The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 179: The Weed Warden

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with John Nores and Janis Putelis.Subjects discussed: Cartels growing pot on public land; wildlife poisoning by weed growers; Vietnam War-style punji pits in Shasta National Forest; special ops game wardens; pink death; concealing man tracks with fake cow prints and carpet slippers; Phoebe, the one-in-a-million K9 lifesaver and her 900+ arrests; secret attack commands; 445 miles of poly pipe; DIY dams; Silicon Valley science camp; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. Okay, we're joined by Lieutenant John Norris. Like Chuck Norris. Like Chuck Norris, you got it pronounced different spelling. Right. N-O-R-E-S. A little different, yeah. Author of Hidden War.

Reading that book, man, I was reading the book over the weekend people are going to figure out what the book was about because we're going to talk about a bunch but it's

about like the hidden war is the war against illegal pot growers exactly on public lands yep

and otherwise just around reading it I had like a hundred questions come up and we'll get i want to get into some background on you and stuff but the main question i think that needs to be dispatched right away is like you're retired now right game warden lieutenant right but you're a game warden right you came out of like busting people for not having their fishing license, having too many trout on the old stringer. How in the world did it become your guys' responsibility to take on cartel-backed illegal growers? I mean, why is that not the cops?

Yeah, you know, Steve, that is a great question. And that is the question that everyone started to ask when we got into this. And, you know, like all of us at the table here in the studio, I grew up loving to hunt, fish. The outdoors were kind of the spiritual cornerstone of where I was at. So when I met a game warden, you know, for the first time in college, I'm like, wow, you know, you actually get paid to do this. You know, you're in your patrol truck, you're 13 miles in the back country, checking me and my hiking partner on a lake. And this is fantastic. And all you're doing is you're protecting wildlife, but you're doing it as a solo, solo cop. I remember it was funny reading your bio information that when you grew up hunting and fishing, but we're kind of like,

not really aware that there were game wardens. Craziest thing. Yeah. So I, I, it was, it was so random that I never met a game warden growing up. Cause I passed hunter safety at nine years old. My dad brought me into waterfowl first. Then it was big game, you know, four or five generations of conservationists from both Montana, California, and everywhere in between. And unlike all my colleagues in the academy, when I get there, when I'm like 20 years old, they've been, you know, seeing game wardens since their first deer camp at 12 years old. And they've been, you know, going that path. Well, I certainly would have started much earlier and gone a whole different direction towards being a conservation officer had I met one. That was the first

time I met one. I was actually in an engineering program at San Jose State University in the Silicon Valley and looking at the ROTC Army Special Forces program. Oh, really? And then I'm on a winter break in the first semester engineering school, and I'm camped out 13 miles into the back country with my brother outlaw, my Baja racing partner. We got a pack horse. We don't have all the right gear. We're kind of new to it, you know, and we're soaked.

We hiked all night to get to this lake. So we had an illegal fire in the park. We knew it was illegal, but we had to dry our stuff out. We were pretty wet and keep on with this five-day hike. And that time of year, no one's in the back country. This is a Henry Coast State Park, 105,000 acres, a pristine country, second largest state park in California and all ours. So we were like, yeah, we're in the wide open, you know, like later on where our big hunts would go. And we see this guy coming down on the four by four, thought he was a park ranger.

Turns out he was a game warden thinking we were poaching black-tailed deer deep red because the black-tailed genetics in that park were epic. I mean, I'm talking boot and crock of things that just light us up, right? And so he comes down, finds out we're just dumb kids doing a backpack. We're not hunting. And I've been to zero for two and a half hours on that lake. And my eyes just blew up and my head started spinning. And when he left, my partner, Jeff- So you questioned him. I questioned him. And he's like, I really regret stopping and talking to these dumb kids this long. And I was done.

I went back as soon as we got out of the woods and I changed my major to criminal justice and biology and learned what a game warden actually did. I said, that's what I'm supposed to do. So I believe that was divine. It was like the heavens parted and there was your answer. You know, I mean, non-cliche, but seriously, it was that random. Had I not met him, I would have been on a different path. Did you catch his name? I did.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was Henry Coletto. He was a county game warden, not a state game warden. But he later was one of the guys I patrolled with when I got back home many years later. Oh, so you wound up running into him. Yeah, we worked together. It was fantastic. So that's how that went. So, but keep going. Yeah, so. The story gets crazy. It just doesn't make sense, right?

It doesn't make sense. So when I got the job, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to bust guys spotlighting deer, taking too many fish. You know, I wanted to do hunter education and train kids. I love teaching, did that early on in my career, developed into teaching super early, did all that stuff. That's what I envisioned game wardens should do. That was the traditional role. And then fast forward to, I started in Riverside County, way down in Southern California and wanted to get back home to the Silicon Valley. I did that in about 1995 and did all the traditional stuff in my hometown area, back in Coe, where I met that game warden, patrolled there. Everything was great. And then in 2004, I stumbled, with a tip from a high school buddy of mine that was now in his master's thesis at San Jose State in fisheries biology.

And he was doing a three-year study up a real pristine channel at two creeks where there's steelhead trout, red-legged, yellow-legged frog, real pristine, you know, threatened endangered species. And he hit me up one day in late spring, right after trout opening, and he said, hey, John, this is weird. One of my transect creeks is completely bone dry. I've got dead fish, dead frogs, but I'm seeing a bunch of like plastic and debris and stuff down at the bottom of the headwaters and something's not right. And keep in mind, guys, these are the headwaters

of Coyote Creek, which is one of the last viable steelhead migration trout streams in the Silicon Valley where they went Pacific Ocean all the way up and came to spawn. I mean, these fish were so threatened at the creek which is one of the last viable steelhead migration trout streams in the silicon valley where they went pacific ocean all the way up and came to spawn i mean these fish were so threatened at the time we only had a couple thousand of them left in that part of california they were like valued at like thirty thousand dollars of fish by the feds so it was pretty sensitive so i grabbed grabbed my buddy and i said okay jump in the truck i'll be with you early tomorrow let's go up to the drop off i want to drop into the canyon and see what it is.

And that whole thing to me was, okay, there's got to be a farmer diverting for, you know, agriculture because it was, you know, kind of not a real wet winter or, you know, maybe it's someone diverting a stream with development, which is what we normally see, what we call stream bed alteration violations that we did a lot of in California. So that was always your groove. That was part of your mandate to look at that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

It wasn't just hunting and fishing enforcement and, you know, the poaching versus the legitimate conservationist hunter doing it right. Like all of us, it was environmental damages to water pollution, development, getting into creeks, big housing projects, commercial development. You guys are involved in, you guys are not involved in, uh, just general environmental infractions would be considered under your enforcement. Right. And the bigger things when it comes to stream alteration, when it's really heavy impacted from developments, it gets into heavy misdemeanors, felonies, civil fines, very complex environmental investigations that people didn't realize game wardens did at the time so we still go down to this canyon and we go and find this water hose basically diverting what was left of that creek and that's why it was dry three miles below

so i grabbed my buddy put him behind me he's an unarmed biologist and civilian like diverted like how like basically they uh they dam up the creek and this is a small tributary this is a headwaters of a steelhead channel so they dam it up they put a water hose in it and they're piping the water somewhere. And it was kind of weird because it was like a one inch black poly pipe, which we later learned is the cartel's main method of what and all of a sudden, you know, we go 200 yards down the Creek and there's the start of what was a 7,000, you know, plant marijuana plant cartel grow that had been in play for probably five, six years. No one had any clue what was going on there. That's why that's, you know, I said, I'm like boiling over with questions, right? Keep in mind, you got to walk me through, like, how is that possible? That's what I was asking myself, you know, and I still, to this day, after doing 500 plus of these missions and spend the last 15 years of my career dedicated to the kind of the special operations side of what it took to catch these guys and deal with them safely.

It's baffling to think that, and keep in mind, these guys doing it, you know, I mean, this isn't, you know, a legitimate enterprise. These are cartel gunmen. They're classified as deportable felons, you know, I mean, this isn't, you know, a legitimate enterprise. These are cartel gunmen. They're classified as deportable felons, you know, south of the border. They're on watch lists internationally because they've got histories of narcotics trafficking, murder, you know, environmental destruction, human trafficking, assault, you name it. And those are some of their best growers and they're heavily armed. So these guys have already been imported here illegally, smuggled across the border, and they've embedded- You found they're smuggled across the border to do this job. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, exactly. Exactly. And as we get further into it, and hidden war really

goes into what we learned later on since my first book, War in the Woods, of how easy it is for them to get here, how involved business-wise the infrastructure of the cartel organizations are, and how many are really spread out through not only California, the epicenter of the weed part of what they do, but the methamphetamine production nationally, human trafficking, you know, the synthetic heroin fentanyl that's poisoning a lot of people and killing them. There's certainly environmental damages to our public lands and some of those crimes, but the poison cannabis thing is what is just devastating. And we'll, we get more into that, but yeah. So, but back to this.

So you guys come down and you say it's 7,000 plants, 7,000 plants. Can I ask a quick question too? I want to know why it's poison cannabis. Oh, we're going to, it's we're going to talk. Okay.

Yeah. Wait for that. And, and I can wait. Yeah. Well, no, no,

you, but, but yeah, let's get to that right away. Yeah. Because you, yeah. Why, why are you saying it? Cause you're not using it like a euphemism.

It's not a euphemism at all. But hold that thought, because I need to get this, though. Yeah. How many acres is 7,000 plants? They were spread out over probably four or five acres on that particular grow. And if it's on public land, how are there people not every couple days wandering through here? That's a super good question, because what they do is they're on a lot of public land areas, but some more remote tracks, like they're going right into deep canyons that most people don't go into in a park that are just hiking recreationally.

But you know, who's running into them guys like you and me, all of us here that are going for that really pristine trout stream. We're doing a deep back country, you know, deer hunt, and we're going to go to a water hole and we're going to backtrack tracks and we're going to look for drops, you know, off season, all that stuff. And so either no one finds them because it's an area of public land that might not be easily accessible. Only the hardcores get there. And so it's anglers and hunters that find it, or it's a guy like my partner that was doing a bio study. Who's a hunter himself and just happened to be in that Canyon all the time and they were kind of keeping out the public for this study area so he was like oh he was almost

facilitating the secret in like unintentionally unintentionally and he was in there this was like the third year of a five-year study he was doing for this thesis and you know loved the critters and was freaked out so none of us had any idea when we walked into and they feel it had been there it'd been hiding there how long? At least five years. And I'll get into a little more in the story as to why we knew that. And when we go down the canyon and we see the plants- And don't forget Janice's question. Yeah. We're going to, yeah, the poison thing. And we see, I should go back to that because

there's so many issues we're just getting fired up. No, we're getting back. We're getting backed up already. We'll dig on it. I love it. When I talk poison cannabis, I got to make a very clear distinction between the legitimate cannabis industry that's doing, you know, they're growing dispensary quality marijuana that's legally used by recreational users where it's allowed. Like California is a regulated state now where I just retired from. And Montana is a regulated state where we're all from here. And our home state of Michigan. Home state of Michigan. There you go, Steve, right? And so, you know, and actually what we're going to get into, and I go into this at the very end of Hidden War, especially chapter 10, when I talk about moving forward with regulation and

what are the issues on things like public land, environmental crimes, but we actually have the legitimate cannabis industry making pure product, calling us their earth warriors. My tactical unit called earth warriors. I mean, it's kind of not the term I would normally think of from a special operations background running with retired seals on my team and SWAT guys and snipers. And we're all hunters like myself, but they like what we're doing, you know, and we like to support they're giving us and where it was used to be handcuffs. They've turned to handshakes with the legitimate side of the industry. That's really trying to do it right. And they are environmental stewards.

And we found a percentage of growers all over California that are as deeply environmentally protective as we are. Yeah. You know, they protect their water, they conserve it. So their stuff has to be- They don't put out, as you'll explain,

indiscriminate wildlife poisons. Yeah. And booby traps and all that. Which your book's full of pictures of like dead mountain lions and bears- Isn't that crazy? Littered around these grow sites from them like poisoning wildlife because I imagine it gets into the crops. Oh, it totally does.

