The Team House - Inside the Fort Bragg Cartel | Seth Harp | Ep. 367

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

In this episode, Seth Harp discusses his book 'The Fort Bragg Cartel,' which explores the dark underbelly of Fort Bragg, including drug trafficking, military cover-ups, and the stories of individuals like Billy Levine and Freddie Huff. The conversation delves into the systemic issues within military justice, the culture of impunity, and the broader implications of these stories on society. This conversation delves into the dark underbelly of military operations at Fort Bragg, focusing on the connections between drug trafficking, violence, and corruption. The discussion highlights the roles of Timothy Dumas and Freddie Huff in a drug network linked to the black mafia, the shocking murders of Billy Levine and Dumas, and the troubling culture of violence within special operations units. The author reflects on the public and military response to these revelations, emphasizing the need for accountability and oversight in military operations.https://www.amazon.com/Fort-Bragg-Cartel-Trafficking-Special/dp/0593655087https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fort-bragg-cartel-seth-harp/1146427694Subscribe to our new newsletter!!!!https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/joinToday's Sponsors:Perfect Jean ⬇️https://theperfectjean.nyc/house15for 15% offGhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Introduction to Seth Harp and His Journey02:54 The Fort Bragg Cartel: Unveiling the Story06:00 Billy Levine: A Delta Force Operator's Downward Spiral08:57 Cover-Ups and Impunity in Military Justice11:51 The Broader Criminality at Fort Bragg15:06 Sexual Assault and Military Justice Failures18:09 Freddie Huff: From Law Enforcement to Drug Trafficker20:50 The Dark Side of Fort Bragg: Murders and Drug Trafficking23:54 Enrique Roman Martinez: A Mysterious Death26:51 The Rafer Drop Zone: A Hub for Drug Trafficking29:50 The Cocaine Bear: A Cover-Up Story32:53 Freddie Huff's Rise and Fall in Drug Trafficking37:01 Connections to the Underworld39:59 The Drug Trafficking Network43:40 Fake Police Raids and Kidnappings45:57 The Murders of Levine and Dumas52:35 The Culture of Violence at Fort Bragg56:30 Public and Military Response to the BookBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special Operations. Covert Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 367 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave.

And our guest joining us in studio is Seth Harrop. He is himself an Army veteran and also the author of the Fort Bragg Cartel, drug trafficking and murder and special forces, a book that in recent weeks has made quite a splash out there and arrived at some controversy. But I'm glad that is getting the attention. It's a book that needs to be read and it needs to get the attention. And hopefully some of these things get addressed down there. But anyway, let's jump right into it, Seth. I want to start off just asking you a little bit about kind of how you came up, how you grew up, what took you towards the Army and your military service and then eventually journalism? Sure. Nothing too special. I was an Army reservist

in college at the University of Texas and was called up to serve when the Iraq war started, did one tour in Iraq, and then wrote out the rest of my time in the reserves. I actually was a lawyer. I practiced law for a few years and then was always really passionate about journalism. I had written for my college newspaper, including while I was deployed to Iraq. I was writing for the Daily Texan, and that was a really rewarding experience. I wanted to get back to that, and so at a certain point, I actually went back to school for journalism, and it's a job I'm doing for about the last 10 years now. It's been really fun.

And have you always covered national security stuff, or like, I'm just a little curious, like, what kind of brought you towards this subject matter? Yeah, you know, the fact that I had been in Iraq was a way that I could get assignments, especially to cover the war in Syria, because at the time I graduated from journalism school in 2016. And as you know, because you were over there, a lot of journalists left Syria after James Foley was beheaded. Because the security environment was so poor. And the fact that I had been in Iraq was a way for me to get assignments in Syria. And so I have always focused on the either foreign wars or the military things of that nature.

Yeah. So let's talk about the Fort Bragg cartel. You know, specifically what kind of tipped you to this subject that, you know, Fort Bragg was an area that you wanted to focus on. How did that come about? I just read an article in the New York Times on December 4th, 2020, that these two special operations soldiers have been found murdered on Fort. Bragg and that one of them Billy Levine had previously killed a guy in his house and that had been ruled a justified homicide. I then read a blog post that you wrote Jack that identified Billy as a Delta Force soldier. Yeah. That was really crucial because the entire time I had been reporting

on the war and the military and even serving in the army myself, I had never heard of a Delta force guy being in the news for any reason. They did keep that pretty quiet. Yeah. So that was at the point in which I realize, okay, there's got to be a story here. Yeah. And there's a little aside on that, I had a couple of years later after I wrote that, I had a guy I served with in special forces who went on to become a Delta operator, hitting me up out of the blue, hence spoken to him in years, hey, you need to change the title of that article, man. Oh, yeah. That's clickbait. You can't write that. I wrote, do Delta Force operators have a license to kill? Yeah. It's like, dude, you read that whole thing and that's your takeaway from that?

that? Like, come on. And your interview with Mark Leshiker's family was also a really important inspiration because you did that before I had even got off the ground. So, you know, I, uh, I saw from what you had reported that there was some kind of cover up there. Um, so that was an important part of it too. And I just, I've been in touch with the, with the Leshickers or, you know, they're, uh, with Nicole Rick and Tammy May me and Laura a Leshiker, um, who since remarried. I've been in touch with them since, since then. I'm glad. did. I'm glad that you got to talk to them. And I mean, the stuff that Mark's mother and widow and sister told me are like things that will, they stick with you as you know. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. And now the poor girl who witnessed the killing, who identify in the book by a pseudonym. Yeah. You know, she's kind of grown up now. That was 2018. So she's, you know, she's a teenager. and she is writing about this. She's written an essay that recalls what because she witnessed her father murdered right in front of her by Billy Levine. So it's pretty heavy story. Let's kind of dive into that a little bit

because Billy Levine, I guess you could say is kind of the focal point of your book, a sort of jumping off point. Let's start off and talk about him and who was his best friend, Mark Leshikar. Yeah. Billy was a Delta. force operator. He had done 14 deployments. He had been in since shortly before 2001,

shortly before 9-11, that is. He was a guy who had severe PTSD, moral injury, drug addiction, a lot of the things that creep up on guys that are in that community after lots of deployments. All that was going on with him. His best friend, Mark, was a 19th group, Green Beret. So he was, I still to this day don't know exactly what he was doing at Bragg. He wasn't on active duty. And his group was not in North Carolina. It's in Washington. So I believe he had some kind of desk job at Usa Sock, but they haven't confirmed it.

But in any case, he was at Fort Bragg. He was working there. He and Billy had known each other from when Lesch was going through the Q course. And one thing they really shared in common or one thing that seems to have been a reason why they bonded is, you know, they both were into using drugs. like hard drugs frequently. And, you know, at a certain point, they got out of control. And the first two chapters of my book are dedicated to this trip they took to Disney World. You already know this whole story.

But they take their daughters, they both have young daughters, they take them to Disney World. The whole time they're at Disney World, they're drinking and doing drugs. And Mark evidently ingested some bath salts. I don't know if he went out and bought bath salts. more likely he ingested some some ecstasy or something that was cut with um you know fillers and um he started hallucinating he was convinced that um that the car was being followed that they were the car was bugged and this really started to get on billy's nerves billy had um really bad anger issues as also can happen to people that have been exposed repeatedly to combat um and he was really

getting annoyed by Mark's, you know, shenanigans. Long story short, he ends up shooting and killing Mark right in front of his house, or right in the foyer of his house when they get back to Fayetteville, right in front of his daughter who had just let him in the door. And the important thing is that the civilian authorities and the military authorities at that point jumped in and covered this whole thing up. It made the case go away and papered it over as a justified homicide. When, you You can debate over whether it should have been like first degree murder, second degree, manslaughter, any of those charges, I could see if it's inappropriate, depending upon the prosecutorial decisions. But for them to just say it was self-defense, that's a cover-up because Mark at the time of his death was unarmed and he didn't even have a screwdriver, which was Billy's cover story that he had come out of with a screwdriver. When they rolled the body, there was no screwdriver.

