This Past Weekend - #674 - Scott Payne

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's guest is a retired FBI special agent who spent 28 years in law enforcement. A lot of that undercover. He infiltrated some of the most dangerous groups in America, motorcycle gangs, drug traffickers, the cartel. He has a book out called Code Name Pale Horse, How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. We go way down the rabbit hole in this one. We want to let people know that some of this, the stories in this one, can be a little bit graphic. I had a nice chat with today's guest, Mr. Scott Payne.

Starting point is 00:00:53 Scott Payne, the author of code name Pale Horse. That's your book. And you had some co-names, too. I saw that big country they called you. Yeah, I'm more like Smedium now, but yeah. Oh, yeah, you coming down, huh? You de-escalate. I'm aging.

Starting point is 00:01:08 Where are you from? Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina. Oh, that's a beautiful city. Yeah, born and raised there, lived in Charleston, played ball, Charles and South Carolina, but I'm in East Tennessee now, man. Amen, man. Well, welcome to Tennessee, dude. To catch our listeners up for those who don't know, you spent 28 years in law enforcement, right? And so that was in police work, SWAT, FBI, undercover. And that was undercover with drug trafficking, cartels, white supremacist groups. What about your life before law enforcement made you

Starting point is 00:01:41 think that that's a direction I want to go in? Well, it's not, I mean, it's, it's, one of those things you look back and you go, oh, I can see what was happening. I didn't really know what was happening at the time, but I just love connecting on people. I mean, I go into great detail in the book, but like in high school, when I was in high school in the 80s, you had a smoking area. Oh, yeah. You know, you go out there with your cigarettes, you know, and then you had like, I could go, I could hang in, in almost every crowd. That's all. It's, it's not saying I could be one of them necessarily. I could just be accepted. So potheads, I'm there. jocks, I'm there, musicians, I'm there.

Starting point is 00:02:18 You look back and you see these things, but something about, I don't know if it started when I became a cop, but like some of my mentors, there's a guy named Gary Ward who was at the Greenville County Sheriff's Office in South Carolina, and he was the strongest man in the late 80s. So he came in after like Bill Casimir, he was a former Marine, but at that time he was a Marine,

Starting point is 00:02:40 and he won the heavyweight class and bench squat and deadlift. So now he's on narcotics, and he's this jacked, big dude with, yeah, goodness, gracious, that's him. Oh, my goodness. Gary Ward, baby. Dude, look at him. And he got bigger.

Starting point is 00:02:56 And then what poor's right? Look at the thighs on, they were damn selling at auction. Yeah, when I met him, he had a beard and everything. And, yeah. Dude, I bet he damn goes to the toilet and his yard just grows better. Oh, dude. You know, I used to ask him, I go, we'd be at the gym. And I'm like, I'm like, man, I never see you doing like this exercise or exercise like this.

Starting point is 00:03:13 but, man, your neck and your shoulders are, he said, someone, when you pick that much weight up off the ground, something's going to grow. I was like, all right, man. Yeah, he used to bust my chops, man. He helped me perfect my squat. Squat was my strongest lifts. So, you know.

Starting point is 00:03:27 So you had a role model like that, kind of? And he had done undercover and biker stuff. And I was becoming a biker. I mean, I grew up on motorcycles, but I mean like riding, like American-made, you know, Harley out there going to rallies and all that stuff. And he had done that. And I don't know if that's what gave me the bug.

Starting point is 00:03:43 All I know is that, like, it doesn't matter during that time frame, that 80s, 90s. It doesn't matter if it was the cheesiest undercover movie. I loved them all. Amen. Love them all, man. Things like that have an effect on your life. The people you meet in the gym have an effect on your life. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:04:01 So you get into police work over there in Greenville, South Carolina. Do you remember a day that it just got real? You're like, oh, this is, now it really feels real kind of. Oh, man. If you're uniformed patrol, I mean, it's most people, I guess if you're not a cop, you don't think this way or know it, but you just see so much trauma and stuff and you get desensitized, sort of. I mean, we compartmentalize it and we're not very good at it. And that's why first responders, and I'm including medic, fire, and military, if we're not number one, we're very high for divorce, suicide, substance abuse, and dying within five years after it's. iron. So it's a pressure cooker. But like going in a uniform, you can show up on all kinds of

Starting point is 00:04:45 stuff. I mean, I've shown up and nothing more. There's plenty of men and women in law enforcement that have done more and seen more. But, you know, you go into a place and it's, you know, a trailer caught on fire and the person died in the position where they were trying to crawl out the, I mean, it's just all kinds of stuff. Somebody gets hit by train. You're finding pieces of stuff. Do you remember a day where you're like, I don't know if we're really trained. for this kind of? Well, the thing that's jumping in my head right now is because I'm still a tactical instructor.

Starting point is 00:05:18 I'm an instructor with alert. It's spelled with two R's, A-L-E-R-R-T. But the FBI and Alert married in 2013, and it's the national standard for training law enforcement and how to respond to active shooter events. So I was just, we were just putting on a class last week in East Tennessee. So that's a national organization alert? Yeah, so we did get in all kinds of stuff.

Starting point is 00:05:40 of stopping the killing, stopping the dying, and then you got to do casualty UVAC. But what I was saying, if you were asking me about something like Greenville County, I had a good friend of mine die in the line of duty. And this is what we're trying to do. A lot of times we're training, we're just saying, man, just slow down just a little bit.

Starting point is 00:05:57 You know, I get it. You know, young gunning. I'm still got plenty of testiles drawn in me. You want to just bust in there and run into rooms, and there's a safer way to do it. But what happened to my friend is we weren't really getting the training at that time. But he was the city.

Starting point is 00:06:15 I was county, but he was city, but his, the edge bumped up to each other, right? So he sees somebody's got a lot of warrants on him, jumps out, chases him on foot, chases him into a building, somebody clocks him in the head with a board, and now you got tunnel vision. Now he's like, all he's seeing is this. Even though he got hitting the head of the board, he calls it out, but he sees the guy running, and Russ was in shape, Russell Sara. He was in shape, man.

Starting point is 00:06:36 He took off after him, and we just hadn't had the training. to slow down enough to... Stop and think... To pan and use distance and angles, and he ran right, because he was a hard corner, and he ran right past the bad guy, and the guy shot him in the back, and when he went down,

Starting point is 00:06:53 he walked up and shot him three times directly in the back of the head, and they rolled him over, and shot him in the mouth and in the eye, in broad daylight. But if we would have had that training, and you got to get the rips, you got to, and it's sad to say,

Starting point is 00:07:08 but most places are, they don't have the budget anyway. But at least in my experience, when they're having budget problems, the first thing that gets cut is training. Wow. And then something bad happens. And then you look and you look and people that are out there in the industry that have the skill sets, they're like, well, there's a lack of training. They didn't know what to do, you know?

Starting point is 00:07:28 Oh, yeah, the rep. I mean, you say the reps, man, the muscle memory. Yeah. Just the idea, you know, it's like, because otherwise I'm sure you're running on adrenaline. and I don't know how much, I don't know chemically what is in adrenaline if there's a part of it, like, of the chemical. It's going to be some endorphins.

Starting point is 00:07:45 I mean, it's going to be like a epinephine or something, right? Right. There's not something in there that's like, hey, let's... Relax. Yeah. It's not that one. Yeah, it's the opposite of relax. So we may need some new adrenaline.

Starting point is 00:07:55 Yeah. So when we're doing those trainings, we call it a stress inoculation. So out there on the range, get you and or maybe when we're doing force on force with the marking cartridges, you're in a man. a mask, you're in a helmet, enclosed, neck protector, and you'll hear people a lot of times say, man, I couldn't hear anything. When we're doing the test, say, hey, this is how you put the mask on, put it on, and you stand up there and you go, hey, can you hear the sound of my voice and everybody raised their hand? It's not the helmet, it's your stress. Wow. So you do that,

Starting point is 00:08:22 and we often refer to it as you bleed on the range so you don't die in the street, but it takes the reps. There's so many videos I can show you military and law enforcement where the officer has no idea how many rounds they've shot. They have no idea that they did at a magazine exchange. They had no idea that they did it behind cover, but they did it because they trained until it became instinctive or like you said muscle memory. Yeah. When things get intense, man, yeah, it's hard to sit back and like, and remember what occurred.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Yeah. Much less. Yeah. Yeah, when you're having an adrenaline dump, and it could be any traumatic experience, it could be your first car wreck. I remember my first car wreck, everything goes to slow motion. Yeah. You're just like, whoa.

Starting point is 00:09:02 And everything's a time dilation. Oh, yeah. So your eyes click. You're just getting screenshots because it's not a smooth transition. Your auditory exclusion, you feel like you're underwater. Everything's like you just hear, whoa, whoa, whoa. And it's just everything so you can feel your heart beating through your whole body. I will say, though, studies have shown that the better physical shape you're in,

Starting point is 00:09:24 the quicker you'll recover from those adrenaline dumps. So adrenaline dump is a, it's a real thing that you guys. Yeah, that's what I call it. But, I mean, there's probably another term for it. No, this is, let me see right here. It says, an adrenaline dump is a sudden large release of the hormone adrenaline, epinephrine, from your adrenal glands that rapidly flips your body into fight or flight mode, followed by a downshift once that surge clears and related stress hormones settle.

