The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 655: A Wildlife Agent Goes Undercover

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Ed Newcomer, Brody Henderson, Janis Putelis, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider. Topics discussed: Being a USFW Special Agent; trafficking wildlife; LA, NYC, and Miami hot spots; rescuing species, not animals; caviar trafficking; how the US lists globally endangered species; the Birmingham Rollers and roller pigeons; synchronized seizures; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; the hawk body; public shaming; the "Fish and Wild Guys"; elvers; the IUCN; the World’s Most Wanted Butterfly Smuggler; getting turned in by the criminal; the Queen Alexandra’s Bird Wing; serving Justin Bieber for his monkey; getting ambushed by duck hunters; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up, we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men, 1806-1840, we tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it.

We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters 1761 to 1775. So again, this new mountain man edition about the beaver skin trade is available for pre-order now wherever audiobooks are sold. It's called Meat Eaters American History, The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840 by me, Stephen Rinella.

["The Mountain Men, 1806 to 1840"] This is the Meat Eaters podcast coming at you. Shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We're hunting. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk,

First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. If you listened to last week's show, you heard me and Mo Fallon discussing my new History Channel show, which is called Hunting History. And that show premieres January 28th at 10 p.m.

So you heard us talk about a handful of the episodes on that podcast episode. Now you can go watch the actual damn things by tuning into the History Channel, January 28th, 10 p.m. Eastern, nine central. Do your own math as you work westward. Hope you enjoy it. You'll learn a lot.

You'll have some laughs. You'll be entertained. Check it out. Joined today by US Fish and Wildlife undercover agent retired. Right? Retired, yes. When you came in, I told you don't look retired. Yes, retired, but I wouldn't call myself an undercover agent.

Well, that's what Kryn called you. Oh,. Okay straight up space. U.S. Fish and Wildlife special agent. Yeah. Ed Newcomer retired because tell everybody why I had no idea. Yeah well I've been retired for two years and that's only because all federal agents have to retire when they turn 57. So I hit mandatory retirement. There's no old federal agent. There are some exceptions occasionally, like if somebody's working on a particular case or something, they may extend their retirement so they can finish up that case. I see.

But it's rare. Yeah. You got to come in before 37, you said, right? Yeah, you have to enter the Academy honor before your 37th birthday. So it's not like you can do it as like a second, like you have a career and then have another career doing what you did. I guess you did. That's what I did, but it was close.

I became a federal agent. I arrived at the Federal Law Enforcement Academy literally about three weeks before I turned 37, so I just made it. And now you're retired. Yeah. Yeah. And now you're retired. Yeah. It's kind of nice, except. I'm so jealous, man.

The problem is, you know, you got a pretty good gig. Not as good as you got. Well, unless you're broke. I'll tell you what, being a special agent, most agents I know go right to mandatory retirement because they love it. They love their job. Being a federal agent is most agents I know go right to mandatory retirement because they love it. They love their job. Being a federal agent is awesome, but being a special agent for US Fish and Wildlife Service is 10 times awesome. I was so, my identity was so tied up in my badge.

Oh. It was hard to retire. It hurt. It hurt. It hurt. And I still, I'm very jealous of the, of the people I know who are still agents, because I talk to them and I'm like, oh, that sounds like fun. I wanna do that. I can't. Really, so you miss it? Oh, totally, yeah, every day, every day.

That's why it's fun to come talk about it with people like you, because it's just fun for me to reminisce. And I like making sure people know that, you know, these agents are out there and they're doing a really good job and they're working a really good job and they're working their asses off for people.

But it sounds like, look, just reading from the notes that a lot of people are interested in that job. Yeah, we get, I was never involved in the hiring process when we would hire the national agents, but I was always told by people at headquarters, we'd get, normally when we have a class of new agents, it's maybe 30 to 35 agents at a time that go through the Academy. And for those 35 seats, easily 3,000 plus applicants, easily more. Sometimes, sometimes they just cut it off because they get too many and it's not, it

becomes a burden to, for the, you know, managers to go through all the applicants to find the gems. Yeah, you work with wildlife, carry a gun. Yeah, and is that- A nice gold badge with a buff badge. It's got a fish and a duck on it, it's pretty awesome. Is that part of the reason that you didn't start that job until the 37 years of age?

Yeah, so totally, this is totally straight up. I came out of law school interested in the job. I went to law school and I thought, okay, you know, finish law school. Oh yeah. Yeah. Law degree, great background to be a federal agent, law enforcement in general. And I always thought, well, if I don't make it into the academy or I don't get

hired by law enforcement, I got a job, right? You'll slum it as a lawyer. But, uh, yeah. So I started applying pretty much as soon as I came out of law school. And, uh, what age was that? Uh, well, let's see, 26 and come out. Yeah. I graduated from law school at 26.

Um, yeah. So I applied the first time there were openings. So total I applied four times before I got hired. Did you do the bar exam? Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm admitted. Full on lawyer.

Yeah. I was admitted in two states, Washington and Colorado. And I practiced law for ten years kind of Accidentally because I was waiting to get hired by the wildlife service. Are there a lot of agents who are lawyers? Not a lot. There are some FBI hires a lot but in the service I I'm not sure how many of us are eight or lawyers, but there's there's quite a few it Probably helps you when you're working a case,

cause you're probably able to analyze your evidence and analyze your case from a, from a somewhat objective perspective of how things are going to look in court and what the arguments are going to be. Yeah. I'm making that up. No, that's a hundred percent right. When, when I did practice law, I was a prosecutor. And so what I kept seeing was,

I'm limited to what the detectives are bringing me. So whatever they do in their investigation, they give me their report and that's what I have to go with, right? And every time I'd read an investigator's report, I'd be like, oh man, that sounds like a lot of fun. And I bet I could have done that better than they did. And so when I could have done that better than they did.

So when I became an agent, uh, I kind of brought that prosecutor background with me and I kind of knew, all right, as I'm building the case against bad guys, um, this is what the prosecutor's going to want. This is what they're going to need. This is what a jury's going to need to hear. And this is how we're going to avoid losing on appeal. So it's very helpful to have a law degree especially if you come from a kind of criminal justice background like I did. Did you have a wildlife background? No and

that's why it was hard for me to get noticed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. I finally like I reached out to this special agent in charge who was in charge of the West Coast a guy named Dave McMullen who is just an awesome US Fish and Wildlife agent and I said know, I'm really interested in this job. I can't get an interview. I can't even get a call back, right? And he was very nice. And he asked, you know, send me your resume. Let me see. He called me right back and he said, yeah, I can tell you the reason you're not getting interviewed is there's nothing on your resume that indicates that you have any interest in wildlife.

And, and yeah, it was kind of an eye opening. I don't know why I didn't think of it. I just assumed law degree was one of the educational qualifiers. I thought, you know, that's gonna get me in. So he gave me some great advice. Here I was an assistant attorney general in the state of Washington, but on weekends

I was volunteering with the Washington department of fish and wildlife game wardens and going out and doing whatever they want to resume. Yeah. Yeah. To do whatever they wanted me to do. You wanted the job. I did. These guys would have me out on, on the, you know, Puget Sound middle of winter, pulling shrimp traps so they could check shrimp traps. And that's a hard, that's hard work to pull a shrimp trap by hand. I don't know if you were volunteering. Yeah, I loved it.

I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait to do it. Uh, funny. We've all volunteered to pull a few shrimp traps out of the depths. Yeah, I realize that sounds funny, doesn't it? Cause most people pay to go pull shrimp pots. You've got to buy your license and everything. Um, like what made you want the job in the first place?

Like as a kid, were you into wildlife and hunting and fishing or? I I've never I don't hunt I fished before but I never got into hunting. You just like nature and wildlife. Yeah, grew up in Denver and so you know my my dad mom took us camping up to the mountains all the time and I love it. I mean, you know back in the day we would, the whole family's car would pull over if we saw a hawk on a fence post by the side of the road. So it's kind of ingrained in us. Not shooting at it. Not shooting at it. But, uh, and then that's the first thing I want to get into. Yeah. Oh, sure. Cause this is the thing, Corinne, like the hawks, I gotta tell you, no, uh, yeah,

the hawk pox, but Corinne, I hope other guests aren't listening. Corinne doesn't usually get excited about a guest. That's not true. Okay, Corinne has a baseline excitement for all guests. Okay. Corinne holds a baseline excitement for all guests, but she had a, like a spike, what was that, a spike,

a high spike for you coming on, inspired in part by her, her, um, discovery of roller pigeons and the trouble that roller pigeon enthusiasts find themselves in. And so I want to, I want to get into this just as a way to lay the groundwork for what you, for what exactly you spend your time on, you know? Sure, sure. So hence my joke about shooting hogs. Yeah, no worries.

I'm getting ahead of us, I'm getting ahead of us. I got it. But to answer your question, I was interested in law enforcement from a real young age. I was one of these five year olds that ran around thinking they were gonna save the family if there was a home invasion, you know? So, you know, growing up in Denver, I'm thinking I'll be a Denver cop,

you know, someday. That's kind of what I figured. And then I saw at some point in my life, I realized there was such thing as a game warden and I thought, oh, cop for wildlife, that sounds pretty cool. I'll do that. That really interested me. And then it wasn't until I was in college that I just literally stumbled across a job announcement for US Fish and Wildlife Special Agent. And when I saw that, you know, it's like, oh, that's like the FBI for wildlife. That's what I want to do, right? You get the most jurisdiction, you get the most authority,

you have the most opportunity to make a difference and do something good, you know? So, kind of where I led. And then, did you spend your whole career in LA? Yeah, I did. And that's another funny story because going back to this special agent in charge, Dave McMullen, when he was talking to me about applying

and how to get interviewed, he said, look, Ed, you got to go to LA. And I said, LA? I don't want to go to LA. I'm a Rocky Mountain boy. I want to work in the Rockies. I'm interested in Rocky Mountain wildlife issues. That's where I want to work as a special agent. He said, no, you know, Rocky Mountain wildlife issues. That's where I want to work as a special agent.

He said, no, you got to go to LA. He goes, there's this little, he said, there's this little tiny firecracker of an agent down there, a woman named Marie Palladini. She's a lawyer. You'll get along great. And that's where the action is. That's where the wildlife trafficking is.

That's where all the big cases are. You got to go to LA. Because it's a big port city. Yeah, big port city and a big urban center where there's just every kind of culture you can imagine there. So LA, New York, Miami, if you wanna be a special agent in the Fish and Wildlife Service and really learn

about international wildlife trafficking and interstate trafficking, you gotta go to one of these big ports. LA, New York and where? Miami. Miami is another big one. That's why we need like, you know, a prime time CSI type show.

Hey, I'm all in. I'm all in. I can picture that. Yeah. So can I? I've pitched it before, you know, like NCIS, but Fish and Wildlife, it'd be way better. Oh yeah.

Superhero saving animals all over the world. Every episode they'd be making you rescue cats and dogs. Well, cute little kittens and stuff. Yeah. You know, that's actually, that's something else we should probably talk about. Cause a lot of people who initially apply for the service, they sometimes, not a lot, but some people think that it's going to be about rescuing animals.

And I got to tell you in 20 years of doing that job, I rescued, literally rescued an animal, less than half a dozen times, because most of the time, the animals you're dealing with are, they're done, right? Even if they're alive in the trade, they're not going back to the wild. Got it. And so it's, what you're if they're alive in the trade, they're not going back to the wild. Got it. And, um, so it's, you're, what you're trying to

do is stop the wildlife crime to protect future animals, not the ones you're dealing with right there. So, you know, if you get upset about seeing dead animals or animals mistreated, um, and you can't, you can't translate that into, okay, I'm in law enforcement, I'm gonna do something about this. Um, and you're gonna be emotionally crushed by that, this is not the job for you, because it's not about

rescuing animals. It's about rescuing species, but not animals. What's a case you worked that would help people up top here, that would help people kind of best understand the work you were doing? Yeah, and I'll give you that example, but let me just say that, um, we have agents based all over the United States, right? And so where you're based is going to dictate pretty much what you're doing.

Right. So for example, our agents here in Montana, you know, before wolves were delisted, they worked a lot of wolf poaching cases. They still work grizzly bear cases to determine whether or not it's self-defense or not, or whether it's a straight-up poaching case. Agents in the southeast work on different things than agents in the northwest, right? Because there's different animals there, there's different species listed under the Endangered

Species Act, or there's different animals trafficked. So the experiences between an agent based in Bozeman and an agent based in Los Angeles are huge. Got it. Right? And I have never done some of the stuff that the agents in Bozeman have done. I've always wanted to, but you know, I've never done a grizzly bear poaching crime scene

because that doesn't happen in Los Angeles. Understood, yeah. So anyway, you know, a typical, excuse me, a typical case that I might've handled in LA involved trafficking of some wildlife, whether alive or dead for commercial purposes. And so, you know, early in my career, I worked on a lot of caviar trafficking cases involving

Russians. There's a lot of Russians in LA and they all trafficked in caviar. Not all of them, but you know, the traffic caviar traffickers were Russians. And then, um, you know, I had an insect trafficking case. I had endangered fish trafficking case. Um, so it, it, it's very variable. Is the caviar when you're working a caviar case, is it caviar coming in or caviar going out?