Right. The other thing is the bullet fragments under the carpet. Yeah. Bullet fragments don't get under the carpet unless you're doing a coupie. de grace yeah yeah right at the ballistic evidence shows that he shot mark from multiple angles and they stood over him and fired a kill shot which exactly is what you know they're they're trained to do and it's sadly what the daughter described seeing after billy died yeah yeah she started talking about it for the first time yeah and that murder of course is just that was covered up

was just a prelude to all the rest of the events that happened in the book i start off with it to show the type of impunity that these guys have and the link to which the command will go to keep, if you're in Delta Force, that they'll keep you out of the news. So, yeah, let's talk a little bit about that because, as you point out, there's never a trial, there was never a real inquiry. As far as I can tell, a police sergeant wrote a report, said self-defense, and that was it, that was the end of it. And it all just sort of went away.

Despite the family asking some questions and, I mean, there's just, very weird the way it all went down. It is. Yeah. And I recently obtained a copy of Billy Levine's memoir. Someone that he had been in rehab with in Texas sent me a copy. I wrote in the book that Billy had been working on this document at the time of his death, but I had never seen it. Someone actually sent it to me, and it was incredible to read Billy narrating his downward spiral. And one of the things he talks about is that shooting. And, you know, among the deep details that he that he goes into are exactly how he shot Mark. You know, he even says he almost takes pride in it. It's strange. He almost takes pride in how, you know, efficiently he dispatched

Mark because he, one little bit of it that I'm recalling is that, you know, he said that as he stood over him, having killed him, he was prepared to shoot him again in the head. Small detail, but, you know, it made an impression. Oh, you know, the reason I brought that up, the reason why I wanted to mention it was not that particular detail, but rather what happened when he got to the police station. Because Billy writes about that too.

And, you know, it was incredible by his account, the sort of entitlement that he showed, and he was, like, outraged that they had even questioned him. He was, by his own account, was telling them things like, you know, do you know who I am? and was resentful of the fact that they had even brought him to the police station. And he seemed to expect everyone to just take his word for it, that it was self-defense, even though, as you know, he told his direct superior on Delta Force originally that Mark had committed suicide.

And then he told the 911 dispatcher that it was a stranger who had broken into his house. But he still was, like, offended that these... So you have three cover stories at a minimum. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. So, but he shocked that the police were even asking him these questions. I mean, that's the attitude that comes across in the, in his account of it that he wrote. Maybe he behaved himself more professionally at the time, but it didn't seem like it in the way he wrote about it.

I mean, he was like, pulling rank is the wrong word, because it wasn't rank, but he was just playing that delta card hard with the, with the sheriff's deputies. What else does, did Billy have to say in this memoir that he wrote? So much. still just processing. I only read it two days ago, but he was even crazier than I thought. You know, in the book, I'm not in the business of portraying any of these guys as monsters. Like, that's just not, first of all, because I've met all their family members and talked to them. And I think that they have done monstrous things, including Mark Leshiker, by a lot of accounts. You know, the reason he couldn't make it through Delta's election was because he had committed

certain war crimes in Afghanistan. Levine as well, you know, he had done terrible things. I still try to portray them as much as possible as humans and show like they didn't start out this way. It was the result of external factors acting on them that turned them this way. But reading this memoir that Levine wrote, I realized that he was even crazier than I thought. Like, I didn't, I mean, he was way off the deep end, man. He was so paranoid and violent and aggressive. Like, you can just feel the anger and aggression on every page of the stuff that he wrote.

And as you go through talking about Billy's trajectory and experience, you kind of uncover in the book that there's like this larger theme about criminality around Fort Bragg, that while Billy's situation is fairly extreme and I guess you could say abnormal, but it's not that abnormal. I mean, you uncover a whole string of murders, rapes, drug trafficking around the base. It is apparently it is a practice on part of the Special Forces Command as well as the district attorney. of Cumberland County that these guys get special treatment when they turn up in handcuffs. And, you know, what the motives for that are is a matter of conjecture, but I assume it's to protect the special forces from embarrassment because reporters will jump all over stories if they relate to the special forces. So that dynamic is definitely in play. And yeah, I showcase after case in the book of guys who are accused of murder, rape, drug trafficking, what have you, who are just

immediately let off the hook. I mean, there are exceptions, of course. Dan Gold is in prison, right, for smuggling cocaine from Columbia in a punching bag, right? Yeah, two of them. Yeah. Yeah, a million dollars were the cocaine. You know, but I interviewed the officer, the army officer

who was at the DEA station or at the U.S. Embassy, rather, in Bogota, who caught or got wind of this scheme. and he said he had a really hard time convincing the DEA to investigate. And, you know, he couldn't even get them interested in it until he finally brought them the punching bags and put them through an x-ray machine. And it clearly showed it was a pack full of code. So I want to take a minute today to tell you guys about the perfect gene. I've been wearing them for a few weeks now and really enjoy them. And I just want to share it with our audience.

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It doesn't shock any of us per se. But the way her trial was handled was a circus, like totally, like, off the wall inappropriate. Can you tell us a little bit about kind of, and also the other thing, too, is what that I find. quite often is how when one of these cases comes down, the local police department and the military police will bounce it around between each other, like, pointing fingers in both directions to try to, I don't know, avoid having to address the issue. Yeah. You know, talking about rape trials and stuff and sexual assault in the military, that brings up a lot of toxicity,

especially among the people that are, like, consuming these stories and debating them on the internet. but Aaron Scanlan was an army officer who after this encounter with Cristobo Valle Vallejo she immediately told several people that she had been raped like within minutes she told people I feel like I just got raped she also went directly to a hospital and had a rape kit done she did everything by the book and reporting that rape she has text messages with Christoval Valle Vallejo where she accuses him directly of rape and he doesn't respond. My point is that people may not like this, it may not like that I bring attention to

some things like that, but nevertheless, this is real. She didn't have any reason to lie about this. People want to impugn, not necessarily her, but women who are in the situation, they want to impugn their motives or say that whatever, but in this case, it really wasn't that way from the evidence. And by ajo, he was charged with rape. But as a... we're discussing at a certain point the special forces command steps in, approaches the district attorney, and they work out a deal so that this is the charges in civilian court go away, gets transferred to Fort Bragg to be carried out under a court marshal, goes on and on, like the time is just dragging on, and then they finally have a trial, and then surprise, you know,

it's an acquittal. So that's another case of what I describe as a cover-up. because I won't go into details now, but I talk about a lot of irregularities in that trial. There's one I'll call out in particular. It's funny how in the cases where the military doesn't actually want a conviction, that the prosecutor who gets put on the case is someone who's never tried a case before. That happened in the Eddie Gallagher case. Now, it seems to have been some contingency there where the lead prosecutor actually had to deal with some situations,

but Eddie Gallagher was prosecuted by a guy who had never tried a murder trial before. That would almost never happen in the civilian court. You would never allow a prosecutor who'd never done a capital case to try a capital case. Same thing happened in the case of Vallejo. The prosecutors that they put on that case, it was their first trial ever. And they got schooled by his civilian attorney who has defended lots and lots of capital cases. I mean, there's so much to go into. even know where to begin.