And when I go into poison cannabis, that's exactly what I'm saying. These banned toxics that these cartel guys bring across the border. You can't get it in America anymore. It was banned by the EPA 15 years ago because it's so toxic. And the product's called carbofuran. There's all kinds of derivative trade names, metaphos, q-feran, ferdan, but there's all these different derivatives and they have to get it in Mexico because in third world countries don't have the environmental regulations we do, it's still produced. It was designed as an insecticide, rodenticide, I say kill anything aside, to be diluted into like 5,000 gallons of water with

one 12 ounceounce container. It's kind of crystalline. And even that was considered so toxic and harmful if it was put on crops to keep animals and insects and everything off. By the EPA, they banned it. What the cartel growers do, guys, is they dilute it with three to five gallons at the most. So this stuff, two teaspoons, no joke, a big 300-pound black bear comes into a grow site, gets to a plant, and these guys have it all over the bud, all over the flower, all over on the soil, around the plants, and in the waterways directly.

And they'll put it out in tuna cans, like little traps for animals, because they don't want anything touching that potentially $4,000 black market profit plant. So a black bear ingested, and the picture in my book of that big black bear, Steve was exactly that, went in, licked up a couple drops of this that they put in a tuna can as like a little perimeter defense. And she died like a couple minutes later and just keeled over and she was done. And then her 50 pound cub that also was with her, she had a single baby, ingested the same poison, didn't die as quickly. And the other picture that's superimposed in that color section of the book is the cub up in the via the tree got scared went above mama

and died you know strung out about 10 feet above her mother a little 50-pound cub and you know I kind of say it doesn't matter where you sit on the conservation preservation hunt don't hunt animal rights you know where we sit opposite of that nobody wants to see an animal die that way so it's just horrendous no animal should ever you know be poisoned that way it's just it's disgusting and so you know i mean when i present on this and i talk about this whether it's a law enforcement group a kids group a political group a good conservation group like we all here are here you know or go to an animal rights group, talk to humane society, the mountain lion

society. I've been all over those traditionally left group societies and they see that and they go, we need to support your efforts. You know, let's forget where we sit on this spectrum. Let's unify, let's fund this to get the cleanup done that we need to do. Make sure you guys are doing this thing safe because the violence we've been involved in, the gunfights, my partner almost getting shot and killed in the Silicon Valley. We got some stuff we could share that's crazy to see how violent these guys are. Not only to a tactically trained, specialized law enforcement team like we developed into. But what if you were, you know, you were on a private, you know, public hunt doing it DIY style.

And you run across this, you know, I mean, most hunters are equipped to deal with it and get out safely. But we've been up against some pretty crazy guys. And so that's the poison cannabis we're dealing with. And the problem with that stuff, what's so nasty about it is this issue doesn't get out, you know, really far enough. I mean, I wrote the first book on the topic back in 2010. We did three years of reality TV with Wild Justice, the first game warden reality TV on National Geographic, which was. Cause it showed you what game wardens do, the diversity of what we do. We're not just checking fishing licenses, you know, and closing the gate and locking, you know, locking up a park at night. We're doing some, you know, legitimate diverse law enforcement stuff, but it exposes issue a

little bit. So we've been talking about it for 10 years. It's been on worldwide television. It's been in one book now hidden war comes out and I'm still shocked by how many people will get the new book. We launched it in NRA annual with Oliver North being a primary endorser of it. And Ollie's a hunter himself. I didn't know that. And after he read it and endorsed it, he told me, he goes, I had no idea. I spent my entire military career fighting foreign drug problems from infiltrating our domestic lands. And we got a team of game wardens and other law enforcement guys and especially you guys had to get specialized as game wardens to fight this and protect our wildlife too and being a hunter and he wasn't even fully aware so when you look

at that aspect of it um the growers are still insulated not only in california but in the rest of america and not enough people know about. So the poison cannabis is going all over the Midwest on the black market, the Eastern seaboard, all over the country, and being sold on the black market. It's being sold as a pure product. It's getting into that black market that isn't regulated versus a legitimate dispensary. Yeah, that was one of the things I wanted to ask about,

and we might as well try to dispatch with that early on, is we were out turkey hunting in Californiaia not on public land but on private land friend of mine's place and i was telling her and we noticed the piping all over the damn place you were on one yeah well because they have her my friend a woman i went to graduate school with her family had her dad had run cattle and he was a large animal vet. And he started – he got older and kind of got away from running cattle. And so some of their properties went, like, relatively unvisited, and no one was actually working the land. And so there wasn't a constant presence out there.

And I brought up to her, like, you see this pipe in weird places. And she goes, oh, yeah, it's just people to sneak in to grow and at this time weed was already legal in california so it raises the question why if if you legalize weed in the state why is there still an incentive like how did it even come up the people are still secretly growing and why why would they need to grow on public land? Why don't they like buy property and just grow weed? Yeah. And then why do you need to sneak in somewhere and do it on the sly? It's, it gets down. That's a, that's a really good question. And everybody thought that when we regulated in California on prop 64th recreational did all these

medical laws, other States did it too, that, okay, that's going to stop the black market. Now it's legal. It's no big deal. And is like a really common argument. It's the main argument you hear for legalizing drugs. It totally is, brother. And here's the problem. The backlash, what people don't realize when you dig deeper into it is once you regulate, there's inspections, there's permits you got to get, there's fees to that. You're now on big brother's radar, right? You're on the governmental radar. So you're going to be inspected. You got to keep your private land grow site open to inspection. Your dispensaries are open to inspect. Can't use EPA banned poisons.

Yeah. Can't do that. Can't use, I mean, the, the purification standards on cannabis legitimately now, and I'm gonna take California as an example, cuz I just came from that state and was part of seeing regulation and, you know, kind of trying to preach the message of, of hey guys if we're going to regulate great that's the choice of the voters that's how the legislature is going to go regardless of what my thoughts are on it that's what we're going to do let's just do it right let's make sure we break the back of the black market and don't facilitate more black market well in california is an example when they legitimized recreational marijuana and then all the new medical laws started to come in. They took public land trespass growing, which is 99.9% cartels from Mexico from a felony to a misdemeanor. And if you were, now check this out, guys, chew on this fact.

If you're a juvenile and a lot of these guys are juveniles because they're coming up generationally to be trained, you know, they're under 18, but they're formidable. They're growing. Now that's a misdemeanor to an infraction for these young growers that are with, you know, a guy that's a grow boss, we call him. And, you know, he's, he's vetted. And these are guys that, you know, they're not just random guys coming up trying to make a quick buck because of the living conditions in Mexico. These guys are vetted grow bosses that got their vettedness by doing this successfully diverting water hiding it from the federales being successful at getting you know big harvest out and not getting busted then they get brought up here because they're basically vetted journeymen that know what they're doing and they're good a lot of them you read the stories in the book and see some

of the pictures of the booby traps and the camouflage that you know the same that's normally the the like the punji stick traps isn't that crazy yeah yeah so uh hold on i got one where's the weed no no i got he's got fish where where is it going are people in other people in california they're going to a dispensary and they're thinking they're buying like healthy high quality clean whatever regulated inspected weed and they're buying stuff that's laced with wildlife poisons or is it going to other states altogether it's sometimes being just like you said Steve it's sometimes being utilized into dispensaries you know and and masked in that fortunately not in super large quantities that we've seen out there but in California but a majority of it just goes back East and gets into the black market,

middle America, illegal States, illegal States, middle America, where kids have no access, medical patients, seaboard States like Chicago, New York, it's going everywhere. And I mean, we produce 90%, you know, where I came from in California is 80 to 90% of the entire nation's black market. Marijuana represents private land or this public land thing. But the thing that's also interesting is even though weed is the one of only six Mediterranean climates on the globe, so it's great growing. That's why it's the weed state. And we February to almost December outdoors that still have a cartel presence just for the cannabis side of what they do is still like 25 to 27 states where it's to a lesser extent being grown on public lands by the cartels, but definitely not the magnitude

that we saw in California. So yeah, I mean, the biggest thing is, is if you're gonna, if you're a cannabis user, be careful, you know, you don't want to be one ingesting toxic poisons that eventually will kill you or the people that you're associated with but also i don't think anybody that's a legitimate cannabis user wants to be complicit in buying into that black market especially from you know a foreign presence that's you know not regulated not supposed to be here in the first place i don't think people think about it too much man they don't they don't i don't think i know you guys wait to say something

i don't think people think about that because I don't think people that buy people that are buying hard drugs out of Central and South America I don't think that they're really cognizant of the bloodbath that they fuel they're not if you told them they're not going to care you can take it outside of drugs too

take milk for example do people really think about where that comes from or sort of like no but people like but but I don't think the dairy farmers are going down mowing each other down and killing hundreds of thousands no tens of thousands of innocent individuals not not at all but there could be environmental damage there could be other sure ethics you know but it's different man like you to buy definitely different to buy hard drugs

out of Central and South America you are My point is that people are very easy to sort of gloss over. No I gloss over. I'm not passing judgment. I gloss over all kinds of stuff. Real quick why why

grow in California instead of just growing it south of the border and bringing it up? That's a good question. That's a great question. And basically, they're kind of doing both. They're still bringing it from across the border, and they're doing it, smuggling it across the border, getting across fairly easily, whether it's tunnels or however they're getting across. And also running what they call panga boats, one-way boats that go around the Mazatlan point and come in and deposit six thousand three to six thousand

talks about that too yeah we got into pangas and it was something you know being a being a more of a you know an inner border kind of woodsy kind of not on the water that much you know domestic unit kind of running all over we did a lot of you know ocean stuff we just had to because the last 10 years we've been seeing more and more of these panga boats hitting the shoreline. And, you know, last we heard as we were working with, you know, different federal allies and Homeland Security and Coast Guard, you're getting sometimes 20 of these boats a month and we might catch two or three of them. So, and then they're making, you know, that all that poison weed is coming in from offshore trucks and, you know, runners are there to pick it up. The distribution center is very highly structured, good corporate model. They have distribution centers, stash houses, and it's,

it's gone in minutes to be distributed all over the country. And I mean, you know, you're not only getting that, you're getting some meth imported and then you get the human trafficking thing. Cause if you can get that weed in off the coast, you can bring in a threat, you know, you can bring in somebody off this coastline from anywhere. So there's been the domestic, you know, the, the, the extreme terrorist groups linked to the cartels as potential threats and evidence of that. And that gets into a whole nother level of public safety, not just poison weed coming in, which is still horrible. So yeah, we got it coming in from Mexico, but if they can produce it here, it's that much less of a burden and cost than having to try to pay what it's going to take to get these guys across safely,

knowing they're probably getting a few of them are going to get caught. Right. And then they're going to lose that load. Whereas, you know, if they're embedded here and they're really good growers, those guys are embedded for generations. And until they get caught, they might go 10, 11, 12 years. We've caught some guys that have been at it for over a decade and embedded in, you know, Palo Alto, Fresno, big city populist centers, completely here illegally, fake IDs, not citizens, but just running operations. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Back up for a minute to, you were telling a good story about this guy that was doing the he's working on steelhead right and all of a sudden his stream runs out of water and you guys going to investigate and you find a a grow operation right walk me through to the end of that because i got a question but maybe maybe you'll answer it okay so then what happens like you're like wow look at this look at this here we are this is an eye opener didn't expect this we keep cruising down you know kind of tactically and carefully like we're stalking animals quietly because you know the spider senses are tingling something's wrong and then we see two armed

growers you know one with an ak and one with a pistol in his hip both having machetes and they're walking up the creek and they're tending their plants and they're getting closer to us and i'm like they're sort of them out working armed they're working armed like they're ready they're not like when someone finds us we'll be like yeah i'm guilty it's it's not that situation at all steve the situation and when we get further into the team that developed and why we develop the canines and every time we go into a grow site when we run across growers it's more it's more often and odd that they're not armed than when they are. And if they don't have the gun right on them, then the gun's being dropped or it's, you know, in camp next to them. But nine times out of 10, it's on them because they have a lot to lose.