And does caviar coming in matter to you because it's someone else's problem? Yes. Okay. And that's actually a good point because sometimes it's animals going out. And we saw a change in that over the years. When I first started in the early 2000s, we were dealing with mostly wildlife coming into

the United States. So things like beluga caviar out of the former Russian republics, right? So poached there. Yep, exactly. And listed under the US Endangered Species Act. So it makes it illegal to import or export. I got you. Yeah. That makes you. Yeah.

That makes sense. Yeah. So that's how we would get involved. And the United States is kind of unique because we do have the Endangered Species Act, which lists animals for protection that don't live here. And not all countries are like that. We have taken an interest in helping to preserve the world's, you know, important wildlife tigers, for example, right? And we don't have tigers here in the wild, but they're listed as endangered,

uh, under our law. So it's illegal to, for someone to kill one or move it around. That's never occurred to me. I had no idea. It's kind of neat, isn't it? I never thought about that before. The, we, we list exactly a fish in Russia. Exactly, yeah. And so, yeah, the idea is, you know, we want the entire world's environment to be there for everyone. When I worked in Africa as an agent,

a lot of times Africans would push back on me that Americans are too pushy about conservation. And I used to tell them, I'd say to the whole room, I'd say, how many people have been to the US? Very few people would raise their hand. How many people want to come to the US? Everybody raised their hand. And they'd say, well, if you come to the US,

would you like to see bison? Would you like to see a bald eagle in the wild? Would you like to see a bear? Everybody raises their hand, right? Same thing, if I ask all you guys, hey, you want to go to Africa and see some lions? Yeah, we'd all be on a plane tomorrow, right? So we want other countries in the world to protect

their wildlife so that we Americans can go there and spend money to see it, hunt it, whatever. Um, but you know, we want them to protect that stuff, you know, so we can go. But we're going to protect it here in the U.S. so people from other countries can come spend money in the U.S. and see it. And it's just, I think you, everybody in this room probably appreciates that wildlife has an intrinsic value, right?

It's just something we enjoy seeing, stalking, trapping, hunting, whatever you do, right? But we want it to stay there. We don't want to use it up. We want it to be there. by seeing, stalking, trapping, hunting, whatever you do, right? But we want it to stay there. We don't want to use it up. We want it to be there. So fish and wildlife plays a really important role in making sure that, uh, species around the world remain wild for us, all of us. Excuse me. I'm going to cough from it.

Tell me about a roller pigeon, which I had never heard of before. Yeah. So a roller pigeon is a, it's not a wild animal. It's a domestic pigeon. It looks just like the pigeon you'd see at the McDonald's parking lot, really. But they come from Birmingham, England, originally, and all roller pigeons are descendants of the original Birmingham rollers.

And what, what they are really is a bird that's bred to have a seizure in flight. I've had a lot of conversations, I've had pet pigeons, I had never, this is totally new to me. Yeah. Really? It was to me. There's a bird that has synchronized seizures? Well, I know that I've told you my story that I shared with you before we started recording before,

but I know we've had the conversation. Not on the, I feel like we had it on the podcast about these pigeons. Listen, if someone told me. Is there another name for them, other than rolling pigeons? There's a different type of pigeon called a tumbler, but the tumbler really does its tumbling on the ground,

which is kind of weird. But no, the ones that roll in flight, they're rollers. What do you mean they're having a seizure? So that's the only way I can describe it, is that while they're flying, if you're watching them, and the guys and gals who are involved in roller pigeon hobby would disagree with me, they would say, we train them to do that.

They don't train them to do that. Okay. It's just a little piece of corn. Sit, jump. There's no way they're training these birds. No, they're breeding them to have this behavior. And if you watch them, they'll fly when a roller pigeon hobbyist or, you know, competitor is flying their birds. They fly in a kit and a kit is about

15 birds. And they'll basically, they fly in an orbit above your property. You let them out and you let them out when they're hungry. So they fly, but they're not going anywhere because they're gonna come back and get fed. And they fly in an orbit together. And usually when they make either a right or left-hand turn, the lead bird, there's usually a leader out in the front, will be

have a seizure. That's the only way to describe it. They whip their heads back, their wings lock up, and they arch their backs and they start to flip backwards. And what I notice, what I think is going on, is I think that you breed the leader to have a seizure on a right or a left-hand turn. The other birds you breed to have seizures when they see the leader have a seizure. And that's how complicated it can get. And these guys are very sophisticated about how they breed and to win the competition.

If all of us in this room were in a competition for, for me to win, my birds need to fly together in that kit and they need to roll together as a group. Like a synchronized seizure. Yeah. So it looks like a waterfall. Yeah, it looks like a waterfall. It's really cool. And the trick of course is you got to make sure they recover before they hit the ground because they'll kill themselves. And so a lot of birds die because they hit the ground or they hit a building before they recover from their little seizure. So how long is a normal seizure or the fall last?

Seconds. Okay, that's what I remember when I saw it. Yeah, just a few seconds. But it looks neat, right? It kind of looks like a waterfall if they're doing it right. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, I don't know how to describe it. It's not beautiful really, but it's just weird.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you're like, wow, I didn't know that could, as a thing. That's a thing. And then they're graded based on how well they roll and then somebody this this thing's a world competition There's something called the World Cup and if you win the World Cup you can sell your pigeons to other They're good breeders right because you've got High quality rollers so you can you can then start selling the birds that you breed As breeders to other people who want to compete and have this status. How much money is in that? Like,

they don't make any money in the competitions. Um, they make money selling their birds. Yeah. So this is a status thing. You know, you, you want to be the world cup champion as a status deal in the U S what is the roller capital? You like the city? Yeah, like where is it big? It's big in all over. It's kind of interesting. It's big in inner city LA. You know, Mike Tyson has roller pigeons.

See, I knew he was a pigeon fancier. Oh, he sees roller pigeons. Yeah, he's into rollers. We're going to go down a deep rabbit hole. You know, downtown New York city on the roofs of houses, you'll see a roller pigeon set up some. But when you see it, when I see a pigeon keeper, what was that movie with Forrest Whitaker? He had pigeons.

Phil, Phil, Phil. Come on, dude. It's got the word ghost in it. Ghost. Ghost dog. Forrest Whitaker. What's his name? Yeah, got it. Ghost. Ghost dog. Wouldn't that be the, what's his name? Yeah, got famous from the crying game. The way of the samurai ghost dog.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you see a pigeon fancier, I always call them pigeon fanciers because I didn't know about this whole other aspect too. Yeah. Are they mostly roller people or are there other kinds of pigeon fanciers?

Lots of other kinds of pigeons. There's there's homing pigeons There's these, you know, these decorative pigeons you see maybe at the National Western Stock Show down in Denver You know that kind of stuff. Hey American history buffs hunting history buffs. Listen up We're back at it with another volume of our meat eaters American history series in this edition titled The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 We tackle the Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger Jed Smith and John Coulter. This small but legendary

fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory Woodsman helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory, but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the mountain man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the mountain men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade,

which is titled The Long Hunters 1761 to 1775. So again, this new Mountain Man edition about the beaver skin trade is available for pre-order now wherever audiobooks are sold. It's called Meat Eaters American History the Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 by me Stephen Rinella So let's get into how roller pigeon enthusiasts have gotten in trouble I was gonna say selling their good rollers is legal. Yes, correct. Yeah, but what part of rolling pigeon Fancy ears their activity is not. Yeah. Where do you get involved? Well, how does a fish and wildlife agent get involved? So as you can imagine, when a pigeon has a seizure in mid flight,

especially a whole flock of them, every raptor within a mile or two is gonna make a beeline for that little flock. Oh yeah, right? Yeah, it's like the deer that's got the limp, right? It's gonna draw the predators right to it. So yeah, hawks and falcons, particularly juveniles, like juvenile Cooper hawks, juvenile red tails

that aren't learning to hunt anyway. They go right for these. They just set up shop. Oh, totally. And yeah, they can come in and take out your best birds. And yeah, so these guys get really annoyed that the hawks come in and kill their roller pigeons, so they start killing hawks.

And honestly, homer, homing pigeon, fanatics, and there's big money in homing pigeon competitions. They kill hawks too, and in fact, that's how I got onto this whole roller pigeon deal is. What about peregrine falcons? Because they're in big urban areas now. Same, because especially since they hunt on the fly, they go after roller pigeons real good.

So it just depends on what hawks are in the area. Cooper's hawks are also aerial hunters, so they're more common than the Peregrine. But yeah, Peregrines get involved in this as well. And that's how US Fish and Wildlife Service agent gets involved. Because of course all raptors are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.

It's pretty straightforward. You kill a raptor and you're violating the MBTA. So tell me exactly how this would flow to you. Yeah. What happens that you become aware of, right? Yeah, so what happens with me is I'm working in Los Angeles and I, you know, I'm doing my job as an agent.

So I'm pretty well connected, like with the wildlife rehab places and I've got sources around. Somebody calls me and says, Hey, we got an injured Cooper sock came into our rehabilitation center and it's got a gunshot wound. So that piques my interest because that's illegal. And normally this would be a fairly low priority case for the Fish and Wildlife Service in LA,

because we're working on wildlife trafficking cases, organized criminal activity ongoing, right? Involving a lot of money and wildlife. But so happens I had nothing going on that day, and I felt like getting out of the office. So I said, hey, I'll come up and take a look. So I drive up to North LA, that's part of the office. So I said, hey, I'll come up and take a look. So I drive up to North LA,

that's part of the LA that's burning right now. And I find out when I get there, there's another hawk showed up and the same guy's front yard dead. Another bullet wound. So I actually treated it like a crime scene. And I- You traced the hawk with chalk.

What had they been shot? Not quite that, not quite that bad. What had they been shot with like a shotgun or? So these were, uh, 22 caliber pellets, pump action pellets, which interestingly can be traced, uh, through ballistics. Yeah. No. Yeah. They come out of a rifled barrel. So they leave, they leave marks on those 22 caliber pellets., they come out of a rifled barrel. So they leave, they leave marks on those 22

caliber pellets. If it's a pump action rifled barrel, which, you know, the good ones are. Sure. Yeah. So, uh, but they do use shotguns and they'll, they also will use, uh, if they use a shotgun, they like to use subsonic rounds.

Some of them will put these sound dampeners, these huge long barrels on the end of it. Uh, that gun was called a Metro gun, these huge long barrels on the end of it. That gun was called a Metro gun, I think. Do you ever hear of a Metro gun? It's like an extra barrel you attach to an 870 and it's about four and a half feet long. So you end up with this insanely long 870. But yeah, it quiets it down.

They're shooting them perched. No, they'll get them on the floor with the shotguns. With the pellet guns, they'll do them perched. No, they'll get them on the fly with the shotguns. Yeah. With the, with the pellet guns, they'll do it perched. They'll wait for them. A lot of times the particular Cooper Sox, they'll come sit right on the pigeon, uh, fancier's lofts and they'll just walk back and forth and it's easy pickings. So I, I didn't do the chalk around the dead bird, but what I did do was I canvassed the neighborhood. I went and started knocking on doors and just asking

questions of neighbors who happened to be home. And, uh... What would be a question you'd ask? Uh, you know, identify, you do the classic federal agent flip of your credentials and you identify yourself, you tell them you're investigating a possible wildlife crime in their neighborhood. That gets their interest.

They want to hear more. And you start telling them that, you know, you're investigating some hawks being killed and you explain the MBTA because nobody understands, nobody knows, has heard about the MBTA. Explain that it's illegal to kill hawks. And then, you know, if you got the bad guy's house, you're going to get a certain reaction

and you're going to know. But most of the time, people are very shocked, very concerned that somebody's shooting in their neighborhood in LA. And they love hawks. They don't want to see hawks killed. And inevitably as happened in that investigation, some people started to tell me, oh yeah, every once in a while, I hear these loud pops. I don't know where they're coming from. One lady told me she found a big bird dead in her yard with big yellow feet.

I'm like, wow, that was probably a hawk. So I knew I'm in an area, right? And finally, I get to a house, and I'm like, well, tell me about your neighbors, right? And she points to all the houses around. Well, he's a realtor. He's a police officer, whatever. She finally comes to this guy's house.