Another example you talk about, there's a very interesting chapter in your book about the cover girls who work in the mission support troop and some sexual harassment allegations at Delta Force. And I mean, that was pretty gross to read that. That, you know, somebody allegedly called this woman into her, into his office, and had her bend over to inspect her underwear.

And like, what in the world is going on here? Guys want to deny that. You know, I see all the comments that, That's one they really jumped on, that Politico excerpted that chapter of the book. And so a lot of people, you know, have been jumping on that to say that this environment is much more professional than I portrayed. All I can say is y'all should have talked to me when I was reporting the book and I was calling all you guys and trying to get you to comment. I would have happily included those statements. But I'm left to go on, not just Courtney Williams's testimony, I would have never published something that was single source.

I reached out to one of her colleagues who's identified in the book by a pseudonym without Courtney knowing about the other woman and vice versa. Kept them completely separate, interviewed them completely separately, and to the extent that their stories matched, that's what I published in the book. So, yeah, that's what I have to say about those criticisms. Yeah, and, you know, I know what you're talking about. And I watched, you know, Brent's response to your book and what was in the article. And I mean, I believe Brent's telling his truth that he would not ever treat a woman in the unit like that. I believe him when he's saying that. But, I mean, if you weren't in that room, you really can't say.

I mean, he said by his own admission, he said, I didn't know this woman. I never met her. You can't really say it didn't happen. Well, Courtney says that a lot of the guys were professional and that were they were cool and they were nice. She talks about the ones who were like good guys. She also, including Billy Levine, she said he was very respectful. He would have never, you know, that wasn't his. style. He was crazy in a different kind of way.

Yeah. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's not so much a cultural thing, but there are assholes everywhere. Yeah. But the problem is that the command even though it's not necessarily a cultural thing, the command, and we see this all the time, even in the conventional

military, where the command wants these things to go away because it looks bad for the unit commander. It looks bad publicity-wise. You know, and it's worth pointing out, too, I mean, the lack of transparency in J-Soc and the special operations community. And I would include the CIA in this argument as well. The lack of transparency has not done these bureaucracies any favors. It just allows these problems to fester and metastasize and things that should have been exposed to daylight and gotten fixed years and years and years ago. Sexual harassment, sexual assault in the military being a big one.

Those are things that could have been fixed. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, they really made an enemy out of Courtney Williams, and she was willing to say all this stuff about her work because she felt that she had been treated unfairly. And I ended up really sympathizing with her. Another interesting thing, I mean, maybe interesting to some people anyways, you talk about how Usasak, the command actually gets used as a dumping ground for fired operators. In some cases, you can get fired from the, you can get fired from the command. the unit for anything. You know, it doesn't mean you're a bad guy by any means. Um, but some of these guys are having serious issues and like you quote one guy saying like, this is a force protection issue. Yeah. Because some of these guys are just so off the wall. Yeah. I remember I got that document from CID through FOIA and it was, I was blown away. I actually quoted it at great length in the book because yeah, the commander of the headquarters company at Usasak says that he had at any

given time he had as many as a dozen like guys that had been kicked out of the unit and he talks about how dangerous it was to have guys that a lot of times didn't know why they were reporting there didn't know why they had been expelled from the unit had all kinds of problems yeah and he even says at one point they busted an ex-celta operator who had at the front gate who had an ar-10 in the backseat with a blanket over it so he was strongly suggesting or stating outright he was worried one of these dudes is going to do a mass shooting which was sobering to to read. Yeah.

Another one I wanted to ask you about, I mean, you do, I don't know how deep you want to go into it, but another disturbing one is Enrique Roman Martinez, 82nd Airborne Soldier, goes camping in North Carolina with some of his army buddies, and ends up dead. Yeah. Yeah, that one takes it to a totally different place. I mean, the rest of the stuff is like gangland stuff, mafia type stuff, cartel stuff. but the case of Enrique Roman Martinez is like some X-Files shit to be honest. The way he disappears.

Yeah. And you know, you probably recall Jack that a lot of the suspicion initially focused on the seven soldiers that were with him on that camping trip. But thanks to the Roman Martinez family, I got CID's whole file on that case, which was 1,600 pages. Wow. It was like the most extensive murder investigation in Army history. and man, it seemed like they left no stone unturned. And you can read all these kids. I call them kids because they were like between the ages of 19 and 22.

These are junior soldiers in the 82nd. And their stories never changed from the beginning. They just said, you know, they admitted that they took drugs. They took LSD that some of them did that Enrique was tripping. He was having a bad trip. And was having these eerily, he was having these premonitions of his own imminent mortality. He was convinced that he was about to die. But they all just thought he was having a bad trip and went to bed and when they woke up he was gone.

That's all any of them could tell the police. Then his head washes ashore on the island, you know, two day or three days later. And medical examiners look at it and say, this guy's head was chopped off with an axe. So who could have done that and why? I think the why is the most important question. because although they could never find any forensic evidence connecting any of these young soldiers to the murder, none of them had blood on them, none of them had any injuries, they inspected their hands,

you know, just as cops are trained to do. None of that. But beyond that, none of them had a reason to kill Enrique, that ever came to light. People speculated this reason or that reason, but there was never any evidence for any of it.

And again, the stories never changed. So for seven people to keep their stories consistent over a period of years, So under the microscope and getting interrogated constantly and also charged with drug use and charged with disobeying orders, the fact that they didn't change their story, I think, is really important. And that remains unsolved to this day. It remains unsolved. One of the strangest cold cases in Army history and North Carolina history.

And whoever killed Enrique Roman Martinez is still out there. That's what's chilling to know. One more that I want to talk about before we start to circle back to Billy Levine is, Thacker and the Rafer drop zone. And he's like a second, if not a third generation drug trafficker on this airfield. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of wild. I struggled where to put that in the book.

My editor, Alison Lawrence, and she knows how hard we, we struggle to find the right place for that material. You know, that airfield for folks who don't know, it's called the Rayford Drop Zone. This is a real business. stuff to be very careful about what I say about them. It's a privately owned business. It was founded by Gene Thacker who's an OG Special Forces guy who served like in the jungles of Laos. I even have a picture of him with the prince of Laos at a certain point, like a black and white photo. Vang Pao? I don't think it was Vang Pao. Wasn't he like a warlord? Yeah. So he was part of

the Hmong, right? So this picture was with the, and the Hamong were deeply involved in drug trafficking famously. This picture was actually with the, because so were the Royal Laotian forces. The Royal Lao Army was also deeply involved in drug trafficking, also allied with the special forces in the CIA. This person was a member of that Lao Asian government, and he was actually busted at a certain point with a $13 million with heroin, personally smuggling in it, trying to smuggle into Paris. I totally digress.

You see the problem with this story? It starts going backwards into. time and so all these other deep dark aspects it really was a technical challenge and it shrunk and shrunk and now it's like two pages of the book but there was just so much there i mean there's this story this whole movie could be made about this guy's career he was a major drug trafficker jean thacker was it's like a berry seal sort of story well he knew berry seal barry seal was one of his boys yeah berry seal and also Andrew thornton the guy who um cocaine bear the whole cocaine bear story is like is directly involved in the sky and the Rayford drop zone,

this airport is right on the periphery of Port Bragg where Delta does their halo training and where I think maybe the whole green bird, maybe you know better than I do, do all the Green Berets do halo there, or is it just Delta? No, mostly they're out at McCull, jumping, at least the training stuff.