Starting point is 00:09:51 Breathing rate increases in airways relax to pull in more oxygen quickly. Blood flow is redirected away from digestion toward muscles, heart, lungs, and brain, so you can move and react faster. and that's on perplexity. Wow, that's inter- Yeah, I just didn't know that. And you can come in and out of it, you know? You can be like in a situation

Starting point is 00:10:09 have the adrenaline dump. And then you start, okay, things are calming down. Now you're coming back to normal and then something else happens. You're like, oh, dadgummit, and you're going right back down to another adrenaline dump. So in your work, you've probably kind of ridden those like a lot over the years,

Starting point is 00:10:22 almost like waves kind of. Yeah. Like you're surfing a little bit. Yeah, but I don't like that kind of surfing. Yeah, but I never thought about like that that's something. I mean, you always hear the term, oh, you have an adrenaline, but I've never really kind of looked at it as to see exactly what's kind of occurring in that

Starting point is 00:10:37 in those moments. So you, you end up moving, I'm assuming from police work to SWAT. Is that kind of how it went? Because I remember, I heard you talk one time about those jump out boys, right? Yes.

Starting point is 00:10:49 And I remember reading about jump out boys, like even down in Louisiana and stuff. Oh, yeah. It was like these sort of like, it was kind of this new thing that was happening. This is what we gathered is just regular. Back in the 50 days, everybody was 5'0.

Starting point is 00:11:00 Oh, everybody was 5'0. Dude, yelling it on the corner, 5-0. I'm like, I'm not even in a Mustang. You see a white Dodge neon and people yell 5-5,

Starting point is 00:11:09 or even, you just see a white guy that hadn't been out in a while. I know, yeah. And people would yell 5-0. Oh, man, you're trying to earn some money on the corner by being a lookout.

Starting point is 00:11:16 Those were the day, bro. 5-0! 5-0! And everybody would run. It didn't even matter, dude. No. But yet, but the jump-out boys,

Starting point is 00:11:24 it was kind of an unmarked car group that was kind of taking on drug trafficking. That's what, that's how we always heard about it. So it's not SWAT. At the sheriff's office, I didn't get on SWAT. I got on SWAT in the FBI. Got it.

Starting point is 00:11:36 But I did make Vice and Narcotics Investigator, and that's your jump-out boys. It's usually your narcotics unit. It is. We're rolling out. I mean, being young and dumb, you know, I'd be out late at night, single, party, and I'd come in. Thankfully, Gary didn't, like, beat me up or nothing. But I remember we've had to drive, like, 40 minutes to where we're going to do a jump-out? I said, hey, I'm just going to nod off a little bit.

Starting point is 00:11:56 About five minutes out, if you'll just wake me up, let me know. I wake up, and I'd go, all right, all right, because you're, you're, you're, young. I mean, you're, you know, nothing's not popping when you stand up, you know. And you just go like, all right, man, we're rolling up. And van door opens, you just start running from a dead sleep. Chasing, yeah. And what, so I guess, I'm guessing they didn't breathalize y'all before your shift. I wasn't drunk. I was just tired. Oh, damn. The night before I might have been a little snockered. But yeah, you know, I'm just, I had the hair of the dog. Amen. What were some of those calls like? A lot of those, so the jump out stuff, you're going to be going to be going

Starting point is 00:12:32 to somewhere that's got a lot of reporting or incidents recorded of high drug trafficking. So you're going to be pulling up. And it may be, it may be quick buys. You may run and undercover in to make a buy and then either they identify them or you've got it on camera and they're coming. So you go through and it's like, all right, the dude's wearing a yellow coat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they just pull in right for that and jump out and grab them because they just sold up if you want to do it that quick. Other times it might be, for me, once I was in the FBI, it was really source development. I'd go out. there with the state and locals and, you know, observe.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Just get involved. No, yeah, you hop in. You hop in and you go, sometimes you can get some good information. So as you're coming up through the police department, what makes you, like, is the police department, is the activity there kind of not enough, or is there like an, like, are you in a search for more? Like, what makes you want to kind of evolve your career to try other genres of law enforcement? There's a couple of things that happen.

Starting point is 00:13:31 number one, the pay. Okay. You're at the sheriff's office for five years. You don't get me raises. County Council gives themselves raises. Happens all over the United States. Oh, did that not just Greenville, South Carolina.

Starting point is 00:13:42 What we all get in Maine? What are we all get? Oh, man, I don't know. I was a, that would have been 93 to 98. I was a cop, so I don't know. 50, 60 grandie, I don't know. Who knows?

Starting point is 00:13:53 But, you know, as a cop, you're also moonlighting. You're doing all kinds of side jobs. You know, you get, oh yeah, you get off of work and then you go to Frankie's Fun Park or some golf thing and you sit there, or you go to the Dollar General and you sit, you know, for shoplifting and stuff like that and you get extra money. So working like security gigs, side gigs.

Starting point is 00:14:13 Yeah. Yeah. Refering, all kind of stuff. Yeah. You forget that. I forget that. The police officers do all kind of stuff. They would be umpires for our game a lot of time. They'd be referee and basketball.

Starting point is 00:14:21 I forgot about all that. Or yeah. Or that's your side. Maybe if you're in uniform, you might see the cop at the high school game. That's a side job. Got it. You're getting paid for that. but I looked at the pay because after five years,

Starting point is 00:14:33 it was kind of like, man, I'm not making anything, even though I was a two striper at that point. But it's like you look, they would raise that. It was weird because they would raise the hiring rate, the pay for the hiring. So starting rate. But at some point I probably could have literally quit, walked out the door and came back in with a four-year degree

Starting point is 00:14:53 and make more than what I'm making, which doesn't make any sense. And you also look at it and you're like, I'm never, I'm never going to max out my salary. retirement. Look at how much we're making, how little we get. I'm never going to hit peak unless I live to be 100 and they let me work as a hundred year old cop, you know, in a wheelchair, you know. But I looked at that, but I was really starting to get a lot more exposure as far as I was learning more about the federal agencies because we would go out and help them with arrest and stuff. And I really

Starting point is 00:15:20 didn't know, I thought the FBI just worked to bank robberies because that's the only time I ever saw him. And I had a sergeant. He said, and my nickname at that time was Kingpin. And he said, Kingpin, if I was you, and I was a single man, and I had a four-year degree, he said, man, I would put in for the FBI, and I'd list New York as my first office. And I thought, you said, I'd list New York as my first office. I'd put New York as, I want to go to New York. And that, you know. New York, yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:48 And I told him, I was like, are you, what do you smoke? I'm like, there's no way I'd go to New York. What are you talking about? I started applying, because I said, all they work, what do they do? And he goes, he says, Scott, they do everything. and I'd heard that it was harder to get hired with them, and I took it as a challenge. I filled out that one first,

Starting point is 00:16:05 and I never filled out another one. It took about probably a year to get through the whole process, but the polygraphs and the physical fitness and all the backgrounds, and then there's tests you have to take, and then there's another interview test, and then you get to the academy. You get your letter, and I arrived in Quantico, Virginia,

Starting point is 00:16:23 on 927 and 98, and 928 is your first day. Dang. Before we go into your first day, when it comes to the FBI, what were some of the criteria that they were looking for? Were there unique tests and stuff that they had you do along the way or even experiences that in hindsight may have been used to weed people out that you're able to notice now? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 00:16:44 I mean, there's all, I mean, like the phase one test. Because you tickle me, I'll tell you what's going on. Yeah, right, right. You know what I'm saying? I mean, I was very truthful on the polygraph I did, but I sat in the box for like three and a half hours. I'm like, I don't know what you may tell you? I'm not lying, you know?

Starting point is 00:17:02 But that phase one test, it has like, there's like questions they ask you, you know, would you be more likely to and they're giving you scenarios and stuff? But there was this math part. And I had to go back, and I had good grades in college and stuff, but I don't remember any of that. I didn't remember any of the geometry and all the other stuff, algebra. I was like, I don't remember this stuff. Yeah, nobody does it. So I go, unless your job has you doing it for something, right?

Starting point is 00:17:26 Nope, if you walked up to them 95% of people that graduated those classes right now, I bet they couldn't tell you shit. So I got- They couldn't tell you shit. Because nobody's using it because what? Sometimes it's like there's a missing dog or your neighbor or something. If somebody shows up with geometry to find a damn missing dog, I'm pointing at them, brother. They got that pup. I look at it like this.

Starting point is 00:17:45 It helps you find ways to solve problems is the way I kind of look at it. That's a good attitude. That's, that's, you know, but I, uh, so the middle section was math. Okay. Now, they do look for certain backgrounds. When I was coming in, if you were an accountant, CPA, that's good, attorney. With you pass the bar, that's good. Former military, intel, foreign language speaking, and diverse.

Starting point is 00:18:09 And I came in under diverse. So four-year degree, three years of experience, but I was a former cop. So that helped if they're looking for that. So they're bringing all types into the FBI. Completely diverse. Yeah. I mean, you got former doctors, former biochemists. Really?

Starting point is 00:18:23 Yeah, it's insane. So it's not just police officers. No. No, especially not in the FBI. Huh. I've never thought of that. I always just feel like it's police and then it's, and they evolve. Like military, yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:34 Yeah, or military, and they evolve into working with the FBI. One of my best friends that went through the academy with me, he was a former Walmart manager, and he smoked the fitness test, and he was a great agent. So, I mean, it's like, yeah, all kinds of backgrounds. Actually, I think that's one of the strongest points of the FBI is their diversity. But sometimes we place people in the wrong places, you know. Yeah. Once they're in, you mean, oh, I could see that.

Starting point is 00:18:58 Like, you got knuckle-drager like me, and you want to stick me on some highfalutin, I don't know, healthcare fraud squad. Yeah. It's not me. Yeah. Yeah. Now, but if you want to put somebody into the healthcare fraud squad,

Starting point is 00:19:11 that's familiar with rolling back prices. Yeah. An accountant or a former medical person, right? Or a former Walmart employee. There you go. There you go. And that's the guy we need. I'm more of the greeter.