She points to this house and says, well, that guy, he loves birds. He wouldn't do it. And I said, what do you mean he loves birds? Oh, he points to this house and says, well, that guy, he loves birds. He wouldn't do it. And I said, what do you mean he loves birds? Oh, he's got lots of pigeons. I was like, okay. I had my suspect's house now, right? So it turns out I go interview that guy

and his name was Marty and he was a racing pigeon fanatic. So this guy actually made big money, like 10 plus thousand dollars a time on a race, if he won. Sometimes those races can be like 50 grand if you win a home run race. Is that like illegal gambling kind of money? No, not necessarily.

Yeah, it's like a pot sort of a thing. Yeah, there's a pot. So he vibed real bad and asked me if I was armed, gave me all the red flag creepy things. But in the end, I actually got him to confess that he did kill hawks. So easy conviction on that. He confessed. He pled guilty. But the more I thought about it, the more it nagged at me that, okay, there's a lot

of pigeon fanciers around the country. And if this guy is motivated to kill hawks, probably some other ones are. So I just started digging. And I realized it'd be really difficult to infiltrate. The best way to get these guys is to do some type of undercover work. And you characterized me as an undercover agent when you introduced me. We don't talk like that really, but I did a lot of undercover work during my career, middle part of my career in particular, a lot.

And this was one of the big cases I ended up doing. And I found that there was this group of roller pigeon guys operating in LA as a fairly large group associated with the National Birmingham Roller Club, the NBRC. And in fact, the president of the NBRC lived in LA. So I really just started to ingratiate myself with these guys online and, and ask a lot of questions that I wanted to get into it. I got invited. Yeah.

Got invited in to, to learn about the hobby and get involved. How long did it take for you were, uh, how long did it take for you were introduced to the rafter control? Shockingly, it was very quick. Yeah, I mean, I got invited to go to some pigeon shows that they have where they show off their birds, they buy and sell the good breeders, they show equipment. And, you know, funny enough, I had an undercover persona all set up. I'd already been doing undercover work by that time, but obviously did not use the name Ed Newcomer, but I ended up on one of their web pages with a photo with me with

a bunch of these guys who ended up, I ended up arresting a year and a half later. And on the little caption down below, it says, you know, the inner city roller club welcomes a newcomer to the group. And it's like, we put that up on the bulletin board in the office. It was kind of nice. But at first you're like, shit, they found out. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever you see new, yeah, you see your name in print. It's like, wait, oh, the context is correct.

Okay. It's not capitalized. Exactly. So, but at that very first, you know, meet that I went to, I saw this funny looking cage sitting there and I knew immediately it was a goss hawk trap because I already knew what these things looked like. And there's this guy selling a goss hawk trap for a hundred bucks. So of course I go up and I'm like, what's this cage for? You know, I'm trying to get into this hobby.

I don't know what to use this for. And yeah, he didn't miss a beat. He says, oh, that's for catching hawks, but don't tell anybody cause it's illegal. And I'm like, you know, could you say that into my lapel mic? You know, that would be nice. So, and that went on.

Once that kind of opened up, then once one of the guys on the inside has made a statement to me about a hawk trap being present on the property and what it's for, it gave me an excuse to talk to everybody about, hey I saw that weird cage, what's this deal with hawks do? Is this something I need to be worried about where I live? Floodgates just opened immediately and yeah everybody was talking about it. I went back, my boss actually wasn't too excited about me, that little firecracker of a lawyer that I ended up working for down in LA,

that Dave McMullen told me I needed to work with. She wasn't excited about this case. She's like, these migratory birds, it's a low priority. We need to work on trafficking cases. And I said, no, just let me go do one of these meets on the weekend. Let's see what happens. I came back and showed her that undercover video where everybody was talking about killing hawks and I pointed out

to her that look there's 250 people in LA who are members of the NBRC, the presidents here. There are people all over the country that are members of the NBRC and I didn't meet a single person at this meet who didn't admit they were killing hawks. And she's like, well, shit, we got to work this case then, you know? And then we were off and running. It was a year and a half I spent every weekend at a pigeon event. At that point, like, what's the goal? Yeah, that's what I was saying.

For me or them? For you. Because it seems to me like it'd be easy, like you got the one guy to confess, but that's not really helping the bigger picture. Exactly. And so how do you work that into being like, if we do this, it's going to make a difference. Yeah, like did you need a dead raptor to tie to an individual like over and over and over again? Yes, yes, that's ideal. Yeah. You know, the quintessential body, it's a murder case, right? It's a hawk murder case.

So you want that body, but you don't necessarily need it because attempt to do these things is also a violation. But what you got to get past is their ability to create reasonable doubt by saying that that trap is used for something else, right? It's used to trap raccoons or whatever. Um, so you, you got, if you're going to go for the attempt, you got to prove that they know that they're trying to catch a hawk.

And so you got to do that undercover work, get those admissions on tape. And so the goal here is with that first case I did with the guy, uh, the racer, Marty, you know, it was a misdemeanor violation. He didn't get arrested. He basically paid a ticket, right? And it was a big fine, but it didn't get in the paper.

What kind of amount? Uh, I think he paid about five grand. I think it was pretty good. Fine. But the word never spread to his friends, maybe, but it doesn't get out in the bigger community that, you know, what happens then is every, all his buddies say, well, you idiot, you shouldn't have admitted you did it. And too bad Marty got caught.

I'm not going to get caught. Right. So what you want is deterrence and you got to deter people. And the best way to do that is to catch a lot of people. And, um, then catching a lot of people catches the attention of the media. And that tends to get the word out. Public shaming. Public shaming.

Yeah, we didn't use those terms, but yeah, that's what it is really. And that's effective. It's really effective. So, you know, Abraham Lincoln said something that I love, and that is that the law without enforcement is simply good advice. And if people don't know you're out there enforcing the law and you're catching people, it's just advice then. What prevents the cage guy from saying in the end, he says, well, what I didn't tell

you is I just relocate them. So maybe you can get me, maybe it's like a legal possession, but I didn't kill it. You don't know that I killed it. I forgot to say, I just move them away and let them go. So yeah, I possessed it for a minute, but that was it. Yeah, and some of them did try that,

but the way the MBTA, the Migratory Bird Charity Act is written is it's illegal to catch them. It doesn't matter. If you want to catch one and relocate it, you have to have a permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So that didn't necessarily get them out of it, but it would have been good jury sympathy, right?

But there were some, some of these guys actually told me, I'd ask them, I'd say, well, what do you do with it after you catch it in this trap? And a lot of them told me, don't release them because hawks will learn to not go in a gossawk trap. And so if you release a hawk, it's just gonna set your fellow roller pigeon guys up to have a nightmare,

cause they're gonna have a hawk preying on their pigeons that you can't catch. In the business, you know what we call that? Trap shy. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's true, right? Animals aren't dumb. So, let. Well, that's true. Right. Animals aren't dumb. Yeah.

So, uh, let's see, where were we on this? So I get into these clubs and, um, basically presented myself as somebody who was interested in getting involved. They did. They did kind of check me out a little bit. They wanted to know where I lived and we had to add the cover was pretty good on that case. Cause these guys were dangerous. Some of these guys lived in south

central LA, right there. I was the only white guy at some of these meetings. And a lot of them, we'd run there anytime I could figure out who they were, we'd run them. A lot of them had felony convictions for assaults, gun crimes, drug crimes. One guy in the middle of the investigation comes up with a warrant for gang rape out of LA County. And so... That's what I was gonna ask you earlier. Like we've had game wardens on that have told us like poaching cases will often lead to like

larger other criminal activity. Did you run into that a lot? Yeah, absolutely. Especially when you've got more organized criminal activity going on. If you're talking about somebody who has two or three extra trout or whatever, kills a buck when they shouldn't have, whatever, that's kind of a one-off. But if you've got somebody systemically and systematically involved in committing crimes. There's a couple things that people will kill you for or hurt you for.

Three things I always say. One is to protect their liberty and the other is to protect their money and to protect their house. And when they are involved in an ongoing criminal activity, you're going to, as a law enforcement officer, you're endangering all three of those things for them. You're going to take their money, potentially their revenue source, you're probably going to do a search warrant on their house, and they definitely think their liberty's at stake. And those are the things that make people really dangerous.

Yeah. So, yeah, so we didn't take any chances with these guys. In fact, every time I'd come in on a Monday morning after meeting with them, my boss would kind of shake her head and say, this is too dangerous. We need to take this down. I'm like, no, no, we gotta go farther. We gotta catch more of these guys.

We need more. And then a really crazy thing happened. I happened to be up in Oregon for a firearms qualification and defensive tactics training, because at the time, Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, we're all part of the same region. So we'd get together as agents for training and stuff. And I'm up there and I'm literally wrestling around

on the ground with an agent named Dirk Hoy, who was based up in Portland. And we're resting in between doing some ground fighting. And I'm like, what are you working on, Dirk? And he goes, oh, I got the weirdest case. I'm working on this case involving these pigeons that flip backwards. I couldn't believe it. I mean, literally here I am in the prone position

with Dirk between my legs and he's telling me this and I'm like, I'm doing the same thing. And from that moment forward, Dirk and I started to collaborate and we realized he was investigating members of the National Birmingham Roller Club up in Oregon and Washington, and Idaho and Montana. And here I was with the, investigating the guys in Southern California.

For the same thing though. Same exact thing. They were doing exactly the same thing. Wide network. And because it was getting around among the club, here's the best way to kill hawks. These guys were sending each other schematics on how to build traps. They were talking about the best way to shoot, how to poison, how to drown.

I mean, oh yeah, they were giving each other. Once we really got into it, the culpability here was just through the roof. You know, if you would have embedded yourself with cottontail rabbit hunters in the 60s, you would have made some good cases. No, 60s would have been too early, right? Well, MBTA was around then. Okay. Yeah. You'd have had a very similar experience, I think.

Yeah, yeah. It's true with so people who raise pheasants, you know, for hunting clubs, they'll do it too, because hawks will hit the pheasants. So, yeah, it's a temptation. I'm sure there's some, uh, chicken, people that have hobby farms with chickens.

I mean, they're a threat to our chickens. Totally. My wife's not into that, but she's, you know, she doesn't like when a hawks flying above. Of course. You know, who are some of the worst offenders are guys who are involved in cock fighting. Cause, uh, they're killing predators.

Oh yeah. Cock can't hold his own against them. Nope. Cause they're killing predators. Oh yeah. Can't hold his own against. Nope. Cause they don't have their little, you know, that little knife. He doesn't wear his blade around all day long. He doesn't wear his blade.

So, you know, then you got to double whammy cause that's a state violation to be involved in cock fighting and then you've got them killing hawks. But that's a hard case to make. So when you tell me how this like, like, how does this wrap up? Like how do you you how do you bring it to a close? Well the cool thing was Dirk and I agreed immediately what the strategy was you know we got to get as many people as possible. He was having peregrines get killed up in Portland so

a little higher priority. So what we decided was there's too many people to get all of them so what we did is we focused on club leaders, people who were, who were, you know, setting the example, anybody who was a president of a local club. We targeted that the president of the national Birmingham roller club, who was one of the worst killers of them all. And, um, we decided, all right, once we have good evidence on all this, this tar our target group, each of us have a target group, we'll do our take downs at exactly the same time. We'll coordinate everything.

We'll do our search warrants. We're going to arrest everybody. And we'll do it all on the same day. And then the word doesn't get out, evidence doesn't disappear. And then we can try to get the media's attention in order to deter people. Neither Dirk or I were interested in having our names in the paper. We wanted the roller pigeon community to know that they had been infiltrated and that everything they had said and done had been recorded and that they were going to look real bad.

So they needed to clean up their act. So that's how it played out. About 14 months after I started, we did our take down. We even, Dirk, even there was a Montana game warden that got implicated in the whole damn thing, which was very depressing for both Dirk and I, but also we really wanted to get that person because, you know, that's a bad image to have a wildlife law enforcement officer involved. He didn't end up getting charged because Dirk couldn't prove that he actually killed a hawk.

But we had an agent here, I think it was Bozeman, might've been Mizzoula, I can't remember, but we had one of our agents here go interview him. And the minute the agent came in and rolled the gold and said, Hey, I'm here to talk to you about hawks. The guy said, he literally said, I want my union rep. And the very next day he retired. Oh, yeah. So that's pretty damning right there. Right.

But he didn't end up getting charged because Dirk just couldn't, couldn't prove that he'd actually killed a Hawk, but it was just obvious he was involved. In fact, one of the guys I arrested in LA, we had him in handcuffs in the back of the car. And the first thing he said was, do you know, and he named the Montana state game warden.