They at least have a pistol on them. Some of them have a slung assault rifle as they're working in the garden because, you know, they know law enforcement could be around the corner. They know what our dogs are doing. But when we're going down that canyon, I see these guys armed. I have one assault rifle and an unarmed civilian and no way to radio out. And I'm thinking, if this gets Western, I get into a gunfight right now, this is going to be the worst day of my career. This is not what I was prepared for. Probably going to be the end of your career. Might be the end of my career. Yeah. Because game wardens aren't notoriously going in on stuff like this. Now, granted,

we went in not knowing what we were going into, but we hid, we hit the cut bank. We just laid low. They drifted by, they didn't see us. And then when I saw how the water was diverted- Dude, were you just nervous as hell? Oh, I was freaked out. Yeah. I mean, my adrenaline dump, like that first buck that I missed- You got some biologists with you. Yeah, I got a biologist for you. He was savvy. He was a hunter. Oh yeah, but I'm still a man. You gotta be like- Even he was like, we looked at each other-

You got to be thinking this is not protocol. Not at all, man. When we finally cleared that and we knew they were out of the way, we just looked at each other. Those eyes were huge. And he looked at me and I looked at him and we kind of nodded. I said, watch your six. We're going to get out of here carefully. We marked it. And then that was the time I turned on and started to know narcotics task force teams, met the sheriff's department, met guys from their marijuana eradication team that I later became very close to. And War in the Woods, the first book goes all into that, where that bond was built because game wardens are seeing all this environmental crime, but now we're getting this backlash

within agency of like, you know, traditionalists that want to do what we've always done for the last hundred years. But that's, that's, that's what I was driving at myself. There's a question boiling up. It's like such a trope of detective movies where there's a crime, and then the local cops, right, but then the FBI, they come and they assume jurisdiction. Yeah. So you see this, and you're like,, oh my gosh, there's these guys and they got an illegal grow and they're illegally diverting water and they're armed.

How does the local sheriff's department, the state police not say back off, Sonny? Yeah. We're going in hot. We're going in hot. How did you guys make it that it's the game or how did it it's not logical that it would be like oh the game wardens will go do it well it was it was a long process and it was it was it was met our efforts of getting involved in that was honestly met with with mixed feelings you know like one hand is the group i brought in

and i go into this in detail in the book, but I'll share it and just go a little further now. All the guys I brought into that mission, there was a narcotics task force that we were working with that led it because they had jurisdiction for that area. Now we could have led it. We had jurisdiction. Game wardens have more jurisdiction on more properties than any other federal, local, or state law enforcement agency because of open fields and animals belong to everybody. So we can go all over that wherever there's a wildlife impact or wildlife or present that could be poached or poisoned. But, you know, it wasn't our forte and we don't step on toes. We don't go in trying to be something we're not.

But I found it and we're pretty good in the woods. You know, we all hunt and fish like you guys and we know how to get in quietly and we're good at tracking and, you know, being careful with our sound and our scent and stuff like that. So, um, we got a big group of narcotics task force guys. We probably had 30 people in this mission and where there was, um, CHP, California highway patrol, there was state parks, there were narcotic police departments, and there were a couple tactically trained SWAT deputies from Santa Clara County Sheriff's office. And the reason I'm going to highlight that is because what happened on that mission and my first mission and what I saw that went right and all the things that went wrong. And I saw how the emphasis was on not really

catching bad guys. It was, we're going to go in and, you know, we're going to bring this force down the canyon. We're going to sort of try to sneak up on them and maybe catch them. But if we don't catch them, we're going to let them run away. Don't chase them. You could get injured chasing these guys down. And then we're going to cut the plants and we're going to destroy the plants. We're going to airlift them out with a big payfuck helicopter, um, federal funding for grants to, you know, fund that part of the mission was all based on plant count at the time. And I'm going back to 2004. This is, you know, there's a historical bill that matters for hunters everywhere. And I saw that and we had the opportunity and myself and another game warden were kind of the bird dog leads of getting these guys in quietly leading it.

And then we pull it, went to the side, let their tactical unit kind of come in like a little SWAT element or SEAL team, do their thing. And I knew that if I had been running the mission different, I wasn't going to Monday morning quarterback because it wasn't my mission. Now I was just the guide since I found it. We could have caught these guys easily and safely. And then when we arrived. And you didn't catch them that time. Oh, we didn't.

We didn't. They were, they were yelled out to put their hands up 50 yards away and they're hidden in their camp. And, you know. And they what? They booked? They booked. And nobody wanted to chase them, but me and one other game warden and one other sheriff's deputy, it was a sniper and a woodsy guy from Pennsylvania. Yeah.

One of my closest friends of this day. And he's, he's, he's highlighted in the first book, especially, um, we decided to give chase and it was futile because they had a big headstart on us. You know, this is way before canines we had dialed in on tactics. So we're chasing these guys a good half mile down the canyon. They do get away. And I went, well got four water diversions. I didn't know the magnitude of this pink poison, El Diablo, the carbofuran, you know, that we call it pink death because it kind of looks pink pasty. It was all over. So I had no idea that we were all around some super hazardous material. We didn't have nitrile gloves yet, any of the protection gear that we now have that we know about. And all that stuff was left out there. And I'm like, are we going to clean

this stuff up? We got a big old military helicopter. It can carry like 4,000 pounds. And I mean, can we take not only the plants, but maybe all the camp trash, all the poisons, the pesticides. And then they keep a real clean camp, I'm guessing. Oh, yeah. They're pristine. I mean, they're all earth first, back to green, you know. Pack it in, pack it out.

Oh, really organic, you know. They make the organic growers in California just go, oh, this is, we got to step up to this level. So it didn't get done. And what was funny was that was- You're saying the cleanup didn't happen. Well, the cleanup didn't happen. The apprehension didn't happen. And we were kind of like considered at the time by that task force of, all right, you game wardens are good in the woods.

Stumble around, do your thing, you know, hunting guys. Get us down there. Just get out of the way, let us do our thing. And I thought, well, federally in state, I'm sworn by the state, right? I work for the governor directly and we're sworn federally. And I'm like, my mandate is first to protect public safety. Second thing is to protect the wildlife waterways and wild lands of not only our state, but any state I'm in at any given time. I said, I've done a lot of game warden work now for 10, 15 years. And I've seen a lot of poaching, a lot of environmental destruction, stream bed stuff, but one guy poaching a trophy

buck or taking, you know, five, too many trout. And what I saw this one growth site doing to the waterways and everything. It's trivial. And I'm like, and plus this isn't like the guy that just caught an extra trout, you know, by mistake or got a little greedy, you know, with his kids fishing one day. This is a foreign entity here illegally with no respect for our wildlife, wildlands, humanity in any way from what I've seen. And that's no exaggeration. And they're embedded and just making millions and millions of dollars of black market profit, destroying our land in the process and threatening anyone that comes in to do that. And I thought, well, I don't see any more important job for a game warden to do based on how we're sworn. Now, granted, I was already more in the tactical element, working with local teams and military and getting into SWAT training and sniper rifle and all that kind of stuff. And so I had an affinity for going that direction, but not just to be a game warden trying to do that, but to apply it if it could ever be applied. And now I saw this type of environmental criminal that was very dangerous and you can't just check them on your standard patrol route, walk in a Creek in a

standard, you know, it just doesn't fit. It's not safe. Um, so we had, we were met with mixed, a mixed bag of emotions, you know, and kind of, kind of responses. Um, but because of Santa Clara County Sheriff's office and I got to give a shout out to them. And by the way, they're all fans of the show. They wanted me to say hi to you guys. They all listen. A bunch of them saw you when you did that live broadcast in Sacramento recently. Um, and you'll read them. They're all codenamed, but they're all, they're all fans and love what you, and they all hunt and fish, you know, so the right way, but those guys saw what we were doing and they said, you know what, this is crap, man. This whole thing that, because you're a game warden, you're not a real cop or you can't be a special operations guy.

You can't be a legitimate SWAT guy. Let's get together. I saw how you work. You saw how I worked. We could have caught these guys. These other guys running didn't think it was a good deal. So they started bringing us under their wing. And so in 2005, we started doing missions and we started doing them ourselves.

And not as, you know, the bird and bunny cops coming in behind the sheriffs. We were equals now. I was getting called in on planning, giving my outdoor, you know, knowledge and stuff and hunting and tracking and mapping out things. Yeah. Like I can imagine it's like how to get in and out of, right? Yeah. Just like planning a hunt. Like how to get in and out of areas. How are you going to get in out of the areas? What ridge you're going to drop down on for your camp? How to recognize a place you're never going to get through. It's just like hunting. I mean, you change four-legged to two-legged. It's pretty done similar.

All the navigational plausibility. How long does it take to walk somewhere? What you can do in the dark and can't do in the dark. Just on and on, right? What would be a good glassing point to set up and find them? Seriously. Across the canyon. Good observation points.

Yeah. When we got our stiper unit, delta unit, wrapped up up in this new Met team that the second book goes into, it was, you know, it wasn't about getting on people all the time. Although we did a lot of that. It was about getting overwatch like we would on a hunt to watch a Canyon below knowing where they were working and getting our team in safe, but seeing trends and changes. Yeah. You tell that story about that. You guys had identified an individual that you knew to be heavily involved, but he never came around. Right. And you talked about just sitting, watching, watching, watching for a long time.

You didn't want to raid the site until you could validate or prove that he was in the know. Yep. Right? Yep. And you talk about just sitting and observing at an intersection out in the woods. Yeah, the big kingpin that knew once he was seen there, it was conspiracy and he was responsible. Right. Yep. And you talk about just sitting and observing at an intersection out in the woods. Yeah. The big kingpin that knew once he was, once he was seen there, it was conspiracy and he was responsible and he waited.

That was a two, three month deal, you know, and that was with the sheriffs that I mentioned. That was with some good partners. Did you guys have, once you got rolling on this, did you have a never ending list? Like, like a never ending list of sites that you could never even get to because it takes, because, because, because of the danger element, you can't just go do five or six in a day, right? Because you got to make a plan so no one gets hurt. So it's inherently slow. By design, you're a hundred percent right.

It's inherently slow. You can't just find one one day and grab a team and run in and hit it the next day. I mean, there's so much planning. Because someone, as you know very well, someone gets shot. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the problem we would have is in the early days when we weren't a formalized team and didn't have the capability to plan one ourselves,

it was me and a handful of game wardens that were tactically savvy and trained, really good at the traditional stuff, but they were starting to see this in other areas of the state and gravitating toward it. So I would bring them down to Silicon Valley or I I would be pulled up to say Northern California. Um, if our, if our boundary district chiefs would allow the move and a lot didn't, you know, they're like, no, no, no, that's a marijuana case. That's, you're going to be a garbage collector if you want to clean this stuff up. And that's not a game warden. That's for the, that's for the cops. That's for DEA. I mean, we had a lot of, you know, internal chiefs and captains that just didn't like it. And nothing against that because it's a traditional job of what we got to do.

The traditional stuff is still important. I mean, we can't stop doing the traditional game warden hunting and fishing checks and being a steward out there. But this was now becoming the biggest environmental damaging crime we were seeing throughout California. Yeah, yeah. Because everything starts in the headwaters and it's everything that happens downstream. So it took a long time to get to the level where we were accepted, we were equals, we were co-planning missions. And what we were doing is we were lending the help to arrest and apprehend and do all the dirty, arduous work of eradicating these plants in 100-degree weather after an all-night raid. But then we were starting to bring these agencies into, hey, guys, if we're going to do this, help us. You've got a helicopter here today. Okay. It's a thousand dollars an hour

to run this blade. It's going to disappear. We're never going to have a helicopter back in this Canyon. Can we take three, four more hours, bring in more people or just do it ourselves if we're not wrecked and let's bag up the trash, let's restore the Creek. Because if we just leave and winter hits all that crap's washing right into the creek it's just a continual environmental train wreck so you guys do it all in one fell swoop we're doing it all in one fell swoop like you come in apprehend suspects like that lingo yeah apprehend suspects good um do whatever that involves right yeah collect Collect evidence. Yep. And then start picking up garbage and bottling up. Cut a bunch of nasty plants and stack those up.

