's like so where who's the what what or who um you know who is what the queen of England. And they're like, I don't know.

What queen is she the country of? Yeah, yeah. I don't know. You can't make it up. I had a lot of fun with them. And one of the best questions was when we asked everybody, which is this, get ready now. What's closer? Europe or the moon?

And remember, you can see the moon. Right. Yeah. It's got to be the moon. I can't see no Europe. I can't see you ever from here. Yeah. Oh, my God.

I had a lot of fun with them. So, yeah, I worked in a warrant squad. That was fun, learn how to do a lot of things like that. And then I went to narcotics. Now, in 1989, I'm working in Brooklyn North, which is the upper half of Brooklyn, which is Bedstuy, Bushwick, Williamsburg, Brownsville, East New York, tough territory, Crown Heights. A lot of shootings, a lot of guns.

It was probably the most homicide-ridden stretch of territory in America by far at that time. And so we did a lot of undercover buy-and-bust scenarios, a lot of cases, a lot of search warrants, with informants. And I really, really saw the drug problem more there than I ever did in any other place I worked because I was entrenched in it at how pervasive drugs were on what they were doing in the late 80s. Crack had destroyed the fabric of most of New York City's neighborhoods. Heroin was making a comeback in many ways.

It was crazy times, crazy, crazy times. It was not uncommon. You're writing around here. Shots going off. Not uncommon at all. And you don't even know what they're coming from, so you don't go crazy. well how long were you how long did you work that job before you were transferred i was a couple years of narcotics so two years of narcotics and then i went to a unit called osir the organized

crime investigation division and this is a more thinking man's game is that something you wanted to do like are they just come to you or do you no no you had to apply and put in for it and it was not easy to get into and i had some some cases and things i had actually helped catch at puerto rico's most wanted fugitive, who was a cop killer, who was killing people all throughout Bushwick. I got an informant that gave him up and we lured him in. So that helped me, and I ended up getting assigned there. It was a prestigious place to work. It was looked up to.

And part of that assignment, part of that unit was mafia cases, mafia crime families. The other part of it was a task force with the DEA, which I was in. So I started working on Southeast Asian heroin cases. And I knew nothing about that. So it was a big education. Yeah. Looking like me. I'm a natural to work Asian cases, but it was, it was fascinating.

I learned a lot there. And that's where I started my first federal RICO case, which branched, it became a drug case that branched into a RICO case. And that was something we had chatted about earlier. This is a two and a half year investigation that was an eye opener for me. And it started with street level stuff, guys getting pop. We were out there. Our mission is find Southeast Asian.

The best heroin in the world, 95, 97% pure, they call it China White. Number four, they call it over there. And it's sold in units as opposed to kilos, and it's more expensive, and you can step on it many more times. And it just was not as easy to find as your traditional run-of-the-mill heroin and Coke and stuff like that. So we were trying to find direct sources of supply. That's what the DEA works on. So I started talking to some people, letting people on the police department know, hey, detectives. I know this one I'm looking for. If you get any trace of this, let me know.

And we developed a few sources of information. What started it was there was a, there was a group of four guys and there's a prison in upstate Manhattan called Bear Hill Correctional, upstate New York, I mean state, up near Canada, Bear Hill Correctional. And in Bear Hill Correctional, four guys who were housed together became very close friends, and then some. One of them was, I think he was Lucchese. Another one was an Asian guy. Another one was a member of White Tigers gang who was Filipino. And the other one was an Italian guy from a Bronx who was involved in heroin drugs for years with his brother. They all became very close.

The Asian guy upon his release was going to be deported back over to Asia. So he told his three good friends, I'm going to make you all rich. When I get out of here, I'm going back and I have a global contact. I'm going to be working in a Thailand-based global heroin. in operation, and I'm going to be sending you guys packages with the best stuff in the world, and he did. He was sending them in the mail, these boxes with these beautiful wooden statues in them, very light balsa wood, painted everything, and if you hit the piece of wood just right

on a corner, it would open, and inside it was a heat-sealed plastic container with one ounce of 95 to 97% pure heroin, which at the time, if I'm a dealer, I sell you that one ounce, it was $7,000. Okay. You can make about $100,000 off it when you step on it and cut it up. Right. So I'm sending you a package with 20 to 25 statues three times a week. You start doing a math.

Right. That's a lot of money. So we tapped into this and it ended up taking us a couple of these guys cooperated. I mean, some of the craziness. How do you, I mean, how do you track that down? Like, I mean, this is a guy, you're saying that he's mailing it back. there. They're cutting it up. They're distributing it. I'm like, do you end up catching a low-level drug dealer? And then you get him to give you the guy above him. Like, what happened. Here's what

happened, actually. A member of the narcotics division in the Bronx had an informant who turned them on to a guy who was receiving heroin in the mail. Okay. This guy I know from my neighborhood. All right, great. They deal with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and they do what's called a mail cover. This guy's address is such and such. Any packages that come here, take a look at. Well, U.S. Customs and the U.S. Postal Inspectors can open any package they want and check it out. So they checked out a package. Sure enough, had a lot of stuff in it. And they did what's called a controlled delivery. Postal inspector pretends to be a postal carrier, knocks on the door. Hey, you're waiting for this package? Yeah, great. Sign here. And you get what's called an

anticipatory search warrant, which means I'm anticipating when he gets this package. He's going to open it up in a minute or two, and we were allowed to hit, if he accepts the package, we can hit the warrant. Right. So this one knucklehead accepted a package. They hit the warrant. They grabbed and it turned out to be Asian heroin. They gave us a call. Now this guy cooperates because he's looking at the rest of his life in prison. Right. And so he comes in and he cooperates and he is a character to say the least. He thinks he's a big time mobster, but in reality is kind of a wimp. Um, he tried to line to us a couple of times. That doesn't work in federal court.

And he lived a very interesting lifestyle. I'll just leave it at that. But we ended up then getting the Italian guy who was related to Lucases, who was funny as hell. A little bit about Mikey. I won't say his last name. He's probably dead. Mikey, when we grabbed him, he took off from us and we had to chase him in the car. And when we finally get him out of the car, he fights.

So we throw him down on the ground and we cuff him and stuff. And he's like, what's with the guerrilla tactics? What didn't you just call my lawyer? I would have come in like a gentleman. You're a knucklehead. Right. What do you think? Paul Castellano, you're just some moron.

Call my lawyer? No, we're not calling your lawyer. And so, Mikey gets brought down. I interview Mikey and I tell him, you know, you're looking at the rest of your life in prison. I don't give it to him. I don't give nobody up.

I'm the last fucking Viking. I don't cooperate with nobody. He's got that rough, gravelly voice. He's a steroid guy. He's a heroin user, too. too. And he's crazy. So we're sitting with him, okay, FBI wants to talk to him because they want to know about, you know, do you want to cooperate and help yourself, tell about your family? Fuck you. All this kind of stuff. Tough guy. Well, at one point, I'm sitting with Mikey,

and it turns out the other informants had given us quite a bit of information about Mikey. Right. Mikey, it seems, when he was in prison, used to like to wear the Catholic school girl, dress, skirt, uniform. That was his role. we'll call it their extracurricular activities in prison so that was his role he played the Catholic schoolgirl I had a Polaroid of him doing that so I'm sitting in my interview and I'm like you don't want you sure you don't want to cooperate Mike you sure you got nothing I'm okay great

we just hit your door we got the drugs we got the money right okay what about that and I slid the Polaroid in front of my wife knows I'm nuts how nuts does she know you are Mike how nuts do you want this on an overhead in a federal courtroom I don't cooperate with nobody okay I'm done talking to you we take him down to the courthouse to process him the next morning I have to pull him out and bring him into federal probation

where he's got to be screened for eligibility for parole or bail and all out of this stuff so bring him in federal parole probation officer sits with me and Mike and says, okay, time for the urinalysis. We've got to test your pee in addition to all this other stuff. The three of us walk Mike into the bathroom. It's cold.

It's wintertime Manhattan. The bathroom's cold. There's a urinal. Mike takes his steroid frame and puts it up in front of the urinal. We can't really see. Takes the scoop, scoops it down into the water, scoops them up and hands it to us. And the probation officer takes it and goes, Detective, would you feel this? It's like 40-something degrees.

Right. It was the water that was in the urinal. sitting there it's like almost freezing in that room he says really really mike this is what you want to give me i said mike my god dead bodies that have been dead for 12 hours the fluids in them are not that cold right this is not your urine you're calling me a fucking liar yeah i am calling you a liar you're you're a liar you've we know what you did okay no worries probation officer takes it tests it gets his report goes into the courtroom mike's mike standing in front of the judge Mike's family owns this house

He has this, he has this history of work And all this other stuff And he failed his urinalysis for evidence of opioids Mike stands up and goes How the fuck did that happen? Right in the courtroom Because he can't believe Mike had the misfortune

Of dipping his cup into water in a urinal Where the last guy threw Had heroin in his system Right It wasn't even his And he's the look on his face was shocked The judge is screaming And I'm just out of restraint him

I was cracking up in the back of the courtroom. I couldn't believe it. You know, like, if you didn't have bad luck, he'd have no luck, Mike. So that's Mike's story. Mike ended up taking a plea, needless to say, he didn't want to go to trial. But that case branched off where... Did he end up cooperating? He didn't cooperate.

But he took a plea. Right. He was happy to get a plea. He didn't cooperate with me. That's for sure. So we got those guys, and one of them was a leader of the White Tigers gang. in Queens. And he was a Filipino guy. He was born in Canada. His name was Chris. Chris was legitimately a sociopath and stone cold evil. And I've met a lot of crazy people in my career

in my life, but he was stone cold evil. For example, Chris, when we popped him, he decides to cooperate. Now, Chris is sniffing heroin and he's having some problems. He's like 22 years old. And he's got his little crew and he's a tough guy. And the Chinese, The Chinese members of the White Tigers gang used his crew for enforcement stuff because Chris would do anything. Shoot anybody, kill anybody, he can care less. And Chris comes in to cooperate and he's sitting there and he's all like dazed out from coming off heroin. He goes, you guys probably know all this anyway. And we're like, yeah, we know everything about you.

We didn't. Poker face, right? I have no idea about your life except we just popped you in Queens. You're a moron. That's all I know. All right. You know about the hit I took on the family? You know about the big press homicide in Midtown Manhattan?

That was me. The big robbery that was all over the front pages. We had no idea. It was him. And we're sitting there. Yep, we got it all. Went outside. We're going, holy shit.

Couldn't keep up with all the crimes this guy had done. So this kid was hooked up with the main source of supply of the drugs who was in Thailand. Because he was the guy I was in prison. Yeah. and he was the guy that was going to cooperate and try to work on helping us identify who else was receiving these drugs. He gave us all the bank accounts that the money was being wired back to, all dummy accounts through shell corporations in Hong Kong and all other stuff.