Yeah. Hoping that would get him out of it. Yeah. And let me just say the Montana, it's Montana game and fish, right? Isn't it? Fish, wildlife and parks. Okay.

They've changed their name since then. Okay. It's like, I can never remember. It's been FWP for a long time. I can't never remember. Colorado, Colorado. A few years ago. Colorado changes. It's like, I can never remember. It's been FWP for long. Has it? I can't never remember. Colorado, Colorado, Colorado changes. It always confuses me. So I can never remember, but to their credit, they were awesome.

They were not interested in having an officer in their ranks who had, you know, violated the law, so they were very cooperative and they were very glad to see him go. So, you know, that's, that's good news. How many arrests did you guys make? Uh, I ended up arresting seven people in LA. I can't remember how many dirt got up here in Oregon and Washington, but it was a, it was a good case and, uh, made a lot of, uh, made a lot

of attention. And the, the thing I really, really was proud of is that it empowered the people in the roller pigeon community who were opposed to hot killing, who often had been kind of shouted down and bullied. It gave them a voice to come out and say, you know, we told you guys, you know, we got to

stop this. And so it was good. And, and the best part is even today, if you go on the roller pigeon chat rooms and email groups or whatever, you'll see somebody's like, well, I'm pretty sure there was an undercover agent at that last fly. Oh, really?

Yeah. And they're very well, they're very well could have been, but that's the ideal situation, right? You always want them looking over their shoulder like, oh crap, those, I used, I arrested this guy early in my career who was a Japanese national, and he used to refer to us as the fish and wild guys. And I always, because he couldn't, for some reason he couldn't pronounce fish and

wildlife so he'd say oh that's fish and wild guys they're always out there and I I just want people to know that that you know if you if you end up committing a federal wildlife law and a fish and wildlife agent gets on you you're cooked I mean every agent I know is so tenacious and so committed to their job It is it is true what it's what they say about federal agents once they're on you and they they have evidence that you did something They're not giving up. They'll get you. It's just a matter of time How do you Create the distinction between like when does someone violating a state's law become federal?

Yeah, that's a great question. If it becomes a Lacey Act, does that involve you then? Yes. A Lacey Act violation? Yes, it can. So the best way to explain that is if you think about the FBI's relationship to say, to the Montana Bozeman police, right? If a car gets stolen here in town, that's a state issue, right? Local police are gonna handle that. If that car crosses the state line into Wyoming, now that's a federal offense. The FBI can get involved.

And the reason for that is the jurisdiction of the Montana law enforcement ends at the border. So it becomes difficult for them to conduct investigations outside the state. For the feds, that's not an issue. I never cared about a state line that never, never crossed my mind. Right.

So, um, if I, you know, if something crosses state lines, it often triggers a federal law that makes that a federal offense, allowing the FBI or Fish and Wildlife or Secret Service or whomever to get involved. And a lot of times it's done at the request of the state. So we in LA often got calls from Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, from game wardens that said,

hey, you know, this LA guy came in and killed a big elk out here illegally. And can you help? Yeah, heck yeah, we can. If he killed an elk illegally in Montana and he drove the meat, any part of it, antler, meat, hide, whatever, back to LA, that's a Lacey Act violation,

which makes it a federal offense. So then you can assist in the investigation. Yeah. So we bring the resources of the federal government to help the state. That's really what the Lacey act's all about. Even though it, you know, it's not like we're stealing the case from the state. Yeah. A lot of times what I would do as an agent. That's how it happens in the movies. That's how it happens in the movies.

We're taking this one over, Perkins. And I, that makes my skin crawl. That makes my skin crawl. Cause it's really not the way it works out in the field. Honestly, what I would normally do if I had that situation is I would get with the Montana warden and I'd say, all right, we got him on the Lacey. What do you need? Here's my report.

Here's that. Here's all the evidence. Um, what do you need to make your state case? And then we, together we would say, who's going to get the best punch out of this, right? Who's going to get the best penalty? And sometimes it's the state. Sometimes in many cases, the states have much harsher penalties for wildlife crimes than the feds do.

Well, it's interesting to hear you say that because we often cover this sort of stuff and it never fails nine out of ten times at the end of the discussion we go so much loin got $300 and losses is licensed for like a year right like That's barely a slap on the wrist. Yeah, are you guys automatically taken over if it's federally managed like waterfowl for instance or Yeah, it we can right if it's a federally managed animal, we can take, take it over as you say, but, um, like especially with waterfowl, we generally, even though we have

primary jurisdiction over waterfowl, all migratory birds, doves, doves too, we don't, you know, bust in on that because the U S fish and wildlife service, we're all special agents. We're plain clothes investigators. We don't have a patrol function. Right. You know, I drive an unmarked car.

I don't have a dispatcher telling me where to go. So uniformed game wardens are ideally suited to enforce waterfowl hunting, dove hunting. Yeah. I guess I wasn't talking about just like someone going over the limit or what if it's like a larger scale thing? Yeah. Again, we would, if a state's got an investigation going,

we would join them versus taking it over from them. Yeah. Yeah. We don't do that. Did you, it's not cool. Did you ever work any cases that involved, um, people in the, in the restaurant trade, serving poached wildlife or serving illegally captured wildlife that was making its way into the restaurant trade? Yeah, I didn't in particular, but there are some cases that that's come up. Even in LA, a lot of the Asian restaurants will serve wildlife that's taken, turtles in particular, reptiles, sometimes fish. So yeah, we got involved in some of that.

But, you know, that reminds me, I told you earlier that, you know, early in my career, what we dealt with was a lot of wildlife coming into the United States, right? About halfway through, maybe around 2000, between 2005 and 2010, we started to see more and more native wildlife leaving the United States. And that, as China and Vietnam, you know, became richer, the emerging economies, you had all these people there who had money to spend. so they they started to spend it on exotic stuff and

Wanting it alive alive and dead both. Yeah for the food trade and for the pet trade So we started to see a lot of native animals leaving the United States in particular reptiles That the turtle population in the southeastern United States has been absolutely decimated by the demand for turtle meat and pets in China and Vietnam. And it's become a big part of what the US Fish and Wildlife Service does is combating the trafficking of animals that are native to the US or at least North America. Are black bear gallbladders still a thing? Because that's something like as a hunter, we always like you always, you always heard about it. Yeah.

Did you know you used to not be able to in some States, maybe all States, there was a rule possess. You couldn't possess your own bears. Go right. Yeah. Like you were, they changed it to be that you're allowed to have like one or something. But it would be that you like, you couldn't remove it from the field of even your own. I did know that. Okay. Yeah. And even now it's not legal to sell it, right? You could, you could keep it, but I think, I think some, I don't,

I don't know if it's even state or federal, but I remember reading somewhere that it was like, if, if, if you legally harvest a bear and you legally tag your bear, you are allowed to, for whatever, there's, there's no prohibition on you having it, right? You can't sell it, but at a time it was, you couldn't have it even in your possession. So ostensibly, if you had a whole ungutted bear in your possession in a truck,

you were like technically in possession of a gallbladder. Exactly. Yeah, it's kind of like having a loaded firearm in a truck, right? It's like you're dead if you find that, it's a game or it's gonna get you for it. Yeah, it was kind of like having a loaded firearm or a truck, right? It's like you're dead. If you find that it's a game, or it's going to give you, get you for it. Yeah. Uh, yeah. It was like a per se violation. So how would, how does stuff, something like that, or take like spotted cats?

I don't know what our Jaguar hides, gallbladder, whatever the hell you know about, how does it flow from, you know, people that are in the, you know, in some rural area, you got some kid who's collecting turtles, right? Like how does it flow and eventually wind up on a container ship? You know, I mean, like, like who's the sort of, who winds up being the kingpin or the sort of export agent on domestic wildlife. Like what does it bottleneck through? Yeah, so it varies of course, depending on the wildlife

and who's interested in buying it, right? So let me give you a classic example of this absolutely phenomenal case that our agents did on the East Coast. It was called Operation Broken Glass. Oh, Elvers. Yes. Yeah, good for you. Yeah, glass eels, right?

That was an example where, you know, for years, decades, generations even maybe, there's been a glass eel fishery on the East Coast and it's always been. But isn't it, there's only a couple states where it's legal to harvest them, like Maine and somewhere else, I think. Yeah, and I'm not familiar with those states. There's a limited legal harvest. Just for listeners sake. Like if you go to a sushi restaurant and you get unagi, like smoked eel, that eel,

they're raising and finishing those eels in Asia. They're sending the juveniles over. But they can't propagate them. Yeah. So basically they're buying us bait, like baby eels or glass eels or Elvers. They're buying the babies in order to raise them and make a processed food item. Exactly. But it's so complicated to propagate them because they propagate out in the middle of the like, yeah, don't don't like off the off of Bahama, off of our gas.

So see, yeah. Off of Bermuda and Sargasso Sea. So, and there's some legal trade, but it's augmented greatly with illegal harvest, correct? Hugely. Yeah. Yeah. They're like salmon, right? They go from freshwater to saltwater. And, but yeah, and glass eel, just for your listeners, you know, the reason it's called glass eel, because it's, they're almost see-through, I think. When they're young, they're just these little slippery things. So anyway, there's been a legal harvest of those allowed, but what happened was this increased demand,

as you described in Asia, for the eels that are used in sushi restaurants, what happened was it's the local guys who are skilled at catching, you know, elvers. And what happens is these Chinese guys were showing up in those communities and they were going out to the different fish shops asking to buy eels and offering absurdly high prices.

Local fish shops. Yeah. Yeah, we're in the process of writing a book right now and I did some, we're doing a thing about that. Cool. And it was something like $2,000 a pound for Elvers. Yeah, it's crazy. That's like more than sea cucumbers, I think.

Yeah. Gee. Well, you know, sea cucumbers is another good example we could talk about. But basically, basically, you know, in answer to your question, what happens is- They put the word out.

Yeah, somebody from the end consumer seller shows up in that community and offers that high price and then corrupts the local guys who know how to do it. And that's true around the world. That's how it works with rhino horn in Africa. That's how it works with sea cucumbers in Mexico. That's how it works with rhino horn in Africa. That's how it works with sea cucumbers in Mexico. It's always the end consumer seller.

And I don't want to just say Chinese because I don't want to, you know, disparage Chinese, but right now China is a huge consumer of wildlife. So we'll use China as the example. Somebody from China shows up that speaks English and starts offering a lot of money for whatever they're after and It just snowballs and gets out of control and the local people are corrupted This this guy there's kind of various levels of kingpins. You might have the local

East Coast guy who's the kingpin organizing five fishermen who are then Giving him all the Elvers he sells them to the Chinese guy who's kind of a kingpin, but he's moving it on to the next guy. And eventually it gets on that container and it ends up over in China. But it's on a container with aerators and. Sophisticated. I mean, they're big.

It's like, it's not like you're, uh, you know, it's not like you're sending batteries. Yeah. Are you guys. You gotta keep them alive. Yeah. Yeah. That's hard.

Are you guys involved with You got to keep them alive. Yeah, yeah. That's hard. Are you guys involved with a lot of like inspections in port cities, like going on to ships and, or do you have to have a reason to go look for stuff? Uh, no, fish and wildlife agents and inspectors. We have a uniform division called the inspection division and those, those are basically customs officers.

Their authority is at the ports of entry. Uh, of entry they look and act just like customs officers they just wear a brown uniform but we have full customs authority sometimes even US customs doesn't remember that Fish and Wildlife Service has full customs authority so when I was an agent I could show up at the airport and I could crack open any package I wanted I could search any passenger I wanted I could go through their luggage because the LACI act gives us customs authority. Yeah. It's kind of nice. Yeah. Let's go back to the Elvers thing for a minute. Yeah. If you are working a case like that, do you have sympathy on the locals who you use the word like corrupted.

Is there ever an element of, entrapment's not the right word, but like if you're going to someone, you know, who's hard on their, you know, hard up, and you make this offer to them, you know, 2000 bucks, what is it, 2000 bucks a pound, right? Is that guy of interest to them, you know, 2000 bucks, what is 2000 bucks a pound, right? Is that guy of interest to you? Are you mostly interested in the person who is recruiting or would you naturally try to work that case to who is exporting?

I think every Fish and Wildlife Special Agent who knew what they were doing would focus more on the drivers, right? So they're going to try to get up as high in this chain of bad guys as you can, but it doesn't mean you ignore the other bad guys, right? I always, you know, there's this obsession sometimes with only getting the kingpin. Well, I'll tell you what, it can take years

to get a kingpin and while you're working on it, a lot of crimes occurring, right? And so there's absolutely no excuse for not getting the lower level people to, um, in part because they can often become great informants, right? You catch those people at the lower level, they don't want to go to jail and they want to

minimize their penalty. They'll often cooperate in exchange for a lower sentence. So you focus on the whole picture, right? But of course, if you were to only catch the local guys who are fishing for the Elvers, you're not doing your job because the bad guys that are buying them are just gonna find other people to do it.

