The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Deadly Cure | 3. The Martyr

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

What starts for Daniel Smith as an attempt to regain trust in medicine quickly becomes "Project Green Life" – a top distributor of MMS. Then, the feds catch wind of his operation, hoping to take him down. The Grenons use Daniel's prosecution as a rallying cry for the Genesis II church, claiming that their church status is what would insulate them from future attempts by the feds to shut them down. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Smoke Screen, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Neon Hum Media, Bloomberg, & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A quick heads up. This episode contains graphic content that might not be suitable for all listeners. Listen with care. A lot has happened over the span of just a few years. Mark Grennan and Jim Humble have started a church in Barahona where their sacrament is basically bleach, MMS. And Kerry Rivera's autism protocols are catching on in Facebook groups around the world. Doug Nash's wife has died after consuming MMS.

He believes it's the reason she died. Meanwhile, the FDA is zeroing in on one of the top suppliers in the world at that time, a company called Project Green Life. By the 2010s, it just seems like the whole movement could devolve into chaos. But that didn't happen. MMS is still around today. Thriving, some might say. Nothing, not even the FDA, would stop the spread of this dangerous, deadly cure. The people we've encountered so far who got involved with MMS did so because established medicine couldn't help them. They were looking for answers. So many of the stories about MMS evangelists follow this pattern. So that distributor

of MMS, the one who sold the product to Mark Grennan and Luke that eventually reached Sylvia, he had the same story. Doctors failed him, he says. Failed his family. He went searching for answers, and he found MMS. And it turns out, he also found something he wasn't looking for. The law. From Neon Hum Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Bloomberg, I'm Kristen V. Brown, and this is Smokescreen, Deadly Cure, a podcast about how a family on the fringe convinced tens of thousands of people across the globe

to buy a miracle liquid made of poison, the international conspiracy it ignited, and the people who fought to take them down. Episode 3, The Martyr. Daniel Smith got involved in MMS in his early 30s when he found out his mom became sick. She had cancer. Toward the end of her life, she was hospitalized. Daniel remembers talking to the doctor.

He wanted to know if there were ways nutrition might be able to help her. He said, you know, I'm a medical doctor. I eat Twinkies and drink Coca-Cola. I know nothing about nutrition. And it seems the doctor he spoke with didn't have much of a strong opinion on nutrition at this stage in his mother's illness. This is all according to Daniel, of course. And I just, it just stunned me.

I thought, I'm talking to a medical doctor who has the life of my mother in his hands, and he just told me he knows nothing about nutrition. She eventually died in a hospital, and Daniel seemed to resent the doctors who, he felt, failed to care for his mother. It was clearly a traumatic experience for him, watching her die and being powerless to impact her situation. Daniel is the kind of guy who looks like he'd fit right in in Washington state. You know, wears a lot of flannel, scruffy, blonde beard, thick ponytail.

You might see him at a health food store, I don't know, a Wilco concert. Like practically everyone we've met who gets involved with MMS, it's this failure to find solutions for serious health events that drives the search for answers. There had to be a better way. And for Daniel, he thought he'd found one. When he heard the story of Jim Humble. So in each day while I was there, I'd visit about two churches where in each church would have anywhere from 10 to like,

one church had as many as 400 cases of malaria. I treated more than 2,000 people with my malaria solution, which was, of course, now called MMS. I really felt like this was, you know, I couldn't wait anymore. It was such an amazing story, the discovery of MMS and how it was helping people. This, by the way, is Daniel Smith interviewing on a podcast. Another one. He didn't want to be a part of this one. Daniel's dad, Larry Smith, was an early supporter of MMS, too.

He even wrote a pamphlet called MMS Simplified for Newbies. Like his father, Jim Humble's approach to medicine clicked with Daniel. There was something about holistic, more natural medicine. Wellness untethered to the big businesses of hospitals, health insurance, and big pharma. Doctors who practiced what they preached. It gave him hope. And I just felt like I got to be a part of this. I want to be a part of this. And this is the time to do Project Green Life. So we did.