So the drug side of the case moved along at that rate because at the DEA, we wanted to identify the source of supply in Thailand and figure it out from there and stop it. So we got back to the source. we figured out who it was. It turns out this entire drug operation was being run from a prison in the mountains of Chang Rai, Thailand, and our guy was in prison. He got released here, got picked up over there and thrown into prison, but the prison itself was a drug operation.

Okay. So it's like, you've got to be kidding me. I got pictures of the guy in chains, and they take the chains off long enough for him to process the heroin and do all this. It's like, it's crazy. So he turns us on to that. get involved in that, we're investigating that. We're looking at the accounts and we decide in order to get anybody extradited to America, especially the main money launderer, the operation was run

out of Hong Kong. The main money launderer and the main members of the organization were Hong Kong based. The Hong Kong Crown Authority, this is before Hong Kong went back to China. They demanded that we have an in-person meeting undercover capacity with these people, get them on tape, to confirm it's them before they will agree to extradite. He's in prison. But like I in Thailand, we couldn't touch.

But the Hong Kong folks, we were able to stop it there. Oh, okay. We would have no luck with the Thai authorities trying to grab them and break that up

in the mountains of Chang Rai because it's, there's so much money, the whole place is correct. So we went after the Hong Kong folks. In order to do that, I set it up with a series of calls to the guy,

in the prison in Thailand, I was introduced as a New York businessman who's going to be over in Hong Kong on business anyway, I have to bring you some money. I have to do this. We have to be careful with the accounts right now. I need you to change the accounts. I need to come over and discuss that with you in person, all this stuff. And they went for it. So myself and my DEA partner, Keith, we're salt and pepper team. He's a same size as me, African American guy. And two of us are going to go over there and do this, right? We're both Americans. I'm sorry. I mean, if he looks like you, then you both, you both look so much like cops. Yeah, but not there.

Not there? Well, let's go back to all Americans look alike. Well, let's go back. Yeah. Let's go back to I talk about early about hope, right? People believe what they want to believe. Right. You're going to bring me money.

You're a representative of this guy. He owes us money. You're our new contact, all this other stuff. Yeah. They want it to be real. They wanted to be real. So they bought it. We went over there, flew over to Hong Kong.

total life-changing experience. Never been anywhere near there before. And now we have to work with the locals. It turns out that the locals, it was too corrupt. But the locals are tiny compared to you. Oh, God, yeah. Oh, the cops were like, I'm six, three.

The cops roll five-five, five-six, one hundred and so nice of you guys to help us. Thanks, elbow red. No, they were nice enough and very professional. They just weren't tactically sound in any way, shape, or form. But we had to do an in-person meeting with these people. And so made arrangements to meet at the Marriott Hotel in Hong Kong in a safe space, so to speak, in a public space. We could talk.

And I was wired up with a Nagra recording device, which looks like an iPad almost. It's about that thick and that big at the time. It was ancient equipment in 1995, and we did it four. And I was wearing this belly band in my back. And I had microphones taped to my chest. And I'm thinking, all they have to do is pat me down and they're going to kill me. Right. but guns are rare over there

and to have a gun is a big deal so there's not a lot of fear of that necessarily but nonetheless we were in armed and we go to the hotel and the Hong Kong police are surveilling us. They're watching us to make sure we're okay hopefully do the meeting hopefully get them to talk drugs

hopefully get them to my goal was to order up more to say keep sending I was going to give them new addresses so that we could document the shipments coming in and we could pop them all that stuff well sitting in the hotel lobby. All of a sudden, you know, I get paged under my, my fictitious name. I go up to the concierge.

Yeah, you call for this guy. Yeah, you have a call. I pick it up. Yeah, change of plans. I gave the address to the concierge, take a cab, click. A lot of people would have called it off. Yeah, I was going to say, that's not good. It didn't look good. It didn't feel good, but I was, I just traveled 10,000 miles to get you assholes. I'm not giving up. So I didn't want to talk to the Hong Kong cops that was surveilling us for fear we were being watched. Right. So Keith and I went outside, got in a cab, and hoped today would take the hint. Follow us.

We're going someplace. You know? This is before cell phones. I couldn't pick up a cell phone. Right. I come this far, I'm doing it. Walk into the building, ring the elevator, takes us up. On the way up, I tell Keith in the elevator, Keith, I got a kid at home and a pregnant

wife. No matter what happens here, we're getting out of here. I don't care if I have to throw somebody at a window, stomp on their throat, I'm getting out of here. Understand that? Have the same mentality. So if this goes bad, we're living. That's it.

Have that in your mind. He's like, agreed. So we're like, good. We shook on it. went upstairs, turned a recorder on, rang the bell, a guy opens the door with a gun in his waistband. I was like, I'm fucked. I'm dead. I'm in the middle of nowhere.

They're never going to find my body. And you have no, do you have any idea that the, whether the, um, Hong Kong police have followed you? They didn't. Found that out later. They didn't. No. So we're there by ourselves.

They're just sitting there watching you guys leave. I guess they're going to lunch. We'll stay here. Yeah. We'll wait for him to come back. No worries. So, yeah, when they were checking out for the tactical operation, they were assigning several of them five shot Smith and Wesson revolvers and giving them five bullets and telling them I have to bring it back at the end of the operation.

These were not cops in a sense that you think. Right. So these guys are, they're lost. We go in, meet with the main woman who's in charge of the whole operation. During a course of probably a 45-minute conversation, she talked herself into federal prison in Manhattan. She gave me handwriting samples All the new account numbers and information

She talked about the drug She everything went like Clockworth But the second we sit down and start talking to her She had a dog the size of a race horse That comes over and is standing right in my face Looking at me growling I'm thinking I was afraid of guns And now I'm afraid this dog is gonna bite my head off

Right I'm sitting there going Oh my God Can I just get out of here Sweating bullets Shook hands, thank you, great We'll talk Betta Bing out in the hallway

Took the elevator it down come out there's no cab waiting for us we have to figure out how to get a cab there's no cops waiting for us so we finally get a cab if we find we walk to a business tell a guy we need points to a wall number we call guy comes takes us back to the royal hong kong police um narcotics bureau offices and uh we walk in and go how's everybody doing they're like oh you're back yeah yeah everybody have a nice afternoon what the fuck were you guys right you left us where were you oh we didn't know where you were going well if you don't know the answer to something wouldn't it be who've you you know to attempt to find out right how would one

find out where we were going follow us yes right one-on-one they didn't do it but we got the tape we got the evidence we played the tape went to court with it in hong kong everybody got arrested the next day it was uh very interesting very interesting uh do they deport them back United to America, which is a process where the U.S. Marshals fly over and fly back with them in cuffs. And so I went. And they must have just felt like, you know, being in Hong Kong committing this with the ineffectiveness of the local police or having paid them off or whatever. And knowing the system, they must have just felt like dealing, what they were doing

was they were just, they just had it had it down. Like they were totally safe. They had a global operation that was making so much money and had paid off the right people in every place, had corrupt people working for that. them left and right and then walks these two knuckleheads from New York. And we managed to snake right through to them and talk to them. And it happened. It was probably one in a million that it would have happened. But they had their guard down because they weren't used to getting hit. But I'll never forget during one of the phone calls, because we had made some

arrests and we had stopped the flow of money back temporarily, I called over and who gets on the phone, the guy's boss. He goes, my boss wants to talk to you on the phone. It's a Brit. And he's telling me with a thick Brit accent, we are all over the world. If you don't come with our money, your family, you, you're all gone. You don't understand the reach we have. We're all over the world. It's a Brit. I was like, okay, in the mountains of Thailand, this guy's boss is a Brit. So you start realizing the scope of things, and it's an enormous ring that they had going on around the world. Specter. We had just tapped into our little piece of it, but it was it was a heck of an experience.

I mean, you know, I think we drank so much that night as a way of saying, thank God, that's over. It was a lot of fun. But, uh, yeah. So what are those, what they get? How many people did were, how many people were grabbed completely and what were the, some of the sentences? I'm sure you can't remember all of them.

Yeah. Well, no, that, that was a, as I said, it was a two-prong case. The one piece of it was the global narcotics piece. And the second piece of it was the White Tigers gang in New York, which we did a federal Rico on. Now, that specific branch of the gang had done a Park Avenue and 46th Street, right under the Pan Am building, brazen rush hour daylight robbery murder, where they robbed a jeweler from Chinatown transporting money and jewels up to his 47th Street location, made big press. We had the contract murder in Brooklyn of a husband, wife, and year old baby that

my informant took, and when he told me about it, he could have been eating a sandwich like it was nothing. He's a total sociopath. He killed all three himself. He, well, he took a hit. He killed the husband. He took the hit, shot and killed the husband five times in the face, knocked his head through the window. The wife was in bed. She gets up. He shoots her just above the heart, but she lived, but she was passed out. He thought she was dead. And then he's frantically searching the apartment for the baby. But the brother, it was the girl's brother who hired him to do it because they wanted the apartment to use as a mahjong apartment to make money. And the family who owned the building was letting the daughter live there because she was brand new young baby. They're working hard.

He's like, uh-uh, dad's dying. I'm going to be the new boss in the family. I want you out. She's like, I'm not leaving. Oh, yeah, you are. So he hired my guy. My guy went over and did this. And the baby wasn't there because he turned the heat off. to try to get them to leave. This, I mean, now, my guy cooperates and gives me the guy that hired him. The guy that hired him, the only evidence we have was my guy. Right. Because this is a four-year-old homicide.

We had the detective in the squad was shocked when I told him we were solving it because he worked his ass and he really felt bad for the family. But we went to, I went to the U.S. attorney's office and she's like, let's just end up him, and because we have enough evidence to indict him, let's see what happens. Let's see who else cooperates. Let's see what else we can generate on this case, because he's just, you know, you hired somebody to kill your own family. It's horrible. And a baby, took a contract on a baby. So we go, I lock him up, I bring him in, he's not cooperating. He's acting like it isn't what I'm talking about. My guy who's cooperating is now in what they call a rubber

room, a psych room in the federal prison system down in North Carolina, lighting his genitals on fire and screaming about Jesus in the apocalypse. He's lost his mind. He's nuts. He's no you, good to me as a witness. He's not going to make a good witness. No, a little less than credible. So all this guy has to do is say, I don't know what you're talking about. Right. And eventually the case will go away. Right. However, right before Christmas, the U.S. Attorney's Office decides to give out Christmas presents, which is please. Let's give out a plea in this case, in this case, and clear the calendar, so to speak. So I'm sorry. sitting in the office with her and she calls up the attorney for for this guy that ordered the

hit you know what your client sickens me but let's talk plea okay so we got him to agree to 15 years and the US attorney says do you are you happy with 15 years I'll take anything this guy's disgusting but I don't got anything else right he's willing to admit he did it I know he did it but he's willing to you know it's not the wrong guy it's the right guy but let's let's work with him so he says I will not admit in a courtroom to taking the contract. I will admit to hiring these guys to go and

scare my sister, but not killer. Okay. I said, I don't give a damn what you admit to. As long as you admit that you were involved in it, you're the guy that contracted them to go there. Whatever. To be honest, let's face it, it doesn't matter if I hire you to go scare my sister and you murder her.

