The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - On The Fentanyl Frontlines: DEA Agent Exposes Why U.S. Government Is LOSING War On Drugs

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

In this gripping episode, Rafa Conde, a former DEA agent and narcotics officer pulls back the curtain on America's deadly drug epidemic from his experiences working on the frontlines — from Florida���s infamous pill mills to the explosive rise of fentanyl. You’ll hear shocking real-life stories about: -Undercover operations inside opioid clinics -How doctors fresh out of med school were lured with $500K to prescribe OxyContin -The DEA's fight against cartels and street-level drug floods -Why fentanyl overdoses are underreported — and why the crisis isn’t improving -Why states like Texas and Florida have harsher penalties than the federal government -The economics behind crack, meth, and MDMA in low-income communities -And whether the War on Drugs was ever meant to succeed... From pill hustlers to Big Pharma, from the streets to the federal courts — this episode dives deep into the systems behind America's addiction. Go Support Rafa! Book: https://a.co/d/hgndeay Website: https://www.manofwar.us/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/manofwarr/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: MANDO! Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get 20% off + free shipping with promo code MITCHELL at shopmando.com! #mandopod AVA! Get the Ava app, and use MY promo code CONNECT so they know you heard it from me, and get your first month with Ava for FREE. PrizePicks! Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/CONNECT and use code CONNECT and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Intro: Fentanyl Crisis & DEA Guest 01:41 Rafa's Task Force Experience 04:56 State vs. Federal Drug Laws 07:53 Pill Mills & OxyContin Boom 13:31 Inside Pill Mill Operations 19:15 From Pill Mills to Cartels 24:28 Fentanyl's Deadly Spread 28:13 This Episode Is Sponsored By MANDO! 30:27 Drug Trends: Opioids to Marijuana 35:39 Impact and Roots of Addiction 41:37 Debating the War on Drugs 46:08 Law Enforcement's Role and Limits 49:38 This Episode Is Sponsored By AVA and PrizePicks! 54:00 Current Drug Markets in Florida 01:00:00 MDMA, Black Market, and Trends 01:05:46 Bath Salts, Designer Drugs, & Trends 01:08:48 Drug Use Subcultures & Policy Reflections 01:13:40 Becoming a DEA Agent: Rafa's Story 01:16:42 On-the-Job Stories & Gritty Realities 01:25:46 Street Busts and Undercover Operations 01:31:01 Taking Down VA Hospital Trafficking 01:41:18 Targeting Big Dealers & Complex Cases 01:50:39 Cartels, Corruption, and Law Enforcement 02:05:29 DEA Tactics: Surveillance & Wires 02:13:01 Smuggling Routes & Maritime Interdiction 02:19:02 After the DEA: New Careers and the Book 02:25:24 Final Thoughts: Policing & Justice System Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Whatever your thing, it could be.

anything. Canva helps you make that thing a thing. Canva is a simple online tool thing. It's a way to design with our magic AI tool things. You can social media your thing, generate images or videos of your thing, make decks for presentations to show your thing. Whatever needs to be done for your thing, Canva can make it an even better and bigger thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Every day you would be responding to things. three, four calls on fentanyl. People dead. And you're talking about kids between the ages of 15, 16 years old to people between the

ages of 60 and 70. Somebody dying from it, somebody passing out from it, or basically treading the line between life and death. Rafa Kondi is a DEA agent based in South Florida. He's been on the front lines of the American opioid crisis since it first began in the 2000s with the explosion of oxycotton out of Florida's infamous pill mill pharmacies and, later, with the rise of the fentanyl epidemic. He's witnessed the worst of addiction.

Pockets of every major city in town that go largely unnoticed by the majority of Americans, but that are being torn apart by deadly drugs like meth and fentanyl imported by Mexican cartels. Rafa shares crazy stories about his years spent in the field and gives us an insider's look at the secrets of the DEA, how they operate, and how they go after targets. He also exposes a shockingly large amount of corruption, especially of U.S. mayors and city council people with money generated from drug trafficking. Finally, he attempts to answer my very basic question, one that I've been asking for many years now.

Is it time to end the war on drugs? You could get Rafa's best-selling book, The 21st Century Man, available on Amazon and in every major bookstore, as well as take his coaching courses, which you can find on his website. We'll put the link in the description of this episode. All right, you guys, a fascinating discussion about the state of drug trafficking, and drug addiction with someone on the right side of the law for a change. Rafa Kondi, right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. I was assigned to two task forces.

I was assigned to the multi-agency diversion task force, which is a federal and county task force. We had FBI, we had, you know, you name it, the DEA, you know, all different agencies, narcotics. That was President Obama initiated that task force. And we were the only one in the entire country to, exist under his command. And that was a very powerful experience because it was during a time where the pills, the, you know, the oxy pills and the hair, that was a huge problem, right? It took over higher than, it was a more powerful drug. Heroin was like third in line. Excuse me,

cocaine was third in line. It was oxy was number one, especially in South Florida. And so they built that task force. Then in that task force, a lot of the guys were assigned to DEA after that, after they completed that task force. Then we were assigned to DEA for a few years and we did mostly federal, you know, federal cases, federal level cases. But I will tell you, a lot of states, specifically Florida, is tougher on drug dealers than the federal system in many aspects. Texas is like that too, probably. So. Like, it's better in Texas to get caught with a couple hundred pounds of weed, at least back

then, than it was to get caught with three pounds of weed. Because feds, feds won't touch that, man. That lightweight shit, like, you know, 50 pounds or even 100 pounds, nowadays, they won't even touch that. No, what I mean? Like, if you got caught in 2005 with 200 pounds of weed in Texas, you know, assuming you didn't have, like, priors or super high points, you do, like, you do, like, you. like three years in a camp, in a federal camp.

You get caught with five pounds of weed in 2005 of Texas, you're probably going to do five years in a really disgusting, horrible Texas prison, Texas state prison. That's what I mean. So looking at it through a lens of a drug dealer, like Florida is probably the same way. Yeah, it's very close.

I mean, it's the whole world of drugs and narcotics when it comes to, I mean, most of my career, that's basically what it was. Working street level, mid-level, and then you go to upper level. And the system is very different. You think that higher level is going to give you higher charges. Not always that, it's not always like that. It's kind of screwed up.

Usually the mid-level is where you get punched in the face. Why is that? Tell us why. Because you can cross-designate them with state charges, and they'll divvy. up, they'll go, we'll hit you with some federally and we'll hit you with some state charges. All right. So they'll divvy them up.

So you'll get state and federal charges. And that sucks. That's like not a good, good thing. When they go too high, federal government just wants to take it. Okay. And usually from there, depending on, you know, your prior history and so on, then it's a whole different world. Well, usually at the highest levels, everybody is cooperating.

And so the more, the higher you are in the drug game, the more information you're going to have and the more leverage you're going to have to get out. Right. Your sentence, if you cooperate, if you play the game, it's going to be minimal in comparison to the states. They don't even give a shit about that. You know, I know our prosecutor, he said, I don't care about cooperation. I don't care. You're going to go do the time. You know, and it's, you know, and it's hard time.

It's not where, well, you know, you've been waiting around for trial for two years or we're going to give you time, you know, we call it bonus time. We're not going to do that. You're going to start from the moment that you go in and you are, you know, that you're found guilty. And that's a terrible thing because for the most part, you had guys waiting three years to go to trial. Yeah. In some cases. Well, but you still, it's illegal to not give them time served, no? No, time served is different. Okay, that's a lot of time. In our state, we called bonus time, which means that if you were to wait, you know, like a year, they'll give you like three weeks or five weeks to extra, you know, reduce your sentence by that. Well, time served, yeah, that's across all states. Right.

Oh, I see. So if you're fighting your case and you can't bail out and you're in there for three years, which I've seen with my own two eyes being in the system. Cats in there are fighting, especially murder cases. Most cats don't have money to bail out. So you're in there for three, four years. You might even beat it. But then you're still, we're just locked up for four years.

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All right, back to the episode. Yeah, no, I mean, it's not a good place to be. Florida is probably one of the, you know, one of the toughest when it comes to that. And when it came to the pill mill epidemic, they were the number, they were, they were, because our state got hit by far the hardest. Of course.

But how did you guys, you know, those pill mills were legal in many cases? Oh, man, I could tell you stories. I went undercover for, I made one of the largest cases, you know, TangleVax operation. You can look it up on YouTube and you'll see that. I mean, we arrested. We did a lot of stuff, man. But how did you guys discern between the clinics that were running? We would go in like this. This is what would happen. I would go undercover. that would put me in there or one of our agents in the task force. And what would happen is that they would go and talk to the doctor inside this clinic.

And keep in mind, this clinic had 500 people in the lobby waiting. When you pulled in, this is great, when you pulled in, the parking lot was completely full. So some of these clinics, they would have, you know how for events, they have these little transportation caddies. they would have people park like event parking, like two or three parking lots away. So they would get, literally, they would get this transport vehicle to take people in,

and they would be waiting in line. Outside, the lines would be waiting hundreds of people outside. So anyway, we would go agents undercover, and then we would basically ask a doctor, hey, you know, I need some pills. Doctor would go, well, let me take a look at you. And you would say, well, my shoulder hurts a little bit or my back hurts a little bit

and doctor will touch you here and there okay, okay, fine, boom, done, prescription done. So the idea was that they would hire a lot of younger doctors that would get, and I remember interviewing them for so long, I mean sitting on a table across from them and saying, what happened after we arrested them,

took their Ferraris, took everything in search warrants? I would say, what happened what happened to you? He goes, well, I came out of medical school. They approached me. They said, here, I'm going to give you half a million up front. And for the rest, you know, for the next year, I'm going to give you another half a million as long as you do this.

You just crank out, crank out. Which is saying yes to everybody, basically. Crank out prescriptions. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And a lot of these had internal pharmacies. So it was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, they would be racking. I don't even know. thousands and thousands of pills every single day.

No, it's like a joke when you describe it that way. It's like the closest thing I think we had to that in America was like the crack lines in any major city in the 80s where like around the block. Yeah. It looked like a welfare line. That's right. People lying up for red tops, blue tops. You know, that's that was Florida's equivalent. It's crazy.

Now, who were many of these people? I mean, we've had a few of these guys talk to them on the show. White guys, kind of like good old boy, Florida guys that are just entrepreneurial and crooked. You know, but Florida, there's not really a lot of qualms when it comes to like making money unethically. Like nobody, nobody bats and I. So, I mean, it's the fraud capital. It's the, you know, it was the Oxy, ground zero for the Oxy crisis, you know, tons of scams. It's just, I don't know.

that place just like it's in the water. So who were a lot of these, would you just call them drug dealers or were they business people who like went crooked as time went on? That's a good question. One of the things being an undercover agent and having an opportunity to interview these people

and remember most of the time you're masked up, right? I mean, they don't see you, but you're asking these questions. And initially, yeah, he's a bad guy. He went and did this in a dirty manner. But when you get their story, like some of it makes sense, okay, why they would go out there and do something like this. Do I say that they're all bad people?

No, I don't think so. I think maybe they did things in a way that they got way too greedy. They wanted to make money way too fast. And, you know, they went down the wrong pipe. on the flip side, there are some that were just there to do it the wrong way from the very start. Okay. But, I mean, think about it. I mean, you're sitting there.

You just got out of, you know, medical school and you have, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars in student debt. You know, you're married, have a child. And someone comes to you and says, I'll wipe out your debt, give you 500K right up front. You know, I mean, it's hard to. And that's who these guys, these medical, these clinic, medical clinic, these opioid clinic operators would target was like doctors right out of medical school. Without a doubt. You know, that's exactly what they would do. They would go hunt them down.

How many clinics were there at like the height of this boom in the 2000s? Hundreds, hundreds, maybe even thousands. And every corner they would sprout one here, one there, one here, one there. And it got to the point because you have to remember that there were selling pills here, but the price point here, when I say here, I'm talking South Florida, the price point was anywhere between $7 and $10 a pill. Okay. The street price was about 1718.