Starting point is 00:19:22 Yeah, yeah. I'm that guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like, oh, they got him out here for a reason. you know. Yeah, and sorry, I interrupted you, man. So you're going through the phase one test, right?

Starting point is 00:19:33 Yeah. So there's questions. There's a, there's a, there was basically three parts. But the middle part was all that algebra and geometry and all this stuff. And I mean, I studied. I studied. I studied. But as I walk in, I see, I've already met some people and they're full-blown CPA accountants who've been doing this.

Starting point is 00:19:50 When we walked out of that thing, I saw them going, I don't even know what that was. I think I felt. And I'm like, well, if you fail. I know I failed, man. I'm like, this is your world, man. But I just started just circling stuff when I was running out of time. I don't know that, dude. The law of averages was on my side that day.

Starting point is 00:20:10 And you passed. Pick C. Yeah. Yeah, that's one day. Yeah, that's what you here. Yeah, I guess I did. I don't know if it was something to break you, like to throw you off mentally just to stress you out because then the third part was back into questions again. So, like if you've ever taken.

Starting point is 00:20:26 the MMP 2 for a job, it's MMP2 something. It's like 547 questions. And a lot of places have it. And even our psychological unit has it. And I think you have to take it like once every two years or four years. But I mean, it's like so many different ways to ask the same question. But if you are hiding something under the surface, I don't know, maybe when you get stressed somewhere in there psychologically it's going to slip out on the back end. Oh, that would make sense.

Starting point is 00:20:53 Yeah. Because sometimes it's a simple word, one word changing something. A little change. A little bit of thing, an angle, how, why? So you do find your mother sexy, and you do like harm in small animals. And you are fascinated with fire. Because at the beginning of the test, you weren't, you know? And then they walk you out.

Starting point is 00:21:09 Yeah. Yeah. So I have some hobbies. Yeah. But, no, I love what you're saying, man. The turn of phrase, a little bitty bit can lead to something so different. And also sometimes sometimes just waiting when somebody thinks you're going to talk, just waiting. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:23 And then their energy sometimes is. Oh, yeah. Starts eating them. Yeah, you got to fill the space. I got to say something. Yeah. Yeah. Because what does their silence mean? Is there silence mean something? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:32 You know. And then you start to interpret in your head, what does their silence mean? And that's kind of a crazy. Maybe I wasn't completely truthful. Yeah. And maybe I wasn't completely clothed. You know? Yeah, man.

Starting point is 00:21:45 Wow. Yeah, this is interesting stuff. Thanks for your time today, man. Thank you for having me. Okay. So you get through the testing. You pass that. And then you were in.

Starting point is 00:21:53 When do people go to Quantico? Is that then? Pretty much. I don't know. Because that's what you hear about on all the movies and everything. Yeah. It depends on, I know you have to pass phase two. Okay.

Starting point is 00:22:03 But I can't remember when the polygraph falls in and when the physical fitness test. But basically all that. You're going to go to phase one. You're going to polygraph background, huge background, thorough, thorough background. Because you're going to be going into a job where you could get top secret clearance. So, yeah. It's like, you know, everything. Every credit card you got, any debt you've got.

Starting point is 00:22:24 Do you have to sit and tell some secrets? and stuff about yourself that you didn't want to tell? No, because I'm transparent. That's just me. I mean, I'll just tell them. I'm not going to hold it back. I'm not going to lie. And really, in the FBI, I don't know right now because I didn't work under cash, but I retired

Starting point is 00:22:41 under Ray and I came in under Louis Free. But if you lie under inquiry, and that's recorded, you're kind of dead to us because you can't go testify anymore. You can't go build a case because you're going to have to release the judge. you were caught line, and then the defense is going to eat you apart. So the truth is the only way to get there. Right. So I've seen some people do some, or have read about in quarterly reports, some things

Starting point is 00:23:10 that employees have done, whether they're gun-toters or whether they're professional staff. But in mitigation, if they didn't lie, I mean, they're going to try to get you help and stuff. But then you read the next thing, and it's like, oh, somebody was called to the table on time in attendance fraud, like they were fudging the numbers. Under inquiry, they lied. Dismissed. Fired. And you're like, well, if I've learned anything, don't lie. Don't lie. Don't lie. Wow. And it's crazy that you would then end up in a world where you're going undercover where it's like, okay, now I'm lying. Yeah. Except for now. Now I'm going back to Scott. Yeah.

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Starting point is 00:25:57 for you. Visit BetterHelp.com slash Theo. That's BetterHELP.com slash T-H-E-O. Tell me a little bit about the training for FBI, Scott. So it's pretty standard test. It's like the Cooper Instant. statute standard, but basically when I came in, you had to be able to pass a two-mile run a certain amount of time. You had to be able to do at a sprint course called the shuttle run. You start on your back. You sprint like 25 yards, turn on a cone, back down, back down, that kind of stuff. And then push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups. But that's just the pass-or-fail stuff. And then you get in and you basically, I mean, Quantico, I look at it like the , remember that old 80s movie, the biodome with Pauly Shore and that's what I look at it

Starting point is 00:26:44 like because I have been in that building for four days and realize I have not gotten fresh air. I've not stepped outside this building. Yeah. Yeah. So you can go from, yes, it's it. So you can go from, that's Jefferson right there at the front. That's where I stayed. You can go in and from Jefferson, you go down to the cafeteria.

Starting point is 00:27:02 You get your breakfast and then you go to class. You go to lunch. You go back. You can go to your room, go to the gym, go to the boardroom at night, hit the bar, go back, and you never step foot outside. Wow. And that's our track at the back. different now. Or you know what? No, they did put a building in the middle of it now.

Starting point is 00:27:18 There used to be a nice ropes course and all kinds of stuff. But a lot of running, a lot more running than I ever did. I was a lineman, so. So once you were there, that became a big part of it was the physical conditioning. Yeah, and you're in class all day. You're learning all kinds of stuff. I mean, you're getting legal. You're doing this. And then we're in Hogan's Alley, learning tactics, firearms range, learning how to be a better shooter. What was one of the more unique classes kind of that you took that kind of stood out. I always loved anything forensics.

Starting point is 00:27:47 Like even though we all know how the O.J. Simpson trial turned out and everything, but if you have a forensics person come in and break down exactly what was found at that, it just got screwed up how it was collected, and then the defense did what they were supposed to do. They created doubt in the jury's mind. But some stuff like that, if a forensic person comes in, they break that down on like, this is what we found here. And it's just getting better and better with, like, I forget what it's called. But now they can take your, there's something that's matching up your DNA.

Starting point is 00:28:18 Let's just say they're clearing like a 30-year-old case. Yeah. Because the DNA is there from that original collection before we even knew we were going to be able to test this kind of stuff. And then now they're going back and they can actually pull things. And you know how you kind of like do that like almost like a 23 and me or that genealogy thing? They're doing that. And they can narrow it down to like almost that's it. Testing DNA on cold cases is just code.

Starting point is 00:28:44 We know that. Genetic genealogy. Oh, genetic genealogy. There you go. If Kodas has no match, labs upload the profile to public databases like GED match, I'll tell you this out of the gate. You do GED match. You're going to find some of my family. I got that family, too.

Starting point is 00:29:00 Yeah, dude. I'm first generation law enforcement. First generation for your degree. Bro, a lot of empty diploma frames in our area. My dad dropped down to 10th grade. Did he? And he said he stopped paying attention in the 8th. Oh, 10's good.

Starting point is 00:29:12 Yeah, oh yeah, gee, that was a popular pastime in our area. So they just cleared one. I was putting on training somewhere, and somebody was telling me how they just cleared this case. That's amazing. And it was, they did that. And they were able to use that family genealogy to narrow it down to, oh, my goodness, this is one of the suspects that they interviewed. And this is one. Wow.

Starting point is 00:29:34 So, yeah. So 30 years later, somebody's getting cuffs put on them. Dang, let's do it. I love that, dude. Yeah. I feel like you could feel the timeline of existence, breathe a little deeper when justice is served. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Yeah. I like that. I like a little bit of justice. And so how long is the whole overall training for the, for FBI? FBI, it's somewhere around five months. Sometimes it adds another month, but it's somewhere around five months. And what percentage of people do they eliminate sort of along the way? Or is that, you know, well, it depends.

Starting point is 00:30:03 It's a case-by-case basis. There was a time where I would go back and I would, because I was a firearms instructor, tactical instructor, undercover guy and all that stuff. but I would be back at Quantico with my peers who were in those units. And you'd look at the class and you'd be like, look at the last class and you'd see like half of them failed. I'm like, what is going on? It kind of ebbs and flows. I don't think half failure is normal, but I'm not there every day, so I don't know.

Starting point is 00:30:27 Got it. And when did your undercover work start? Did that start from the FBI? No, it started at the sheriff's office. So once I made Vice and Narcotics Investigator, you have an opportunity to go to undercover techniques or technical surveillance. These are classes that they were put on in Columbia, South Carolina, at the Criminal Justice Academy. And once you get certified in that, then they'd let you go work undercover. But, I mean, just picture me.

Starting point is 00:30:52 Number one, I don't want to mess up. Number two, you're around a bunch of older guys and gals who are seasoned in street-level buys and all this stuff. And I'm just trying to – you're going to have to show up. You've got, you know, it's not up to them to like me. It's up to me to get them to like me, right? Got it. Yeah, you've got to ingratiate yourself for sure. Yeah, and it's a tough crowd.