You're still on the hook for that. Yeah, you're done. Yeah, you're exactly. You're on the hook for the murder. If I say I arrange for you to rob a bank, but don't bring a gun and you bring a gun, well, I'm still going to get, if you kill somebody or anything, it's still going to be my fault. Right. It's the root cause thing. So he, um, he goes into the courtroom to do what's called Alecue, which is admit your crime and talk about the whole context of it. The judge says, I want to hear from you. Not just, yeah, I did it. No, no,

what happened? They want to make sure they don't get wrong people convicted. Tell me what happens. So he gets in a courtroom and he speaks Chinese and almost no English. She has an interpreter. Now, this is the guy who hired the crew to kill his. sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, and the family's all there supporting him. The sister, who survived with the baby, had to move to the other side of the country because the family abandoned her. Oh, wow. That's their culture.

Right. The son comes first. So he's in the courtroom with his pregnant wife, his parents, they're all sitting there. He's a greener of 15 years. He gets up, and he begins his allocution. And it goes through the interpreter. He speaks in Chinese, he interpreters, says what he said. I hired the gang to go over to kill my sister.

He admitted it. And as soon as he said it, the interpreter said it, and he put his head down, he realized, oh, my God, I just admitted it. Right. His wife erupts in the courtroom in the front row. She's like eight months pregnant. She's screaming at him in Chinese. She grabs her stomach and rolls down to the floor. I had a call an ambulance.

It was a scene. It was crazy. But I thought to myself, you know, sometimes there is justice. I mean, this guy, you know, he admitted it. Everything he didn't want to say, it's the classic tale, do not say this, do not, do whatever you do, whatever you do, you say it. That's how we're wired as people, you know. But I, that was satisfying. I was like, okay, all right, I feel better that he did it and I feel better that he admitted it.

And now I can feel good about that case. I know I got the right guy and the right, and a little bit of justice was done. What happened to the shooter? How much time do you get? You know, he entered the witness security program with SEC. He cooperated, and I have no idea where in the world he is. Once he gets moved into that, it's a change your name, move you, and I have no more contact. I didn't want any more contact anyway. I just hope I never meet up with him again.

He's crazy. He's legitimately crazy. So what happened with the people that were extradited from Hong Kong? What did they get? You know, I didn't stay on top of the case. I know at least one of them cooperated, maybe more. and after that I lost contact with it because the DEA was very concerned

about the widespread organization so they're going to make every effort to get these people to cooperate. I forgot what the sentences were but the rest of the White Tiger crew that was involved with my cooperator they were all his guys that were involved in shootings and robberies and all this other stuff they all got like 50 years

life without possibility federal RICO when you throw that weak RICO charge on somebody with violence it's life you're never getting out um so i'm going to tell you a story that you find funny i i know colby's here heard this and we had this guy on his name uh was uh won carlos one yeah one sanchez one carlo one sanchez one carlo one sanchez i think is so uh yeah like it might as well be like like john smith yeah so one one ran a real estate a huge real estate scam i'm

you heard the whole story you die like i and i probably tell the story better than he does um but he he ran a scam where this is before the meltdown so he's he's basically going in and he's he's selling these huge developments right and selling to the people he's getting him a mortgage or whatever well then things start to go bad and he's looking for investor money and he goes to venezuela and he borrows money from the, from the, I'm going to say the cartel, which is actually the government. So he actually borrows money from the Venezuelan government. So he's meeting with government officials. They give him a bunch of money, whatever, $10 million or $20 million, something like that. He comes back. He loses it. He goes back again. They give him more money. He, because they're

making tons of money. They're laundering money for like the cartel and stuff. So eventually, you know, they're threatened. At this point, they're threatening to kill him and everything. So he basically just kind of disappears. So he disappears. He goes to New York. It eventually catches up with him. And there's a whole slew of things that happen. But he catches up with him one day, FBI knocks on his door.

And because a lot of what he was doing was manipulating the market and stuff. It's bank fraud. So they knock on the door. They indict him. They bring him back to Miami. And he's in Miami. And he's, you know, he's under indictment. He's got no money.

Of course, the first thing they do is take away all your ill-gotten gains. Take away his money. he gets a public defender he ends up pleading guilty he gets 20 like yeah i don't know what i want to say 15 to 20 years let's say 20 i think he probably did he probably still did eight or nine years so he gets 20 years he's doomed he ends up hiring and finally he actually raises the money to get a second attorney off of facebook raises like 40 grand or something hires this new attorney and by the time he just about gets the attorney one day he gets a visit And he's more than willing to cooperate.

And his new attorney is going to try and fix the sentencing. And it's federal. One day he gets a couple of FBI. He says they said they were FBI. But his attorney is saying he thinks they may have been CIA, whatever. Point is, is that they show up. They sit down with him. And they say, we look through your cell phone.

Do you know this guy? You have cell phone number for this guy. This is a, this is basically like the attorney general of Venezuela. Like he's like a cabinet member or whatever. Like he's high up. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, yeah, I met that guy. And he's like, he's one of the guys that gave me the money. They gave me a bunch of money.

He's like, right. They're like, well, we indicted him. He's been indicted three, two, three years ago. And he's like, right, well, why don't you get him? He's like, well, he's in Venezuela. We can't get him to come here. He goes, and he said, obviously he's not going to come here. And he went, well, I could, I could get him to come here.

And he goes, they go, no, no, he wouldn't come here. I mean, he knows we've, they kind of know we've, we've looked into them. Like he probably knows he's indicted. He goes, no, no, no, he'll come here. He wants them to go to Disney World. And they go, what are you talking about? He said, yeah, yeah, he said, because like a year or two, like two years ago before I kind of went to New York and tried to hide from you guys, he said a year before, so a couple years

ago, he contacted me. And they were asking me to do all kinds of favors for them because I lost all their money like in between the phone calls where they said they were going to kill me in my entire family they would periodically ask me to go buy an SUV and try and get it shipped there you know he said so one of the things he did one time was he said my family my kids my wife and kids they want to go to to Disney World he said I need you to get me to come in and he said you know the way it works is like I could do that but I needed to get him approved and I had to say that I was like an owner of a company that he was coming to possibly work for and bring him and his family in

he said, I told him I could, I can open a corporation, but it would be a new corporation and they might have an issue with that. And so you may not get the visa. And he said, try. He said, well, I did try. And it turns out that the local U.S. Embassy down there like denied his visa. He goes, so if you guys have the embassy write a letter from the embassy saying that they made a mistake and his visas approved, he'll fly in. And they went, he can't be that. stupid. And he said, I remember Juan goes, listen, you don't get to be at the level he's at in Venezuela because you're bright. He was, it's because you're brutal. And he's stupid and brutal. He will come. He's a thug. Yeah. And he said, he thinks he's untouchable. And so they were like, okay. One ends up going to jail. Goes to prison. And one day he like, somebody one of them gets a newspaper article somebody's getting like the miami harold and like this guy's on the front page like miami harold they mailed him the letter saying your visa's approved a week later he and his family show up and at miami international airport like they're wearing like

disney world shirts and the kids have on like little mickey mouse airs they arrest them in the airport as he flies in and then he shows up at coleman with the federal president and where, where Juan was. Yeah. Actually shows up. Juan sees him before, like before they, he sees him. He sees him and he's like, oh shit. So he kind of has somebody go to him and say, look, do you know who this person is?

He's like, yeah, I know who that is. He's like, okay, look, you know, is you going to be okay, this and that? He's like, yeah, yeah, bring him out. I'll talk to him. Let me talk to me. He's not a big deal. So he comes over and he talks to him. Look, he's like, I don't want any trouble.

You don't want any trouble. And he said, you know, one of the things they did at one point was they actually. kidnapped Juan at one point and Juan kind of got away got on an airplane flew back to and he goes

he came to say when he came to he's like he's like man you you got me to fly in here you got me you got me in a lot of trouble he's like you kidnapped me he's like you stole our money and he's like listen

this is going nowhere can we just be okay yeah it's fine it's fine that guy and like you were saying they wanted that guy to cooperate yeah he did cooperate he ended up getting four years he was out

for laundering hundreds of millions of dollars of the cartels money you know the the the Colombian of Colombian cartel money through Venezuelan government part of that money went to Juan yeah so you know that whole thing like you know he laundered hundreds of millions of dollars he ended up getting four years he was out on his sentence before one ever even got a reduction on his sentence for the guy yeah like then the government never even told Juan they arrested him they said nothing he had to see it in the newspaper call his attorney and say hey yeah this is what happened yeah then his attorney calls it as did you guys forget to mention something yeah but yeah that's so far i love the i i i can picture them getting off the plane with the mickey mouse air ears on and the t-shirts and we're going to

disney world not really not so much yeah you know you bring up the case about south american kidnappings related to the columbian cartel and um after that assignment i went on to work and was called a Major K-squad in the NYPD, and we handled every kidnapping for ransom in New York City. And at the time, we were doing about 55 to 60 a year. And the majority of those were alien smuggling, Asian-related alien smuggling, became a big thing. It was part of their MO. They make money. And it was, I worked a lot of them.

But I also worked some Cali cartel drug kidnappings. So just so, and because Cali cartel was New York, I can speak about them. They moved their drugs through Queens, and they have the whole Eastern Sea. board up and down and middle antics states and everything and they they were forced to be reckoned with now that was the enemies so to speak of eskabar but none and they were powerful so when they as an organization bring you in to do anything for them they know everything about you they are the biggest they were the biggest cash business in the world so they have phenomenal investigators they have enforcement wings they have intelligence people they know everything right if something

goes wrong with you. Your family's dead before nightfall. I mean, they, they will find you and they will kill you, but they're going to take your family out. But what they did was they had this group of guys called Los Gijos. They were their kidnapping wing. So we had a couple of kidnapping that were drug-related, where we had people who were couriers for the cartel when Little Rogue skimmed five keys. They're not going to miss five keys, right? Let me tell you something about the Cali Cartel. They miss a half a key. They miss an ounce. They account for all of it. That money they don't play with. And you're not. responsible for it. So this guy was a pilot, this one guy, and he took some. Skimmed it,

pretended it wasn't put on his planes. No, that wasn't, man, it wasn't your mistake. They don't make a mistake with that. If they load a plane up on a wrong way down in Columbia and it stops in Central America and all that stuff, it better have the same amount at each stop than it did when it started in Columbia. Well, this guy skim someone took off and he had a lot of money. He had a lot of money from being a pilot for them and he thought, you know, he'd get away with it. The problem is he had a sister who had a baby, and they lived in Queens. Well, they're at that family's house within hours. They grabbed the baby.