However, most people that came down were from very far away states, specifically Kentucky. Kentucky, you would find Kentucky licensed. plate everywhere. I would say half the cars in these parking lots were from Kentucky. And people, well, they're going to ask me why, right? Well, in Kentucky, for whatever reason, the price of one pill was anywhere between $80 and $100, one pill. And these guys, what they would do, they would swing and they would go doctor shopping. They'll go from this clinic, this clinic, this clinic, this clinic. By the time you know it, they have $10,000 pills, almost a million dollars worth of product going back home. And that's one one one trip around. They'll be back next week.

Insane. So they would hire, you know, what happened is drug dealers would just hire them, say, hey, do your rounds. Pay, I don't know, a couple grand for almost a million dollars worth of product. Holy shit. Yeah. So it was mostly out of town drug dealers descending on Florida. Is that because the laws were stricter? They must be, right? In terms of getting opioids, getting oxycont in states further north? Yeah, there were stricter, and it was just Florida was so loose at that time, you know, where it was so difficult to really track, you know,

doctors. It was difficult to track the pills where they were going to. It was almost impossible. But, you know, a new system eventually was put in place. Everybody started all over, and it was just, you know, things are better now. But back then, it was a free-for- So did that give any benefit to the crackdown on oxycotton and these clinics, the looseness of these pill clinics, did that give any advantage to Mexican drug cartels at all?

Mexican drug cartels were, believe it or not, starting to dabble in the pill market. You see, the pill market, a lot of people, you know, big cocaine, very sexy, right? They, you know, they look at it from a point of view a kilo. You know, sometimes, I mean, you would see fluctuations in kilos from, you know, 12, 15,000 street price to 25, 30,000, you know. And but when pills started to hit the market, it's almost like every other drug took like a step back. They weren't as popular. Everything that everybody wanted. I mean, they wanted the heroin, that heroin fix.

and it just, it became more than an epidemic. It became just an easier way for drug dealers to make money, to make bank faster than cocaine, faster than marijuana. And even we were mixed, we were also doing cases on MDMA, you know, ecstasy and things like that. But pills were taken over. I realize that. But making them illegal or very hard.

to get. So just take meth for a second. There used to be biker dope when you could just go by as much of Fedrin over the counter as you wanted, right? Just like kind of the way that you could with OxyContin in Florida. Once they crack down on that, now you basically, they gave the whole market in doing that, that government policy, they effectively handed Mexican drug cartels a monopoly on crystal meth, which they now completely control. completely so was did you see any of that happen with uh opioids like oxy cotton or or not i don't know i'm just curious it wasn't like how it is now where they have a staple on that they started dabbling in that there was they wanted to get into that market that market was so closed off though where um

there wasn't the supply you know with cocaine and and even with, you know, MDMA and crystal, the supply is almost unlimited, right? And the supply was so, so hard. You know, these Mexican cartels, they want quantity. You know, they would probably be looking at, you know, 100,000, 200,000 pills. And that wasn't the game. So you couldn't even do that, because we had a guy on here who used to bring pills back from Tijuana, and he would take them to Indiana, which, you know, obviously like state ravaged by OxyContin. Yeah. But you don't think the cartels could do that to scale the way that they could with fentanyl, for example?

No, that was a fact. They could. They tried. They tried. It was just, no, it wasn't, there wasn't enough putting out. Production capacity. Right. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. There wasn't enough. Okay. Even though ideally when, you know, big pharma would have loved to back that. Right. Right. Right. I mean, that was the thing.

But the, can you imagine? Oh, my goodness. Like, right? Like big pharma backing the cartel. Well, that's what's super interesting is what we realized about that. The Purdue pharma, farmers of the world wanted this crackdown on these pill mills because they wanted to monopolize the market. That's right.

Just like the cartels want the government in America to crack down on drugs. So they can monopolize it. But just something happened where I don't know what it was specifically, but that just kind of fell out of favor with opioid users. Like I think, correct me if I'm wrong. So what year did you see the opioid epidemic, not the opioid epidemic, the oxycotton phenomena start to taper off? Right around 2015, 2016, you started seeing that's when the fentanyl, boom starts to take off. That's right. So do you think that that proceeded?

Do you think the Oxycontin epidemic of the mid-2000s gave rise to this new era of fentanyl users? Without a doubt. I mean, it was, oh, man, the stories that I can tell you about fentanyl, yes. I mean, it gave, it opened it up. The punishment by the state and then finally the feds, was so harsh on pills. They were doing such a hard crackdown that people started to say,

you know what, I'm just not, I'm not even going to go that way. You know, so you started to see these pharmaceutical companies pump out the product, but doctors now were way too shy, way to shy to start writing prescriptions. Because they, you know, once they saw a bunch of them going to jail,

and it was stacks and stacks of these losing their lives, they said, you know what, we're going to chill. So that definitely, right about 2014-15, we saw the downscale there. And then all of a sudden, boom, fentanyl comes into the line. Because now you have all these addicts. You might not have doctors writing scripts, but you have a bunch of opioid addicts. Yeah, they're cross-lacing, you know, fentanyl with everything. Whatever you can imagine.

Man, did you, so you were working up until a couple of years ago when you retired. Did you see, talk about fentanyl in Florida. Is there, I mean, I'm sure it's all over the place there now, but did that, was that one of the ground zero states for fentanyl or did it take a while to get over there? Yeah, it was one of the ground zero states. So I worked for both a city of Riviera Beach, considered one of the most violent cities. That's where crack cocaine, the lineage of crack cocaine started in the entire country. then you go to West Palm Beach, which is the next door neighbor in a beautiful city,

but a lot of violence and a lot of drugs. And when I was tapering off my career the last few years, you know, I was a field training officer. And boy, you know, I can't tell you stories right now that. I mean, fentanyl was every day you would be responding to three, four calls on fentanyl people dead and Narcan okay which is you know we used to call it you know the what is it called rising from the dead you know drug you know boom hitting people with Narcan and you're talking about kids between the ages of 15 16 years old to people between the ages of 60

and 70 you know and it's fentanyol was just an everyday thing somebody dying from me it, somebody, you know, passing out from it or basically treading the line between life and death. Yeah. And now you've seen overdoses from fentanyl curtailing kind of sharply. I think it was like last year overdoses deaths were down like 15%. Do you think that's because of a shrinking of supply, or do you think that's because people are getting used to it, like the people are getting a tolerance for it? I think that's neither of those answers is correct.

I think reporting is a big deal. Departments have changed their reporting ways. All right. They used to be UCR reporting. Now there's different ways to report these. So most of the time, look, I still am in contact with a lot of guys that are working the B, working the street, working narcotics.

I mean, it's not. any better than it was a few years ago. There's still the same waves of people, you know, dying. And however, I think the way that some of these things are reported, sometimes the numbers are skewed. Yeah, certainly. It's getting harder to believe government statistics. You know, I read that fentanyl seizures were up 40% since Trump took over. Now, who knows, a lot of that is probably the cartels simply giving it.

to the Border Patrol. We all know that they call up and they say, hey, there's a load coming through for you guys and they can report it as a bust. So you, I mean, could it be anything else, though? You don't see demand for it waning at all because of how deadly it is. Man, I don't see it.

Fentanyl's rather, you know, it's in numbers out there. It's still in numbers. And I just don't see anyone being able to put enough of a plug in that to, you know, make it a 15% lower, you know, that's 15% to drastic number. You tell me three to five percent, I'll be a little bit more in line and say, yeah, but I'm going to call BS on that and say, I believe that it has to do with a lot of the way that these departments report and even hospitals report. Fair enough.

Fair enough. What would be the motivation for them to underreport, fentany all overdoses. Well, I mean, I mean, we talk about big pharma, right? I mean, there's connections all the way across the board, even from police departments. I mean, the idea is that they don't want people in their city, I mean, right, dying from overdoses. I mean, that just looks horrible for the city. You know, you sit in front of city commissions. Like, you had 37 overdoses last month, who the hell is going to want to buy in your city? You know, who the hell's going to want to open up up a business in your city? It just doesn't sound good, right? Also, from a perspective,

you know, when you talk about hospitals, I mean, you know, these pharmaceutical companies are out there. You know, they govern a lot of what these hospitals take in. Right. So, you know, overdose fentanyl from here, fentanyl from there. It's just not a good look no matter how you look. From whatever perspective that you're looking at it, it's not a good look, right? And fentanyl, I mean, when you really look at it, what it's made to do, I mean, a lot of people, you know, say, well, automatically it's some type of horse or even elephant tranquilizer.

And when you study it in turn. But the reality is that the way fentanyl right now is being sold on the street is not fentanyl like from the hospital. Right. Okay. Fentanyl's been around for a long time as a pain. 100%. A lot of the cancer patients take it, you know. Yep.

So, yeah, it's just, it's not, man. New York Times ran this big article. They're having trouble making good fentanyl down in Mexico right now. So if you go to Kulia Khan, well, not Kulia Khan, that's there in war, but, you know, Sinaloa, Durango, all these different independent fentanyl cooks, it's like, they're like evil scientists. They're experimenting with batches. They take animals and they give them, you know, a hit of a fentanyl batch.

And if it dies right away, that's a good batch. Yeah, so it's like, if you go to Kulia Khan, they say, there's stores, little tiendas everywhere that are selling little bunny rabbits, sweet little bunny rabbits all over the place because that's where these cooks go to get their, their experimentees. So I think they're maybe having a hard time with like supply chain from China getting the precursors. So I don't know. I mean, it's tricky. Nobody really has a full answer to it. But yeah, certainly out on the streets, it doesn't seem, like even in Austin,

you go a mile up the road to the freeway overpass. I mean, the demand certainly seems to be there, you know, whether the potency is all that or not, I don't know. The best way to find out is you asked the fire department, you know, how many calls are you responding to? See what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, you know, I guarantee if you walk over to your nearest fire department, they're going to say, yeah, none of this has changed. It's the same as always been.

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And please support our show by telling them that we sent you. Mando's got you covered. Protect your pits and smell great doing it. Do you think working 18 years in drug undercover, DEA, drug interdiction, what comes first? The demand or the drug? Because we always hear like, well, drug dealing, it's a victimless crime or it's, even if it's not victimless, it comes from demand. But perhaps if you introduce, like Mexican cartels introduced. fentanyl to the streets.

Yes. So what do you think, what do you think it is more of? Like if somebody, if dealers bring fentanyl to the U.S. and to start giving out tasters in places like downtown L.A. and, you know, Palm Beach and, you know, Kensington and Philadelphia, like, do you think that actually gets, gets, creates a whole epidemic around the country? Is that possible? Yeah.

No doubt. I mean, it's all about one person taking it and then saying, wow, what a great experience, especially when it comes from junkies on the street. They are the biggest, your biggest source of marketing something. It comes from the junkies, right? From a lot of the homeless people. And then it trends. The next wave is obviously, you know, teenagers and, you know, the club culture and, you know, nowadays the electronics scene, right? but for the most part if you can man if I'm the cartel and I want to spread a drug that's what I do

put it in batches out on the street and see how people react to it and with a moment that we start getting good feedback from this batch I am modeling all my batches like that and I'll spread like wildfire yeah yeah of course we've known that forever like even with traditional heroin like when somebody odes that's good marketing for a drug dealer because then all the junkies are going to there. However, opioid addiction has been around, you know, at least since the start of the drug war in like the 1920s or 30s. People have always, there's just, just how people have a predilection to alcohol addiction or stimulants with cocaine and speed and stuff. There's always been this, yeah, there's always been this segment of society that's just liked.

opioids need opioids sometimes for medical reasons or just get hooked on them quick so in that sense the cartel is just responding to a demand but they're now responding to it by you know giving out the next evolution of of an opioid that's you know tearing apart yeah uh lower class people uh or or you know people on the margins in America. So Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the first big weekend of summer, total wine and more is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzers for the cooler.

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But the reality, especially when it came to Oxy, right? When the opioids, you know, when they were out there strong in 2010, 2012, the it was it was more about just baselining meaning that for that person that was so addicted to that drug for them just to be normal to have a conversation like this they would need to be two or three pills in they would net i mean if they did not have that in their system they would be completely erratic so it was just maintaining so most of the time when it got to the highest of levels it wasn't people trying to buying these pills, right? It was more people just maintaining, right? That's the difference when, you know, you asked me about a batch, a little bit ago. But to answer your question here, where it comes, you know, when it comes down to opiates and specifically in the market that we have now, I don't know if opiates right now is the go-to drug for a lot of people.

