The Team House - The Coast Guard Unit That Hunted Drug Traffickers | Giuseppe Weller

Episode Date: August 15, 2026

Giuseppe Weller recounts the little-known story of the Coast Guard’s Drug Interdiction Assist Team, which worked alongside the DEA in South America conducting riverine missions, training local forces, and helping destroy cocaine labs and airstrips. He also discusses Ranger School, hunting traffickers in Bolivia, the eventual shutdown of the unit, and how that experience led him into a career in undercover and organized-crime investigations.Today's Sponsors:GhostBed ⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Mars Men⬇️For a limited time, our listeners get 50% off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men at https://mengotomars.com/PrizePicks ⬇️Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TEAMHOUSE and use code TEAMHOUSE and get $150 if you win your first $5 lineup! For ad free video and audio and access to live streams...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________GRAB JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featuredJack Murphy's book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 - Start01:19 - Growing Up and Joining the Coast Guard07:44 - Joining the Coast Guard’s Secretive Drug Interdiction Unit09:28 - Why the Coast Guard Was Sent Into South America12:23 - Ranger School and the DIAT Training Pipeline16:54 - Preparing for the Drug War in Bolivia20:23 - Arriving in Bolivia After a Massive Drug Raid26:39 - Riverine Operations Deep in the Amazon29:38 - Blowing Up Cocaine Labs and Airstrips31:27 - Hunting One of Bolivia’s Top Drug Traffickers38:45 - Washington Starts Restricting the Mission46:31 - Was the Drug War Actually Working?55:26 - Coast Guard Operations Across Latin America57:47 - The Beginning of the End for the DIAT1:04:49 - Leaving the Coast Guard for Law Enforcement1:17:06 - From Stolen Cars to a Philadelphia Mob CaseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy. And today we have a episode that I have wanted to do almost since this podcast started. It is a very unlikely and relatively unknown story about the U.S. Coast Guard. And many of you would probably be surprised to hear that in the 1990s, the Coast Guard was down in Central America and South America conducting operations that you would normally associate with special forces. Going down there and. and training local units and accompanying them out into the jungles and destroying drug labs. Giuseppe Weller, our guest today, was one of those individuals assigned to what was called the DIA, the Drug Interdiction Assist Team. They worked hand and glove with the DEA and other agencies. The program went on through the late 80s into, I guess, the mid to late 1990s. but we'll get into the whole history of it. But I mean, I think it's a fascinating story,

and I think more people need to know about it. So I appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you. Glad to be here. So if you could, tell us a little bit about your own kind of upbringing and how that sort of took you towards eventually the Coast Guard. So I was originally born in Italy. My father was a U.S. Army Staff Sergeant. So met my mother there.

I have two other brothers. So I spent 14 years between Germany and Italy on American basis. And then, you know, it's a little status story. My father, you know, Vietnam veteran, got in trouble in the Army. So they separated, you know, my mom separated. The only thing that the Army did was to send us back to the United States. So I was never back in Italy. I was pretty much, you know, a soccer player back at those days.

So when I came to the United States, we bounced around from Maryland to D.C. and Virginia. And I was going through high schools. And the only way back to Italy was to try to get into like the military to go back. And that's what I was trying to do is to go back home. And, you know, I was 17 then. And then my, you know, my mother was like, no, no army. You have got to stay in, you know, something else. And I remember going out to the recruiter for the Air Force.

My brother was in the Air Force, my older one. So I didn't like to be a cooing side of it. You know, I wanted him to give me something like I was going to be on shore patrol doing some kind of police work. He wouldn't guarantee it. And so I went back home that day, my mom was like, hey, the Coast Guard called. And so that's what got me to the Coast Guard. So I went to go see the recruiter down in Alexandria, Virginia. And I spent a few days down there.

And then I realized, you know, what they did, not just Coast Guard, you know, there was a bunch of drug war pictures that the recruiter had on his, you know, on his, on his board and stuff. So that's what started everything. And then, you know, I just, I enlisted. I forget that what they called it, but I enlisted before I came out of high school. In January, I enlisted in January in my senior year. I was only 17. And then once I left high school, I went to Cape Maine, New Jersey, did my recruiting there.

And I got my first station down in Key West from like 18, 1986 to 1990. I was on a surface effect ship, which was a hydrofoil, basically. There was three of them down there, the petrol, seawater, and the Seahawk. So once I got down there, that's where my law enforcement piece started to come together. And, you know, started to experience how law enforcement worked in the maritime side of things and you know I was a E2 became an E3 there and then I struck my boasted mate you know rating and I was asked to stay one more year from the billet officer if I could help out because they had nobody come in as an E4 and I did

that and that's how things started to turn around in my last year my commanding officer was a Bickham was his last name he was a law enforcement detachment team captain for the lead that's down in Miami and he had asked me you know if I wanted to stay in law enforcement he could get me to a unit that was very special in the coast guard and it was unheard of uh the only problem was you needed to be an e5 and above and i was only in e4 so the billet officers basically gave me a guarantee that if i did one year for him in key west he would send me there without their knowledge and that would be my orders so that's how it all worked out so in 1990 i basically flew into uh portsmith virginia that's where they were stationed that uh they had

they had an office building away from the District 5 headquarters in Portsmouth, so it was on top of a bank. So they were segregated there. We still wore uniforms, but I showed up there basically, and that's how it all started. So when I walked in the office as an E4, my commanding officer, Imhoff, which is his name, was like, looking at me kind of strange, and my orders were in place. And that's how it started. So they had to take me in, and we started going from there. So before we get into this sort of like Coast Guard special ops, if you will, can you tell our audience a little bit about the more like historic normal role of the Coast Guard and what their job is, what your job was so that they can kind of understand how different and unique this specific program was? Yeah, so basically the Coast Guard, you know, you go out there search and rescue with the primary missions. You know, you have small stations all over United States and abroad. You have some in Italy, all streets have those times.

And you have, they do a lot of navigation, buoy tending. So all the nap lights in the lakes in Michigan and around, you know, the borders of the United States, they patrol the small side of the United States. They have small boats to, you know, ships are about 375 feet long. You can be on a cutter for a while. But, you know, they have all kind of ratings, mechanics and boatswins mates and, you know, all kind of different job aspects to it. But your primary mission is search and rescue.

Plus, they have avionics. They have, you know, they have people who have diving techniques and all these little pieces. And your basic job is search and rescue and then buoy tending or navigation. That's kind of like the two little primary areas you're into. And that's what you do pretty much for your career. You kind of pick and choose your routes, what you want to do, what your rating is. And you kind of grow yourself through, you know, through rank all the way through. So, you know, I always wanted to stay in the life.

law enforcement mission. You know, you're always tasked to do some law enforcement and some search and rescue and some other things that are required, but you're basically a search of rescue kind of guy. Do the Coast Guard, or do they have a sort of mission of like border security, so to speak, that they are kind of like protecting America, you know, our east and west coasts, and have like that sort of interdiction mission also? Yeah, so we do a lot of maritime interdiction. It could be human trafficking, you know, immigrants coming over. We're small. And I think, if I remember when I was in the, academy there in boot camp, I think we're at 36,000 total at the time in the 80s. And I think

the New York Police Department was like 38,000. So a lot smaller. So we kind of try to do those tasks. And, you know, we have a lot of mileage that miles around the United States to cover. But we also have, you know, places abroad that we go also in other places. So we're very like small when it comes to it. In maritime, it's not so elite. Nowadays it is because it has changed. But in those days, your primary mission was always search and rescue. And then law enforcement, you know, assisting in immigration work, that was just always

secondary. But search and rescue was always the first primary. And so when you walked through the door as an E4 to this highly specialized unit and kind of secretive unit in the Coast Guard, what was your conception of what they did? I had no idea. Zero. I had, when I got the, the orders to go, I remember my commanding officer basically saying, hey, you're going to have fun, and I had no idea what I was going to get into.

I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't like, you know, one of those, in the Coast Guard, basically, you know, you're not into this elite mode where you're always training every day. You're in a gymnasium. You're doing this. You're doing that. You're on the range left and right. We did small these qualifications.