So we had a 19-month-old baby kidnapped. That's a crazy case because kidnappings are serious cases always, of course, but for detectives, they're very nerve-jarring because anything you do wrong can result in that person being killed. You have to be good at what you do and covert about it. and a low-key, and it has to not be publicized. You're on this. It has to be behind the scenes, and you want the safe return of the victim.

That's your only priority. Everything else is secondary. It doesn't matter. Criminal case, we'll figure out. First and foremost, get the victim back. This was a baby. We were highly motivated to work it. Well, we talked to the sister, who was the mother, and she was destroyed, and she's like,

it's my brother. He's an asshole. He's wrapped up with these people. I'm not. I'm an American. I work hard. So she manages to get in touch with the brother, and she reads him the Riot Act. You better get your ass here and make this right.

So what they were demanding was that he show up with the drugs and extra money and they'll let them. They weren't going to let them. They're going to kill him. So we knew that he comes out of the shadows because the sister told him. Now, he's going to be our courier. He's going to bring the money and all that stuff to them. But we had to back him up. So the day comes down for the drop, the ransom drop.

It's about 95 degrees with high humidity in Queens that day. He admits to you that he took the money. Oh, yeah. It's obvious that he took it. He knows we don't give him. Not the money. Sorry. Yeah, the drug.

He knows, I don't give a crap about that. That's not my deal. My deal is getting your nephew back home to your sister. Right. I don't care about your world and drugs. Let the DEA care about that at that point. I was working different stuff. So he had me, yeah, yeah, we'll do it.

So we had him out in the street, dummy rolls of money, dummy rolls of drugs. Also, he could flash it. so we would know who we were looking at. We had surveillance everywhere. We had cars everywhere. Me and my partner are sitting in a car. We're in a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, bulletproof vest, gun, a pair of sneakers, hot day. We might be fighting with people running and chasing them.

And I'm in a car that has no air conditioning. And I got the window down, rolled down just that much so I can get some air. We're waiting for hours. I'm already to go to the hospital. I'm like, God, let this go down, this drop. So finally our surveillance team sees these crews. They do counter surveillance. They're riding around the area looking, make sure the area is clean.

We were in the most nondescript vehicles. We had people in the bodega. We had people who blended. We had undercovers from the car. We had the neighborhood watched, but you wouldn't have known it. And you couldn't have known it because these guys, if they raised up, they would have killed a baby. If they would have said cops were involved, they would have killed a baby. So finally, after several cars go around, the car comes.

There's five guys in the car, two in the front seat, three in the back. The guy sitting on the bump in the back is holding the baby with a 45. This is in New York City in plain sight. Like a Tuesday afternoon at 2 o'clock on a hot summer day, right by Flushing Meadow Parking Queens. That's fucking insane. So our lookouts are looking and saying, okay, this car is suspicious. Okay, we see a baby. It's the baby.

It's in the car. It's doing this. The car pulls up by our guy who gives us the signal, whatever signal it was, that this is the car. That's my nephew. and we know if we give it too much time, they're just going to kill them. Right. We know they're going to kill them.

And they're probably going to kill a baby and dump it someplace else and just take their drugs back, whatever. But they had no intention to let that guy walk away with the baby. None. You don't cross them like that and get away with it.

Right. So we start pulling up. We just, it's like move in, move in, move in, move in, we have to stop it right now. Screech up, get their attention, jump out of the car, it's probably eight of us. Open the car,

doors throw people out in the ground. Everybody's got a gun. They're all a mess. The guy in a backseat is still holding a 45. I jump in the car. He's right here in my face with the 45. I take my Glock, crack him off the face with it, the metal piece. It opens him up. My magazine falls out. I got one round now. He's still got the 45 in his hand. Louis Estevez, who I work with this big guy, grabs the baby, and I'm hitting this guy in a face with my gun to get him to drop his gun. I finally get him to drop it, and I pull him out. These guys, treated that baby like gold during the captivity, which was maybe a week, changed the diaper, fed it, it was comfortable, had toys.

I mean, they're professionals. Right. They had no intention to harm in the baby unless they had to. We want our money and our drugs back on the courier killed, at which point we'll keep our part of the bargain to let you. But these were a professional crew. They did it all over the world. And that's how they do it.

And I was blown away by the professionalism of them. They were just, you know, we have a playbook. This is how we work. You mess with us. We can't find you. We go right to your family. So if you think that you're going to get over with those people, good luck. Good luck. I mean, I hate to tell another story. But the whole them knowing your family thing, you know, I've heard, I mean, obviously, you know, I've heard about this over like these guys, you know, they're fronting you 600 pounds of, you know, whether it's, you know, marijuana or whatever it is.

You know, a lot of times, yeah, they just gave it to me. I, it did. So I wrote a story called American Narco about these. this guy who was uh he played in a band he's basically like a rock star right used to play with like uh he's played with like lindy cravitz and um three doors down and you know uh he just never made it big but he he he was a he's a great musician anyway i wrote a story about him and his friend and the first time he got he he was buying a little a little marijuana here a little bit there a little bit there he said you know and he was dealing with a guy that he didn't know he was a cartel he didn't know he was connected to cartel like he's like he's a mexican guy yeah and uh he said and one day he comes to him and he's like hey man let's uh let let's talk let's talk okay he said um he said we

go and he said look i want to front you some you know more like five six hundred pounds he's like oh wow because he'd been buying like a couple hundred pounds he's like you know he'd gotten up to that he's like i'm gonna give we want to front you some stuff he said oh he's like oh he's you live around here he's like yeah i live right down the street he's like can we go by let's go by your place and he's like oh cool he's like he's real friendly you know this guy is very like he's real friendly we went by my house we had a couple of drinks we had this i told him i grew up in the area my parents live in the area he was where do your parents live he's like oh they live in he was we drive by my parents house yeah and as we're talking and

i'm sitting there talking you know i'm writing my notes and i'm like do you realize at this time what's happening so he's like no like he he's funny because he made a joke with me one time he's like you know like i mean do you have you you pay your bills do you like they want me to ask you some questions. Like, you pay your bills, right? Like, you have good credit. He's like, yeah, I got perfect credit. I got a house. I got a mortgage. He's like, okay, you know, we just asked some questions. Do you live around here? Where was your house? He's like, yeah, he is. Can you believe that? He asked me, like, what's my credit? And I sat there and I thought, you have no idea what's happening. It's funny, at the end of that story, one of their contacts, as they get up

through the chain, they're dealing with a guy, this guy, Apples, you've ever heard, you know, they call, they have nicknamed, right? Like, you have a big head. They call you, apples right his contact apples apples apples got at some point he gets busted and loses a couple thousand pounds of coke and goes to prison the cartel kills both of apples brothers who are in mexico they just never find their bodies they just they're they're normal guys working works at like a t-shirt factory one guy works at you know in a retail store just normal people just one day they just go and they're this guy gets off work they pick them up yeah the other one gets off work a couple hours later they pick them up i don't know if they found their bodies um in the desert

or he i forget i said check the thing but i think he he said they dropped the bodies off in the desert or something but i think they were just never found again they was whatever they're they're they're definitely they're gone but yeah it's it's you know people he was just if when you talk to him he's like i'm telling you this was he was the nicest guy this was a nice which you don't necessarily just like you said people believe what they want to believe right he didn't see it right you know and you don't realize till suddenly you get busted somebody gets busted now i owe them fifty thousand dollars right now also note of times when things have been seized and guys you know but it's clear the DEA got this and they go and you were responsible for it and you go and the

cartel says we're going to let you work it off you know i've seen i've i've heard those stories before too and they let them slowly work off the amount that they up that they but other times you're not so lucky depends upon how much they trust you and what your track record is right well and that guy's just a thief yeah they didn't get seized you to get pulled over and they that you lost it in in transit no customs no no you stole from us right well crime tends to attract criminals yeah right and so it's fun no honor among thieves right if you're going to be in a drug gang there's always a reason why you opted for that lifestyle and it's generally not because you're the most honorable person in the world, and some people are, but there's a lot of people who aren't. And as a result of that,

these organizations, whether it be mafia, whether it be Colombian cartels, Mexican cartels, they have an infrastructure built up to deal with people who play games, and they have strict internal discipline. I was involved in a federal RICO case when I was detective of a group called the Poison Clan. The Poison Clan was a Jamaican, Jamaica, Southwest Indies, group out of East New York, Brooklyn, run by the Beckford brothers, Dean and Devon, who were both say hello to Florence, Supermax facility right now. These guys were responsible for 27 homicides in Brooklyn and 8 in Richmond, Virginia, where they were just starting. Most of it was internal discipline, and it was strict. This is how we do things, period. You deviate,

left or right, they have no problem killing you. It doesn't. a couple of things. It ensures quality control among the crew, for lack of a better term. It also ensures loyalty. And it makes sure that everybody understands that there are repercussions that you don't have a second chance. You cannot do this twice. It sends a clear message to everybody. And these guys were ruthless, as you've seen the most successful criminal organizations, they cannot be given people breaks. It just doesn't work in that line of work. Because it's It's giving latitude to somebody whose whole life is about pushing the limits. So you take your criminal crew and tell me, it's okay.

It came up short. It's okay. You're going to come up short every time. Right. You're rip you off like crazy. Actually, probably one of the reasons that Paul Costalano was killed by the Gotti crew was because he didn't act first. He suspected Godi wanted to take over. He knew he knew Godi was getting involved in drugs and hurting, hopefully not, but definitely.

going to hurt if it ever came out the name of the crime family and turned them into a different type of entity castellana was old school and didn't want that god he knew that because of a tape recording that was out there and the old man knew it so he acted first and because he acted first he assumed the helm uh so they have their own internal discipline and they're more brutal to each other than you think uh but it works for them what you told me about another uh case uh kidnapping the kidnapping case. Yeah. When I was in a major case squad, as I said, we worked every kidnapping.

This one specific incident, I had a bit of an expertise in Asian, Asian organized crime. I had done some federal RICO cases. I developed a bit of expertise in it. And in my role in the major case, well, whenever we were to Chinese kidnapping, I was, I usually worked on it. If I wasn't the case detective, I worked on it because I knew the players. I knew the gangs. I knew who was who. And so we had this one specific instance.

There was a time when there was two separate kidnappings, two different places. two different places, two different times, reported, and two separate detectives from the major case squad, each had their own case on it. But it went cold. We didn't have any information. We weren't getting calls into the family. We weren't getting anything.

Things had gone cold. This is only, only costs of a couple of days. Usually things are hot right away with a kidnapping boat. They're taken. The family calls and says, my friend was taken. My sister was taken from the store. She was leaving. Did they have any idea why?

