The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Deadly Cure | 6. The Raid

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

In the summer of 2020, the government raided Grenon's compound and arrested two of Mark Grenon’s sons. But where in the world were Mark and his other son? This episode traces the Grenons’ moves around the world, and examines both how they rose to international stardom … and how they were ultimately brought 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

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. Like any good disciple, Joseph Grennan understood that his body is a temple,

which might be why he developed a thing for running. Running in general, it seems, is something Joseph and his father Mark had gotten quite good at over the years, from the U.S. to the D.R. to, it seems, everywhere in the world. But he had no idea it wasn't just his health-minded friends tracking his progress in the Adidas running app. As soon as Eli Dagon, the bleach hunter, discovered his run-tastic

profile, he reported Joseph to the feds. Representatives from the DOJ and FDA didn't comment on the investigation, so we can't know for sure whether Eli was the one to reveal their location. But he did, in fact, reveal the location of Joseph and Mark to the world. They were in Colombia, in a coastal city called Santa Marta. It's a small housing complex that's set up in the way that it has like a patio that's shared by most of these houses in the middle. That's Patricia Laia, a reporter for Bloomberg News in Bogota, Colombia. When U.S. law enforcement got wind of the Grenin's location, they contacted Colombian law enforcement. They were going to need all the help they could get. Each house has a different entrance, a different garage, and things of the sort.

So many ways to escape, which is why something of a SWAT team waited in the early hours of the morning outside the housing complex. There was a big team there. Some of them were carrying military-style weapons. They will take father and son by force if they have to. At last, the moment arrived. The team entered the complex, past the tightly packed apartments.

Neighbors completely unaware that an internationally wanted citizen was in their midst, leaning out of their windows. First, they went for the son, Joseph, Mark's right-hand man, his intrepid co-host on the G2 Voice podcast. They knocked on the door for a long time before he finally appeared. And when they got there... He was in his boxers, sort of wondering what was going on. He was in his underwear, groggy and confused. There wasn't enough time to run or to tell his dad that the law had arrived. They also knocked for a very long time.

At first, Mark didn't answer. Had he been alerted by someone in the building? They knocked and knocked and knocked until at last Mark appeared at the door. The same thing happened. Mark opened the door in his boxers as well. Like father, like son. Mark let the authorities in. Some of the police went inside their houses and started to set aside the MMS or what they assumed were the chemicals they were using for MMS, which they had inside their houses.

Too late to hide the evidence. Joe and Mark were stripped of their clothes and their sacrament. Joe and Mark were shocked. Maybe it's because they really thought their day would never come. This split second, holding the door open, bleary-eyed in their skivvies, would be the last few minutes as free men for a long, long time. Maybe forever. 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 6. The Raid. Mark Grennan had evaded the government for years, not just from a regulatory perspective. Even when authorities had shown up to arrest all four Grennans in Florida, they were only able to catch two.

Which is kind of funny because it's not like Mark and Joseph were exactly keeping their mouths shut. They were running their mouths for hours each week on their podcast. In fact, long before that Adidas app became their Achilles heel, they basically revealed where they were hiding to their listeners. Here's Mark being coy. So let's just pick a country. No, let's just pick Colombia.

Use it because we do it here. Everywhere in Colombia, people can come. And we got people in Colombia that already help people. As it turns out, they'd been hiding in plain sight in Colombia for quite a while. For years. What on earth were they up to during that time? We needed to find out. So I asked my colleague Patty to hop on a plane from Bogota to the seaside town of Santa Marta.

Santa Marta is a very popular tourist destination in Colombia, and I have been there before as a tourist several times. This was my first work trip to Santa Marta. I realized, you know, there's so much that we don't know about what their life looked like in Santa Marta, even though they spent so many years there. And I was put in contact with a local reporter in Santa Marta. Priscilla Zuniga is a reporter who covers security in Colombia and is from Santa Marta, this coastal town at the tippy top of Colombia where Mark and Joseph had been on their permanent vacation. There's a lot of local flights, so most of the people coming in and out are Colombians.

But there are international tourists, and I did run into a lot of them at my hotel. The beaches themselves in Santa Marta are not the most spectacular, but just a short boat ride away, you have a natural park called Tairona, where a lot of tourists want to visit. So you're able to just take sort of these speedboats and 20 minutes you're in a beautiful beach with crystal blue waters. And it was here, in what could be a location for a future season of White Lotus,

that Mark and Joseph and their family had been hiding undetected in plain sight. It wouldn't be hard for the local law enforcement to track them down. Our most important interview was the criminal head of Magdalena's prosecutor's office, which is the department where Santa Marta is. Don Angel is no nonsense. You get the sense you wouldn't get away with much if he was your dad.