Project Green Life. That was the name of Daniel's business. PGL was an online store where you could purchase all sorts of alternative health products. But really, they were selling MMS. Anyone could make an order on ProjectGreenLife.com, a website that, well, looked like it was made in the mid-2000s. We began selling MMS. We started with our own MMS that we had in the cupboard. Daniel recruited his friends and family into the small

business, including Carista Long, Smith's common-law wife of 11 years. They had three kids together, all between the ages of 10 and 20. He also recruited some old friends to help run the business. They went way back. They'd all met when they were involved in a ministry that prayed with people in prison 20 years prior. They handled administrative tasks, answering phones, filling bottles, customer service, etc. Daniel and Karis ran the business right out of their own Spokane home. They outsourced much of the shipping of their products. They did the same for their supply of sodium chloride, the substance used with an activator acid to make MMS. To hear Daniel talk about the early days of PGL,

you'd think he was the founder of some world-altering startup. He said when a positive testimonial came to them about MMS, which he said happened all the time, he'd ring the bell. Another happy customer. Something I've observed about Daniel, he isn't a sharp-elbowed, bombastic fighter like some of the other proponents of MMS. He seems rather sweet, earnest. He clearly doesn't trust established medical organizations, and he would eventually have his day in court. To the people in his life,

he was a nice guy. He cared about his immediate family, friends, and the community. He was committed to serving others, involved in ministries. Some of his future employees he met while volunteering. And by all accounts, PGL was his passion, something he poured himself into. You can imagine him getting all swept up in the success of his new business and not exactly appreciating how dangerous this all was. But Daniel had big dreams that went beyond the store too. He imagined an affiliate program,

something where he could expand his client base and profit from the sales of other MMS evangelists. Daniel would split half of the retail sales with the affiliate. The affiliate idea was especially appealing to one of Daniel's customers, someone who relied heavily on purchasing MMS to support his own operation. Mark Grennan. That's when I got plugged into you. It was about 2008. 2008, I think it was. We had a little website, and I said, wow, this is great.

Grennan saw PGL as a solid distribution partner for the church. He'll help us make a little money, and we can get it to anybody around the world that contacts us. So it's perfect. You weren't doing anything wrong. And of course you're motivated. Yeah, well, we did come down there to Dominican Republic, Dominican Republic and met some great folks, you know, people who became friends for life. But some might say he missed all the warning signs, that what he was doing was dangerous and, according to the feds, illegal. Daniel needed more sodium chloride to meet demands, and he needed it fast to fulfill the hundreds of orders he needed to make industrial-grade purchases.

80-gallon drums of the stuff. And the powder version of sodium chloride is highly flammable. Set a match, and you could burn down the block. Industrial manufacturers mostly had no idea what was going on. The chemical companies that Daniel and other sellers of MMS were purchasing raw materials from mostly sold the product for industrial use,

for things like fracking. And if a manufacturer did raise questions about the chemicals being used for something else, which some did, he would find a workaround. By all accounts, he was legitimately shocked when the FDA showed up and warned him about his operation. To him, the risk must have been worth it. He was a true believer, and this was a tremendous business opportunity for him and his family. An opportunity that was short-lived. Which brings us back to Sylvia Fink

and her untimely death in Vanuatu in 2009. After Sylvia dies, Doug Nash files a complaint with the FDA. That wasn't necessarily enough to bring about an investigation into Daniel's operations. But just a few months later, in the spring of 2010, the world was gripped by a global pandemic.

H1N1. Which is how word traveled from Washington state to Washington, D.C. In 2010, H1N1, known commonly as the swine flu, was raging. Right when they had the H1N1 flu pandemic scare. Hoax scare. Hoax, yes. You know, the newest version of the hoax. And what they did, the FDA was, they put together a task force.

