The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Betrayal on the Bayou | 2. The A-Team

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Meet the A-Team, that’s what Chad called his ragtag group, also known as a DEA Task Force. Karl Newman is a real likable country dude with no moral quandaries. Johnny Domingue is the protege, fresh out of college, with a knack for making drug busts. Chad handpicked this team, and commanded them during operations. But little did he know that they were far out of his control. Subscribe to The Binge to get all episodes of Smoke Screen ad-free right now. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Smoke Screen: Betrayal On The Bayou show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. A Neon Hum & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Driving down the interstate, talking to my buddy, and I see his eyes light up.

Next thing I know, I feel like somebody hit me in the head with a 2x4. Chad Scott had just left a frat party. I glanced to the left, and there was a guy hanging out of the window with a Tech 9 and fired 27 rounds into the Jeep that I was driving. I actually got struck three times in the head. At this time, Chad's an undergrad studying pre-law. It's the late 80s. The gunfire doesn't make any sense. Chad was just driving down the highway north of New Orleans.

These guys in a Caprice Classic pulled out of a parking lot, almost sideswiping him. So Chad says he flashed his headlights, and they came at him with a semiautomatic. So the guys started chasing me. It looked like something out of a movie scene where, like, I'm going from one lane to the other and as we approach the Independence exit, actually went across the median, interstate the wrong way.

It's like something out of a dream starring Tom Cruise. Chad and his buddy make it to the exit, but it's not over yet. So I pull into Independence and taking my clothes off, I'm covered in blood and I'm like, you know, bleeding from my ear. And I guess the adrenaline and all that just, and all of a sudden my passenger buddy's like, go, go, go. Look up and here they come again. I'm like, oh my word, you know, so getting the Jeep which is a little six-cylinder I mean I'm running as hard as I can and trying to get to the bar that I worked at because we had Off-duty police officers working at the bar Finally, they make it to the bar the guys in the Caprice Classic drive by, and they leave.

Luckily, Chad just has graze wounds. One bullet nicked his left ear, and he has a gash in the back of his head. Chad gets stitched up at the hospital and makes a police report. I had a soft top on the Jeep that had 27 holes in the top of the Jeep. This was the moment that this wild story, the kind of thing you might tell at bars for the rest of your life, became more than that for Chad. It became his origin story.

Ask Chad, how'd you come to work in law enforcement? And this is his answer. A couple weeks go by, and there's no progress in Chad's case. Being young and dumb and carrying Dad's pistol in the car now since I got shot, I decided, well, I'm going to go find him myself. Chad thinks it should be pretty easy to find these guys in Tangibaho Parish. They're driving a distinctive car with tinted side windows and California plates. So Chad, who's 20 years old, decides to take the law into his own hands. He hunts for them for a few months.

Then finally, he's driving around in his Jeep with four friends when he sees the car. Holy, you know what? The car is on the side of the road. And as I pass the car, there's a guy digging in the trunk, like looking for something. So I stopped the Jeep, I jumped out of the Jeep, and actually slammed the hood of the trunk on him. Chad says that he got into a fight with him. Then the police come and they arrest the guy. Ultimately, the two men who shot at Chad get charged with criminal damage and aggravated battery.

They're both sentenced to three years in prison. Chad thinks they got off light. I mean, he shot at me 27 times. One of the prosecutors on the case, when we met with him, was like, well, he didn't kill you. He waited all of two weeks for the cops to dole out justice. Then he went and got it himself. Chad's cocky, impulsive, impatient. But also, Chad gives a shit.

He has a hard time not giving a shit. Someone comes at him with a semi-automatic, so he gets his dad's pistol. This story would be incredible enough, but Chad takes it a step further. The deeper mystery, why these guys came after an undergrad and a Jeep, Chad has an answer for that too. Come to find out it was actually two guys from California that were trying to bring the Crips to this part of the country. So I guess at the time in California, if you flash your lights at somebody, it's a sign of aggression and you got to do something about it.