He's a very serious person. You can tell that he comes from a police background. It's a government building, so there's a lot of security going in. You have to go through the metal detector and all that. He leads the criminal unit, right? So his team is outside of his office and inside of his office, he has a lot of the sort of the awards that he's won over the years. In one corner, there's a bulletproof sort of outfit that he has on a mannequin. There was a reason Patty and Priscilla saw Don Angel first. He says it plainly, he heard about them probably 24 to 36 hours before arresting them, right? And it was in those hours

where they sort of figured out where they lived and what they were doing that he realized that there were so many people around him that knew of the Grensons and knew about MMS. He just himself had no idea about the topic. The Church of MMS had been making inroads among his friends. They'd been taking the sacrament and endangering themselves. When Don Angel realized all this, he didn't hesitate. In just a day and a half, he actually found out plenty about the Grennan's operation. He remembered sort of when they got this assignment and how they spent basically the following day trying to trace down where the two of them lived, where they were having sort of these seminars that they offered for people to come into Santa Marta

and receive healing for about a month or so. And where they were selling MMS and all that. They'd made themselves into a little travel destination for tourists looking to cure themselves. They had plenty of MMS holed up in their homes. It felt like they weren't just passing through. Maybe Mark and Joe had been in Colombia for a while. How long had they been in the country? How were they able to stay?

Patty and Priscilla talked to a local immigration official. He was able to look into the immigration system and see both Mark and Joseph had been married to Colombian citizens. So the last visa that they had was through marriage. And according to the information that he was able to give us, Joseph was even naturalized as a Colombian citizen at some point after having stayed in Colombia for so many years. They'd put down roots.

And yet it had taken the FDA this long to track them down. The immigration official was near downtown Santa Marta, which isn't very big. You definitely need a car to drive around. It's not like you're walking around these places. But this was all near downtown Santa Marta, which is about a 20-minute drive from Rodadero, which is where the Grenons used to live. None of this would have been too hard to figure out. Mark explains it all in his book. Apparently, they moved to Colombia in 2012, after leaving the Dominican Republic.

The way he tells it, the cost of electricity was simply too much in the Dominican Republic. Seems like a pretty drastic move just for a utility bill, but okay. So, likely the feds knew about the Grenin's general whereabouts for a while, which makes sense with everything we've learned about MMS so far. It sometimes takes years for indictments to come down to purveyors. Now, up until this point, the Grenins had made the Genesis II church into a global operation A widespread and deeply resourced operation Which, at least as an idea, had spread well beyond the individual efforts of the Grenons

But the Grenons themselves? They ended up settling down in an area that had seen better days. This is Enrodadero. It's about a 20-minute drive from downtown Santa Marta. And this is a part of town that you could tell has sort of lost its shine a little bit. You can tell that it used to be a pretty wealthy area near Santa Marta, but isn't so much so anymore. Priscilla told Patty that Santa Marta used to be a center for drug sales in Colombia. So a lot of money poured into the region. Fast.

Usually these giant, fancy, shiny new buildings are built when there's a lot of drug money coming into this area. But it went away just as fast. And when the money dries up... These buildings sort of become abandoned, or there's nobody really buying these apartments anymore. And from a certain perspective, this location made sense. Rotadero had what the Grinnons needed to set up shop.

Empty apartments for tourists looking to get away and get their MMS and attend a seminar or two that Genesis 2 put on. When Priscilla and Patty drove out to Rotodero, they were looking for some spired temple, or at least a sprawling estate, or better yet, a compound. No luck. But they did find a neighbor. So we meet this lady at this property that she's trying to sell near downtown Santa Marta. That's where she agreed to meet us.

She was also kind of hesitant to speak about them because she knew the Brennans pretty well and was actually friendly with them. Her husband actually knew Mark and Mark's wife pretty well. We took her to get coffee and she sort of loosened up a little bit and she started to tell us about how she thought it was really unjust that they had been arrested. She considers the Grennens really good people. She says they talked about a lot of natural medicines. His interest in those medicines didn't seem like a sin or anything, she says. The Grennens had always helped anyone out who had questions about natural alternatives, she told Patty.

She remembered Mark as well-educated, a pleasant and warm person. And then she admits she used to get MMS from them. She bought it from Mark's wife, and she even had a roll-on version that she showed us in her house that she used to roll on for bruises and back pain and things of the sort. She also suggested that the Grenin's were unfairly targeted, that it was all part of a bigger conspiracy to suppress MMS.