Okay. I think that marijuana, believe it or not, has made a huge turn, and it's coming back stronger than ever. What was that mean in the black market? In the black market. Did it ever go anywhere, though? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It faded away for a while, not nearly as power. powerful and as, I mean, man, there was a time where marijuana was in the front of everything, right? And then when these pills started to come in. But marijuana has always been the most used drug in America and probably the world. Right. No, I'm talking about a recreational drug, okay? Marijuana, the reason why marijuana is the most used drug, it's not because it is the most recreationally used drug, is because administered in so many other levels of medicine, right? So they account for that.

You know, one of the things at DA, and they still haven't taken it off as one of their schedules, which I think eventually they will, is there's a lot of medicinal properties that are counted in the use of marijuana in their statistics. So recreational drugs in comparison, especially to MDMA when MDMA was, oh man, when these MDMA pills were hard in the 2007, 2008 scene.

That was a number one recreational drug coming straight from China here. Marijuana has always had a lot of users overall, and it'll always be the largest used drug, but not recreationally. There's two, you know, one of them is from the medicine side, and they're going to put that along with the users. So in Florida, I don't know how it is here, but you get a card, you get a medicine card, right? What is it? Marijuana medicinal card, okay,

where you can go and you can buy your marijuana, and you know, you can buy, I don't even know how much personal use is. There's over, last that I heard, there's over three and a half million people just in our side of the county that are using marijuana. So those statistics go into the quote unquote use of marijuana. So marijuana is always going to be, unless they find some medicinal purposes for MDMA, which they have technically a little bit, okay?

And fentanyl, not nearly as much. So marijuana has all these properties and it's always going to be the leading drug of choice for doctors and people using it. It's, but even before it had any medicinal legitimate or in the eyes of the law, any legitimate medicinal purposes, it was still the most used drug. It's only medicinal because that's like the law. That has nothing to do with anything. It's always been and always will be the most used drug because it's the best high. It doesn't kill you.

I would love to do opioids. Heroin seems awesome. I don't do it because it's going to destroy my life. marijuana, middle class people can engage with it the most. That's the reason. So marijuana, you're right. And I'm arriving at a point that I'm trying to figure out or that I'm, I guess I'm trying to challenge you on is that you will addiction is complicated and it comes from so many different societal factors. And a lot of that is what leads people down the road to using life destroying drugs. cartel or criminal groups that introduce it to the market are just responding to a demand that has been created by government making drugs illegal. That's my argument. That's... But I wouldn't, I would agree with you there. I don't think there's anything that we disagree on that from that point of view. Oh, okay. So do you think, so this is great then, do you... They are responding to a

demand and that's, you know, it's part of part of the game. So then I guess, and I think people at the DEA understand that. I think you talk to any DEA agent. They're like, yeah, the war on drugs has never worked, won't work, but we're in it because it's our business. So if you made drugs, like, is it possible to, when are we going to, like, move on from this war on drugs that's been going on? Like, it feels like it's like, we're doing this again.

like we're cracking down on drugs again? What is this 1981 with Ronald Reagan? Like, you know what I mean? See, I see it from where you're coming from. Okay. And I think that sometimes it's a little bit different being on the other side of the house. Okay. Understanding that when I took, when I was assigned to the task force, you know,

what we saw was more than anything, that really hit home with me was the younger generation, you know, dying and dying and dying. I mean, we were having so many deaths of kids between the ages of like 15 and 18 years old. So that that screwed me up, right? That was like, you know what, man, this needs to stop. Okay. Now, the other side of the house is, look, we understood that you're going to have, you know, these cartels, they're going to come in and these larger organizations, because it's not just the cartels.

You have the triads, yakuza, you have mafia, different staples of mafia all over the world, right? And of course, you have the cartels. They're going to go out there and they're going to move their product. They're going to respond to a demand. And that's what they're going to do. The way that I look at law enforcement is curtailing some of that. Okay.

And when I say curtailing some of that is, hope you're hoping that it doesn't hit the streets and does what these oxycodone pills do start taking all these lives from from a perspective of high level okay you're talking about guys that are moving products and in the millions and millions of hundreds of millions of dollars yeah okay you know if if we didn't have that if we didn't have that stoppage or at least teams, okay, that would curtail that. First of all, let me say this very clear. Drug dealers would lose a lot of money

because drugs would be a lot easier to get. People would have no, there's no recourse to it. So the street market price of the drug would go to nowhere, right? Supply and demand. Like it has with marijuana, more or less? Yeah, because it's such a, you know, such an overwhelming amount of it that is just, like everybody is growing it.

I mean, a lot of states, it's legal, you know. So, yeah, I think the supply and demand, I mean, if you imagine right now cocaine being okay in every state, that kilo is going to be worth two grand in two or three thousand in a year. Yeah, some guy, a gentleman we just had on the show, Luis Navia, he was, he worked for the Medelline, different groups within the Medellin cartel for years. He was a huge cocaine smuggler. He made an interesting suggestion. He said, what if we grew coca leaf in labs, like in greenhouses, government controlled greenhouses in the United States? And yeah, basically controlled the whole production line down to, you know, distributing cocaine, the final products in clinics.

you would tank the price and there'd be no, there'd be no incentive for producers in Colombia. I mean, there might be some, right? Just like, you know, there's always bad actors, but I think you would cut out the illegal trade by like an overwhelming percentage. I mean, I think that would have a huge impact in illegal trade. However, to play devil's advocate,

you guys cut down on the pain clinics, Like the government was essentially doing a small experiment by allowing these pain clinics to operate, right? The state of Florida. Like, that's what happened. These guys, criminals basically took advantage of these lax laws around pill mills. And that created a huge epidemic. So it could go the other way. Like, what could have been done differently, I guess, with pill mills?

People that legitimately need. Sure. you know, an opioid, unfortunately. I don't know. I'm skeptical that you even, that those have any value. But just say that they do. Say that they like, there are some people who are injured or hurt who have illnesses or pain from, you know, no fault of their own.

You know, can the government, can we trust them? Can we trust our government? Our completely useless government to administer that to them, things getting out of hand. It's so hard. That's hard to say. You know, I mean, it's so hard. You asked me, how can we, you know, how could we have done better to prevent that

before it even got started, being a little bit proactive? Well, I think first and foremost that these clinics that were just being able to pop up here and there with absolutely, you know, no at all, no guidance, regulation or they just opened up anywhere. And it was very little. So I think we could have made it a little bit more difficult. Okay. I think also we could have made it

where we would have a little bit of a background checks on who actually opened up these clinics. A lot of them were people that were, you know, past criminal histories. And, you know, not to say they can't open something, but you would want to make sure that we kind of draw down on that and see, hey, how's that clinic doing, having a little bit more focus on those clinics. But overall, I mean, it's hard.

I mean, it is a hard, look, from a law enforcement perspective, we're not going to stop drug trafficking in the United States. It's just not going to happen, okay? It's not going to happen. But the best thing that we can do, as far as anybody working in a narcotics front, is to curtail. And hopefully you make enough impact.

that you're not letting it flood neighborhoods and streets. And, you know, those users are outside those boundaries. See, when you start bringing them in to, you know, places like businesses and downtowns and areas that are, you know, families go to and that's the problem. If you're able to clear that, okay, this is for, a boots on ground perspective, right? You're able to clear that.

You know, you're okay. Like, I don't think it's going to be such a dynamic problem. Okay. But the more it saturates and the more that it, unfortunately, the more that we see the drug cartels come in and start distributing these drugs here and there, look at Miami. I mean, just, I don't know, have you ever been?

I mean, you were just there, right? Yeah, I love Miami. You know, it's a born and raised there. I love Miami. Man, okay, I mean, you can go in any corner and get whatever drug you want, like in no time. And they have narcotics teams there. They have everything there. It doesn't matter.

You're not going to be able to stop it. But you can't clean it up a little. It didn't affect me at all. I mean, all I see is cities getting nicer, for the most part, rich cities. Now, the cities like, I don't know, places I've never been, Knoxville, Tennessee. downtowns are probably forgotten and getting shittier. You know, the Midwest, the flyover states, yes, are probably crumbling. But I don't think that comes from fentanyl.

I think that comes from problems that we've been dealing with since the 70s, outsourcing, the diminishment of the middle class, all these populist policies that every politician runs on. I don't think the drugs come first. I think the misery comes first. And then the drugs come in. come in. You know, Miami's a gorgeous city. So who cares if there's drugs everywhere?

Let me push back a little bit here. Okay, cool. Yes, I agree with you. That misery, number one. Okay, we're going to agree on that. But what happens is this, drugs are a very close second because what happens is these drugs

cause crimes all over the place. You're talking about burglaries. At a moment that we see a saturation in a specific area, Right. Okay, we already know that burglaries are going to happen within that sector. We've seen, hey, we've had 15 cocaine busts in this sector. This is where they're selling it. This is where we've seen it go to. They shifted from point A in the city to point B. And all of a sudden you start seeing break-ins. Why? Because, you know, obviously the lower society, the lower socioeconomic.

That's how they get money. and then the crack heads and that's what they're going to do. They're going to go out there and start burglarizing homes. People are going to get hurt from it. Right. And so it does cause that wave in criminal areas, okay? Yeah, I believe. You know, and in these criminal areas.

So it's, yes, misery, okay, but the drugs do make a huge impact. If you saturated into an area, chances are that crimes are going to increase. For sure, for sure. Okay. So, and generally, you know, they're not. nobody's Mexican cartels, correct me if I'm wrong, because Miami's your city, they're not dumping a kilo of fentanyl on some stash house and coconut grove. Nobody is using those drugs.

These, the worst drugs are going already to the worst neighborhoods. And that's just, that compounds the problem for working class people who live there. Have you ever felt like you're being punished for mistakes you made years ago? That's what bad credit can feel like. But there's finally a way. out. Let me tell you about Ava. If you watch my show, you know that I've been working with Ava for some time. I cannot recommend them enough. Ava is a credit building app that makes it so easy to improve your credit fast so you can get better rates on loans, pay off debt faster, and keep more

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Prize Picks. It's good to be right. Okay, so let's talk about Florida. Let's talk about, we'll start with cocaine, we'll start with Miami, and we'll work from there. What is the cocaine trade like now in Florida and in the United States? Well, I retired a few years ago. I left and I hung my badge. And until that time, what you can see, cocaine was still tracking.

It was still very, very prominent drug. in the years that I was specifically assigned to Reverebeach Police Department, crack was the leading drug out there. I mean, there was nothing like it. Crack is back is what you're saying? Yeah, so I don't think crack ever left. Okay, I think crack, you don't see it as often in your more affluent cities, but when it comes to the lower socioeconomic areas of most cities,

crack is king. I mean, you're talking about cheap, I mean, where else can you go and spend eight, 10 bucks to get a, you know, to get a fix, you know, that'll last you, you know, a couple hours. Very, very, very, you know, I mean, it's a very rare, you know, you pop a pill, okay, it's still going to cost you more. So when it comes, even some places,

I remember, like, five or seven dollars for like a little rock. Mm-hmm. Okay. And so it's still there. I mean, especially the drug dealers that go out there and start cooking, you know, the cookies and they still, that's still in areas and it's still out there. I assume that's a black driven trade. It is a black driven trade, yes, but it is not only, okay, in black neighborhoods. We've seen them also in lower socioeconomic, where you would think. that, you know, other drugs like pills or even meth, okay, were predominant.

Right. Crack is still there. I mean, it's easy to cook. It's, crack is just easy. You know, you're talking about a cookie that you can literally do. You mix it up a little, and you can do it in a very short period of time and sell it for 30 times which you invested in it. Yeah, and you can put your own mix on it.

if you're a drug dealer, whereas with Crystal Meth, all of it's already coming pre-packaged from Mexico. So you have a little bit more wiggle room when you get a package of cocaine and you can bust it down and cook it up. Do you think that crack is still more prominent or cocaine is more prominent than Crystal Meth? Or do you think Crystal Meth's taken over

amongst the working class as far as stimulants go? It's coming. It's coming. over the last few years right before I hung my badge and law enforcement, I, I start, we started to see that spike again of meth. And, you know, guys that I was speaking to, meth was coming. I don't know if it's going to overtake cocaine, but in my opinion, damn close. As far, especially as far as like ghetto or working class people go.