So yeah, you wanna focus as high as you can because you wanna kill it, you wanna kill the trade, or you wanna kill the illegal trade. That's the goal and you're not going to do that by focusing on just the kingpin or just the catchers. You got to get them all. Yeah. Yeah. As many as you can anyway. Did you work a case, I think Kareem was saying, did you work a butterfly case? Yeah. Yeah. It's like the the first kind of case I did that was kind of bigger on my own. And it's just coincidence that I got assigned to it. But there was this Japanese national named Yoshiko Jima who was kind of

notorious for trafficking in endangered butterflies. For what purpose? Decorations? Decorations. Why is that funny, Corinne? Everybody laughs. No, it's just the whole, the the drama of you know. You're just writing the script in your head. Yes. Yeah I'm just picturing every episode of this like new undercover you know it's just it's not about. Like the butterfly collector is actually the head of the triad. It's not yep it's not's not, it's not about drugs. It's about all this other stuff and the weird, you know, interesting kind of interests of decoration or food or whatever. Yeah. I haven't really watched any serial shows since Duke's a hazard, but the way it works in Duke's a hazard is every episode a new bad guy comes to town yeah I mean like right so every

episode is like a new critter I mean this is like always tension there's always tension between Roscoe Pico train and who is the cleatus right and then you know bowling Lou and who drove the tow truck. Cooder. Where'd boss hog fall into these? There's always the mayor and boss hog every episode of new, new bad guys. Use your pair of bad guys comes into town and they like align with boss hog, often double crossing him. They're vanquished in the end by bone loot, something you will get blown up by

dynamite on an arrow. And then like a week later, like a new bad guy emerges. And for this show, like every episode is. I hate to tell you, I hate to tell you this, but Cooder was probably a bad Elver poacher. I'm pretty sure he was either that or Hawks. He was killing Hawks one or the other. I'm sure he was. Well you know Bull and Luke were convicted moonshiners.

There you go. So they were they're troublemakers. One crime leads to another. Yeah probably poachers too. So off that subject and off subject to how good of a TV show this is gonna line up in. Butterfly decorations. Yeah. They're displayed what in a glass case? Sometimes yeah a lot of you'll see them a lot on in frames on people's walls. Start paying attention even in TV shows you'll see them in the background in frames on walls with their wings spread. Yeah like needles all around. Are you ever watching the show and be like, Oh yeah. You're not supposed to have that one. Well, no, I haven't seen that.

I haven't seen that. There's tons that are legal, right? I'm like the same designer kind of made a mistake. Well, the monarch might get listed. Yeah, right, exactly. And a lot of times butterflies that are not a problem here, or not, when I say problem, I mean, they're not valuable, they're not traded, are super valuable in other countries.

Does it, because there's like species that are classified as endangered here. And then there's like the international union or something or other. Yeah. I UCN. So like the yields are listed by, I think the ICU. I'm glad you brought this up. And then they're not here because international union of the IUCN. Yeah, I forget what the C stands for, but it's concert. Anyway, so in terms of the law and law enforcement

and crimes, the IUCN means nothing. Okay. The International Union for Conservation of Nations. We think these be. Exactly, and it's not to say that their science isn't legit and that it should be, but from a special agent's perspective, we care about two things.

One is, is it listed as endangered or threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act? Because that's the law that has criminal penalties. The second thing we care about is whether or not it is listed under either appendendix 1 or 2 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. That's CITES. And the reason we care about that is because CITES is incorporated into the ESA. So the Endangered Species Act allows us to enforce the CITES provisions. So it becomes a violation of the Endangered Species Act

to import or export an animal in violation of CITES. So CITES and the ESA are what special agents are looking at. And a lot of butterflies, there are a number of butterflies listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. So obviously we care about that. But then there's a whole ton of butterflies that are listed as either appendix one or two under CITES. And so we also care about that. But then there's a whole ton of butterflies that are listed, they see their appendix one or two under CITES. And so we also care about that.

So you can be, yeah, you can, you can be on CITES, but not be endangered. Yes. For instance, bobcats, IUCN has them as a species of least concern. They're, they're in some states, they're a non-game animal, in some states they're listed as a fur bearer, but they still are CITES. Right. Right, because they resemble, I guess the logic of it, which probably doesn't matter to you guys,

but the logic of it is it's a spotted cat. Right. And so in trying to track all these endangered spotted cats around the world, you need to pay attention to bobcats so that you don't have spotted cats that aren't bobcats moving as bobcats. Right. Or so I could be screwing that up or something like that, right? Yeah, and with CITES, remember it's an international agreement, right? So say if Canada wants to put bobcats on as a CITES appendix 2, and they get enough support among the CITES membership and

it's voted that bobcats become a CITES too, the US is obligated to enforce that law. I see. So even though we wouldn't have put them on CITES, if Canada wants to or Mexico wants to put them on and they get the votes, then we're obligated to enforce that. And that becomes your responsibility in the field.

Exactly. So we're always looking, anytime we realize an animal involved in something responsibility in the field. Exactly. Yeah. So we're always looking sight anytime, anytime we realize an animal involved in something is a CITES animal or listed as threatened or endangered at peaks, our interest because there's probably some illegal activity afoot. Yeah. I want to, I want you to tell the full butterfly story, but I want to tell you a funnier, yeah. Well, how much ever you'd like to share funny anecdotism when, uh, years ago we were in, uh,

doing some work in Guyana and had these two riddle river turtles and they have their native words for them. But I remember they would, there's one turtle that even the, the, the tribe we were with and explaining the turtle, they would be like, there's the, the meat turtle and there's the Cites turtle.

And I couldn't figure out, it took me days to figure out what they were saying. I'm like, Oh my God, he's talking about the Cites tree. Cause they used to traffic in those turtles, you know, they would sell those turtles and they knew them like, you know, the damn Cites turtle. Yeah. The one you touch, the one you don't touch. Yeah. Yeah. And most countries don't have anything like

the Endangered Species Act. So they rely only on what's listed in CITES. Great Britain, for example, they have their own Wildlife Act, but when it comes to the international species, they're only enforcing CITES. Okay. Yeah.

Butterflies. Butterflies, yeah. So this, I was a pretty new agent, and we got a tip that thisflies, yeah. So this, I was a pretty new agent and we got a tip that this guy, Yoshi Kojima, was coming to the International Bug Fair at the LA Museum of Natural History, which go ahead and laugh,

but there is such a thing as a bug fair. It's actually the largest event that the Museum of Natural History hosts every year in LA. They get about 10,000 visitors a day. And it's everything. It's kids running around who are interested in scorpions. And then there are these serious collectors that go and they sell high-end butterflies

to each other basically. But some of these things, the most endangered birdwing butterfly could go for $10,000 for a male female pair, easy. Alive. No dead. Yeah, they're not really valuable alive. People want them displayed, pinned in a frame or in a display box.

So again, it's a status thing. Friend of mine describes it as kind of like the obsessive baseball card collector. Like somebody who would spend $10,000 for obscure baseball player. Or art or something like that. Yeah, yeah, or art. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have another friend who talks about it. Like it's, you know, if you steal a Van Gogh, what do you do with it? You know, where do you display your stolen value? You spend the rest of your life saying to your buddies, see that? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he always does. Your really good buddies. Yeah, he described it as you have a secret room in your house with a secret door, and when certain people come over, you open the door and you're like, my van go, right? I mean, what's the point? But that's kind of the driver for these things,

and they're beautiful, they're cool. But anyway, Yoshikojima had already been on our radar screen. This agent named John Mendoza in California had tracked him for years and believed he was going into Death Valley National Park and the Grand Canyon National Park and poaching butterflies and then selling them overseas.

Himself. Himself, yeah. So John had been doing a lot of surveillance, trying to catch Kojima in the act, but as you can imagine doing surveillance in Death Valley, it's not easy, because you're gonna get seen, right? And eventually, to John Chagrin, justified Chagrin, he was ordered by his commands,

chain of command to close the investigation. And I loved it. When I picked up the Kojima case, first thing I did is I looked up John's old reports and his closing line on that last report was awesome. You know, it was just like, you know, he just dimed out his supervisor. He's like my supervisor ordered me to close this case. Close this pretty sharp. For what reason? You know, didn't think it was a good enough priority. Didn't think it was going to succeed, whatever, you know, um, 20 years ago and farther, there, there were still some agents around who,

who didn't really understand why it was important to work on international trafficking cases. Didn't think it was important, disagreed that it was important. So, you know, I don't know if that was the case there, it just happened. Um, so the story was Kojima is coming into LA. We had an informant who we were working with and my boss said this is a great opportunity for you to work with an informant. You're going to

go to the fair, the informant is going to make the contact. We're going to see if Kojima will admit to anything. Kind of see, right? So I thought shit, my job is just to get the guy wired up and supervise, make sure nothing bad happens. So I meet with the informant the night before, we show him how to work the equipment. He goes to the fair the next day, and for whatever reason, Yoshi Kojima wouldn't tell him. Can you real quick, who the hell is the informant?

Informant is somebody else involved in the insect trade. Yeah, I'm not going to name him, but... Who's already been caught or they're like a? No, he was kind of irritated that Kojima was undercutting all his prices. Okay. Yeah, and that happens a lot. So you keep certain informants involved in your orbit.

Yeah, I mean, to be a good agent, you really have to make contact with people in the trade, right? And you have to develop trust with them and try to get them to help you because animals can't tell you what's going on. They can't call you. No, no wolf or grizzly bear or California condor

is going to call you and say, guys are shooting me. So, um, yeah, you get to know a lot of different people and the motivations are varied. Sometimes you'll arrest somebody and then they're like, well, I'm not going to go down for this by myself. I'm going to be an informant for you and get a better sentence. Other times it's people who are trying to do things legit and they're getting

undercut by people like Kojima and they're pissed off. So they're going to turn. Um, sometimes the best people to go to are ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands. I'm telling you, you're investigating somebody and you find out they're divorced, the first person you talk to is their ex. Definitely, definitely. They will give you fantastic information about what's going on. Oh yeah, I've had so many wives invite me, give me permission to search their husband's garage or whatever, because they're just tired of the reptile smell out in the garage.

Yeah, it's happened more than once. So, um, I mean, she's like, please go look in the garage. That's that's out there. That literally happened. We showed up at a house in San Diego and knocked on the door and the wife answered and We identified ourselves and she said what's he done now? And we explained it and she goes oh His garage our garage is full of reptiles and my partner said can we take a look she's like, yeah

Walk out and there's there's endangered monitors out there. And yeah, he was in trouble in more ways than one. But anyway, so I go to the fair thinking, I'm just gonna be kind of overseeing our informant, right? But Kojima's very cagey. He's the guy that invented the phrase fish and wild guys. And he was very paranoid. He, John Mendoza had actually gone out

and interviewed him at one point, kind of frustrated because he knew his case was getting shut down. So he just thought, what the heck, I'll go interview Kojima. And Kojima later, when I was working Kojima undercover, Kojima bragged to me about how he had outsmarted the fish and wild guys.

And this agent, which is a dumb thing to say to an undercover fish and wild legged agent. And the Kojima case really kickstarted a long few years of me doing pretty complicated undercover work. I actually ended up starting undercover businesses and working the roller pigeon guys and I made some great undercover cases and it was all because I learned how to do undercover work getting Kojima. It took me three years to get that guy. And my boss was absolutely a fantastic mentor. She's one of the greatest undercover fish and wildlife agents ever as far as I'm concerned, Marie Palladini. And she really tutored me on how to do this work.

Because what happened at the fair was, Kojima would not talk to our informant. He talked to him, but he just wouldn't, he wouldn't get tripped up and say anything, even remotely incriminating. So by the end of the day, I was kind of frustrated that our informant wasn't getting anywhere and it wasn't his fault.

So I just, you know, it's a public insect fair, so I just walked, Kojima had a booth, he was selling stuff. So I just walked up and I was like, what's this, what's that? I don't know anything about this. And for whatever reason, we hit it off. And he just loved telling me about all these butterflies

and nothing he had for sale on the table was illegal. It was all legal stuff. He wasn't that stupid, right? But one thing he did that was really weird, was all legal stuff. He wasn't that stupid, right? But one thing he did that was really weird, he, I think he was trying to impress me, he pulled out from underneath the table, which is usually where the illegal stuff is,

this live beetle in a little Tupperware container. And this beetle is called a Dynasties beetle. And you'd know them if you saw them, because you probably only see them in a museum. They're huge, six inches long, maybe. And they have a giant horn. Hmm. Yeah.