All they did was they swept the internet night and day looking for anybody who was selling a product on the internet that said it was effective towards H1N1. It was a hoax slash scare, of course, but somehow also a treatable illness with MMS? Anyway, Daniel claims that MMS sellers were targeted because they said the solution would cure a variety of ailments, including H1N1. That's why the government noticed, he says. Well, that's how MMS got on the radar. The MMS was being used for water purification, Daniel said. He insisted business was good. In 2010, the State Department began reviewing a complaint. A U.S. citizen on a small island nation in the Pacific had died. Sylvia Fink. The government, the one Daniel barely trusted, was after him. And this is a consistent theme with Daniel. He seems shocked and confused that he might have done anything wrong. From Daniel's perspective, all he wanted was to share this

treatment with people who wanted it. So when he received an order from Alameda, California in the first few days of August for MMS, he gladly accepted payment and shipped the order. It wasn't just MMS inside the box. There was Jim Humble's book, a pamphlet Daniel's dad wrote called MMS Simplified for Newbies, and a DVD called Understanding MMS, Conversations with Jim Humble. The box was delivered across state lines from Daniel's Spokane office to a nondescript mailbox in California. What Daniel didn't know just yet? These boxes weren't going to a believer. They were going right to the FDA. They had sent the FDA agents, they made controlled purchases, so they essentially lied.

A week later, agents from the FDA's Seattle district office started inspecting Daniel's operations in Spokane. And they're armed, they're, we should say, pretty bossy. They use the line from the TV shows, we can do this the easy way, the hard way. The inspection to Daniel felt like this major violation of his rights and his business. It felt like a scare tactic. Up until now, established medicine,

big pharma, the government, couldn't touch what he was building with Project Green Life. Now, they were knocking at his door, telling him to stop doing the thing he dedicated himself to, that he could even go to jail for selling MMS. Daniel realized he might be in trouble. He needed guidance. He found an organization called the Pro-Advocate Group that he felt could help him out. It was a membership organization

that helps people who want to practice therapies and treatments away from the mainstream without all those burdensome government regulations. Seemed promising. Who said, basically, you have a constitutional exemption to operate as a private association, Seemed promising. It aligned beautifully with Daniel's mission, and he thought gave him protection from the watchful eyes of the government. The pro-advocate group gave Daniel a plausible-seeming legal defense, turning PGL into a private membership group. It amounted to, you can't tell me what to do at my own house party.

It wasn't subject to government regulation, or so it seemed. They had experience with Daniel's type of situation, helping alternative medicine groups circumvent the law. Seemed like a good deal. So Daniel forked over, in his words, a large sum of money in exchange for some advice. $48,000. Daniel also engaged a lawyer who went to the FDA. She wanted to know what Daniel could do to come into compliance.

Maybe he could change the website or add some labels to the product. They jointly agreed. Daniel would recall the MMS. And so we affected the recall because I have a family and, you know, it was pretty scary at the time. So we did the recall. Project Green Life tried something else. They reorganized as a private association, hoping that would cover them legally. They alerted the FDA, as was customary, of their filing as a private association. The FDA, by the way, wouldn't talk to us about Daniel's case. But according to Daniel, a whole year passed without any word from the FDA. It was for the best.

The FDA was off their backs. But they didn't destroy the MMS like they said they would, at least from the FDA's perspective. They were buying and selling all over, including once again in Oakland, California, then San Clemente, California, Bozeman, Montana. Daniel didn't know it, but he was selling to the feds again. And this is where things started to get real bad for Daniel.

I happened to be in New Mexico taking my daughter to summer yoga camp when I get a phone call from tenants at our house who said that there are men in flap jackets who have basically just raided the house. So they had 10 to 12 agents swoop down on three different locations at once. This was sort of the beginning of the end for Daniel. While Daniel makes his case with the pro-advocate group, federal agents were making theirs. The morning of June 29, 2011,

agents approached a three-story brownwood house with a white deck and white picket fence, warrant in hand. They flew in from all over the United States to conduct their stormtrooper raid on our home, the bottling facility, and the shipping facility. And they left with bottles of MMS, hard drives, passwords, business cards. Enough to make their case. They seized about $26,000. It was very intrusive. It essentially put them out of business.