That's right. Because meth gets you higher for longer. I think for the same price. Like, okay, you know, what is like, what are the economics of crystal meth versus like crack? How much does it cost? Depends, depends on what size of rock for crack, for example. If, you know, the rock, you know, if it's a $20 rock or a $30 rock, that's going to boost you up for a couple hours. Okay.

Yeah. And, you know, if you're buying meth, you know, depending on what, you know, how much of it you're actually taking, it can be two hours and they're somewhere in the same ballpark as far as, you know, $20 to $50 on an average. So mathematically as far as how much money you spend on one or another, they're similar, okay? But they're different highs, though. Okay. There are different highs.

You know, crack cocaine is a much more in-your-face kind of high. it just kind of takes you over, womp, right? Meth is much more of a slower, okay? And it kind of peaks you out and then brings you down. Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I was locked up with a lot of Mexican guys who are like, you know, this is on the West Coast.

It's different, but they're like, oh, yeah, meth, that's what we push most. Mass gente consume. Yeah. Wow. That's wild. Yeah. So, you know. You know, you have to remember.

though. Because if you're a truck driver, like, it's hard to smoke crack if you're going to wig out. But if you get this like slow spike and then high and then, you know, a relatively gentle come down, you know, that's probably what you're going to choose. Yeah. I agree. I mean, I think that. And it's going to be predominantly, meth is not strong in the black culture. No.

It's just not strong there. So, you know, they're going to be... Those are like black skateboarders. You don't see a lot of black guys smoke and meth. But you're like, when you do, you're like, oh, that's cool. You're like, for a hell. You know, I think the, you know, for the most part, though, I mean, predominantly, you know, black drugs are marijuana, of course, number one. And then you have, you know, crack cocaine.

And I worked and, you know, half of my career was working in an African-American community. So that's, but meth very, very little. You know, that's more towards, you know, the whites. That's more towards the Latins. Yeah. That's where you start seeing that fade away. That's right. You mentioned MDMA.

That's an interesting one. Can you, is that something that, like, law enforcement actively goes after on, like, a high level? Is there even, like, a trade, like a really hierarchical trade? in MDMA? Yeah. Most of, a lot of the ecstasy, MDMA,

came through, came to this country, through China or through Canada borders. Okay. Yeah. And so, you know, we would see batches, you know,

sometimes, man, I've made seizures of thousands of these pills, you know. The problem with the MDMA, while not as strong, initially not as strong as oxy in those, but then they started getting worse and worse and they were mixing them with fentanyl. They were mixing them with all sorts of who knows what.

Some of these times where you would test these drugs and you would send them to the lab, you would get back to lab readout. It's like, what in God's name is in these drugs? This can just kill anybody. So, you know, we worked, you know, some undercover Miami festivals. You know, we worked some of those festivals

where also some other festivals like BET had some festivals in our city. Man, and some of these pills that you would find, you know, you would try to test them and they just, you don't even know what's in there. So it's scary. Yeah. And but China was bringing them in, man, by the but load.

I mean, they were bringing them in big time. Like how? like through ports of entry in the United States, or would it go through into Vancouver, Canada, and then get mixed into the, you know, made into Mali or pills and then brought into the U.S.? Like how does China move MDMA into America? We saw a wave of cruise ships bringing them in.

Okay, we saw a wave of cruise ships that were coming from that area coming into ports to your typical trucks, boats, You know, and how other ways. I never, I was never involved in the MDMA world that deeply, but we saw them come from, and we worked a case out of China. We were trying to see where we could connect with the producer of this. But man, they are like the main, or they were the main supplier. Wow.

Wow, that's fucking crazy, man. They really are the main supplier and everything. We had numbers that were like 30 cents on an average to make a pill. And they were selling them here for anywhere between like seven and ten bucks. And they sell them by the hundreds of thousands. What about the, you say marijuana in the black market is coming back in a big way. I mean, yeah, I didn't even know it went anywhere in terms of the black market. But yeah, what about do you, where you see that?

specifically those big black market who are the big black market players and what about like Florida for example how does that how is that making an impact on the illegal drug trade in Florida well the it's not that the it went anywhere is I think that what happened is you saw slow down at some points where you know the some of the the especially and with the African Americans, the low socioeconomic class, were trying to shift. And believe it or not, MDMA was a big thing. Okay. In that culture throughout a time frame. And we would find more of that. There came a point where we were finding more MDMA than we were marijuana and traffic stops and so on. It's not, maybe I would say, I didn't say it correct. Not that it went away,

but there was something else that was more prevalent. Oh, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Whatever the hottest rapper is, I'm going to sound like an old white dad right now, but whatever like future or, you know, young GZ come out with like a hit song about a drug, it really makes a huge impact on like the subculture.

Yeah, I agree. And like that's fucking crazy, you know. I agree. I mean, you'll go back to the bath salts or, you know, those. The bath salt phenomenon of 2013. Johnny, I could tell you freaking stories of people running around the streets. We had training specifically how to take these people down in groups of five, seven, because they were running around.

Like you would think they're what, I mean, like exorcist like kind of shit like that, you know? What are bath salts? I mean, everybody, that's like a joke now when we talk about Florida. That's like a punchline. what actually are bath salts? It's chemicals, man, that are mixed. We don't even know. We call them bath salts more.

They're more of a generic type of drug, but it's a chemical that is mixed with sometimes, there's something called, I think, cantonol. If I'm not mistaken, there was fentanyl mixed in there or catamine. I don't remember the name, but it's ketamine. Ketamine, ketamine, yeah. Fentanyl, there was,

Sometimes there was cocaine in there. We saw all these mixtures in pills and also in, and they would stick it with needle. It was like a yellow syrupy thing. So these things that were called bath salts, nobody really knew what they were. Nobody really knows. It was just like these chemical compounds that had specific traces of something,

okay, that would make, these people completely out of whack. I mean, completely out of whack. Like PCP used to do. Yeah, like you could, but these people were literally contorted to the, I mean, you would think they had body that, their bodies overheated. So they started getting hot. They started running doing all sorts of weird things. They started seeing visions.

I think it may have so of even some of the mushrooms or something in it too. I don't, I don't know. I never really got into that because I was in a position at that time that I was more of a beat cop, okay, for some of this. It just, for me, it was the time that it went crazy, that everybody was doing it. It was just unbelievable. Yeah. It seems like the, when we talk about drug use in the United States, there's like a sliver of junkies, whether that's like, like, 2% of the drug users or 1%, I don't know.

It can't be very high, but they, and usually, yes, it's amongst like the underclass and and just straight up homeless people, right? Like there's homeless cities from San Francisco to New York to Philadelphia to Austin, right? There's the subculture of, uh, of bums, junkies, dope fiends that, that will, that, uh, make the trends of these really, really, really. bad drugs like fentanyl or trank you've ever we've heard of trank now and bath salts makes them popular for a time and then they'll move on to the next thing right and then there's but then there's the drugs that always are there ever present and they seem to just stick

around even as the generations change right cocaine meth um obviously weed if you can still count that as a drug i guess it is because people are still making big money off of it. But so the question I guess we ask ourselves is why do we, why do we care? Like, why do we care? Why do we care about the drugs that don't seem to be causing actual quality of life issues for most people like fentanyl does? It causes people to like walk up Congress Avenue right here and just makes my neighborhood look like shit, right? Like that directly affects me. But why do we need to interdict?

I mean, I guess you don't want a truck driver smoking meth, but he keeps him up. It keeps him safe. This guy's got to drive for you. He's been up for four days, this poor bastard. You know what I mean? Like I'm just trying to figure out so many lives, so many lives have been destroyed by the war on drugs.

And from what I can see, mostly from the, like, incarceration side, mostly from homes being broken up by people getting sent to prison for way longer than the money that they were making deserves, right? It's all the kingpins can always get out. Choppos, his sons are ratting right now. They've killed tens of thousands of people. They'll be back in Mexico someday. They will be. you know, it's the black guy that's got a couple of ounces of crack that's, you know, been in and out, right? And obviously we could talk about his life decisions, like, you know, you shouldn't do any of this,

but it just, I don't know, there's got to be some kind of, I don't know, my mind just goes to like, what is the solution? And I look at countries like Switzerland, they used to have a super bad heroin problem back in the 80s, Switzerland of all fucking places. And now you can go get it in a government-sponsored clinic, and it's completely cleaned up to streets, the cities, no crime there. There's no drug traffic there, right? There's no illicit market there. I just don't know if America has it in us.

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Yeah, those are difficult questions to answer. From my point of view, while you say that there's a lot of people that are serving time, Maybe that doesn't correlate with what they did in the drugs. And I would tend to agree with you there. Okay. But the other side of the house is there's just as many or more of young people that died and overdosed than a lot of these drugs. Car accidents.

You know, you mentioned truck drivers. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, you know, whatever. But realistically, there's been numerous truck accidents where the truck driver is high and kills 10 people on a, you know. So I'm not completely against what you're saying at all. But there has to be like a happy medium. Middle ground. Right.

Right. Right. We're not seeing people go to jail, you know, because they sold, you know, 10 baggies of dope. And they're spending five years in jail. Yeah. But at the same time, we don't want to see people die from drugs either. Right. You know, there has to be some type of, some type of even grass.

I know, you're right. Yeah, totally. It's, you know, I'm from Portland, Oregon, and they, you know, around the pandemic time, they said, yeah, any drug, if you have under like five grams, it's literally, we'll probably won't even write you a ticket. And that was just had terrible blowback, you know, and very quickly everybody, all the liberal people were like, we're not that liberal. So, yeah, America just can't. We just are a place of extremes. you know it's like you know this isn't working it's going to keep getting worse it's going to keep getting worse until there needs to be there's going to be some kind of resetting i think uh in the coming decades whether probably a monetary reset there may be there may be and i think a lot of these pharmaceutical companies you know are they are in the cutting edge of a lot of different drugs and there's a lot of money being moved and i will tell you that there's going to be of new drugs over the next decade, there's going to be a lot of new drugs

that are coming through the pipeline. Drugs that are good though, that could like cure, like, opioid addiction? Drugs, yeah, that are good. I mean, I know Pfizer, I know Monsanto, and those companies have been working on things for a very long time, but there's always a big butt on that, you know. Would, will those drugs be then taken to the street and be used for a different type of high or who knows?

I mean, because that's what happens, man. Or will those drugs give you, turn you into a fiend, right? Like that's, that's, like Percocets. Most people, percissette's legal. Most people that are addicted to drugs get them from the pharmacist still, I think. Yeah. So. And Xanax, same thing.

Yes, right. It's a great, it's a great point. You know, it's hard to trust Pfizer after what they did with the, the jab. You know, it's very hard to trust Big Pharma. Who are the people in Florida? Let's talk about your journey as a cop there and being with the DEA task force. Like, how did you get started?

Well, my road took me down a very different road. I mean, I was a Wall Street broker for 15 years before it made the turn into becoming a cop, right? One of the things that I've always wanted to do was be a cop and be a narcotics cop. And it wasn't so much because I wanted to, you know, be cool or anything like that. It was more because I started seeing that there was a lot of people affected by drugs and a lot of people that were dying because of it. And so one day, you know, I'm a year married and I sit down across with my wife and I say,

hey honey, you know what, I feel like I need to serve for something greater. I need to do something greater with more meaning in my life. And, you know, I'm a Christian guy and she's a pastor and her father is a pastor, a very, very well-known pastor. And, you know, she just looks at me and says, you know, whatever God wants and I'll be with you. You know, I'm with you. Keep in mind that we went from, I went from making like $700,000 a year to making $38,000 a year. Okay. So that was that was a typical road, right, to become a cop. You're a Wall Street millionaire first.

Wow. Yeah. And then so, you know, I wanted to do something different. So I went out there. I applied to several departments. And finally, the city gave me an opportunity, Revereux Beach, and they hired me. and I went to work to, you know, literally about a year from the point that I actually applied,

went through the police academy, and then started working there. Very violent city, a lot of drugs. Wow. Probably more than per capita, more than any city in the United States. No shit. The things that I saw there are, you know, at every level, whatever you think you've seen, Believe me, I've seen it at the grittiest nastiest level. What are we talking?

