The Team House - Smuggling Carlos Ghosn Out of Japan | Mike Taylor | Ep. 214

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Michael Taylor is a Special Forces veteran who had a hard-earned reputation for taking on dicey assignments. Over the years, Taylor had been hired by parents to rescue abducted children. He went undercover for the FBI to sting a Massachusetts drug gang. He is most well known for smuggling Carlos Ghosn (former chairman of Nissan) out of Japan. Grab Vitamin 1 here:⬇️ https://www.drinkvitamin1.com Today's Sponsors: The Lite Sleeper⬇️  (VETERAN OWNED, US MANUFACTURED) the perfect addition for the light backpacker, ground sleeper, or prepper/survivalist. https://THELITESLEEPER.com/discount/teamhouse click the link to get The Lite Sleeper and get 10% off your first order! https://THELITESLEEPER.com/discount/teamhouse  To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ 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/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #specialforces #carlosghosnBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hopes, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey everyone, welcome to episode 214 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. Our guest tonight in studio is Mike Taylor. Mike served in special forces,

number of different assignments in Europe, in Central America, in Lebanon. Left the Army, went and became an entrepreneur, did some undercover work with federal law enforcement, even got involved in repatriating children who'd been kidnapped from the United States and brought overseas, spent time in Iraq as a security contractor, time in Afghanistan as an intelligence contractor. He also probably most famously involved in the Carlos Ghosone affair,

the Nissan CEO who was arrested in Japan and then brought out of Japan to Turkey and then onto his home in Lebanon. And, you know, I was talking to Mike when he got back from that and all the way up until you were extradited to Japan and spent what nearly two years in prison altogether. So this is Mike his first time breaking his silence really after all of that went down. So Mike we really appreciate you joining us here tonight. Great being with you guys. Yeah it's a real privilege. So Mike, you're a superhero obviously. What's your origin story? What led you to the military? How did you grow up? And please remember to like and share and subscribe to the channel.

Oh right. Really appreciate it. What led me to the military? Well, Well, my dad was in ASA, Army Security Agency, which later became Army Intelligence Service. And, you know, we lived on different bases where those guys were, and the school for ASA and the most code and blah, blah, blah, all that, code breakers. And I hated the Army.

I hated the military because most of those guys were dorks. I remember I'd go to the gym. Where's the kid's going to hang out in the military base? You'd go to the gym. And any time we needed money for, lunch. We'd go down and buy a sub and a soda. We'd play two of these dorky guys from ASA and basketball two on two. We'd play them for each for two bucks. Two bucks buys us a sub and a soda. So we know we're going to win. We didn't have a penny in our pocket, so we're going to have to fight if we lost,

but we're fighting dorky-dorkey G-I. So yeah, we're going to win, so we win her money. I hated them. And then up in Fort Devons, they bumped in these other guys that look fairly normal. Some had long hair and good guys and they were helping us with lifting and telling jokes and stuff. And they were special forces guys. So long story short is I was due to go to college and play football. And at the last minute, I said, no, I'm going to try out for SF because through the SF guys I knew in the gym, they found out that they were running like an X-ray program, which means you could try out right from high school. They were doing it back then, back in 79.

and I happened to be lucky enough to fit into that period of time where I went right from high school in, went to basic AIT, jump school, and right to pre-phase. And I don't know how it is now, but pre-phase back then, they're trying to wash everybody out. They didn't give a damn. And ended up making it through. And one of my classmates was Gary Gordon,

God rest of soul, Medal of Honor winner from Somalia. So, yeah, in two-thirds of our graduating class, came right from high school. So we used to tease, you know, the older guys when we got in the teens, you know, SF school ain't that hard because two thirds of our graduating class came right from high school.

Last year we're in high school, this year we're green berets. I'm sure they loved that, oh yeah, they didn't go over very well. But we had to tease them, you know how it is. So that's how I ended up in the military. Yeah, and then what was, like, what was it like when you first got?

Well, first off, what MOS did you go through? What? Originally, 18 Charlie. 18 Charlie. Well, back then was 12B. They converted to 18 Charlie, yeah. So, okay. And then what was it like when you first got to your team?

Oh, see, I went to the pig team. We had Colonel Potter, so a group command, and they called it the Potter Imperial Guard team because they got all the good missions. And this team was stacked. It was all E6s and E7s and E8 as a team sergeant. It was a Halo team. green light team and so I was the junior demo man at first and it was great because

everybody there was the next closest guy to me was an E6 and that was Jeff Hanley who ended up becoming one of the Golden Knights and then the chopper pilot but just just it came from the Ranger Battalion so just a wealth of knowledge and experience and it was great because those were you know those are my teachers then that's pretty rare for a brand new guy to end up on a green light team right because you had to be both scuba and Halo right no No, only Halo. Oh, really?

Yeah, only Halo. Yeah. So for, you know, we haven't really talked about Greenline teams very much. Can you, and it's really not talked about that much at all. Can you tell us what that was? Yeah, it's essentially, you know, and this part's been in the newspaper, so there's nothing classified about it. It's the SATAM device. It's a special atomic demolition munition.

Saddam is the acronym for it. And that's one of the things that we had in our tools to use in case of war. And how fast do you have to run to get away from that device if you jump it in? I don't know. How fast is a nuke? So, yeah. You know, the older guys are funny about him because they said, look, you got the least experience. You're a double man. You've been to the school.

So your ass is going to be the one pushing the button. And we're going to be far away. So, yeah, that was my job, push the button. What were those training exercises like? I've heard some pretty wild stories about. Well, we have to take, you know, guns and ammo with us, everything's live because you've got to protect that device. And, you know, the worst part of it is jumping it in.

You know, somebody says, well, I've got to jump the device. You're not jumping a device. The device is jumping you. I've got over 3,000 free falls, and that's still a major league pain to jump that thing. It's brutal. And you end up sitting on it, falling in free fall. you're not flat and stable like you should be

and then all your other gear is divvied up so all of a sudden you're a refugee because my gears I gotta go look for my my warmies my snivel gear to the junior commo man I gotta get my socks from you know the medic and I've got to get one of my sea rations

from the weapons guy you know so it's yeah being a young guy in a team with the green light mission is not fun was it feasible to to move the satem, like once you jumped it in or wherever you landed, was that where it was just going to have to... No, no, no, no.

We hump it. Really? Oh, yeah. It's not that heavy. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. I don't know if the weight's classified, so I'm not going to say.

Yeah, I don't know. But you can, believe me, we've all humped a lot heavier rucksacks. Wow. Oh, yeah. Much heavier. Interesting. And then was it, well, I don't want to... Yeah, okay.

Was it manual, or did you, could you, like, get away from it and everything back then was manual yeah yeah yeah so you have to actually punch the code into the device and hit enter and pull ass yeah and and their clocks we were trained on are or are routinely continuously historically off so you know the old army watches they would give to you once in a while uh they kept better time than this device was that's how bad it was it's a little iffy what are you going to do yeah yeah

what I mean obviously that was a very secret program at the time what did like did you realize when you got picked for that team sort of that you were being put in this special access

did you know no no I had no idea whatsoever I had no idea I knew it was the HALO team I was jacked about that even though HALO school was closed at the time too many guys were dying

in Halo school so they shut it down and then And, you know, after I got there, I got briefed and whatnot. And so that was, that was, yeah, it's an eye opener. Yeah, wow, this is great. Does it get any better than this? But, yeah, and then I had to wait to get to Halo School. Although, you know, these guys are all got thousands of jumps.

So I was jumping with the Parachute Club. And we'd go out and do our Halo drops at helicopters or C-130s or whatever without oxygen. So they had me doing that before I even went to Halo School. and then Haley's School was shut down for, I don't know, maybe a year or so, and then they opened it up where we were using the wind tunnel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base before we had our own. And they run us through that, which I thought the wind tunnel was the hardest part of free fall. And then after that, we'd fly back to Bragg.

And when we're flying back to Bragg, our first jump at 12,500 feet was flying back to Bragg. But Hale School is the absolute gentleman's course. You know, you lay down on the table most of the time. where you're going to wind tunnel. It's great. Good times, yeah. Yeah. And after your time on the Greenlight team,

you got, did a couple of deployments down to Central America, right? That was early on. And no, actually, I didn't. I didn't get to go to the places I wanted to go. Because Seventh Group ended up taking it over. And at that time, Seventh Group was fighting for all those. And our group commander at the time Potter was fighting. And we ended up, although we had, you know, Russia and North,

away in Scandinavia. We ended up in Beirut. So we didn't get to go to Central America. I think maybe one time. But all of our time was spent over in the Middle East. And we're a winter warfare. So it was 10th group. Were the groups really established, like 10th group was Europe and the group was Middle East? But you guys were still doing that?

We don't know how it happened. We don't know how it happened. We heard that, you know, somebody down in the Pentagon threw this on the table and group commanders were fighting over, and Colonel Potter ended up getting it. I could be wrong, but I believe the division happened. It was like political considerations that had to do with, we didn't want the same SF guys going back and forth from Israel to Arab countries and then back again,

but there's some security concerns. So I think that's why 10th group ended up taking over like Israel, Lebanon for a little while. Interesting. I didn't know that. I believe that's why that came about like that. But it came out of the blue, you know, we're up in above the Arctic Circle for 90 days at a time, December, January, February.

You don't see light. It's anywhere from 40 to 70 below. You're constantly skiing. You're constantly moving. We're doing our best to make snow caves. And, you know, we're dreaming of warm weather. Right. And then all of a sudden, you know, you get a flash message.

You've got a 10-digit grid. Go here for an evacuation. Oh, what could this be? We're going to war? Okay, great. We're going to war. Instead of playing with the Russians and the GRU and the KGB on the border. We're going to war.

Then we find out you guys in big trouble. You're going to Beirut. What are you kidding me? This is the best weather on earth. Yeah. Send us, please. So it was pretty nice to go from the Arctic freezing at, you know, 40 to 70 below to, you guys are going to Beirut. So what was that like?

I think you told me once you were on the first NTT to. Yeah, they put a composite team together pretty much because we had a few spots on our team. You know, back then teams weren't at full strength. So we were missing a couple team members. I think we're missing a medic. We're always missing medics. You never have enough medics. So we're missing a couple of people.

So they threw some people with us and we ended up having a composite team and went over on the first MTT. And it was really eye-opening. You know, we spent about three months in isolation preparing for it, which of course by then we knew everything about the country, the people, so on and so forth. Three months and a long time to study such a small country. But it was a very dynamic country because everybody and their brother was in there making problems and fighting and backstabbing and art over the quadruple deal and so on and so forth.

Everything that you could think of was going on. It was there. And it was a terrorist capital of the world. And what year was this that you guys went in there? Eighty-three. Wow. Yeah. What happened was in September 14, 1982 is when their president-elect Bashir Jemayo was assassinated. And after that, they had the massacres of sovereign Chetela and the Palestinian camps. and then you know which is quite common over there Bashir Jamail was

assassinated and his brother ended up taken over for him to be the president he wasn't elected but he was the brother that's how it goes there that's how it is right so and it was after that

that you know Marines were in right away pretty early after the sovereign and she'll deal this stuff because they were there as peacekeepers which I never believe in sending our Marines in as peacekeepers. Marines are there to destroy things. That's it.

You know, bring the heat and let's make some order and discipline here. That's what the Marines are for. So I felt bad, horrible that, you know, they're sitting at the Beirut airport and they're getting sniped that constantly and, you know, random motor attacks and rocket attacks. And they're not allowed to fight back because the State Department's got their nose in it. And, you know, anytime the State Department has given orders to the military, there's going to be problems.

And hence, October 23rd, 1983, when the BLT got blown up. So walk us through, you know, like landing in Beirut for the first time and what your mission was, what you did. Yeah, first of all, we went in in civilian aircraft, civilian clothes. It was all undercover until we got there. And we got there, you know, intentionally like three in the morning. The airport's closed. It's shut down, but, you know, they opened it for us. We ended up flying in with a TWA flight out of JFK.