Starting point is 00:31:12 It usually is. Military law enforcement, we're pretty tough crowds. So imagine me, number one, not wanting to screw up. Number two, being scared at death. And number three, thinking about them watching it and not wanting to screw up in front of them, too. So my Gary Ward and some of those people, you know. But, yeah, I mean, the first cracker I bought,

Starting point is 00:31:33 I was probably 275 pounds with low body fat, you know, just jacked. And I'm like, I don't look like I smoke crack unless I just started. I just started back, you know. I buy a cracker, I can drive around for 15 minutes and come back and buy another one. I'm not the guy smoking it, you know? And so something like that, that's a real instance. You either have to come back and buy another one.

Starting point is 00:31:55 And would you have to seem cracked out when you came back around? Well, what I was told, because I never smoked crack, was that it would wear off in 15 minutes. That's why they didn't care if you came back and bought again. So, yeah. But they were probably giving me little slivers of sense. or something, who knows. But once I did it, the bug got me. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:13 Like the undercover bug. I don't know what it was. It's not lying. It's not like, you know, I used to, like, it's the infiltration. Yeah, I mean, getting to know people. But during the book process, I can't remember what I used to term it as. But I just realized, I go, holy crap, I just love connecting with people. Wow.

Starting point is 00:32:30 I don't care. Even if I get called out at three in the morning because I was considered a good interviewer. So, you know, to either get information, a confession or, you know, flip them. and maybe they work with us. And I would go, and I didn't mind getting called out like that. And I love it. The crazier, the better. I mean, rich, poor, big, tall, smart, dumb.

Starting point is 00:32:50 I love it all. Did you guys have groups that would, like, say you go on, like, get put on an assignment. Is that what it's called, basically? Yeah. For undercover. Yep. And they could be very smaller or they could be bigger ones.

Starting point is 00:33:00 Yes. Deeper or shallow ones. Yep. Do they, do you go to, like, wardrobe and stuff like that? Like, do they have all of that? Like, who creates your backstory? you. How does all that happen? I say ultimately, ultimately it's on you.

Starting point is 00:33:12 And what I teach you. Oh, I know, I know, right? You know, you go, I believe, I did you used to call the unit. I'd go, when are you going to call me for? Because I was big country, even though I'm not big anymore. But they'd be like, I'd call headquarters and I'd go, when are you going to let me do one of those Wall Street jobs? You know, those big old tycoon jobs, and they're like, no.

Starting point is 00:33:30 And I'm like, I can say buy, sell, you know, put a big hat on and have that boss hog, longhorn on the front of my car. rolling in the and they're like no and i got fine because it's my skill set my skill set leads me to back woods with meth heads and white supremacist and whatever else you know oh yeah dude those are some of my neighbors probably um what what were some of those early spots that you got put into um well early on at the sheriff's office it was the you know you got by a crack rock which was terrifying to me and then it might be picked yeah because i never bought crack i'm pulling down there man i I barely cracked the window, you know?

Starting point is 00:34:05 I was just like, they go, what you want? Because they come up around the car. You're going to go, what you want? I'm like, I want a 20, you know. He's like, roll down the window, you idiot. You know, I'm like, I'm sliding money through the. You're like, let me Venmo you. They didn't have no Venmo back then.

Starting point is 00:34:21 That'd have been good, though. What's your cash at, bro? You know, I'll send it to you right now. Oh, dang, man. That's pretty good. And then type in, what's it for drugs? Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:32 Crack. Yeah, but that was the odd stuff there, but I started cutting my teeth. But when I got in the FBI, my first long term, I mean, I was doing some cameo stuff, which a cameo is basically what it sounds like, like on a TV show. You're there just to help somebody else, or it's a quick, it's not even a full-blown undercover operation. It's just going to be one meet. Like you an example of that. Like a buy bust, or we're going to deliver, L.A. takes off a huge load of dope.

Starting point is 00:35:00 It's supposed to be coming to New York. So L.A. gets on the phone with FBI, New York. We're like, okay, what does it look like? We want measurements, all this. We would go build the exact same shipment, and then we would deliver it to where it was supposed to go so we can get the bad guys on that end. No.

Starting point is 00:35:14 And that's just a one time. I'm in a truck with NYPD detective, and we're just dirtied up and going to deliver. So in that way, were you able to bust both ends of the... Yeah, yeah. What is the reason that they would do it like that as opposed to just showing up at the actual meet? Because sometimes you don't know if it's getting delivered

Starting point is 00:35:31 to a fictitious address, or where is it going to go? But we were delivering it, and it depends on the assistant in the United States attorney because everybody's a little different. So maybe this one says, this is all I need to charge them. Somebody might be a little bit more thorough. They go, no, I want to actually know that they open the box. Well, how can we do that?

Starting point is 00:35:49 Well, let's build something. So when we walk away, it's not enough that they take possession. We want to walk away and know that they pop the box before we hit it. And how would you guys know that? Would you guys put cameras in the box? Or something. Some tech guy is going to do something. I mean, there's so much technology now.

Starting point is 00:36:04 I mean, I don't know what they can do. Yeah. But, of course, my people watch TV and think we can do stuff we can anyway. Is that true? Well, I don't know. It's getting better. I saw, I've seen some things since I retired. I'm not going to say what they are because it's tradecraft, but it really made me want to go back undercover just to use it for a recording device.

Starting point is 00:36:19 I was like, I cannot believe. I'm like, you know. Well, they just had those SUVs that they bought. I think they had Israeli technology. And I'm, I don't if you saw that, there was these SUVs that allegedly can drive by an area and read your phone, basically. Can you bring that up, Trevin? It's probably like if you're on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and it's pulling stuff off of your phones.

Starting point is 00:36:39 Israel's Palantir Rival is selling $1 million spy vans to U.S. cops. Is this a recent story? Because this was like three days ago. Oh, yeah, this is good. There we go. Let me see. Cognite, which sells technology to snoop on phone locations, largely in Israel and Europe,

Starting point is 00:36:54 is making inroads in America by tricking out trucks with spy tech. Texas State Police's purchase of four brand-new Chevy Tahos, This March was unusual, not just because of the staggering $4.5 million price tag, but because the vehicles were kidded out with technology that could monitor the locations of nearby cell phones. Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognite, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it that enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity, whether they're owned by a suspect in a case or not. Huh.

Starting point is 00:37:28 You're going to have some issues there. Yeah, it sounds like... I'm listening to what you're reading, but I'm telling you you've got the Fourth Amendment protection. So if I'm going to be able to track you at a minimum, I'm probably going to have to get a court order. A lot of places, a lot of times now you have to get a full-blown search warrant. Do you think, though, that maybe they're buying these in advance

Starting point is 00:37:49 and they know that the laws are going to change? That could be, but I can tell you right now, if somebody's coming by and pulling your stuff and they're actually tracking you, I mean, like you can, like, say if you've got a scanner and you're riding through apartment complex. Back in the day, you could pick up different cell phones and stuff. Is that, I mean, is that a Title III wiretap? I mean, if you're using it for evidence, it is.

Starting point is 00:38:11 But for us, like, that's a huge invasion of privacy. For me, everybody who listens to your phone. A PIN, register, trap, and trace, that's just going to let me track your phone and maybe see where you are off of towers. I'll get to see phone numbers coming in and calling in and calling out and texting and texting out, but I can't read. Got it.

Starting point is 00:38:30 I can't read the content. Got it. If you start getting into that kind of stuff, like if somebody puts a camera in your house, that's a, that's a title three. And it's not easy to get. It's not TV. It's not like,

Starting point is 00:38:41 hey, I need to be on this phone in five minutes. It's different. We can now, you can track a phone in an emergency, or there are some, maybe it's harder, especially if you got a burner phone,

Starting point is 00:38:53 but there are things like if somebody's missing or it's a threat to life or maybe a cop. goes down and we're trying or somebody. Amber alert. Yeah, we're trying to do that. That's, that's a, we might be able to expedite it a little bit, but you're still going to get some type of order.

Starting point is 00:39:08 Got it. And now sometimes, it seems like, uh, that police or FBI, they may use these tactics for the moment, knowing that they're not, just to, to behoove them to advance in whatever that moment is to have strategy, knowing that it may not hold up in court later. Well, I wouldn't do that. Uh, really. for me Oh

Starting point is 00:39:31 But does it make sense what I'm saying? I know it does It does but The way I've always done it Like do it now Ask permission later Like that's what I'm saying For forgiveness

Starting point is 00:39:40 Right Ask for forgiveness It seems like I could see that Being a part of maybe this strategy I don't know Well That would be an on the spot

Starting point is 00:39:47 Kind of thing But generally Or let's just say For the most part I would not I'm retired I'm not bonded Right now

Starting point is 00:39:56 But I wouldn't build a bad case or do something like that because that's a violation. But if there was a gray area, if this is just me personally speaking. I'm not saying it's covered, it's not covered by policy. But there have been horrific cases where young girl goes missing. I'm kicking myself for not remembering her name right now,

Starting point is 00:40:22 but she goes missing in Florida and everybody's looking for her. So you go out and you start canvassing the neighborhood. Well, you might look and you can see. hey man, we've got like registered sex offenders right here where she went missing. Well, that's the first doors I'm knocking on. Sorry if I'd offend you, but you're a registered sex offender. Yeah. And, uh, it's your trade.

Starting point is 00:40:39 Yeah. And they, after the fact, they found her, she was dead. She was buried alive with her, with her stuffed animal. But in the original canvas, they went and talked to the guy at the trailer that was holding her, but they never got in. So me, that I would violate. I'm getting in there. If you feel it.