Oh, well, what do you want to go? We're talking about, you know, 12, 13-year-old dying in my arms with his brain splattered because there was a drive-by shooting and I'm the last person that he says, help me too, right? We're talking about, you know, I mean, I could tell you so many different stories. we're talking about people just, you know, walking into a house and guys, you know, hanging, blowing, that blew his head off or hanging from the wall or from the ceiling, you know, kid, you know, little baby died in my arms, you know, I'm giving it CPR and then, you know, that's what I remember the most. Yeah.

You know, being in a gunfight, getting, you know, one of the stories that I tell that has a lot of power to it, meaning that you know when you have reached a level of, complete detachment working for a violent city is we get called up. I was part of the SWAT team, part of one of the teams that were specifically created for the holiday season. And it was the silent night task force. And we're four deep in a Yukon tacked out. And, you know, we get a call. We were only answering priority calls. A guy beats a hell out of his girlfriend. She's bleeding, whatever. We approach, we get there. We see him grab her, throw him and throw her in the car. The guy takes off. We start behind the guy. Probably about 10 minutes chasing this guy. He pulls over in the middle

of a dark highway and he kind of goes to the border of the outside the actual paved highway and into the dirt road. And all of sudden we start seeing a cloud of smoke around the car. You know, he starts spinning the wheel. So it creates a cloud of smoke. Meanwhile, we're pulled out. We're like, okay, how do we approach this car? There's no way, right? We can approach it because it's extremely, you can't see it. It's extremely offsetting, meaning that you see an angle of the car here, but you don't know if that's this part or that part. So after the, that storm dies off, the sand kind of dissipates. You know, we go, we take positions of the car.

We do tactical entry. One of the officers opens up the passenger, the driver's side and draws down on the guy. The guy's gurgling, you know, we call it the last gurgle. He blow, he had blown his brains out. and the reason why there was a smoke cloud was because when he did that, his body reacted by pushing on the accelerator. So that caused that.

And now I'm on the other side opening up. As I open up, there's brain splatter everywhere. His girlfriend's brain, her head is completely blown off. She literally falls on my arms, right? And I'm sitting there, okay, fine. This is part of the job, you know, mentally. So the other units get there. they take over, you know, we hand that over to the patrol.

And as we're walking away and I never forget this, Lieutenant Anthony Smith, if you're listening to this, he looks at me and then looks at another officer and says, says, all right, man, you guys hungry? Let's go to Denny's. Boom. Yeah. That was that.

You got to turn yourself off or else you couldn't do the job if you, you know, broke down and questioned everything, humanity, if every time, you know what I mean, you had to make a call like this. That's great. I would get home and I would say, hey, I got brain splatter on my uniform or on my vest or whatever I would tell my wife. She would be like, don't bring that in. You put her in the back. Yeah, it was no joke. It was like that and it was like that, you know, not just once or twice. It was like that pretty often. Do you think that is driven by drugs a lot of times? Like what is a baby dying in your arms? What's happening there? Well, you know, it's, again, you're, you know, you walk into a house that has, you know, the mom cracked out, you know,

the, the, the brother's cracked out. Everybody's cracked out on that house. The baby is like two months old. You know, she calls police like, you know, maybe 10 minutes after she sees her son blue. You know, I mean, and it's like, you go there, you do everything you can, you know, and it's, and it's crappy. But I'll tell you, and I haven't talked about this, I don't know in any podcast ever, but, you know, you ask me about drugs, right,

and what they can do to people and how they can change lives for the worst most of the time. So, and I'm trying to be more authentic lately and I'm trying to be more open. So this was during one of our operations in the multi-agency diversion task force. And we had a buy bust setup, okay, which is an agent going to buy drugs from, you know, from a person that's selling them drugs. and I remember this was in a Home Depot parking lot and we had the takedown team. We're all tacked out literally with balaclavas on, tactical vests.

You know, I mean, we were all tacked out, ready to move in. And I remember the agent, you know, the agent, I believe, does the buy. He calls for the takedown sign. and I remember once we do the takedown, we approach the cars, everybody has rifles, get down, open the door, get down, you know, like a regular, you know, handcuffs them and take them away. If I get choked up, you know, that's just because this is a powerful.

And this young man must have been, I don't know, 20, 19 years old. I have the gun on him. I have my rifle on him. I'm telling him, get, you know, open the door and get out. You know, open the door and get out. He's refusing to. He's refusing to, right? And I'm like, get out.

So I start opening the door. He starts holding it. And I see he has like a plastic bag with a whole bunch of pills in the bag. Probably, I don't know, maybe 30, 40 pills. And it's a plastic bag. and it's sealed up. And he looks at me and he sticks it in his mouth. So he sticks it in his mouth.

I'm like, you know, so I open the door and I take him down to the ground. Okay. And I'm cuffing him. Okay. And as I'm cuffing him, I see him start like, you know, like choking on the bag, you know.

And immediately, I don't think he was even ever cuffed. We drag him to the grass and start fucking going CPR on him, you know, trying to dig that bag out of his throat. We went from arrest to trying to help this guy who got the medics on the way, try to get it out of there, try to get it out of there. And he died.

He choked or he ingested those pills in an overdose. He choked on that. Oh my God. He choked on that. Like you put a freaking plastic bag in his mouth. I mean, I mean. Yeah.

And, you know, I just think back and I'm like, man, you know, his mom, I mean, he was a 20-year-old kid. Like, sure his mom, you know, the call, your son just died, just choked on. Yeah. And that's, that's, that was a tough one. Well, stuck with you. Yeah, yeah, stuck with me, especially the, the IA investigation that came after that, that was, you know, that was freak. We had to stay there, separate, you know, the whole command got there.

All the black cars get there, you know, and you're like going through this and you're like, holy crap, you know, what did I do wrong? You know, you're going step by step, but you realize that, you know, you really didn't do anything. You're just making an arrest. He made the decision to put that in his freaking mouth. Is that, yeah, I wonder if that's like necessary. Did you ever think it was like, over?

overkill to go with, you know, the militarization of the police. That's a phrase we've been hearing about a long time. It makes me very uncomfortable as somebody who's a libertarian and I distrust government, you know, almost completely. Is that too much to go with bucklavas and tactical gear to arrest one 20-year-old low-level drug dealer? Well, this is, it's more of a... Like, does that cause more of a problem?

And like, you know, riot cops? They go to peaceful protests and they basically make it more of an issue. Like they kind of cause more chaos than what they're putting down or trying to put down. So this is the problem. Okay. And I could see it again from where you're standing because I'm clear on that. Like it's a clear where someone sees like, why are these guys wearing, you know, hoodies?

Why are they wearing? Carrying rifles. Why are, okay? However, what you don't see is the flip side to that. where cops get attacked often or, or I can't even tell you how many shootings that are cop, you know, an officer involved. Especially when you are doing a buy bust, right? If you're not swift and you don't scare the living crap out of them,

compliance becomes much more difficult, then it escalates. When you do, we call violence of action, when you just come strong and attacking, it brings them down, de-escalates everything because they're very compliant. Yeah. Everything is boom, boom, boom. Okay, so it's more, it's more the effect.

Right, right there. It's more the effect. The problem is that if you're just like, you know, a patrol officer coming in, the drugs, you know, whatever, hey, can you kindly get out of your car? That's never going to work. The guy has a gun on his tank. He has a glove compartment, whatever.

you get into that there's too much time for them to act too much time. So I can see it from your point of view, but from our point of view, from a police officer, we want to take that guy down as swiftly, efficiently as possible, done with it rather than trying to mess around. Now, the Bala- Go to police chase like I took the cops on. Yeah, I mean, but those are kind of fun to sometimes, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first one had to, the second one had to have been fun for the cops that I took the, they were undercovers though. You know what I mean? This is a little different than I actually never saw cops. I think there's people in, uh, especially liberal states or less not even, I don't even know if it's a political thing, but like a place like Portland, Oregon just doesn't have the amount of crime at a place like, you know, the coast of Florida, like a Florida town does. So you would just never see SWAT team members doing by busts. Right. You would, I just don't think it's necessary.

There just isn't the level of violence. So I, you know, I think this is kind of unusual in some places, like where I grew up. Right. I mean, I mean, well, man, I could tell you stories where he got very, very, very violent, like very violent, very fast. So, yeah, the escalation, you just don't want to leave it. empty-handed where there can be any sort of retaliation. You want to completely just take control of the scene, right, get and get it moving.

Okay. You know, that's mainly. Now, the bottle of cloud is a lot of people say, why do you do that to scare people? Well, no, I just don't want people to see my face. As an undercover agent, I mean, you know, why would I do that? There's people around who knows. I mean, no.

I mean, it's my family. I could tell you that I've been out of my family, and I've seen, you know, people that I've arrested, that luckily I've actually had a mask on throughout the search warrant that, you know, it gets uncomfortable. And I've also seen people that have arrested and, you know, they give me that look and then I know that guy from somewhere

from 10 years ago. He gave me eight years, seven years. So it's still, you know, even today, I ride my cars. All of them have 5% tint. I don't care if I get pulled over. You know, I'd say, hey, listen, my cars, I pull very dark tint because I don't want anybody

looking in. I just don't ever know. And a stoplight, who knows, you know, the area that I worked is only a few miles away, you know, so. From where you lived? Yeah. How did, so did you end up moving up beyond like the kind of street level riffraff? Oh, yeah. Okay.

Okay. Tell us about that. Yeah. So then, you know, once we, you know, once we cleared that, you know, President Obama came in, designated a task force, which was mostly, we were trying to target. you know, these bigger dealers and bigger doctors. And we put away some very, very high-level doctors. And from there, during this task force,

I mean, we did so many different deals. Then we did, we went into, some guys got selected into the tactical diversion squad in DEA. And these are all very, very large cases. And is that what you ended up doing? Before, yeah, yeah. So you're sworn it, sworn in federally. Oh, yes.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I was a task force, task force agent. I mean, so what they call it, task force officer or whatever it is. But before that, though, let me kind of go back. One thing that I didn't talk about, before I went over to DEA, I worked a very long case undercover at the VA Medical Center, okay, for a very long time. Interesting. Else about that.

For an entire year. And we made 30-something arrest. thousands and thousands of pills were seized, hundreds of thousands of dollars were seized. Hold on, they're selling pills out of the VA hospital? Yeah, so I worked in conjunction with Officer of Inspector General, and I went undercover there for a year, and I would go undercover as the janitor, as a doctor, as a nurse.

And what would happen is a lot of these, and do some of these buys and people, the pharmacist, the main pharmacist for that particular hospital. And by the way, when I say hospital, it's a city. You know, it's humongous. Huge. The VAs are gigantic. They're like college campuses. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's just huge. So don't think of a hospital like, you know, where you're walking in and there's 200 beds. This is like a monster city. So we had received several. tips from different DA offices that there was one of the pharmacist sons had been caught selling pills, a lot of them. And it linked back to the mom that was actually a main pharmacist in the

medical center. So we started, boy, we hit search warrants. We went on undercover, bought from, you know, not only from the actual pharmacist itself, but we also bought from different people that were selling in there that were in conjunction with the pharmacy. And I can tell you just story after story where there was a connection between the pharmacy. Imagine that what they were doing is there were shorting people. So you say you got 60, but I only gave you 47. right and if you do 500 of those a day you have like 800 pills left and those were not accounted for so they were going out the back door okay okay this is daily we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars wow and so pharmacists that we're working at the VA legitimate pharmacists went to pharmacy school and they are supplying the streets they're supplying drug dealers they're they're supplying

Yeah, they were supplying, yeah, with this stolen oxycotton. Yeah. Wow. And not only that, but we had guys in there that were already, there were nurses that were already, the DEA already had arrested them for cocaine trafficking. And somehow they were still working there in the medical side of the house.

So they were also involved in this, where they were selling out the back door. And it wasn't just all of it pills. A lot of it was cocaine, too, you know, inside the VA Medical Center. What's the market there? How does that make any sense? Yeah, well, it was a trading area for a lot of these guys where they would go into the laundry, into the laundromat.