And we stopped in Germany. I think we stopped in Frankfurt just to refuel. And ended up going in and we're on a army, Lebanese Army bus, a little bus. It probably holds about 20 people driving through downtown Beirut at three or four in the morning. And all you see is ruins all over the place. It looks like something out of the movies. and I would say a good 50% 60% of the buildings were damaged and destroyed

and it just like the apocalypse had come through but again that was a result of I don't know how many years of civil war at that time but they ended up having about 17 years of civil war in addition it was you know the Israelis had come in and sort of attack the Palestinians to get them out because the Palestinians were firing across the border and the Lebanese army wasn't sufficient to

provide security to stop the Palestinians from there from being there. So that whole mess just boiled over. In 1982, the summer of 82, we saw the Israelis invade and that forcing the Palestinians out. So that's what we went into as a young, 20-year-old kid. It was interesting. And was your job to the training mission

was for the Lebanese army? Yeah, the primary. mission was, you know, the cover of it was to train the Lebanese Army, which we did. We trained to Lebanese Army. And they were getting all kinds of shipments of brand new gear, brand new one-13s coming in, brand new tanks, you know, brand new M60, brand new M-60. We've never seen such new equipment before, and it was being shipped in there. It was great. They still had the transportation grease on the APCs that were going in. So it was pretty interesting. And, you know, we had, you know, two full teams of SF then. It was great because, you know, most of the guys

were older and had a lot of experience. So, yeah, it was a great time. And so you said that was the cover mission. What was the real mission? Oh, we were doing all kinds of stuff. We named it. We were getting all kinds of stuff. But, you know, we had, you know, a lot of problems back then because the Palestinians were actually providing us with good security, good intel. So they were giving us a lot of intel. That's why you didn't have many problems with anybody messing with Americans. But as soon as the Palestinians were outed, you know, we started having some real problems. April

18th, 1983, our embassy blew up. We lost, I think, 17 Americans, 63 people in total. Most Lebanese at work with us and people outside. I was on my way to a meeting there at 1 o'clock, and I had stopped to get some orange juice from the kids

pushing the carts of orange juice. Otherwise, I would have been in there at 1 o'clock, so I just missed that one. So you heard the bang when it had. I was, across the street. Jesus. Yeah, but we lost a lot of good Americans. We lost Bobby Ames and the staff of other guys there.

He was the region chief of the CIA, a wonderful human being and just, you know, that hurt us badly. That hurt us badly. And again, we never had those problems before when the Palestinians were there providing us with information. And then after that, it was just a few months later.

That was April 18, 1983, October 23rd, 1983, when the Marine Barrage got blown up. And the French bearers got hit and blown up also simultaneously. So, yeah, that wasn't a good time. And, you know, it's interesting there's a show out now by Peter Bergen called The Ghost of Beirut. It's on Showtime. Brilliant, brilliant show.

I've only seen some of the trailers. And Peter Bergen's a really, really intelligent guy and really wired in. So if he's a producer for it, it's got to be good. So I'm looking forward to watching that. And it's about that error and about Imad Mugnay, who's known as the number one terrorist in the world, you know, used to be, but we got to him, he's dead. So, yeah, it's about that time frame also.

What was it about the Palestinians that they were providing intelligence? Were they sort of in competition with some of the other Islamic groups in the area? Yeah, they were and they weren't. They were in a sense that they were looked down upon because, one, they're not Lebanese. And they could never be Lebanese. the law is such that even if a Palestinian marries a Lebanese woman, a Palestinian man marries a Lebanese woman, you can't have the passport.

So no foreign man, any country anywhere, that marries a Lebanese citizen, can have the citizenship. It doesn't work that way. So that's one of the things that the Palestinians were always under their craw about. But number two, the Palestinians, there were tons of them. They had numbers, and they were better organized, they were better trained, and they had better intel than the local Amal militia or any other militias there. And, you know, in time, the Palestinians

started having their own divisive problems with different people wanting to split off like George Habash, wanted to split off and create his own group. He thought he was smarter and better than Arafat. So then they had started having their problems, but a lot of those really didn't come until after 1982 when the Israelis invaded. So, and, you know,

Again, that goes back to the history that, you know, everybody thinks that they went from Israel slash Palestine and it got kicked out, went right to Lebanon. They did it. And it's amazing how many people that live in that region of the world don't know that they actually went from Israel slash Palestine over to Jordan. And it was King Hussein. They kicked them out. And they went to Beirut.

Yeah. So. But yeah, they dominated Beirut. It was the Palestinians. Looking back on that experience, I mean, I know you sort of developed like over time and sort of affinity for Lebanon and, you know, learn the language and a lot of things. But, I mean, what did you make, looking back on it, of the American military presence there, be it special forces or Marines or whoever?

I mean, do you think it was wrong for us to be there? Do you think we had a potential to help? No, I don't think it was wrong for us to be there for the most part. Like training the Army still was very good. And I think to a degree that's still happening. I think that's very wise for us to do. We've got to keep a hand in that. And we've got to do that for obvious reasons.

and obvious reasons are, one, you've got Hezbollah there. So we don't want Hezbollah taken over the army. We don't agree with them. And number two, you have the Syrians that are always looking to have influence. And they've actually, you know, occupied Lebanon for many years. It wasn't until President Bush, the son was in and he got them to leave. But Hafez Assad was the smart, you know, Syrian leader for, I don't know how many decades. But he was the real brains behind it.

He's the one that end up having his claws into Lebanon. And they were draining in the resources from Lebanon, especially from the port, because the port of Beirut is a deepwater port, and they can do a lot of commerce. So the Syrians came in and, you know, as a favor to help keep peace between the Lebanese and the civil wars from battling each other, which was effective at first. And then they stopped fighting. And the Lebanese citizens realized that, okay, we may have a different religion, but it's okay, we can get along. you can get along because they have a weird dynamic you go over to Africa and the

Lebanese regardless of the religion they're having cookouts they're going to each other's weddings no problem it's only in there in the country when they're battling so yeah it was there's always something going on it was a very fluid situation I think that we should stay there training the army I don't think we should have had our Marines there as peacekeepers that's the part I didn't agree with. And again, Marines aren't peacekeepers. If you, you know, let's say positively needed destroyed overnight, send the Marines. Don't bullshit around by having them stand there and, you know, we'll get shot out. Right. Marines aren't nice. Marines aren't made to be

nice. They're a killing machine. Let them kill. But no, they shouldn't be peacekeepers. And we ended up losing a whole bunch of them because they're putting in a position where the State Department was controlling them. Dave, you want to give a quick shout out for our sponsor for this podcast? Yeah, so anybody who's been in the military knows that the only thing the military ever got right was Wooby. And our friend Dustin Ward, episode 201, if you haven't seen him, he's done even one better with the Wooby and created the Light Sleeper. It's a lightweight, wooby, like, high speed. would be with a spot for your sleeping mat to actually hold it in place.

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So after Lebanon, you got out of the Army in 1987. I mean, before we move on, are any other interesting Army episodes that you'd like to highlight? No, not really. There's always somebody, you know. Like I told you, I saw the other day, you guys had Nick Brockhausen on.

Yeah. That's the guy that's the guy that's. got the interesting stories. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, Nick's awesome. He is. Yeah, we've had him and Jeff on a couple times. Jeff's another one. We'll have to do it a couple. We'll have to do it again. So what led up to you deciding to leave the military in 87? Yeah, I was thinking about going to work for another government agency at the time. And because of my language, that was, you know, a big plus. So that was interesting. So that was a path that was going down. And then I ended up back in Lebanon. And, you know, because I could speak a language,

I was working in the civilian side. So I ended up doing some more training and things like that and getting into contracting. And then, you know, one thing led to the next. I had a security company. I was in the Special Forces Reserves at the time and then came back, was raising a family and I opened a security company. And then originally our first customer was Ali North. because he had a threat against them from some people in the Middle East, legitimate threat. And, you know, he was writing his book at the time, and he had gone through the Iran-Contrae issues.

So then he started the book tour, and he went to Europe with it as well. So we had to provide him with some real protection. So that's how the security company got it started. And there were, correct me if I'm wrong, but a couple like close calls with Ali while you're traveling with him as far as attempts. Oh, but there's always somebody trying to get to him. I don't think they were really, these were trying to kill him, but he had legitimate threats on him.

And, you know, it was sickening to see some of the politicians grilling him saying, why did you have a security fence and why did you have a security alarm at your house? Oh, I remember that. Come on. He's out there doing America's work, and he had legitimate threats against him by legitimate terrorists. But there was also another element of crazies out there that don't know how to kill anybody, wouldn't kill anybody, and he would probably puke on themselves if they saw a dead person, but they would still try to do embarrassing things to him.

Right. I remember, and if my memory serves me right, that during the Iran-Contra hearings, they were grilling him about that he used government funds to have an alarm system put in his home, and that was like a point of controversy of whether or not that was appropriate. Yeah, I don't know if it was government funds or funds from the sale. of the hawk missiles to the Iranians at 100% profit. I don't know. But who cares where it comes from?

Well, you know, the guy's got a legitimate threat. He's doing work for the government, us, the American people. He's not doing work for himself. He's not enriching himself. So, yeah, he needed protection. So as time went on, how did that security company kind of expand and sprawl out into other? Yeah. You know, one of the early bigger projects we got to do,

was work on the vulnerability assessment for Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, right in New York. It was after the February 1993 car bombing in the World Trade Center. And then we got the subcontract from a much larger company to come in and do essentially a vulnerability assessment. They were trying to figure it out. They had a bunch of former CIA and Secret Service guys

and some brilliant brains and what they did, but they don't know how to target something. So they asked for the SF guy to come in and I look at it from a terrorist perspective. You know, they've got the George Washington Bridge. They've got the JFK Airport. And, you know, in special forces, that's what we do. We're the nightmare for the other people.

You know, when they stay awake at night, it's because of guys like us. We're going to find out where their vulnerabilities are. We're going to exploit those vulnerabilities and we're going to kill a lot of people or put them out of business or both. So that's what we did here. And then we just turn it around

so we can mitigate it and provide. it from happening. So that was one of our biggest contracts to date. And that was a good one because we got to spend, you know, I spent about six, seven months here in New York City, done by the World Trade Center working. We did every one of their facilities, the outer bridges, the airports, the communications facility, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the path system, the Port Authority bus terminal, you name it, with outer bridges. We did it all. It was great. It was a good experience. When you're doing that, especially with so many targets, and in a free country, how do you mitigate, like, all the risks?

You don't. You're absolutely right. And one of the things, the interesting thing, as soon as you said free country, we were looking at some of the tunnels. I'm not going to get into specifics, but some of the tunnels they have. I went and bought the blueprints for the tunnels for $7 because they're available to the public. And that was one of the things we said, you know, one of our recommendations. Shut that off. Don't let anybody come buy that. There's no need for public to have it. Right. So, and that's the world we started creeping into as of February 1993 from that first car bombing.

I have to ask, of course, considering everything that happened subsequently on 9-11, I mean, that's another threat that would have to be mitigated elsewhere to prevent that attack from happening. But, I mean, what was going through your head when that happened, when that attack happened? Told you so. Yeah. Told you so. because I actually wrote it and I got a lot of pushback saying look if you you know follow up and all these recommendations we make one of the only things we can't help you out is you know

common causey type of tax which is you know the people doing the screening at the airports and the screeners at the airport back then everybody that flew knew that most of them could barely speak English and they didn't want to do their job they didn't care they're getting paid minimum wage and just yeah whatever go by so you know getting a couple box cutters that on an airplane wasn't a complicated task. But I actually wrote about that and ended up speaking about it on a Bill O'Reilly show after 9-11 happened because he had found out about it and asked me.

Wow. Yeah. Somewhere around this time back, we're talking to late 80s, early 90s. We also got involved into an undercover work for the government. Yeah, and it was just because it was an SF connection. One of the agents was a former SF soldier. And asked me, he says, hey, you speak Arabic,

and we know you're over there for a long time doing the war. We're trying to penetrate this organization. Would you mind helping us out? What do we know about this stuff? He said, okay, yeah, sure, I'll help you. That was on a Wednesday. He said, we spent, you know, a lot of money trying to get into this kingpin.

Just of Arab descent. I said, okay, and that's Sunday. I was having brunch with that guy that they spent years trying to get. Just because of the contacts in Lebanon. So luck or whatever. So were you posing as a buyer? I wasn't posing as anybody. I went in as who I was.

I went in as my real identity. Again, I didn't know anything about doing law enforcement type of work. But a guy asked me to help. Sure, I'll help. The country asks you to help. You're going to help. Four years later, everybody was arrested, indicted, and $100 million worth of drugs that came from the Middle East.

Wow. So it wasn't bad. And so you were over there for four years doing that, trying to identify. No, no, no. It wasn't just over there. It was both here and there, mainly in the U.S. Yeah. And the arrests happened here in the U.S. So they had to get them over here to make the arrests? Some of them actually lived here. The leaders of it actually lived in the East Coast in the U.S. And that was like one of a string of like sort of undercover federal investigations he helped with.

Yeah, and then there was another one called the Supernote. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to hear about that. Yeah, that was interesting. It was a super note and it was a counterfeit $100 bill that was so good. It passed through the Federal Reserve undetected. Holy shit. The Federal Reserve banks. So, of course, you know, we needed to find out who's doing this.

And the purpose behind it was to undermine the confidence in the U.S. currency. You can't beat us militarily. So you're going to try to undermine the world's confidence in our currency. When you got brought into it, did they know where those notes were coming from? No. Oh, shit. No. ballpark idea, but we ended up finding out. And through the diplomatic channels, they shut it down.

But it was a real deal. And ultimately, the people who were doing it were from the Shaw era. But the Shaw error, people from the Mint then were no longer in charge. They were forced to do this. So they had no choice. Otherwise, their families would be killed and they'd be killed. Could you tell us a little bit about how that investigation went down from your point of view? just spent a lot of time doing a basic, you know, investigative work and talking to people and working sources and just like if you're looking for somebody that's been kidnapped. It's the same thing. You're not getting calls from these guys, though. That's the difference.