We did some small things, but nothing to that scale. So I had no idea what I was walking into, except I go to this unit and you're going to figure it out then. And what did you learn when you got your in-brief? I was, first of all, I wasn't in good shape. That was my biggest thing. I was like, wow, I got to get in shape because once I got there, I started to learn about who was there. It had been in place since 1988, basically, when they put the first guys in place. And then when I got into there, my basic instruction was, hey, you got to get to.

get ready for Ranger School. This is what we're doing. Here's what we help the DEA. We're going to go to South America. This is what we do down there. Your assist, all the boating mechanics that we have to figure out, instructions also to the host countries. So with the basic thing was to, you need to qualify yourself and other programs that we have to make yourself that we can get down there together and safe. And then I recognize real quick, like this is real and, you know, little nervous about going to Ranger School, obviously. I want to ask you about that for sure. But also, I guess maybe we should take a second to explain to folks,

why was the Coast Guard doing this in the first place? Because as most of us understand, yeah, you have the DEA, they have the counter-drug mission, makes sense. You have special forces that goes down there and they'll train the local military, okay, got it. The Coast Guard, you know, the search and rescue mission, the sort of interdiction on our coastlines. That's one thing.

But now we're talking about you guys. I mean, primarily you were in a, it sounds like the landlocked country of Bolivia. So, I mean, it's very interesting. Like, how did the Coast Guard end up down there doing this? So from my knowledge that I knew from before, basically what happened was they used to have the U.S. military down there. So doing kind of like some kind of narcotics enforcement down and they figured out that, hey, listen, we can't really do that in host countries. It's like an active war.

You can't be down there doing some of those missions. So at the time that the Coast Guard was with the Department of Transportation. So it wasn't the Department of Defense. So that was one of the pieces to get DOT in. And then also they realized the DEA was like, we have a ton of rivers down here and we don't have riverine expertise. So they needed a bunch of guys to show up basically that have like small boat knowledge of how to run boats, repair boats.

navigate and help out with, you know, taking a team from one point to another point in those riverine waters. And there was no mapping system down there. So you're kind of in the middle of the jungles and the Amazon, basically. And that's how they all pulled out. So once they got the DOT in there, which is the U.S. Coast Guard then, then it was easier to facilitate the mission to help out. And D.A. had requested that. So once it all went through headquarters and they figured things out, and our Admiral at the time was Admiral Yost. He put things together to assist. And I don't remember what the unit looked like when it first started, but I think it grew to about 20 to 22 total staff between some officers and the enlisted. So then they put us together to where we came together

and just had enough different expertise, you know, from mechanics to Boston's mates to gunners' mates to people like that that can navigate certain things. And then some officers in place to, you know, take the team down as, you know, commanding officer. They put it all together and they figured things out, who would deploy when and where after you pass these courses, basically. And the commandant you mentioned, the commandant of the Coast Guard, Yost, he had a special ops background. And so he was very like, like when he got a sense that this could be a Coast Guard mission, he was all about it, wasn't it? Yeah, 100%. You couldn't have a better support system than that commandant sitting in there running that show. And, you know, just to realize how far

up the, the chain it went all the way up to Washington, like where we were. at in this unit was very special. And so the DEA is already down there. The early operation was blast furnace and then the next one was snow cap. And so they're down there doing their thing with the host nation partners. And that interfaces with the Coast Guard. Well, let's talk a little bit about the training pipeline that you went through. You're a young, Coastie, E4, all of a sudden going through all this tactical

training. You know, qualifying on an M-16 at that time, we also had the old Colts and switching things out to, we went into Beretta and the Glock. So when we went to Ranger School, everything was brand new. My biggest thing was, I was in shape. I didn't know, you know, and I was the youngest. So I believe I was even 21, 22. So when I walked into the unit, I was the youngest one there. Obviously, you know, it was pretty big to me because I recognized real quick, like, hey, you have a lot mature people down here that know what they're doing and the risk was different. You know, as a young person, you don't have the risk so high in your head. Sure.

So you get older, you know, the risk is there. You see it more often. So Ranger School was the biggest thing that that was the biggest hurdles. I knew I needed to go through that and pass that because they had two different things. So if you arrived at the unit at a certain time, Ranger School was the, was the piece you were going to. If you arrived late into the unit and Ranger School was already, I think they did one a year, I believe. you had to go to Marine Recon School. So I had a couple guys go to Marine Recon,

and which one did you want at the time? It was easy to go to Ranger School because we went in more of a pack of a group. And then if you went to Marine Recon, you only went as, you know, whoever it was, you could have been going by yourself. And that training is you were just by yourself when you went there.

You didn't have a team next to you, so you had to deal with the actual Marine Corps was different because you were dealing with the Marine Corps guys. There was no other coasties. But in Ranger School, it was a pack. It was a pack, right? We had coasties in there, and we had DEA agents mixed in together to work together at Ranger School. And it was like a familiarization with patrolling, if I understood correctly.

Yeah, so we did all of the phase except for jump school, and I believe it's the desert phase, they called it. But everything else was in place. We did all of the other pieces that were necessary to put things together. A lot easier for us to do a lot of the military side of things, and DEA had a, It was struggles the way the military did some of the work because DEA's structured differently in law enforcement, right? Outside, it's a little bit more technical on things than the military's pretty much a little bit more like, you know, just go in and just take over everything. But the law enforcement side of it had a little bit of a problem to it because there was a lot of rules that they weren't allowed to engage in as the military would. Yeah, no, absolutely.

But the point is to give you the patrolling skills, but also so that you can teach. it, right? Yeah, correct. Everything that we did, the biggest piece was to take everything that we were trained for, take it down there to the host nation and train with, in Bolivia, they were called the UMA part and the naval side of it to make sure that they received the same training we did to help them navigate whatever piece that they needed to do within their system, whether it was on boats or patrolling or just operations and mapping and putting, you know, clandestine operations together. We were supposed to teach everything. And after other than Ranger's school, was there anything else they put you through before you were deployable?

Yeah, so my background, obviously, I was Puerto Rican Italian. I didn't speak a lick of Spanish. So after that training school, we were deployed my partner that went to Recon School. We came back. They put us in three months to Guatemala. We went down to Guatemala for three months. They put us with a host family. and we went one on one with an instructor or a teacher at a school for three months.

And in those three months, you learned, obviously, you lived with them. So it was a lot of, you know, just being immersed so deep, you learn the language really quick. And then on that one, for me, I came out. I qualified as a translator from the Department of State because you could actually get a test down there also, and that's what I did. Wow. So we got that piece done. Yeah, because, you know, it was big, I think the DEA guys, went to another school.

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and to talk a little bit about this mission, you know, before you get down there in 1991, when the first teams got down there, it sounds like from, you know, the book that I read behind you, what is it, not your father's coast guard? Correct. Very interesting book. They talk about how they get down there and the State Department or maybe the DEA had bought these Piranha motorboats. but they had all kinds of maintenance issues.

And then the mothership, which you guys nicknamed the Africa Queen, I guess after the Bogart movie, what was just like eaten through by termites and needed to be dry docked. So it's kind of an uphill battle from the get-go, wasn't it? Yeah, first of all, we had, you know, when we got down with the boats, the biggest seems were to figure out what we can do mechanically wise to keep them running. The engine's correct.

like it was we did everything we could do like for example when we got these 22 feet piranhas they had twin engines on them they were outfitted with you know like i think an m60 on one side and some other stuff some small technical or some armament on the other side but even like just fiberglass you learn how the fiberglass boats and putting all those things together then you know you want to stay in camouflage mode right you're in the middle of the amazon right you're trying to go for drug labs but some of these engines we would get them and they actually had like an ever rude white and red, black, you know, what do you call, shell on it? So when you're navigating through the river, you got these white engines showing up. So nothing was really like camouflage or anything.

We had to deal with a lot of that and then trying to help them make these piranhas work all the time. So we were instructing them where it was very, very difficult. You didn't have a lot of tools, the electrical. The motherships were really hard to work with because they had to do a lot more work and bring in some better infrastructure for the boats to be able to travel down. these rivers and then, you know, tow these piranhas so we can get far down to the rivers because there was no navigation. There was no maps. Maybe we should also talk a little bit about what the mission actually was and why these drug labs were upriver where they were. You know, as the river

changes course, I think are they called oxpos where it's like the remnants of the old pathway of the river? Yeah, so the two seasons, dry season, wet season, right? So the dry season, you could be looking up 20, 30 feet up into the mainland because the waters dropped so much. And in the wet season, there was just rivers everywhere. So, you know, you have to know how to navigate, especially at night. The daytime was a lot easier.