Alien smuggling generally. With the Asian community, it's like, well, certain communities in New York City, we could assume, right? Okay, it's a Jamaican thing. It's probably drugs, kidnapping, because that's how they do it. Right. Columbians, probably drugs. Aliens, it's alien smuggling and gang related. I don't understand. You mean they owe money or? Yeah. Well, here's what happens. They want to make more money off them. It's a racket. It's all a racket. These people at the time, Fujia province was the poorest province of China. They were having people brought over to America to get out of that life

and they were willing to endure months in the hull of a ship. They were willing to endure whatever it took to get to America. But to get over, to get passage, they had to work through what's called a snakehead. Snakehead's the guy that organizes the whole thing. Now, the price for you to get your new life in America was always $38,000. Now, they love the number eight. That's a good luck number to them. $38,000 somehow paid.

Some up front. Some worked off as an indentured servitude thing. You're going to work 16 hours a day in the back of a restaurant, seven days a week. And at the end of everything, we keep everything except 50 bucks and you sleep on a cot until you're paid off. Or a 16-year-old girl, yeah, she's going to work in a restaurant right to the brothel. Right. And she's got to do 500 guys to work off her time. And then it becomes 750.

I mean, they never get out of it. They really do destroy their own people by doing this to them. And it's their own people, the snakeheads. But they come over here out of desperation. Now, when they're over here, if they have any indication that your family has any assets whatsoever, they'll kidnap you, and they'll grab you and hold you for $38,000. They love that number. Kidnapping ransom was always $38,000. They used to do the ransom drops. They'd pick up the money, whatever money could get raised in and around New York area. And we would lock them up because it's easy. Knucklehead's coming. We just heard it on the wire.

we're monitoring the home phone they called in you know meet us here have the brother meet us here with 38,000 we'll give you your sister back so we would always lock them up we were batting a thousand they're showing up we popped them then they got smart and what they did is they decided we'll have the money wired we will have our cohorts over in fujao so the first thing they did when they grabbed them was they put them in a car they tell me your china number give me your family in Fugia province, give me their number, and they call them up and say two people are going to come visit you very shortly. If you want to see your daughter again, here she is, mom, you give them what they want. And they do it because they know that victim has a family who has a house and

or a restaurant or something over there that's of value. So I get off the phone, they're all distraught and two minutes later the doorbell rings and it's two guys from the gang. I hear you need a loan. Yeah, I do. Okay. We have money for you. You just have to sign over to your D to your house and your restaurant and your car, whatever else you have. And we'll hold on to your, I mean, it's crazy. So they do all this and then they wire the proceeds, some of it back and some of it's kept over there and they released the victim. So we didn't know what to do with that this because we didn't have a ransom drop. We can't identify our players in New York.

We made a couple of cases go by where somebody would get kicked out of a car after the money was transferred and they would say what happened. We're like, well, we had you as a kidnapping victim, but we had no activity and all of a sudden you turn up on the Street. So our unit, through various contacts, got in touch with the Fugia Police. And the Fugia police decided this was a great opportunity for them because according to their laws over there, in a case like that, if they grabbed the people in China picking up the money, they seize all the assets of their family. And they love that. Apparently, they get some of it themselves. It's a big thing for them. So they were happy to help us out. So we had these people helping people.

Yeah. We had these cases, these first two knuckleheads, I won't go into it tomorrow. I'm deviating from the story in this one case. But they were cooperating with us, and that was a good thing. So these guys, the first two guys that go to pick up money in China, on one of those cases, get popped by the Fujia police and summarily executed within two weeks. And they do public executions in a big stadium, and they keep numbers, tallies. executions to date kidnapping drug traffic certain things are just kill right away yeah and the sum

total of their judicial process in china was a hearing with a stenographer a court a prosecutor and you death click next they don't play so we have these two cases these two people are being held it's labor day weekend 1995 i head out to montalk area with friends and family hanging out out there all weekend this is beeper time this is pre-cell phone right My beeper doesn't get a signal out in Montauk. It's way in the ass end of the Long Island, and it's really nice out there, and I can't, nobody can get in touch with me, really. But I don't care. I'll explain what beepers are afterwards.

It's up there with phone boots and rotary phones, yeah. So I'm out there enjoying the weekend, start driving home, and my beeper is going off like crazy. Right. Like crazy, backed up beeps as soon as I get into range. I jump into a pay phone at a gas station. And I call back and it's the office, of course, and they're like, where the hell are you? I'm out in Long Island. What do you mean?

Shit hit the fan. Everything broke with these cases. It turns out these two victims taken at separate times in place was being held by the same gang along with a third victim whose family didn't report it to the police. So the three of them are being held by a gang in a basement apartment in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Okay? The gang, Chinese gang, Chinese victims. They took the girl. There's one girl, the first girl, and they beat her and killed her, stabbed her, crushed her head, suffocated her because her family refused to pay.

They said, they have no money. So they killed her brutally. Now, this is a small apartment, and then they hung her by the neck from a weight bench and left her right next to the two other victims they had on the floor. And they said, see her, that's what's going to happen to you if your family doesn't pay. They took the dead woman and they took a note, and they wrote on the note in Chinese that you'll never catch. us. This is a clue of our identity and they put a king of club's playing card down her shirt because that was an identity. It would help them because they would call the plum flower boys of the Fukinese Flying Dragons gang. And they thought they were really, really sharp and

they were going to get away with this because they had done a lot of it. We found that out later, how much. Two other victims, the guy, his family can't pay. They're like, okay, let's just take him out. I feel like shooting him. Let's have fun with him. So they take him. So they take the guy out and they tell him, they tell the girl laying on the floor that they wrapped up in duct tape like a cocoon. They said, we're going to kill him. Party, come back and kill you. It's 2 o'clock in the morning now. We're back by about 7 to kill you. So she's laying on the floor inches away from this other woman who's dead, brutally killed, bleeding all over the place. And she realizes I have to do something. So somehow she manages to worm her body over to the

stove. And she picks her head up and manages with her teeth to turn the light, the ignition, I'm sorry. She ignites the flame on the stove. Worms are way across the floor, picks up a newspaper with a mouth. Worms back, gets it up on top of the flame. It starts a fire. Just enough to go out, the open window, and somebody calls 911. Well, fire department gets there this smoky room, and they're like, whoa, we got a problem here. All right. Precinct gets there. you got a dead body, you got a girl, she starts talking, blah, blah, blah. Simultaneously, at the same time, out near the Queens-Nasaw County border, they took this guy, they drove off the side of the highway, into a wooded area, shot him in the head, and left him there.

Problem is the bullet hit his cranium, traveled around it, and didn't enter it. So he was knocked unconscious with a concussion. And it looked like he'd been shot in the hand. Yeah, because he was out, and they left him. And they took off. He wakes up and wanders out into traffic and almost gets killed. causes an accident. The cops come, who the hell are you?

He's got a bleeding head and he's babbling in Chinese about something. Well, it starts getting put together. They do a record check. They find out we had a case. Our case gets involved and everything starts taking off. Now, who did this? Who are these guys? They're in the wind.

I get called in right away. We start working on it. We're interviewing people. We're doing our stuff tapping into resources. Who do you have that's a source within the Chinese community who's your source of information who's your informants who knows anything about this because these guys talk everybody knows who did what right like if there's a gangland slang the bananas know that the columbos did it right right or something people know all right so i'm talking to informants

uh and at one point we realized through phone work that at the time and again i'm dating myself there was these things called international calling cards right if you had the number you bought fifty dollars worth of credit you can call anywhere in a world with that number you just punched that number in. So these guys had used a calling card from this kidnapping to call over to China. The same calling card numbers were used in Seattle to call over to China at the same time. The Seattle FBI had a kidnapping case in Seattle at the same time, Chinese, and they made two arrests. So we found that out through the phone company. We called the Seattle FBI. I said, yeah, we got two people. We had four perpetrators. We got two arrested. Okay, our guys are related.

our crews are related. Can we come talk to your guys? Sure. So myself and the guy named Bill Oldham, great detective, lunatic, but a great detective. We get on a plane, we fly out to Seattle. We go to talk to these two guys. They're in some lockup. We meet with the two FBI agents. They tell us the case. And we're sitting. We're like, okay, you had six perpetrators. Yes. Okay. And you arrested two. Okay. Tell us what happened. Well, the victim was being held in this house. and the house stood alone surrounded by yard

and a fence you know that because the phone call requesting rent another phone call came out of the basement in any event we heard the person

we know it's the victim we went to hit the house okay you hit the house and you got two out of six were they all in the house yes

how come you only got two well four of them went out the back I said you all went through the front door? Right. Yeah. Okay. Nobody watched the back. I thought, oh my God. You mean to tell me, you, we looked at each other, we're like, I can't, I don't even want to, none of you bothered to go to the back to watch it, thinking they might do that. So that was, anyway, make a long story

short, these two knuckleheads did not cooperate, but we knew the path we were on because we knew they were affiliated with this crew. We come back to New York. We're back in New York about a day. same guy, Bill, who's got snitches everywhere. He looks at me at one point, he goes, they're in L.A. I said, how do you know they're in L.A? They're in L.A. Bill, how do you know they're in L.A? They're in my snitches apartment.

You have a snitch in L.A. And they're staying at his apartment. Yes. Grab the captain. Captain says, what are you doing here talking to me? Get your ass to the airport and get out. So we did. A bunch of us.

Jumped on a plane, back out to the West Coast. You put somebody behind the house. my god unbelievable it was like rookie amateur hour but we get out there and we began a manhunt because they had left the snitcher's apartment at that point they only stayed there a little while they felt they were they were too hot so they're moving around and which we're doing all kinds of phone work any piece of information we have we end up coming upon an apartment that we have really good reason to believe they're in and it's like a melrose place style apartment garden style apartments with a pool and you can see everybody's door when it opens it's like

like a motel. Right. I'll explain Melrose. Yeah. I'll explain Melrose place after the podcast. It's a throwback reference. Yeah. I can go farther back than that. But we go up to this apartment. We get the Orange County Sheriff's with us or LA County Sheriff's think it was. And they were great. We're like, we think they're in that apartment right there. And so we knock on a door. Of course, we have people on the back. We knock on a door. Bang on the door. Police, we hear people moving inside. And all of a sudden, we hear crash out the back window. One of these idiots jumped out the back window and is in the tree that's outside it and falls down the tree. Compound fractures his leg, bone sticking out, and he's dragging his leg as he's trying to run away. They jumped them. The other idiot, we pushed the door in. The other idiot is sitting there with 17 kidnapping victims' identifications plotted out on the floor in front of them. They kept the ID from everyone in their victims.

Not a good move. Not a good move. It's called evidence. It was the hottest trail I've ever like. blood in my life. Oh, we know exactly who they kidnapped. So this guy gets up and tries to do the karate kid with me. He's about five, five, 130 pounds. Now, to put it in perspective, I've been working 16, 18, 20 hours a day for nine, 10 days now. I haven't slept, barely seen my kids. I haven't eaten right. I'm exhausted. And you're going to try to effing karate kid on me.