Starting point is 00:41:04 Yeah, I'm getting, then you don't have a problem. You're not holding anything. You might if I walk in here and look? And if you say no, well, okay, well, we'll find a way to get in here. Right. But I'm not leaving. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:41:17 Have you had instances like that where you had to trust your instincts? Oh, yeah. Yeah. As a case agent. Well, even as an undercover. But as an undercover, you're in a situation and you're, you're basically playing chess. You're trying to be five steps ahead of them,

Starting point is 00:41:29 and they're thinking you're also like tennis. Like, I'm serving it to you, and I have no idea which way you're hitting it back, but I'm over here going, you know, I'm that goalie. I don't know what you're throwing, but I'm trying to be ready. As a case agent out there trying to call shots

Starting point is 00:41:45 right there on the spot, you know. I had a case in McAllen, Texas, where I was at for six and a half years, and what it was is that, The, the, they were undocumented aliens being smuggled in. We get the call because the undocumented family is already in Virginia. They had paid for two sisters and a daughter to come through. And what happened is the smuggling organization got them across the river.

Starting point is 00:42:15 So you get them across the river, at least in Rio Grande Valley. You get them across the river and then they're usually at a staging location, a house or something. Because now they've got to get picked up by a coyote, a walker, and they're going to be handed off, and now they're going to be walked through the brush around the checkpoints to where they'll be picked up and then carried to wherever. Where this one happened was,

Starting point is 00:42:33 one of the sisters was physically and mentally challenged, and they left her in the brush to die. They left her in the brush to die. And Border Patrol found her. She was 16, but they couldn't figure out a lot, so they called Child Protective Services. They came over and were able to figure out, you've got family.

Starting point is 00:42:52 They actually figured out the other family was in, Virginia, and they were now being extorted. They got them across the river, got them into a house, and now they're calling saying, hey, we already dumped one of your sisters, your five-year-old daughter's sick, and we're not getting her anything to make her better unless you pay us more money. So they're extorting them, even though they've paid. And in my mind, I think that's truly a victim, even though undocumented alien is an illegal charge, but I'm not working undocumented alien. I'm working kidnapping extortion. Well, yeah, especially if, I mean, I think there's a moral code inside of a lot of us.

Starting point is 00:43:24 Yeah. Where you have to decide what's going on. Yeah. You know, and sometimes you can't even decide. It's just a built-in thing. You're like, this is how I'm going to operate in this space, right? It's a very human thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:43:34 So in that case, particularly, we're probably running for three, four days nonstop because we're trying to find this phone that they're calling on, that the bad guys are using the call, the family. I've already hit FBI up in Virginia and say, hey, can you go over and give them recording devices, all that, all the stuff they need. and it was a Honduran family. And about that third day, we're out. And all we know is that the phone, like I said,

Starting point is 00:44:01 just location stuff. It's not, I'm not giving away. Right. You're not getting text messages. You just getting some location tags or something? But it's not like, it's not always pinpoint. You know, it's not like, hey, that's it moving right there 10 feet away. That's not at least when I was working at then.

Starting point is 00:44:15 And we know pretty much that the phone is somewhere in the store. And they're like, hey, it's moving. and then at the same time, four different people come out, and they're all walking into the cars. And we've been up for three days straight, and we're all, most of us are parents, which doesn't matter if you're parent or not, you're still going to be like,

Starting point is 00:44:34 but you're getting personally involved in this case because it's a five-year-old girl. And I had to make the call. And they're like, what are you? Because I was leading it, and they're like, which one? And I'm like, look, I'm going, oh, son of a, I'm going, okay, here we are, here we are, here, here, right.

Starting point is 00:44:48 Yeah, it's like, the mass singer or whatever. Yeah, I'm like, come on, Lord. And I'm like, hit me. And then I'm like, let's go with that one. And we follow it away and get to a point to where that one stops. And then we were able to say, yep, the phone moved and it's somewhere close to there. So then we go in and hit the house. But the house didn't have the undocumented people in it.

Starting point is 00:45:06 It had the guy, had the ledgers, had all the names. Of course, the phone was in there. They were trying to flush stuff and everything. We get in there and cut the phones on. And I call the bad guy phone and it rings. And I go, it's you. So we do a long interrogation, and luckily the guy broke and took us to the stash house. And we recovered the girl and her sister.

Starting point is 00:45:29 Amen. And of course, we're all crying. Like, all the grown men, my friend who's the female board patrol agent, she's like, she's like, all of us are like, you know, because we put the young girl on the phone with her Honduran mother. And she's like, mommy. And, you know, and she still had her schoolgirl outfit on it. Man, they went to dry. They want to dry.

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Starting point is 00:48:35 Yeah, but think about it. Say you're, I'm like, I've interviewed, not this, not that case, but you're interviewing somebody that's nicknames El Ocho. It's because the cartel's already cut two of his fingers off. They've been tortured. They've been all that. me yelling at them, how am I going to work this to where I can get something out of you? I can't chop your fingers off.

Starting point is 00:48:55 Right. We have a Constitution. Yeah. That would be frowned upon. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, you've hoped to play by the rules.

Starting point is 00:49:05 Yeah. Did you see some pretty severe stuff that came across the board? Like, how intense is some of those scenarios and stuff down there? Like, you hear so much about the cartels and, like, the level of violence that's, like, almost something that we can't even maybe fathom sometimes. A lot of people don't. They value life a little differently. I'm not saying Hispanics because somebody's going to say,

Starting point is 00:49:29 oh, you're saying all Hispanic. No, I'm not. I love. I mean, I've got tons of Latino friends. But the cartel, at the time I was down there, OZL Cardenas was running it, which once Department of Justice took him off, it actually created a vacuum.

Starting point is 00:49:45 Because now everybody's like, well, who's going to run the Gulf Cartel? And then you got the enforcers, the Saitas that are saying, you know what? We're the ones that kidnap everybody in torture them. We're going to run it. And then you got maybe the government saying they're going to do it. And then a Senuloa cartel comes in and says, we're taking over. And then you just end up with a bunch of heads and bags and vans.

Starting point is 00:50:02 Really? Yeah. I mean, it's you would. Is that a real thing, heads and bags and vans? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you, like, it was getting bad enough to where, this was shortly after I left, but it was getting bad enough to where, because everybody's vying for the territory.

Starting point is 00:50:15 If you're in a territory and you have a decent vehicle, like it looks like you've got some kind of money because there's really not a lot of middle class you're either low or high and you're going through the wrong territory, neighborhood, whatever, and maybe it's the satea's going, well, you're not one of us

Starting point is 00:50:31 or are you one of the Senuloa cartel and they pull it over and I mean, yeah, and there's been innocent bystanders lost, you know, because they didn't know any better and, you know. Man, almost invested in a damn zoo down there in Senaloa. Yeah. We're a buddy of mine.

Starting point is 00:50:46 We almost bought into a zoo down there. Well, I mean, I've never been to Cineula. So there's probably like a lot of places that are outside the United States. There's going to be, well, it's just like in the United States. It's going to be good and bad, yeah. Oh, yeah, my friend Andrew just went fishing down there. And he said he had one of the best experiences of his whole life, some of the greatest fishing he's ever done. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:05 What smuggling did you see? Did you see any human trafficking? We hear about that term so much. What did you see? So when I got there, I was working drugs. Obviously, you're on the border, but you got every federal agency there. Legacy Ice, DEA, ATF, us, FBI. DTF, if there's some hotties, huh?

Starting point is 00:51:24 Do you? Yeah. I saw all kinds of stuff. When I got down there, I was working drugs at first. I mean, it could be 50 kilos of cocaine and a tire. You can see that much? What's the most you ever saw, man? I personally, probably get into that 100 kilo mark.

Starting point is 00:51:44 How much is that? Show me with your hands. Well, a kilo is 2.2 pounds. So 100 of those. Wow. I saw two eight balls once. I know. Way bigger than that.

Starting point is 00:51:53 Indestine. It was indestine. Yeah, two eight balls. I used to buy them five at a time. Undercover. Undercover. Yeah. All the time, yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:01 Dane. But you get deeper and you get into the more serious. Now you're getting up to like ounces. You're getting up to kilo buys. So you'd see real, that much cocaine. You saw real. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:11 Yeah. But that's nothing. Was it hard not to smile when you saw it? No. You smile after the 10. takedown, and then you get the photo. You go up there and do your trophy shot, you know. But that's nothing.

Starting point is 00:52:26 Just picture if you were working in Miami. And like I'm saying, where I worked, man, 100 kilos. But you go down the border, well, man, you can trip over 500 pounds, just riding up and down the river. Yeah. Because it's so porous and stuff. But the biggest weed seizure I got was 5,000 pounds. Wow.

Starting point is 00:52:44 We literally filled up two trucks. I mean, my truck was loaded. I was sitting in the seat like this. I mean, I couldn't even, it was just packed and we've loaded another truck. It was a lot. Did you even get a buzz driving with it? Because you smell it?

Starting point is 00:52:56 Was it that strong of a smell? Yeah, it's strong, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh... Dude, one time me and my friend Billy Conforto, RIP, and he was one of the, he was one of the first gay male prize fighters in America.

Starting point is 00:53:08 But he, um, we got taken out of a car. We had some, uh, weed on us, the cops pulled us over like, like shit. So we put it in our front, like, in our paint. And the cop was like, I'm going to sit y'all in the cruiser while I searched the vehicle. So he sat us in there and we just had it. Was it wreaking though? Huh?

Starting point is 00:53:25 Which did you smell it? I don't know why he's thought that. But it was like, well, he just put us in there. We had it in our, so now we're sitting with it in the cruiser. He searched the car and then just said, okay, nothing to see there. Put you guys back in it. You guys take it easy. There you go.

Starting point is 00:53:39 So I don't know what made him thinking. Maybe he did smell it originally. But anyway. We got lucky that day. Yeah. We got lucky. And we didn't do too much. You know, we weren't doing anything really.