A lot of the naval, it's called the naval narcotics guys that ran some of these boats understood a little bit where things were at. Most of the time, we were hand-drawn maps. So when we would go up certain rivers, so there's a couple rivers that were pretty big that we knew what they were. But once we went down another river, we were trying to figure things out. So, you know, the canvas on these jungles was pretty deep. So it wasn't like you can get out there and run a plane around and find some kind of lab out there.

You had to go, you know, build information, you know, meet the people who lived on the rivers. You met a lot of people that were just Indian, never seen like a white man before. Right. You had to figure that out. and then you have to figure in the relationship about how you could get to certain pieces. But these rivers were, it was intense when the water was high. So let's talk about, you know, when you arrived in 1991. When you arrived and walked onto that situation, what did you find down there?

So when I got, when I first got down there, I had just, I was on the, I think, the second tour. So the first one before me in that year, they had just did a raid. I think the raid was like, I think there was one of the biggest raids ever on a town. It was like 630 plus officers. Well, you know, everybody included that raided a narcotics town called Santa Ana. So I forget how many small planes and things that they seized, it was a massive operation. So when I get down there, everything kind of like was really quiet because there was nothing going on. So we had to build certain things to figure things out.

So by wiping that city out, it stopped a lot of the movement for those three months that were down. So when I got down to that first year, it wasn't pretty because there was nothing going on. The other problem we had is that I don't know if you remember Peter Jennings, the reporter. That same time frame, ABC comes down there to work on the drug wars. And now they find themselves like without having any kind of like, you know, anything to really report because everything had been kind of like quieted down and seized. So it was really hard in those three months. So we just learned a lot of things went on patrols.

There were some missions out there, but a lot of it was really, really dried up. And then it comes back around again after three months. Interesting. Yeah, it was really, it was a, it's, I remember seeing it on TV that ABC was really like, it was a shot at snowcap that all the money put into this is now seeing like, hey, there's nothing really going on. Well, I mean, that's what, you know, in special forces, they talk about working yourself out of a job. And, you know, if you're doing that, actually, you're doing a great job. job. But as we know, you know, the drug trade's never going completely away and we'll always come back. And when what did you guys do as it started to pick back up in Bolivia?

So for us, COSI's, the DA guys were in charge of all the, all the operations basically of what came in, the informants. Like, we didn't have expertise in that. We had, you know, that's not our job title. Like to bring in the form. How do we interview? We had no interview skills when it came on to all that stuff. So basically what happened, one stuff came into the, into the, well, we bring it back, that we actually stayed at a hotel down there. We had a place called the Ganadero. It was a four-story, five-story hotel.

They locked off one section of the hotel for us. So we had rooms all the way down, communication centers and everything we needed. And we had trucks down below. And we would venture out of that hotel and get to the airport to go down to any helicopter, or whatever. They brought all that information and then they would call us basically or, you know, they would say, hey, I need one coastie, two coasties. Here we're going to go, especially if it had the rippers that we had to get on those boats. We didn't do a lot of like, like let's get in a helicopter with DEA agents or this squad, you know, on a CASA mission with her plane. We did

savans, we would do stuff like that. But they did all the missions. We only got on board once we had some riff ring aspect to it that we had to actually help them out with. The DEA had a whole kind of other piece of this that you could do another podcast on, really. But as I recall, the DEA was down there and they had to get tactical training, as you mentioned. And there was, I wish I could remember the gentleman's name. There was a Vietnam era long-range reconnaissance patrol guy, a ranger that brought a lot of the tactical expertise to the DEA. And then they also had contracted pilots that were flying here.

Huey helicopters, I think in both Bolivia and Peru, if I recall correctly, or maybe it was Peru and Columbia. But some of the contracted pilots were indeed Vietnam veterans. Yeah, correct. I forget the name of this. They used a contracted side piece to support the mission to DEA, and they were Vietnam veterans. Some of the helicopters that we had in Trinidad in Bolivia were Vietnam helicopters that they used in. So they had the, you know, like, you know, the ballistic shield on the side of the pilot that they were pool. But these pilots would come down, they flew everything.

From all the helicopters to the casas, whatever was needed, they came down. I think they came in every, like, two to three weeks, and they would switch them out. So that's what they did. So they had a big mission on this whole thing. But, you know, like anything else, I was always like, hey, call me. I love to go on one of these missions. But when you look at the tactical side of it about a Coast D and a DEA agent in the middle of the jungles, the Coast Guardmentsman doesn't really know much except for the waterways of things, right?

Because, you know, law enforcement is a little bit different, how they act and how they maneuvered things. So we were more in a support staff than anything. But I always volunteered for every mission. I was trying to get on every mission that I could because I just thought DEA was like, like, wow, what a place to be if I could be there. But I think the DEA also had to kind of like hang back. Like they weren't supposed to be out in the front shooting, right? Yeah, everything was supposed to be basically the responsibility of the UN part of the host nations to help them out. You know, it's kind of difficult because there was a lot of corruption in the whole thing.

So you couldn't, you know, when information came in, they were really like, there was a few people that they could trust and they knew who they were. But even like when they would go out of missions and when we went out of missions, we, just pulled them up along with us. The minute that that mission needed to go, we would pull them in and brief them on that way out what we were doing with them. Right. Because a lot of times, if you gave them the briefing the night before,

the mission wasn't going to happen. You were to go to a spot and everybody was gone. So they had a lot of that piece, and they had to make sure that, you know, if you wanted to get a successful mission, you had to kind of like get them to tag along after we were on the way out and then brief them. Right, right.

Like tell them you're going on a training mission and then brief them on the, road. That's it. Yeah. And so what was your first experience like kind of going up river and doing these riverine operations? Yeah, I was young. And some of the DEA guys used to tell me, listen, you're young, like you got a lot of energy, you know, be careful when you're out there because it doesn't look like what it really is. I mean, if you look back then until now, you realize that the risk level was really, really high. Come back to then, we didn't have all these shootouts going on, right? They didn't have all these things.

They kind of a little bit more respectful. If you got into a lab someplace or you found something, they used to just scatter on you and not fight back. I think there was one instant where two of our unit guys got into a big shootout down there. And there's an episode on cops where they fly down there to put that episode on cops about the Bolivia side of it. It was a huge cachet of weapons and stuff. But I went into the shootout also. When I got to the lab, they were all gone already.

But shots have been fired. you just kind of get there, they're just scattered. That was basically it. We didn't have much. A lot of times it was just like we, not in our side of it. Trinidad was different. Then we had the other group of DEA agents that were in Chimoree, we're down the South Park.

So we had two groups in Bolivia. Now the South Park, which I never went to, because I was always in Trinidad, a couple of the coasties were in Chimare also that helped. They got into a lot more beef with traffickers than we did because down in the Chappar region, and it was way different down in Chimeraig. They actually lived in a like, in a, some shape, little camp in the middle of the jungle.

And that's how they lived for three months. Like, we were living in the city in a hotel, which was like, you know, there was a lot of poverty around. But we actually had structure around this hot water. They had it too, but they lived like, you know, they were at Fort Benning in one of those little, you know, huts out there, you know, just hanging out. And then they would take their missions out. They lived in the dirt, basically. When they went outside, it was all jungle. In the labs themselves, as I understood it, it's mostly the cultivation of cocoa leaves.

And sometimes they're being processed there and sometimes they're being taken further upriver to be processed in plants. Because there's a chemical process that they have to go through to manufacture cocaine. Yeah, correct. We saw, this was the beginning stages a lot of times what we would see. So our job, a lot of times, we would see like the beginning stages like, you know, you would have generated. You would have ether. You saw a lot of guys that, you know, that the farmers that were out there that were helping out in the labs, you would see the lesion on their legs from all the acid burns. A lot of the stuff would be the paste of the coca leaf.

And then once they got out, they would send it up river to get it up to Columbia or beyond so they could keep producing it or, you know, co-de-beating it. So we found a lot of base labs and stuff. And we found, you know, we were dealing with chemicals a lot of time because they needed to chemical. to bring them into the lab to process this stuff. And you guys had to have demolitions training too, right? Because you're supposed to blow these labs up. Yeah. So obviously in Ranger School, we went to demo school for whatever, however long it was.