You know, when somebody gets kidnapped, you're usually getting a call saying, hey, I got so-and-so and what are you going to give me for them? That wasn't the case here. We had to go find it and through the sources. So once we found our way through the sources, we were able to determine where, you're able to determine where, the supplies were coming from, who was actually making it, and how it was being distributed. So once we had that information, we brought it all back, and they were able to shut it down diplomatically. So how were they doing that? Wow. You needed a Secret Service agent to explain the details.

But what they did, they had the paper, and this was when the first started putting those strips in the $100 bills. They actually had those strips. We were able to get some of those strips that they had. How did they actually manufacture that stuff and got it? I still couldn't tell you today. I don't know because our sources can only go so far. But we were able to get it. So only one sheet had the print and the other sheet didn't.

And our source would say, okay, here's a real $100 counterfeit bill and here's a fake. Give that to your people and tell me which one is real. He's telling me which one is real. He's testing us. So I remember going to a Secret Service agent in a meeting and saying, okay, here, look at this. He said this one's real. This one's fake. Secret Service agent pulls out his briefcase, his little lab, and starts looking at it.

He says, sorry to tell you this, but your source is playing you. You got a bad source because they're both real. So, oh, okay. Then they're saying, well, don't go back. You know, this is dangerous that the source is playing you. playing you. About 15 minutes later, he says, oh, time out, I stand corrected. These are both super notes. So, oh, no, oh, my source is no good.

But you've been doing this for 17 years, and you don't know, it's that good you couldn't tell right away. Right. So that's how good they are. If you've got a Secret Service agent's been doing this for 17 years, he couldn't tell initially. See, it took him about 15 minutes before he could say, oh, these are definitely super notes. So that's how good they were. do you know if it was ever determined that if somebody from our own mint was sourcing this stuff to them? No, no, no, no. No, no. That had nothing to do with us. Nothing to do with us. That was all foreigners.

And what happened was when the Shaw was in power, his people came over and they saw how our mint worked. They saw how we made our currency. So they went back. And then they were out of power. And they were grabbed by the Khomeini type people. It said, here's what you're going. guys are going to do for us. This is what we want to do. And so they could use the money to finance or elicit activities, but also, as you said, undermine the dollar. Absolutely. And they were distributing it by the crate loads in Europe. Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, it was unbelievable. But, you know, it was at the time, and I'll never forget, it's Vice President Cheney who shut it down diplomatically. So he's the one that had the meetings with whoever in the

Middle East. They put pressure on the Iranian something. He told them, you know, I think it was actually through the Syrians that this is going to stop. Or else we're going to have some serious problems. And remember at the time, the Syrians also controlled the Bikah Valley. And the Bukaw Valley had hash crops and opium for from the furthest north to the further south down to Zahli and the Bacah Valley. All hash crops, as far as I could see, guarded by Syrian Russian tanks. So they don't want to let. They don't want the Americans to come in and destroy their cash crop.

The Iranians were manufacturing the bills in Syria or they were manufactured in Iran and brought to Syria and then on to Europe. I think that they were doing it. They used Syria as a transit point and they were actually making them in Lebanon. Oh, wow. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, that is a complicated case. Yeah.

Yeah. But there was, but again, like if it wasn't, if somebody from the mint was like one of the company, because aren't some of those things like the strips or whatever. They're kind of proprietary, right? It's all proprietary. Even the paper's proprietary. Because you look at the paper, and it's got like a little blue and a little color. It's a little red, like little hairs in it. Yeah,

that's all proprietary. So somewhere along the way there was a supply chain weakness, whether it was an individual or it would... I don't know if it's a supply chain weakness or they were bleaching $100 bills and using the paper. Oh, oh, oh.

That makes sense. You know, now you're getting into stuff that I don't know about. It's very technical. Yeah. You got to talk to a Secret Service agent about that. But those are other options. Fascinating. Yeah.

One of the other things you got involved in around this time frame, too, was recovering children who had been kidnapped. And I remember a few of the parents actually reached out to me at one point. I was wondering if you could tell me, like, how you got brought into that world. Yeah. I don't remember. I think it was somebody was in deep shit and I got a phone call. saying, hey, this kid's been abducted, blah, blah, blah, we need your help.

It wasn't a matter of could you help. We need your help. And it's a kid who's not going to help a kid. Yeah. But I've also had calls. Actually, going back to 1993, I was on top of the George Washington Bridge doing the vulnerability assessment on the intermediate supports, you know, the towers. I was up on the tower. When I got a call from an FBI agent, I won't say his name.

He's retired now, though, and said, we need your help because there's been a child abducted and taking to Beirut, Lebanon. And the mother is presently in Cyprus, and she's getting ready to go into Beirut to try to get her child back, and we're scared because the husband will probably kill her. And the wind's blowing, and I'm thinking, did I hear this right? And said, yeah, so he says, we need your help. can this lady call you? Sure.

Have her call me. All right, she's in Cyprus. She's going to call you in five minutes. Okay, the lady calls me, you know, and it's a mom. I say, well, is it possible you can wait until I get there? She's absolutely not. This is Mama Bear. She's going for a child.

Don't get in the way of Mama Bear going for a child. She's absolutely not. I'm going to get my son. She said, okay. Do you have a phone number there? She gave me her phone number. So I was able to, her phone number. She got in there, and she played it cool.

We talked about how she'd play it, play it cool with your husband, and try to be nice and no hard feelings, and don't beat him up or anything, and don't stab him when he's sleeping. And just be calm and give me a few days, and we'll catch up to you. Okay, so I was able to catch up to her, end up meeting her at the local produce market right on the street.

I was able to talk to her. And she did, the FBI confirmed there's an arrest warrant for the father. The mom has custody through the courts. And the state department wanted them back also. So it had the blessing of all down. And it was legit, you know, through the courts. So I said, okay. So you did the standard.

What puts some surveillance on? We had the inside scoop with the mom because she was living there. So we saw when the father would drop the child off at school. We dropped the child off at school. We pulled up with the mom right behind. See the father take off the child. Mom calls the child, hey, Johnny come here. Jenny comes running over.

Mom gives him a hug. Let's go. We're going. Off we went. Cross over to Damascus, get on an airplane goodbye. And home, safe and sound. And you ended up doing a handful of those, right? Yeah, we did several of them, but not just there.

We did them in Peru. We did one in Northern Ireland. It was back in the days when the IRA was still bombing stuff and big war going on there. So that one was a dicey one as well. But yeah, we've done them in many different parts. of the world. But it's always been with the blessing of the State Department and law enforcement and the courts given the parent custody here. How often do the local governments help you and how often do you avoid them? We never talk to them. Okay. Never talk. I take that back. We talked to

in England we had to get the Lord Chancellor's office to stamp some papers for us. The court orders from the judge here and then from there we went to Belfast and because we had the Lord Chancellor's office stamp it we were able to get police support as well so the police came in with their armor personnel carriers surrounded the house and we were able to go in so that's one time we were able to use local otherwise we don't say a word we just in and out because if you were to be caught doing this in a place like Beirut I mean ostensibly you'd be charged with kidnapping, right? You've got a problem.

Yeah. You've got a problem. And in a lot of places where particularly father is run with the child, like if he's in Middle Eastern descent, like the state recognizes the father's right to the child. That's right. But under Sharia law, the mother has custody until the daughter's like 11 or 13 with its son.

And after that, the father gets custody. Okay. So. But still, at the end of the day, you've got to have father's permission. to travel a lot of those countries. Another interesting one that you had mentioned was that there were several different times that sounded like where you were tracking some of the former TWA hijackers or potentially for them to be arrested or swooped in on.

I just wonder if you could detail some of that. Yeah, that was interesting. You know, we've been approached about that a few times, but, you know, I was going over there a lot and really didn't want much to do with that, you know, because that could be dangerous for people I know and so on and so forth. So I kind of brushed that off and didn't pay much attention to it. And I don't believe in those bounties anyway. I think they're all bullshit.

Bounties from who? Like Bounties for Justice type things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've actually spoken to the State Department, and I don't remember the guy's name, but he was a former SF guy. So he gave me the straight scoop. He said, look, that's only there because we've got to put it there. I said, no, what if somebody just says, I'm going to get somebody,

and I'm going to bring him back? He says, we've never had that happen, and we don't recommend it. And I've actually had other law enforcement guys, federal law enforcement, say, don't do it because you'll get prosecuted. For like kidnapping or whatever? No, just for getting a wanted guy. Right. And I've been told, well, that's in case, you know, is an American law enforcement officer's on vacation or something, and he sees one of these guys. I said, come on, you've got to think of something better than that.

That's pure bullshit. Yeah. Tell me a guy from NYPD is going to be in Beirut on vacation. He's going to bump into some terrorists. Right. He's going to handcuff him and bring him home? Are those rewards more for people who might be in that organization or be around and is like, I'm going to turn this guy in?

Like putting a bounty on bin Laden. Originally, no. I don't think originally they were set up for that. I think originally they were set up for the old American bounty hunter to go get them. Right. But I think later it developed into that. because, you know, agencies started using sources to get information and sources to lure people out and do those kind of things. Yeah.

Yeah. That's interesting. Let's get into Iraq then. I mean, 9-11 happens, the war's on, and having all the experience that you have and already having experience as a security contractor. I mean, you were involved in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Yeah. It was interesting because the undercover case was still going when the first, Desert Storm started and that undercover case went from 1988 to September 1991 I forgot when Desert Storm first happened I think it was January February

yeah of 1990 right or 91 wait was it 90 or it was 91 yeah it was 91 yeah positive anyway I got activated so I remember calling the case agent, one of the case agents in the case and said, hey guys, just want to let you know, I'm leaving. I got activated. So no, no, no, no, no, stay right there. Now, that case you had FBI, IRS, customs, FBI. So there's four different case agents. After every undercover meet, I had to come back and debrief with four different agents. They all wanted me alone. And there was four hours right there. So if I have a two-hour undercover, I got to give them a Reader's Digest version because I know I got four more hours to go. So we're going to cut that short. So what happened

was I called one of the case agents said, hey, I got activated. I'm out of here. Oh, no, no, don't go anywhere. And probably within 30 or 40 minutes, I must have had 15 or 20, you know, G cars in my driveway. All the different agencies were coming over. It said, no, no, no. They brought their little mobile van with the high-tech telephones and commo gear in it and stuff and they were calling the Attorney General saying hey we need you to call the Pentagon because he can't go now because we're close to the end of this we're only if we later real life only about four months away I think

or five months away from the undercover case being wrapped up so they said you can't go you just can't do this right now we'll lose four years of work and my shit's already packed I went and packed my duffel bag and my kit bag. I'm ready to go. I said, no, you can't go. So I was disappointed. So anyways, they said, well, you can go right after we finish the operation, undercover.

I didn't get to go. But anyways, they ended up going as a contractor back in 2003. When we, December, January of 2003, when we first started. And we're doing a ton of PSD work. We did a lot of work with. Department of Justice, the mass graves. I've got to work with some great guys there, some of the U.S. attorneys, some of the agents. And it was helpful, too, because I speak Arabic, and you know how it is.

There's not a lot of people that speak Arabic. And State Department was, you know, scarfing up everybody they could that could speak Arabic. So we'd go out in the middle of a desert to a mass grave that was identified, and they'd bring all the scientists out. We'd set camps up, you know, and they'd bring. the chow in and you know you'd have showers and some mini camp there and they'd have the DNA specialists and the the the what do you call it the FBI like the evidence response team folks just people that are absolutely brilliant in this stuff and they dig up all these bodies yeah and start going through to get

the DNA and start working on it so we secured that and we secured the transportation to and from people so on and so forth so that was that was interesting And we also did, you know, because the Department of Justice a lot, we had to do with the protection of some of the witnesses against Saddam and an administration and when you're building a new courthouse over there. So it was really impressive to watch. This was a lot of security and protection work mostly. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And how long did that keep you busy going back and forth from? Well, that was to like 2008, 2007. Yeah, it was busy because it was constantly. And, you know, they're just throwing contracts at you, just throwing money at you. We need you to do this. We need you to do that. So it was a busy time. Now, what were some of the other thing?

Because in your bio, like you mentioned, some of the other things that you were asked to do during that time or hired to do. Like what were? Yeah, like a Codell. We had a Codell contract, the congressional delegation. So anytime those people would come in, the politicians, we'd have to pick them up at the airport and bring them into the green zone and take them wherever we want them, do their protection for them. And, you know, until they got really bad and then we'd start flying them in or they'd take that Iron Dragon to and from. You know, the big, big piece of Target Club.

Yeah, that's one of the things we did. We did a lot of static protection at Taji, which is north of Baghdad. We did some of the UN facilities. We did protection for some of the logistics sites as well. Did you ever cross paths with Bob Adolf by chance? He was an S.F. officer. Actually, I believe he was a 10th group guy, and he was running security for the UN building when it got blown up.