She says that it's all part of the pharmaceuticals plot to try to keep MMS from being discovered by the world as this miraculous cure. And she took it herself. She gave it to her kids as well. She claims that it's one of the reasons she never got COVID and she had a good experience with MMS. She hadn't just bought the cure. She had bought into the lies. The Grenin's had convinced plenty of people. Something funny that Don Angel told us is that after he found out about the Grenin's and MMS, He started finding out about several people in his office that took it, and he had no idea. So it wasn't just his friends. Fellow police officers were taking the deadly cure.

He says that it's something that once he found out about it, he started to hear about more and more people who were taking MMS around him. It was popular, or it remains popular still in Santa Marta. From the sound of it, Mark and Joseph were living a good life in Rotodero. Had roots, a community. The neighbor even told Patty that they fell in love.

She told us that Mark and his wife had a very loving relationship, that Joseph's kids would be running around the neighborhood all the time, like riding their bikes or skating, that they never gave the impression of being wealthy individuals. They were sort of low-key, dressed down most of the time in shorts and flip-flops. But they were always just very nice neighbors. There was an ease to their lives there. Joseph could even walk his kid to school. It was that close.

We knew what preschool they went to because we saw a photo of them holding this little diploma. And the preschool, we drove by it, it's literally two blocks away from the Grenin's housing complex. Apparently, the Grenin's lived right next to each other in this housing complex, with about 30 homes, all about two or three stories tall. That Genesis II sprawling estate? It wasn't an estate at all. They're very narrow, and the third story tends to be sort of a terrace where people hang out with given the beautiful weather. In fact, to our surprise, Mark and Joseph and their families were not basking in wealth and opulence at all. You know, it looks like a middle-class housing complex. Small but nice houses, all built right next to each other.

As soon as you walk in, everybody sort of pops their head out. You know, it's one of those housing complexes where everybody's in each other's business. Meaning, people really noticed when Patty and Priscilla showed up. They played it cool, pretended to admire the facade. There were mango trees, so the birds were all over the mangoes. This was likely the nexus of their life in Colombia. So it wasn't really a church or a spa,

not in the way I imagined anyway. It was just one big housing complex where the Grennens did business. Where they lived, sold MMS, and rented out rooms for their so-called detox facility. The Genesis II Church Restoration Center. The goal, Mark would later write in his book, was to recruit new bishops to run the center. And if you look at the pamphlets or what they were sort of selling about these month-long stays for people to come and heal themselves, they promised them beach access,

warm weather, natural foods, and that's something that you can get there for a very cheap price. But also, Mark could sell it. Consider it. A 30-day all-inclusive vacation right on the water. All foods, almost all organic and raw, provided. Balcony views of the beach, daily personal guidance,

sacramental videos, a copy of his book, and Genesis 2 church sacraments for detoxing. For only 6,,000 a month, you could cleanse your way to purity, to perfection. If the body was the temple, Santa Marta was the Vatican. There was an upside for the Grenants. This type of thing attracted the type of person who might go home to talk about MMS and spread the word of what a relaxing and cleansing retreat this all was. I can see it. Maybe an aging hippie or a social media influencer committed to living well. Our guess was that they were not staying inside of the Grennans's house, but rather rented apartments nearby,

nearby where the Grennan's lived that were probably very cheap to rent out to these people coming in. And if they didn't have a good experience, they'd go back home to another country. End of story. In other words, not a lot to hold the Grennan's accountable.

It worked the way all things do, until it didn't. Which, on some level, you have to guess Mark and Joseph knew, especially when their distribution partners in Bradenton, Florida, Jonathan and Jordan, were hauled out of their homes and into U.S. custody. It was only a matter of time before the feds would come for them, too. At the start of 2020, Mark was living the good life in Columbia, keeping the U.S. government off of his scent. But after the raid on his family's Florida home, he could tell they were closing in. And then...

Welcome, everybody, to this emergency broadcast from naturalnews.com. Emergency pod. We're joined today by Mark Grennan from the Genesis II Church, which has been raided by U.S. Marshals under the orders of the FDA. Mark was invited on another podcast. Again, not this one. He didn't respond to requests for comment to be part of this one. He did agree to talk to Mike Adams, though, the self-proclaimed health ranger. His jurisdiction includes the entire range of anti-government fringe ideas,

from anti-vaxxing, COVID hoax conspiracies, and of course, MMS. This is government tyranny at its worst, invading a church, confiscating products and money, absolute government terrorism. Mark Grennan is currently in Colombia, and he expects to be arrested and extradited at any moment. He joins us now with an emergency message for health freedom. Mark, thank you for joining me today. Mike Adams may have seen this as an emergency, and it's hard to know what Mark was thinking. But sitting in his podcast studio in a ball cap and white Genesis 2 button down,

he seemed to be searching for calm. So I have God on my side, and that's what really gives me peace. I'm not really shaking. If they come, I'll just, I have my backpack. I literally have my backpack. I have my Bible. I have some clothes. I have a few books.