Are you kidding me? So he puts his hands up and I just knocked them on his ass. I was like, no, done. No, not going to work. Wrong guy. Wrong time. There's a time when I might have laughed and just had the phone with it. No, I'm too deaf and tired. So we locked them up. We got what we got. Turns out the other three guys had gone out for booze and cigarettes and were gone at that moment. But later on, we found out they drove past the apartment, saw all our cars and said, adios. Now, this is outside L.A. I think it was Alhambor or Monterey Park. These guys took off, and now how are we going to find them? Went through every piece of information we had in the apartment. found all kinds of phone information, started working with it, found some numbers, had some interpreters

look at it, said, this is this guy, Wu Jai, he's the leader of the gang, this is his beeper number. So he said, okay, we know from their beepers that they work off code. We knew that 888-911-88 would always get an answer because 888's prosperity, money, good stuff, 911 immediately, call me. So we set up a dummy number, a Chinatown Exchange Manhattan number. and pages this guy multiple times 88, 911. He calls back. We don't answer the phone.

We don't have to. We just see the number. He's calling from the Super 8 Motel 8, 8, their lucky number in Milpetus, California, outside San Jose. They managed to make it 400 miles north overnight. They just drove straight. They stayed in their lucky number hotel, and they were there. So we're like, okay, knucklehead Wujai is calling us from Super 8 Motel.

So we notified a Miletus police department. around the hotel. We went up there and we're sitting there trying to arrest them and we're sitting in a car like, why are we here? We flew up, first of all, commuter flight. We're exhausted. I haven't slept. Get off the plane.

They meet us on a tarmac, which is kind of cool. If you can get met on a tarmac for non-incarceration reasons, it's kind of a nice feel like royalty. Yeah, I'm getting on the cop car on the tarmac. So see you guys later. This is the way like, this is the way it plays out in the movies, not in real life. So we go to, it's funny. We go to the Milpitas Police Department.

I'm with my lieutenant Pete Tartaglia, who was a character. I'm with the guy, Dougie Hopkins from Brooklyn South Homicide, Carol Rabb, who is the case catching detective from the 6-6 squad. And we march into the Milpitas Police Department. They have a big briefing. Everybody's there. The whole department's in. It's the biggest thing that hit Melpitas in years.

NYPD kidnapping homicide, Vic Perps are sitting in a hotel. They want to do the right thing, and they were great, very helpful department. So we're walking for the briefing, and they're like, okay, we get the hotel surrounded. They're in this room number. they're there, we're going to go over and get them. And so my lieutenant, who insists upon smoking and the no smoking building that they're in, because we worked in dumps. Our precincts were like dumps.

You could smoke in them. You could die in them. But there's like these beautiful, clean, air-conditioned precincts. And he's just walking and smoke. And they go, could you put that out, please? Yeah, he puts it out on the floor and the carpet and lights another one. He was that kind of guy. So we're sitting in there, and this guy's doing a briefing, and he's all confident they're in the, they're in the little room.

And so he goes, excuse me, how do you know they're in the room? Well, we set up as soon as we got your call and no one is left, I understand no one is left, but how do you know they're in the room? Well, like we said, we haven't seen anybody leave. So you don't know they're in the room, right? Oh, we deflated them. I was like, oh, God, let's just go over. I'm so tired.

Let's just go there. We get there, sure enough, they're in there. but we're waiting to go in and all of a sudden their chief of police is on the phone with the city attorney who's telling them, I'm not sure we have to cause to make an entry into that room. We have to talk. We have to have a discussion about the legal elements of it. And we're sitting in a car going, you're kidding me, right? You're kidding me. These guys are insane kidnapping killers.

They're in that apartment. They signed in. That's the room they were seeing going into by the staff. Why are we, what are we waiting for? You know, eight, 12 hours to one of them comes out. Right. Well, we're sitting there, and this is going on back and forth. And finally, my lieutenant goes, come on, we're going to hit it. I have no legal authority in California, but we get out.

We start running up to the door. And I guess they got embarrassed and they beat us at a punch and they knocked the door in. And in typical fashion, there's always something funny that happens. Three guys in this little room, they know what's happening. One of them runs into the bathroom and closes the door because you know we're not looking there. Yeah. think but that's what happens to people under pressure and stressed they're not they're just I got to get away he runs into the bathroom and close the door and we're like hello you want to come out

and they just knocked the door down but it was it was kind of funny um these guys had done 17 kidnappings they had done that homicide they did a bunch of stuff and they were so emboldened because they had gotten away with it because they prayed on their own community and many of them didn't report it and many of them did pay they found a way to pay but they ruined lives all the time And they thought nothing of it. But as I used to like to tell them, I'm sitting there talking to them, you can cooperate or you can not cooperate. And if you don't cooperate, I have one guarantee for you. I can guarantee you that you were not born and raised and created physically to survive the American penal system.

You're 5 foot 5, 115 pounds. You're hairless. You're the closest thing to a wife that some guy in prison is going to. you are not going to survive it. They're going to make you shave your head so the moth wig fits. And they look at you like, I'm a tough guy. You know what? You keep that attitude.

No. Good luck. Not with six guys. Oh, no. But it was a, that was a fascinating case. I felt good about that case because, you know, we like to speak for the victim. And that poor woman was killed and brutally abused so badly. And, you know, all joking and laughing aside, you have to have some justice.

for cases like that that was not a simple case that was you know horrific and and we felt good about the closure i was i was going to say it's like it had the best for for the situation at hand it had the best possible outcome you know but it's still not like a positive you know i'm saying nobody wins yeah nobody wins no um i was going to say so do you go what do you go over on your do you go over this type of thing on your podcast or do you solely interview people so specifically, or what do you do on the podcast? We have a bit of a mixed bag. So we are a true crime podcast at heart in as much as we want to give our audiences the best true crime that we can get from the mouths of the people who made the cases, detectives and investigators.

But we veer off in certain areas and certain times, depending upon the guest, if we think it's worth it. It's all related. We've had some military folks on talk about some things because we think they're just fascinating people. Tom and I have talked about some of our cases. We had an episode each we did just to focus on a case that we did that was complex. and we thought interesting for the audience. But our goal is to bring true crime from the mouths of the people who make the cases. Like, for example, we're going to have people on who did serial killer cases and they interviewed

to serial killer for hours and hours and hours and know all the evidence and can tell you that kind of backstage, this is what really happened. The media didn't report this, but this is something that you should know about him, explaining the pathology and psychology of the people who do that type of stuff. And I think it's, we've had fun with it so far. I mean, we're giving it a shot. It's a brave new world for us, podcasting, but we've enjoyed it because we've met amazing people. And now I get to meet you.

And is it on YouTube? We're on everything. YouTube and Rumble for video. Okay. And we're on every platform there is for audio. How does Rumble do? I don't know. You know, we're not, I'm not the number checker.

Oh, you're just the host. You're not paying attention to the analytics? I hate to, I'm just the talent. Oh, yeah. That's what I told Colby when we got this. And it said, media, I said, I really wanted one that says, talent, the talent. Yeah, yeah.

I can relate to you. Yeah, I don't have to do the rest of that stuff. Yeah, I didn't talk to your, I'm just kidding. I didn't talk to your co-host because he looks like, he looks, he looked at me a couple times and I was like, but he's, he's, he's in good shape. Yeah. Yeah. He's thin.

He looks like he looks like he's a little bit, a little buff, but I was like. Tom has that look with everybody. Yeah. I didn't know he was with you. Like I was. Oh, he's a pussy guy. He's the nicest guy in the world. He really is.

And we know each other. We worked together in the PD and became friends. And he did a lot of his career in a terrorism task force. He did a good portion of it. And he traveled all over the world. And he did a lot of work on behalf of the victims of 9-11 and beyond. And he's a good, solid guy. And we have fun.

He's a good guy, too. We don't just do a serious show. We try to interspers a little bit of humor as we can. But we give people, be good people a chance to tell our stories. It's not about us. It's a guest-centered show. Well, I was going to say, you've got to, like, just like when we're talking periodically, it has to spark something where you're, you know, you're kind of, you know, that reminds

me of this. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And sometimes it makes sense, you know, it's like it's, it's because people don't, I don't I get questions all the time. People will say, oh, well, you know, this is how it is. And it's like, no, that is how it is. Maybe in California state. Yeah, yeah.

But in the federal system, this is. or what about parole well won't he get probation but he was in the feds there's no there's no parole or will he get when is he eligible for parole not in the fed system not in feds he's not you know but you know no they still have parole because my buddy's on parole well where's that well oh he's in missouri or something yeah yeah okay well i don't know yeah the federal system is very different and i did a lot of cases in the federal system and uh from my perspective as detective, once you understand and can tap into that resource, you have a lot of leverage over the people that you are right, especially organized crime. I'm not talking innocent people. I'm not

talking about people who are lassoing innocent people. I'm talking about people who are career criminals, organized crime entities who are harming and destroying neighborhoods. You can tap into that and you can do two things. One, you can put away the bad guy and you can do it without having the neighborhood having to come and line up in court and testify because everybody rolls on each other. And so you save people's lives. And I enjoyed that piece of it because people, I mean, These people are not, you know, white-collar criminals. I didn't work on white-collar crime until I became a chief security officer in a bank. But I just, these are criminals.

They're hardcore rapists, murderers. I mean, these nasty people, you know, and you want to see them off the streets. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I was, you ever once we get somebody that will, I'll get some people in the comment section? Because I'll interview someone who, let's say, who's like, just innocent. like they they were you know just railroaded went to prison did like 16 years and then happened to get like the innocence project to run DNA ran the DNA found out that the DNA matched somebody else that guy's in prison for the same kind of thing they put this guy in prison he gets out and so then in the

comments they're like you know half the people in prison are or are innocent and then the cops this the cops out i'm like listen i'm like very few people are are innocent And even then, now, if you want to say maybe people are over-sentenced, you know, there's a sentencing disparity. Like, I'll give you that. Like, maybe this guy should have got five years. He got 20 years. Okay. I'll give you that.

But innocent, I didn't mean anybody that was really, even if they're innocent of one thing, it's like, the guy was still making meth. Yeah. I get it. That was wrong. They probably should have just focused on the meth. Right. You know, a lot of crazy things. things happen with that. And I would agree with you, the vast majority of people who are in prison

earned it. But if you asked them, there's not a guilty person in prison, not a single one. But that's normal, human beings, we all. But to pull back a second, I would rather never have made an arrest than arrest one person and put them away wrongfully. Right. Do mistakes get made with identification? Sure. I wouldn't assess money is not as reliable as people think it is. Do mistakes get made during course of investigations? Yes. But have I ever. seen any cop or investigator or agent go out of their way to put somebody wrongfully? Never. We don't want that. I don't want that on my system sitting in my heart because I actually didn't enter the job to do that. Most people come in the job wanting to get the bad guy,

not the wrong guy in trauma way. That doesn't do any good. It's, you know, are there bad people? Yeah, there's bad seeds in law enforcement. There's bad seeds, you know, in the clergy for crying out loud. You know what I mean? There's bad doctors. There's bad everything. But the vast majority of the work that's done is done with honest intentions, which is why in America you have a chance for a stout defense. Right. And hopefully, you know, your attorneys take it seriously and you get a chance to represent yourself.