Oh, no, no. We didn't have it then. We had a UN site. I forgot where it was. Not Taji, the officer direction. I forgot the name of the site. Anyways, it was a UN camp, a small camp. It was mainly military there. It wasn't civilians.

But I know what you're talking about. You're talking about the UN corporate building. It was early on in the war. The headquarters building. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. We had a, we had a UN military place that we were secured.

And they had, you know, foreigners that are assigned to the UN force that were staying there. That's the base we protected. And then you mentioned that, like during this time, you were also asked to sort of set up an Intel network, like a local Intel network, right? That was in Afghanistan. Oh, that was Afghanistan. I'm sorry. That was Afghanistan. Okay.

How did Afghanistan figure into this? Because you said you were bouncing around to Iraq like 0-708. When did Afghanistan kind of come up on the radar for you? That was in 2007, 2008. Right around the same time. As soon as we'd finish with one, we started on the other. So it was that when you say we, I mean, it was like your entire security company kind of moving from one to the other.

Yeah. And we worked a lot with the company that was a prime contract. and a lot of these called MBM. Yeah. The guy, Dario Marquez, great guy, and Rob Rubin, another great guy. Rob was the brains to make everything happen. You know, he's just

Jews off the chart smart. I'd call him on a Jewish holiday, you know, three in a morning, his time. And he'd say, well, look, you know, my daughter, my wife, Rachel's the daughter of a rabbi. I really can't be using anything electronic, anything electronic today,

but let me sneak into the closet and I'll bring my laptop with me. And he'd bang out all the numbers on a proposal in the closet when he wasn't supposed to. So I hope Rachel's not watching this. But anyway, great guy. But he's the guy that made it all happen. And so what kind of contracts did you start picking up in Afghanistan? Afghanistan, it was actually a maintenance contract.

We would embed with SF teams who were training the commandos, the Afghan commandos. and it started out a very small pilot program at first it was only like three or four people and none of the big companies wanted it so yeah we'll take it so we did it put the proposals in only two people only two companies put proposals in it was in one other one and the other one they weren't even technically acceptable their proposal was like two pages long we actually saw a copy of it later but so we got the contract and then from there it built you know it grew And they kept adding more and adding more, you know, FOBs and more teams that wanted us to be embedded and train them on the maintenance. Mainly the Afghans trained them on how to repair your weapon, how to clean your weapon, how to do the night vision, you know, and your generators and so on and so forth.

Because they were terrible about it, which a lot of armies are, you know, it's just basic maintenance. They'd say, well, the gun don't work, throw it out. might help if you clean it once in a while. Yeah. So then how did you get involved then with, you know, the Dewey clergy clergy over there? Well, actually, I knew Dewey from way back in the days of Beirut. But then we ended up working together on a couple different projects. And one of them was there was a New York Times reporter that got kidnapped and taken across the border and ended up being in the custody of the Haqanis.

that Connie's took him over. So somehow a connection of New York Times contacted me and asked for help. We were able to help do some work on that. And of course, Dewey was instrumental in it. The guys got contacts all over the place. It's just stunning. He was the first head of the Counterterrorism Center

for the CIA. So there's not many people Dewey didn't know anywhere in the world. Are you able or willing to talk about that at all about about how you get in that reporter out of there, how that came about? Well, you know, again, it's just using sources and different sources and confirming. So you get three or four sources and eventually, you know, you find out that two of them are telling you the straight scoop and one's not. So you push them aside and you're constantly trying to develop more sources. So it's like any kind of investigative tool.

we pull that up, that information, all the sources, and I'll use sources, do it with use sources, other of our guys who use sources, and we pull our information, we analyze it and see what's right and what's not, and look, find out where he's at, and we have people on a ground there if we need it, if we need to take some kind of action, and it's only a plane right away, and, you know, ultimately we find out where he's at, and that's when you start zero in, and, you know, the bad guys that, you know, Hacanis are asking for millions and millions of dollars. And then you got the FBI involved also in another angle because it's a U.S. citizen that's been abducted. So they're involved.

And, you know, and I got to say the reporter's wife was just, you know, what a lady, constantly working for them, constantly pushing people and different agencies and the emotion of it. And she was just an amazing human being just, you know, pushing. If I was ever kidnapped, I want somebody like her pushing to help me because she took no prisoners and smart lady and she worked hard at it. But yeah, so ultimately it's developing sources and working those sources and getting the intel, processing it, analyzing it, and then seeing what's the best options to get them out.

At the end of the day, I think there was a book written by the reporter that said he escaped. So what is it You know we Obviously we know about the CIA We know about the DIA And then we know A lot of us know about Dewey Clergy Like there are these sort of private intelligence

Efforts out there Across the world You know very involved sometimes And very competent What is that What does that look like from the inside? I'm sure that it's very compartmentalize You're just doing your thing

but like do you worry about funding do you worry about covered you know or or and I don't mean cover as in like like a cover an alias but top cover like the state department like taking care of you great question great question we've been one of those you know outfits that provided intelligence we had a contract and it comes from some of the big contractors and it goes to a second and then we're the third subcontractor And I heard they do that, you know, so it just gives you more top cover per se and less people know about you. Bullshit. They all know about you because we're the guys on the ground over there. So they find out about us.

They don't know who the other two contractors above us are. And they don't care because they never have any dealings with them. We're the ones passing the intel up. And it's a one-way street. We're not tasked to do things. We're contracted to go collect information. And that's what we did. We collect a bunch of intel and we send it up the pipeline.

And, you know, there's the difference between collecting it for force protection and collecting it for intelligence purposes. We're collecting it for force protection. Atmospherics, I think, is the term. Indeed, it is. Right. Yeah, so we're collecting atmospherics. Yeah.

So we pass our atmospherics up and then, you know, we can sometimes see the results in the newspapers. Yeah. Which we have seen. We've seen, you know, drone strikes based on some of our intelligence we've provided. But again, we're not tasked with anything, and we don't know where it's going. Right. We get the information. We think it's good.

We pass it up. Right. What the government does with it, it's their business. Right. You mentioned, you know, you were pretty close with Dewey, and, I mean, he's not with us anymore. But, I mean, I was wondering if you had any interest in talking a little bit about, like, what he was like as a person, as an intelligence professional. Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

boy, he was like, you know, we were kids, we had these Britannica encyclopedias. He was like Library of Congress of those put together. The guy was, first of all, he's a Brown graduate, so he's no dummy. And he ended up running, you know, the first counterterrorism center for the agency. But we had issues going on in some place in the Middle East, and, you know, we needed to contact Israelis to the, let him know that stay out of this for deconfliction purposes. And Dewey says, yeah, no problem I got that. What do you mean you got that?

He says, what did I just say? You said, you got that, but I don't know what that means. What does that mean, do it? He says, I'll call so-and-so and I'll make sure that there's not a problem. So-and-so was the last head of the Mossad. So that's the kind of guy. So he had that. I say, I got that, I got that.

Okay. Okay, all right, cool. So, of course, I'm going over searching the name of the guy. I'm going to be, damn, he's right. That's the former head of the Mossad. Yeah. So, but the guy was absolutely brilliant, brilliant, practical, you know, and 100% pro-American. Oh, to the bone, to the bone, you know.

We're all pro-Americans. And Dewey was actually in the military for a little while. They made them when they first signed up the CIA. They say, go join the army. go join the army and then come back and we'll touch base with you and come back and check in with us in six months so they go in as officers and lieutenants and they do some of their basic stuff that officers do and then six months later a year later they come back and start their training in the CIA so but you know he did the Fazi Yunus also that capture

Vazi Yunus was um I forgot what the crime was but that's the one they did in the Mediterranean where they lured the guy out, the terrorist out, and on a boat with bikini-clad women and partying and drugs and all that. And that was Dewey's mastermind. He was a mastermind behind that. And then the FBI agents, the girls in bikinis were FBI agents. And they had some of the HRT guys there and they arrest them right there on the boat. And then they take them over to one of the Navy ships, our Navy ships.

get him to an aircraft carrier, put him in a straight jacket, fly him straight back to Andrews, and then they prosecuted him there. So that was Dewey's brainchild. It's pretty wild stuff. And then, you know, as you mentioned, you know, the security contract relationship you had to provide maintenance to the Afghan military, and that kind of like blew up at a certain point on you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we had big problems from it, which shocked me because, you know, this is, again,

Harvey Silverglave wrote a book, A Felony a Day, great book. And, you know, you think that the justice is going to be fair and legit and all that. Now, I've been on that side. I've seen how prosecutors work and agents work because I spent four years undercover with them. So, you know, there was, you know, Department of Defense had the inspector generals office out looking for people to prosecute and they ended up prosecuting us because they thought we had done something wrong. They thought we knew what the other company was going to bid for a project. Although they had the evidence because they subpoena everything, they have the evidence

showing in an email traffic that that wasn't true. Their whole case is based on when they prosecute somebody who charged somebody. Well, you had inside information. Well, check with everybody on the selection committee. Nobody knew us, nobody knew anybody else. And this is all in transcripts, and it's all in the motions, and it's all in the judgment. But it's some weird shit that went on, because we had a judge originally

that our local council in Utah was friends with the judge. The judge recused herself in writing, a written order, because there's a conflict because her good friend is one of our lawyers. Well, that lawyer, unbeknownst to us, we didn't know that why she recused herself

because she didn't say why. It just recused herself in an order. Okay. The local council tells us, well, we've got a, we're busy. This case looks like it's going to take a lot of time. Can you get other local council?

Didn't know any better. Said, yeah, sure. We got other local council. The judge takes the case back from another judge. Really? Yeah. Isn't there something in the law that says the judge can't have a sense of a biased?

Yeah. It's kind of weird. Yeah. I've talked to guys that were involved with the prosecution of Saddam Hussein U.S. attorneys, and some of them have been career prosecutors for 25, 30 years, and they've never seen that unheard of. So, oh, no, it's not unheard of. It happened.

And so they were accusing you of essentially bid rigging. I mean, it's kind of what it comes down to. The accusation was violation of procurement integrity act, which I never heard of before my life. But anyway, that charge was disson. missed. So, and then they charge you with money laundering and a host of other companies. Money laundering is because you submitted an invoice to Department of Defense and you got paid pursuant to the contract. But they're saying since you had inside information, the contract's no good. So we consider that

money laundering. It's all a crock of shit. Anyway, the bottom line is the violation of procurement integrity act gets thrown out. Prosecutors got a real problem now because we had a suppression hearing. catch the agents under oath lying and confirming they violated the search warrant. You got a search warrant for the year 2007. Did you look at anything else? Absolutely not. You're under oath. You're under oath, Mr. Special Agent from the IG's office, the ODIG's office.

You're under oath. Nope, we don't look at anything. Oh, here you go. You know, it's like when they got FLEE bill, he got Furman. You sure you never use the N-word? you sure yeah I'm sure oops here's the tape well here's the document this is you

Mr. Special Agent from the Inspector General's office you lied you said that you didn't go outside the warrant here it is outside the warrant anyways the Reader's Digest version of this they said okay look we're going to give you two million dollars back plead guilty to any charge you want

and we'll call it a day it's so weird that like this is after they freeze your money also right so you can't fight How long has your personal, and this isn't, we're not talking about your business money, right? No, this is business money. Okay. How long has that money been frozen? Well, you know.

Oh, they freeze it before they charge you with a crime. Right. So that was probably froze about 24 months. 20, 24 months. Right. Your funds are frozen. And in the meantime, they're. So you're not innocent until proven guilty, though.

No, absolutely not. Well, the way they get around that is your money is not. But nonetheless, I mean, they threw you in the slammer because they considered you a flight risk. So how long are you cooling your heels in prison? 14 months. Yeah, they considered me a flight risk because, listen to this, because I speak Arabic. They didn't say anything about Norwegian. I guess you speak Norwegian, you're not a flight risk.

So anyway, because I speak Arabic. And two, they said, I bribe Taliban officials. And they're silence and crickets. How do you bribe a Taliban official? because what's the name Ross? Brian Ross, ABC investigative reporter, wrote an article saying that unnamed sources said American International Security Corp, which is my company,

paid a few hundred dollars to bribe garbs to look the other way so the New York Times reporter could escape. So based on that, the judge says you're a flight risk because you're a danger to the community because you bribe foreign officials. I don't know if a taliban... This is in writing. This is a war with the Taliban.

Right. This is the judge's decision in writing. So basically you paid your company at, you know, paid guards to look the other way while the journalists escaped, and that's paying foreign officials. So that's the reason to keep you detained. It's all bullshit. Yeah.

Because if they don't have a strong case, it's a white-collar case. You get out on bail. Right. Personal recognizance. It's a white-collar case. No violence here, no drugs, no guns, none of that stuff. What's the problem?

The problem is they've got a weak case, so they've got to put as much pressure as possible. And here's the big kicker now. This is a real kick in the gut. They said, plead guilty any charge you want. Okay. I'm going to plead guilty to the violation of the Procurement Integrity Act. You know why? Because it was dismissed.