And, you know, me as a youngster, I was like, wow, this is amazing. You know, just all the different things that we, tools that we had to have underneath us, I didn't expect any of that. So dynamite, T&T, Claymore, shape charges. we were blowing up air strips and then they had some other stuff we dealt in

M16 M60, AK-47s, grenade launchers, things like that. So just to help us out, we had grenades and stuff like that. So they equipped it was pretty good to go down there like it was going to be real. Obviously it was. Any other operations during that deployment that kind of like stand out for you that were interesting?

there's a few of them out there i remember going on a mission uh talked about the boats we we actually had uh when we were when my first trip down there i remember meeting a bunch of navy seals they were down in country also they did a lot of training on the outside and helped you know some of their elite teams gone so they didn't get involved in missions uh obviously they weren't happy about that and then we had uh i think the navy c bs i think they're called CVs. They came down there and they used to put camps together for the military, the host nation military. So they were building like barracks and stuff like that. So they were down there too, but operation-wise, they didn't get involved. But I remember taking, we had some of those old

RHS pontoon boats with the Navy's, the covers, elite, you know, quiet motors. I remember taking a group up there. I was on a mission with my chief and some DEA agents and some Umu far we went on like i think it was like 36 hour trip that information on i think it was the number three uh narco trafficker for bolivia they had a location where he was at up on the the border with brazil so they i knew the rivers because i had gone up to those sides before i knew what we were doing uh so they had asked me to say to to lead the boat crews up there was four boat crew um we landed like one of the i think it was san wakim like the little town put the boats down, put them out.

They went back. The helicopters went back to the city to go pick up the rest of the crew because there was just too much weight on these helicopters. So around midnight, 2 o'clock in the morning, as we departed to go to a location where they thought he was at, I had to put camlights all the way up the river. Every time we made a turn of chemical, you know, one of those infrared cam lights. Yeah. Because we couldn't return. We didn't know if we could return correctly in the middle of the night.

There was no moon or anything, right? So, you know, I'm thinking to myself, I'm only like 22, 23. years old. I was like, wow, this is this. I've got to get this like, this is real. I remember my heart beating, I think, for the entire 36 hours because I'm like, I've got to leave this crew to where we need to go. I know where the city's at, this little point we need the entrance. Nobody's been up there before from the DEA guys. They didn't know it. They didn't get on boats with us. So I think it took us four or five hours and we got up to this region. And then it went, once the Oomah Park got off the boat, went into this little town. I think it was like six hours of

silence. You know, it's like a movie. You know, you just kind of, there's no radio chattering. Everybody's just sitting in his boat and your heart beating. Because, you know, if something goes wrong, you've got to go inside and, you know, rescue. So eventually, you know, the radio clicks back on and it's like, you know, basically, hey, we got them. We're on the way back. So we knew that he had a bunch of bodyguards and everything else. And we're like, okay, well, here's the extraction side of it.

So we got to get ready. So once they hit the beach when they came down with the purse of interest, on the boat, everybody out. trying to get back to the base to the extraction point that was like four hours away on these on these R-HIs i think i blew a piston on one of the engines so you know the three lead boats that had the person of interest in it kind of make it back like two hours before us i just want to make sure we weren't being followed you know or targeting because your heartbeat is gone you don't you don't really know there's no real intel about that like there is nowadays you get so much information back in those days you didn't have it you were you were out there by yourself i mean you know i i i'm

I knew that I had a personal EPER, you know, responders. Like if something went down, turned a responder off, they could pick you off on the saddle. That's all we had. The radios were okay and they didn't really communicate great. You're basically on your own. So once we made it back, took the person of interest, loaded everything up, did a couple of tricks back and forth. I remember landing at the base, we're at the airport in Trinidad with person of interest and getting off the helicopters. And, you know, as soon as we landed, this Learjet landed.

And Persson Ventures went to the Learjet with a couple of guys. I think they handed them off to, you know, their special, probably their CIA and RCAA. And they were gone. Never saw him again. Wow. That's how quick that way. It was like a movie. I remember sitting at that airport going, wow, this is, I've never seen that before.

You know, as a first coast to you, like, it's real. Yeah. And, I mean, it's pretty cool that it sounds like the Bolivians picked him up without a shot fired. Yeah, yeah. Of course, you never hear back on what happened, but the mission was successful. Everybody's like, hey, good job, good job. Next. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's one of those kind of things as a coach that you say to yourself, like, I never knew for one second that I would ever be part of this in this system. And I was trying to take up so much to understand how to work law enforcement because I wanted to venture into law

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um that's a that's a different sort of thing that our military today i don't think They're trying to understand it because they know they're going to have to deal with it. But we've been very fortunate the last 20 years. So, you know, you bring up a good point because I remember when we were, you know, to figure out our land nav, we had the old green boxes. The latitude launch suit would come on, right? The military satellites would hit those boxes and we could figure ourselves out pretty good. Not even the helicopter pilots would use them on our routes. We had to use them for them because they were, they never believed.

them so sometimes they would do everything by map on air you know you got these you know Bolivian pilots trying to do all these things by you know they have this land this lap map and they were trying to navigate themselves with compass and you know we have the GPS going so you know at that time we had that too and then the other thing that we had back in that day which I always bring up to people who asked me I said I had a digital camera there was a mini-disc so DEA had a had a big lens camera so we would leave on a cess to do a, you know, if I would try to go find a lab, I'm doing some information.

I remember going up with the lieutenant from the Umo Par, the narcotics team, and an informant in the back of the system. I'm going all the way up back to that Brazilian border, which I knew pretty well, and circling the Amazon, trying to take photos of a lab that you couldn't see from up there. And remember, you know, I was getting sick up there, going in circle, trying to take photos. There's nothing down there. But that, that disc was a reminder like, wow, this is a. amazing because when I got back, they just took the disc, they stuck it in that printer and they started,

you know, they had analysts down there and they started pulling all that data. I was just, you know, I was like, wow, this is amazing what's going on. So that's how that whole disk thing that, and it was, it was just digital for me. I'd never seen that before, but that was like 1991, 92. It was amazing to me that that existed then. And how many trips did you make down there with the, with the drug interdiction force? either three or four. So I got there in 1990 and 91 I started deploying. So I got there to like 93, 94, and then things started to change.

I didn't stay too long in that unit. So there were some imbalances that not your father's coast guard, but it's behind me. That's where this is all coming around, why this thing is changing on us. So Soldier Fortune magazine was down there for people. of time, they interviewed a couple of the guys that were partners that were down there. And that's one of the quotes that's in there from the magazine that, Not Your Father's Coast Guard. And as the Admiral was coming out, the new Admiral coming in, that it was like a shot at the U.S. Coast Guard, basically, and it was like, it didn't mean anything wrong.

It's just like we were beyond the usual Coast Guard duties and it wasn't a shot at the Coast Guard. It was just like, hey, it's not your father's coast, it's not an old thing. It's a new thing. It was getting more modern. And that kind of turned us a little bit. That Soldier Fortune magazine kind of turned the events in Washington for us, and things started to change. So I think in my third tour, we had some big orders going,

you will not get off that boat. You will not support DEA. You know, we started to get this imbalance and things. So all the guys in that unit were all about DEA and supporting no matter what the mission was. You know, you know, the guys were just so bonded that we were going to support them. And we knew them pretty much when we came back in country. We stayed in touch. I have some friends still out there today.

And we just knew that anything that happened, we were going to support them and make sure that they had us 100%. But what happens is we started getting this piece going, hey, don't get off the boat, being big trouble. Things are going to happen. Your job is beyond that boat. If things go wrong, then, you know, think about what you need to do. But it was a big thing on the turn. It kind of like started to change the unit. Yeah, like risk adverse.

I remember there's a quote from one of the guys in the book that I thought was pretty good where he says, I wasn't going to let the mission fail because of a rule. So what was it like going down on your second trip down there then? How had it changed? So once I went down on a second trip, I recognize that, hey, we can do a lot of work down there. We can do things down there. Obviously, you want to make them better because you realize, you know, down there they don't have much. So outside of the city, you know, there's a lot of poverty, right?

They need a lot of work trying to, you know, we're trying to help them out. We had, I think it was called the Narcotics Affairs section. That was where a certain amount of money would come into like an admin group. And this admin group was creating things around cities and helping like, you know, gas, fuel tanks, helping them out with, you know, repaving like the airstrips, you know, all this. They would help out the, you know, the locals and trying to get things. up with the money for support. So that allowed us to help out and do what we needed to do down there.