So that was his initiation into the gang was to kill somebody. This idea that flashing your headlights might set off a violent gang initiation, this was an urban legend in the 90s. It spread through email chain letters. Today, it's debunked all over the internet. We don't know how or why it ended up

part of Chad's origin story. Maybe that's what the shooters told the cops. Maybe that's what the cops told Chad. Or maybe Chad put two and two together himself. We tell this story because it's part of the legend of how Chad came to be Chad. The cop whose name was written on jailhouse walls. A hard charger. Feared by those he hunted.

Loved by those he worked for. A golden boy at the DEA. But this story is also an example of what talking to Chad is like. He's charming. His stories are detailed. You want to believe him. But we can't say exactly how much Chad embellished. We have the police record for this incident. Most of it checks out. But it doesn't look like he beat up the suspect. He told us there were 27 bullets fired. But at the time, he only said 7 to 10. And one of the guys said

they shot up Chad's Jeep because Chad pulled up behind them and shone bright lights into their car. But the point is, when Chad talks, he's got authority. He's in command of the details. When Chad tells his account, it's like, yeah, this guy would sound credible on a witness stand. Reporting on Chad over the past six years, we've teetered back and forth from giving credence to his version of events to being skeptical. An FBI agent once warned us that Chad's a serial liar. Once you get to know someone well, you generally have a pretty fixed opinion of them. But that's not how it goes with Chad. It's impossible to disentangle the myth from reality.

In fact, I still own the 1982 Jeep, which is in the garage, and rebuilt it with my son, and the one condition was the bullet hole stays. So there's still a bullet hole in the windshield frame of the vehicle. The Jeep is real. Feynman and I have seen it. Yeah, it still has a bullet hole. One thing is certain. It's not just Chad. From the drug dealers, to his team members, to the legends he learned from, Chad's world is full of people who make their living on charisma. People who are not what they seem. Chad thought he was in control.

That all these men were his pawns. But that's not how it turned out. I'm Jim Mustian. And I'm Feynman Roberts. From Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Smokescreen, Betrayal on the Bayou. Episode 2, The A-Team. Chad assembled a team to work in his backyard, the North Shore.

Some people called it Chad's Task Force, but it was also known as the A-Team. Ten years ago, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime. The A-Team was an action-packed TV show in the 80s about a group of ex-military commandos turned vigilantes for justice. Soldiers of fortune, if you team the A-Team because they always accomplish their mission. He'd even use it with trying to sign up defendants as informants. And he would tell them, hey, come on and join the A-Team. This is Carl Newman, a member of the task force from the Tangipo Parish Sheriff's Office. He was Chad's right-hand man, real character. Carl came to the office every day, you know, dressed to a T in his own way.

I mean, starched Wrangler jeans, starched, you know, plaid country shirt, big belt. You know, the guy drank milk at lunch every day. Carl was a fixture on the A-team from the beginning. So Chad was the Hannibal. I love it when a plan comes together. Correct. You were the... We never did go down through the different players, you know,

but he just called the team the A-team. One of you would have to be the B.A. Baracus, I guess. Hey, man, we got to find the fastest way possible to get to my mother. We can't be late. Face, man, I want you to scan my plane. Better yet, make that a jet. The A-Team. It was kind of Chad's own mini task force.

So what exactly is a task force? I'll let Jim take this one. Okay, so a task force is a kind of partnership between local and federal law enforcement. Basically, you have officers from the local police and sheriff's department working on a team with DEA agents. It's a good deal all around for law enforcement. For the DEA, it's a force multiplier. They're a global organization that attempts to be everywhere it wants. With a task force, the DEA gets more people on the ground,

officers who understand the local drug landscape and know the big players. Local law enforcement gets money. It's fair game to take cash and property if you can tie it to drug dealing. If you help seize it, you get a cut to fund your department. The local officers get a welcome pay bump. That could be in the tens of thousands of dollars. For rural officers in Tangibaho, that bump could almost double your salary. And for a DEA agent like Chad,

he was able to put together his own team within the task force to work in his backyard, the North Shore. Because Chad's team was so effective and good at skirting supervision, they got to operate pretty independently. So even though Chad wasn't officially their supervisor, he de facto led the A-team. The majority of the cases, it was like he was a boss and I was a subordinate. Absolutely. Carl again.