So give me my $2 million. back and I'll plead guilty to that. So that's what the deal was. Do you know where they developed this hard on? Like did did some other company try to sink you? What I think is that investigators start going down the path and they don't stop. They put so much work into it.

They don't want to go to their boss. They put so much time and money into it that they're not going to stop. Right. And you know what? What do they care? Right. Who do they care? We caught you. We got the transcripts now. He's all transcribed. You lied under oath. They got promotions afterwards.

Right. Because they were guilty verdicts. That's justice in America. Mike, did that, I got to ask, I mean, did that feel like a big kick in the balls? Not just because of that, but because you had done a lot of work with federal law enforcement. You would try to work with these guys over the years. And then the way they kind of came at you like this. I mean, did that kind of embitter you, I guess?

Absolutely. Of course I did. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, when they said we're investigating this and when I first heard about it, I blew it off. I laugh. Yeah, yeah. Well, they're good investigators. They'll figure it out. I'm not worried. I'm not worried at all. And I said that based on my experience with investigators and prosecutors. Right. Right. Nothing's going to come at this.

Yeah. I wasn't worried at all. They'll figure it out. These guys are smart. No. What I don't understand, though, is because the government, the government went after a number of, especially smaller. Like the government didn't go after Halliburton obviously, right? They don't go after. Of course not. They go after these smaller companies. I have a friend whose company they went after.

But it was a civil case, I think. You know, I mean, I don't, maybe it was criminal. But why did they go after you as an individual instead of just like your, like you as a company? As a company? They did. They went after the company also. But how do you get? Yeah, I just.

You know. Look, I think... I'm getting angry for you right now. I think, in my opinion, grand juries were created way back when for prosecutors who were ethically right and honest and presented true evidence.

Now let me say, you know, you can indict a ham sandwich. Why is that? Is it because of prosecutors aren't being ethically honest, not telling them a scoop? It's pretty simple to convince. convince, you know, a group of people who don't necessarily want to be sitting in that jury room to go ahead and give me a yes vote to indict somebody. Or know all the intricacies, very complicated intricacies of security contractor.

Yeah. And there's not a lot of prosecutors that know government contracting because these prosecutors didn't know government contracting. Right. And the special agent from the inspector general's office, he didn't know very well either. And it's pretty sad with that when their own expert they go to says, The question by the Department of Defense Inspector General agent was, were they making too much profit? Well, your own expert in writing says, no, it's a firm fixed price. That means the company's taking the risk.

We took the risk. Right. Yeah, not the government, we take the risk. Right. Because if it goes over, we pay for it. Right, right. So, hello. So 14 months overall, you get out, and is that when you see,

start going into other entrepreneurial endeavors. No, actually what happened was when I got out, I got contacted to help on another undercover operation in the Middle East. Even after all that, the government came back to you and wanted your help. Did you do it? I did. Yeah? I did. What was that one? And it was successful.

It was just some wing nuts ripping off visa for like $700 million. It's scamming stuff. And I knew this from before when I was doing investigative work and undercover stuff in Egypt. After the fall of Gaddafi, there were a whole bunch of problems that arose out of that. But yeah, after that case, the violation of procurement integrity act, come on, really? That's dismissed, and you're going to let somebody plead guilty to that?

It doesn't make sense. So I had to go to my priest later and ask for forgiveness because I swore that I did that when I didn't. And I had to do that just as a business perspective to finish it and get out of jail. Yeah. So that's justice in America, unfortunately. And how does a judge recuse herself? Her buddy is my lawyer. He gets off the case, says he's too busy.

How convenient is that? Now, we didn't know the relationship. It goes to another judge, and we start to process with the other judge. That lawyer says we're too busy, big law firm. get a new lawyer local council and then she takes the case back which is a violation of their own local rules it's bizarre

isn't there something just stinks there yeah yeah yeah yeah for sure and oh by the way her husband was general counsel for that law firm so after all this you go back start doing some undercover work for the government again now we're now we're into the Arab Spring it sounds like

around that time frame just after Just after, yeah. Yeah, just after. I banged that out quick. But then I was working mainly on vitamin one, the new drink that I've got. Right here. Why don't you tell folks about your company that you started? It's delicious.

I'm just going to say this right after that. And you can get it on Amazon. What happened was in Iraq, you know, they had the big pits out there, the wooden pits. The fire pits? No, not the fire pit. Like the bird pits? No, not a burn pit, like a big box. Oh, yeah, the big-ass box.

Yeah, the big palace. Yeah. Fill with gatorade. Yeah, yeah. And we were all drinking gatorie. We bring it back somewhere and put it in a refrigerator and drink gatorate. Yeah. And we're cramping up.

Yeah. You know, it's 120, 140 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer there. Yeah. And we're cramping up and we couldn't figure out why. And one of the flight surgeons told us, you guys are eating too much cake. I said, Doc, look at the, these are abs. Does it look like we were eating cake? No.

We figured out it was the sugar in the gatorade. Yeah. So that's where I got the idea to make vitamin 1. So this has got the electrolytes in it. It's got the good vitamins and it's got no sugar. So we don't have that issue. And it's clear, no artificial coloring. And it actually tastes great with all natural flavor.

It does taste great. And I'll tell you one of the things I love about this is it like, you talk about Gatorator power radio or these other things. Like when you're really hot, they're like thick, they're syrupy. Like they're like they're not refreshing. Yeah. You know, I mean, I used to cut mine, you know, with water. because they're not refreshing.

This is really light. Like, I don't know if you guys see, but it's like, like you said, it's clear. It's delicious. It's light. And it has, yeah, it's fantastic. It really is. So, yeah, I've been focused on that. We were shipping overseas to Qatar, Lebanon, UAE, pre-pandemic.

But then after the pandemic happened, you know, the pricing for shipping containers went through the roof. And to ship to the Gulf Coast countries, you've got to ship in a refrigerated containers. So instead of a normal 40-foot container, it's got to be refrigerated and that's usually double the price. So now you're talking somewhere between $6 and $10,000 to ship a container. So what we're going to start doing in the near future with the company probably in the next 60 days is start manufacturing over there. That way we don't have that cost. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. And for our viewers, I mean, where's the best place to go and purchase these if they're interested? Amazon. Yeah, it's on Amazon. It's a good rated drink on Amazon. And we're also up in New England. We're in the market basket supermarkets. So we're always looking for more, more distributors.

But it's a tough competition here because Coke and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper, Snapel, they dominate everything. Yeah. They dominate everything. So while you're involved in this entrepreneurial effort, you're starting your vitamin one company, somewhere along this time frame, you get contacted by. Carlos Gown or his people. How did that come about for you? Oh, I never heard of him before.

No, just okay. It's not what I read in the newspapers. Well, you can't believe everything you read. Well, it's funny, I got to, you know, I was bitter from the judicial system that I went through because I was pissed off about it. You know, how many criminals, if you're really a criminal,

offered to take a polygraph? Right. And then they say, well, we can't use that in court. It's not admissible. Bullshit, use it as an investigative tool. Right. Come on. Hook me up.

I didn't do anything wrong. Hook me up. No, not doing it. Anyways. So I had a bad taste in my mouth about that. And then I get a call from a guy that's saying, hey, we need some help. Can you help us get somebody out of somewhere? Okay.

Yeah, sure. when you want it done tonight five o'clock yeah no problem that's literally can you help us get somebody out of somewhere I don't know what are you talking about so I found out that there were two couples that I know over I don't know if it was an Amman Jordan or in Beir, Lebanon they were talking

and one of the wives said to the other three if my husband was ever kidnapped I'd call Mike Taylor because he'd get him back for me that's how the person said oh I know him I can call him so that person called me and said hey we've got this problem anyways I said you got to give me more information you know next day he gave me more information and told me this guy Carlos Gosone he's over in Japan he got set up he's being tortured he's out right now but he's being tortured they held him for 22 days then they

charge him with another crime so they can hold him for another 22 days and then after 44 days go they charge him with another crime just to joke him and they keep him in solitary confinement and you know he's got to sleep on a floor and he only gets two showers a week so on and so forth okay and then I met his wife was a very nice lady and of course she was distraught over it it's her husband's over there and one of the things that really got under my skin about this is that the Japanese court told Carlos you're not even allowed to speak to your wife that's part of your bail condition right

what do you mean you can't speak to his wife draconian you can't talk to her on the phone you can't see her you can't speak to her what is this that sounds like something Saddam Hussein would you know put it as a bail condition or North Korea yeah real quick can you give us a brief background

on Carlos Casasant was he just some guy who was tagging wall spray painting in Marajikin in Japan good point Carlos Gosen was the chairman of Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi all at the same time. And it's my understanding that part of this was set up because Renault, a French company, was taking over a large portion of Nissan, their shares.

And from internally, this had been going on, this investigation that they had set up against Carlos and Greg Kelly, the American attorney for him, which ultimately resulted in a coup de if you will, where Carlos went into Tokyo and Greg Kelly came in because they said it was an emergency meeting. They'll send a corporate jet form. Greg Kelly said, I really can't because I've got to have back surgery in a couple days and Thanksgiving's coming up. They said, please, please, please, please, send the plane over. He did, you know, the honorable thing. He said, yes, there's work to be done.

I'll do it. Jumped on a plane and went over there. They arrested them both. Throw them both in solitary confinement. Greg Kelly short end of it. They charge him with four different crimes. Three and a half years later, his trial happened. And he was found guilty only one, the three, not guilty.

So I don't know if he was really guilty that one. Maybe they're just trying to save face. What were they charging? Anyway, it took three and a half years. I don't know. I don't know what the crimes were like misuse of funds or something along those lines. you know and you know violation of the confidence of the shareholders or you know misappropriation of money things like this so but anyways you're going to put people in

solitary confinement torture them right for this so that's what they did they did it to them so anyways they asked me to help I met with the wife several times wonderful lady and ended up saying okay I'll do it I'll get them out remember at the time I was still bitter and pissed off about my experience. And I thought it was very unfair. And today I think it's unfair. And I'd sit with the judge and tell the judge that and tell those, the prosecutor knows it. The prosecutor called one of my attorneys afterwards.

We're so sorry about this. So many mistakes. Bullshit. If you're sorry, you stand up and do the right thing. A bunch of cowards. Anyways, I felt bad. And I said, I'll do it. I'll get the guy out.

And I did. I got him out. I planned it. The operation was absolutely perfect. it was smooth without a glitch and I pulled him out like I said I would do and he's free and clear in Lebanon living in life can you

can you share the details of how you got him out are you willing to do that sure well you know he's so well known everywhere he goes somebody knows him he goes to have a dinner somewhere lunch everybody hello Mr. Gone they call him going over there I'm still going.

He's a guy that, I think he was born in Lebanon, raised some in Brazil, and he's got the French citizenship also, so he's the Lebanese citizen, Brazilian citizen, and French citizenship. So I couldn't just walk him on an airplane and get him out because he's so well known. So I came out with a plan where I got to hide him. So I thought about a mask. Mask is not going to work. I said, okay, I got the idea. I'll rent a Lisa aircraft.

I'll fly over there. Take a music box that they use for stage hands, stage boxes. I'll build one of those. We've got to make sure it's custom built so it fits in the cargo of the airplane. I make sure I check which airplane I'm getting so I know the cargo size to fit it in properly. I had it so it was only about one centimeter. The box one centimeter short enough to fit in, so it fit in perfect. and then I'll go over and he's in Tokyo.

I'll land in Osaka because I did the vulnerability assessment on the airports. There's no security on the way out in Japan, only on the way in. No security. And I made the box big enough anyway where it wouldn't fit through the x-ray machines. They're x-ray machines because the box was too big. And I left it open. No locks on it. You put locks on it, what do people think?

There must be some important shit in there. don't put a lock on it so I would land in Osaka I took the boxes to my hotel checked in put the boxes there the Japanese cargo people from the private airport is the ones

that moved it for me and I jumped on a bullet train went to Tokyo linked up with Carlos and let's go you have special forces here to rescue you let's go home put them on a train went back you know hit a mask glasses and a hat

And everybody over in Japan wears the mask. This was before COVID hit. But they still wore masks. And took the three-hour train ride back. No, was he on house arrest at the time? No, no, no. He was just on bail. Okay.

So he could travel anywhere within the country for, I think it was like 48 or 72 hours with telling the prosecutors, as long as he stayed within the jurisdiction of Japan. So he could travel around him. So being on the train is not a big deal. So what? He's on a train. So he went down to Osaka on the bullet train.

The bullet trains are great, by the way. They're smooth and they're fast. A little bit crowded. And the food they sell on it, it's horrible. Went into my hotel where he still had his camouflage on. He said, okay, we're going to leave at 2,200. That's 10 o'clock for non-military people. And I said, okay, we're going to wait a little bit.

The people from the airport showed up in the vans at 10 p.m. so we're going to wait so we can be a little bit late. Now, I had gone over to the airport about an hour before at 9 o'clock to tell the lady, the manager, we've got to make sure that we leave on time. I can't be late because I got an important meeting in Istanbul. I was looking for surveillance or any extra law enforcement or anything going on. That's what I was doing a recon. And then I went back to the hotel, saw him.