And then go into like hazmat mode. Yeah, go into hazmat mode and do a cleanup mode. And, you know, a lot of agencies don't want to do that. And when you left, it was like that thing was never there. Yeah. To some extent. To some extent. And you had to tear out irrigation.

Tons of it. Yeah. The black pipe, even though that's not the biggest poisoning element out there with all the other stuff, some of that pipe was running three miles to another county to get water for one grow. No exaggeration. We tracked one three miles one day. Is that all brought in on just people's backs? Yeah. This is a crazy thing, bro.

These guys, I will give them an A for effort. They are hard workers. They're the toughest guys. They're bringing in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of yards of this pipe on their backs. They are hard workers. They're the toughest guys. They're bringing in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of yards of this pipe on their backs. They're running loads, a hundred pound loads continuously to get all their grove, the big five gallon propane tanks, all the clones of marijuana, the seeds, the camping gear. And they can't just go park at the local trailhead. Oh no, no. They're going to take crazy routes. They got to take crazy routes. And a lot of them,

some of them are, you know, as close as three, 400 yards from a $5 million home on the edge of- You're kidding me, right? No, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. Especially where we started in Silicon Valley. Yeah, because a lot of that stuff, like having spent some time in the area, a lot of that stuff is just like impenetrable.

Yeah. Like brush choked hell rush. Yeah. You know, coyote brush and they go- Like around here, it wouldn't fly. People would see it from so far away, but there it's like dense. It's dense. Yeah. It's dense. Yeah yeah and deeply cut very much yeah very much but they can get away with a tooth you know they could be two three hundred yards away from an affluent

community in the silicon valley a kid's science camp we've had that and then they can be eight miles into a crazy hike into the back country you know almost above alpine level yeah didn't you guys i think i feel like i saw this in your book that, uh, you guys found some grow sites on designated wilderness areas. We did. We did. We had a, we had an issue with one of the coolest missions I ever did. It was like a top five in my career.

And it was definitely one of the top couple while I ran. I think that's prohibited on a federal wilderness area, right? I think so. I can't, you can't ride a bike. You definitely can't ride a bike. I don can't. You can't ride a bike. I don't think you can grow cannabis and poison bears and kill golden trout and stuff like that. But yeah, we did. We got in some wilderness areas.

And we were finding this stuff on grows. We did one thing over on the eastern Sierra of California, and there's a subspecies of Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep called the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep. They're all up there in that lone pine area, you know, below Mount Whitney. And there's not a lot of them. There are about 600 at their, at their peak population and something our agency had put millions and millions of dollars into, you know, to enhance. And then in 2017, we had just an excessively heavy winter. So those glacier snow packs were, you know, they, they stayed up a lot longer and the sheep were pushed really low while they were getting pushed into grow country. And these guys, these cartel guys were coming up from LA and coming up on the Eastern Sierra,

getting in that real pristine golden trout wilderness, you know, kind of above, above a timber level. And they were putting grows at like 9,000, 9,500 feet. And we're up there, you know, doing scouts and recons and we find grow sites and it's, you know, I mean, what, 9,500 feet. And we're up there, you know, doing scouts and recons and we find growth sites. And it's, you know, I mean, what is one, what's the value of a bighorn sheep that there's only 600 of them in the world, you know, and then there's black bears. And so we're finding black bears poisoned. We actually found a massive, beautiful 17 year old ram, you know, just the Sentinel of that species lion killed. But the only, of that species, lion killed. But the reason he was lion killed was he had ingested some of those poisons.

He was only 100 yards from a grow we found, and he ingested some of those poisons and just walked off and was in the process of dying. So he was an easy target for a cat. Yeah. So the cat got him, which, you know, you see at the end of a sheep's life, of course, but that cat's probably poisoned and dead too. We never found that cat. But when we started to see that, we said, hey, there's no just raiding this and, of course, but that cat's probably poisoned and dead too. We never found that cat. But when we started to see that, um, we said, Hey, there's no just raiding this and, you know, chasing guys

around and cutting plants. This crap needs to get out of here. Now there's sheep all over in this area. And, you know, they're even more sensitive than like, you know, threatened, endangered steelhead trout. There's far less of them. So we're, we're talking a great species, you know, and just in that part, and people wouldn't think that would be in California, but that was a California species in one area. So I learned a lot more about a different species of sheep. It was super cool being a big game hunter. I was just blown away. And we spent, you know, several part of a good month and a half up there doing missions like that. It was cool. How do most of the sites get reported? Are people, do people out recreating find them?

Do you guys find them yourself? Do you find them from the air? It's a mixed bag. We find a bunch from the air. We can do a lot with Google Earth. Now Google Earth's gotten good enough, just like when I'm learning a hunting route on a big game hunt. We're looking around, and we're looking at six months ago, six months now in a traditional area. And really, if you find a south facing slope, sometimes other facing slopes where there's a water source, you know, through the summer, one out of two times, if we go do a scout and we don't know anything's out there, we don't see

anything from the air. There hasn't been a tip. It's maybe not even a historical grow site that's had grows there in the past. We just go, okay, this area has a good, you know, annual stream, and it might be really really trickling but it's enough to you know fortify marijuana and it's in the right area and it's remote and it's never really been hit let's go scout it sounds like hunting it's hunting yeah there it is exactly it sounds like that was a reliable way to find it like this would be likely habitat i am not yeah one out of two times we will find a grow doing that the guys that are in the game and it is i mean it's kind of fun you You're hunting it. You know, if you find it, you get, you know, you get the Easter egg that day. You're like, oh yeah, now we got a mission. man track signs off of a main hiking trail and want to just go explore where does that go?

Or they see that water, you know, that, that semi-annual blue line on the topo map or on their GPS screen. And they go, you know, I just want to go check that out. I mean, I'd be hunting today. I'm scouting or I'm putting a camera out on public land or whatever, or whatever. And they're checking it out and they're like, oh, oh, there's plants. Oh, I hear, oh, that's a guy with an AK-47 um tippy towing out you know weapon up and then calling us right away hopefully so you mentioned uh there's some pictures in your book that are interesting you just talked about man tracks yeah do you guys found i know what you're going to go to yeah you have like trail cam images of guys with carpet right oh yeah strapped to the

booth but also fake cattle tracks yeah like a slip-on cow print yeah you strapped to your boot yeah it's so so you can make like a cow print when you're going places you're not supposed to be yeah and the funny part about that was we were getting duped for about a half a season we were you know on a lot of public land like forest service lands national forests they're still cattle leases right so these growers are realizing hey these you know some of these teams are getting really good at finding our man tracks, even if we try to brush them, they know where, you know, the water is. So they're kind of bisecting our tracks. So these guys would put those fake cow hooves, you know, on the bottom of their feet, tie them off, go

clumping around with the cattle, get up where the cattle are, then take them off. Well, you know, a couple hundred yards into the dense stuff, like you just mentioned, Steve. And then, you know, we're looking around for man tracks, knowing there's a growth somewhere up there and all we're seeing is cattle tracks. And then we caught a guy and he had that in his backpack and we were like, clever bastard. I'm like, I'll give him another A for effort. But yeah. And then the felt bottoms on the, you know, on the feet, they're, they're, they're definitely dedicated and diligent at counter tracking and staying camouflaged. These are hard to find. You know, they're, they're not mad, to find um you know they're not mad

they're not half they're not half ass in it by no means in terms of people finding sites are there areas where there's such a presence that a place gets a reputation among local hunters and anglers or other users where it winds up being that the idea is that it's not a good place to hang out that's's happened, especially in California. Yeah. Yeah. What we call it, we call that a DTO traditional grow area. And DTO is just short for drug trafficking organization.

It's basically an official term that you see in the book. That's a law enforcement term for basically cartel groups. A majority of any drug trafficking organization, we're referring to a cartel group, mostly out of Mexico. And we do have those traditional areas and these guys will go in, they'll set up a grow and they'll not be successful at it two or three years. And then it gets caught, you know, we bust it or some agency does. And then they go another half mile up the Canyon on the same water source and they put another grow in because they're smart enough to know that the resources we put into finding these and the fact that we don't find near all of them, and there's only so much money, there's only so many guys

dedicated to doing this type of work with all the other law enforcement stuff we got to do. And we said it before on the game warden front is one example. You know, there's less than 400 game wardens as an example that I just came from my old home state of California and less, and there's 12 of us on my specialized tactical unit with two canines. And granted, those teams are getting bigger, but think of all the other impacts to poaching. We got to do with the traditional stuff, commercial wildlife sales, black market, ivory, you know, you name it, the traditional poachers doing their thing. So these guys know by just doing the odds and playing the numbers, if their particular sector has 10 or 11 grows out in the forest and they lose even eight of them, two or three of them are going to make about $30 million profit.

Oh my gosh. And so that gets to the attrition of, hey, if we put enough out there, we're not going to get, some of them are going to make it. That's what I wanted to ask is how valuable these are. Yeah, they're valuable to the point where let's take an average growth site, and this is the lower end of the average size, say 5,000 plants, you know, that's medium to medium small from what we were used to seeing. And I've, I had some of the Silicon Valley foothills and in Northern California, when we were statewide that, you know, reached 50,000 plants and covered like two football fields

and they were spread out over a mile. I mean, crazy, but 5,000 plants at approximately $2,000 on the black market per plant, that's kind of conservative. And if you do all those zeros and multiply, you know, a 5,000 plant grow is still up in the several millions of black market profits if we don't interdict it. So not only is there a bunch of money involved, but our whole thing was, man, let's get this stuff, not let it get too big because we don't want any of it harvested. And they dry it, they process it, they weigh it on scales, actually in the growth site, they put it in one pound bags and they take it in a sea bag and it's ready for sale. They just got to get it out of the woods, get it to their pickup car, get it to a distribution center, and then it's nationwide. And we know it's all poison, carbofuran. So it comes out of the woods, ready to sell.

Ready to roll. In their camps, very organized, digital scales, you know, vacuum bags of one pound, wrapping material. It's ready to go. And they hang it, they dry it, they trim it. They're very efficient at it. It's like working away. It's like working away. It's like going into an indoor grow site in a dispensary, except it's, you know, the bizarro version of that. It's nuts.

I remember one time I was scouting for muskrats in Michigan one time, and I was out in a cattail marsh and found a grow site that was— In Michigan? Yeah, but it was all five-gallon buckets. Yeah. It was five-gallon buckets laid out in a cattail marsh. I mean, no one in a million years would find it if it wasn't for someone looking for muskrat huts. Yeah, you were going deep, man.

But I'm saying, there's no one camped out there. But in looking at and going through your book, I mean, it's like you guys kind of take for granted that people are living in tents and stuff, guarding, guarding, working like a lot of these places have residents. Yeah. It's most of them do the big ones that get above 10,000 plants. You can't like, especially if they're way into the back country, a grower crew can't like hike in all day and all night and tend it and water it and tend those plants before they start drying out or before they get impacted by animals or they got to move for sunlight or whatever and then leave and then come back. They live in the site. And these, some of these complexes we've seen are so elaborate.

I mean, you know, Adobe's cut into the side of hills and camouflage like little Ho Chi Minh tunnels. I mean, there's a lot of, I make a lot of references to, you know, I had some of my family veterans in the family and relatives, you know, Vietnam veterans, I'd show them pictures or videos. They'd see some of our TV on this and see the pictures in the book and go, I thought I was back, man, on the, you know, Northern Vietnam border. This is crazy. And I go, yeah. And we, we would literally walk five feet from this thing before we'd see something wrong in the brush on the wall. And then it's dug out like a tunnel and it's you know like a hooch that houses four guys there's guns in it there's a kitchen that's all hidden um processing areas it's so wild it's crazy but explain the i alluded this alluded to this earlier explain the like the punt like the hell's the punji pit for i mean who like how's

that that's not really really gonna save your grow site No, no see did like a so a game warden falls in and gets like impaled on sharp sticks I mean, what do they think that then everybody's just gonna leave and not come back. Yeah. Yeah I mean, it's like it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense Other than you look at the mindset of the other criminal you're dealing with it. Hey someone's coming into my grow site And I don't want an animal. I don't want a person. I don't care what harm I do to them, but I'm going to do anything I can harm them to such a level that I'm going to impede as much progress as they make in their element of what their mission is. So when we started to see punji pits, like in 2015, and

that picture was from a national park, that was, that was, you know, that was in a national park, national park, whiskey town, Shasta County. And that was, that was Brian you know, that was in a national park, national park, whiskey town, Shasta County. And that was, that was Brian Boyd, one of our premier canine handler and canine Phoebe and a bunch of guys from Shasta County Sheriff's office. Um, and that was when we had our full-time team. So we were up there, we were all over the place. And one of our point guys, a really good guy from Shasta County Sheriff's office that we work with almost stepped in that. And our canine Phoebe, because she's been trained to detect so many other scents, our apprehension guru dog,

she sniffed up on the band poisons and alerted because that, you know, that tarp was so camouflaged, she was going to walk right into it. And what they're doing on those punji pits, like in Vietnam, they used to, you know,

the Viet Cong would dig the punji pit for our soldiers. You put human excrement, right? Human excrement, exactly. And then what these guys do is they take the band poison. They take the pink death. But they play that same game.