But there was a lot of influx money come in to help all these places to help them military-wise, you know, whatever they needed, like more boats and more this. They were getting BDUs. They were getting training in M-16s. They had M-203s. They had dogs. They had a bunch of trains. So the U.S. were supporting the UMA part in the narcotics trafficking, trying to help them

grow and kind of like, you know, make this thing go away from the United States. ever do that and teach them how to do things on their own way. So the pilots would come. I forget where they used to take the pilots, whether they were plane pilot or a helicopter pilot and bring them up to the States. United States, I forget what base trained them for helicopter piloting and for Cessna's and DC-10s and stuff like that, but a lot of them would fail. So they would send them that. So that contract group I told me that we talked about that had Vietnam veteran pilots, they would send them down to Bolivia and they would do like on the job training with these pilots. So that was a, you know, you talk about, you know, risk missions.

You know, there was a couple times, well, we've had some incidents where, you know, we were on flight and things were going wrong on our flight because the U.S. pilot would be in the middle and then the two other pilots from the Bolivia side would be find that plane and things were going wrong. So we had a plane crash on one of them. Nobody died obviously. I was on a DC tent. We were leaving the strip in Trinidad. And I remember we were going down the airstrip. We were fully loaded. And then, you know, the tail comes up. And what happened, he hit the rudder too hard. And I thought we went on was spun out on the air strip. And we got it off the ground. And, you know, when we got to the, the, the Brazilian board, I remember the agent in charge with DEA going, oh, we are not on that plane

anymore. We are coming back on helicopters. So he rerouted the helicopters, coming through it for six hours and pick us up to take us back. There was a mission where two of the coasties were on a Cessna, it was overloaded. So when they went up, when they tried to land in Chimareg, the Cessna bounced two or three times on that airstrip, which was the dirt air strip, and they went up. They try to pull it back up and it stalled. So when they've been installed, it just flipped over. So when they came down, they landed upside down. So nobody injured but enough to, you know, do some damage to everybody. That was the pilot stuff. Like it was really, really scary because that, that, that, that session that went down that, my partner's in is the week before myself and

my partner, Mike, we had went on a, they give us like an R&R in Santa Cruz. It's like the city away from all the city, then it's beautiful, right? It's got everything up there. You can go a hotel. They give us two days off. You know, you reset yourself. You sit at the pool for a couple of days. But when we left Trinidad, we were also overloaded.

And I didn't know how much weight we could take. But the pilots, going down the airstrip, I remember the pilots telling us, Mike and I, to stand up in the back seat because, you know, it's only a four-seater. So we would stand up and they would say, hey, hold, grab us, grab the pilot and the co-pilot, grab us and put your weight forward so the tail,

could rise. So, you know, you don't think much about that. But when you're up in the air, you say to yourself, okay, well, this is crazy. And I think we only flew like a thousand feet off the ground for like four hours all the way down to Santa Cruz with all this gear. You know, you kind of did things like that. You're like, wow, is this the way it's supposed to, you know, there was trips like that. And then speaking of that same session, when I was doing that trip up in, up in the Mamaret, which is the river and the Brazilian border, I remember like after doing all those photos shots of the digital camera, you know, on the way back, I had fell asleep. I was nauseous as as it could be. And when I fell asleep, I woke up to the engine stop it. You know, it's a single

engine. And the first thing I grabbed was my EPR going, uh-oh, it was my MRE, where's my EPIR? Make sure I have my weapons. When we landed, when this plane hits the ground, I'm jumping out. Like I'm like, it's, it's survival mode. It forgot to switch the fuel tank. So they went dry for like 10 minutes. And then I couldn't figure out why the pilot underneath was kind of like it looked like a lawnmower. He was trying to, you know, prime the engine back up with the gas because he forgot to switch the fuel tanks. But, you know, in those moments, you don't know what's going on. You're thinking like, oh, we're in big trouble. This plane is going down. They always say it can glide. I wasn't up for that. But yeah, he turned it back over. It took him 10 minutes. So it was kind of

strange. But, you know, I got back to the base, you know, back to the office. And I was telling that agent in charge, like, can't do that again. we got to switch fuel tanks, we went dry. You know, you're trying to go home. Yeah, I mean, years later, when those Dinacore guys went down in Columbia, because of mechanical failure, I think, like, one of the big, like, after action, you know, points was no more single-engine aircraft ever. Yeah, that's right. That's the name I was.

I could remember Dinicor. That's the same guys in there. Okay. Yeah, yeah. They were great. They were really great. They were great to have the mechanics who come down there and everything. I just do that.

And there's these training days. Like, when we were up there, they were, you know, we just got to make it through the flight. Because even the Dinahawk guys were trying to make it right. So, and then, you know, in the helicopter, they tried a couple times. They try to do an auto rotate on. I don't know if you know what there is on an auto rotate where they stopped the blade. And they wanted to do whatever an auto rotate for a training mission. I never want to be part of that.

Anytime we went up, I made sure there was no auto rotation going on. Like, we're not doing that. It's scary. You know, you're trying to, you know, also come home. And as the mission is going on, you know, on your now second trip down there, how are you perceiving the sort of efficacy of the operation overall? Because, I mean, on paper, it's very smart to go after the drugs at the source. That's probably the smartest way to handle it.

Did you think it was being effective? What did you think of the program? So, you know, not knowing much about the narcotics, like the piece of it, how much actually being produced and where it's going and coming up, like DEA would have, you know, that information they know a lot more. I remember that second one. So my tenant then was Bob Addera.

He had a great mission. What we did, we started doing co-star stuff on those boats because we knew that we were getting pulled away from being on certain missions. So at that time, I think they had three motherships at that time. I forget the names of it. I got some photos of them. He decided, we put up an operational plan,

And they decided to kind of like shut the rivers down. So nothing can move except for by plane. So we went up there. I think it was like a two week or two and a half week patrol where we took all the Coast Guard guys, took two D-A agents or three, put them on the ship with us. And the motherboat took the four piranhas out. Everybody had piranhas. We went out and we just locked everything down.

So we started boarding and moved with anything that moved on the river, we just grabbed whatever it was. Interesting. So we were throwing things down, making us. sure there were no movements. You know, you find some kilos here and keep kilos there. People move with small little loads. But we weren't inside of those labs, but it was shutting things down on the rivers. And it was a big impact at that one time. So we realized that we had to generate Coast Guard missions to help them out, understand how to navigate the rivers. And that's what we started doing. So, and then we started just going on any,

that we would just take a patrol and leave the mothership and two piranhas go one way. The other the two pranhas go the other way. We had everybody we needed and we would just patrol the rivers and try to hit every single little smaller river, go down the stream and see what we can do, and then, you know, like, you know, drop the engines down, listen, see if we can hear, like, labs and talk to people, pick up information. Is there anything out there, is there or not? We also, I think we, my second, my third, I think my third one, I started to tell myself, well, why, why are you guys walking so much to get to a lab, because one of the biggest problems we had is that if you find a person who had information on the lab, they would take you there, right? That's your informing. But they would always say, yeah, it's just down,

it's just down over here to the bend. And then you'll be four hours later. You're still walking. He's like, yeah, it's not too far away. And I used to say to myself, well, why would you do it that way? So we started bringing in, I think we were able to get NAS, Narcotics and Parasetectin by like six crossbites. And I said, why not buy cross bikes and try to make it a little easier? So we started taking these motorcycles, cross bikes. I got a great photo of one of whom. Obviously, they weren't camouflage. They were red in color.

So it's nothing you could do. But like Kawasaki dirt bikes? Yeah, that's it. That's it. Cross bikes. And we would load it on front of Parana and we would go out. And then when we hit a certain place, we would drop those bikes down. We would get on those bikes and we would patrol.

And that's how we did a lot of that. we got more coverage and stuff like that because, you know, the information was only so much that we could get. So, and when we had good information, it basically did an operation. They would get it right where DEA would really take over and really run that operation with helicopters and hit it, like hit a ranch or a lab that was really deep. But we did a lot of information grab for DEA too. So we just knew that our mission was probably more to, hey, get what we can get to them, let them do their job.

And then, you know, that way we would, you know, we would be. good at headquarters we didn't want any problem with headquarters the the the impression i got from reading the book uh it seemed like the operation was effective enough that it actually pushed a lot of the drug trade further up river that they were transporting the cocoa leaves up river i believe into columbia for processing as opposed to doing it you know in your area of operations yeah we were pretty dry we didn't get a lot um when we did and i believe the chima ray guys that the other guys, they were doing a lot more than us. Even in Peru, they were hitting a lot.