Starting point is 00:53:48 heavy of it there. And I think back then, if you were gay, you had to be high to even just get through it. It was a different time. Yeah. If you're prize fighting too. Yeah. But anyway, what were you talking about? So, so I've seen a lot of the dope stuff, but just picture, if you're in Miami, like I just told you 100 kilos and you think that's a lot, well, what if you bust up in the hole of a ship and you've got 2,000 kilos? I mean, you see that stuff. And I'm like, I've never seen 2,000, but I've seen, I've seen some big stacks. Does it get competitive to be on a big bus? Yeah, sure.

Starting point is 00:54:20 Friendly competition. Or, I call it friendly. You know, D-E-A versus FBI, yeah, we always bus chops. Yeah. And you're working cases together. But then I switch to alien smuggling. Because at that point in time, in McAllen, well, I guess in the Bureau, it was becoming a serious topic to look at special interest alien smuggling.

Starting point is 00:54:42 And it's not just, you're not saying, hey, I'm looking for the normal, human trafficking, we are looking for people being smuggled in from threat countries. So like your threat countries, Russia, China. And why would they be being smuggled in? Like, what is... Well, that's what we're trying to figure out. Got it.

Starting point is 00:55:02 So you just... Are they up to... Are they going to come in here with nefarious plans? Or are they legitimately trying to get out of where they're at? Is it... To a better life. Got it. It's interesting to me that, like, that that would be kind of an assignment for you guys, right?

Starting point is 00:55:16 or like that would come down as part of the detail. Yeah. But then at the same time, you would have the government that would like lackadaisically, it would seem, allow people to come into the country. Right? Like it seems like they're trying to play both sides of the scale there. Yeah, I don't like it.

Starting point is 00:55:33 Did it ever feel to you like the government was starting some of the problems that you guys were then being hired to go and solve? Like, did it ever? Well, ATFs Fast and Furious, that would be a yes. I mean, you know, there's plenty of documentaries out there and some good books. Oh, I'm not even familiar with that. Fast and Furious. That's when they...

Starting point is 00:55:55 Or the movie. No, no, no, no, no. That was their Operation Fast and Furious where they were... It was alleged that they were allowing guns to go to the cartel. And then those guns would show back up. Yeah, those guns would show back up. And one of those guns killed a Border Patrol agent. Wow.

Starting point is 00:56:16 But you're smuggling. So look at it like this. And I'm not trying to bash anybody. No, it doesn't seem like it. I'm asking you. Everybody's got, every agency has their black eyes. But just look at it this way. If I released a kilo of cocaine into the streets and it came from me, an FBI agent,

Starting point is 00:56:34 anybody gets sick, hurt, killed over that. That's my fault. That's a liability. So I'm looking at it the same way with fully automatic weapons and stuff. Yeah. I just know that, I know as a case agent. working what I've worked, how hard it is to get approvals for anything close to that. So it was a little dumbfounded at how.

Starting point is 00:56:53 How that worked out? How the heck that happened, you know. Let me just so our listeners know about it. Operation Fast and Fure is a controversial 2009 and 2011 Bureau of Alcohol, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Sting Operation used a gunwalking tactic, letting illicit firearms pass to Mexican cartels to track high-level leaders, which fail when tracked weapons were lost and used in violent crimes.

Starting point is 00:57:15 Wow. they let them through to be able to kind of maybe, I guess they would tag them or find some way to try follow them so they could know who these people were that were getting them the high levels but then those were used to kill our own people. Yeah. Led by the Phoenix Arizona field office under Project Gun Runner, um, allowed straw buyers to illegally purchase thousands of weapons with the intent to trace them to a major cartel leaders. Um, agents were ordered not to interdict or seize weapons during purchases, losing track of roughly 2,000 firearms. They were exposed after the, Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010 by rifles tied to the operation.

Starting point is 00:57:52 Resulted in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress in 2012 for withholding documents through a Department of Justice report, though a Department of Justice report cleared of direct knowledge of the tactic. So this was happening while you were working. Yeah. And did that scare you? And I'm probably going to get a lot of hate from ATF. I'm sorry about that. I love ATF.

Starting point is 00:58:13 I got a lot of friends at ATF. Well, I have a lot of friends that do a lot of things. and it doesn't mean that their bosses or the people above them might not be having some separate interests at times. Right, and the FBI were an easy target too. They can name plenty of things that that organization is done too. But yeah, I'm just thinking off the top of my head, like, and you know, you got to be careful because, like, let me use an example.

Starting point is 00:58:37 Like, I'm a vice and narcotics investigator. So in Greenville, South Carolina, at the time I was there, it was illegal to gamble. Okay. So maybe we identify three major gambling operations. Well, maybe we pop one of the ones or go and interview them and flip them, but the head of that one is now giving us information on the other two, and we're working the other two. But you don't want a Hawaii Bulger situation where you're letting your source go and wreak havoc for free while it's always a, you know what I mean? It's a balance.

Starting point is 00:59:04 Yeah. And that's why when we do stuff like that, if you're providing information, we let you know what you can and can't do. and I've told many, many sources that I've had for 28 years of career, I'll be like, look, if you do this, I cannot take up for you at all. But if you call me before it happens, I can take up. You know what I mean? It's kind of that thing. Understood.

Starting point is 00:59:23 Oh, wow. Yeah. So when dealing with informants, this has got to be pretty fascinating. You dealt with a lot of informants? A bunch. For me, operating in informant for me is a lot like undercover, and they mesh. Because when I'm an undercover, I'm essentially being a source for another FBI. agent, it's just that I'm not a criminal. I don't have a felon on my record. I'm actually a bonded

Starting point is 00:59:46 law enforcement officer. But I'm still going in and getting the information. I'm still getting the recorded stuff. I'm still that person. So for me, when I'm dealing with sources, I go, you're doing what I do on other cases, but I'm asking you to do it for me. First of all, what people in like towns and regular towns in America are actually end up being like informants or narcs or whatever? Because, dude, when I was in school, you always hear like, Rick is a a narc or whatever. You don't say. NARK. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Dude, Rick, bro, Ricky, it would be like one kid, like wore the wrong PE outfit and were like, that guy's a fucking NARC.

Starting point is 01:00:17 Like, NARC was the biggest thing, bro, and people were, and sometimes you'd even find somebody who got a snitch. Yeah, snitch who got a little card

Starting point is 01:00:25 from like the local police department that said they were helping them and stuff. Like every now and then they had like this like, I don't even think it was laminated, bro. That bitch got wet and it didn't exist. Yeah. But what types of people like in towns are actually,

Starting point is 01:00:40 are the first types of people you would get as informants for certain things? Or is that not even a real thing? Or like at a high school? I'm just trying to think where, like... I would say it depends on what violation you're working. Okay. If I'm working gangs

Starting point is 01:00:53 and I'm working transnational organized crime, which is what I worked for a long time, well then maybe I'm going to try to find and develop a source that can give me information on this, like this car, this, whatever, this group that's been bringing in drugs that we've heard about.

Starting point is 01:01:08 Or what if it's multiple robber? We're trying to find somebody that knows something about, have you heard any scatter, any scuttlebutt? Maybe you talk to ladies of the night, some prostitutes escorts and say, hey, if you know, you know, things like that. But you can also be a highfalutin case. I'm saying highfalutin because look at me. I'm not highfalutin.

Starting point is 01:01:29 But it could be like an espionage case. It could be like a white collar case. And maybe, maybe the sources for those are very upstanding members of society. and you can go talk to them and say, hey, I was wondering if you could give me some information. They'd be like, I would love to give you some information. Me, I'm talking, when I say developing sources when I was working, I'm like, I'm talking about going to somebody that you may never would hang out with, that you may think is a piece of trash or not, but those people have never liked law enforcement. And I'm talking to that person. And after a conversation, I've heard things, you hear things like, man, for a cop, you know, for a cop, you're not that bad.

Starting point is 01:02:08 or I didn't know there were cops like you. So you just, it's, it's on you. But yeah, I mean, that's the way I would do it. And I do think it goes hand in hand. But if you don't know, in my opinion, if you don't know how to develop and operate sources, I don't think you're probably going to be an awesome undercover. Did you ever have to pick, like, disguises or was there like a war? Like, yeah, did somebody help, like, fit you for a scene?

Starting point is 01:02:34 Did they give you a photo or like a lookbook? Like, hey, here's what you can wear and not wear? were there like, was there ever a thing where you couldn't wear a certain patch? Like if it was like a certain gang affiliation or something. Like how did you manage that? Take me in a little bit of that. It really comes down to the intelligence of the case team that's bringing you in. Hopefully they've done their due diligence.

Starting point is 01:02:54 And as an undercover, you can ask those questions. Now, is there a wardrobe department? No, but do we have things in the undercover program where maybe you could get some jewelry and stuff like that? Yeah, we've got that. But as far as like wearing the wrong patch or not, that's going to be. be, again, ultimately it's on me as the undercover. But if I want to know, if I, like if I ask for a weapon that doesn't come back to law enforcement,

Starting point is 01:03:22 well, I shouldn't just take their word for it. I probably need to run that number in NCIC to make sure it doesn't come back to FBI Quantico because I've been on cases that that happened. Like what does that mean? Like it means like, so you got serial numbers on your weapons. If they check that in NCIC, it's going to come back to something. Well, sometimes bad people have contacts that can run that kind of stuff, whether it's through corruption or whatever. Oh, I see.

Starting point is 01:03:43 So if your weapon has your number on it and they see that. And they run it and it says, oh, this is a Glock 22, FBI Quantico. Right. And that's how you. So I was undercover and I had requested a fully covert weapon, whatever. It's supposed to be working with ATF and everything. And I was probably six months in to the undercover. Somehow I was on the call with Quantico.