Chad put everybody to work. Chad, you know, has a type A attitude and everything. If it's, you know, his case, naturally he's going to be in control of every aspect of it, and it's going to go exactly the way he wants. So let's cut to the action and see how Chad's A-team operates. 2015. These are the good old days, when Chad is at the height of his powers. He has tons of informants. He's making busts and seizing assets. It was supposed to be a million dollars, okay, was gonna be coming through.

Tonight they're doing a traffic stop. Chad is working on intel that almost a million dollars in Girl Scout cookies is headed back through Louisiana. Just kidding, it's drug money. Skip Sewell, Chad's DEA friend from Episode 1. He's there, too. I wasn't his supervisor at the time, but they were going out, and they were a little bit shorthanded,

and I knew they were about to get a million dollars, so I said, yeah, let me come out and give you guys a hand. About a million dollars is a pretty good lick for New Orleans. They know the dealer will be passing through Tangipahoe Parish around 10 p.m. Here's Carl. I was hit out on the side off an exit on the interstate. I think Johnny was riding with me that night. They're all hiding out. It's Skip and Chad, Carl, and a young task force guy named Johnny Domang. They're parked off different highway exits around the Louisiana-Mississippi line. There are other task force guys, too,

but Carl and Johnny, they're the ones you've got to know about. They're all waiting for one dealer to drive down the interstate. This dealer's name is Frederick Brown, nicknamed Boobie. He's the third person you've got to remember. Chad heard that Boobie sold 30 keys of cocaine in Atlanta and that Boobie's going to be driving back through Louisiana with a suitcase full of cash. Remember, if a narcotics cop finds money that's tied to drug dealing,

they can seize it. Carl said they'd sent an agent to Mississippi to give them the play-by-play. So we could just be ready to jump on him without no hitch. The agent that was following him told us, you're not going to have to hunt probable cause to stop him. He said he's running 85 miles an hour. I don't know why you would do that with $863,000 in your truck, but in this case, he was.

They have a canine unit pull him over. The officer starts talking to Booby and his wife, Tigress. She tells a thin story about coming back from a casino. The canine scratches at the back of the truck, a signal to the handler to take a look. Chad isn't taking the lead here for a reason. The thing is, Booby knows Chad. He's one of Chad's informants. He'd help Chad make cases because Booby doesn't want to go back to prison. But what Booby doesn't know is that a friend of his is Chad's informant too.

That's where Chad's intel is coming from. This is Chad's style, his strategy. His informants might think they're close to him, but he's got someone snitching on them too. Well, there's three rules to informants. Number one is don't trust them. Don't trust them and don't trust them. If they snitch for you, they will snitch on you.

They snitch up, they don't snitch down. Even though I've invited him to come over and kind of cooperate, I still got my eye on him. But Booby doesn't know that Chad has come to suspect him. So assuming, or hoping, he's under Chad's protection as his informant, Booby starts name-dropping. The canine officer talks to the task force team on the radio. He said, look, man, he's throwing Chad's name all over the place and all. I said, well, look, I'm going to roll up there.

Just go tell him that you got a hold of me, I'm on duty, and that I'm coming. Carl, he knows Boobie too. He knows that trafficking 30 kilos behind Chad's back spells the end of Boobie's career as an informant. So naturally, when I walked up there, you know, Boobie was standing there, and I just kind of walked by him and said, man, what did you do? He was on top of the world. I mean, he was working with us. And now you done screwed this up, really.