And hopefully a judge and a jury will look at you and they'll look at the evidence. I mean, things go wrong everywhere in the system. It's a human system. Yeah, I would say that. I'm like, listen, even if the system, even if the system was perfect, it doesn't matter. It's still run by humans and humans are flawed. Right. Okay.

Yeah. I'm saying I'm a lot. Do you feel like, do you feel like, do you feel like, you feel like there's anything else you want to talk about? Do you feel okay with this so far or this? No, this has been great. I really appreciate the opportunity. It's really nice to meet you. Your show is a success and I'm so happy for you.

You know, no, honestly. I mean, you know, it's, it's probably a time in my life when I wouldn't have wanted to sit down with somebody who's convicted fraudster. Right. Really? but the older I get the more mature I get the more wise I get the more I realize hey we're all humans I'm one decision away from being a guy

in a jumpsuit right and it's really and it's it's it's not that we're so different what unites us what we have in common is far more and we can learn off each other and I'm all about meeting interesting people and people who have you know I think you use your show for great for great reasons

and there are wrongfully convicted people there are properly convicted people who have a story right everybody's got a story. And, you know, understanding the human condition, understanding who we are as people, we're all flawed. So I don't act like I'm any better than anybody else. I just, I chose the path I chose and managed to stay clean. But I tell you, it could have been many times when for just one second, if I had thought differently, it would have been a whole different situation. And, but I applaud what you're doing now. I mean, you're honest about it. You're up front about it.

You know, embrace who you are. You know, we're imperfect. But I appreciate what you do and I appreciate the opportunity to come in and talk with you thank you okay i i appreciate that um i never know what to say when people say that uh but i do appreciate it you don't have to say it thing man it's all good um all right so well well okay so one we should turn that i can't even see myself i've been the whole time i've been thinking to myself is this on is this on but i don't mean to be insulting when i said convicted frost i mean help you are you kidding me bro i prefer con man scumbag okay all right sometimes i go with with i hate to say former scumbag because i'm still, she started myself kind of a derelict, but I appreciate, no, listen, I had, I did a, a speech,

you know, I'd go and I do, like, keynote speeches. And this woman was like, what do you want me to say, you know, at the beginning of your thing? And she said, I said, well, she's, right now, I have white collar, or I was thinking white collar this. And I go, well, why don't we just go with con man? And she says, no, seriously. I said, well, you can say former conman. She's, are you serious? I said, would you prefer former fraud, sir? She's, let me go with, like, former fraudster and I was like like I was I said listen I'm okay with scumbag like I'm not you know and and she just she's like I I'll go with former former fraudster current white collar expert and I was like oh okay you're you're doing a whole thing oh my god so and then I go and I talk in

these you know have you ever talked to the ACFE certified fraud examiner I'm a certified fraud examiner oh are you yeah I've three times oh yeah yeah they're they're good I mean I like doing them. I've done some of the cyber ones. Yeah. And my favorite, though, is doing for a mortgage conventions or I just did one for like a credit union, but it was still mortgage base. Like, it was kind of like the mortgage departments at the credit union. Yeah. So I don't have to, when I say I, you know, I, you know, I changed the verification of deposit or I provided fake, you know, three months worth of fake bait statements or the DTI was off. Like, I don't have to explain that. So if I say I whited out a 30 day late on a verification of rent, you know, you can see all of them.

Where a normal person is just, they have no idea what I just said. Yeah. But you can see the whole crowd. Yeah. And I'm sitting there like, you're my people. You know, like we understand. So I had the opportunity to be the chief security officer at U.S. Bank and I was responsible for all fraud investigations and regulatory reporting. Okay.

See, he said, by the way, he said security. I went, well, security doesn't mean fraud. That means like he's the guy that tells you who hires an off-duty cop. Yeah. That doesn't mean fraud. Well, in the world of banking and bigger banks, the CSO role encompasses all the fraud elements for investigations and reporting, all the SARS, all out of the crap, and it encompasses physical security, executive protection alarms, a lot of the shit.

Right. So it's a big mishmash. The bigger part of my job was dealing with the Federal Reserve Board and the Office of Control or currency on regularly, they would look at my team SARS and break them apart and break their balls on page 37 of this stupid fucking endless piece of paper describing how somebody, you know, did some element to fraud somewhere. Right. And one of the biggest things that I think most of the public doesn't understand is, if it ain't

over $5,000, there ain't nobody in any bank investigating it, unless you, they have a personal interest or you break their balls. It ain't happening. So you can lock, you can take $4,000 a day in various fraudulent schemes easily from the same bank and they'll never know who your name. Right. They don't care. I mean, they let it go. They write it off because they don't have the time. I had 120 investigators almost working around the clock writing frickin' sars. That's all they did. They don't investigate. They write SARS. They gather information to tell to the government

who ignores it. Right. So, I mean, it's actually, you know, the world's business. The whole time when I was pulling money out, I had one CTR filed on me. And we're talking about removing millions of dollars out of the bank in cash what did you do i'm curious i mean and i had one sard by the way one suspicious activity just one out of all the times i would go in and say hey i need eight thousand dollars i need seven thousand dollars i need nine thousand and two thousand and two i went one time i went in and cash the chat for two nine hundred for two yeah sorry for twenty nine thousand dollars that was a a ctr that was it and that guy that list that bank manager and he knew something was wrong yeah he

did everything he could to figure it out. Yeah. And he still ended up coming out because I wasn't leaving. I'm saying, I don't know how long it's going to take. Make a call. Yeah. Yeah. I need my money. But what I did was that the quick, the simple version is that, well, I own a mortgage company that was regularly subprime. We did FHA VA conventional, but the majority of it was subprime. So there was a lot of fraud in the subprime. And it's just like, you know, changing a W-2, right changing a pay stub you know and so you know and of course i you know there's lots of people change like a slight a number here number there of course which is totally fraud but you know i got to the point where it's like now i'm going to change bank statements now i'm going to

make my own bank statement templates that are in color so i can get so i could send the color bank statement three months worth of color bank statements original bank statements to the underwriters because they would see the originals and they'd call you up and say, oh, my gosh, Matt, you send us the original. I go, oh, man, I'm so sorry. Can you send them back? And they go, sure. And I go, can you go ahead and stamp those certified, you know, copies that you saw the original copies. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they'd make a copy and certify. And then they don't even call them. And I'd mail them back. So, and then it got so bad that I then realized, what if they do call? So, you know, and so what you did is you, I actually went and I made bank Webber. websites with my for my own bank for my with my own bank statements so they could call and we would hold on you know you'd say well I can't tell you how much is in in the bank I can but if you tell me I can verify whether I can tell you whether that's true or not yeah well right now it says

the balance was it yes that's true okay thank you know um so it you know I did there was all these things you know it's funny all all the protections in the world all the um sure what they call them. Safeguards, security procedures. All the stuff in the world. It all comes down to the human element. When I was the head of security for Albertsons based on a Boise, Idaho briefly. I met the CEO.

I ended up moving out there of all places, fucking Boise, I know. But it was a great opportunity. So I remember I was in a business trip from there on where the hell I was, but I'm in the airport and I got a frantic call. The CFO, all these other people sitting around a desk, I'm on a spider phone and they're all panicking. What's going on? I did all investigations at that level of Fordham.

We have this crazy ACH fraud case. Fuck, we're screwed. Somebody. Now, if you are a major retailer, you do business with big names. Frito-Lay, Pepsi, O.E., they move a lot of shit for your stores, and a lot of wire transfers go back and forth, a lot of movements of money to pay for product and all that other stuff. So, this one girl who made $13 an hour, her boss was a director. made about 200 grand, and it was his job to make sure that anybody who changed the bank account information for payment to any of these companies, he approved it because it was all millions

and millions going. It was his job, make sure it was legit. So somebody got smart and made of dummy Pepsi and Frito-Lay email address, sent an email to her, telling her, please change this. This is the new account information, right? So in one week, $10.3 million went out the door to these new accounts. And they're like laughing their balls up before somebody caught it. This is something. This is Zach. This is like Zach.

Sorry, my buddy, Zach, who they would go steal checks, going to like, you know, Kellogg's for $2.5 million. And they would go open a, they'd go get an occupational little license that said, you know, it'd be somebody's name, DBA, Kellogg's, you know, of Tampa Bay, and open a bay. account and deposit that kind of thing. And he was like, and they go through. So, funny shit. So this money takes off. It's in the wind. They're panicked. 10.7 million dollars. And it's egg on the face because they didn't follow their own internal controls, controls where I'm looking for. Didn't follow it. Didn't bother it. The director, I'm not doing that shit. $13 an hour girl, right? She's shitting her pants. I go to interview her. She's like, am I going to get fired? Am I going to arrest it?

I'm like, you know how hard it is? to find a job making $13 an hourling? Yeah, first of all, once you pump gas, you make $15. But this was probably over 10 years ago. This poor girl almost had a heart attack. I had to calm her down, relax. You're not going to prison unless we determine, did you take the money? I didn't take the money.

Okay, I know you didn't take the money. You barely found your way here today. There's no way you could figure this out. I didn't say that, but I thought it. Well, make a long story short, this money takes off. They're panicked. I'm like, son of a bitch, how did you fall for that one? It's like you went for underscore rather than, okay, I get it.

these guys are not stupid. They know how to do this. So that money had already moved. I went to see this guy knowing the FBI. There's a justice program, Department of Justice program I knew about because when I was in terrorist task force, my team was telecommunications and terrorist financing. So I got to work with all banks around the world on a freezing of assets, movement of money. And I learned a lot about it there. That's why I ended up working in banking. But this specific set of money, by the time the FBI, which was less than 48 hours later, had already moved through like six countries. It was in Dubai. It was in Hong Kong. It had moved here. It's now in Slovenia. I mean, like bang, bang, bang, bang. And then you can't get it back

from this country. Yeah, you got to all of it. Everybody would have to cooperate and line up and they're just not going to do it. Pain on the ass. Well, I ended up getting eight point something million of the 10 something back. Nice. Because I made the right call to the right person early. And the bank was like, oh, like praising me. Like, honest, whatever. I mean, let's not focus on giving me a little plaque. How about like wake up and fire him, first of all? And they did. And give that girl a raise and put somebody in here who's going to do their job.

Don't make her do that job. Now we've addressed the situation. But it's amazing how many people fall for that shit. Yeah. It's almost like reminds me of the stupid bank. People get these letters. You know, I'm a barrister from England and the Nigerian scam shit. It's so funny.