Yeah, but track what I'm saying. Yeah. Where is the win? There's no win. Where is the win in maiming or killing a person like that? It's just viciousness. There's no game. Because it's not like you're like, oh, we got him.

Now we'll continue to grow weed for 10 years. Yeah. It's like, you know what? We hurt this guy. We slowed down his operation. We got a piece of him and we're going to just move out. The other reason they put those things out there. It's just like kind of bizarre because like.

Yeah. And the only other advantage they have is if you think of, they put those punji pits just like that, the little bear trap with the tuna can or snares. They put them on the edge of the grow or on the edge of a camp. So if a team falls into that, they're not, those guys are going to lose the grow, but they're probably going to get away. Because now we've got a. Yeah. Now you got a whole situation. Now we've got an officer that just went in and we formed a perimeter. We're looking for guns. We're not going to continue to assault that grow. And if we do, it's going to be, you know, several minutes, if not hours later. And what's going to happen now is those guys have escape trails and they, they're good at what they do and they get out quick.

Not going to save the site, but you might, it might buy you the time to get away. And, and we like to catch them because we know they're so vetted. They're going to get out of one grow and they're going to be thrown in another one within a day it's that you know it's like journeymen moving around on a contracting job okay you're not needed here but you know we need you 20 miles to the north on another one that we're we're doing it's that same mindset model tell everyone about uh bringing dogs into this yeah i love it when you talk dogs, man. Coming in the office, seeing all your dogs, I got a little yellow lab that's retired as a companion canine. She's nine. She was a companion canine with me at work for six years. And she wasn't going to bite any cartel

growers. She's going to lick them to death, but she could sniff it out. But I'm going to talk about the dog development, which really started completely from scratch. So, you know, you have, you have law enforcement dogs that are working in cities and they're working out of cars and they're, you know, they're very close to backup and doing traditional law enforcement canine stuff. And those dogs are amazing, save our lives all the time. And then you got war dogs, you know, that my SEAL team buddies have worked around, you know, and they evolved that whole canine program. I mean, relatively recently, even our military special forces guys, um, it's been about a 20 year process, especially in the last 10 years, it's really changed. We were the same way on met, but we were having to take kind of a, tell me what Matt means.

Matt. Oh, you didn't even do that. Yeah. We're the marijuana enforcement team. And the marijuana enforcement team was the, the official term of the tactical unit that we built a pilot program out in 2013. And I handpicked all the right guys from across the state to do just that. We weren't doing traditional work anymore of the hunting, the fishing, you know, the traditional poaching stuff where, um, chief Mike carry on was so, you know, uh, concerned with this issue and he believed in us enough to say, okay, we're going to take some heat on this politically. And it's not, you know, might be met a little weird in inter-atter agency, but I want to test it. So you guys build it and we'll do three months

in summer of 2013. I'll get to the dogs, but this, this is relevant if you bear with me. And in 2013, six weeks into this thing, since we weren't just ad hoc all over the state, hodgepodge in it with different agencies, suddenly that we, the training was better. You know, I got better equipment for the guys. We were all becoming a cohesive unit, like any small unit in special ops does. Um, we got the support and the funding to go out and be boundary lists. So we didn't have to worry about, Oh, now I'm into Northern California boundary. It's not my district. I can't go into this, you know, this captain's territory. Now we were just working for headquarters for the chief and going anywhere we needed to just like a small unit should be, you know? And in six weeks we were documenting everything. We were far safer. We were

catching a bunch more guys. Our dogs were tearing it up. We had two great dogs and we thought we're just running out of money. And myself and the captain that co-founded the team with me, we're meeting with all the chiefs to like beg for money. And can we keep going? We want to prove ourselves by the end of summer. And they said, Hey, we've been talking before you guys got here. We're done with that. We need this full time by January 1st, 2014. So build it, get the testing protocol. It's open to everybody, but obviously we have some vetted guys that are really good at it, test them objectively. And, you know, we had to basically build the first special operations force in fish and wildlife in our 150 year history, test the guys and know,

Hey, you're leaving patrol. You know, it's one way. And if it, if it succeeds, you're great. If this thing fails, well, you're going to go back to patrol, but it's going to be different. You know, I don't know how welcome you're going to be. And, um, we just hit the ground running from 2013 until I retired. Now it's running great. And it was just, it was amazing how much stuff we were not documenting, how much poisons we were taking out that wasn't getting logged to know the amount how much oh i got hundreds of miles of black poly pipe steve guys uh you know i'm when i retired i mean you weren't you weren't you weren't cataloging your not enough yeah no no i mean everybody your impact everybody was doing a little different because like like brian boyd with canine phoebe he'd be working

with shast all the time apprehending a bunch of guys with, you know, with that team, tearing a bunch of plants, taking a bunch of poisons out, but nobody was doing the documentation that was getting back to us. And then I was doing my thing with Santa Clara County Sheriff's office. And I was, you know, honing tactics with them. And we were developing things without dogs at that time, but I wasn't documenting anything. I was along for their ride because we weren't running missions. So when we started as a full-time team, we were running missions. We were equals if we were using other agencies or being with them. And our different approach was we're a three-pronged team. Okay. Met's going to arrest and apprehend, you know, as aggressively as we can safely with dogs, without dogs, we're going to hunt these guys.

We're not going to just go in and fly the helicopter in and drop in, scare them away and cut plants. Secondly, we're going to cut plants safely. If we can, now we're aware of the poisons. Sometimes we couldn't cut them because they're too toxically tainted. They need like 14 days just to like dissipate a little before we can go in with the nitrile gloves, the face masks, the proper protection equipment to even touch this stuff. So we don't contaminate everything. So we take the plants out. That's phase two, but phase three that we would push on any agency we would help on a mission, if MET was going to be involved, if I was going to send my guys there is, you guys got to help us reclimate. You got to help us clean up the damages, restore the waterways. I want the wildlife content to be pristine when we leave. And if we can't do it that day,

get it on the books to do it in the near future. If we don't have a helicopter that day to pull it all out, Steve, then what we're going to do, we're going to bag it in really, really heavy contractor bags. Get it in an area where it can't erode into the stream, you know, through a year, through a winter with all that fishery and all those wildlife drinking off those water sources. And we'll come back with a chopper. You guys even came back with mules. We came back with mules. Yeah. We had some places in wilderness areas or we didn't have a blade. You know, funding was always an issue because the most expensive part about these missions is a cleanup.

So it gets to horseback. That's expensive. Very expensive. Because of manpower or equipment? Manpower and equipment. You know, and you need a helicopter to pull this stuff out. And a lot of times you need a lot of blade time because if it's a big grow, you're going to have, you know, 10, 11, 12, sometimes 20 loads of 600 pound loads of a net.

And you're going to have to fly it to, you know, a disposal area. You're going to have to come back. So it's a big cost and a big cost that we're constantly reaching out to, you know, conservation friends to help us out. Foundations that we have. Well, you'd go get outside money to do cleanups we have

to yeah huh one of the one of the groups that we've been working with there's a really good group called the the california um wildlife offers foundation and it's like you know ex-chiefs and you know affluent donors that are conservation patriotically oriented and they formed a foundation about 10 years ago and just bring money in for the, Oh crap moments. Like, you know, we lose a canine to death and you know, a canine and all the training that goes into a canine. I mean, that's a, that's a 30, 40, $50,000 endeavor. And then the tactical gear, our team needed night vision, you know, battle helmets. I mean, I built a sniper team that had never been built before. So, you know, you start getting into weapons like that besides normal patrol weapons and there's no budget for it,

and it's already unconventional anyway. We had to get outside sources to fund that, and we had a lot of good help on the canine front, especially with our new dogs and keeping our dogs safe and that equipment we needed from our Wildlife Officers Foundation to good effect and some other places too. Yeah. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the onx club, y'all. So get into the dog, like how you use the dogs. It's pretty interesting. The dogs are... Risky for the dog. It is risky for the dog.

On a couple levels. And as you probably noticed from the book, we've honed tactics a little bit because our dogs are starting to get hurt because these guys, these cartel growers are aware of what our dogs can do. Um, the dogs are trained to be as quiet as they can go in with us. Um, if we see that they have a weapon and they're pulling that weapon, we're going to deploy a dog. We're not going to try to take that guy head on and get into a gunfight if we can avoid it. We had had, I think we had about four gunfights up until we really got the dogs honed. And they were happening more and more frequently because a lot of times, not every time, fortunately, but a lot of times these guys don't want to give up.

Even if they have a whole tactical unit of highly trained officers on them with big weaponry. So they're keeping their shotgun up. They're pulling that pistol. And then we have to do what we got to do to stay safe and, you know, solve the problem. Um, but it was always close calls, close calls, close calls in 2005 in the Silicon Valley foothills in August 5th of 2005, a date that, you know, burned in forever. That was the first officer involved shooting we had in a cartel grow site. And it was the first officer in the nation that had ever been hurt or hit by one of these growers. It happened to be my young game warden partner that I had not only trained in the academy,

but he had come on to be a partner in my squad in Santa Clara County. And one of the best game wardens we've ever had, great guy. And he wanted to go on a raid. And I'm like, absolutely. I'm working with the sheriff's office. This was the pre-Met days, right? This is going way back. And we're hiking up in there and it was harvest time and it was an area that had been going eight to 10 years of growers from working in a remote area, public land, right above the Silicon Valley, the tech capital there. And, um, the guys were, the growers were there

and they had armed gunmen just defending the grow during harvest time. I mean, hardened cartel guys from down South and full camo SKS is a, AKs, pistols. No shit. Wearing all the patron saint monikers on their hats and belt buckles. And tactically, they were set up right in the site. You know, they used the early morning light to their advantage.

They had a little dugout parapet that they could kind of hide behind a brush wall. And, you know, we're looking, we're scanning, we're doing everything we can. We're going through this grow site. and we hear one shot ring out. And they only got one shot off, fortunately, because we all reacted the way we needed to before the gunfight got any further. But sadly, that one shot hit my partner through both of his legs. So he was hit with an AK-47 round through his right leg and then it exited his left leg. So he was bleeding out of four holes for the better part of three hours. And because no agency had ever been attacked like that from these guys, air support wasn't really coordinated with their administration. No one knew who would

come and help us because he couldn't hike out. So we needed helicopter lift. Some helicopter teams wouldn't come in because they said, Hey, that's a hot zone, man. We're not a military bird. You know, we're like, we're, we're, we're a fire, you know, we're a Cal fire and we're a Huey. And, you know, if that's not a secure site and you just got shot, he's going to shoot us out of the air. We're gonna have more casualties, which made sense. But my partner, my brother, you know, is bleeding out to death and he's fighting three hours and he's fighting shock. And he was all, all, all fight, you know, he wasn't going to quit. Um, and, and it was his, it was his will to survive and his will to stay in the game that really kept him alive. But we realized that day when he got air rescued and finally made it out as he was going into shock and survived and recovered and actually is a lieutenant now in California doing great work.