You screwed yourself up bad. I mean, I went and looked at it, and it was, that was the biggest suitcase I ever seen in my life. I didn't know they made them that big. And this thing was chugged full of money, just packed to the gills. Frederick's panicking at this point. Frederick is Boobie's given name.

And he says, I need to make a phone call. I need to call somebody. And he calls Chad. He calls him on his cell phone. And as soon as Chad answered, he says, I fucked up, big dog. He called Chad big dog. And little did he know that Chad was a few hundred yards down the interstate watching everything that was going on. Chad tells Booby he'll be there soon. He pretends that he's on his way from his house,

bluffing that he wasn't part of the bust. This is Chad's tactic so he doesn't give away his other informant, Booby's friend. It also works because at this point, Booby thinks the only way to help himself is to tell Big Dog everything. So it's a win-win for Chad. But Booby? His worst fear is about to happen. Chad rolls up, and he walks up there, you know, and Booby tells us, look, y'all, just take it. Take the suitcase. Take the suitcase. Let me go. And we're square. We're done. We're good.

Just the night never happened. Take it and let me go home. You know, I never seen y'all. Y'all never seen me. And, you know, that wasn't going down. So he got arrested. It's the middle of the night. They've arrested a drug trafficker and bagged almost a million dollars in cash. And I didn't want the guys to drive back to the New Orleans office. It'd be a 50-minute drive down there and a 50-minute drive back, which would mean they wouldn't be home for 4 or 4.30, whatever.

So Skip tells them, let's go to the Tangibahoe Parish Sheriff's Office. It's closer. We'll keep the money in the safe overnight. When we got there, the money was taken out of the suitcase and it was put on a table. We actually took what we usually call a trophy picture. All the agents stand around the money.

Hey, look what we got. We have that photo. At the time, it went out in an internal newsletter announcing Group 10 seizes nearly one million in cash. Seven white guys stand around a table covered in stacks of green, rubber banded and partially bagged. A few bundles sprinkled on top and to the side like a garnish. Most of the guys are wearing polo shirts. One has his arms folded. Chad's at the center, looking really intense, his eyes kind of laser at you. Johnny, who's new to the task force,

is standing right next to Chad, almost leaning towards him. He's young, bearded. Carl, who's been with Chad for years, is standing on the fringes, wearing some kind of green tactical vest. I've seen the picture of all of you guys and the 850,000 and nobody's smiling. Everybody looks tough. Is that part of the sort of things like, look at the camera, look, we badass? No, it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't mean mugging or nothing like that. You know, maybe not for you, Carl. I think mugging or nothing like that.

Maybe not for you, Carl. I think it was for some of them. It could have been for some of them. It wasn't for me and Chad. We were just kind of, it was like normal day to us. This is a moment to remember. The trophy photo, those serious faces around a table piled high with cash, we're going to come back to it later. Because like Chad's origin story, there are multiple layers here.

This bust would become a focal point of the federal investigation of Chad Scott. This is our fly-on-the-wall tape from that investigation. This is Senior Special Agent Douglas Spruce with the Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General. During the bust, Chad seemed like a tactical genius, like a chess player who used people like pawns. But now, in the room facing investigators, things weren't looking so good for Chad. Johnny is represented by his counsel today. In fact, the task force Chad commanded was on the verge of collapse.

Johnny, just for the record, if you can just state your name and spell it, just so they recognize your voice on the recording. Johnny Jacob Domain II, last name D-O-M-I-N-G-U-E. Johnny started off as Chad's protege, but he ended up turning on him. The federal investigation would set off a chain reaction of suspicion and betrayal on Chad's own team. Was there people in the task force to group 10 in the DEA group that he told you he didn't trust? Yes, sir.

Chad's favorite slogan was, you know, he'd always tell me, you know, you got to surround yourself with people you trust because it's the people you work with that'll do you first, you know. Chad knew not to trust the people he worked with. He was careful about controlling who he let in. But in the end, they still did him dirty. But these guys, the ones he's standing with in the trophy photo, they really mattered to Chad. He'd handpicked Johnny and Carl for a reason. Johnny was ambitious, a hard worker. Carl was likable and willing to look the other way. I visited Carl Newman on his family land on Newman Road in Kentwood. Hey, puppy. Hey, puppy. Hey, puppy.