And then there's a couple drop zones on Bragg. But there's also the, what is it, the Parachete Parachute Parachute Club out there? That's the private parachuting club that's based there. Yeah. that Levine was evidently a member of. Yeah, yeah. And I don't have any, you know, dirt, so to speak, on that company.

I don't know that they had anything to do with anything. In fact, Billy worked at this airport. It's all, like, connected in a way where the dots are right next to each other, but you can't really draw the lines between them. Yeah. Levine's last job was working at this airport. He was on Jumpmaster orders, and he was training guys to do Hayho. And...

It's probably the accelerated free fall course that they run out there. I would imagine that's what. it is. He talks about it extensively in his memoir and details exactly what his job title was. It was something along those lines. But this airport in the 80s was a massive, was center of massive drug

trafficking. All these FBI documents that talk about Gene Thacker's role in it, but they could never catch this guy. I started to admire him in a certain way because he was so good at bringing hundreds of kilos of coke into the United States on these little airplanes that he maintained there, right by Fort Bragg.

At one point, Florida state authorities chase him because Thacker was a pilot and they chase him, you know, coming into the country from the Caribbean, but then they have to veer off at the end because they don't want to enter Fort Bragg's airspace. And so he gets away clean. But, you know, the cocaine bear story, that's, this is the real story. I mean, I have to bury it in footnotes in my book, but you see, I can't even talk about this without getting sidetracked indefinitely. So let me just say, the cocaine, you know the cocaine bear story, right?

I don't know it, but I know the movie, right? I didn't see the movie, but... The bear that overdosed and a bunch of cocaine. I thought it was a fake. I thought it was just a fiction movie. I didn't know it was based on reality. It's supposedly a true story. In fact, when that movie came out, the New York Times and

the Washington Post, both ran stories saying, is the cocaine bear story true? Yes, it is. Here's the true story. It was about Andrew Thornton, this ex-Fort Worth paratrooper who turned into a drug trafficker and was moving all this weight into the US and he threw the coke because what they would do is rigged the coke with paratropped and then jump it in the cargo drop. Yeah and then come back and get it later. But he died on one of his on his last jump. He parachuted, didn't pull in time or something happened and he

died. And so supposedly a bear got into a bunch of the cocaine that he had dropped and overdosed and died. But when I really investigated the story and went back into the news archives and read everything in sequential order about what had been, what had actually happened, it was crystal clear that that bear thing would never happen and that was a cover story

for the cops who freaking stole that cocaine and told the press that a bear had eaten it. That was their cover story. And the medical examiner that the AP interviewed, this is in like 1985. He just tells the reporters in the room straight up. He's like, yeah, that bear didn't

eat the cocaine, and the question is, where's the cocaine? This is only the 1980s portion of this story, because as you know, Thacker's son, Tim Thacker, who went on to run the airport and was a Delta Force pilot, he was a major drug trafficker, too. And in fact, North Carolina, federal prosecutors in North Carolina described him when he was convicted as the biggest methamphetamine trafficker in North Carolina history. So this is the guy running Delta Force's little airport where Billy Levine, works. Interesting. And Thacker's still in the clink, the sun. Oh, 40 years. Yeah. Yeah. They threw the book at him. So we can't brush past without talking about this incident that happened just in the last

couple of years where was it one of the, was it the co-pilot jumped off the back ramp? Right. That's how I got pulled into this airport story. Because in 2022, a guy just literally fell out of the sky. That's another X-Files type of, yeah. What happened here? Right, yeah. I mean, and the NTSB has nothing on that. Like they investigated and they ultimately, it was just inconclusive. He was the pilot for rampart aviation, which is a country that does a lot, a company that does a lot of recruiting for, does a lot of contracting for for Usasog and for the Navy Seals. And Charles Crooks was his name. He was a young pilot. And for some reason, they were doing, I mean, they were flying special forces soldiers that day, presumably Delta operators on, on, Charles Crooks was his name. He was a young pilot. And for some reason, they were doing, I mean, they were flying special forces soldiers soldiers soldiers that day, presumably Delta operators on, and Charles. And, training flights and one of their return flights, he just fell out of the plane without a parachute. Why? Nobody can really say. So that's the mystery that got me drawn to this whole airport thing. It's really not central to the book. But eventually I just use it as an example of how Fort Bragg's like this Bermuda triangle for weird stuff that never gets explained. Yeah, exactly. All right. So tell us,

who is Freddie Huff? Freddie Huff, as you know, was a North Carolina state trooper who was very good at his job. He was like the best at asset forfeiture. He sees something like $9 million in cash. I've looked at these police reports where he's like pulling an inconspicuous Mazda minivan over and finding like $400,000 in cash, like hitting in some secret compartment. He just had the knack to do this. but and he he was going around the country giving lectures an asset forfeiture he was seconded

or deputized by the DEA and um the sky seemed to be the limit for his law enforcement career until he gave a DWI ticket to a guy an insurance executive in north Carolina who was a big donor to the governor of North Carolina that'll do it that did it for Freddie he was fired before the month was out they said and they got him for um selling a pair of state issued shoes on eBay, some complete pretense in Freddie's view, which is easy to understand why he would think that. And at that point, you know, he's unemployed. He's totally embittered towards law enforcement.

He has all this knowledge about the drug trafficking world. He's kind of a savant at like detecting smugglers. And he decides, well, I'm going to get into the game myself. And that's what he did. He turned into massive drug trafficker. The way I understood it was that he first started like an import-export business, I think selling washers and dryers down in Mexico. And then like a good entrepreneur thinks, what can I bring back with me on the return trip? Yeah.

And he had all this know-how from being a police officer. Like I was told he had like a ritual. He would get like naked in the hotel room and wipe down all the satchels of drugs with pneumonia, like wrap them, rub it down again, wrap it again with cellophane. And then when he drove through the border, he'd have open containers in his car of pneumonia to burn out the noses of the dogs. Yeah. Yeah, he shared some of those details with me as well, double bagging the bricks and shop towels that have been soaked in ammonia. And he also used diversion tactics. They would have their associate Jaime Rosado, who was also convicted with Huff.

You know, they would have he was, because Huff did not look like a drug trafficker. He's a six-foot-something white guy, high and tight haircut, usually wore a full suit and tie. And he's got law enforcement badges, you know, in his wallet, knows how to talk to police, etc. He does not fit the profile. Now, his buddy, his plug, Jaime Rosado, did look like a drug trafficker, fit the stereotype. And what they would do is Jaime, when they were rolling up to the checkpoint, the CBP checkpoint outside Laredo, Jaime would smoke a joint and fill up the car with smoke. but he would toss it before they got to the checkpoint.

So when he got there to come into the United States, he rolled down the windows and these billows of marijuana smoke. Like Cheech and Chong? Yeah, exactly. And so, of course, the officer says, step out of the car, dude, you know, get the dogs over here. They're giving him the fourth degree, but he doesn't have anything. Right.

And actually, smoking weed is decriminalized in Mexico, so they don't get him on that side either. Meanwhile, Freddie Huff just cruises past with like 10 kilos of coke, $500,000 worth of drugs. You know, and they just wave at him. Have a nice day, sir. Are you a U.S. citizen? Yes, sir.