Thank heaven. You know, just we really lucked out on that one or we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I don't know that we would have continued to do this work. Like you said, what are you doing? Um, that right then told me there's gotta be a better way to detect these guys, you know, and, um, certainly we can go face to face. We can do that. And that was right before literally like a couple months before we started doing an apprehension canine program. And that was before Brian Boyd, a warden buddy of mine and a longtime teammate who I brought into Met when we started, that's when him and canine Phoebe were made it up when she was just about

a year and a half old. And they had to kind of trial and error these apprehension tactics of going in and keeping her quiet. And, you know, it's hot, we're going on long hikes. And then how do you identify a bad guy, not on an open field in a concrete parking lot or in an alley or in a building, right. Or near a car, but through all that brush. And you said it before, Steve, how choked up that terrain gets, that's 90% of our mission. So you guys, what we're dealing with is we're going in and she's got to see what that target is. We'll usually see the gun we're hiding. We're laying in wait, just typical hunting situation. And then, um, when we go to make that announcement, we got to get close enough that we don't lose our suspect and we got to deploy her knowing that we got to get on that dog quickly, because

if he pulls a gun or a knife or anything on the dog, the dog's going to get hurt or we're going to get shot at. Or so you're like creep up on the people. We creep up on the people we creep up on the people we spend some we have literally spent five hours moving 20 yards and watching them and just like so you hear them talking working you hear them talking working or they're processing or they aren't quite up out of camp and you know you don't want to you know break cover for safety just just things that you naturally got to do and and there's been a lot how tight do you like to get for you? Spring the trap, you know?

You know, buddy, it all depends guys on, on, on venue. It all depends. Yeah. Cause I was reading one time you guys, you guys were looking through their tent window. Yeah. Yeah. One time, I mean, literally it's been good morning, not coffee I'm delivering, you know, and you're just right there. And sometimes it's been open field, you're in some sort of meadow, there's a processing area and you know that they're getting antsy. The dogs get antsy and sometimes it's, you know, 50 yards. Yeah. Well, it needs to be close.

It really needs to be close because they have the advantage. I mean, they know their terrain. They have escape trails. They walk it morning, noon, and night. They know every sound. They know where the animal bird sounds are. They know when something makes a sound like, you know, from a good hunt that, you know, that blue jay, that stellar jay that just burns us down. You know, or it's a raven here in Montana or a pine squirrel or something like, oh, man.

Yeah. On that white tail, it goes, ugh, little sucker. Same thing. They know every sound. And so nine times out of 10, if a team isn't really honed at taking their time and taking a long, slow tactical stock in, they're burned before they even get to the grow. They get to the grow and, you know, there's a pot of food cooking, there's tracks, you know, you don't see guns. Usually they take them with them, but that's all they take.

And so it took a lot of years to go, okay, how are we getting, this is a real, this is a very formidable adversary to catch. And then the challenge came up like a hunt of a, you know, real nice animal you're spending your lifetime going after in that experience. And so we would get a little more honed. Okay, well, that was a little too far to deploy the dog or a little too far to make an announcement and announce from cover. And now we're going, oh, that was a little too close

because we got him before he got us, but it was kind of, oh, crap distance. So it just varies a little bit. It's close, 25 and in. And so the dog mostly just goes in to take down the guy. That's its main job? That's one of the two primaries. And I'm glad you brought that up because I would have forgot to cover that. But the other thing is our apprehension dogs are honestly some of the finest.

And we have our other agencies now, local agencies, sheriff's departments, and federal agencies that have incredible dogs that we work with the whole dog thing is really kind of morphed especially last decade but um they're not just going in there to apprehend they're going in to smell because like phoebe is an example what is a great detection dog as much as she was an apprehension dog detection of what detection of marijuana detection of how they smell being in the woods that long and the food they eat they have a distinct smell because they don't growers the growers okay exactly um the band poisons we can train our dogs to pick up that scent of that poison that we can't touch i mean you're talking 44 000 times on that nose of that pup and so um you know traditionally our our apprehension dogs

or detection dogs are trained to sniff abalone, black bear, gun cartridges. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. For poached animals or a guy that, you know. You guys have abalone dogs? We got abalone dogs. That's pretty fun.

Because we're on the California coastline, you know, the commercial abalone deal, you know. So Phoebe was every bit as good. And Phoebe got really amazing at detecting a grow as we get in and detecting men from tracks on the ground or their smell. And then she starts, you know, she starts squirreling up. She gets birdie. We call it, she gets starts squirreling up. She gets birdie. We call it, she gets birdie.

That's it. She's birdie big time. And she, you know, it took her a couple of years to calm down. There were a lot of missed apprehensions because she's running through brush. One bad guy runs, a partner next to hers and camouflage her face painted. We all look the same. And she's like, overload, who's the bad guy, you know, and then miss the apprehension. But when you say apprehension, you mean the dog.

The dog is catching the person. The dog's catching the person. And not to sugarcoat it, when they go to guns, I mean, it's deadly force now. That dog is biting them with all the force that dog can bite them on. Not lethally, but putting enough pain compliance on them, whether they bite them in the thigh, the calf, the shoulder, the forearm. Canines, different canines are wired different to bite different parts of the body. I don't understand the legality on that.

Absolutely. No. Yeah. So the dog knows the dog doesn't attack until, unless it sees a gun. The dog is, doesn't attack until we give the command and release the dog to do so. Okay. Gun or not. So the dog is just running.

Like if it encounters a backpacker, it's not going to maul the backpacker. No, not at all. Okay. So that's what I was trying to figure out. I backpacker, it's not going to maul the backpacker. No, not at all. That's what I was trying to figure out. I was like, how do you avoid just it, whatever, cutting loose on some stranger? So it doesn't do it until you're like there, that individual. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because I always look at it from our, you know, you said use of force and policy types things, you know, and from the layman, well, this dog just sees a gun and goes, man, how does that work?

You know, and, but from this standpoint, about two, three years in Phoebe started to become the dog and we knew we had a, uh, you know, that special dog and we all have great dogs, but we've all had that or heard about that one in a million dog, right? That hunting dog, whether it's a waterfowl dog, an upland dog, Phoebe was that dog. And I'm gonna get into my other, our other dogs here in a minute, but I'm gonna talk about Phoebe because she's not only legendary from saving lives and putting up great numbers, she was as social as my yellow lab. She never been an officer. She was the kind of canine, no exaggeration, guys. We're doing a briefing three in the morning.

We're under headlamps. We're with our group of med guys. We might have other agencies, feds, county guys. We might have 30, 40 guys there. And everybody looks kind of the same. And plus it's dark and we're all in the battle gear and plate carriers and rifles and face paint. And she would go around, Brian, we do a briefing, you know, we brief everybody, our guys on the canines. We know them. We're trained to handle the canines with our handlers in case he gets tied up or hurt,

but we have to tell everybody a brief that we're working with. Hey, this is my dog. This is her name. This is the command you give if, you know, she's on the bite and I'm disabled or, you know, in, you know, sidebar or whatever. And I got to get the dog off or needs to protect me or whatever. What's the command? I can't say, I can't give that away. I can't give that away. Is it a word? It's a safe word. It's a word, but I'll say it off the air. Yeah. So anyway, she, um, and you can yell that word, scream it, yell it, whisper it. She got that good. Not all dogs are that they get kind of wired up, but what she would do is guys, she would go around and hip check every officer.

Look, you're right in the eye. Wait till you petted her. Look you eye to eye and kind of like, I got you today. I know you now. And she would do it in a big circle every time she'd do it to me. And I knew her, she was like a family dog. She'd come and hang out with my dog before missions. And so in all the chaos, all the cacophony and all the drama when it goes down and it just, it gets crazy out there.

If it's multiple, multiple cartel guys and multiple guns or we're splitting the team up and we're in different camps. She never bit a bat, you know, never bit a good guy. And one of those things that if she got a little confused, we just point the weapon in the direction of where she got to go. And she's like, all right, I got it. And she just keeps going. And by the time she semi-retired in 2017, she had 116 bite apprehensions on armed gunmen. And she had 900 more arrests where she bait him and didn't have to bite. 900 arrests.

Yeah. Yeah. So almost a thousand. If you look at one-tenth of those being actual bites. See, how many? 116 bite apprehensions? 116 bite apprehensions and 900 apprehensions where she just got up to him, but they gave up, so they didn't get a bite because they didn't want any part of that. So if they give up, the dog doesn't attack?

Right. No longer a threat. He's in custody. If he puts the gun down and says, hey, I don't want, a lot of them know. Okay, so it's not a given that you're going to get mauled. Absolutely not. No, no. See, we're only going to let that dog execute. That's why I keep being curious about it.

I don't want to dwell on it, but I keep getting curious about how this is received by administrators, the public, whatever. It's like, okay, you got some attack dogs. It's it. It's it. These are pretty sophisticated dogs. They're very sophisticated dogs. They's it. It's it. These are like pretty sophisticated dogs. They're very sophisticated dogs. They're highly trained.

I mean, you look at the way we train our dogs, the way, say, SEAL team buddies of ours train their dogs and how they're, you know, designed and how they're, the mission's a little different, but the level of training, the level of control, the level of restraint, or the level of aggression that needs to be executed when it does, it's the same. We use the same type of dogs that our special forces do for a reason, because what you just said, Steve, is policy on how much force can you use. And you come from a state like California, not only California, but I mean, canine apprehensions are scrutinized. It's not the hardest, coldest state in the world. No, right, right. You know, you guys are chill.

It really is. Like what? Dogs are biting people? Why would you ever have to bite somebody with a dog? So, but to get to that point, yeah, we stay right within the, you know, only use the force we need. And it's not only us with our weapons, it's dogs too. But what I can say, and all those bites she made, and I mean, I don't know of any other dog that's ever come close to those numbers. And that's not a dig, but she prevented so many gunfights when we had her on the team permanently. Once we started in 2013, Brian and Phoebe down to Santa Clara County with my sheriff's partners. And we had two armed guys coming right at us. One's pulling a Taurus Judge. Brian's like, John, I got this guy.

Take my dog. And so Phoebe's biting another guy that's pulling another gun. And I'm like, I guess I'm dealing with the dog now. Because I was his cover and his canine support that day. So I'm dealing with the dog. But that guy that had that gun, it was a Russian Torkov pistol. And Phoebe had him bit and was putting bite pressure on his back calf and he was laying on his belly and she was putting enough pressure on him that he couldn't just pull the gun out real quick and start shooting me in my rifle cover. He was struggling

and under pain. And he got it to right about here when I dove on his back and had she not been there, I would have had to engage that guy. He would have engaged me or three guys behind me. And several of us would have been hurt. And then that's when the light bulb went off. I went, I've worked with you a lot of times with Phoebe, all through some wild justice filming. We did the Nat Geo thing. And we would work together and not catch anybody.

And then we'd go apart with the film crews and catch other people. But I had never seen Phoebe actually do an apprehension, even though I knew how cool she was and how awesome Brian was as a handler in that symbiotic canine handler relationship they had developed. And when that, when it was my life and my guys, and it got so crazy and I was this close to getting another one and having to shoot myself since the first gunfight in 05, when, when Kyle was shot, I was like, we need this all the time. When we're doing this job with these cartel growers, we need this all the time. We can't be, oh, we're going to do it, but we have one dog that's doing this statewide and we're doing it in four different parts of the state. And Phoebe's tied up in Shasta and now we're going to go just rogue it on foot. And we had some other gunfights we could not get out of because we didn't have a dog on several missions. And so when we got the full-time team and how we built it, it was a godsend guys, no exaggeration because I had two dogs. A lot of those dogs get shot?

We've had, we haven't had one shot that I know of, but we've had them stabbed fatally. What started to happen, and I go into this a little bit, as you remember in the book, and I have a couple of pictures where- Yeah, you got one dog that got stabbed, but then recovered, right? Yep. But recovered. And that was one that did recover that got stabbed, but there's several that didn't recover. And they weren't with our agency. They were with other agencies.