The people were there, I said, let them wait. We've got to be late. So we're late. Japanese are very, very punctual. Everything's SOP. They don't think outside the box. If it's not in the SOP, we're in deep shit. That's how they are.

They're just like robots. And of course, in the SM mentality is just the opposite. So we're going to be intentionally late. I'm telling them, we're going to be like 12 minutes late. So they're downstairs, you know, going through a panic. And I said, okay. Now we can go, get in a box. I threw a bed sheet on him, shut the box,

rolled him downstairs. You get a bottle of water, some food? No, no, no, no. I had drill holes in there. He don't need food. He's not going to be there very long. I don't need any food. So, and then he might be drinking.

Then he's going to piss. Right. Then we got a problem. Right. So I had drilled holes in the bottom so he could breathe. So there's plenty of oxygen. So then rolled him downstairs, put him in the elevator, went to the lobby.

It's come. The Japanese people took the take case. They couldn't lift. it and put it in the back of the van. So I'm the VIP. I'm the guy with the private jet. I'm not supposed to be doing this stuff. I'm supposed to be, you know, somebody special.

So I got like eight Japanese guys on one side. I'm on the other side. We lift the box up because Carlos was in it. So we lift the box up. They couldn't get it in a van. So we finally get in the van, shut the door, jump into two vans, and we go back to the airport. It's great.

Everything's there. The same immigration guy that was there in the morning. We arrived at 10 in the morning, 930, 10 was there. Same policeman with a nasty little old revolver looked like it came out of World War II, still there. And that was it. And, you know, I threw my rucksack on the X-ray machine,

say, let's go, and say, no, no, no, no, no, you guys are in a hurry. Besides, no screening, no security check on the outside. When you guys are leaving, no security check. I said, okay, great, let's go. Push the big box with Carlos in it, and I had another smaller box. Pushed the two boxes through.

I'm in a van. on the airplane. The jet was a global express. They put the conveyor belt for the luggage up to it. It was about a three-foot gap here. They didn't know how to drive the conveyor belt very well. So there's a guy, a little Japanese kid that goes in a cargo. He's trying to lift the box.

He's got a better chance to have a lunch with God to lift that box. So I tell, hey, you know, Hop Singh, come here. Go over there. Get out of here. Get out. So I lift the box up. I got like eight Japanese pushing the other side. So we had to get over that three foot gap.

We got it in, no problem. Sit in. I had the pilot, hey, come shut this door, make sure it's sealed properly. So the pilot shut the door, we're good to go. Okay, I knock on a box. That was our code. Everything's okay. And plus he can hear what's going on.

And I'm talking loud enough so he can hear. He's inside the box. So we're button up. Now what's probably about, I had asked the pilots also earlier. can we leave at 2230? We're supposed to leave at 2,300. I said, can we leave at 2230? They said, okay, no problem.

So we're buttoned up by 20 minutes past 10 p.m. And I said, we're leaving in five minutes? They said, no, Tower won't allow us because we filed a flight plan to leave at 11. They'll make us wait until 11. So we couldn't even turn the engines on. So it was about a quarter to 11, we're allowed to turn the engines on. Meanwhile, was, is car? Carlos is still down in the hold?

No, no, no. Okay, you got it. Look, look, he's in a cargo. But the cargo is here. Then the bathroom's here. And then the cabin's here. It's all on the same deck. Oh, it's not like a belly or something.

No, no, no, no. It's all on the same deck. Yeah. But what happened was once we sealed the door, we got everybody off the airplane and shut that door. I lifted the box. Carlos was in. I said, sit tight until we take off.

Right. Everything's good. We're golden. Don't worry. And I put a towel in there, a bathroom towel, just to keep the lid open a little bit more. because it was tight back there in the cargo area.

So I did that, and then we got wheels up right at 11. Right at 2,300, we were wheels up, see you later. Okay. And I went back to the bathroom, just a little bathroom, and to open it up, Carlos had gotten himself out of the box and was sitting on top of it. I said, okay, great. We're good to go, buddy.

All done. So it was probably about, I said, just sit here. a few minutes till we get stable at like 30,000 feet wait a few minutes so we got up to 34,000 feet cruising speed and I already told them look you know don't go over uh don't go over Europe go over Russia over China and Russia because if we have the emergency we got to go down I'd rather go down in Russia or China because they don't like Japan so we should be okay there so anyways that's the flight path we took and then once we got stable at cruising altitude at 34,000 I would basically come on out he can't

came out and sat and we were talking and done deal. Get to Istanbul, Turkey bright early, like O'Dar 30, maybe zero-fourish. I had another aircraft there waiting for him a smaller private jet. I put him in it and transferred him. He went with one other guy, a local Turk, and off to Lebanon, he went. And I went over to the commercial airport. Took about a 40-minute ride to the commercial airport. I got my visa at the private airport

and I went to commercial airport jumped on a commercial flight and went into Beirut. Mission was a success. And so Carlos pops up in Beirut like how long after the rescue? Because I mean this became like a huge

international news story like pretty quickly. Yeah, I'll say. I pulled them out on December 29th, 2019. And December 30th he was in Beirut. He arrived maybe like 7 in the morning.

And media probably knew by an hour later, maybe 8 in the morning that he was there. It's Beirut. Everybody knows everybody. Were you hoping to keep it quieter a little while longer before this? Oh yeah, at least until I got back into Beirut. Yeah, at least a few more hours.

But look, I knew the world was going to sit up and take notice this guy's back in Lebanon. That part's okay. He's not going to hide himself. Right. And Lebanon, he felt like Lebanon's non-extradition to Japan like he felt safe there. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

And they don't extradite their citizens, unlike the United States. So there is one other, like, wrinkle in all of this that I have to bring up because it comes up later is your son's alleged involvement. Yeah. And all of it. What was, was he there in Japan with you? Like, what was his... No, let me tell you what he did in his involvement. Sure.

He was doing search engine optimization for Carlos. So all the media was coming out. He was boosting the good articles to push down the bad articles. That's what his focus was there. The mistake that was made was he had Carlos, he'd go visit Carlos several times in Japan and met with him in his lawyer's office. and so forth. He had this hotel room when Carlos came the day December 29th. Peter came to meet me to show me where his hotel room was in the lobby and Carlos had changed clothes in his room.

Peter didn't know it. So because of that, they charged Peter with a crime for assisting in bell jumping. So you get back to... But Peter actually left the country. Before. He didn't know we were leaving that day. He didn't even know I was coming to Japan that day until I called him when I was in Japan.

Basic upsec. Right. Why did you bring him over there, though? He could have done SEO stuff from back home, right? The timing had nothing to do with each other. We didn't know... He was going over there on his own. He was going over there on his own anyway.

We didn't know we could get the airplane until that day. Right. December 29th, December 28th, when I knew I could get the aircraft in six hours the next morning. And in Japan, if you get charged with a crime, you're pretty much going to be committed. The Japanese judicial system has a 99.4% conviction rate. That's higher than North Korea. Right. That's higher than Russia.

That's higher than Iran. 99.4%. And, I... We'll get into that. We'll touch on that again in a moment. So you get to Beirut, and then you're heading back home from there? Yeah, I was going to head back home. But the news broke and somehow or another, my name leaked.

And I had news reporters all over me. So I was doing E&E for a little bit. Do you ever find out why your name leaked or how you were associated with it? Yeah, we think we know why. yeah it was pretty sure somebody was trying to fuck you no I don't think it was it wasn't intentional oh I see no no it wasn't

intentional but it wasn't it wasn't like like the Japanese law enforcement didn't put it all together oh no no no this was laid out for them on a silver platter by the media

yeah yeah and I mean I think that's why always part of why they came down so hard on you is because you just embarrassed the Japanese police made them look like a bunch of chumps the way you got him out of there so easily i think that's a part of it is what it is and it's it's a face-saving you know uh uh sort of culture so is what it is yeah yeah if they did torture people i wouldn't have done it right so you know look let's i was there you know my sentence i couldn't have a trial because to i was extradited i was you know i was betrayed by my country trump and pompeo both of them in my opinion

their bags of shit. And I got no problem saying that to their face either. So let's let's get to that. You get back home, you're trying to like way low, avoid the media. They're keep pounding on your door. What kind of happened? What happens at that point? Media went away eventually because Carlos had a big press conference over there. Media from all over the world was there and he was dealing with the media. So all the media attention was on him now and I was clear, nothing going on. But too late. January 28th, I believe it was the Japanese issued an arrest warrant for me and Peter. And the next thing was they're going to issue a red notice. I had the lawyers come over.

Now, I had lawyers before this tell me it's not a crime, what you're doing. You're going to go rescue it. It's not a crime. Because what a lot of people don't know, bail jumping in Japan is not a crime. You can jump bail in Japan. It's not a crime. So if you're helping somebody jump bail, how can that be a crime? Right.

Okay. All the legal scholars, legal scholars in Japan, not all, many legal scholars, even professors, an American professor named Clancy, over there says still to this day, it's not a crime. It's not a crime. It was never prosecuted. The law they prosecuted us under says, it's Article 103 of the Japanese penal code, that you cannot help somebody escape custody. custody means from jail from the back of a police car handcuffs something like that prison that's custody

he's out on bail right custody so if bail jumpin's not a crime how's assisting somebody in it a crime I'll tell you how because they spent a hundred and third day the Japanese spent $138 million a year on lobbyists inside the beltway that's how it becomes a crime

so so they put this arrest warrant out for you. Yeah. Then the lawyers came and tell me, look, we've got to be careful. They did an arrest warrant. It might be a red notice next. So, probably best to stay here in Lebanon. I said, I'm not staying

here. If we're going to have a legal battle, I want it in my country where maybe I can get a fair shake. And so I came back to the U.S. And we're waiting here for it. If we're going to have a battle, let's do it here. Because even all the lawyers that I had here in the U.S.

said they'll never extradite you. It's not going to happen, not for this. Because number one, it's really not a crime. And number two, you don't get extradited for little nitnoid things like this. Right. You know, like the Takata Airbag thing. They had, you know, three Japanese citizens indicted in Michigan in December 2016. And there's a result of their indictment.

They're indicted because to date they've caused 29 people to die. 29 deaths on their hands. And they weren't extradited. So they're not going to extradite me and my son for this. It's a Nittanoid thing. They did. And that's because Trump and Pompeo allowed it. And you were, again, locked up in prison here, locked up in jail here, awaiting extradition,

while that whole played through the American court system. Yeah, because here under the extradition treaty, they have to detain you. They must detain you unless there's really special circumstances. So you're forced to be detained because of the extradition treaty. the extradition treaty. And Japan only has extradition treaty with two countries. I wonder why that is. South Korea and the United States. South Korea in the United States. Nobody else wants to do an extradition treaty with them because they violated human rights constantly. Every day they're violating human rights by torturing people.

But I mean, that's one of the arguments about Guantanamo Bay. One of the reasons why we can't send people from Guantanamo Bay back to their countries is because their countries violate human rights. So we keep them in Guantanamo Bay so that they don't get their rights violated. But the U.S. will send a U.S. citizen to a country that's known for violating human rights. That's right. And it's even on a State Department's website that they have no heat. They put you in solitary confinement. And these are violations against the Convention Against Torture. And these are violations. I had to research this stuff when all this was going on and you were facing, tradition and we were talking while you were in jail and uh and i mean this isn't just i should point out

it's not just mike taylor's opinion like human rights watch and others have done reports on this and other foreign nationals who have been charged and put in japanese prisons and subjected to what can only be described as draconian treatment things that are not in line with anything as americans we would consider a justice system um you mentioned the conviction rate the way they charge people over and over again. There's this presumption, a presumption of guilt in their system, right? That if they charge you with a crime that you must be guilty and you need to like pay penance for that and you need to, you need to plead to that because it's sort of, again,

sort of a face-saving culture, right? Yeah. And everything's punitive. Right. There's no rehabilitation whatsoever. It's all punitive. And they will drag you out into interrogation at all hours of the night until you, plead to something. Well, they did that does. We had a 15-hour plane ride from Boston to Tokyo,

and then we spend another four hours, three to four hours in the airport being interrogated, lame interrogation, and then we go check into the Tokyo Detention House. Prosecutors are waiting there to interrogate us again. This is all in one day. Oh, and mind you, you get no attorney-client privilege either. Your attorneys are not allowed to be with you. And anytime you want to communicate with your attorneys, there's a guard in there, sitting next to me with an interpreter, listening to everything or writing everything down. Do you know why Trump and Pompeo decide? Because is it essentially the president's decision? Like, whose decision is it? On the extradition, how it works is,

Japan can file a request for an extradition. The State Department can flatly say no without any reason whatsoever. Or they can say, let's see if they're legally, allowed to be extradited. So they send it through Department of Justice, Department of Justice, comes arrest you, put you through court, and decides if you're allowed to be by law, according to the extradition, if you're allowed to be extradited. Now, some of the points we argue, look, I had some great lawyers at Dan Marino, Tillman Finley, Abby Lowe. Abby Lowe, Abby Lowe represented Bill Clinton when he was being impeach. Abby Lowe, you know, represents Hunter Biden now, I think, but he also represented at the time

Jared Kushner. Happy Lowell is, you know, one of the great lawyers in the world. Same with Dan Marino and these other guys. They're brilliant and they're hard workers. We also had Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb was a White House general counsel under Trump that left, you know, advising us and helping.