How are you? You good? Good. Good. Good dog. Kentwood is a rural area with green rolling hills. The Newman house is red brick and ranch style. They have an overgrown lawn and a barn next door.

Carl, I'm at the right place, huh? You're at the right place, man. Hey, good, man. How are you? I'm good. How about you? Good. Doing all right.

I don't even know. I'm just barking at you, man. They bark just a little bit, but then I pet them. They're all right. Let me, I just want to make sure I was at the right spot. Let me grab my stuff out of the truck.

Yeah, you can just pull right up here, bro. Okay. You sure? Yeah. You'll remember Carl from the bust. He's Chad's right-hand man on the local side. Now, Carl's pretty country.

I'm sorry about this, Darren. Y'all heard my dad go, oh, my mower's been broken, and I've just got that thing put back together to lay it up next. Yeah, no worries. No worries. Carl worked on Chad's task force from the start. If you think this whole podcast takes place in the middle of nowhere, well, Carl's from north of nowhere, and I should know. I'm from around here. Chad's turf was the North Shore, Tanchpo Parish, an area across lake and swamp from the city of New Orleans. It's kind of a no-man's land, a gas stop on the drug corridor between Houston and Atlanta. To the south is New Orleans, to the west is Baton Rouge, and to the

north is a whole lot of nothing. And then Mississippi. That nothing is where Carl grew up, next to his best friend who lived on a dairy farm. We grew up hunting together, fishing, and just building forts and stuff in the woods, camps and stuff like that. One of the main things we really enjoyed doing was looking for arrowheads. We didn't have a lot to do out here. And so we found a lot of arrowheads and learned a lot about Indians growing up. I didn't like school. I didn't like to be tied down with school.

I was never afraid to work, but I never wanted to be in law enforcement or be the police. Chad has kind of a superhero origin story. Solved his own crime, vigilante style. Carl's beginnings were somewhat less auspicious. Well, my friends that I hung out with, they would smoke a little pot. And so I would drive them around while they're passing the dew back and forth,

and they didn't even offer it to me because they knew I didn't do it. And they were talking about how good it was, all that stuff, and I finally couldn't take it anymore. I said, I want to see. I said, hand it here. And she had rolled up a big fat joint. I mean, as big as your finger, you know. And I took it, and I pulled on that thing as hard and long as I could,

and I passed it back. And I held it and blow hard and long as I could, and I passed it back. And I held it and blowed it out, and heck, it was about that time it was coming back to me again. They're hitting the joint, driving around, when Carl sees the Kentwood police. So he decides to get on the interstate to avoid them. So, heck, we get on the interstate, and I'm hitting that joint, passing it with them. And I said, oh my God, and I'm hitting that joint, passing it with them. And I said, oh, my God. And my buddy's, what, the police? I said, no, man, we're doing 15 miles an hour up the interstate.

And he said, you've got to speed up. I said, no, man. And that was my first experience with drugs. It kind of sets the tone with Carl and drugs. Carl's a drug cop who's fascinated by narcotics. In his own way, he's also like Denzel in the movie Training Day. A good narcotics agent must know and love narcotics. In fact, a good narcotics agent should have narcotics in his blood.

Whether he wanted to be the police or not, a law enforcement career came and found Carl. Someone he knew in a local police department asked him to give it a try. He said, you never know, you might like it. Well, unbeknownst to me, nine out of ten people, once you get into law enforcement and really enjoy it, you know, it's hard to get out of it. And how do you square the kid who drove around smoking pot with the guy who became a drug cop? Well, Carl fought the drug war not because it was something he believed in,

but because he was interested in drugs, and he wanted to be good at his job. I have a very hard work ethic. I want to be at the top, and I don't care what I become involved in, if I get on a football team, whatever. I want to make the most tackles. I want to be shining. And that's how I was.