When we did our side of it, it was like, it just seemed like it was compressed somehow. I don't know if we were doing a good job or not, but it was just harder to figure it out where everything was at. The people were easy to speak with. You know, you didn't have this whole thing, you know, because, you know, they just lived out in the middle of the fields. And we figured a couple little things out. We would hit some air strips. I think there's one of the, I wasn't part of it. of it, but they had found that they, they actually dismantled a Cessna and walked it through the jungle and put it back together and threw it out of the jungle.

That's what they were doing. They were, like, they were trying to be so creative that it was unbelievable. I think it was in Chimerae, you know, they would walk the wings in, you know, they have these farmers that they would pay or whatever, and they would do all the work, basically. That's who did all the work. They weren't really the traffickers. They were just being run by the traffickers. person. So somebody in there was actually showing them how to do things and then, you know, they would, you know, give them whatever they would give them to keep them going. But, yeah, it was the people who were running planes. They had the franchise, had the farms. It was one of those kind of areas where you didn't have a lot of intel about, you know, what plane here, what plane there, what air strip there. You just had to get what you had to get and then give it back to the EA, let them assess it through their analysis. And then what was it like going down there on your third trip? Were you in the same place generally? Yeah, I've always went back down to Trinidad. So I had a good routine.

I thought as a young guy, too, I had to build my reputation up too because, you know, I wasn't great in Ranger's school. I was struggling. I got through it after Ranger School. I was putting things together for myself. And I wanted to help those DEA guys so much. I was so about this drug wars thing because it was like, you know, you don't really see it much. I came from the Miami area in the Coast Guard,

So I knew what, you know, the 1980s and 90s looked like in Miami, Key West, big time drug junk. So when I was down in Bolivia, like, I was like, wow, this is amazing. I really took, I was grateful for where I was and what I was doing. And obviously my mom was like, oh, I can't wait until you're done because you're down there. You know, today you see TV all the time, all these shows. It's something that we were doing way back when before anything I ever existed. We had good, we had good partnership with DEA, BORTAC was down. down there with us too. I forget how many board tech officers came down there. So, you know,

board control tactical units. And then being stationed in Portsmouth, Virginia, which is, you know, it's the, it's, it's, what they call that area, the tidewater area, Northfolk, Chesape, Port Smith, Virginia Beach. We had connections to the Navy SEAL team that was there too. So anytime I came back, uh, I always used to try to, you know, figure my gear up because my gear wasn't right and how do I hold this and how do I do that? Because we didn't have all that tactical gear. So I would design some of the gear stuff and I would go and name CEOs and I'd say, hey, can you construct this for me? I'll pay you for it. And then they would do their own thing that they liked that. They kept the design. It was theirs. But I remember doing like N16 magazines because I didn't

like them on the belt anymore like the old style. I put them up on my chest. So I needed somebody to create me a belt that can hold my magazines. So that was the other thing too is to create things to make it easier for us to do our job down there, whatever it was. You know, just out of curiosity, you know, I was wondering if you ever came across one of the seals that I know was down there at that time frame. Herschel Davis is the... Yes.

So, my chief Chief Davis knows Herschel. And I know who Herschel is. I did not, I think I met him once, but on the side. Is that makes sense? Because I do know he, he's that guy. He's that, like, he was that guy

down there that was running the show, for sure, very well respected. Yeah. And we all knew who he was and you know his his knowledge was absolutely amazing yeah yeah we've had him on on the podcast a couple years ago great guy yeah yeah it has a lot going you know back in those days they those guys were doing some things we've never heard of right so yeah we met a navy seal back then now you know they're more exposed because of the the social media that's out there but back of those days you didn't know any native seals unless you personally met one right yeah and i mean this is also the time frame where all of this is happening, but also things are starting to really

heat up with the Medellin cartel in Colombia and all the stuff that killing Pablo, everything we know today about what was going on down there. And the book, you know, not your father's coast guard, also gets into how the coast guard was not just in Bolivia, but also in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Panama, a number of different countries, not necessarily doing the type of stuff you but they're still pretty active. Yes, so in this, so we would do three-month tours, right? So within those three months, I also went to Panama and I also went to Costa Rica. So Snowcap had a team in Bolivia.

They eventually went to Guatemala, and they were also, we were down in Ecuador. So even though that wasn't a snow cap thing in Ecuador, we would send guys down to Ecuador and they would be. do whatever they needed to do down there. So we were all over the place. So we had guys everywhere. I never went to Ecuador, but I went to Panama and I went to Costa Rica on the side with my lieutenant who eventually passes away, Joe Rodriguez. He's a, he went to Marine Recont. He was a lieutenant. We went down to Costa Rica. We went on the south side, the Pacific side to help out their Coast Guard trying to figure things out what they had going on for like a week.

We didn't really do much. And then we ended up in Panama to help the Panamanians out. their waterway things. We were down there for a little while. I never went to Columbia. I think one of the guys went to Columbia, but we were basically, our biggest hubs were Bolivia and Ecuador. That's where our hubs were.

So every three months, when we would go back and tour, we would have to go to Quantico and re-qualified with DEA. And then when we would leave Andrews Air Force Base at that time, that was the name, right? They would take us out in the C-141, all packaged up. We would go to Guatemala first, drop a team off there, you know, go to Panama, stay overnight. And then, I'm sorry, Panama, Guatemala, however the tour, we stay overnight to Panama.

And then we would actually go into Peru, drop a team off. And then we would go to Bolivia and drop a team. And that was the last thing we would get dropped off. So that's how they routed everything. So everything without Andrews Air Force Base. So what were you kind of observing on that last trip down to Bolivia? How had things change? And how is things changing for the drug interdiction assist team?

So my last tour is probably the worst tour. Because we had to be, the bosses are now being switched. The one bosses that we have, now we have, I believe it's a commander in right now at that time. So we're getting that switch. And basically on that switch, we're basically, hey, you're going to go down there. You're going to do nothing but mission support for the teams down there. but you're not going to be staying with DEA anymore. We used to stay together.

So we had a Coast Guard liaison commander down there that stayed at the embassy. They set us up in an old narcotics house, traffickers house. And they had like seven bedrooms. So all we didn't, we went down. We didn't even have weapons anymore. So our last tour, we went down there. We didn't get on a C-141. We didn't go to Quantico.

They really cut us off. The Coast Guard did, not DEA. they cut us off and basically threw us down there on a commercial jet, stay down there, where you'd be to use yourself. Your job every day was to go out there and help the host nation on anything they needed. No more operation. We were done. So we would go see DA guys.

They had moved over from a hotel. They had their own little area. Now they had like another home and they had this warehouse basically. And we would go in there and try to help them out whatever they needed. There was support here and there, whatever. We did all that stuff. But they were cutting us out. because they were cut that unit out.

This DIA unit was being cut out, and you can see it. I felt it because I felt, you know, later when I get back, I knew I was getting cut out because I only been there three and a half years, and they were not going to retain me on my next, my next billet. They didn't want to retain me. They wanted me out. So everybody that was basically in there was being shoved out, and they brought in new staffing because the whole mission was changing,

and they didn't want the old guys or the guys that had history with DEA and Snowcap confusing their new mission like we were going to make it worse, right? We were coasties. I mean, we're military guys. Why would you, you know, so I could feel the cut coming out and wasn't pretty.

What did it? A lot way from us. I think a lot of the DEA guys, like the bosses, I was really good with the, you know, do it's G. And I, you know, you sit down with them, and they were really disappointed of why the mission was changing for us. when we were always good for them and helping them out a lot.

We did a lot of work. We did the Grontford basically. We were refueling, putting ammunition on the planes or on the helicopters, moving these these RHIs from one helicopter to another, doing all that work for DEA. That's what we did. We were supporting the mission, and we were getting cut up. So it was not great. We were part of that anymore.

So when we went to our own little home and DA was in another location in the same city, It was tough. I didn't like it. I was like, it's not good anymore. Obviously, the commandant was switched out, and, you know, they were taking everything from it because the name was going to change eventually. Yeah. What did this unit eventually turn into? So it's international maritime law enforcement training team, basically.

In right. It went from drug and addition to international maritime law enforcement. So, and they were changing everything that, you know, they were going to support it that way, cut the name out. You know, you get rid of the name, you get rid of everything old. Yeah, I was like, I could see it, I could feel it. But I knew that, you know, it would never be the same unit again. It was going to change its mission out. And it was time for me to find something else to go to.