And here we go. They don't have to even handcuff me if they want. That's right. A lot of people have, most people have a go bag. You have a go to jail bag. That's preparedness. Mark's playing it cool here. But remember, when Colombian authorities showed up at his door, he wasn't prepared.

He was in his boxers. His MMS wasn't even hidden in his home. It's odd because two of Mark's sons and his alleged co-conspirators were already locked up. They'd been arrested in America. They were going through the legal system. And despite Mark's bravado, for his sons in Florida, things were off to a rocky start. The day Jonathan and Jordan were arrested, they made their first appearance for a bond hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Amanda Arnold Sansone. Except they weren't in a courtroom.

The two showed up in tiny little screens on Zoom. They'd been charged with conspiring to defraud the United States and to deliver misbranded drugs. I've spent a lot of time in court as a reporter. After you're arrested, you come before a magistrate judge. You hear about the charges you're facing, usually share your plans to get an attorney, and the judge decides if you'll sit in jail or get out on bail.

A routine thing. Off the bat, it was clear that this was not going to be a routine bond hearing, and it probably wasn't going to be a routine case either. Almost immediately, Jonathan asked the judge if he could say just one thing. The court judge said, of course. He said, quote, we will be defending ourselves until the Lord Jesus Christ changes it, and he is our lawyer and our defender. He had something else to add about how he was in danger in the middle of a pandemic. Quote, I'm in here right now during this COVID, and I'm protecting myself with my sacrament. They did not let me bring my sacrament with me.

And now I could get sick and die in here right now. This is true. This is real. I don't have any sacrament with me. I can't take them. I don't know what to eat here. I eat very natural. All of my rights have been taken away.

It went on like this. Throughout the hearing, the judge really urged them to consider getting a lawyer. It's not even a joint decision, she said. They don't have to do it together. She even asked if they wanted to have a public defender's office available just on standby. They said, no. God is my attorney. The judge asked if there were any closing statements. Jonathan didn't argue his case. He simply had a question for the judge. Quote,

The judge responded, me legal advice. But right now, I win over a lot of rights in the Constitution. Your right to remain silent. Your right to have an attorney. So the Constitution permeates this whole process. This kind of back and forth would become standard in the case of the U.S. versus the Grenons. In fact, the Grenons spent more time questioning the fairness of the proceedings than they did actually building a coherent defense. Then the email campaign started. One morning in July 2020, Judge Kathleen Williams, the same judge Mark threatened to take out,

started receiving emails from different members of the Grennan family. The first came from the patriarch himself, Mark Grennan. The message is peppered with exclamation points and bolded passages. It says the doctor told Jonathan's wife that Jonathan's blood pressure is at a dangerous level and he might have a heart attack and die. Please, Mark writes, they're being affected physically, mentally, spiritually. Thirty minutes later, Jonathan's wife, Belgica Alcantara Grennan, writes to Williams herself.

She's pregnant, she says, and so afraid something will happen to him. She writes in her email, I know for sure if you can release him to his home, he would stay here. If you need him to continue this case, he would be available at any time. I sincerely ask you to help with all my heart. Three minutes later, Barbara Grennan, Mark's ex-wife,

writes with a similar plea, sent from her iPhone, Let Jordan and Jonathan out. Jonathan has high blood pressure and is in bad health. Please let him out before we lose him. None of it worked. The Grennans remained in jail. And in spring 2021, nearly a year after their arrest, Jonathan and Jordan pleaded not guilty and demanded a jury trial. Around that time, all four Grennans filed motions, asking the judge to dismiss the case outright. They called themselves vessels and said, quote,

no negotiation of contract was offered, no meeting of minds occurred, that they were, quote, unaware that corporate bylaws do even apply to God-fearing sons, mankind, not residing in a foreign federal district inhabiting our bodies, on Florida and Columbia, serving Christ Yahweh our Savior.

Federal prosecutors weren't impressed with the Grennan's efforts. Instead, they argued that the Grennan's claims to constitutional rights and religious freedoms were essentially smoke and mirrors. They were responsible for sickening thousands. Poison control centers had seen more than 16,000 cases involving chlorine dioxide poisoning since 2014, according to the American Association of Poison Control Centers. Prosecutors urged the judge to keep them in detention until their trial. There was no doubt in their minds that once released, they would resume selling their toxic cure. Two days later, the judge dismissed the request to toss the case.