Starting point is 01:04:07 asking how we get the way. It's the drone out, but basically the guy's like, whoa, at that point in time, he goes, we really don't have any covert weapon. I looked, I said, go run this weapon right now, through the trainee, and they ran it and it's at FBI Quantico, and I'm like, I'm like, bro. I mean, I could have just carried my normal weapon.

Starting point is 01:04:27 Yeah. That goes back to Quantico, too, but it really is on you. But for me, I'll tell you what I have done. If I go in and I meet a source, I'll ask them, Like sometimes my beard's this long and a long hair, which is getting less and less now. I'm going to be thinning out here even more soon. Looks healthy, man. But you go, the thing is they'll go, I'll ask them, hey, I was on an undercover.

Starting point is 01:04:55 Meet the person. We talk for hours. I'll come back and meet them again because I'm trying to figure out, hey, are my the right fit? Is this going to work? Because we're going to be basically undercover. Yeah. We're basically going to be undercover together. And I'll say, does this work?

Starting point is 01:05:06 and they would look and go, nah, man, that's too dirty. We're rednecks, but we're clean-cut rednecks. And I said, well, what do you do? I said, how about like a nice goatee? Is that a normal haircut? They're like, yeah, that'd be perfect, man, button-up shirt, untucked.

Starting point is 01:05:18 I'm like, cool. Now, I'm just doing that so I don't look like a way out of place. I'm mirroring them. Got it. But for me, I always stuck really close to who I was. I was always Scott, different last name, but I may or may not have played football in college. I may or may not be a musician and a singer,

Starting point is 01:05:38 may or may not be married with kids for your degree, but you can bet most likely I ride motorcycles and I lift weights. Got it. And then you just kind of go from there. Because my jokes are literally the same. I'm just twisting them because it's real to me. Yeah. I tell the true story.

Starting point is 01:05:55 Have you ever been in an instance where you weren't even the best choice for the role, but you ended up in it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can word it a right case wrong, undercover, right undercover wrong case. But I had a buddy of mine and he was running, he's an undercover as well, but he was the case agent. And he was running this undercover on like a dirty doctor selling pills or giving pills for sex, stuff like that. The idea was, because of my background, to come in and be the closer to get this doctor on drug trafficking, right?

Starting point is 01:06:27 Got it. And I came in and I basically said I'm a competitive power lifter, but I'm getting older. Bills are getting tight and I need something for the pain kind of thing. I was trying to to do that because they had already had a bunch of reporting of like this this doctor like you know a woman goes in for a visit she he prescribes her a bunch of pills or whatever she leaves and there's a used condom in the trash can got it and you're like okay all right and then maybe somebody reports hey this doctor tried to do this to me or something like that so now i'm coming in as a new patient and i knew a lot of the pill mill stuff because i was working it as a case agent as well um but um yeah i was just the wrong guy. Like I did the first meet and then the second time I came back, he starts telling me,

Starting point is 01:07:09 well, you know, Scott, sometimes people come in here and they get these and they go sell them on the street. And I was like, I never said I was going to do that. I said, I'm in pain, man. He's like, what? And I left the meeting that day and I went to hand over the recording of the case agent. He was my friend. And I told him, I said, I'm not the right guy, man. You don't need to send me back in there. I said, I don't know what it is, but he does not like me. It just wasn't fit. Yeah. Can you feel when something doesn't fit? Yeah, yeah. Because if you feel it, yeah, you can feel it, especially if you're trying to force it, you know.

Starting point is 01:07:41 And I tried a little bit that day with that guy, but he was not something about me. I don't know whether he thought I was a snitch or a fed or something or something, but he didn't, maybe he didn't feel he could control me. But I was not the right guy for the job. What are some things as in it undercovered? It's like general rule of thumb that you don't want to do. It's like, do you not want to talk much? Like, is there like, you know, I guess, is it case by case basis, I guess?

Starting point is 01:08:04 Yeah, I mean, it depends on, I mean, there's actually Attorney General guidelines on what we can and can do. Like, we can't be involved in an act of violence unless it's self-defense. You can't, like, instigate the crime, you know, because that'd be entrapment. You know what I mean? Instigate and run the crime, and then all of a sudden, no, now you're under arrest, you know? Have there ever been romantic things that happen along the way where it's like, there's almost temptation for that? Like, where you met somebody, you're like, well, shit, I'm spending half my days in this environment, you know? I've been in situations where, yeah, but you don't do that.

Starting point is 01:08:40 You don't do that. I've seen other things where, you know, maybe people fall in love. Just think about it like this. If you've got my luck and I'm doing a deep undercover and I'm at this bar and you start hitting on me and I actually is a single man and we end up hooking up and dating my luck, that's going to end up being the target sister or something. You know what I mean? Is that frowned upon? Can you legally do that, though? No, it'd be a policy violation for sure.

Starting point is 01:09:07 Okay, got it. Yeah, it'd be a policy violation. Now, maybe in like, if you go super eye spy, I don't know, you know, I don't know all the CIA's rules. I don't know MI5 and MI6's rules, but yeah, that would be, it would just be a bad foundation, period. Even if that person ended up not being, I'd rather you, I'd rather you bring in your real wife who isn't also an undercover FBI agent. Yeah. Then y'all just be you, you know, if you got that. Do you think that most of us interact with undercover officers or agents within our lives without even realizing it?

Starting point is 01:09:45 I wouldn't say that because literally, like in the biker world, they call it, like you got the 1% or biker clubs. They say that if you're an undercover in law enforcement, you're a 1% or because there's like 1% of law enforcement that does undercover work. I see. So you don't think most of us have interacted. active probably with an undercover agent without realizing it. You might have, based on some of your history, you know what I mean? Depending on where I'm at, I might have, but, you know. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:10 I'm surprised we haven't met. I know, right. But if I was at the, if I was at the Oak Ridge Laboratory, no, I'm probably not running into an undercover, I don't think, you know. I don't know, maybe you can be, if you're trying to sell, you know, classified material, then, yeah. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't. I don't walk around like that, yeah.

Starting point is 01:10:29 But it's not that common that most of us just regularly. people have interacted with the undercover agent in our life? You don't think so? I don't think so. Got it. But I don't think paranoid either. There are some people like, what if everybody in this room is an intelligence officer? I'm like, what if they are?

Starting point is 01:10:42 Right. They're trying to get information. I'm trying to get information. Buy me a drink. Yeah. You know? Pay for this steak. Yeah, what is a one percent?

Starting point is 01:10:52 You hear about that term a lot, and that's a gang, a Niger gang? Motorcycle clubs. If you are considered a one-percenter motorcycle club, let's see, after Vietnam War, and everybody should, well, I don't know about these days. Who knows if they know about Vietnam War, but they would come in, soldiers were coming back, and they weren't treated very well. And there was no kind of a transition thing, you know,

Starting point is 01:11:14 or decompression. And a lot of the motorcycle clubs, I mean, they started back in World War II and stuff like that, but a lot of these motorcycle clubs were forming, and they were doing some, you know, rowdy stuff. So the president of the American Motor American Motorcycle Association, I think is what it was called,

Starting point is 01:11:34 comes out and does this media blitz to say, hey, 99% of all motorcycle riders are good law-abiding citizens. So they took that as a badge of honor and said, we're then we're the 1%. We're 1-percenters, and it's a patch on there. On there, yeah. So you see 1-percenter,

Starting point is 01:11:53 you're going to see the big ones, Hell's Angels, outlaws, Mongols, So they like to be the out. They like to be the, well, we're not the one. We're the, we're the non-law about it. We're doing our own thing. Yeah. I like that.

Starting point is 01:12:03 So am I saying? Yeah. That's the patch right there. Yeah. Everybody always asks it, you know, they're like, well, are you saying all one-percenter biker clubs are criminals? I know, but it kind of goes with being a one-percenter. I mean, you're not.

Starting point is 01:12:15 Yeah, if you're not. I mean, I'm not saying that means you got to go break the law, but you're definitely not. It's just saying you got an edge. Yeah. You don't care about the law, basically. Yeah, you like a little, or you like to. You got some of your own laws as well. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:29 That's what I think. A one percenter. Man, it's all interesting. Because some of these terms I've heard before, and it's nice to just kind of get to like hear them in the use of the world that they're from. Yes. Take me into your experience with the outlaws, right? That's a biker gang you were involved with where you went undercover.

Starting point is 01:12:45 Yes. That was the longest one I did, two years. Okay. I've done like, if I look back in my career, I can be like, yeah, there was a year and a half case. That was a year and a half case. You'd go where the case takes you a lot of times. or the case ends because something happened. They're like, we're not doing this, like something,

Starting point is 01:13:01 like somebody got hurt or something. But for the outlaws, I was already a certified undercover. I had already done several undercovers in the Bureau, but I had all the state and local experience, too. And I was already role-playing and helping at the undercover school that we have. And this is in South Carolina? No, no, no, no. By the time I was doing that, I was living in McAllen, Texas. Okay, got it.

Starting point is 01:13:29 Yeah. So when I got hired out of the FBI or I got hired out of South Carolina for the FBI, when I came out of Coantico, my first office was in New York City, which goes back to the sergeant, which is funny, because I did not pick it as number one. It was like 36 out of 56. So when I went back from my, pick up my clothes and have the going away party for Scott, I went up to him like, dude, you jinx me, man. I'm like, I got New York City. What is wrong? But I was actually assigned in New York when 9-11 happened, but the day of I was undercover. I was in Texas. So now I'm moved down to Texas.