So in law enforcement, a lot of guys like to make detective, you know. I didn't care for detective work. I enjoyed investigating narcotics. Carl's talent as a narcotics cop? He's great at finding things drug dealers want to hide. Where people thought that they were real good at hiding drugs, and I wanted to be real good at finding them. He's the go-to on searching. People he worked with told us he was a real technical guy. If they were searching a car, he'd have his tools, and that car would be in 80 pieces.

And he'd find the hidden compartment. If it was a room, he'd look in the vents, refrigerator, freezer, empty a flower pot. I mean, everybody else would tire out. They would burn out within 30, 45 minutes of searching, and they'd be all on the front porch, congregated up, talking war stories or something. And I'm the only one in there searching. But I would come out of there with it, too, you know, sooner or later. Early 2000s. Carl's coming up as a narcotics officer at Hammond Police Department.

Chad's a DEA agent. They both have young families. Chad's hobbies, outside catching drug dealers, are water skiing and promoting country music concerts with his wife, Michelle. Chad's building out his task force. He's looking for local guys, and he recruits Carl to work with him. Carl gets to know Chad's style right away. He has a mind for it.

When he's using, like, a it. When he's using like a dealer and he's using one to bust other dealers, he can put together scenarios that's like Hollywood. It really is. He comes up with stuff that's like, wow, how do you even think of that? Most DEA operations are about high level dealers. Agents do surveillance like wiretaps.

It takes a lot of time. But Chad was more of a street agent. He was well-connected, had a huge Rolodex of informants, made a ton of cases. And that made him a popular guy with management. is pretty much satisfied if their special agents make one to two or three arrests a year. So with Chad making two or three arrests a week, they're definitely happy with him. The group supervisor's happy, the sacks are happy.

That's where he started getting the name of the golden boy or whatever from the SACs. SAC. That's an acronym. Special Agent in Charge. The Boss. He was the perfect agent that you would want training you as long as he stayed out of the black area. The black, right on the edge of the gray. Chan has some shortcuts that he shows Carl.

It's all about lightening their paperwork load. They juggle evidence around, fudge some things. It's the kind of loopholes you might find when there are members of your team who aren't exactly under anybody's supervision. During that training, he would say, look, let's work smarter and not harder. They want you to do this with this type of evidence, and it's going to take you a seven-page report. He said, let me show you how I would do it, and you get around all of that. Was it legal to do that on that case through DEA's eyes?

I think it was walking a gray line. And this combination, corner cutting, praise from the bosses, did not go over well with his colleagues. If they seized a Mercedes, a BMW, or a new custom truck, Chad would walk right into the SACS office and ask for it. And it might be slated for another agent, you know, but if Chad wants it, Chad's going to get it. I've seen it happen before, and the agent gets pissed, which he should have. You know, he's been waiting two or three years to get a new vehicle or more,

and all of a sudden here it is. He sees it. It's parked up there. They're fixing to be handed out, and all of a sudden, poof, it disappears, and the golden boy, Chad, gets it, you know. And you had special agents that got pissed with him. They hated him. And Chad, to me, that would bother me, you know, that someone hated me or that I'd done someone like that, that I worked with.

Chad, he could care less. He didn't care. Actually, he'd kind of get tickled over it. That's how he was. Members of the task force came and went, but Carl stayed. He was the paperwork guy, the guy who could always find the drugs. A real likable country dude who was good at doing what he was told. If Chad was the ends justify the means, Carl was the means. No need for justification.

It's a hell of a team. Around 2013, a sheriff's deputy fresh out of college joined the task force. He had a lot of talent and ambition. We were actually watching him say, hey, that's the next J.S. Scott right there, you know. Johnny Domain. If he'd never joined the A-team, Chad might still be on the job. Johnny was young, had the same kind of calculating mind as Chad. He got how to catch drug dealers. He made drug buys like there's nothing to it. had the same kind of calculating mind as Chad. He got how to catch drug dealers.