Not just that. She said that given the bizarre contents of the motion, that perhaps the defendants weren't well. The prosecutors, the judge said, would need to decide whether or not they were fit. Fit to defend themselves. Whether they needed to be psychologically evaluated. The prosecutors declined. But later, the judge would ask for it anyway. That's how erratic their behavior in court had become. Meanwhile, Jonathan's wife had the baby, and he missed the birth. Let's go back to the morning of the raid in Colombia,

when Mark answered the door in his boxers. I want to go back to that moment because Mark tells the story differently. And those differences are telling. He says he was already awake, reading the Bible with his wife, when officers shoved an automatic rifle in his face. A SWAT team from Columbia smashed my door at 6 a.m. on the 10th of August when I had already given the U.S. Marshals my address of our home church there in Columbia. Because we were doing nothing wrong and I had no fear. And I basically was calm. I told them, listen, in Spanish, I'm not afraid of you.

I told you where I lived. Why are you doing this to me? We're a church. God's going to vindicate us. And every one of you are going to learn one day that you broke into an innocent man's home. We've done nothing. In his telling, he's unafraid. Mark stands up for himself and proclaims his innocence. And did you catch how he accuses authorities of breaking into his home? Yeah, in his telling, he doesn't answer the door. Mark knows how to rewrite the story so he is exactly who he wants to be. The victim. The persecuted churchgoer. The innocent man who's brave and unrepentant.

That's part of the reason we wanted to have Patty, my Bloomberg colleague, track down someone who was actually there on the morning of the raid. Here's Don Angel, criminal head of the local prosecutor's office, again. Don Angel and his team were about to knock on the doors of Joseph and Mark. They had everything they needed. A court order and an order from the Attorney General's office. Each person had a role. There was a goalkeeper who'd approach first and make sure the detainee couldn't make a phone call or flee. Agents came with mechanical tools and blunt instruments,

ready to break a lock or knock down the door if need be. It was 5.30 in the morning. The agents secured the site, made sure there weren't any old people or kids, and made sure no one inside was armed. As Don Angel says, the protocol is basically put everyone in the living room and tell the person, Joseph, that there's a legal proceeding by the prosecutor's office.

They read him his rights and told him he was under arrest. And that he should probably put on some clothes. The agents film it all. That's protocol two. The agents wear helmets with built-in cameras. That's how we know what happened. Another team went to Mark's store, where they found him in his boxers.

The agents did the same thing with Mark. Secured the house, read the arrest warrant out loud. Mark responded that he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. Outside, Joe was anxious. So was his wife, Belgica. The agents sat him down in a rocking chair outside to calm him.

Inside, the agents took stock of supplies. They didn't find any weapons. And they kept Joe and his dad separate. They didn't want them to communicate with each other. They were interviewed separately. And some of the police went inside their houses and started to set aside the MMS, or what they assumed were the chemicals they were using

for MMS, which they had inside their houses. Donán even says that inside Mark's house, there was a space set up almost as a storefront of sorts. He also mentioned there was a space set up as a recording studio, which is where we assume the Grenons would record their podcast. The agents got Mark and Joseph ready to go. This was right at the height of the pandemic, meaning Mark and Joseph got suited up in scrubs and masks

intended to keep them from transmitting the very disease that they were certain MMS killed. In photographs, Mark and Joseph look almost stoic, as men clad in bulletproof vests and helmets took them by the arms and led them into a car. Mark and Joseph were going to prison where they'd await extradition. After years of running from the law, Mark was trapped. His wife left alone in their house.

The MMS abandoned. The podcast studio empty. Mark was trapped. His wife, left alone in their house. The MMS, abandoned. The podcast studio, empty. His microphone had gone, the radio silent. Mark and Joseph were about to make a trip stateside for a family reunion. Usually, Bogota to Miami is about a four-hour flight. But for Mark and Joseph, that journey would take them almost two years. That's next.

Smokescreen Deadly Cure is an original production by Neon Hum Media, Sony Music Entertainment, and Bloomberg. It was written and produced by Carla Green, Kate Mishkin, and Jonathan Hirsch. Our associate producers are Navani Otero, Zoe Kulkin, and Anne Lim. Production assistants from Stacey Wong, Gilda DiCarli, and Magnus Henriksen. Editing by Jonathan Hirsch, Catherine St. Louis, and Maureen McMurray. Catherine St. Louis is our executive editor. Thank you. and Jeff Grocott. I'm Kristen B. 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.