Sometimes they're called rhinoceros beetles, but they're just. Yeah. Wasn't it, wasn't it Doug Emlin? Yes. We interviewed a guy that works on those horn beetles. Oh yeah. Cool.

And the horn actually looks like a jaw. Not worked in your way. Yeah. And I understand. Worked in a, he works in a university way. Yeah. Yeah. And they looked like He works in a university way. Yeah.

Yeah. And they looked like they'd be really ferocious. Right. But anyway, it's alive. And I was like, Oh, where'd that come from? And he goes, Oh, I brought it up from South America. Shh. And the reason he shushed me is because generally

it's a violation of USDA regulations to bring a live insect into the U S so that's not the crime of the century, but here he was admitting he'd done something illegal. So I thought, oh, that's good. But I didn't know where to take it next. Cause I, I didn't really done undercover work. So the weird, where you're undercover area, I'm just kind of impromptu.

I'm just talking to him, making sure I identify him as Yoshi Kojima, just trying to do whatever I can. Right. But the weirdest thing was at the end of the day, I'm just loitering in a group and I feel somebody tap my shoulder and I turn around and it's Yoshi standing there. And I actually kind of, you know,

I kind of panicked a little bit because I'm like, you know, why are you here? And he had this box in his hand and he said, here for your collection, to start your collection. And he gave me this cardboard box. I opened it up and it's full of just crappy, you know, butterflies, dinged up wings, moths, nothing. And on the top, he wrote his email address.

Oh. Yeah. And I went back and told my boss this and she goes, this is perfect situation, right? Now I don't wanna spoil what I already know cause I listened to the interview. She recorded that? She didn't tell me she was recording that interview. No, the one you did with Leanne for NPR.

Oh yeah, years ago. Yeah, cause like now, looking back at that, you know the reason that maybe you got a little preferential treatment. Yeah, yeah. Cause like now, looking back at that, you know the reason that maybe you got a little preferential treatment. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know if it existed then or not. I didn't get weird vibes from him then.

But what you're getting to is later, Kojima definitely had a crush on me later. I don't know if he did then, maybe. You know what, I have a friend whose sister worked undercover narcotics and she was at the time in her late 20s Hmm, and I was asking her a million questions about her. She's she's out of it now. She did it for a long time and she said They always

Think there's to be a relationship. Always. Interesting. Interesting. If it's- In the role she played. Yeah. Okay.

In the role she played. Yeah. It's- As a young woman. It's hard. I mean, you know, I was telling you about my boss, Marie, she did a lot of undercover work when she was younger and it's a problem because the bad guys will hit on you.

You know? And you know, you gotta be, obviously you can't get in a relationship with an informant or a bad guy. That's just not cool. But I want to tell you something funny that you told me about. I said, she was like an out of state drug buyer, right? Okay. So she would periodically show up in a town to buy, right? She lived in the town. Her, her cover was that she lived elsewhere. It would travel to buy. Okay. Um, and I said, well, how do you avoid, like if some

drug dealer wants you to go into this creepy ass house and you're undercover, how do you not go? She said, I would say, I'm not going into your creepy ass house. Exactly. Exactly. And, and I'm not going into your creepy ass house. Exactly. And, and I'm sure she would, she would tell you that there's a temptation to go in, right? Cause as a law enforcement officer, how often do you get invited into the bad guy's house? Right?

Normally you got to have a warrant, right? But if you're undercover and they invite you in, you don't need a warrant. Cops, come on in. Yeah. You get this free opportunity to look around, but it's super dangerous to do that, super dangerous. And then, you know, it happened to me with Kojima,

he invited me into his place and I had to make a call. And at the time, it was a different story, but you know, I had a cover team behind me and they lost me in LA traffic. And we pulled into Kojima's underground apartment and in there I was like, oh, well, my cover team's definitely not gonna reacquire me now, right? And so I thought, well, I'll make a fake phone call

to my cover team. I'll say, hey, Yoshi, yeah, we can go check out your place, but I gotta make a call because I gotta change this appointment. And Murphy's law, I step out of the car and my undercover cell phone actually fell, landed right on the antenna, and broke into like three pieces.

So now I had no way to contact anybody. And I gotta make a call. Am I gonna go into this apartment when nobody knows I'm there? Or am I gonna get out of this? Did you feel like this guy could be physically dangerous? Physically, I was never afraid of Kojima. Like, he wasn't gonna beat me up,

but, you know, I can't defeat a gun. Sure. Kojima's got a gun. And I don't know who else is in his apartment. And he's so paranoid about the Fish and Wild guys. You know, if he's got a friend or two friends in that apartment, they're gonna beat the crap out of me till I tell them who I am.

I can't, once I'm in there, it's hard to extricate, right? So you never wanna assume that this little guy is not gonna hurt you, because anybody can hurt you with the right weapon, right? So anyway, I did it, because I'm like, I gotta see in this apartment. And, but I knew I had limited time. Cause what my cover team is going to do, they're going to follow

certain protocols to reacquire me. Right. And if they can't find me pretty soon, they're going to notify the LAPD that we have a missing undercover agent. And that's going to cause helicopters and black and whites to be in the neighborhood. So I knew I had a limited amount of time to get in and out of that apartment. And it was fine. It worked out fine.

I made sure I stayed closer to his front door than he did. But getting into that apartment was amazing because he his whole apartment was filled with butterflies and and these illegal Beatles that he'd been bringing up from South America that he was selling, claiming selling in Japan for $10,000 a piece. I don't know whether that's true or not, but anyway, it was, I got in and out of there in about 10 minutes. And by the time this is, I had no cell phone.

So I raced to the local, like 7-Eleven, find one of the last remaining pay phones in the city of Los Angeles, call the office. And yeah, the cover team was getting ready to call the LAPD We just just got a check back in just check back in. Yeah, that was fun Well other than like seeing some evidence of what's going on there Like I mean, did you have expectations of what his apartment is like? Like it was it was it like a super nice apartment

you're like Oh my god this guy's crushing it in his field because look at this apartment, or was it dingy and dirty and crusted? Dingy and dirty. I mean, it's nice place, right? Nice building, but dark, kept his curtains closed. Just gross.

Like, you know, they got a big wraparound couch, but there was only one place to sit and everything else was just stacked with butterflies or butterfly containers. The grossest thing was two gross things, actually. One is I, I looked down the hallway of the apartment from the living room and there was

like a T, I assume it went to a bedroom on the right and a bedroom on the left. And then there was a bathroom and the door was open and I could actually see into the bathtub and there was this disgusting black ring all around the tub. It was like a silence of the lambs. Like he had some weird shit living in that tub. Yeah, maybe, or he didn't, or he, I don't know. But the second gross thing was he very proudly goes to the kitchen and

opens the cupboards to the, above the sink. There's nothing, no food in the cupboards. It's all Tupperware bins filled with these beetles. So it's more of a warehouse. Yeah, yeah. He lived in Kyoto, but he had this apartment in LA and it was just kind of his base. He did ultimately admit to me that he did poach butterflies out of Grand Canyon and Death Valley,

but what he was doing now, he didn't do as much poaching himself. He hired people to go. And he eventually tried to recruit me to go out to Death Valley and collect butterflies for him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, see, take a guy like this.

Is he like, does he imagine himself as mostly legitimate, but now and then I'll fudge the line? Or is he a career criminal? He was committed. He described himself to me as the world's most wanted butterfly smuggler. fudged the line or is he a, is he a career criminal? He was committed. He described himself to me as the world's most wanted butterfly smuggler. He took pride in the fact that Fish and Wildlife was after him and he took pride in bragging that he outsmarted us, which as soon as I heard him say, you know, he outsmarted John

Mendoza, I was like, no, you didn't. Number one, no, you didn't. And number two, I'm going to catch you. I'm putting you in jail, dude. That is the, that went through my mind. When he said that I was like, nope, I'm never quitting until I put Yoshi Koji men jail. How did you, how does it go about the event?

I mean, at some point you got a big an arrest, right? Yeah. There were a few ups and downs with him. Um, he was real touchy and you know, it would take a long time to explain how that whole case transpired over three years. But suffice it to say there were two times during my relationship with him in an undercover capacity where he cut me off. He got mad at me so he would stop talking to me.

At one point what he wanted to do was he wanted to go into business with me and have me sell butterflies for him online that he would send me from Japan. And very clearly, obviously, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what he wanted was a fall guy, right? So when the Fish and Wild guys came coming, he would feed them Ted Nelson, which was my undercover name, he'd feed them Ted and he'd slink away and

he'd hope fish and wildlife would be happy because they caught Ted, right? So I knew that was his plan going in, but at one point he wasn't sending me enough butterflies, like he wasn't sending me the endangered stuff. So I created this undercover eBay account where I looked like I was selling some stuff on the side. And what I hoped he would ask me, my plan was undercover eBay account where I looked like I was selling some stuff on the side.

And what I hoped he would ask me, my plan was he would come back and say, Hey, uh, Ted, where are you getting these? And I'd say some baloney line like, Oh, I got a dealer, a supplier out of Germany and he's terrible. He sends me horrible material and hope that Kojima would then say, well, I can give you that. Right.

But instead he turned me into the local tip line for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. You're kidding me. No, I got it. His game warden called me. His game warden called me one day and he goes, hey Ed, I know you're doing a butterfly case. We got this weird tip on our tip line

and some Japanese guy turning in some guy. And I'm like, well, send it to me. And I listened to it and then it's like, yeah, turning in Ted Nelson for selling Sides material that he doesn't have permits for. You are kidding me. Yeah. So at that point, case is done, right? Cause Kojima, I'm thinking I can't get him now

because if I stay in the business, Kojima thinks he turned me in. If I stay in the business, he's gonna think I'm an informant. He's gonna think I turned. So I let it go and my boss, Marie, was like, oh, case is done, you're never gonna get this dude. So I literally put it aside

and I started working on High Roller. Yeah, that's when High Roller came up. Like I said, I had nothing to do that day, right? So I went out and did that hot case. But about a year later, right in the middle of high roller. So I'm all right now I'm doing a different undercover case with a different persona where I play a much rougher guy than I was portraying with Kojima.

I get a tip that Kojima is coming back to the fair and I'm like, I'm going to take one more shot. So by this time I have got a striped suit, so you're just out of jail? No, but I did have a giant handlebar mustache, because I grew a big mustache to kind of fit in with the pigeon people better. And I go to the fair, and my plan is I'm gonna find him, and I'm gonna accidentally, in quotes, air quotes, run into him and I'm gonna see what happens.

So I go to the fair, I find him, he's in the big hall doing his usual thing. He's got his fanny pack in the front where he usually carried about $10,000 cash in his fanny pack. I don't know how this guy never got robbed walking around LA, but whatever. So I wait till he's moving from one hall to the other

where you gotta go through like this narrow walkway and I come the other direction. And he looked like, he looked scared out of his wits when he saw me. But I immediately went out and said, hey, Yoshi, it's so good to see you. And in the conversation, I very quickly let out that I owe him a huge debt.

And that caught his interest and I said, because of the advice you gave me about how you handled the Fish and Wild guys, I didn't get arrested. I said, some asshole turned me in to Fish and Game and they came to my house, they did a search warrant, but because of the advice you gave me, I had everything hidden somewhere else.

They never found a thing. They couldn't prove anything. And thanks to you, Yoshi, I'm not in jail. Is this what they call a double cross in Corinthian? He bought the whole thing, man. He bought it hook, line and sinker. This is such excellent material. So he takes me to lunch.

And at that moment, he liked that handlebar mustache. He did like that. It turned out, I think he did like the handlebar mustache, but he, he takes me to lunch at this awful Korean restaurant in Korea town in LA. I'm not sure we had beef. I'm not sure what the meat was in that.

You're like, man, I might need to investigate this place. I'm telling you, it was not good, but he was so convinced at that point that I was also a bad guy and now I gave him the line I initially planned to. He said, where are you, where are you getting your material? And I said, I got a German supplier, but he gives me crap. And boom, he immediately said, oh, I can give you the material. Perfect condition. And right then I knew I had him because he said, look, I'm going to go back to Japan,

get on Skype. We'll start talking by Skype early 2000s. Right. And I'll show you what happened to those guys. Yeah. What happened to Skype? I was just thinking about that as I, whatever happened to those guys. Yeah, what happened to Skype? I was just thinking about that as I was coming here to talk about this. Zoom happened to them.

Zoom killed Skype. So he says, we'll talk by Skype. I'll show you what I've got. You tell me what you want, pay me, I'll send it to you. And I was like, this is perfect, right? I'm gonna record him on camera making incriminating statements. And that's exactly how it played out.