And Ty Cobb never even charged a penny for his time, by the way. These guys are good guys, good Americans. They don't need this case. It's a peanut case, but they jumped in to help. Impressive. And then we've, another great. great lawyer Paul Kelly in Boston, you know, a former AUSA. He's the one that prosecuted that undercover case I did.

Oh, right. So when I think about prosecutors, I think of guys like him who are honest and ethical and they don't bullshit and they don't lie and they're fair. They're fair. They get a lot of power. The power of federal prosecutors have is awesome. And you want guys like him using it because they don't abuse it. Right.

So anyways, these guys all jumped in and they're all saying, no, there's no way you're going to be extradite. It's not going to happen. It's a penalty case. It's foolish. But the State Department finally gave, the judge asked for a sworn affidavit saying they're not going to be tortured. And the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State wrote the sworn affidavit and gave it to the judge that were not going to be tortured, which is a ball-faced lie. Because on the State Department's website, they talk about there's no heat in there in the winter. There's no air conditioning or ventilation during the summer.

You're subjected to, you know, months of solitary confinement. Now, solitary confinement over in Japan is not like the United States. The United States, you get one hour out a day. In Japan, you get no hours out a day. You get no time out. I went six and a half months and only two showers. Only allowed to have two showers. I spent 17 out of 20 months in Japan in solitary confinement.

And you sleep on the floor. everything's on the floor lights on 24-7 and you got a CCTV camera in there so that's solitary confinement there you only know what time it is and there's mold all over the place mold all over

you only know what time it is by based on the meals that you get you know during the day you get about 1,200 calories a day of meals of rice and tofu so make sure there's no rice and tofu around me here so how did the DOJ

like if the State Department referred it to the DOJ, how did the DOJ like look at the case and say, well, he actually didn't break a law in Japan, so what are we sending for?

How did they do that? They don't say that's for the Japanese to decide if you violated a law there. DOJ went after it's hard. Prosecutor from Boston went after it's hard. It was like the case of his lifetime. You know, you're trading Americans out.

You get caught into political stuff. Yeah, yeah, you're doing your job. Bullshit. Have some balls stand up and do your job, really. That doesn't exist very much in America nowadays. So, yeah, they say essentially, you know, we don't have a ruling on the law. And even the judge says, you know, I can't tell the Japanese how I can't interpret their laws for them. They have to decide that.

So they leave it up to the Japanese. I remember the judge saying herself that, like, you would be put under deporable. conditions that we do not really consider to be in line with American justice. Yeah, when they still sent us. They did, yeah. But who in America gets that treatment? It's clearly a violation. The United Nations said it's a violation.

It's a violation of human rights. There's a million violations there. It's a Turkish lawyer, Kutoulos, that is representing us within the United Nations. But come on, you get six and a half months, you get two showers? Two showers and six and a half months? Who does that? Refugees do you get better treatment than that. Send me to Guantanamo.

I'd rather go to Guantanamo. Those guys get showers daily. They get pizza when their lawyers show up. They get soccer. They get recreation. I was out eight times in a year to see the sunlight. And most of those times, you like in dog kennels. You put you in a dog kennel.

And that's where you walk on a dirt floor. That's your outside time. So when I got back, my vitamin D deficiency was so bad. I had to have a prescription for and B-12 injections. The food over there is horrible. Nobody speaks, you know, English. It's very rare. You've got to have an interpreter to speak English.

My father, my attorneys told me in September of last year, 20, what is this? 20, 22 in September, my Japanese lawyers came and said, your father's dying of cancer. My father's a career soldier also. And they said maybe days, weeks. I put a request in to call my dad. He said, no, absolutely not. Not allowed. You're not allowed.

We don't allow that. He said, okay. And the day that my lawyers told me your dad's dying, I got called into the deputy warden's office for an investigative questioning. He says, you had a visit from your lawyers today. I said, yeah, yeah, I did. You don't know that? Would they sneak in here?

Anyways, he says, yeah, but you raised your. your voice and that's a violation of our rules. I said, I didn't raise my voice. I said, there's five people in that room. Two lawyers on the other side of the glass. I'm sitting here. Your guard sitting here. The interpreter is sitting there. Four of the five people will tell you I didn't raise my voice. It's all through an interpreter. He says, well, who are the four of the five people? I said, my two lawyers and me will tell you I didn't raise my voice. And your guard will tell you I didn't raise my voice. He said, why do you say the guard? I said, because he's sound asleep.

If I raised my voice, he would have woke up. If you doubt my word, pull the videotape. The only person doing this is trying to get a promotion is your interpreter. I thought he was calling me into his office. The deputy wanted maybe you need a grief counseling. We're going to let

you call home or your father before he dies, but oh no, no. They wanted to try to get me in trouble. So that's the Japanese prisons. And they suck. The people, The run-em suck. The politicians suck. They're horrible.

Would human go six and a half months with two showers? Yeah. You know, for such a sort of what we consider a shame-based culture, they should really be ashamed of their politicians and how they conduct their law. There's another story along these lines that I'm working on now about an American soldier. This guy is an active duty soldier who, I think you're familiar with a case,

had hypoxia at altitude. driving around in the mountains. And tragically, accidentally, you know, killed two people. And, yeah, another guy who got railroaded. There's a lot of different stuff that I won't get into here. But, I mean, another guy who got railroaded by the system over there. I mean, it's terrible. Oh, yeah.

And you know what? They spend a lot of money. They spend $140 million a year ballpark inside the Beltway on lobbyists. So Japanese get what they want in America. They own a lot of politicians. I'd like to ask you know what's Mike Taylor's take on all this I mean I know you're personally invested obviously but what why was the prosecutor in the United States so cock hard to extradite you and then why were the Japanese also it begs the question

too why are they so adamant about extraditing you and is it just because they've been shamed publicly is that what this is about everything that I've heard and learned and talked to and I've talked to guys the Japanese prisoners some of them and they all say same thing. They say, you're our hero. In China, I meet Chinese people. They say, you're a hero. Because the Chinese don't like the Japanese. And they said, you know, you embarrass the Japanese government. We're proud of that. We're so happy for you. You know, you guys are saying, I wish I had a camera I could take a picture with you. I said, guys, please just, you know, back off you a little bit too close for that stuff. Like some Yakuza guy who's missing fingers?

They are, they do. But the accuser guys were all nice guys. Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, you embarrass the Japanese government, but then the Japanese government went and embarrassed themselves by making this a deal. And then our American government, you know, embarrassed itself. But wait a minute, you get the Dakota Airbags, three Japanese citizens that are wanted for the murder of 29 people. Yeah. They don't get extradited?

Right, right. It's one of these things that extradition treaties, and this also exists, interestingly, back to the child kidnapping thing, is that when foreign children are kidnapped by a parent and brought here to the United States, we will enforce the laws and the international agreements we have and repatriate that child. In accordance with the Hague Convention. But when it happens when one of our citizens, an American child, is kidnapped and brought overseas, we won't put pressure on, let's say, the French government or whatever,

because we don't want to mess up international relations. Especially the Japanese government. It happens a lot. Yeah. When a mother or a father will take the child and go back to Japan, the Japanese government protects them. they've even arrested the father coming in. There's an Australian came in.

He wanted to visit his children. They arrested him because he showed up to visit his child. You know, my position on this has always been, you know, if you committed a crime, then, okay, maybe Mike has to pay the price for that. Yeah, got to pay up for it. I don't have a problem with that necessarily, but I do have a problem with the human rights violations. I'm not okay with what they did to you. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's still, it's amazing. that people can't believe. 17 months of solitary confinement. I forgot what my voice sounded like. You know? And you're only allowed to write four letters a month. Wow. And it's on small stationary.

My highlight was when I got to write my son. After six months of solitary confinement, they allow you five letters. And I was allowed to write my son who was in a different prison. So we could communicate. That was like Christmas morning for me whenever I got a letter from him.

Did you ever, I mean, Jack asked us and I kind of derailed it, but did you find out why the Prosecute, why the Department of Justice had such a heart on for you? No, I think it was a young prosecutor and he's making a name for himself. Well, he's a shitbag, whoever he is, so that's his name. Figure it out and he's a shitbag. And he's a West Point graduate too, by the way. Shitbag, he should be shunned.

On a personal level, I mean, all that time in... Pompeo's, excuse me, Pompeo's a West Point grad too. I'm highly disappointed. It's disgusting. Yeah, it is. What was it like for you on a personal level going through that experience? Almost like two years in Japanese prison, right? 20 months.

20 months. What did you do with yourself? What's going through your head as you're having to have this experience? Well, look, some of it is really, you know, if you're going to commit a crime, you've got to be prepared to do the time. Okay. but when all these legal scholars say it's not a crime and you go ahead and do it and you know bail jumping's not a crime

okay then you get a problem with the you know processing that you got a you got an issue you got an issue with processing that you've been betrayed by your secretary of state and your president because he traded you off and then you got a problem because they got a 99.4% conviction rate if I want to go to trial in Japan, it's going to take me three to three and a half years. So do I want to sit in solitary confinement or jail to enforce labor for three to three and a half years just to be able to have a trial? Where's the fairness? And then do your two years anyways. And then do your, yeah. So now mind

you, my sentence was 24 months. My son's sentence was 20 months. We both did 30 months because the Japanese judge says, we don't care that you were in the prosecutors. Prosecutors over there make the rules and the Japanese judge follow the prosecutors. You're supposed to get time served. Yeah, you're supposed to get credit for time served. No, because the Japanese judge says, no, we don't care about the time you were in America and fighting extradition. Prosecutor said, no, when we requested extradition, you should have come immediately.

Oh. Oh, what do you think? I'm your bitch or something? No, you guys got it wrong. It's not how it works. No, it's not how your extradition works. But it's, again, the power of a prosecutor. How is this, I mean, I understand that you only would know this in retrospect after the fact,

but I mean, how did the Japanese press cover all of this? I don't know. I haven't seen much Japanese press. So I really couldn't say. You know, we didn't get good newspapers over there. They only have one newspaper that we were allowed to get in English. and it was always about how great Japan is how many gold medals they won during the Olympics

when we're sitting there soaking sweat breathing in COVID about how great the Japanese leaders are and how great Shinzo Abbe is and that's right I forgot that was all about the newspaper that's what it was in the newspaper The plague happened while you were in prison I forgot all that way.

Yeah we had COVID also and then Shinzo Abbe got shot by a Japanese kid yeah great security Was there any effort at any point during the Trump or Biden administration is to get you back? No, no. We had a bunch of guys from the military, especially the SF community, reaching out the people in the Special Forces of Caucus and Carl De Uriel, Rocco Procopio, a bunch of great guys, you know, little teammates of mine pushing,

but, you know, they go to some politicians like Mike Walsh in Florida. He didn't do anything for us. you know and another congressman would say well you know he's not in uh not my jurisdiction i can't help him he's not a constituent it's amazing though when we're fighting a war right we're fighting for the whole country not one district right not one congressman so next time we next time we go to war we got to make sure we clarify that hey hey shit stain we can't fight for you we can only fight for the district we lived in right what about what uh what uh we're Was Gosen ever, I mean, did Brazil or France or, like Lebanon try to intercede in your behalf?

No, no. In fact, the French have actually brought charges against Carlos Gosen for something. I don't know. Some white-collar stuff. So don't embarrass the Japanese is what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. Look, the Japanese yield a lot of influence because they have a lot of power. It's the second largest economy on earth.

you know they're the next in line is china first the u.s japan then china so they've got a lot of money we have a pretty strong military and intelligence relationship with japan as well which sure plays in all absolutely and i heard they were in the process of buying some eGIS radar land base then people that were going to be near it in southern japan didn't want it so the japanese backed out of that deal. And then Pompeo went over in October 2020 and got him to buy at a several billion dollar more.

Put it on two ships. So now they have two Aegis destroyers. Good work if you can get it. Yeah. Yeah. But how convenient it was just after that that, you know, we were told we were being extradited.

Yeah. So I'm, you know, I'm curious if we were part of that deal. So almost 20 months in prison, you guys get out. 17 of the 20 in solitary confinement. And you finally get released, come back home. How do you start putting things back together after that?

It's got to just got to do it. It's like being on a 40-mile rock. You just got to keep putting one foot in front of the other. You've got blisters and your feet are hurting and your back is sore and just got to keep doing it. I remember I talked to Peter, I think, first when you guys got back and I remember him saying, like, you lost a lot of weight and we're trying to get back into shape. Yeah, I dropped about 50. 52 pounds there. But you're only getting 1,000 or 1,200 calories a day.