Okay, and there was a lot of deals being done there all the time, and it was just a normal thing. it was infested with drug activity, activity the entire hospital. Nobody had ever, I mean, they have a police department there, but, you know, they're not, they're not even worried about all that. You can't trust a male nurse. You know what I mean? Just like you can't trust a hot chick from Miami to not be a guy, you know?

What? Anyways, hottest, hottest trans women in America, Miami. me. Wow. So how did you pose as when you went undercover at this VA hospital, how did you pose as nurse, janitor? Like, weren't you worried about getting discovered? Like how that guy? That's the funniest thing in the world. Okay. And I say this. And this is why security, you've got to be very careful with it. I would literally go as an agent with my badge out at a certain time of the day to do my walk around. You know, two hours later, I would come in dressed as a janitor. And the same security guard there, it wouldn't even.

No, I mean. I would give my other badge, you know, of a janitor or a nurse. You wouldn't even notice. Would you go in with a disguise or anything? You know, sometimes I would wear, you know, a hat or maybe I had longer hair at that time, real long hair, so I would comb in a little bit, but nothing, nothing. Wow. I mean, he's security guard.

He's getting paid peanuts. He doesn't care. He doesn't care. So it was easy for me to get in there. You know, I worked in different areas of the hospital. You know, there were different areas. It was pretty unique. It was a very interesting experience and they're going in and really understanding the flow of

how things were and how dirty, really, some of the things were. So your goal was to pose as a buyer? Yeah, my goal or to get in with who's doing what in there and figuring out, you know, getting the leads and figuring out who's doing what. So I was always the buyer. I was always the hire, you know, more of the middleman saying, hey, you know, if you can get me some of this, you know. And then, but I also did some buys, you know, I bought from several people that are probably still serving jail time now. Really? So that's a lot of time. Did you bust some of these like pharmacists? Oh yeah. Like all the way at the top. All the way at the top. And those are federal cases?

Federal cases, yes. Now how much time. So like for example, that lady that was supplying her son, that pharmacist who was supplying her son was stolen oxy cotton, right? What are the sentencing, what are the sentences looking like for someone like that? I don't remember exactly what everyone received, but I know that there was anywhere between like three years and 15 years. Yeah. So we hit some people pretty heavy for 10, 12, 15 years. But those were the guys that were, they were not just your, you know, hey, I buy, you know, a couple pills from you.

Yeah. You know, there was multiple buys and there was a, they would buy from other people. And there was a, it was a, it was, It was an organized thing. It was organized. I mean, some parts of it not as much, but it was organized. The fact is that, though, this is, you know, this is for veterans, man.

Like, you know, and people are paying, you know, tax money goes to this. And just getting ripped off left and right. It's just not. Yeah. No, that's not cool. What was the biggest bust you remember? What was the biggest case that you were involved in when it came to OxyCon? Yeah.

I mean, we had over, I think. I think we seized over, I think it was like seven, eight thousand oxy pills. And we had over, I want to say about half a million, a little bit over half a million dollars in a search warrant that had to do with that pharmacist's house. So these people are making millions of dollars. Yeah, this was, by the way, this is in the attic. It was just like, hey, it was up there.

Yeah, like extra money. Yeah. Wow. And when you really track the money, it's not going to be in the attic. You have, that's why, you know, we worked with IRS. We worked at different whatever. And, you know, you track where the money goes, right?

You, you, I hate to make this about race, but they're obviously, like, different ethnic groups tend to gravitate towards different, uh, black market, uh, drug trafficking, uh, activities and behavior. Were these mostly, like, white people? Half and half was an equal, like pretty, pretty balanced, pretty balanced. Yeah. We had a lady specifically. She used to sell all the time. You know, she was just walking around selling all the time. Basically, I think that was her entire job.

I think she was a janitor. But all she did was just sell. Just walking around the VA hospital? Yeah. Just like letting, was she letting veterans know, hey, I can get you? A lot of veterans would go there. And actually, a lot of veterans would buy their, a lot of veterans.

We arrested several of them, sadly, but that they would actually buy their stuff and then just go and sell it right there. And like right there. So it's almost a fancier Skid Row. Because when you go to Skid Row, you got a lot of veterans that are selling heroin and fentanyl and, you know, you just go to a clinic now.

Now, like in my utopian idea, are my idealistic idea of what a post-war on drugs world would look like is a place like this. It's a hospital where addicts and drug users can come and get regulated dope given to them, right? But you're right. You can't a lot of those are leaving. Most of those pills, it sounds like, we're leaving. the hospital and going to people that didn't actually need opioids for a legitimate medical purposes, right?

Yeah. You thought this was your run club era. Turns out it was more of a thinking about run club era. The good news? Someone's marathon training is about to start. Sell your workout gear on Deepop. Just snap a few photos and we'll take care of the rest. They get their race day fit and you get a payout for trying.

Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop where taste recognizes taste. That wasn't the sick guy coming and saying, hey, I ran out of my pill prescription this month and no. And you're it's tax dollars. Okay, so how long did you do that for? How long were you part of this opioid?

Well, I was three, a little bit over three and a half years. About three, three and a half years. I was at the multi-agency diversion task force. Yeah. Yeah. And then where did you go after that? DEA. Okay.

That's where we did. Those were bigger cases. We went into several wires. I mean, we had been part of T1 wires for a long time. But, you know, we were presenting, you know, larger scale cases. And, you know, the whole. work up in DEA is, you know, there's a lot of investigatory, you know, a lot of it's investigatory behind the desk, you know, pulling this information, that information.

But I'm going to say something here, and this is maybe somebody from the agencies can, can hear this. When it comes to information between one agency and the other, it's hogwash. It is horrible, horrific, very bad. Like literally, FBI could have information that DEA knows nothing about, you know, and then ATF could have information that FBI and DEA don't know anything about. ICE can have information here. I think now it's gotten a little bit better, but still from the people that are working out, they still say that it's not great.

I mean, I can tell you that there were so many times where we, There was so much information that we had and so much information that FBI had. And we literally had to go to their office and sit there and talk with them and say, oh, so you know this guy. Oh, yeah. I know this guy. And I'm surprised that we didn't have any more blue-on-blues. You know, we used to do the ninjas making sure that these ninja reports, they're deconflicting reports. And when you're going to serve a warrant or you're going to do an operation here, you deconflict with the other agencies.

So you make sure when you bust a point. there aren't undercovers or people that could be, you know. Ideally, yes. Yeah. People from a different agency that are there and maybe they get hit and crossfire, something like that. That's correct. That's correct.

Yeah. Okay. So now that you're with DEA, that didn't take you that long, right? Like, how long did it take you to get to DEA when you first became a cop? Well, I mean, I did two years and then I went to vice narcotics. Vice Narcotics there, I did three years. And then I went, then I was selected to be part of the multi-agency diversion task force. I did three years there.

And then I moved, and then from there I was selected over to them and switched over to DEA, which I did very close to three years too, somewhere in that neighborhood, two and a half years, something like that. So what was your goal at this time? What was the field office you were working out of when you were with DEA? West Palm, Field Division. But we would go also, we would connect with. Miami Field Division. Okay. So now we're talking lots of cocaine, right? It was, you know,

during that time, during that time, see, inside DEA, you have different groups, right? You have different groups. Certain groups work, certain cases, certain areas or, or, not certain areas, but they specialize more on, like, one group may specialize more on cocaine, the other one more on marijuana, MDMA, you know, pills, whatever. So every group had its own. You know, we did, you know, get involved with cocaine. We did get involved with pills. You know, we got, you know, we got involved in a lot of different cases.

Now, with DEA, one of the things that you're going to realize right off the bat is, no matter how good your cases, you better have it squared away. before you bring it in front of an AUSA. Right, right. Because AUSAs don't take cases that are loose. Yeah. They don't want to lose. They don't want to lose.

Yeah. Right. They want slam dunks. So more of the work is done on the front end. Well, you have to exhaust every single possibility in existence, right? You have to give you an example, doing surveillance on someone, right? from a perspective, okay, first you got to find out who this person is, you know, what exactly they're, you know, they're doing or get an idea. Then you have to surveil them. And you have to

surveil them not just once in a while, but often like hours and hours and hours a day. You have to document all this. Then you'll go and you'll start doing, you know, a few things. You'll get, you'll get a warrant to do, to put up a pole cam, okay? You start, then you start running the pole cams, you know, all over. You know, you have, and then, or you get a warrant to stop a GPS on track or on the car. Right. You know. Are those more common surveillance tactics now than, like, trying to tap a phone?

Because every drug dealer, they know they're using burner phones. They're using chips. You're not tapping a phone unless you're exhausted all of what I just said. Right. Okay. Yeah, that's like, because that's the most costly, that's the most invasive. Yeah, there's, yeah, the AUSA is going to say, have you done, when you sit in front of them, they're going to say, have you done this much surveillance? Have you done a pole cam?

Have you done GPS trackers? Have you done direct buys? Right. You know, I mean, and even have you done any rips? You know, rips are basically you pull the car over and, you know, you search the car. Okay. I mean, you've already been surveilling them and you saw what they did, but you're not arresting them at that point.

You'll freaking take the $200,000 they got and say, go get out of here. And then you document that. Okay. So, and then you can use that as evidence, okay, to build, you know, your case. Right. Then eventually if you've exhausted all of those possibilities, then and only then will they, you know, hook you up for a wiretap. And are those even effective, though?

Wires? When I was in the game, we would go by, I would go to, like, it was called Fred Meyer. It's the, like, the H.E.B. on the West Coast. I would go to the rack or I would send somebody in, and we would buy 20, 30, 40 burner phones. We would buy them all, like, we would clear them out. Right. And I would use the phone once, and then I would toss it. Like, they couldn't get a wire on me if they tried.

Right. I mean, is it effective? For us, it was effective to a certain degree? So big-time drug dealers are talking on, like, phones that are registered to them? Big-time drug dealers are, a lot of the communication that we had on these wiretaps were more about, because they're always going to have one main phone. They're not just going to be on loose phones all the time. They're going to have one phone where they talk to their girlfriend, where their girlfriend could call them, or their parents could call them, whatever. So typically that is the main phone that we know that for the most part is registered.

So we understand that we're not going to get like... Them talking about a big buy. We did. We had. We did. We implicated a lot of people that... Right. Let's just say that some of these wires, you never know who you're going to get on the other line.

For sure. For sure. People get lazy. People get sloppy. Yeah. So, you know, what you're hoping for is that he kind of says something in these conversations. so you have an idea of what's happening. You know, we made some arrest off good wiretaps. We made some very, I think I would say, very strong arrests.

Now, is it the end-all, be-all, especially in our day and age? I don't know how effective they are, honestly. Okay, so got it. So it sounds like you're using an element of all of these tools to try to make a bigger case. Okay, so who are some of your targets in your years at the DEA? We had, because this is recent stuff. This is not like something from years gone by. This is gives people should pay attention because this is like gives a snapshot of how it is today, how the game works.

The, um, my group specifically, well, we were, we were working a case out of China. Uh, one of the guys was working at we, we, uh, where, you know, the MDMA game was big at that time. So we were trying to work a case there. As a matter of fact, I remember some of the agents were flying out or going that direction. Well, what do you mean? How do you work a case out of China? Well, you start making contact and acting like you're somebody else. And then you connect.

And, you know, so they were working it in a really cool fashion where I was like, damn, how do you do that? But, you know, a lot of these Chinese, they want to connect with Americans. And, you know, they wanted us. They didn't know it was us, but they wanted us to be, someone that, you know, build a relationship with and then bring in, um, bring in a whole, they want, I think they were talking about like 100,000 pills at one time, you know, but. So you're posing as buyers.

Um, yeah, that was that, I didn't, I, I left before all that happened, but, um, my, one of my biggest cases was, um, um, I, I really can't say the name because it's, it's too recent and they're still, there are still some areas of the trial that are still ongoing. But it was a pretty big arm seller. And this guy, there were several, he had different connects from different areas throughout the United States and Mexico. And this individual was bringing in a lot of meth and also cocaine. Pills were his main, but when...