The only thing that was weird is after we were at lunch, he wanted me to drive him to a, like a, I don't know what you call it, a sauna in Koreatown. Sure. Oh yeah, those hot baths. Yeah, the hot baths. Is Corinne gonna do this scene?

This exciting Corinne for her TV show. This is the- I just wanna know what restaurant you went to. I can't remember. He did take me later, like later that weekend, he took me to dinner at Lowry's Steakhouse, which is pretty nice, cause he bought the whole thing. Cause she's already pictured in the network saying,

there's not enough sex. Corinne's like, but wait. But wait. We got a scene there, spice it up a little bit. So the whole way to this bath house, I'm driving him there and he, you know, he's asking me, he starts asking me, what actors do you like?

And I didn't know, so I just said, I just started saying actors. Well you look like Keith Fitzgerald. I do? Oh man. Big time, man. I'm not hitting on you either, just looks like you're just. This is disgusting, hey. Wow, wait till I get my mustache.

I'll grow my mustache back, I'll be irresistible to you. So anyway, on the way there, he starts, he asked what actors do you like? And I just named somebody, right? Whatever, Brad Pitt. And he goes, oh, he's gay. I'm like, oh, Brad Pitt's gay, okay. And I'd say, who else?

He'd say, who else? Oh, Tom Cruise. Oh, so gay. Everybody I named was gay. And I was like, I didn't really understand what was going on. Cause then you're like, geez, I must be gay.

Well, I think he was trying to hint. Now he's like trying to hint that he's either bi or gay. And it kind of played out after that. When we started to talk on Skype, we started to do a lot of deals with butterflies. He starts sending endangered stuff. Like he would send stuff to me that I would then take to the University of California at Riverside

to make sure I had it ID'd right. Oh yeah. So they have a big entomology department. So I'd get it and I'd immediately drive out there and have them look at it. And they'd be like, where did you get this? We cannot. Such a long story. Yeah.

I mean, this is a, you know, internationally known entomology university. And they're like, we cannot get this for research. We can't even, these don't exist. And you're, you're getting them in the mail. So Kojima had a very, very sophisticated network around the world. He had the good shit. Where are you getting the, um, the money? Yeah. Like, how did they, how did they, very sophisticated network around the world. He had the good shit. Where are you getting the money? Yeah, like, how do they, as you're getting the money, how are they sort of confident enough

that they're gonna wind up getting the money back? Sometimes you don't know. Really? Sometimes you do spend money in an undercover situation and you do get ripped off and that just happens. But you have to live under a sort of price cap, right? Like you couldn't go and say, I need $10 million to buy a butterfly. Right. They're gonna be like, no, no, no.

Yeah. So you usually ask for more than what you need, right? So I can't remember how much I had to start with is like maybe 30 grand or something. Little con man budget. Yeah, exactly. So what you're doing is you're to avoid entrapping people. You don't want it. You can't entrap people, right? So you got to offer reasonable rates for these things. You can't. And so you take the risk that they might walk away from you or they might steal your money. That's just part of the, part of the risk.

Yeah. But he didn't, he wanted the money and he provided the stuff. But as we were talking, it became clear that he had a thing for me and, uh know, that's fine, whatever. It just became really awkward when you're on a Skype call with somebody and they want you to take your shirt off and stuff like that. It was very uncomfortable. I would have had butterfly tattoos all over.

Yeah. That's just the real entrapment there. You know what, it was the worst part is at the time I was married and, you know, we would have a lot of these calls at when it was convenient for him. Cause one of the things that really made him mad is if you were not available when he wanted to talk. So he's in Japan, you know, whatever, 12 hours ahead, 13 hours. Yeah. He's winding down for the night. Yeah. And I'm winding down for the night. He wants to talk like it. My time zone's wrong.

Yeah. 12 one o'clock in the morning, I'm on Skype. And my wife has to be extremely quiet. She cannot come into that room. She cannot make any noise because he'd be very alert to, I thought you lived alone. I thought you were single. Sure, yeah. So that was stressful

because he wanted to talk almost every night for a couple of months. It was pretty rough. But I ended up, you know, back then we didn't, I didn't have a fast enough computer to record screen on the screen. So I just had a video camera set up to the side that he couldn't see.

And I'd just record him and me on the call. And man, I got some incredible incriminating statements just about how much material he had, how much, how he would get his species, which species he could get. I remember once I expressed some interest in an endangered butterfly out of the Caribbean and he said, well, it'll take me a couple of weeks, but I can get you one. Name one of these butterflies for me.

Well the big one, the final one that I got was the Queen Alexandria butterfly. It's the largest butterfly in the world. You can pull one up. I want to see what it looks like. The female is about the size of a small dinner plate, maybe 10, 11 inches across. The males are generally colorful, but they're smaller. You can click around there. There's someone's head next to it for comparison.

Yeah, they're big. Yeah. And there's like someone's head next to it for comparison. It's like the, it's. Yeah, they're big. Yeah. Yeah. With these, um, with these cases like the butterfly one, I'm sure a lot of other ones, were you in a position where you were having to work with another country's law enforcement? Uh, yeah, I worked a little bit. Did Japan get involved with the butterfly thing at all?

Interesting question because later we tried to get some help out of Japan and I went through the Homeland Security Law Enforcement attache based in Tokyo and we did not get, we got minimal cooperation from Japan. That's what I was getting at. Like does, like when you're dealing with something like that's ending up in China or coming out of China, like, is there any kind of cooperation or? It depends. Sometimes it's great. Sometimes China is actually really good.

Just kind of depends on the species who's involved. The interesting thing with the Japanese government is, and the Homeland Security attache told me this, they consider undercover work to be dishonorable. So when they heard that it was an undercover agent who had basically built a case against a Japanese citizen, they weren't that interested. No kid. Mm-mm.

Nope. It didn't matter. We had everything we needed on Kojima, but yeah, I eventually, I owed him some money and he made some flirtatious statements to him and I basically kind of hinted that things might heat up if he came back to LA, because I had an arrest warrant for him,

we just needed to get him. And then he came and we hooked him up at the airport. Yeah, it's fun. Were you present? I was there, but I, we wanted to kind of see what he said after he was arrested. So I wasn't part of that. I didn't see him until the next day. But you interacted with them. Yeah. Cause when you arrest somebody in the federal system, you move them, you take them into the jail for the evening. And then the next day,

you're responsible for moving them to the court. So I had to go pick him up at the jail and move him over to the district court. How's that conversation go? It was, it was funny. He, he looked, he's excited to see me when I first walked in. Then he saw my belt badge and he saw I was wearing a holster and I had handcuffs. What did he see? Like he thought you were in trouble too? No, I think he thought I was there to bail him out. Pretty sure he thought I was there to get him out. Was he an American citizen?

No, a Japanese citizen, but he claimed, he was very good at weaving lies. So he made up a whole American life where he claimed to have a wife and a half Japanese, half Anglo kid. And so he claimed he had a passport, an American passport, but he would never tell me what name the American passport was in.

So I didn't think he was telling the truth, but we didn't know for sure if he had an American passport. And he was pretty tricky. He would tell people, he would tell, if he knew all of us, he might tell you, hey, I'm in Grand Canyon, but he really was in Japan, right? He might tell you, I'm in Utah next week. And so what you would hear, the buzz you would hear

among the insect trading community was very confusing and conflicting about where he was. It was tricky. How's that? I always tell sons of bitches right where I'm at. How's that work? I'm gonna stop doing that, man. How does that work in cases where you're dealing with like your target is not an American citizen as far as like sentencing and getting them in jail and like what ends up happening?

Yeah, I actually did a lot of cases against foreign nationals and I was involved in extraditing a number of those people and And it's a long, very complicated process, but it is possible that extradite people back here to the United States, whether they're Americans or foreign nationals. And I did that in a number of cases. The way it should work out is a foreign national should not get bail, right? Unfortunately, sometimes they do, and I've seen foreign nationals flee. Just top on a plane. Yeah, and that's really frustrating

when you're the case agent, because now, thanks to a judge who stupidly gave this guy bail, now you gotta spend possibly years trying to hunt this guy down, and then get him back, right? But generally, a foreign national who commits a crime in the US or where there's US jurisdiction can be sentenced here, no problem.

You get them back here, they go through their trial if they want one, or they plead guilty and they're sentenced. The thing that's most interesting about a foreign national though, is if you're convicted of a felony in the US, and you don't have US legal residence, you're immediately deported after you finish your sentence, and you cannot return to the US. So that's actually a big deal. A lot of people wanna come to the US,

they wanna take advantage of our banking, our business, they wanna go on vacation here, they want their kids to go college here, and once you're convicted of a felony and you get out of jail, you know, Kojima got out of jail and was immediately turned over to immigration and customs enforcement. They drove him to LAX. They watched him get on a plane and boop.

He went back to Japan and is not allowed to return to the US ever. Was he then arrested in Japan? I don't know. I doubt it. I doubt it. But would you send a file case like that to them to say, hey, heads up? Yeah, I've done that before. I've shared information with like South Africa. They just might not give a shit.

Might not have time. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Yeah, it's their business, you know, if they do or don't. I've worked real closely with Germany on some cases, actually a case involving. Remember when Justin Bieber got busted for the monkey? Yeah. Germany needed to serve Justin Bieber with some papers because Justin left the country before they were able to give him his fine. So in German law, they had to serve him personally.

So they were like, how are we going to do this? So they called me. I happened to know some German cops who are working the case and they said, Hey, we've got to serve Justin Bieber. Can you do it? And I was said, Hey, we got to serve Justin Bieber. Can you do it? And I was like, hell yeah, I can serve. That was one of the best days of my life.

When I tracked down Justin Bieber gave him German paperwork to pay a fine. So how much time did, uh, what's his name? Kojima. He got just under two years. So I think it's about 21, 22. Did he get a lot of restitution and fines and stuff? He did, he never paid him. But nothing you can do about that.

We confiscated whatever property we could and did a US Marshall sale on it. I think the property had in LA, we only got about 16,000 out of him. Two years. Two years, yeah. Imagine that conversation. Yeah, exactly. When you're like,

what are you in here for? You know, like Norm MacDonald, the comedian, Norm MacDonald, he used to have a joke where he's talking about the hierarchy, you know, in prison, like the worst you did, you know, the higher he is. He's talking about OJ going to prison. And when he finally went to prison for stealing memorabilia, that he would sit so low on the hierarchy, but he would say like, no, man, I killed my wife and a waiter with a knife. And all the guys like, no, you didn't. We saw that trial. So it's like when you're in there on butterfly theft, it's gotta be a weird position you occupy. Yeah.

International smuggler is what you tell everyone. That sounds good. You're right. Yeah. I'd leave the butterflies out. Exactly. They'd be like, well, what were you smuggling? Nothing. For me to know when you didn't find out. Contraband, contraband. Contraband, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Did you have any or possibly many instances

where you really felt scared for your life, like in situations where maybe you got into that apartment and all of a sudden you thought, uh-oh. Yeah, you know, I was lucky, and the service has been lucky in general. We haven't had an agent shot in the line of duty since 1968. That was shocking. Yeah.

And of all things that agent was ambushed by duck hunters. Man fully ambushed. Fully ambushed. Yeah. Like they set him up. They set him up. Yep. They set him up.

They knew he was coming down a dyke. He's working with the state game warden. They knew he was coming. I think it was Illinois. I knew he was coming down a dike. He's working with the state game warden. They knew he was coming. What state? I think it was Illinois. I think it was Illinois. Illinois! Yeah. Oh, you're gonna tell me Louisiana.

Coming down a dike, they set him up, they hid, they popped up right in front of him, shot him point blank. What? Yeah. He lived. He had a shoulder holster on at the time and they were loaded with birdshot because they were duck poachers. That was their first mistake. That was their first mistake. So he, but it was close. His close range is like 10 yards, it's close. And he was drawing his pistol,

he had a shoulder holster, he was drawing his revolver and most of the shot hit the revolver. And he tried to fire back, but for whatever, it somehow disabled his pistol. And he was hit. He got hit in the eye and the head and yeah, he lived though. He stayed an agent. Till he retires. Yeah. But anyway, to answer your question, you know, uh, I always considered LA to be

like a higher risk place to work, but I was lucky. I, you know, I think in my whole career, I had to chase one guy on foot. I wrestled one guy to the ground. I pulled my gun whole career, I had to chase one guy on foot. I wrestled one guy to the ground. I pulled my gun often, but I only ever came close to shooting one person and you know, didn't have to, but I never felt like I was ever in a meeting. I never felt super scared. I, there were moments when people said creepy

things to me where I realized I need to get out of this situation, but it never got to the point where, you know, anybody ever physically assaulted me or drew a gun on me. There have been agents that have had guns pulled on them, which is pretty scary. When you pull your gun, you mean just like to be like, yeah, get down, you're under arrest. Yeah, to be ahead of them on the OODA loop, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I always want to be ahead of the bad guys. Yeah. So, um, you know, an agent who retired a long time ago, uh, who's deceased now, a guy named Sam Mahola, when he retired, he said something very profound at his retirement party. He said, you cannot be in law enforcement for 20 plus years and not have had a few close calls,

including the ones you don't know about. And that last, that last fart that really hit me. I had been on maybe 10 years when he retired and that I had never thought of that before. And you know, if somebody's going to assault you, it's not your choice. It's their choice. Right? So you don't know, you don't know if somebody's thinking about killing you, looking at you to see if they could get the upper hand on you. And you know, or hiding in the bushes like that one story we heard.