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Apparently, he was the biggest drug dealer in the Carolinas. I mean, the people that associated with him, they all told me, Freddie was big, man. He was everyone respected him. He was hooking up the bloods and the crypts, gangster disciples, all the street gangs that operate, like in the Raleigh-Durham area and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, central part of North Carolina and around Fort Bragg. You know, Freddie was the guy. He was the one bringing up, you know, up to, it's, there's different estimates in federal court documents, but, um, on the outside end of it, on the high end, it may have been

three tons of coke that he smuggled in the U.S. in his career. And you write about, you know, how he was almost like a little pop go escobar there in North Carolina. Like, he was living large for a while there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Apparently he didn't save much of his money. He just blew it all.

by his own admission on prostitutes, high, high price prostitutes, and gambling. And then doing cocaine himself. That was his downfall was using his own product, really. Oh, yeah. And he admits that that it made him super paranoid. You know, I really, personally, I've never done cocaine. Certainly never done it in an extended way. But apparently, they say that it can make you really paranoid.

And that's something I've seen again and again in writing this book, is the dudes that had a really bad Coke problem, they ended up super paranoid. thinking that people were plotting to kill them and then plotting to kill those other people. So it can take you to a dark place and that's what happened to Freddie. And so, and Freddie was connected to another character here. We needed another person. We need to talk about Tim Dumas.

Yeah. Who he was a warrant officer, a logistics guy for special forces, gets out of the military. And was he, if I understand correctly, was he like Freddie Huff's connection into like the local black mafia? Yeah, well, I don't know about the black mafia. He was his connection to Fort Bragg. Okay.

So Timothy Dumas and a key connection to Billy Levine's murder, which we haven't got to yet. Yeah, we'll walk into that. But Dumas was a member of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade. And in my book, that unit comes up again and again with their people being involved in some really questionable incidents. The Sciops unit down there at Bragg, too. Apparently it's not, oh, the SIOPS units too. Also some weird stuff, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure.

The fourth psychological operations group and the eighth, definitely. But, you know, I've taken heat online from people because of my characterization of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade. With people saying this unit's not even soft, you know, blah, blah, blah, the civil affairs, like it's a joke. But I have Dumas's enlistment record, and I know that he worked with J-Sod. He was part of the J-Soc-led task force in Afghanistan during four deployments.

And he talks, you know, in his separation packet, which I've read, you know, he talks about his J-Soc deployments, and he even has email correspondence with Admiral William McRaven. So I don't really, I can't pretend that I understand exactly what the 95th does. But he got kicked out of the Army for getting creative with the supply room, right? So he was kicked out of the Army for drug use. Okay. But his separation packet makes clear that for the, he was a supply officer, a, yeah, a quartermaster. And, but his separation packet makes clear that his entire military career, he was losing sensitive items, failing to keep track of, you know, gear and weapons, and basically just stealing stuff.

I mean, it's well substantiated that Dumas was using his position. And also people close to him in the same unit, Christopher Mann, someone who was never named, people were. convicted, were charged and convicted of stealing millions of dollars worth of military property. So it's clear as day that Dumas was also involved in that theft, particularly of weapons and diverting weapons to the black market, which is another big criminal activity that takes place around Fort Bragg. However, he was kicked out of the military for drug use. That was like the official reason, but there was more to it, obviously. And so what is, well, first let's talk a little bit about a little bit,

more about the association between Dumas and Huff. Those guys were like pretty tight and they were doing some other nefarious activities together. Yeah. So Huff is trafficking drugs for two years independently. And then in 2018 he meets Timothy Dumas. And the introduction, he was introduced to Dumas as a drug trafficker. Someone told him, hey, this guy moves a lot of weight. And Dumas told Huff that he was a soldier at Fort Bragg.

And that there was a group of special forces soldiers at Fort Bragg that were like a little cartel, a little gang. That's where the title of the book comes from. Billy Levine was one of them. He was one of the guys that was working with Dumas. There were other people that were part of this group and they were distributing tons of drugs on Fort Bragg and around it. And Huff found this partnership with Dumas to be very lucrative because Dumas, you know, it's one thing to traffic drugs into the United States. That's hard enough. But then you've got to sell it.

turn it into money. That's a really hard thing to do sometimes. You've got to find buyers, people that can liquidate Coke. And that was what Dumas was able to do. He was able to offload a ton of Freddie's product right onto Fort Bragg, where, you know, as I document my book, a lot of these guys do cocaine, a surprising amount more than I would have guessed. So it's, you know, the fact that Fort Bragg is this massive drug market is why it mattered

to Freddie. And tell us about these, like, fake police raids. that they were doing at times. Well, so they, both of them are doing tons of drugs and getting deeper and deeper into trouble. And they start having money problems because Freddie made millions of dollars, but he blew it all on, you know, we already said what he blew it on. You know, again, by his own admission, he said that the girls in Aeros.com cost $700 to $1,200 to $1,200 an hour. Pricey.

So that's where the money was going. and they got stolen from by some guy, some gangbanger in, I think Durham, Raleigh, maybe, who stole a bunch of drugs from them, and they owed money to some Puerto Rican plug because they were also bringing drugs in from the Caribbean. It wasn't just Mexico. I don't know if we specified that,

but Freddie was working with the Los Zetas cartel in Mexico. So they're bringing a ton of product from Mexico, but they're also bringing it from Puerto Rico. They got behind with their Puerto Rican suppliers and I believed that the Puerto Ricans were going to have them killed. And so in order to get their product back, this guy is a street gangster named 100K was this sort of hood alias. This guy steals a bunch of coke from it, and they're like,

all right, well, we've got to go get it back. And so they disguised themselves as U.S. marshals. They made, they fabricated these uniforms and they created a police car. They bought it from a police auction, and left it still registered to the state. They had all of it, like the versimilitude was very exact. And then they went and kidnapped his right-hand man, this dude name, that went by the name, Rise,

kidnapped him, held him prisoner, and told 100K that they were going to chop off his head if they didn't give him the money. And so it just goes on and on from there. But, you know, Huff and Dumas, they were impersonating police officers. They were breaking into houses. They were shooting at people.

they were kicking people's door downs they were driving around like they were cops and um you know it pretty clear this wasn't going to last forever this is yeah things would catch up like it started it started to catch up with them right when uh i think they hit uh it was the mexicans and like the old lady the mother in the house started having like a stroke or a heart attack or something and they had to call in the ambulance because they i guess there's some honor among thieves they weren't there to kill the old lady you know I think that and also, I'm sure they didn't mean to, but also Huff, you know, being a police officer, knew that he could be charged with murder if that woman had died. Because she was like flex cuffed and everything. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, you flex cuff an old lady robbing her house and she dies, you're going to get charged with murder. So Huff, knowing that, uses a drop phone to call the emergency services. But what he doesn't realize is that there's a hospital like two blocks away. So they immediately show up and have an encounter. The EMT's like, what the fuck? Yeah, something doesn't compute about these guys. Maybe the fact that they're wearing ski mask and bags of loot over their shoulder.

And so the cops show up and Freddie didn't know this was possible, but they picked up the phone that he had wiped and they're actually able to geolocate it and show this phone has been in proximity with this phone. And these two phones have been moving around the city, city. And so, and that other phone's in his name, and he was on a federal watch list. And so that's when the feds moved in for Freddie. Okay. And let's walk this back into, like, what is Billy Levine's association with Dumas?