What kind of pills? Oxy, straight up Oxy. But at that time, towards the latter part of me being in DEA, pills started to go down a little bit. Right. So meth and cocaine. And we built a case where, you know, he sold us firearms. And, you know, I went undercover, sold us firearms, sold us.

crack, some other types of cocaine. It wasn't, when I say other types, I'm talking about, even to this day, I think it was laced with fentanyl. It was a brownish color cocaine that we're still trying to figure out, not now, but at that time we didn't really understand what it was, but it had traces of cocaine. And this person, you know, we surveilled them,

we had a big case on them, the ATF was working it with us, It was a very, it was a, I don't want to say it was a super high level case, but it was a mid-to-high-level guy. He had direct connect with the Medellin cartel and also with a group called something Fox. I don't remember out of Mexico. Well, part of Mexico. I don't remember. Yeah, that's pretty crucial. I don't remember exactly.

it was a group that was actually it was a group that had beheaded. I remember we used to get pictures. Still got to get more specific. Yeah, we were a group that had beheaded people. They all do that. Which group? The Zetas? No. The Zetas, I know,

I would do that, but it was something... Cartel Northweste, Northeast Cartel, the Sina Loa Cartel, Cartel, Calisco, Nueva Generation. No, hold on. It was... They had a name something like Fox. Fox?

Yes. Wouldn't it be Fox unless it was a Spanish word, but it sounds like they're maybe one of like a subsidiary group of one of these bigger cartels, perhaps. I don't remember exactly. It was a group that had done some nasty stuff. That's all I can see all I remember. And he was tied in with him. And then there was also some politics involved with some people in the, in the, in different areas.

I don't want to say city commission, but I think they were part of some city structure in one of the cities in South Florida. And it was a pretty nasty... How so? They were involved in letting him... From what I remember, he had a... It was an auto car, like a paint body shop or something like that.

So he was dealing from there. and apparently some of the city commissioners or somebody in the commission knew that that he was there. I think the FBI at that time had already arrested or was going to arrest some of the guys in the city commission. And because they were part of the whole operation. When I, my part of this particular case was the surveillance side and the firearm side working together with ATF. So FBI was working another angle, the same dude, and I believe that ICE also was working because they had some connects with one of the cartels that I don't remember their name, Fox, whatever. They had a connect there. So it was a very interesting case.

You know, we finally, you know, we made the arrest. But during that time when we made the arrest was, you know, they went to trial and then they went to trial again. And then after that, I had already left DEA. Gotcha. Gotcha. So it sounds like there's corruption involved. Did you find any more of that in Florida,

which has been notorious, historically, notorious. corrupt, you know, local police, state police. Did you ever stumble upon any of that when you were investigating these drug dealers? Police corruption was very rare. I never, I never came across it. With the exception of maybe, you know, a cop that came on a wiretap one time, that he worked, I don't remember where he worked, but he worked from her for another department. But outside of that, never came across that. Now, city commissions, that wasn't, that wasn't a, that wasn't a, like city commissioners. Yeah, like city commissioners. I remember a couple of city commissioners. Why would they be, in bed with criminals and drug dealers? Well, I think there's all, you know, kickbacks. There's,

there's money involved. You know, we, I never worked a case that it was, that was, I was the primary, but I know that there was, people involved in the city commission and some of the wires that we that we went up on what is the benefit to a criminal and a drug dealer what are they paying the city commissioner for well let me let me say this well i mean kickbacks you know meaning like let me operate you know keep the police away you know i get arrested uh you know you know things like that well man are you kidding me we had um we had uh let's just say one of the mayors for the first city that I worked for, I mean, we would pull them out of crack houses. The mayor.

Yeah. It's the guy was in there getting high. Yeah. Mayors love to get high. Mayors love, for some reason, mayors specifically love to get high. I think it's because they want to like ingratiate themselves with the people. Mayor, Marion Barry from Washington, D.C., caught on cameras, smoke and crack with some hookers.

He made a comeback, though. I think he got elected again after that. The mayor of Toronto, that dude, I think his name's like Tom Ford, something like that, something Ford, crack smoker. Dude, mayors love smoking crack. I don't know what it is.

So that, so you thought city commissioners have the ability to at least tell cops, hey, nothing to see over here, investigate somebody else. 100%. Wow. So you don't even have to pay off cops anymore. You go to the local officials. And what does that look like? Like clearly they know they've got to be subtle. Like what is that, how does that corruption happen? Well, you know, at the time that I was there, you know, we saw that where, you know, you would arrest someone and you would get a, hey, let him go or

some to the effect of, you know, when they would go to trial, they would know the judge and all of a sudden, you're the arresting office. You're like, how the hell did this guy get off? Well, wait a minute. He knows this guy. He's that, you know, no, no, no. So there was always a mixture, especially in the lower, say, socioeconomic districts and cities. You know, I don't trust city commissions at all.

I never have, and I probably never will. But who's, you know, a place like that, who has the money to corrupt a city official? Well, I mean, under the table, you get a guy that says, hey, you know, you get me off. I'll pay you a couple grand here, you know, three grand there. Or doesn't even have to be that. That's really low-level shit. It doesn't even have to be that way. I let you eat for free at my uncle's restaurant for ribs.

Right. You know what I mean? That's all it takes. You know what I'm saying? Like really. Yeah. Wow. That's, it's, yeah, it's favors.

It's, it's, and are these just local native drug dealers, drug traffickers, doing this or does it go as far back as like Mexican organized crime in your view? So in my career, what I saw was you can have a low-level street guy that's just a corner doper right this one's dope in a corner. But then who he works for, usually that guy has a broader reach to go to the middle, middleman. All right. So you're not so far off going right to the corner guy because I remember the corner guy led us to a lot, you know, a lot of bigger deals and a lot of bigger, you know, mid-tier guys. They're not ever going to reach the head of the cartel, okay? But they'll reach the dude that's,

you know, next in line or two or three down from that where he is the main, the guy that's distributing it and he'll bringing it in wholesale. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, We had one of, I did a reverse, and I actually, I taught in the police academy for over a decade, and I would put this video on so they could see what it looks like. You know, one of the reverse, this guy was part of the, oh, God, not the Medellian cartel, but the, man, you got to know these names, too. You said it a moment ago, the Zetas. The Zetas? Yeah.

Yeah. And he was part of this group. His family was attached to that. Okay? And he lived, he was a Mexican guy, lived, you know, in one of the cities nearby. And he, you know, he had, he swung a lot of cocaine, okay? He wasn't a corner doper. He was an upper mid-level guy.

He was a guy that had direct contact with the distributor. Yeah. Like he was that source. And so we did a reverse. I mean, I had to sell him on the phone. I had to speak Spanish to him and sell him on the phone to come meet me at a designated area. Okay. And that I had, you know, two kilos that he was going to buy.

Did you actually have the dope? It was. Do you bring a reverse buy bust? Do you bring the drugs? Right. And this particular, this particular time, we did have the drugs, but they were fake. Okay. in this particular time, but we had done it before with real, real.

Okay. But it's not what you see in movies sometimes, okay? They just give you the fake stuff. It doesn't really work like that all the time. You have to have a lot of clearance for that. But for this particular one, the cool thing was that I had, the way it was supposed to be is, you know, as an undercover agent, you want to make sure that, especially when you're doing a reverse, that you take command of what's happening in front of you. like the guy comes in, you lead him where to sit in the car, it's super important. You're not just letting some dude walk in on you unexpected, right?

So the idea was for me to park and then to have him come in next to me in the passenger side and then we could negotiate there. Once we made a deal, then we would walk to another car, open the trunk. He would take it, put in a bag, and leave. Okay. So what happened is that he came, instead of going to the passenger side, and I thought that I had locked all four doors. And I didn't. So he opened the freaking rear door. You know, that's a worst position you ever want to be in because he has an angle from the rear. I got to turn my head. Okay. So it's a,

and, geez. And, you know, he's there. He lifts his shirt up, has a gun on him and starts talking to me saying, where the fuck's a dope? You know, where is it? Where is it? I'm like, all right, you know, take it easy. We're going to do this, you know, whatever. I talk to him, I'm like asking him questions, trying to have good, trying to start building a little bit of a relationship with a guy. He gets angry and he asks me, hey, multiple times, are you, are you a cop? You know, tell me the truth, are you a cop? You know, meanwhile, he's in, he has a beat on me in position, right? Like, there's, even if I drew my firearm and tried to, he would, he would pop me three, four in the head by the time I turn around. So that's a very bad position to be in. And,

Big time learning lesson, by the way. So finally, I was able to calm him down, build a relationship, and walk him around to the other car. As we approach the other car, he opens it. You know, we open the trunk. And, you know, he's feeling it. You know, he's touching in. And then automatically, like, he feels the weight on it.

This guy, this is how much he had had. handled, you know, kilos of cocaine. Like if it was off by like a quarter of an ounce, you know, if it was off by a quarter of an ounce, he knew. Right. He weighed it like this, you know. And as he weighed it like that and he shook it, I'm like, all right, he's going to call me out.

He's going to draw his gun or whatever. So I, you know, I did the call sign to take him down. So my unit came. he saw them, started running, whatever, finally they tackled him, and they arrested him. But my point is that these guys had deal so much, they know the way of this by just feeling and touching it. Well, he must have been hard up because if this guy's got real Mexican connects, why is he going through some guy that's dealing bricks out of his truck? I don't know. This guy, he must have been, it must have been a drought because, you know.

Well, no, it wasn't a drought. I'll tell you what it was. It was the person that introduced me to him. He was snitching for the FBI. Ah, there you go. So there's the trust link. There you go. That makes sense.

That makes sense. There's a lot of propaganda, in my opinion, in the news surrounding cartels operating in the United States. You know, we know a lot just through the course of doing this show. But I'm glad you're here because it's another, it's an opinion from the long. enforcement side. Do you see actual cartel members selling drugs in the United States or are the top level guys in a city like, you know, Boca or Palm Beach? Are they just getting it from the border after it crosses in from Mexico? Twofold. In some areas, you'll see that the cartel is mixed in with the Mexican community and they're living lives very, very low. Nobody would ever even know that they're there.

Okay. They live amongst them. You would never even know that this guy is a cartel leader or any type position. So yes, they are running the house and they have their own mules running, okay, and delivering and doing their thing, but nobody knows who they are. Okay. So that's that part. The other side is, it is for the most part when drugs are coming in through the Mexican border, okay? It's almost like handoff, okay? There is no, we're going to take it all the way in, deep into the United States, into the neighborhoods, into specific drop-off points. It goes to one destination and from there it goes all over, right? From everything that across the board, people that we have spoken to,

and any information, any intel that we ever had was that these points of contacts were points were, think of, I don't know, FedEx, you know, plane comes in, drops off, whatever, and you have all the trucks kind of take deal. That's right. And those are independent dealers that are picking up from the mothership. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like the old days where Colombians would send their own people up into Miami to sell the drugs for them. No, you still have submarines that come across once in a while. I mean, I remember working with the Coast Guard. You know, in one of our operations, you know, we did multiple operations. And we were taking people down and arresting, and they would tell us the stories that they would tell us were, man, you know, we come across some of these submarines, you know, a couple times a year, two, three times a year. In the United States. Coming into the U.S.

Yeah. Where is a submarine land? landing in the United U.S. Man, there are so many cities that are not, see, this is the thing. I believe that there's a lot of drop-off points because I remember in this city that I worked for, you have the entire intercoastal. There were areas that were completely unmanned than anybody at 2 o'clock in the morning, you could just bring your boat there, unload, go across the, it's like a wooded air,

area, come across into a street and nobody. You wouldn't, you wouldn't even, nobody would blink an eye because nobody would see you. Even in Florida. Oh, yeah. Wow. Even in Florida. There's a lot that the Coast Guard doesn't cover still. Wow.

And, you know, I've always thought that every police department should always have patrol units in the water. And I know it's costly, but, you know, the Coast Guard can't monitor everything, especially cities that are on the beach or that are, especially the harbor cities that are on the intercoastal. Yeah. I mean, those are easy drop-off points. Wow. So do you think semi-submersible submarines from Columbia are actually making the trip all the way to the Florida coast?

Recently, not too long ago, not too long ago. I mean, there was a couple of years ago, there was a, you know, they took it down. It's made out of wood, you know, and they work. And if you think that that's the first. time that that that... Of course not. Listen, I was part of Blue Lightning Task Force. I was cross-designated Title 18, which means basically that the Blue Lightning Task Force is all ice, right?