Yeah, we had a game warden. We did this couple of volumes of the series called Close Calls, near death experiences with people. And we interviewed a game warden who, near death experiences with people. Yeah. And we interviewed a game warden who he had a close call that he didn't know about. But then later happened to interview, later happened to interview a serial poacher. And in the interview, the serial poacher who he's been arrested on other charges, he's been arrested on drug charges or domestic violence, can never a handful of charges. And he's interviewing them because of potential connection to a poaching case, but he's in trouble now. So now he just wants to talk.

He tells a story about a night in Colorado and the warden interviewing him realizes he's telling him a story about himself. Oh man. About his plan to kill the guy. Wow. But the guy didn't follow him down the right himself. Oh man. About his plan to kill the guy. Wow. But the guy didn't follow him down the right road. Wow. Yeah. And he's sitting there being like, he's talking about me. That's crazy. Like I remember that night. Yeah. He's like, he's like, if he turned down my road,

I was going to give it to him right through his window. Oof. Yeah. How many times, you know, you never know. If it ever happened to you. No, he'd been living his life, no idea. And so I always kept that in mind, what Sam had said at his retirement party, that you just can't predict what people are going to do. All the undercover things gotta be scary, man. It is, but it's also so fun. It's so rewarding to know that you're in there and they're believing what you're saying, and they're saying these incredibly

incriminating statements in front of you. Sometimes it is just so fun to leave the undercover contact and just be like, I got them, I got these guys. But how often do you end up liking the guys? You know, it's weird. I, there were times when I got to like the people I was working undercover, especially like in High Roller. I respected some of those guys.

They reminded me, I went to an inner city high school and they reminded me people I knew in high school. And I liked them. But, you know, they're just blatant killers. They're blatant lawbreakers. And I just have no respect for that. So... It always affects the affection. Yeah, it does. It really does. I mean I guess it's I like you but you need to have consequences and I'm gonna see what you do when those consequences are

delivered right. So what I'm more interested in is what happens after these guys are caught? Do they accept responsibility? Do they change their ways? If that's the case I can like those people right but if they snub their nose and they call me a jack-booted thug and I made up everything and I fabricated everything and they don't take responsibility, I don't have any respect for that person. So you can't really like a person like that. So if you do undercover, take the Japanese individual, you do undercover but then because of the way your agency works, you don't vanish.

Right. Right. You got to, he's not like, whatever happened to that guy? Right. Right. It's like, there you are. Right. You're like, Oh no, I'm me.

I'm special agent blank. Anyone can find out what my family history is, where I live. How does that not wind up stressing you out that all of a sudden you're a known thing and if they ever had some kind of vengeful impulse it's like they know exactly who betrayed them. Right. Yeah and this is where I think sometimes our agents get too paranoid. They act like they're secret agents not special agents and the bottom line is we're not secret agents. We are special agents. And at the end of your undercover,

you are gonna have to sign affidavits. And you may have to go to court and testify. And you're not gonna do all of that with your undercover name. You're gonna be known. And the way, you know, I had so many situations where after I had worked somebody undercover for a year or more,

I would run into them in court, and now I'm in a suit and tie, I'm clean shaven. Now I'm referred to as special agent newcomer. They know me as Ted Nelson or whatever. It's like this weird disconnect in their brain. I had people wave and smile at me in court. Yoshikojima waved and smiled at me in court. Yoshio Kojima waved and smiled at me while he was in belly chains with his hands chained in front of him. I

had high roller guys smiling and waving at me in court and I could never figure it out. And I think it's just, there's like this disconnect. They don't associate me with Ted Nelson. I'm now the agent who's treated them decently since the case has gone down, you know But more to your point. I I did have a case once where I arrested a guy He became a fugitive because he jumped bail and I spent years trying to get him back eventually caught him in Mexico We extradited him his two sons Absolutely hated me. I mean hated and these guys had guns. They were former Israeli army. They knew how to use guns. And I was worried about those guys

because they knew who I was because now I'd signed all these affidavits. I'd testified in court against their dad and their adults, you know. So when I drove home, I did counter surveillance whenever I drove home, I took different routes home every day. I never drove directly from the office to my driveway. I keep a gun in my bedroom. And you just have to be careful. You have to be aware that there are people may be planning things you don't know,

but it doesn't mean you don't do your job. I mean, these, these guys, sometimes you hear game wardens or federal agents say, well, I'm not going to get killed over a deer. Well, it's not, if you're doing your job, it's not your choice. If some deer poacher decides to ambush you, take a shot at you just for doing your job. Yeah. You darn right might get killed for, you know, over a deer.

But that's your job. Like you said though, you're possibly going to take away their money, their house, their liberty, right? Exactly. So it's not just a deer. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, you were talking about the low penalties, right? Bad guys don't know that they might get off with just probation.

They think they sell an illegal butterfly, they're gonna go to jail for 10 years. So their ignorance of the law may cause them to react in a way that's not right. But bottom line is my belief on this is you become a federal agent in any whatever agency, but Fish and Wildlife, Secret Service, FBI, whatever, you're making a commitment that you're gonna carry a gun,

you're going to physically arrest people, You're going to physically arrest people. You're going to threaten their liberty, their money, their house. Right. And with that comes certain risks. And if you are not willing to accept those risks, then you better not be a federal agent. You better not do undercover work. It's not mandatory. You do undercover work. It's they ask you, do you want to do this undercover case?

And if you say no, you don't have to do it. Did you have a conversation with your wife or spouse before you started doing undercover work? No. Is that why they're not your wife anymore? Well, I don't know why my wife's not my wife anymore, but you know, there were times when it was very stressful on the relationship because she did not like

sometimes when I carried my gun off duty. I always carried my gun off duty. And there were times in LA with 10, 10 million people live in LA, right? I was working on a case involving Russian caviar traffickers, and these are probably mobbed up people. And I'm talking about, I'm taking a million dollars worth of caviar from them at a time, right? When I seize it at the airport, million dollars,

definitely get killed over a million dollars. One time my wife and I are at a restaurant in Santa Monica, I'm, you know, I'm off, we're just having dinner. We happen to be seated at the window and these two Russian dudes walk by who are connected to the guy I just seized a million dollars worth of caviar from, and they, they do the double take and they recognize me.

Cause I, we had just done a big search warrant at this caviar processing place. They saw me, I interviewed them and, uh, I just looked at my wife. I was like, we gotta go, we gotta leave. And you know, that's not, she was planning on a nice dinner out and that all changed. So, um. Oh man, my heart rate's going up just listening to that. Yeah. Canceled your caviar order. That was kind of a no crap moment. You know, another time. I'll take that caviar to go. Exactly. Gosh. Uh, you know, one, one time I went, I just went into a McDonald's during high roller.

I still have my big mustache, but I had to go down to the US attorney's office. So now I got my mustache, but I'm in my federal agent suit, my uniform, my black suit, white shirt, plain tie. And I thought, oh, just go to McDonald's and get a Coke. I walk in and two people in front of me, I'm like, how do I know this guy? I hear his voice, I'm like, I know this dude.

And I realized he's one of the guys in Operation High Roller. He's one of the bad guys. And I just, I put my sunglasses on and I turned around and I walked out and he never saw me. Or if he did see me, he never made the connection guy, guy in a suit versus who he was seeing on the weekends.

But you know, I'm in a city of 10 million people. What are the odds I'm going to run into this guy? I just was working undercover six days ago, you know, that's freaky. And what if they see you, you don't see them. You also have developed a probably very heightened spatial awareness and you're probably more likely to recognize and you know, who's going on.

One thing we haven't talked about is I worked five years of my career. I worked in Africa as a agent based at an embassy overseas. And, uh, I did not realize how, how stressful it was to constantly be on like that deep yellow alert. I was more on yellow, hot, you know, deep yellow or light red alert in Africa than I ever was in

LA. And, uh, when I came back, I just had this huge release of tension that I didn't realize I had. And I've talked to other federal agents who were based overseas when I was, HSI and FBI, and they said they had the exact same reaction. They came back from Southern Africa, and they just like, they just had their muscles relaxed.

And that's because it's just a more hostile place. Yeah, and there's so much gun crime, right? It just related just being a person there. You are constantly, you know, you don't even stop. When I lived in Africa, if you're driving at night, you don't stop at red lights. You're insane if you stop at a red light. Yeah, you slow down, you look,

but if nobody's coming, you go. Because that's where car hijackings happen is it stoplights at night in Pretoria. So you just don't do it. And, um, you know, I, uh, I won't give it the gun stuff in Africa, but yeah, people get killed all the time over stupid stuff in Africa.

And so not only now are you a federal agent working overseas on rhino horn trafficking. Which people die over every year all the time. Yeah. And yeah, life is cheap in Africa, right? They'll kill you for anything. And if you're talking about $100,000 rhino horn, they'll definitely kill you.

So you've got the law enforcement aspect, but then you also have just going to the grocery store is super dangerous. So I don't want to scare people. I never got in trouble in Africa. I never had anybody try to do anything to me, but at the same time, I never went from a store and directly got into my car.

I'd walk to another car. I'd look behind me before I got in the car. I'd sometimes walk around the car, just do something unusual to so that I'd see somebody change their behavior around me. So yeah, you, you do get in this mode of being on yellow alert all the time. And back, back to your question, if somebody's going to do undercover work, they don't automatically become a secret agent. They just have to be careful, right?

They're still a special agent. They have to do their job and they're going to have to just suck it up. Are you going to go now and launch a whole second career? Uh, so since I retired, I've been doing some adjunct teaching at Cal State, which I really enjoy on law enforcement. Yeah. Criminal justice.

I teach criminal justice, administrative law. I do some consulting here and there, but if you don't mind me plug in'm in conjunction with Cal State. I'm starting a podcast called nature's secret service, where we're going to focus on wildlife crime, interviewing people involved in it and try to talk about what drives it. Some of the things that happen, some of the

interesting stories should be fun. It's going to, should the first episode should launch in like early March. Oh, great. So nature's secret service, anybody wants to look for it, they can find it. And that's in conjunction with who? Uh, Cal State University.

Oh, congratulations man. Yeah, thanks. Should be fun. I don't know if I'll be a good, you know, host, but we'll see how it goes, right? I think you'll probably do all right. I get some tips from you if I need them. I don't know, that's where I'd go for them.

I think you got it figured out. Well, I think, I think it'll be fun. Mostly it's going to be talking to talking to you know law enforcement professionals and and when you get to law enforcement people talking the good stories come out pretty quick Yeah, so I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure we'll get to some good stuff. That's great man. Congratulations. Thanks Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Oh, it's been a pleasure. I appreciate it, but you're very welcome. I appreciate it Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks Ed. Yeah, nice to meet you guys. Hey American history buffs, hunting history buffs, listen up, we're back at it with another volume of our Meat Eaters American History series. In this edition titled The Mountain Men 1806 to 1840, we tackle the

Rocky Mountain beaver trade and dive into the lives and legends of fellows like Jim Bridger, Jed Smith, and John Coulter. This small but legendary fraternity of backwoodsmen helped define an era when the West represented not just unmapped territory but untapped opportunity for those willing to endure some heinous and at times violent conditions. We explain what started the Mountain Man era and what ended it. We tell you everything you'd ever want to know about what the Mountain Men ate, how they hunted and trapped, what gear they carried, what clothes they wore, how they interacted with Native Americans, how 10% of them

died violent deaths, and even detailed descriptions of how they performed amputations on the fly. It's as dark and bloody and good as our previous volume about the white-tailed deer skin trade which is titled The Long Hunters 1761 to 1775. So again, this new Mountain Man edition about the beaver skin trade is available for pre-order now wherever audiobooks are sold. It's called Meat Eaters American History the Mountain Men 1806 to 1840 by me Stephen Rinella.