He made drug buys like there's nothing to it. And, you know, when he left out of there, he didn't only make that buy, he had the next buy lined up, you know. So he was very good. Both Chad and Carl took him under their wings. You know, Johnny had lost his mother in the last few years. From what I understand, you know, his dad had left when he was 15 or maybe before that.

I don't know. But anyway, he kind of had it rough. And I can see where he was kind of hunting someone to hang out with and spend time with. I mean, I liked him. Boy, I really did. Carl says Johnny was quiet at first,

but once you got to know him, he's the kind of guy you can't help but like. Funny, real dry sense of humor, and good with Carl's kids. I mean, heck, me and the wife at the time would let him come hang out at the house with us. He'd come watch movies. Next morning, get up, we'd eat breakfast,

and he'd take off, you know. It was like he was lost, is what he really looked like because he didn't have anybody else, really. It's disorienting talking to Carl. Later on, you'll hear details about what he did. Many stories are disgusting and just plain weird. He allegedly dosed his own colleagues with ecstasy, trying to get everybody to have group sex. Carl denies this. Well, Carl admits he provided the drugs, but he says somebody else put the ecstasy in their shot glasses. The stories, without Carl's voice, make him sound like a moral black hole.

There's just nothing there. But talking to him, you feel different. And maybe I say this about everybody I meet. Carl's a likable guy. In spite of all he'd come to do, everyone we talked with seemed to like him. Even some of Chad's enemies had good things to say about Carl. Before meeting him, our team talked about the kinds of questions I could safely ask Carl out here in the middle of nowhere.

But I found I didn't have to hedge. Carl's an open book. Book might be half fiction, but it is open. Carl told us he had reservations about the drug war from the beginning. You know, it was, I had the feeling like we're never going to win this. Even at the time you had that feeling? Absolutely. I mean, it's no way that we can stop and win this. Once me and Chad Scott got together and began working

together, we got on this topic of talking about the same thing. And Chad said, you know, he said, I worked with an old DEA agent out in Texas. And we got on that conversation. He said, that older agent told me, he said, look, let me tell you about how much we're going to stop the flow of drugs coming into this country. And he said, you walk out in the middle of the Tangibaho River. And he said, chest deep. He said, and hold your arms straight out beside you. And whatever water you hold back is how much drugs you're going to hold back coming into this country.

Next time on Smokescreen, Betrayal on the Bayou, a whistleblower goes after Chad. Everything was flowers and ice cream down there. And I came down there and messed it all up. And that dude's dirty, man. That dude's dirty, and he ain't going to change. He discovered that Chad was close with the drug dealers he used as informants. It's like the kid who's the star football player all his life, and he goes to

college, and then he expects he can get anything he wanted. I mean he was going to skirt the law, walk that line, and he was going to do what he needed to do to make himself to be a hero. And he did that. And the whistleblower decided that he needed to do something about the golden boy. Next on Smokescreen, Betrayal on the Bayou, a showdown between two federal agents. Smokescreen, Betrayal on the Bayou is an original production by Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment. It was written and produced by Odelia Rubin.

It was reported by me, Jim Mustian, and my co-host, Feynman Roberts. Our editor is Catherine St. Louis. She is also Neon Hum Media's executive editor. Our executive producer is Jonathan Hirsch. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Theme and original music composed by Hansdale Shi We also use music by Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound Our associate producers are Ann Lim and Joshua Moore

Our intern is Zoe Culkin Fendall Fulton is our fact checker Our production manager is Samantha Allison Alexis Martinez is our podcast coordinator Special thanks to Stephanie Serrano, Mia Warren, Kate Mishkin Thank you. and Allison Sherry. I'm Jim Mustian. And I'm Feynman Roberts. If you're enjoying the show, be sure to rate and review. It helps more people find it and hear our reporting.

Thanks for listening.