But we all kind of took a big breath and went, okay, is there any way we could have prevented that? Is there anything we could have done to change our canine tactics? And, you know, they become, I mean, we're all dog people here in the room, man. They're our family. And they go home with us. They're not just work dogs. We have them as pets from the start and canines, we retire with them. And so, you know, when some of our, our, our allied agency brothers on the federal level, we're losing dogs because these cartel

guys were starting to realize, Hey, if that dog's really far away from the officers and I'm not pulling guns and I suck in that dog and I take the bite, but I got a fixed blade of eight to 10 inches on my hip and I can stab for that jugular up in front of those ribs. I can take this dog out because I know this dog has shut down about 30 of my partner's grows. Yeah. And that team would not have been as good maybe, or in their mind of catching so many guys and really apprehending our main guy or a couple of guys in that grow and not only

shutting it down, but putting these guys in jail and putting the hurt on them. And when they were being that violent. And so if we take their dogs, we're going to slow these guys down and make them less effective. They're not done that way. So we honed some things, and none of our dogs were stabbed fatally. But, I mean, Phoebe, she passed away, sadly, last year at 13 years old. And it was a leukemia. She had been semi-retired, even though she was checked out as a seven-year-old dog health-wise by the vet at like 12.

She was still actually technically deployable. Our administrators, rightfully so, our canine program leads, and even myself and Brian and all of our other guys on the team were like, you know, she has had a historical career, man. If we can get another dog up in her place, she's getting up there. She's like battling the odds of age. You know, it's not common for a 12 year old Belgian male to be out apprehending guys, hardcore still, they're usually done, but she was doing it. So we pulled her and we developed the new dog, which is Brian's current dog, a male, a little bigger than Phoebe. He's doing great work. What's one of those dogs way? You know, somewhere the real lightweight little, little missiles, we call them a little female missiles and males, maybe 50, he's doing great work what's one of those dogs way you know somewhere the the real lightweight

little little missiles we call them the little female missiles and males maybe 50 55 pounds 60 pounds max and then the big ones 80 you know 75 80 so a 50 pound dog can take a person down it's crazy we got we got a little lightweight one working a 55 60 pounder that um just a straight fur missile man i'm no joke you guys are thinking about training up some mountain lions? If we could do what we would, man, that's a good idea. Hey, uh, are people, are people in your community, um, are they miffed that, that you, do you feel that you, that you reveal too much about how your guys, how you guys like to operate by writing a book about it? You know, not so much. It's been one of those things where we balance it.

And our agency, and I was one of not the only, but one of a few, that were kind of targeted by, I'll go back to Wild Justice and the TV thing, because that was the biggest exposure ever, even outside of the book. Oh, yeah, man. The thing for me was, it wasn't about showboating anything game wardens do or what I was doing or what my guys was doing. It was, I've been dyed in the wool 11 wildlife, wildlands and waterways since I was a kid. And when I saw the destruction, man, it broke my heart. And when I saw this cartel thing happen, I'm like, okay, you know, we can take the easy path and the safer path and maybe go do the fishing license compliance stuff.

Or we can dive into this, but here's a problem. No one knows this is going on. We're not going to fight it alone. I don't care for the most whiz bang tactical, high speed, low drag seal team, six lack team doing our thing. We're going to what one tiny little dent in this issue in one part of California, this is going on nationally. And I'm like, and I keep hearing the same thing over and over again, over and over again. Hey, nobody knows, nobody knows other law enforcement teams that are coming up in other States. And even in our own state, having the same challenge. And they're like, can you train us? Can you, um, given presentations on the shootouts we were in one where my partner was shot, we have a whole debrief presentation. I do PowerPoint radio tapes for LE groups all

over the country. So all the mistakes we made and almost got shot and killed. I don't want to see that happen to any of my brothers or sisters. Like talking about that story you had where you had a guy that was down for three hours, right? Yeah, you know, or all of us in the room being out and you guys get hurt. I get hurt hunting, you know, off duty doing my thing because I'm out there, you know, with just my family. So we weighed, do we talk about it or do we not talk about it? And one thing I do in the book, and we did it on TV too, we give away stuff that isn't really super secret. I mean, if you really dig deep, you're going to find it. It's pretty common stuff. I mean, I don't talk about the, the inner team tactics, you know, right now, um, on these broadcasts, I certainly didn't reveal

them on TV, but we got to give up a little to get the message out. The other thing we needed to do, besides getting this issue out was I just felt like we needed to legitimize game wardens everywhere. The thin green line of conservation officers. That's funny. I was checking out your shirt where it's like the, it's like the, what do you call it? The blue, the thin blue line. Yeah. And this is the thin green line. He's got, he's got one of the shirts with the, with the black and white flag on it, with the game warden green. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. You notice that. I've never seen one of those four. Yeah. And that's just, that's the, that's the same thing. It's just, you're looking at rangers, conservation officers, border patrol. You're looking at those of us that are in our wild lands without a lot of support and not to take anything away from the thin blue line because we're all law enforcement. This isn't anything different. It's just showing that as thin as the blue line is, there are so few game wardens per capita compared to our populations throughout the entire country. And obviously, we still have all that traditional wildlife poaching going on that we talked about that we, you know, some of us don't do a lot of anymore.

Yeah, and you're not- And then you got this too. Yeah, you're not acting like that's not important. No, no. I understand that. And there's some appendices sections in Hidmore that you probably noticed where we did a study between the first book and the second book.

It's been exactly a decade. And we look at the population of every state in the nation- And the game warden numbers. And the game warden numbers. And the game warden numbers. And you've got this exponential- They don't change much. Multi-million growth in impacts to our wild lands.

And we've added like 800 game wards nationally in a decade. A lot of those be like, you know, 10 years ago, there was 46 game wards. Now you got 47. That's it. So it boils, it really comes down to sharing what we need to share. To not only, you know, talk about what the thin green line of conservation warriors do nationally, even outside of the special ops stuff, the traditional stuff, but letting all you guys know that our eyes and ears, I mean, we're all

team. You guys are avid hunters for all the right reasons. You're in the woods for all the right reasons. We call you, you know, fellow hunters, force multipliers. You're going to find it. You're savvy around it. You're going to get out safely because you got great skills and you're as pissed off and irate to see this happen on your public lands or even private hunting ranches. California is a 50-50 split right now. When I retired, and Steve, this is, guys, this is an interesting stat. I did those stats as I keep them all annually and I tabulate my spreadsheets.

It was literally a 50-50 ratio of private land, personal ranches that the cartels had infiltrated and public lands. So I could be on one of my buddy's black tail hunting clubs that I grew on, grew up on doing a black tail deer hunt, or I'm doing a spring hog hunt thinking, oh man, you know, he won't be this deep in my buddy and his ranchers and his cattlemen are running fence all the time. And I find a growth site. I'm like, you gotta be freaking kidding me. I don't want to name the place, but I was on this place. It was a big ranch and they do a grow site. I'm like, you gotta be freaking kidding me. I don't want to name the place, but I was on this place. It was a big ranch.

And they do a lot of, there's a big recreation program on this ranch. They run cab, but they also have like an actual recreation program, an advertised recreation program. And when I was talking to those guys, it's a constant thing of theirs. Yeah, it's become literally the biggest hurdle.

They're backpacking in, and this is on a very active ranch property, and they're constantly encountering illegal growth sites that pop up and not happy about it. Yeah, and you hit it on the head to the point where, how much do you want to keep hunting? I mean, how much is that starting to outweigh our, you know, we have dwindling consumptive users in conservation actually hunt in California. And I mean, I go back to my old home state and I say, look, there was so much good resource there. That is a beautiful state. And we're losing, you know, hunting numbers like exponentially. And that's certainly not helping because I go back and one out of two times, even on private land, I'm going to run into a growth site. And I'm like, do I

really want to deal with a growth site today when I'm on one of my few hunts because i still go back i have yeah especially you got little kids and yeah you know problems with the turkey and you know it's a great state i mean there's some really cool hunts out there so we want to we want to counter that as much as possible hey uh i don't expect you to do this out of memory but in your book you have a in the end you have a little bit of a synopsis of how of uh you put some metrics okay around miles of pipe the stat sheet yeah rattle open that up and rattle a couple of those off it's kind of funny to look at the it's kind of funny to look at the list i can't remember where i encountered it in there so so looking at breaking it down like you said the metrics breaking down the stats um in in six years between 2013

and the end of 2018 our team destroyed three million of the of the contaminated marijuana plants all carbofuran contaminated it's three million plants three million plants that would hit that black market and then we uh then we destroyed almost 59 000 or 29 tons of processed marijuana and that's the stuff in the one pound bags with all the poisons on it about to go back East or, you know, be sold in a black market. I, I had forgotten it was that high, actually 29 tons.

Dang. Um, 973 felony arrests and armed gunmen, um, seized 601 firearms during those missions. And I'm sure we didn't get them all. That's a pretty significant. So almost a thousand felony arrests. Almost a South pretty significant. So almost 1,000 felony arrests. Almost, yep. Almost just under 1,000 felony arrests.

And our dogs were a big part of that, making that happen. Are there a lot of the same individuals that are rolled up in there? Are you guys pretty successful at prosecuting people? Well, we're successful at prosecuting them now when we get the environmental crime enhancements. Keep in mind, when it went felony to misdemeanor once legality started in California and misdemeanor to infraction, very few DA's offices would even prosecute these on the local level because they wouldn't get a jury on a marijuana case and take those risks and, you know, convict them. They didn't want to do that. But we would say, wait a minute, you know, they were within 150 feet of a stream or they were using a banned poison. And I'm glad you brought that up.

And they overstayed their 14 day federal camping limit. Exactly. So let's make it a felony again. But Steve, the thing that you just triggered, which is great that I forgot to mention is that banned toxic poison is a felony in the California penal code is one example. So even to possess it, now it becomes a felony. If they divert a waterway, if they block up a Creek, if they alter a stream bed, all that becomes a felony enhancement. So that's how we were starting to get prosecutions even after regulation. I got it. It was working.

But we had, yeah, we had 601 firearms, 450 tons of just general gross site trash. And that's one team of 12 not getting everything and a bunch of other teams that have done other work, other good work that hasn't even been documented. Food packaging. Food tents. Blankets. Propane cans. Toilet excrement in the creeks. Trash dumps.

And if we haven't got it in one year, imagine five years of that with guys living out there for eight months straight. It's a train wreck. They must have to start to hide the trash after a while. They try to. They actually dig big, like, compost, you know, like landfill holes. And we'll go out and see them, and we'll do a reclamation and clean up one. And then all of a sudden, there's another layer and another layer. And the worst part about it, you brought up a good point, is they'll have these holes that are, like, almost 20 feet deep for the next grow site the next year for their trash or for a water catchment.

And they don't cover it up. So animals are coming in and deer slipping into it and going to their death we're walking in we could walk into one on a scout so you have that besides the pungy pits and you know the little little trail things it's something our listeners especially should know about is good but um yeah 450 tons of just general gross site waste and you talk about poly pipe guys before 2.35 million feet or 445 miles of black poly pipe i mean that's more about poly pipe that's like a one inch line yeah that's a one inch line that's how much of that crap we took out how many miles of it 445 so that's one tip of montana to the other far corner

montana that's the whole stretch of california half of california it's crazy um and then we and then 46 tons of fertilizers, 750 gallons of the illegal toxic chemicals. No kidding really. Yep. 700. Yeah. Yeah.

And then 793. This is the one that, um, this stat I think is one that's underlooked and it's important because every time we take out a water diversion, just think what that water diversion was doing. It wasn't only blocking water for everything downstream that you survived, mostly our wildlife or our drinking water, but it was

also poisoning the water to the grow site. And what was, you know, in ingesting that all that wildlife. So, and that's basically 795 water dams we dismantled in that time. And there's a lot more out there. So, um, and then those dams, when you look at the number amount of water they would steal, and we didn't know how much water was really being impacted. And California was in their most severe drought in a century between about 2013 and about 2017. Oh, I remember that. And the whole country was taking notice. Yeah. I traveled there a little bit then. Yeah. And it was, it was just really dry. And so all the all the the cartel growth sites like in the traditional mountains in northern california silicon valley it just wasn't happening they couldn't even get underground water so they were like in the delta

they were doing stuff in weird places but the science finally came out and we determined we were able to learn that in hot arid outdoor grow each plant takes between 10 and 12 gallons of water per day stolen for up to 90 days before it's harvested. So when you do all the, on 10,000 plant growth for 90 days, 10 to 12 gallons, you know, a plant, how many millions and hundreds of millions of gallons of our water was being stolen in our worst drought? Did you ever take a stab at it? We did. We actually calculated it. And the dams that we dismantled were responsible for 12 billion gallons of water. Conservative estimate. That was pulled out of its natural course. Pulled out of its natural course. Whether it was drinking, wildlife, habitat, whatever.