They work together dealing drugs in Fayetteville. And there's strong evidence of that from multiple sources. but Levine was also working with civilians to sell to sell drugs. He was working with a lot of dealers in and around Beaville. Dumas apparently was the biggest. I mean, I should have said before, Billy's memoir, he uses pseudonyms for everybody. So sometimes it's hard to tell who he's talking about. And I'm still not sure which of the traffickers with whom he's working,

what pseudonym he uses for Dumas. I have to go through it a few more times and read it more carefully. but I've got other eyewitness accounts that put them together in the same time and same place and then obviously they were found dead together. Tell us about that. So December 2nd, 2020 is a deer hunter walking around Lake MacArthur on Fort Bragg and he sees Billy Levine's truck just abandoned in the woods back there. And a short distance away, Timothy Dumas is laying on the ground, a dead from a gunshot to the forehead apparently.

looks like he's been killed execution style and Levine was in the back of his own truck wrapped up in a blanket having been shot multiple times in the torso. So that's the double murder on Fort Bragg that we talked about the beginning of this that I read about in the New York Times and that you heard about right away too.

And that's when all of this stuff kind of started to come to light for the first time because prior to that, you know, the fact that Levine had been the shooter in the Mark Lesher case was not publicly disclosed until Levine himself was killed. Yeah. kept it pretty quiet.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the problem with sweeping problems under the carpet is they get worse and worse and worse until you can't anymore. As bad as the murder of Mark Leshiker was for Delta Force, it was way worse when Levine himself turned up murdered and people started to say, oh, what about this guy he killed 18 months ago? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, someone has been arrested for those murders now. Who was that? And do we have any sort of, I guess, educated opinions or, you know, anything you uncovered in this book about what actually happened there?

That arrest of Kenneth Maurice Quake really came out of left field because there were so many suspects. There's some people who had a motive to kill them. Sure. And Dumas. I mean, Dumas was also a guy who was, who is believed to have killed people. He apparently killed a guy named Green. Joey Green, aka Joey Bananas, is identified in the book. And he may have done other murders for hire.

So Dumas had a lot of people who wanted to kill him and Levine as well. It could have been, you know, Mark, suspicion, there was suspicion initially on Mark Lesterger's former teammates. You want to be clear, there's no evidence of that that I ever disclosed or that I ever uncovered. But people wondered, you know, the fact that he had killed Mark made people wonder. Right. And apparently these guys, some of them had made some of them.

threats. So there's suspicion on them. There's suspicion on Billy's cartel associates, which his memoir goes deep into. And then finally, there's a lot of people who thought, more conspiratorial-minded people, you know, believe that someone, that his own teammates could have done it, that Levine was messing up so badly that someone, you know, on the inside took him out. But in 23, the Department of Justice indicted a 20-year-old black kid named Kenneth

Maurice Quick, who lived two counties away from Fort Bragg, has no connections to the military, and was already facing life in prison for an unrelated murder. So, his trial is scheduled to begin in early 2026. And, you know,

a lot of the sources that interviewed are very dismissive of the possibility of his guilt and say, you know, couldn't have been him. They're just framing him. Personally, I have to believe that the Department of Justice doesn't accuse he will or murder lightly. I'm still not at the point. Obviously, I'm very critical of many elements of the U.S. government in the book, but I am not to the point where I believe that the DOJ just frames people in order to solve a case. That said, if Kenneth Maurice Quick did it, then again, like, we got to be careful how we talk about this because this is a death penalty case that's ongoing.

And these are real people. I don't want to prejudice the case. I don't want to say something that it's not supported or what have you. But what I would like to know about that case is if Kenneth Maurice Quick did it, if Quick did it, who put him up to it? Because he was 20 years old. I guarantee you he did not take out these two veteran special operations. age 37 and 44, both of whom were really serious dudes that you do not want to mess with. It would be hard to take out under any circumstances.

Guys who were always armed who always kept their head on a swivel. How he could have done that by himself really challenges the imagination. Yeah. And so I hope they will look beyond him and see who might have been, who might have put him up to it. Yeah. 20 year old kid out on the drop zone at Fort Bragg, killing two. Why was he at Fort Bragg?

Weird. He has no connections to that base. He lived an hour away. He had, all of his previous arrests, by the way, took place in his town of Lorenburg, North Carolina. He had been arrested there multiple times

and is accused of having committed a murder there. At one point, he was arrested. There was like this shootout of these, a group of guys met at this trailer. to do a drug deal, and it erupted into a close quarters gunfight, and there was like three guys laying dead, Kenneth Maurice Quick laying there, shot several times. Police came, arrested him, and once he recovered from his wounds,

he was charged with killing one of those other guys. So I don't doubt that he is capable, or if everything the police allege about him is true, it seems that he is capable of killing somebody. But again, why these guys, why Fort Bragg? Another thing is the ballistic evidence. Quick was arrested like three or four times for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. And he always carried a Glock. He always carried a 9mm Glock.

And the weapon that was used to kill Dumas was apparently a 22 or a 380. So maybe a small detail, but it's one more reason to question like what exactly the evidence is against Quick. And he's pleaded not guilty by the way, which is an important point. That's interesting. Yeah. So one of the big questions that comes out of this book for me is what is the relationship between special operations on Fort Bragg and the Cumberland County Police? Because the police department gives so many free passes to these guys for murder, rape, drug trafficking, I mean, really serious crimes. It gets to the point where it's like, come on, man, what are we doing here?

What's really going on here? Is there some sort of money transactional relationship happening? What is it? Because it doesn't make sense. Yeah. I've never seen any evidence of money changing hands. There is a lot, you know, we've heard over the years in general in the United States, there's a lot of corruption in sheriff's departments and among sheriff's deputies, particularly

in small towns. That said, the dynamic that I see and perceive that was explained to me by unit employees like Courtney Williams, is that they have processes in place when one of their guys turns up in handcuffs. You know, they really spring into action and try to make it go away. I mean, they really do try to make it go away. They try to, because Delta Force doesn't want any press, positive or negative. You know this as well as I do. What they probably fear the most is increased legislation and increased oversight. Oh, yeah. And they really want to avoid that. Right. So you can see the incentives that are at work.

may not necessarily be that they have such a that they hold guys like billy levin and chris vioho in such high esteem and they want to protect him they want to protect the unit right and so it's not hard to imagine the power dynamics there because you're talking about a relatively small town you know the DA is just a country lawyer basically Billy West dealing with JSOC you know which is one of the most you know central institutions of the US government with incredible powers that we really only know a fraction of. And Freddie Huff is in prison still to this day.

Yeah. And Thacker is still in prison, and the person has been accused of murdering Billy and Dumas are in prison. So, you know, you point to Fort Bragg being like, I don't know if this is right or not, but you make it sort of sound like in your book, like it is this sort of like toxic hub of murder and drug trafficking. I mean, is Fort Bragg, like, uniquely bad by comparison to other military installations in your research?

I mean, it seems that way to me. That's exactly what I've been saying all this time is that this is not normal for a military base to have this many murders and this many deaths. And people will say, well, Fort Bragg's the biggest base, and it is, but on a per capita level, still, it's much higher than any other bases. You know, a soldier dies at Fort Bragg every week. That's a really high mortality rate when you're talking about a population of 50,000 young men who are all physically fit, like by definition. And the primary cause of death is suicide. We know that the suicide rate at Fort Bragg is like four times a national average and is significantly higher than any other military base. There's also a ton of overdoses at Fort Bragg, which we have rock solid data from the

Department of Defense, which Senator Edward Markey secured after reading one of my stories for Rolling Stone. He got the Pentagon to turn over this data. And it shows just what I had alleged, which is that the overdose rate there, is way higher than any other military

base in both absolute and per capita terms. Those being the two highest causes of death are the most frequent causes of death by itself demonstrates there's a problem here with this culture. And then on top of that, there's all these unsolved murders.