So in that world, especially when you're patrolling the oceans and you're going and you're boarding ships and, you know, you're doing drug interdiction, whether it's from the air or whether it's from the, you know, from the boats. I only worked at a short time, and it was cool. I mean, you know, shooting of freaking the engines off of, you know, off a boat is, you know, stalling. You did that? It was amazing. Yeah, one of the operations that I was in.

Wow. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, it was just, you know, we basically it was a, it was a boat that was called out as a, it was, you know, carrying drugs and whatever. Was it like a fast boat or like a cigarette boat? No, no, no, no. It was like a, it was like a, probably like a 35, 40 foot open fisherman. Okay, but it had some big ass engines. Right.

Okay, motors in the back. And so, you know, told it stop, stop, stop several times and finally didn't stop until we had to, you know, they got back in the gun, boom, boom, boom, boom. And they took the engines out. Right. Do you guys, and you boarded it? Yeah. We vessel boarded it. In that particular, I don't know how much they got,

but they got some cocaine out of that. And there was multiple arrests done. You know, it was more, you know, of a dynamic situation, but it's a very normal situation. They tell me that that happens pretty often. And also in the middle of the waterway, they'll, you know, they'll spot these boats. They'll cover them with kind of like a car cover,

like a boat cover. at night. So, and these, they're reflective, so there won't be any heat signatures when planes or helicopters are trying to. And it's all, listen, it's all a- So smodling's pretty robust in Florida still, off the coast of Florida.

Cat-and-mouse game. Did you see any Colombians? Did you arrest any Colombians? Yeah, Colombians were actually, Colombians were, there were a lot, Colombians were more sophisticated, okay? They were more along the lines,

of trucks and they would stash their their drugs in places. Oh my goodness. When I went through one of the courses for stopping trucks, drug interdiction for trucks. And one of the guys there told us a story that, you know, he stopped the truck and he seized, well, he seized over, what was it, like over 50 kilos and like 40,000 pounds of marijuana. like an excessive amount.

And everything was hidden all the way at the front of the truck because it had like a false wall. Like you would think the trailer ends. Yeah. You know? And it's just a false wall. Like you just think you would not think anything of it. Like you would go in there and be like, damn, nothing's here.

But one of the dogs was able to hit on it. And then they started punching walls, you know, holes through that wall. And it was an entire like 10 feet. behind that. So they were very good at that. You know, that came from a Colombian cartel. That was actually one of the Colombian guerrilla groups that was moving that. Really?

Yeah. Wow. And they knew that. You guys had intel that could trace that all the way back to Columbia? Oh, yeah. Well, this is not, we, I didn't work this case. This is one of the guys I was teaching us in that particular group with that particular drug stop.

but they had well where he worked he worked uh um i want to say like here in texas palo alto i think is where he he worked um palo alto it's you mean uh el paso el paso yeah yeah el paso yeah um and that's where this interdiction was it was a very interesting story where he he said like everything was there but they had connections with columbian guerrillas and and also they had connections a lot of the was being smuggled through like Hell's Angels and, you know, the biker gangs like the outlaws and things like that. Yeah. Why did you leave the DEA?

Well, after my time with the DEA, basically, I remember my chief called back and said, hey, man, it's time for you now to come back. You did your stint and teach, get promoted, be a sergeant, you know, and maybe run the narcotics, you know, and, you know, maybe run the narcotic squad in the future, you know, that's kind of like the way that it was posed to me. I thought it was horseshit, you know, so, you know, I, when I came back from that, you know, it was not happy camper. And literally two weeks after that, I got into a gunfight in a gas station.

My wife says, it's time for you to get out of there and go to another police department. So I did. Wow. How did you get in a gunfight? Well, this particular incident had to do with, there's a guy that was in the gas station and laying down, sleeping in his car. He had a gun next to him. And then you ran his tag and he came back as he was a suspect of a robbery that just happened

that night. So I remember police officers that got there before me were screaming in a loudspeaker, get out of your car, get out of your car, get out of your car, the guy didn't get up. So me and another younger officer, kind of like a rookie, you know, he busted the window and why he told him, I said, hey man, if you bust the window, you got to grab his hands. Because if you bust a window and you let him free, he's going to turn around and pop three in your head. You know. So, you know, he broke the window.

He grabs a gun. He turns around. But at the same time that he's turning around, I'm there. I see the muzzle of his gun. I'm backing away. He steps on the car and he continues to crash against the wall. And from there, you know, he shoots, you know. To this day, they're saying that he only shot once or twice.

I don't know, man. You know, there was gun shots everywhere. And the thing is, his backstop, this was like 8 a.m. in the morning. his backstop were parents and kids walking to school and buses driving by. So we had to aim very, very low on that doorway. In other words, on that, the car door, because if it penetrated through the window, we could kill people behind him.

Right, right. So it was a very... Okay, so you guys just smoked the motherfucker. You know, well, no, we actually didn't. He got out alive. He ran away from us. because all our shots came on the door frame and most of them didn't penetrate,

which is crazy. Wow. So he ran whatever. Later on, he was caught by a dog and that was that. But that was just two weeks after coming back from the DEA and then I moved departments. Yeah, yeah.

It's like... That never had happened in DEA or any other narcotics team, but I could go to the road and it's like... Yeah, because when you deal with high-level drug dealers, it's like these are professional people. You know, you're not going to get in a gunfight, unless you're in Colombia or in Mexico, actively pursuing like a boss. Right.

You're not going to get in a gunfight with one of these guys. Very true. It's only the people with nothing to lose, you know. Very true. So why did you write this book? Tell us about the book. Well, the book basically, it's redefining the 21st century, man. One of the things as a police academy instructor that I saw was that men were not strong coming into the job.

they were just weaker and weaker and weaker. So we started to see that women were stepping up their game and they were becoming way stronger than men. And I'm thinking, well, what happened to the warrior spirit, the mentality of a guy to come out here and do the job properly? So I started a podcast in 2017. The podcast took off. I started talking about, you know, mentality of a man, masculinity,

you know, just overall the concept of living a warrior lifestyle, like a more, a stronger type of man. And the podcast took off. Right after that, I said, you know what? I'm going to build a program or a brotherhood of men who at the very least want to be stronger. You know, they just want to be stronger men. So I built a program that breaks men down

and then builds them back up. We have an incredible brotherhood. And believe it or not, a lot of them are guys, that were drug dealers that were part of Mexican gangs and all that, that changed their lives. And then we have a lot of high-level businessmen in our programs too. But it's just a great mixture of great men. And I figured, hey, I want to write a book about a little bit about my life, a little bit about, you know, my experience as a police officer and how I view life and pretty much, you know, how I believe most men should live. So I divided into 25 principles that I live by. And then, you know,

It's been a bestseller ever since. Wow. Let me show the audience. Redefining the 21st Century Man, Rafa Kondi. Is that how you spell you? Yeah. Kondi. There we go.

Wow, that's awesome. It's a bestseller. Yeah. That's amazing. You can go pick it up. I mean, you get out at Amazon. They only place you buy books. That's amazing.

And then you run a program. Where do the people find that? Well, if you go to man-of-war. Dot, U.S., you'll find everything there. Okay. I run on my Instagram as at Man of War with two R's. And basically you'll find me. Look me up, Raffa Kande.

I'm pretty much everywhere. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome, man. Wow. That's a real, that was a real, like, kind of you turn that you made to become a cop and then a DEA agent and then you're back being an entrepreneur, you know, from finance to law enforcement to entrepreneur. So very interesting stuff, man.

That's great. That's great. I congratulate you and, you know, I guess thanks for doing your best, trying to get drugs off the street. Didn't leave a dent, but, you know, it's like, you know, you can't let it be a free-for-all or else it would be Europe. It would be Mexico. So, you know, like that's what people I think, that's what even me as an immature man didn't realize about law enforcement. like it's never going to get rid of drugs and crime. But if it wasn't there, there's examples of what your country could look like.

It would look like Ecuador right now. So before we finish up, I have a question for you. Yeah. Your interaction with police, how was it? Always nice guys for the most part, except for, you know, the guy that threatened to punch my teeth out. But I was being a shithead. Like, I can forgive that. reaction you feel like it was overall was a, I don't want to say pleasant experience,

but a professional type of experience? Definitely. I tried to bribe the cops. They didn't go for it. I had hundreds of thousands of dollars. I was getting ready to like give these guys to let me, you know, make a run for it. I wish they would have gone for it. But yeah, if I'm looking at it now as like a civilian, I'm like, yeah, it's complete professionalism. But, you know, again, like I'm from, you know, I know many, many, many stories of dirty. people, not even at necessarily a law enforcement level, but like dirty prosecutors. I think those are way more rampant than like dirty cops. Dirty prosecutors, dirty judges. And those people have those people actually have the power over human beings' lives, right? Like the cops,

you guys are just the front line people that bring the dirt bags or maybe not off the street, you know? So, yeah, I still. think it's the best system of justice in the world, but it makes me nervous. It makes me nervous seeing, you know, I think it's, things are fraying a little bit, but I look at everything in terms of like a larger macro lens. Like our countries, the problem is it's, I see things through the lens of fiat currency. I'm a big bitcoiner. But I'd be a gold bug if there wasn't Bitcoin. The problem is that we, our society is crumbling because of the value of our money is crumbling. Venezuela is a society that's crumbled because their currency's dead. Dead. I agree. And so it starts with money.

Go back to the Greeks. Go back to the Romans. They started fucking with their gold coins because the politicians wanted to make war. And they started diluting their gold. The Romans, yeah. And boom, collapse. You can put it's science. It's not like my opinion. It's a fact. So I kind of try to take a more macro view. And that's how I look at politics.

Things are going to get worse. You know, we have a guy who's basically a petty autocrat now in power. He's a, you know, the right wing. The right wing tends towards fascism. And as a pushback to that, you're going to get a left-wing government in three and a half years from now that's going to continue to print money and become more of a socialist government. And that's going to keep moving the dagger further into our heart. And so it's just going to get more extreme. And so there's a big, I hope you're wrong, man. I hope I am too. But I just, I, yeah, I don't

think I am because I'm just looking at the, what history does. It's extremes that are responses to extremes. And it's been coming, it's been moving this way since I was since the 90s. I'm just, Like, I'm old enough now to, like, have some perspective on that. Sure. Like, it gets more, it gets two left wing, and then it gets to right wing, and then it gets way too left wing, and that's going to get way more right wing. So, I mean, yeah, I think, and that's going to affect institutions. And that's going to make people have less faith in institutions, like the police, like

the justice system. So, but no, I think most cops are just doing a job. I mean, obviously there's dirty cops, right? There's there's shitty people in all places and all different fields. But no, in my whole journey on the other side of the law, the cops were like the coolest ones. The shittiest people were the DA, the fucking prison guards, to be honest with you. I've made some friends that I've arrested. I've made some friends of guys that, you know, they were very, very dirty at one point in their lives.

And I, listen, one of the things that I, when I did this job, I never judged people. Like, it wasn't like, hey, you're, you know, you're a bad dude. I just, I never judged people. Right. You know, I'm doing my job. You got caught in the mix of it, you know. And I could tell you many of times where their moms would call, you know, fathers would call. Please, you know, can you work, you know, help me work, you know, my son down to, whatever.

Yeah. or their wives would call. Yeah. Please, please, please. And, you know, there were some negotiations that went on the table with the prosecutors. And, you know, they're asking me to. So, you know, to me, I don't judge people like that. You know, unless you go out there and you're a pedophile.

Right. And, you know, you're a pedophile or you're someone that actually killed somebody blatantly just for the hell of it. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you. Like, you know, it's all, it all comes from larger problems. It all comes back and this is a good way to end the podcast. Why do people take drugs? Right?

It's like the whole king of New York when they ambush Frank White. And he goes, he asked one of the cops, do you think ambushing me is some club is going to fix what makes people take drugs? Like, I'm not your problem, man. Just a businessman. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But it's certainly fascinating to hear your story because we usually don't have. have cops on, but I think you might be the first DE agent we've ever had on the show. So,

so I appreciate it, man. And go check out his book, Redefining the 21st Century Man. Just go look him up and then go take his course. Rafa Condi right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. Thanks again for coming by, man. Thank you, man. Bless.