And the new mission was basically going to be strictly, like, training Coast Guards of foreign nations. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. No more like, you know, M16 Glocks. Cowboy. Cowboy. That stuff is gone. No more BDU.

you would be black and your blues. You know, they used to tell us, hey, you guys gone too native. You know, we weren't native. Like, we always, we did the military job. When we came back, you know, we were always in uniform, clean-shaven. We didn't do all that crazy stuff like people thought. I mean, like I said, that Soldier Forster magazine pushed too hard, I guess. People have this idea what we were doing, but it wasn't really like that.

And as all of these changes are coming and you're kind of feeling that you have to go somewhere else. I mean, what did you end up doing with the rest of your career? So, you know, when I, so when I reached this unit, I just was like, wow, this, I was going back to the coachco is going, what else is out there? And realistically, well, let me take this back. When I, they didn't re-up me to stay. You know, I make E5 in that unit. You know, I took the test in there, so I was an E-5. five then within the unit, they got me to do the testing and do things.

I went back to Key West as, what was the official word? At base security, basically, back to QS. I went right back where I came from. I was ecstatic. I was like, wow, I'm going right back. You know, I'm not looking at a ship or anything. I was on base security. When I went back down there, obviously what I was doing, I was picking up all the Cuban

immigrants that would land on the beach, you know, from morning to night. and how we get called out, I would work with Federal Police Service, FPS. So I would drive up the Keys. It was a federal police service. We would pick up, put them in a van, drive them all the way back down the Key West. INS at the time, immigration, national service would show up, card them all up, put a fingerprint, and send them up to Miami. I did that for a while.

So my lieutenant that I went to Panama with and Costa Rica, he became the lieutenant in charge for the law enforcement detachment. team in Miami. So as I was getting close to 19. So I stated that DIA unit for three and a half years. I only had a year and a half left on my, on my, on my, on my, on my, I'm in billet basically. And I was like, why, why aren't you just extended? I stay in Portsman. They didn't want to do that. Like, no, no, you're out going back to Key West for a year and a half. So I went, I went back to another base for only a year and a half. And then at that, at my extension time, that Joe Rodriguez was going to pull me up into Miami to be part of lead that unit again.

So it was the highest unit that the Coast Guard has when it comes to law enforcement. And then travel, they jump on the Femont with the Navy. They do all this long for misinterdiction. So when I got to the end, my base XO wouldn't confirm that I could go to Miami once I reenlisted, he wouldn't guarantee it. And Joe Rodriguez trying to get me up there.

If I reenlisted, I was going to Miami, but the base XO froze that. He goes, hey, listen, you reenlist. There's no guarantee you're gone. So I didn't re-enlist. So once that happened, I was on my way out. My process was, hey, U.S. Marshals, I can't get in DEA. I only had a high school diploma.

So I didn't have a lot of that upper education that you needed. So when I got out, I stayed up in the Miami area, Fort Lauder area. Within a year, I got hired in the Brower Sheriff's Office, and that's where I went for 22 years. Wow. So, you know, I was 28 years old. I went to the academy for six months. I blew right through the academy. Because, you know, the academy to me was I've done all this stuff.

And that DEA snow cap mission taught me so much about how to do things in law. So when I went to the academy, like, I had no problems. I was in and out real quick. As soon as I graduated, I did my first six months as a patrol officer up in Deerfield Beach. Within the six months, I was on probation for, what, a year plus? They took me right off the patrol car. I was in Detective Bureau. And then three years later, I found myself doing undercover work.

I was off the streets and I worked in a specialized unit that was just organized crime. And that's where I was. I did that for almost 2002 to like 2017. Never came out of it. Never wore uniform again. I was a detective then. I did a bunch of wire. I learned to do wiretaps.

I was a, you know, I was an affiant. I did all kind of crazy stuff. you know and then I became a supervisor and became a sergeant and that's how I ended in my career I retired like that as a sergeant but that background those four years or three and a half years with that DIA unit pushed those pieces why I became and I always asked myself how is it possible you never got we even when I got promoted in the sheriff's office they were supposed to kick you to the streets because that's you got to go as a sergeant you got to be back to the streets I'm going to be a sergeant on the streets I never went back from the sheriff's sheriff down, they were like, nope, you're going to write into this unit. This is your unit. You handle it. So, you know, I work with SWAT teams. I work with narcotics teams. I did all that

stuff. So I was just in that phase like, you know, this is what I wanted. I wish the Coast Guard could have kept what they had. Right. Right. Right. Because I wanted more law enforcement. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. Um, and so you were doing like a lot of like undercover drug buys and stuff like that. Yeah, I did. So I found out real quick that I wasn't a good liar. because, you know, to me, that's a hard trade. You've got to be, like, deep in that stuff. Like, it's, like, it's got to really work on it. So when I first started, that's where I was at.

I was doing undercover stuff. I bought two kilos, you know, I was running around. I was a cigarette dealer for a while. You know, I was truck loads of cigarettes. You know, when you get into the street stuff at a local place, you have a lot more access to do things and how you're doing things, right? You get all this, you know, these pieces going on. And then after a while, I found myself being more of a, you know,

I was better as a case agent than I was. as an undercover. So, you know, I would pull the group together, good detectives, good undercovers, put the case together and put it, you know, to the U.S. Attorney's Office. That's where we usually work with and just grab these organized crimes. I worked at the mob, basically, the mafia for a while. Because down here in South Florida, that's where everybody comes to vacation. So I worked at for a while. I did, you know, some big time, you know, wiretaps. You know, I did it for months. You know, as an African in a wiretap, I, I've always been told like, listen, not everybody can do a wiretap.

You know, you'd be part of one. You know, you can be part of a wiretap case, but when you put it together and put your name on that dotted line, that changes everything, right? Because the liabilities go way up and you got to make sure everything. And I did, I think, six of them. So it were great. I mean, you just learn how to do things at another level.

And I always go back to my Coast Guard background because that's where it comes from. This was also mostly counter narcotics. Yeah, counter narcotics. Yep. And then my last 10 years, I went into the human trafficking internet stuff. So I did a lot of human trafficking, too, at the end. So I was part of violent crimes against children's squad with the FBI. So I was sworn in with them too. But, you know, I did the human trafficking stuff. That's what I was doing in the Coast Guard, basically. But now working with Border Patrol was a lot easier for me because I had a background from previous with Bortax. So when I went to Border Patrol here in Dania Beach, Florida, like with the bosses and the major and stuff, to me, doing the job that they were looking helpful because you know they don't have a lot of people the staff so us supporting their their their their their their their intercalo areas of you know this human trafficking side of things it was easy for me i put a ton of groups together patrol here patrol there organized get this get that whatever they needed just to support

to support their missions too so it wasn't hard yeah it sounds like the coast guard set you up for success i always grateful you know i did my nine years i was so grateful that That piece, especially in the academy, it was like, wow, you're moving quick than usual. So I thought that was a good thing because you learn, you know, I tell you a funny story. When I put my first two days of leave in with the sheriff's office, I had given it to the sergeant. I gave him 48 hours of leave. So I was on patrol. He calls me in one night and he goes, 48 hours of leave and he's got two days.

That's not two days. It's 16 hours. I'm like, what do you mean 16? One day's 24. He goes, no, eight hours, right? You know, you're military, right? You're always on duty. I think I only had like 60 hours of leave on the books at that time.

I was new. I walked out of there going, wow, this life is good. It's only eight hours. And I asked for two days. I take 16 out of 60. I'm good. I got a lot out. I can take a lot of leave.

Yeah, because, you know, in the military, one day is 24 hours. Yeah, yeah. That you leave. And that's a funny story. I just thought how grateful that I am. So you learn a lot. I heard a story years ago about a, this was back in the day.

And it was a dude, special forces guy, he was on a mission supporting the CIA down in Central America. And at the end of the trip, all the CIA guys start filling out their per diem. And the SF guy goes and he starts filling his out. He's like, whoa, you're in the military.

You don't get per diem. And at that point, he made the decision to get out of the S.F and go to the CIA. Well, you know, this is a funny story, too, because when we were down there, we got predomium two military-wise, right? And we made a little bit more money than usual because we had the, we got some extra hazard pay, whatever. But when we find out what those DEA guys were making to go down on those operations, you know, you handle, you know, you touch a grenade, there's your demo pay. You put your foot on top of the helicopter and never go anywhere.