Back in Spokane, Chris Stein was in the newsroom at the Inlander, an alt-weekly with a reputation for its watchdog reporting. He's not sure how it came across his desk, but Chris remembers the email. Some eye-catching language, something to do with, you know, I am not an animal. I'm not an animal, the tagline Daniel Smith had been using in protest of the FDA. The tipster wanted Chris to talk to Daniel. Look into what happened. It piqued Chris's interest. It seemed like kind of some big and unusual crime. So Chris and a staff photographer met Daniel on a park bench. They met at Menido Park, a beautiful 90-acre space

in an upscale area of Spokane with botanical gardens, trails, and towering pine trees. But as Chris sat down, he found Daniel wasn't what he expected. Not like a grinning, rash, indignant. I remember that he was cagey,

and surprisingly so, because I thought that they wanted media attention. They contacted the press and, you know, they got the press. Daniel wasn't seeking this kind of attention, clearly, and he wasn't parlaying it into some kind of platform for himself. He truly felt ambushed by the FDA. I think that was sort of like the very like bare bones of it was just sort of like a frustrated business owner who was in some serious trouble with some people who were seriously unaccountable to him. This wasn't the county prosecutor. They didn't, you know, like this is the feds. Chris filed his story and for the most part moved on. Daniel and his family moved on too. They'd had enough of Spokane and put down roots about 500 miles southwest in Ashland, Oregon.

It's a town of about 20,000 people right over the California border. This could be a new life. Their daughter could go to a good Waldorf school. They could put this all behind them. And they did. For the next year and a half. Until the morning of February 5th, 2013, when Karis was trying to get their daughter off to elementary school. She's not even out of bed yet.

Get dressed, answer the door. They ask if we're so-and-so. They step in, they put handcuffs on us, they tell us we're under arrest. And this was the beginning of some really heart-wrenching experiences. Daniel's arrest sent shockwaves through the community. There were Facebook pages, websites,

GoFundMe pages for the family's legal expenses that raised about $100,000. There were even support videos, like this one. I'm here to ask you to join me in helping a dear friend of mine. His name is Daniel Smith. He and his wife, Karis, were taken into custody by U.S. federal marshals

at the behest of the Food and Drug Administration. Mark Grennan, for his part, was upset. When Daniel finally made his appearance on Grennan's podcast, Daniel seemed kind of pissed. His product, as far as he was concerned, was being linked to the death of Sylvia Fink. When you read the transcript of the grand jury testimony by the FDA agent, they opened up to the grand jury with the story of Sylvia Fink and told the grand jurors that we were selling this dangerous product

that killed this woman. But there were none of the elements for any of the crimes in it, which are required for an indictment, as you probably know. It was just this smoke and mirrors document. It wasn't just Daniel and Karis who were indicted. The feds were after two employees, Chris and Tammy Olson.

Daniel and the people who supported him had renewed reason to be upset. This, they said, was just another example of big government overreaching all the way across the country and into Daniel's Pacific Northwest enclave, where he'd been happily and successfully running a small business. The feds were making an example out of Daniel, showing everyone that no one stands up to the FDA. A photo on the fundraising page shows Daniel, with his arms around his wife and daughter, smiling into the camera. There's an endorsement from the grandfather of the whole operation, Jim Humble. Quote,

this fight is our fight. Obviously, they all had to get lawyers. Daniel's friend who had gone into business with him, Tammy Olsen, was assigned Nicholas Veith, a Spokane-based lawyer. They didn't think that they were selling, you know, snake oil. They didn't think they were selling bleach. They really thought that they were selling medicine. And it took a long time, months and months and months, for them to, you know, appreciate and listen and learn, you know, that there's certain things you have to do. Like follow regulations set in place by the FDA.

Or not just say something is medicine. Especially if it's an industrial bleaching agent. During interviews from this time, Daniel seems shocked. Completely unaware of the government's claims. Some days it's hard to get out of bed. When you're looking at, you know, a potential 37 years in a system as corrupt as it is, you wonder if you will truly have a fair day in court.