A little harder to quantify, but, you know, I'm tracking like maybe 24 cases of Fort Bragg soldiers who have been either murdered or convicted of murder or charged with murder since 2020. Very hard to compare that to other basis because, you know, I had to piece together this data. There's not like a repository of that type of data. But I just, have there been 20 murders at Fort Hood?

I mean, I know there were a lot at a certain point. There was like six in a row, but I don't see it. I think Fort Bragg is pretty unique in this regard, and it could use some of them. oversight in this regard. All right. So let's talk a little bit about the response to the book. It's been out for what two weeks now. And I mean, it's definitely taken off. It's gotten a lot of attention, a lot of needed attention, I think. What has the response been like from the public and from the military community? The response has been on the whole. It's been really positive.

You know, I thought the book would do well. My editor had a lot of confidence in it. None of us expected it to be like a massive bestseller, like on the top of the New York Times bestseller list. And that has really amplified, you know, the response that I've gotten from the military community, which actually is in a lot of cases very positive. I get letters or emails and messages every day from veterans who tell me more stories who said that they like the book, they dug it, and they can add this or that. But there is a significant component in like the operator community, I think, who are really resentful of how adversarial, you know, the book is. And what an aggressive line I tell you against them, which, you know, I can totally own.

Like, it's not only because of this criminal stuff, but also because I strongly oppose the the post-9-11 war paradigm that these guys have been front and center and prosecuting for years. So I get asked all, I do get threats, nothing specific so far. but the tempo has definitely been increasing. I've seen stuff online that does cause me to worry. And my team, you know, all of them have, I've kind of laughed all the stuff off. I've never let that affect anything that I wrote or affect anything that I did in any way. But I've gotten to the point where so many people have asked me, am I not concerned about security,

that I feel like I need to, yeah, I do need to take measures. but before I do any of that stuff before I go into hiding like what's his name Salman Rushdie or something I mean I would just like to I know a lot of these guys watch your show so I would like if any of them are watching these guys that are allegedly according to these suspicions that are plotting to like kill me I would just say why because you know I am an American patriot I was born in Texas and you know I went to public school. I served in the army. I worked for, I was a lawyer. I worked for the Texas state government. I am not some wild-eyed, crazy, I don't know, woke, whatever culture warrior, that's not

where I'm coming from at this. And I was never, it was never my intention to, like, throw shade on anyone's service. The stuff that I write about in the book are crimes. They're serious crimes. You're talking about drug trafficking, murder, rape, all the stuff. I'm an investigative reporter. That's what I'm supposed to do, especially when it's apparently related to this elite military unit. Do I not have the right

and actually the obligation as a reporter to look into this type of stuff? You really want me to sugarcoat it and write on every page. Well, these guys are heroes and thank them for their service and I just want to talk about these bad apples. I don't waste any time with that.

I'm just telling the story. Right. And if guys are so offended by it, Are they really going to murder a U.S. journalist on U.S. soil to protect their impunity to commit these serious felonies? Like that's, and make our country like a third world country, you know, where journalists get killed for writing about these legitimate stories. And I would point out, you know, Seth Harp did not invent the criminal activity that you depict in your book. I mean, it's not your fault that these things happen. You're writing about it and telling people that there's a problem.

and they need to be told it's a problem because they've ignored it over and over and over again. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Do you know for a fact that it's that it is like operators and soldiers that are doing this? Or is it fanboys that are saying that they are? Because I, and not that they wouldn't, you know, not that there aren't guys out there that wouldn't. But I know especially with like Alpha and with code over country that that like a lot of the vitriol.

came from like, like the fans, right? The, how dare you talk shit about U.S. service members or Navy SEALs or these brave heroes? You know, and I mean, I would just add on to that that, look, if you're, if you're a soldier or a veteran or even a, you know, somebody who admires the military, this kind of stuff is important. and for you to try to shut down a journalist who's writing on this stuff. Again, you know, this isn't like some leftist rant about the evils of the U.S. military. This stuff needs to get policed up. Like, if you're proud of the military, then you should be proud of people like Seth who expose this kind of stuff because this weakens the military. this this you know these units with this highest spree to core and this high you know level of performance

should not have these type of people in the unit and you know and if if like it's it's a process of you know tbIs and post-traumatic stress and things like that that lead to stuff like this then the command should be sitting up and and seeing this stuff and not ignoring it until it gets to this point. Yeah, thank you for saying, so Dave, I appreciate that. And, you know, a lot of guys will strongly disagree with the stuff that I wrote about U.S. foreign policy

and against foreign wars. And that's okay. It should be okay because we have the First Amendment right to talk about these things that are important to our country and to our government. But there ought to be a confluence of interest that at a minimum, wherever you stand on that spectrum, You should not want people in units like Delta Force to be committing murders and doing drug trafficking and getting away with it.

I don't understand who that would help or who would stand up in defense of that. I think this book also comes at kind of an interesting period of time where the wars have sort of wound down. You have this population of veterans that are now retiring from the military or getting out of the military and they're in civilian life. And they're kind of having the process that experience and what it meant to them, what it was. was as the years go on, you know, you hit the, we're kind of getting to the time period where guys find themselves in AA programs, finding religion in many cases. Like there's a, it's a period of reflection, I think, on the global war on terror. And there's a lot of things that happened during the war that got swept under the carpet, some ugly stuff that's going to come out. It's

in this book. It's going to come out in other books. Yeah. In Billy Levine's memoir, he, describes in three cases committing unlawful killings in the course of Delta Force raids. And he just mentions it completely in a completely casual way, as if like no one would even question that. He doesn't even seem to know what he's saying. I'll tell you one example. The 2015 raid that killed that ISIS financier Abu Sayyaf in Syria. It was the first cross-border raid, I think, kind of kicked off the U.S. war in Syria against ISIS. So Billy, I knew he was on that raid because I had his enlistment record and the dates matched. So I knew he participated, but in his memoir, he was an incredible first-person account of that, which is just, it's something, it's like

nothing I've ever seen before because, as you know, these guys don't talk and they don't write about books, and when they do write about it, they don't talk about operational details. Billy broke all those rules. and, you know, just one little thing I can tell you in that raid that he recounts, you know, they had orders to take Abu Sayyaf alive. Now, one of the operators ended up shooting him dead because apparently he reached for a pistol, according to Levine. While that's happening, you know, Levine's clearing another room and his dog takes down a guy that's there.

And the guy has his arm all shredded from being attacked by this canine, and this prisoner is brought to Levine. unarmed. Levin specifically says that he had his hands up by his head. And Levin said that he moved the hair out of the guy's face, because I guess he had long hair. And when he saw that it wasn't Abu Sayyaf, he shot him in the head and killed him. And he even said that, you know, his mouth was slightly open when he pulled the trigger and that a piece of the guy's brain matter went straight back into the back of his throat. And he had to spit out a piece of this guy's brain. And he just describes this totally illegal killing in a casual way that makes me think that it must have been

routine. I don't know. Do other guys in the unit? Are they that casual about executing prisoners? Because that totally is totally forbidden by the laws of war. And that doesn't make me a, you know, a namby, pamby, you know, lawyer-e guy type of guy to point that out. That's fundamental that you don't execute prisoners. Again, it's like, do you want our country to be a third world country? Like, Do you want the military to get professional military? Like I would certainly say yes. You know, so that's just one example about some of the reckoning with some of the operational. One of the other things I was criticized, I saw people criticizing you was, you know, when Billy allegedly had his canine eat the brains of killed enemy, apparently.