That's your, that's your flight pay. You have, they had, they, you know, they were making way more than we were. And I was like, I don't know if I want to be here that long because I got to doing these missions. I probably need to make a little bit more money than I'm doing because the risk factor is way up there. But you know, you start to learn a lot what, you know, how it really works for people when they, you know, they put their lives in the line. It's not, you know, money is not everything. Yeah. You realize we were cheap, really cheap. But it's a quality of life thing, you know, I think there are some special operations commanders out there who really don't want to let their guys go and be attachments to a DEA or FBI or

whatever it is, CIA, whatever it is, because they'll see what the other side is like and get out pretty quick. But as far as, you know, the DIAT and this whole Coast Guard mission we're talking about, I mean, it's interesting. It's kind of obscure. There's only a few stories in special or a soldier of fortune magazine that you mentioned that you sent to me actually and then the book not your father's coast guard um so there's not a lot out there about you guys no and i think you know the book came out because they were doing the history on where it's at today right with the units that are out there and you got a couple guys that graduate seal school now and you know they've moved it around you see it now with these these these narcotic submarines the coast guard guys up there and

you know they look like some special forces unit jumping on top you know it's a amazing where it's at, right? I'm super happy for that because they evolved it a lot more. So, but it's one of those kind of things where I try to, you know, I'm still connected with all the guys. I try to get, you know, you're trying to do some things at the Coast Guard historical museum, whatever that's at, that's been a little bit of a nightmare trying to get art piece in there. And I've always said, look, today the way things are, you don't have to wait for a museum to put your stuff in because most people see it online now. Like, you can, that's why I, I started doing that Instagram literally.

I started putting little pieces out there trying to get things together. I got a lot to do. But I was like, hey, get it out there where somebody can see it. Right. Where somebody can kind of recognize what this was way back then because nobody really knows. If you put the story right, you know, you see there's a lot of guys in there that did a lot of good work in there from chiefs down to like, you know, us, you know, petty officers

all the way up to the, to the bosses that were in. They're fighting to do things right and trying to get things to a good spot. So, you know, like I said, don't, don't wait on something military-wide, you know, it takes a long time for them to figure things out. So, and, you know, get it out there as much as you can. So there's some videos on YouTube you can find and some, you know, some old videotape, stuff that they put out there, but it's not like, you know, it's not cut up or anything like that. But you can do a good job at it if it comes out right, for sure. I'm looking forward to seeing whatever you guys put together.

Is there anything else you want to talk about before we get going today? Is there anything that I didn't ask that you really would like to get into? No, I just thought that, you know, just exposing it. I said to the guys, too, look, there's a a handful of us still out there, like 20 of us. I said, try to expose it for yourself. You know, you got more than I do. When you read the book, the one thing about the book,

see, that cover on the book, I think it was Bob out of there, I think my old boss that asked me for some photos, and I sent him some photos. Like that, that's a gray and white, or black and white, but it's actually, there's a, there's a color one. Those photos came out on our first tour when everything dried up, we went out with our lieutenant.

They said, hey, let's go take some photos we've got out here. You know what I mean? Let's remember these memories. You know, obviously had the old 35 millimeter. You don't have like a, you know, a phone to do it on. Remember these moments. So basically, that's what we have. We got that photo out there. And then in that book, we never got interviewed.

So me and Bob's team never got interviewed. So in that book, you hear things and you see things, but there's a lot of other things that are just missing in the whole thing. So, and then I found out from the, from the author that basically, oh, I didn't have enough time. I didn't call you up.

They got the photos in, which was great. But if you look at cops also, there's a series of cops where they do, I think they go to Guatemala, they're obviously in Bolivia, and they show the firefight, the post-fire fight, that happened down in Bolivia.

And basically, it's, it's the coasties that are down there. I think the coasties even, I think they were actually a couple of guys that got shot up. They actually, you know, gave a medical, rendered medical service to them, you know, passed them up real quick. And I think that one, too, threw off the Coast Guard in the piece. But it's on cops, you know, they froze everything.

They basically said, you know, don't move the lab around. Donne, they'll mess with anything. They'll fly. They flew, Don Ferron, I think his name was. He was the head of DEA at the embassy. Cops flew down there, and then they flew back out there. They went out to that lab and you can see the whole piece that's on cops. You know, it's pretty intense looking, you know, the amount of weaponry that was down there and the lab that was down there.

But those coaches deserve a lot of credit, too, because they were actually in the firefight. Like, you know, I have, their, one's not here anymore. That's Joe Rodriguez. But the other one is still around. He lives close down to me. So they're still around. Like, that's amazing to me that they were able to get through that. Yeah.

You know, we were never on TV or anything like that. And nobody really said much about it. I think we have a question from one of our viewers. Yeah, somebody asked Giuseppe, what's the biggest or one of the biggest cases you worked on as a detective, like wiretap mob case, something like that? Well, a double case. Mob, mob stolen. I think we were working on up. We were working on, we started getting these stolen cars.

So my background is like I could go down the street. I still do it now today. I can figure out what the car is and why it's stolen because I can just see it from, I have all these little cues that come up. So I started doing a lot of like stolen car stuff. Like I would recover them, you know, I think my best was 11 in a month.

And then when I got to that special unit, I had information on some stolen car stuff. Nobody can figure out this is when they had the, the emergency boxes in it where you could, you know, satellite in and say, hey, you know, I'm stuck. What happens? They were removing on. all these boxes and I was trying to figure out why do you remove these boxes well little by

little I figured out so I was dealing with derangos I was dealing with hummers I was dealing with Mercedes I was dealing with the Lamborghinis and I started putting things together within that system one of my players showed up that was in the mob and Philadelphia mom and that's how that started out so I had a auto theft case switching into a mob case at the same time so I had the the organized prime group with me and the all of death group that I required and I mixed the together. I think I I think we filled the garage up with like I in 30 or 40 car that were stolen and then I had like 10 motorcycles that they were just ripping people left and right so on wire taps that's what it just grew to be huge so I had to hold on to everything I just couldn't you know once you take it you know you get a stolen car

you got to take it out of the system right now the system goes back to the insurance company whatsoever we couldn't do that because we didn't know if they were in insurance jobs right we had to hold on to everything so it came to a point six months later where we have to make the arrest. I think at one point, the attorney always, you know, said something to me. I think we started with the 34 suspects. Turns out to be 19 at the end. One of the best moments is when I went up to Daytona, Florida, and we had to keep the cars hot because we didn't know who was involved in. I think we drove three stolons down. I was in a car that wasn't stolen because I was leaving the group, and we also brought a stolen Donzie down or scare

one or two. We had to make sure that Florida Highway Patrol didn't come by us and try to run one of those tags or the boat number because they would have been hot. They would have to stop on us. When I worked in that unit, guys have beards, you know, they don't look at cops. So we were taking everything back down

to our warehouse where we had warehouse. But that case was amazing to me because it just highlighted where we were at on things for sure. But I did some mop cases up in, you know, New York, Philly, for sure. Always interesting, you know, so, but, you know, I still watch myself today. So I always watch the rear room here.

Well, I'll be keeping my eye out to see, you know, what you and your former teammates put together on all of this. The book, you know, not your father's coast guard. You guys can find that on Amazon or wherever if you want to give it a read. Is there anywhere, are you on, why don't you plug your Instagram and send people that? there. Yeah, well, basically I got it under Diat, you know, drug and addiction assist team. It's kind of brand new. And that's what I put on that whole thing is drug and an interdictonid period, I period, a period, T period, and then team. So that's it. So I put it out there. I'm trying to do more to it. So I, you know, I have a bunch of stuff that if I don't

get it out there, it's probably going to die with me. Nobody's ever going to see. And that's right to tell the guys like, hey, try to get it out there. so people can see it out there because if you leave things like they don't see it, there's nobody going to see it. So I was saying, hey, send it to me. I'll get it out there eventually. Yeah, yeah.

No, that's great. I'm really glad that you're doing that. And again, Giuseppe, thank you for doing this interview. Really appreciate it. And I'm grateful and humble that you reached out to me and super grateful that I can get this story out, and I appreciate it very much. Oh, yeah, absolutely, man.

And everyone else, thank you for joining us today. I hope you enjoyed this slice of Coast Guard history. And we'll see you next time. Thank you.