That day did come. The trial lasted seven days. During jury selection, one potential juror had to be recused because he'd already heard about Daniel's case, read about it on the internet. Actually, he donated to Daniel's GoFundMe campaign. Listed as witnesses for the defense were Jim Humble and Mark Grennan, but the two never testified. Oh, and that membership organization Daniel engaged, the pro-advocate group, when it came time for the big day in

federal court, those people were nowhere to be found. The pro-advocate group didn't respond to our request to talk. But while Daniel seemed to be part of an international movement, MMS, when the Fed showed up, he was basically out on his own. He had a public defender representing him during the trial. Good morning. This is from the trial transcripts, but these are actors. A lawyer for the government made the first opening statements. From late 2007 until June of 2011, the defendant, Lewis Daniel Smith,

ran a business called Project Green Life. He was the president and founder of the company. He recruited some of his family and friends to work in it. He had an unusual business model. He sold a toxic chemical for people to drink as a miracle cure for illness and disease. He called this product Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS. MMS is a mixture of sodium chloride in water. The defendant knew what he was doing was illegal. He knew that he could not sell his product out in the open. Time and time again, he told whatever lies he needed to tell so that he could keep selling this product. The defendant is charged with three crimes, selling misbranded drugs, smuggling, and conspiracy.

Selling misbranded drugs, smuggling, conspiracy. People have been selling miracle cures since we started walking on two legs. It's always been hard to figure out whether they really believe or whether they're just pretending. We're not going to try to answer that question. This is a case about selling a dangerous chemical as a cure to sick people and their desperate loved ones. A case about a defendant who refused to stop selling it. He had to lie and defy the law to do it. The government's case against Daniel and PGL was simple. This wasn't about what Daniel believed about what he was selling. MMS was a dangerous substance, not a medicine. And whether or not Daniel believed it was a cure,

he broke the law by selling it as a cure. But Daniel's defense barely addressed the legality of what he was doing. His lawyer essentially said, he's not a poster child for MMS. Don't shoot the messenger. The FDA does not like Miracle Mineral Solution. The FDA doesn't like books written about Miracle Mineral Solution. The FDA does not like everything that Daniel Smith said or everything that he did. But just because the government dislikes something

doesn't make it a crime. Here's what happened in a nutshell, and it's really not that complicated. Daniel and several other people were part of a company. That company sold a product called Miracle Mineral Solution, or MMS. They sold it over the internet. They were not alone. Customers could go online and place

orders for whatever products they wanted. Daniel Smith sold a legal product. The customers who bought that legal product got what they ordered and got what they paid for. They got exactly what they expected to receive. There is no fraud. The government walked methodically through the case against Daniel. Undercover agents were able to purchase MMS from PGL. Representatives from chemical companies that had sold MMS to PGL indicated that they were unaware of how the sodium chloride was being used. When approached in one case, Daniel created a phony website

to appear to be using MMS for more traditional purposes, like disinfecting. The prosecution called the shipping company representatives, who spoke to the scope of PGL's operations. They even called former PGL employees, like Christopher Olson, who had pled guilty in exchange for their testimony. Emails showed a concerted effort to find ways to acquire sodium chloride, even as chemical distributors raised concerns about how PGL was using the material. The trial went off with little fanfare.

Reading the transcripts, it feels like the whole thing was a foregone conclusion. The prosecution's closing arguments had the finality, the simplicity of a eulogy. Arrogance. That is the word that best describes this case. This case is about the defendant's arrogance. He lied to get what he wanted. He thought he got to decide what was safe for everyone else. This case is about the defendant's arrogance. He lied to get what he wanted. He thought he got to decide what was safe for everyone else. This case is about his lies, his arrogance, and his fraud.

It's also about the defendant's obsession with making money by selling a dangerous chemical as a cure for disease. Members of the jury, this defendant views a law that's designed to protect our health and safety as a hangup and a hassle. And finally, the public defender addresses the jury on behalf of Daniel. This case is not about beliefs. It's not about personal opinions.