You fall for that. You've got to be like marginally retarded. I don't mean to put retarded people down. Why would you fucking answer that? You know, dear sir. Oh, you ever see that guy James Veach, the comedian? There's a skinny little Brit guy named James Veech, V-E-I-T-C-H who does TED Talks where he scams. He messes with scammers.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, I've seen several of them, but he's a riot. He's funny. Dear sir, Winnie, Winnie Mandela, the Winnie Mandela is reaching out to me to have me take her check. I just check for $2 million. You can keep $100,000 if you just, oh, people fall for that shit, though. It's amazing.

Oh my God. Yeah. How long did you work for the, what was it, a U.S. Bank? U.S. Bank was, what, three years, three and a half, four years or so before they did a reorg. Federal Reserve Board said you have to have a complete center of excellence for fraud. And my job was just going to be the physical piece. And they looked at me and said, we pay away too. much to just do that. I said, I don't want to just do that.

Here's your package. I said, thank you. Highway robbery, legalized. Give me a nice big check and I walked away. And since then, my wife and I do a bunch of entrepreneurial stuff. You know, like we do, Tom and I do this. My wife and I own, of all things, a franchise nail salon. Right. It's based out of Sarasota.

If you guys live in Florida, maybe you've heard of paint anail bar, I don't know if you have, she goes to get her nails that, whatever, but what the fuck do I care about? I don't give her shit. It's a business. She's happy. do live in we live in florida where you live i live in i live in westly chapel which is like maybe 20 minutes uh north of tampa and colby lives in lakeland which is probably 45 minutes or an hour from me it's about 50 minutes yeah oh yeah it's right in between Orlando and tampa yeah oh cool

cool yeah so was this good for you did this is this something yeah yeah yeah this is good this is I was going to say, I think, you know, I mentioned the change. I was going to say, back to me. When we were talking about fraud, I was going to say, like, it wasn't, it wasn't just changing that. It was like I ended up making fake identities. Oh, okay. And borrowing money from the bank.

So it ended up being like multiple scams, like 11.5 million, three and a half million. Okay. I went on the run. Like, that's kind of why. So I ended up getting, I ended up doing 13 years and federal prison. I just got out like, like, but the first 10 years are the hardest. Um, so the last, oh my God. So where were you? Oh, I was in Coleman. Where's Coleman? Coleman's a one mile north of Tampa. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. I was like the medium for three years. Like I, it's, it's all fraud,

you know, but I got, initially I got 26 years. So you have to, you have to, if you're over 20 years, you have to go to a medium. So I end up in a medium where these guys are like stabbing each other and there's, it's, you know, there's riots and there's, you know, but I would say like I felt like like I was like a non-enemy combatant in a war zone. Like, you know, I just, this is all happening around me. I'm just walking to, I go to work, I teach GED, I teach the real estate class for 10 years at both facilities.

And then I came back to my cell and I write or do whatever. And then I went to the low and then I started writing guys stories. I did that. And towards the end, guys kept saying, like, bro, when you get out, you got to do a podcast. I'm like, what, what's a podcast? There was no podcast. YouTube had just come out like a couple of years. I'd never been on it. Yeah. So I didn't know what YouTube is. Oh, my God. And they're telling me what a podcast is. And probably the last year or so when I was about to get out, people started giving me articles. Like, this is a podcast. Look at the top 10 podcast. Like, bro, look, it's all true crime. It's just and I'm like, okay. So I got out and I tried to figure out what this was. You know what I'm saying? Like, what is a podcast? And I still didn't do it right away. Like, we just started. I did it for about six months by myself.

And then I convinced Colby to come in and help me. And so we've done that for about two years. That's great. And it's, you know, like, it's been the last six months to whatever. That's my six or seven months. It's like gotten to the point where it's like it's actually starting to make money. And so now it's like it's all I do. I mean, Colby was all Colby was doing anyway.

for about two years. But now this is like all I call on it. That's great. Congratulations. I'm happy for you. So I find bank fraud to be almost an interesting term because banks are fraud the way that they make money off you. Let me take it. Give me all your money. I'll give you 1% back, maybe less. We're going to make about 20 to 30% off that in a variety of different ways. You're going to move around a lot of different ways. If you want it all back, we won't be able to do that, just like Carlo Ponzi couldn't but um yeah we're going to make a lot of money if you money and give you back a pittance that's fair right but you know you can feel good about it because we have nice commercials and we give money the united way so what the fuck it's fraud they the way that they operate is they

it's anyway don't get me started banks banks in america suck they all suck that's a remote podcast topic yeah i i was actually it's funny might have to wear glasses and disguise my voice for that one well when i was when we were when i said so would you feel like that like i was going to wrap it up then we're going to get off i was going to say do you want to do another one like remotely you know just about like or first i was going to ask what did you do and if it was fraud related i was going to say you want to do one a remote one just on kind of like you know your time at us bank and you know that sort of thing we could well i don't know that i have a lot of stories from that be honest with you because at my level i didn't read every case and i wasn't

investigating them. And it wasn't a lot that popped up to my level. It was so much run-of-the-mill kind of stuff. I don't know that I could give you good stories from now. Let's put that way. That's fine. I have a buddy name Zach, and one of his stories is, which is, you know, plays into what you had just said. He actually went to, he used to do, he was cashing checks. And one day he had a friend of a friend that knew someone that worked in the fraud department. at, I forget what bank, let's say Bank of America. So he goes and he meets the guy. He says, look, I'll give you $1,000 to just answer 10 minutes worth of questions.

So the guy meets him, he gives him $1,000, and he asks him some questions. Look, if I go and do this, what do they do? If I do this, what are they going to call? And then he's like, yeah, this, this is the answers the questions. And then so they're talking. And then, you know, he, of course pays him. And he goes to get up. And the guy goes, wait a second.

He sits back down. He goes, what's up? He said, you got another $1,000 on you? And he goes, yeah. He said, I'm going to tell. you something that happens all the time there's nothing we can do to stop it he said now most people i wouldn't tell because i don't think they can do anything with it but i think you can he was give me a thousand dollars and i'll tell you what it is he was here he says okay he said if you own a bank

if you have a bank account and you go into the bank he said and you you take out a thousand dollars five thousand dollars he said and walk into the bank the next day and try and pull your money out and they say you don't have $5,000 and you say what are you what happened to my $5,000 and they check and they go it was removed you know whatever 20 minutes ago or it was removed two days ago you go I didn't take it because they have to give your money back immediately and he went what because they have to give you your money back is now they can do an investigation they can do this they can do that he said maybe they'll give you the money back close the account they're going to give you the money back and he said and we don't he said we don't investigate

anything under $10,000. And he was like, holy shit. He's, I don't know what you can do with it. He's, I know that periodically bank employees tell their friends who have had accounts. Like, they'll load up the account, put $9,000 in the account,

leave it there for a few days, and then they'll remove it. He said, like, they'll take their debit card, drive four states away, remove it, and walk into the bank 20 minutes later and say, hey, I need to get out $1,000 and have the or say you don't have a thousand dollars you have 42 dollars left you just took out 9000 what yeah

and so he was like okay thanks so he got up and left and he said i remember he said his wife was goes well there was a thousand dollars wasted he goes are you nuts because that guy just gave us the ticket the golden ticket so he turned around because he could make fake IDs so he would go and get people and he'd give he'd give you three IDs and you three IDs and you and send you to you know Idaho he'd have you go open three bank accounts because you can open about three accounts at three different banks before the fourth bank starts to go wait a second are you because they run you through like check systems or they're like did you just go to you got a bunch of inquiries yeah after about the third one they start really they started going no we're not going to open

account so each guy had three IDs and opened up three bank accounts in each ID and there's three guys so we're talking about like a hundred thousand dollars at this point he would then have them, once they got their debit card, they would clone it. They'd send it back. He'd make a card in Florida. He would then go into a U.S. post office. He would order nine $1,000 money orders, swipe it, punch in the PIN number. They'd give them the money orders. He'd then go deposit those in a corporate account that he had. He'd then call those guys up and say, hey, Jimmy, go in the bank. Yeah, I just did, you know, whatever, U.S. Bank. The guy, Jimmy would walk into U.S. man, as Jimmy, you know, walk in and say, hey, I need to get out 200 bucks.

And the person at the counter would go, you've got like $40 in your account. What are you talking about? I got over $9,000. And they go, no, it was taken out. When? About 30 minutes ago. Where? Florida?

And then you get Florida. Like, I'm in Idaho. Like, what are you talking about? Do you have your debit card? You go, right here. And they go, gosh, you need to just talk to Jan. And he talks to Jan. And Jan's like, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry.

we'll be going to put that money back. Even if Jan said that's weird, it's weird that you open this account. She still has to give you the money back. A week ago with $9,000, you just got your debit card. And suddenly the money's taken out. He was, yeah, it is weird. And Jan, I'm not saying that you guys are running a scam here at the bank, but you guys took my money. Well, we're going to, we're going to need to call the police.

Call the police. He's got a fake ID. He's not, he's not real wording. And he also knows they're not going to. She's not going to call the police. No. So, right. She may make a referral to corporate security who may,

may follow up except it's not it's not the threshold it's not a sorrowable amount right and they don't give her shit and and so by listen they put the money in the account the next day that he takes the money closes the account yeah he would have him walking and say i'm not saying you guys are doing saying anything illegal but i'm done here i'm done yeah he'd get the money and and so these he did this like forever like for for for years and the guys he's working with are horrible by the way he's like they're drug addicts they're yeah they take off with the money they would they were like he actually came up with a system where he would remove he he would remove the money where one of the things they would say is what do you mean my

money's gone i just wrote a check for a down payment on a house for nine that that's going to clear tonight and they'd be like don't worry it'll clear and so he got the money back they didn't actually but they would go in the next day when all it was clear and they'd close the account so yeah he did this forever and he said sometimes he's the problem is they're drug addicts so you know they'd make whatever 40 grand or 80 grand he said not they'd get 20 and he said He said they're, they were, you know, you couldn't work with them after that. You gave him 20, you gave a drug out at 20 grand. Like, even if he showed up the next time, he couldn't function well enough to do what he's supposed to do.

Oh, he's probably going to overdose because he's going to go crazy. Right. Yeah. So he said they were good for one, maybe two. And, uh, oh my God. And keep mind, these people that he sent didn't know him. Right. They knew him through a phone number.

They couldn't give him up. Right. So he would, he would get a phone call from like the hotel saying, listen, the cops were called. your guys walking around naked in the parking lot i don't know here you know look we're we're we're afraid we're going to have to move him out he'd be like yeah that's fine i understand pulled the card out get rid of it away he's burnt we're leaving we're leaving him in washington state he can't get back and he can't call oh my god i got to get boogieing back over to the show and shit oh yeah yeah you wrapped up or do you no we're yeah let me wrap this up okay okay all right um

Hey, so I appreciate you guys checking out the interview and we're going to leave all of the links and in the links in the description box for Gold Shields and and we'll leave the link and I appreciate it. I appreciate you guys watching and see you.