And that was very conservative because that doesn't take into account any of the private land grows that were quasi-legal or maybe not legal at the time. And people were doing it wrong, maybe diverting their own water, but not a cartel public land trespass thing. So that really got the governor's attention. And that's when we started to get teams for watershed enforcement and stuff like that. So yeah, in the West, right? You fight over water. Exactly.

Some quote like that. That's it. I call water is life. I mean, it's, it's gold, you know, it's more precious than gold in, in, in states. And so pristine States like we have here in true public land Mecca of Montana, I always keep an eye out for this stuff. And it's been in this state before, not as much, fortunately, because of the terrain, but the mountain states will get it and they have, and it's just something we got to be careful. Is it a good enough environment to grow here?

Seems like it's a pretty short summer. It is, but it's short. It's a very short summer. The grow window is really tight, really tight. So it doesn't happen often. But up here we get a little bit of that, but we get a lot of the methamphetamine, the fentanyl, and we certainly always have the gun running and trafficking because that's only one element of what these groups do they're doing all kinds of stuff they're on the same organization and you know when they're not growing weed in the summer they're cooking meth in the winter they're doing fentanyl they're running guns and something people don't understand and I didn't know this until the toward the end of my career when we started really embed in Intel circles was that of all the hundreds of millions of dollars of profit these cannabis growers these cartel guys make a third or more of those profits go just to guns and ammunition stolen in America to fight the cartel wars south

of the border because they don't have the ammo and they don't have the infrastructure for weapons. And down there, they're at full on war because it's, it's, you know, it's wild west hands off up here. Fortunately, they want to play nice. They want to draw attention and have, you know, law enforcement or public outrest. And the other thing is they want to keep it as quiet as possible because it's going to hurt business. Hence, one of the reasons we named the book Hidden War. You know, it's just one of these things. Let's try to keep it under the radar, a domestic eco-terrorism thing, if you will. And I'm glad we're not having that here. Our job would be a lot different. But a lot of that is going into guns and going down south of the border so um kind of a little uh eye-opening fact there okay so uh tell people real quick we've talked about hidden war a couple times but but but talk about plug both your books in the best way for people to find you if they get i don't know how much you want to be found but yeah well at least plug yourself plug yourself all right basically to whatever degree you're comfortable no no problem you can get copies of hidden war that's the newest book.

And you can go back and get the old one, the first one, War in the Woods on Amazon. There's an audio book out. I'm going to be doing an audio read. Well, the audio book will be read in August. It's on Kindle. You can get it through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, any major bookstore. You can also get it through me if you want to, through, if you want a personalized copy. I work that out, you know, through my email. And you just get me on johnnorris.com on my website and on Instagram, Facebook.

That's N-O-R-E-S. educate because we were getting a lot of public awareness now, now that I'm retired and out of California, it's kind of cool to be going more on a national level and presenting on the book, doing signings, doing presentations to this stuff with some pictures and video, and just sharing some stories that everybody seems to resonate with, whether they're conservationists or not, you know, kind of a unified front. So just appreciate you guys. One, love the work you guys do. Love what you stand for. Fan myself, my team members are all fans, so they're really excited to hear this. Oh, great. Thanks. And thanks for spreading the word.

It goes a long way. And we are one big team here, you know, trying to protect our wildlife waterways and wildlands, and you guys are stewards of it at the top level. I appreciate it. Great. Thanks for having me on. I didn't ask Yanni if you got any final conclusions. No, I'm good.

Sir. I'm good. You're sated? Thank you. Great questions, guys. Yanni's got to go check on his illegal grow. I'm just joking. Can't think of anything more.

Anything. Open book. I'll share what I can. Yeah, well, thanks for coming on. And it's like, yeah,

I'm glad you guys, you know, I'm glad you guys are out there. And it's interesting. I think one of the biggest, like my concluder is, I don't think people realize the complexity of game warden life. That's it. Like growing up, man, you kind of had like, everybody's just like, you know, you didn't talk fondly of the game warden.

Yeah, it's like, we got to watch our back. Got to watch over our back. He's on our butt. He's always suspecting us. I know. I didn't have that fear because I never met one. But everybody else, it was the same thing. Once you get to a point in life where you're not, where you haven't recently broken a law,

now I see a game warden, I'm like, hey. Hey, I'm your buddy. Because we all went through those moments. I'm not going to say I didn't. But when we were young, I was like, oh, no. Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. Turn the radio down. It's the game warden.

Yeah. Get that first Crossman 760 and you're on every blackbird hunt and whatever else you can. And you're like, oh, is there a limit? There's an on game. Oh, okay. Yeah. You know, bad stuff. But no, it is.

And I really appreciate you saying that, Steve, because that's the thing. The whole thing now for me is, like we said before, is don't simplify what game wardens do. They're legitimate law enforcement officers, no matter what state they're from, they're highly trained and they're out there by themselves, you know, and it was, it was hard enough to deal with a poacher with a felony warrant or, you know, a guy that could get really violent on you. You know, we, a lot of fugitive recovery or guys hiding out in wild lands. That's where these guys that need to stay off the grid, not to go back to prison. And not to mention that most of the people

you go and talk to are probably already toting a gun. They're already toting a gun. The flip side of it is 90%. You got to run a lot of math in your head, right? You got to.

You got to. When I was doing all the traditional stuff for the majority of my career, the cool thing was is that I knew 99.9% of the guys I was contacting,

they were cool. You know, they might have, can we check, I want to check, hey, what do you, what hand loader do you use? That's why I feel like it's helpful to have game wardens and I was contacting, they were cool. You know, they might have, can we check? I want to check. Hey, what do you, what? That's why I feel like it's helpful to have game wardens. And I know a lot of them do. It's helpful to have game wardens that come out of a hunting and fishing background.

Thank you. Because. Thank you for saying that. But you know what I'm saying? Just to sort of have a sense of having a read on people. Yeah. Because people that are going to be like, people that have this thing where they're suspicious of someone like, well, why does he need a gun?

Right. Freak some out. Like that's not the right attitude to have. You got to kind of know who you're dealing with. And I feel like that would be a major advantage. I'm not saying that's the only way, the only path. But I feel a major advantage would be having people who understand culturally the groups of individuals they're likely to be policing in order to make those judgment decisions that you can't explain and teach someone about how to read a situation, reading a person's intents. Yep.

Right? Where someone could walk into it and get a really wrong impression of what's going on or inversely miss things that someone else would have picked up on. Yeah. You hit it on the head. Having known the culture. And that's what we've seen, right? Most of us, at least from my academy, I'm a dinosaur. Going back to the early 90s when I, you know, going

back to like the early nineties, when I started, we all grew up hand-loading, you know, we learned how to use a rifle early. We were taught the respect of it, very comfortable around firearms, like you, like all of us, you know? And, um, then as we started to get to the latter generations of game wardens coming in the last 10 years, and I was, you know, I taught at the academy, a lot of, a lot of subjects and been an instructor my whole career. And, you know, we would get people coming into the job, these young, you know, college kids that have, how many of you guys hunt? Two hands go up

out of 40 cadets. I'm like, okay, how many of you have done a lot of shooting with a rifle? And like six hands go up like, wow. So we're going to teach people to shoot weapons in this. We're going to get them qualified. And then we're going to have to get them comfortable. Like, like you just said, Steve, Hey, if I didn't have that background that we all have going up to a guy with a gun, even that's a cool sportsman. Hey, how you doing? And that rifle comes out. I mean, that's an old crap moment and training past that to get the comfort level. It really is an upward. It's a learning curve that is so steep compared to the traditional guys, you know, that have been on it and gals that have done it for a long time. So it definitely helps.

And it keeps, you know, that one warden, no matter how much experience they have in the field because of their background from overreacting or in some cases underreacting. Yeah. Because you're right. It's a good judge of character. I mean, you know, from your experience, how easy it is to see someone that's really what we call hinky with a weapon or really relaxed. And it's like, Hey, it's another buddy hunter. We're on the range sighting in this guy's not a threat, but it's that fine line. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a tough game. All right. Well, uh, thanks again for coming on, man. I hope people will find your book. It's

pretty interesting reading, especially, uh, that, you know, people from other States are just beginning to deal with this. I'm guessing the problem is not going to go away. Um, unfortunately it's not going to go away. And I mean, there's all kinds of debates on, do we legalize nationally? Do we do this? Do we do that? In chapter 10, I go into not so much solutions because there are no easy solutions, but things to consider. Coming from a state that is a heavy cannabis state on the legitimate and also the dark side, and looking at what has worked and hasn't worked and looking in our, you know, our home state now in Montana, what's worked and not work, Colorado, some others, you know, like

maybe some, your probably experiences like what you got back in Michigan. I think legislatively, we need to really think that if we're going to regulate, we got to let regulate right. And one thing I can say that I get into in this book a little bit without giving it all away is don't go easier on these public land trespass cartel foreign growers. Let's go harder, you know, because there's going to be tax money. There's going to be funding coming in millions and millions of dollars now from legitimate cannabis that are now paying into the government pot that really needs to go back to

this stuff. In California, we're supposed to start seeing those proceeds actually this year from legality that started two years ago. So where we were millions of dollars short and not only able to reclimate 44% of all the growth sites we went in start to finish. Now, maybe we can get to that a hundred percent mark. Maybe we can put double the amount of officers on doing reclamation education and, uh, and just spread the word. So I think we need to learn from our mistakes and not be, you know, so cocky in our position that we're not making mistakes. Hey, we made a lot of mistakes before we formed this team. We made mistakes as we formed this team. And we were, you know,

there were a lot of things we could have done differently. And that's one of the things when we formed met as well as when we do legality, they're almost kind of two parallel courses. Let's just try to fail forward. You know, and one thing I'm doing now and my teammates back in California are, we become very effective, specialized, diversified, but the cool thing about, you know, being more successful or being more effective environmentally, which is great, but 30% of what I was mandated to do as a lieutenant and team leader of the unit was outreach. So it was to do interviews, it was to do podcasts, it was to, you know, if we had to do TV documentaries, investigative news, things like wild justice, you know, certainly there were parameters that I could work within. Um, and, and I think being

retired, I'm glad I met you guys now and not then, because we can talk a little more freely, not to discredit anything, but get, get down to the raw, real answers, you know, of what's working. And I think in what we've discussed today, and you guys have amazing questions. Thank you for those questions. I think we've kind of broke a lot of that down. And I think a lot of fired up outdoorsmen and women are going to think a lot about it. And I appreciate any input you guys have or your listeners do. Yeah.

Thanks, man. Thanks again for coming on. I feel like we could talk all day. But yeah, it's a really interesting idea of widening that discrepancy between the right way to produce the product and the wrong way. But again, we could talk all day. John Norris, author, hidden war. Oh, Yanni's coming in. Yanni, what do you got?

He worked up a concluder. You guys might want to hook up with Onyx and do like a historical growth site layer because those would be some good hunting spots here soon. That would be good. They're right across the parking lot. You can head over there next. Okay. No hunters have found them for five or six years. Get that referral from the meat eater team,

and I might get in the door. They'll have to work up a new icon. I know what it'll be. I know what it will be. There's one on your book. All right. Thanks. Thanks so much, guys.

John Norris. Is that a John Norris Jr.? I'm a junior. There you go. Yep. All right. Thank you very. Yep. All right. Thank you very much. Thanks, guys.

Okay, everyone. thanks for listening again. And if I said it once, I said it a thousand times. Please go check out our feature-length documentary about hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky. You can find it at starsintheskyfilm.com. It is available for streaming and download. Again, do yourself a good turn. Do us a good turn. Stars in the Sky. Find it at starsintheskyfilm.com.

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