It's not about books. It's about the law. This case is not about whether you like or dislike MMS. And I told you quite candidly in opening that the FDA didn't like it. I think that was clear. But that is not a reason to convict Daniel. Despite the clear danger of what Daniel was selling,

the defense maintained till the very end that Daniel wasn't really doing anything wrong. This was, in essence, something the government just didn't like, because they couldn't control it and make money off of it. A jury found Daniel guilty of one count of conspiracy to commit multiple crimes, three counts of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud or mislead, and one count of fraudulently smuggling merchandise into the United States.

Jeffrey Neeson defended Daniel at his sentencing. And even he was suspicious of Daniel's claims, in hindsight. Look, they're in it for money. If they weren't making money, all the protestations about, oh, they want to help society, that's bullshit. They're in it for money, okay? The way Jeffrey remembers it, Daniel was doing quite well for himself. He's not wrong. Court documents show that at one point the business was grossing $120,000 a month.

An involvement for the benefit of mankind. was grossing $120, that I recall, that was supporting anything he did. And that is why he suffered a conviction before a jury. Daniel Smith was sentenced to 51 months in prison. In three years, he'd have supervised release. The Grennans didn't testify on behalf of Daniel, but they certainly took Daniel's conviction as a talking point, something that riled up their base of supporters. Why if MMS is illegal or so horrible,

why aren't we in jail? Why didn't the police show up at that service, that seminar? Why didn't they take us away? Because we, for donations, we provide the products for donations. Okay, so why is Daniel in that situation he's in? And we aren't. That's my question. Mark and Jonathan talked to Daniel about everything that happened. Well, you're doing the exact same thing, John.

Daniel was doing, but as a church, for donations, and these are sacraments. So you ask why, I'm just answering. Go ahead. No, that's right. That's good. I want someone answering. But I'm going about this because it's very simple. It's so simple. So simple, you could do it. Daniel was a private business. The Grennans had the protections of Genesis 2. As a church, and even bank accounts and all these things that used to shut us down when we tried to start a church, they're not shutting us down now because we've done it as a church. I've heard this tone from Mark Grennan before.

Sometimes on the podcast, he seems to be trying to convince himself of something. He's less talking to the listener as he is thinking out loud. And in this instance, it's notable. He seems to be trying to convince himself that the government will never come knocking. Or even if they do, like they did in Barahona, they'll turn on their heels when they discover Genesis 2 is a church. Daniel begins his sentence at the end of 2015. Nine months later, Joe and Mark start their podcast.

A few months after that, Donald Trump is elected president. In the early days, Fiona and the Bleach Hunters were fighting MMS on Facebook groups and message boards. But the conversations were spreading to all these other sites, too. Twitter, Telegram, Instagram. MMS was alive and well. The bleach hunters would have their work cut out for them. And I thought this is going to be, you know, this is easy. We can, you know, make some calls.

You know, this will stop pretty quickly. But I was very wrong that this was going to be a quick solution. And soon, an even brighter spotlight would shine on the Grinnons, a light they did not welcome. CBS, Fox News, you're all liars. It's all scripted. This guy's an actor. Are you really serious about this? You think this... You're an actor. No, I'm a reporter. And you honestly believe this can cure cancer? You're an actor, okay? I'm a reporter. And you honestly believe this can cure cancer? You're an actor, okay?

I'm a reporter. You people are bulls**t liars. That's next time. Thank you. original music composed by Asha Ivanovich. Catherine Nguyen is our fact checker. Our production manager is Sammy Allison. Alexis Martinez is our podcast coordinator. Our executive producers are Jonathan Hirsch, Katie Boyce, and Jared Sandberg. Thomas Buckley's

reporting on Genesis 2 for Bloomberg informed the development of this series. Special thanks to Chloe Chobel, Krista Ripple, Stephanie Serrano, Odelia Rubin, Liz Sanchez, Shara Morris, and Jeff Grocott. I'm Kristen V. Brown. Be sure to rate and review the show. It helps more people find and hear this story.

Thanks for listening. For emergency assistance, please call Poison Help at 1-800-222-1222 to speak with a poison expert or visit poisonhelp.org for additional resources.