Right. You know, 75% rice, 25% tofu. Body by Japanese prison, man. So when did you get back to the United States? I got back October 28th. October 28th. My father died October 8th. I got released from prison. And they already knew I was going to be released because the federal magistrate came over and did the hearing, the transfer hearing. So the Japanese knew I was going to be released

If Japanese Ministry of Justice Approved the transfer to the U.S. So bearing in mind all that, they still wouldn't let me call my father Was on his deathbed? What shitbags? I mean, honestly. And then you had to spend, like,

Was there like a month in American prison on the way back? About three weeks. Three weeks? They flies into L.A. And the people that flow was in from the Bureau of Prisons, the transported, they were professional,

they were phenomenal, very good. They said, look, you guys don't need to wear change. We're not chaining you up. We went with the Japanese. We had chains. They'd take your shoes. We had a dog leash on us.

They had six guys on you, right? Six? They had 17. 17. We're into 787. 17. A couple of prosecutors, interpreters. Oh, yeah.

I wasn't allowed to go to the shower without six guards. And you've got a 15-minute shower. You come out of your room. You go to the shower and back. Yeah. Like they're treating you as, though, you were an international terrorist. Hannibal lector.

The bond their subways. That's what I said, look, you know, I was asking the consulist. Could you send us a Gitmo? Yeah. Send us a Gitmo. Yeah. At least they got decent weather there. Yeah.

Here, we freeze. We get frostbite in the mornings, on our feet and our hands. Every day you get frostbite. Yeah. No heat. None. Zippo. And you're not allowed to use a blanket to stay warm.

Yeah. And in the summer, you're soaking wet. There's no, no airy, no ventilation. And your screen, you're, you can't tell if it's daylight or dusk because there's so much mold on it. I'm just, I'm so frustrated with, obviously Japan is Japan like they can fuck off and do whatever they want, you know, whatever. I'm so frustrated with the United States in this scenario.

When we make this big, you know, to do about human rights around the world and human rights in this country, when really, when it comes down to political expedience, it doesn't matter. Yeah, you know, we beat our chest Like we're the the beacon of human rights Yeah It's all bullshit Yeah, you know I laugh when I hear blinking

And Pompeo talking about human rights There is a West Point graduate Who's a prosecutor Who didn't care about human rights Good job on you Yeah, well, and Pompeo too Yeah The end of the day Pompeo could shut that down

Anytime he was Yeah, didn't do it So I did You know, guys stop being hypocrites About human rights Yeah You're full of shit Yeah

So what has What has post-prison life? been like for you i mean getting back to the united states putting your life back together yeah like i said one step at a time you drop that heavy rock and you just got to keep pushing you know and i'm putting a lot of my time and effort into vitamin one and yeah want to increase the sales no more rescue missions overseas yeah yeah but let me ask you something sure if if you had the experience i had and somebody came to you said uh my child has been taken or something like that you're going to turn them down? If it's a kid, I'd have a hard time just saying. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But then again,

I mean, knowing what slimy bastards, a lot of people on the United States, like Department of Justice and government are, like, it's sort of like, it's a gamble, right? It's a crapshoe. Well, you've got to make sure that there's custody here. Right. And to make sure that there's a warrant for the person's arrest, right? Unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. And that you don't pay the guards to look the other way when you do it. That could be very detrimental also. Yeah. Yeah. We know how that pans out in federal courts. So vitamin one

honestly everybody check it out if you I mean it's great it tastes great like we've been drinking it. It's delicious. Our mini fridge is stocked up. Yeah thanks to. Dee what are you saying? There's a link in the description and then what else are you working on? Obviously

a movie I mean this your life is yeah MGM's gonna produce a movie movie. Yeah. A premiere movie. Yeah. Sam Rockwell's in it. Javier Bartum. Sam's going to play me. Javier. Bartum's going to play Carlos.

And they're working on that. And that's in the going. And there's talking about a TV series also. On the TV series, I believe it's on my life. Yeah. You know, different things I've did. I coach football in the military and rescuing people and that kind of stuff. That's fantastic. They're going to do that. And then what else is there?

And then there's some other magazines coming up. Oh, there's also a book coming out. We're shopping the book. You wrote a book? No, it's not written yet. The proposal's done. Gotcha. The proposal's actually done.

It might be done today, actually. And they're going to shop that to some of the publishers. So we're going to see how that goes. We'll let it know when that comes out. We'll happily plug it for you. Yeah, yeah. I'd love to have you back again. GM's doing a premiere movie too, so that'll be interesting. I just want to tell you, I'm so, like, I'm so heated right now.

I'm so mad. I'm so angry. Like, I, I, uh, I, for you to, like, for you to kind of like get your life back and to move past this, like, if it had happened to me, I feel like I'd just be in this dissent. So I admire, you know, not, you know, your whole career, but your ability to move past this. because right now I'm just like on fire thinking about how like said fuck the Japanese and whatever they did but but how our own government treated you yeah they've betrayed us and they knew in both cases they knew they knew you're going to be tortured yeah they turned a blind eye and that's okay you know you're going to have somebody torture you're going to send them stop being a hypocrite though stop talking about human rights I don't want to hear any bullshit about you know Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman right Khashoggi knock it off that's one guy right knock it off right knock it off, come on. Stop talking about the Russians. We didn't really give a shit about that either. Well, that's true.

But still, why are we talking about that? Yeah. You know, you got a drone strike that goes bad. How many innocent people die? Right. You know, you're sending literally, and the fact the matter is, it was under the Biden administration.

Trump made the deal and approved it with Pompeo to send us. But the judge, the judge waited before making the final decision until the Biden administration took office. Right. once he was sworn in, then we started probing the judge a little bit, getting her to make a decision. Because we knew Biden wasn't going to do anything. Biden had the chance to shut this down. He didn't either.

Biden and blinking. So again, chill out guys with bullshit on human rights. So both administrations are really just like full of shit. Again, the Japanese pay for American politicians. Yeah. Yeah. Do we have any questions for Mike? Let me look it up. Do you have anything on Patreon?

No. Okay. Let me get there. See here. So vitamin one, make sure you get some hydrate, guys. Hydrate. Yeah, it's clean hydration. Even diabetus can drink it because there's no sugar in it.

Let's see here. JC, thank you very much for the donation. I guess we have stickers now because people are like giving us stickers instead of comments. RS, thank you very much. Thank you for having Mike on. Good to C. He's doing well. Yes. Eric, thank you for.

both the donations. Keep it up, guys, enjoying the content. Cat Chaser, Brock, thanks for the stickers. Ian Hutch's thanks. Fantastic episode. Ninja as Hell Escape Story, for sure. And Cat Chaser, thanks again for the sticker. Say that again? What is he up to? I have no idea. I don't know either. I was hanging out and love it on. Yeah.

Has he And, like, obviously he didn't go to jail and you did. Did he ever, you know, express any appreciation for what you did or anything? Yeah, I think he did. And, you know, he's got his hands full himself right now. You know, he's, he ain't moving anywhere in Lebanon. The French have an arrest warrant for him also. And the French have, you know, Lebanon used to be a French colony.

So they have some influence there. And Lebanon is in, you know, dire straits right now economically and civilly and politically. They don't even have a president right now. Yeah. I don't think they have a parliament. Port blew up a year ago. Yeah, it was the largest non-nuclear explosion since Hiroshima, Nagasaki. That's impressive.

Yeah. And that was all ammonium nitrate. Yeah. It was a wing nut that was storing that there. But anyways, yeah, they're in dire straits, so, you know, and the French have a lot of influence. But what's interesting, though, he welcomed the French prosecutors in and sat with him and met with them, and then they went and charged them.

But I would think that why would you allow a prosecutor to come in if you were really guilty of someone? Don't make any sense. Right. He didn't have to let him do that. Well, I mean, Mike, did Carlos pay you for this, or you just volunteer and go off and do this? No, I did not.

ask for a penny for service beforehand. I didn't ask for a penny of it. And I don't want to get into any of the talk about any of the funds. But no, I didn't ask for money. The issue of money came up saying, well, he's got leverage. I'm insulted by that because I never asked for a dollar. It's, I mean, you did something super cool. I mean something that would be in a movie written for screen.

You know what I mean? Like you did. Look, I get to say the operation was flawless. Right. Absolutely flawless. Right. You know, it made mission impossible like a joke. Right.

And the fact that it was so flawless, I mean, that's probably why Japan acts like an angry three-year-old, you know, about the whole thing, is because you conducting an awesome, some operation. You know, when I first got back, I go into a Chinese restaurant, I ordered some food, went to pick it up to the Chinese restaurant, and they knew who I was. They said, no, no, you can't pay. That's great. What you did to Japan, we love you. Yeah. So I got free Chinese food. Yeah. That ain't too bad. So, you know, you've got vitamin one and, you know, these other projects with

the movie and the book and things like that. What else would you do? like what else interests you these days and I'm sure you're super busy. You know, I've got some good friends over in Dubai. I'm going to start manufacturing over in Abu Dhabi. But these guys are like brothers over there in Dubai, a buddy of mine Ahmed. And I got two sons that live there too. Wonderful people. So we want to penetrate the market there and get this build up.

And, you know, we do a lot of skydiving. It's a great place to skydive. Yeah. Beautiful weather. A little bit warm during the summer, but still, I'd rather be hot than cold. Yeah. So, yeah, so I'm going to work on vitamin one and get it pushed all over and do some skydive in and enjoy life. Well, it's awesome, man.

Yeah, I'm glad. We deeply appreciate you. Yeah, come on and sharing your show with us. This story had a happy ending, but it took quite a long time. Yeah, it did. And, you know, I'm not sure it's over just yet. You think so? Yeah, there could be more to come.

Like legal drama? Oh, no, I don't think legal drama. Oh, just your story? Oh, but there's definitely legal issues with the United Nations. United Nations are going to come down pretty soon and say this is a violation of human rights. So the United Nations Working Group out of Geneva. They've got this in hand. Can you do a civil suit through the United Nations or is it all criminal?

No, it would be civil. I hope so, man. I hope so for you. But again, I don't know. I'm not clear on that yet. Because, look, the United Nations. is going to say, yeah, you tortured him, and you tortured his son. And they're going to say, you know, no, we didn't.

We do that to everybody. That's what they do. Right. And the United States, what do you think the Department of State's going to say? Right. The White House and the Department of State are the biggest media machines on earth. Right. They can bury you in the media.

Right. But the reality is you get one journalist that got some intestinal fort or two is going to say, uh-uh, time out. You guys have this on your website that says they've got no heat. Your counselors have told you these people are being tortured. Your consular is written to you in cable saying there's been 17 months of solitary confinement, six and a half months and only two showers, and you're allowing this? Well, they'll change their website.

Like, they'll change the text on the website. It's still on there. Plus, we've got prints of it. Yeah. Can't change it now. Yeah. I mean, what is the additional drama that you think could come out of this that hasn't happened yet? Oh, I think, you know, the United Nations says, you know, you so-called beacons of human rights.

Right. Yeah. You guys violated human rights and you knowingly did it. That'll be interesting. I hope so. I hope so for your sake and everybody else. I mean, not just Americans, for Japanese people there. Yeah.

Well, there's a lot of Japanese people that don't like their system of justice. You know, it's called hostage justice system. They're going to hold you until you plead guilty. Once you plead guilty, then they'll cut you loose. But that's what they did to you here in America over your case, right? That's right. Same thing. Like, we have it here to you.

We just pretend that's not what's happening. But that's exactly what's happening. Right. And it's happening every day. Right. People spend two years in jail before they ever get to, see a judge. And how many times do we see a black American that spent 20 years in jail for some murder or rape or violent crime that we find out later he didn't do? Right. And what about that poor human

being? Right. What about his life? Right. And by the way, where's the prosecutor who lied? Right. Oh yeah. How come they don't go do those 20 years? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, yeah. Mike, I mean, this has been a like pretty wild, all-encompassing interview and I would love to have you back when, you know, I'm sure your book is going to get published sooner or later. I mean, it's an incredible story. When it does, I'd love to have you back. Sure. You know, and...

He comes out bringing Sam Rockville. Sure. Sam's a great guy. Had dinner with him. Awesome. Okay, good. I'm glad that's coming together. Anything else that you think we failed to cover that you want to get out there? No. I think that's pretty much it. Well, we deeply appreciate it. Well, we've been talking a while.

Yeah, man. Well, guys, I thank you, everyone. who joined us tonight. I mean, I think this has been a fucking amazing interview to say the least. I'm hot. I'm just so angry right now. Tuesday, this Tuesday, we're going to have Andrew Milburn on the show. He'll be here

in studio. And then on Friday, also in studio, we'll have Toby Hardin and Justin Sapp. So I hope you guys will join us for that. We look forward to seeing all of you. Andy's always a fun time. And so is Justin and Toby. Great guys. Mike,

again, man, thank you. We deeply appreciate it. Thank you, Dave. Yeah, we'll do it again. Absolutely. So, all right, guys. We will see you on Tuesday. Everybody, please like, share, join our Patreon.

Do all that amazing stuff. Links are down the description. And buy vitamin one.