And people were like, oh, that's not true. Well, I spoke to the same person you did, and her story was exactly the same as what she told. do. Yeah, yeah, Nicole Rick. Yeah. Not only that, but people jump, for some reason, people jumped all over that detail to say, this must be made up and therefore the whole book's made up. The crazy thing is that, I don't know if you saw this, but somebody on those forums then posted a video shot by a drone that shows exactly what I was talking about. It was mind-blowing to see this emerge. It showed a K-9, clearly marked as like, I don't know if it was Delta, but it was clearly a special operations canine, just absolutely going to town on a, on a dead body,

attacking it in the head area, in the vicious way that an attack dog would do. So it was like visual proof of exactly what I, I wish you were making this stuff up. I really do. Me too. Because it's so painful and it's, it makes all of us very uncomfortable, right? Yeah. To have to address it. But again, it gets worse and worse if you don't, you know, stand up to it. And look, that's not necessarily. you don't have to see that as necessarily as a war crime like it's an attack dog and the body it's a dead body you know dogs are going to be dogs but it it illustrates the brutality of the world that these guys come up in and you see that on every page of billy levine's memoir where he's talking about participating in all these raids and you can just feel like that anger and um you know aggression that he later takes out on the people because i didn't get into the half of it unfortunately i mean from reading his memoir i realized i only covered about half, maybe let's say half of the stuff that he was up to in Fayetteville in the 18 months after Mark was murdered and between and when Billy was murdered. During that time, this guy was out of his fucking mind and he was going around armed all the time.

He was casing civilians' houses. He was convinced that this person was trying to kill him and that person was trying to kill him. He says he was working for the cartel. He says that, you know, he says these guys knew what my skill set was. you know, I proved it to them multiple times. He very broadly hinting at having done murders for hire for cartel figures around Fayetteville. And he also describes three brutal beatings that he gives people who had stolen drugs from him or stolen something else from him. And he talks about being like totally covered in blood and beating the shit out of a guy with a hammer.

And like he looks around and he sees that everyone is afraid of him because he's got his shirt off and he's covered in blood. And he's like the writing this is as if people are going to admire. admire this about him. He doesn't realize that he's lost his mind. It's really sad and scary to see how far up the deep end he was. Is there anything from the memoir? Because you just recently got that after this went to press. Is there anything from the memoir that you wish were in here or that would have changed something in here? Nothing that would have changed it. I wish all of it was in there because, you know, I never met Billy Levine. I never talked to him. And now here I have 158 pages in his own words and like if anything it just emphasizes all the stuff that I wrote just puts it in even

stronger terms to where no one could doubt it you know hearing it from from the horse's mouth are there any of the uh you know other criticisms outrages pushback you've gotten on the book anything else you'd like to respond to or clarify for anyone um you know something i say again and again in interviews i really don't dwell on it in the book i do write it in two places at least, is that I don't allege that everyone in Delta Force is a criminal. And I don't think that. I quote people who say that like the unit guys kind of separate themselves into the group. There's like the guys who don't drink who are like super Christian, Warriors for God,

who by their own lights are ethical people, maybe extremely ethical in probably a lot of cases. And then there's the other guys. And, you know, my book really focuses on the other guys because you have to pick a subject and that's clearly, you know, it's my job to write about the bad guys, not the good ones. Right. But I recognize and acknowledge that there are people in these units who I disagree with the foreign, with, you know, the wars that they have, that they have fought in and participated in them. But I recognize that from their perspective, they are, you know, doing the right thing, that they join the military for the right reasons and that by their own, you know, internal standards that

comported themselves in an ethical way, I've never doubted that. And I am not trying to say that every single person who's in Delta forces like Billy Levine. So that's just a clarification that I can't make often enough to the guys who think that, you know, like I said, throwing shade on all of their service. That's not what I know what it's like to be to be young and to think that joining the military and joining the Army be a cool thing to do. That's what I did. And, you know, my path diverged at a certain point from these guys, but I, like, culturally

am sympathetic to them. I come from the same sort of cultural place, you know, being from rural Texas and so forth. So, you know, I'm not the, you know, the enemy that I think a lot of them think that I am. What's next? I mean, with all the additional stuff that's starting to come to light and this trial will probably be resolved, one 2026 or 2027. Do you think there's a follow-up to the Fort Bragg cartel? We'll see. I'll probably write something maybe for Rolling Stone about Billy's memoir and about the revelations that it contains, how it reflects on the book.

details that it adds and it's a story in its own right just hearing someone who is so damaged like chronicle their own downfall and again you know it really points to the people who may have been responsible for his death Levine in his memoir says that he was working with the biggest drug trafficker in this part of North Carolina and around Fayetteville he says he was a Mexican man named Uno and I don't know if that's a name that he actually went by or if that's a pseudonym that Billy made up because he calls a lot of people by their pseudonyms. So, and then, you know, the last chapters of his, he describes him as a short Mexican guy, featherweight, covered head to toe with tattoos, but someone who was very fearsome.

And there's even one scene where he describes this man, Uno, just brutally beating the shit out of a white drug dealer with dreadlocks and then standing over him and cutting all of his dreadlocks off with a pair of scissors. I mean, the under the view of the Fayetteville underworld that Billy Levine's memoir presents is truly incredible surreal and in the last you know billy stopped writing this in may 2020 so seven months after before he was killed and the final two chapters of his memoir he is talking about how this guy who knows trying to kill him and it's hard to say whether that's paranoia or the dude really was and did so there's a lot to explore there i'll probably write an article about that and also cover, you know, Quicks and murder trial. Yeah, sadly, um, you're sort of scratching

the surface as I think you understand there's like so much more going on there. Yeah. Yeah. Seems like it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, so people can find the Fort Bragg cartel. It's out now. You can find it. Where should people go to look for it, Seth? Uh, anywhere books are sold. I know it's sold out in a lot of places. Amazon, there's like a three-week wait. A lot of big bookstores are sold out, but the last I checked, you could still get it in one to two days from Barnes & Noble. Other online booksellers, check your local bookstore. You can find a copy if you make an effort. And they've sent another order to the printer for more copies.

So if you can't get it right now, just hold on. There's more that are being shipped out on. They can also check out the e-book that never outsells. I don't encourage any of that. I'm about paper books exclusively. But if folks want to do that, we get their Kendall, I'm not here to judge. But yeah, that's an option.

All right. Yeah, it's out there if you can't find it in the bookshop. Seth, anything before we get going? I mean, anything that I haven't covered or haven't asked you about that you want to talk about? Not specifically. I'll just say that, you know, I call you out in the acknowledgement section of the book to talk about your contribution. to the investigation.

You and I talk from time to time while I was, I appreciate the leads that you gave me. And thanks for having me on your show. Yes, for coming. Absolutely, man. I'm, I strongly believe in the kind of work that you're doing here. And, you know,

this show is often like almost a celebration of people's military service in so many ways. But there are times where we do have to talk about the dark side. This book, Code Over Country, Alpha. Yeah. Some of these works are important also. Alpha is a great book. So is Code Over Country. Both of those books are very well written. I admire Matthew Cole and David Phillips very much. Yeah, they're both good writers. So for everyone else out there, thank you for joining us tonight. Please go check out Seth's book. There'll be links down in the description also that you can go and click on.

And we'll see all of you guys next time. Hey guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it, enjoying it. But you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do. this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com slash the Teamhouse. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of the Team House ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, Mick Mulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. the Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business, survive,

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