Starting point is 01:14:03 I'm in McAllen. I'm a case agent, so I'm still doing that stuff, firearms. Okay. So you're down in McAllen. Yeah. And then as a certified undercover, I can't remember if they canvassed it through an email or did I get a phone call from somebody? Because once you start going back and role playing and teaching at the undercover school,

Starting point is 01:14:21 I mean, the best way to describe it is let's just say, well, it scared me, man. I thought something bit me. My phone vibrated. So I get a call because you're starting to get known. If you're role playing at the school and... What do you mean at the school? So there's an undercover school? To get certified.

Starting point is 01:14:39 Just like to become an FBI agent. I mean, it's not five months. Wait, hold on. So there's an undercover school, an academy. Two weeks, yeah. And you learn how to be undercover. Well, you got to pass. It's not so much that you're learning.

Starting point is 01:14:51 It's just that you're learning techniques and stuff. But, Jed, you got to pass. And what are some of the... the techniques you learned there. Sorry that I didn't, I didn't grasp on of this before. Like, is it almost acting teachers that are there teaching? No. No. So, it won't give away everything for the school, but I'll give away what's kind of out there. The FBI undercover school is considered one of the toughest certification schools the FBI puts on. Some say it is the toughest. I'll say HRT is the toughest because HRT is Tier 1, SWAT on steroids,

Starting point is 01:15:20 is two weeks as well for the trial. What does it mean HRT? Uh, hostage rescue team. Okay. So you can be SWAT in all your divisions. Like I was SWAT in McAllen, San Antonio division. I was SWAT in Knoxville. Um, but HRT is at Quantico, based out of Quantico. Hell you.

Starting point is 01:15:37 Hostage rescue team. And I mean, they're hot too. They train with a tier one teams. It's high speed. My high speed, you know, helicopters, all that stuff. Um, but that one is also a two-week tryout, very physical and mental. A lot of times, at least from what I understand. HRT is you?

Starting point is 01:15:53 H.RT, it's like, you just want to get through the two weeks without getting injured. And you went through it? No, no, I was going to. If I wouldn't have got out of New York City, I was going to die it down to probably around 250 pounds, and then, because there's a lot of running. And I was going to go try out. Does that mean I would have made it? No. A lot of people don't ever, I don't know if I haven't known anybody that made it their first time.

Starting point is 01:16:12 Wow. But the undercover school is two weeks. Yeah, what are some of the course? Like, what are you guys? So you're going to, the gist is this. big on sleep deprivation, no days off, that sleep deprivation brings out weaknesses, right? So you're going to be getting training during the day. I might teach a block on the outlaws.

Starting point is 01:16:33 I might teach a block on white supremacy cases that I've worked. Maybe somebody else is teaching. Maybe it's the legal person, whatever. You're going to get training during the day. And at night, generally, the way it was running when I was in it, at night, you're going to be doing role-playing scenarios. You're probably going to get two a night, and everybody goes through every scenario. that way there's no liability.

Starting point is 01:16:52 In other words, you can't say, hey, that person's background is drugs and you only gave them undercover drug scenarios. Got it. You know? What's like an example scenario you would probably go through? They probably wouldn't want me to say.

Starting point is 01:17:03 That's fair. Because it'll give it away. That's fair. But just say this, you're getting tested. You may die. You may die miserably in a scenario, and then you've got to turn around and go, all right, buck up, little camper.

Starting point is 01:17:13 We're still got one more for the night, you know? Well, if you go O for two and one night, bro? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I will tell you this, I got certified in 2002. I started role playing in 2003, and I probably only missed a handful of schools in my 23 years of the FBI, and I never knew or heard of a 100% graduation rate. It doesn't mean that it's hazing and none of that stuff.

Starting point is 01:17:38 It just means that it's a great certification school, and not everybody's cut out for undercover. Understood. What do you think is the number one thing that blows, like, an officer's cover? I'm blowing the cover Oh man There could be I mean bad Backstopping

Starting point is 01:17:56 Having a bad You slipping up and not knowing your stuff Like a story or whatever Yeah you need to know it And picture picture if you're undercover for two years I'll meet you on day one Whatever I say right now I need to remember two years from now

Starting point is 01:18:09 So that's why I stuck close to who I was Bro And as I got older now Early in the game Oh man I was making like I'd be undercover and I'd be signing my name Scott Payne. And undercover, the P would form and I'd go, oh, I'm Calloway.

Starting point is 01:18:23 And I'd do it. But then I'd be home as Scott Payne and I would sign Scott Calloway. And you're like, dadgum it. But lucky for me, I ended up getting better at it. And by the time I was, when I retired, I think I had like eight phones. I had like one FBI, one personal, everything else was undercover. And I just, I just get so, I got so good because I'd be like, or I'm going to say good because it sounds like I'm chest beating.

Starting point is 01:18:44 But it just, it was easier for me to do. Like the phone would ring and I'd see the skull and the color and I go, okay, that's that case. What's up, brother? How's it going? Blah, blah, blah. You know, that's that case, yeah. Dang, man. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:18:57 So at one time you were actively involved in how many cases? Oh, man. So there are, again, I'll say it again. There are men and women out there have done way more than me. For sure. But I will say that for my 23 years in the FBI, if you were a full-time undercover, like you're not doing anything else but undercover, that was pretty rare. as an FBI agent because, as I said,

Starting point is 01:19:20 I was still expected to run cases and do whatever back in my office. But you were working full-time undercover? There was, I know, I can remember twice. Maybe there was a third time that I was listed full-time undercover in the FBI, but all the other times, it might be two weeks undercover,

Starting point is 01:19:36 but I go back home, and then I'm a case agent again, and I've got to run training for everybody and firearms and tactics. You ever do like chef for? You ever been in, like, Because I could also see you. I just thought of this, man.

Starting point is 01:19:48 I'm thinking of ways I could see you doing undercover. And I'm thinking dessert chef. With a hat? Yes, with the hat. Because a lot of those guys, you know, they'll have a beard. They'll have some facial hair. They'll have tattoos because it's a lot of art. Oh, no, yeah.

Starting point is 01:20:02 I can put the hair in that on. Oh, totally. It's artistic people that are kind of chefs. You know what I'm saying? It's like, that's kind of like an artistic sort of style. Yeah, yeah, that frosting pipette. You like it to pepper? You put a, you want the pepper?

Starting point is 01:20:15 You put a set of handcuffs on a declare, you know? Yeah, I can see you doing something like that. All law enforcement thief, but pretty good. Was there pretty, but most of the ones that you did, it was pretty close to who you were, though. Yeah, the exception would be when I got called for murder for hire, because I'm a jokester. I got a pretty sick sense of humor.

Starting point is 01:20:37 I may know and not, I just say this, okay. I might not know a lot, but I know funny. Yeah. That's fair. So sense of humor, jovial, but when I'm doing a murder for hire or what I would call a closer, like if you're somebody wanting to do something bad and you're meeting me and you want a bomb, I call that like a closer. Like I'm providing you with a gun that you want to go shoot up a synagogue or something like that. Got it.

Starting point is 01:20:58 I call that a closer. So those, my jovialness goes away. I never, I mean, I wouldn't, there's no point me really building rapport with you because you think I'm a stole cold killer. Got it. And the stone cold killer, those are usually quicker cases too. Have there been some murder for hires that you got involved? Oh, yeah. Really?

Starting point is 01:21:13 And who's often trying to kill whom? Is there a commonality there? Well, I would say it would be spousal, right? It would probably be the most, but it would be like wife, cheating wife and her, the man she's cheating with, solicit me to kill the husband because there's like a $92,000 life insurance plan. Got it. I never, the stuff you see in the movies, and I mean, I've known some of my mentors, that have done those $100,000 payment hits.

Starting point is 01:21:45 I'm like, I mean, no, not in my world, man. It was 10 grand. I'll give you 10, yeah, I'll give you 12 grand after we collect the insurance policy. I'm like, you're telling me, you want me to go kill somebody on your word. Wow. And we, no, that's not how this works. Yeah. So give me something, you know.

Starting point is 01:22:06 And where would they meet? Where does somebody like that usually try to meet you at for the first time? Like, is there a general place and people? I mean, I've met them in hotel rooms. I've met them at their place. One of the ones that's in the book, they believed we were bikers. I brought in a task force officer.

Starting point is 01:22:23 They believed we were 1% or bikers, and they were hiring us to do four home invasions and murder, I think, two or three people. But what they do is they knew where the dope was because the son was running the dope and the money. So he knew of four different drug dealers and he knew where the cashiered. was at where the guns were at where the dope was at

Starting point is 01:22:44 in every house. So the plan was to do four home invasions and then murder two of them and then I get some money I guess. That seems like a lot. And she was a wild one man. This is later in my career and I like I told you I would joke around and be like

Starting point is 01:23:03 with headquarters I'm like how come I don't get to go to like you know overseas and how come I don't how come I don't get to get on big boats You know, yeah, I can get on one if I'm cleaning it, you know what I mean? I'm getting the chum out the back, you know. Yeah, why don't I get the big gigs? Yeah, what is this?

Starting point is 01:23:19 Oh, I get to carry the luggage. That's cool. Yeah. If I'm in a fancy environment, it's because I was muscle for the main person there. That's it. Amen, yeah. You need that guy to stand next to the guy. I just in the back, you know.

Starting point is 01:23:32 Was you ever, were we ever in an environment where somebody pulled out a weapon and it was really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I have been. But let me tell you about Tammy real quick, though. Okay. Yeah, tell me about Tammy. So we go for this one case, and it was in Ohio, and this late, we think we know we're going to meet the husband. And we thought it was the husband's plan.

Starting point is 01:23:50 Because we've talked to somebody that's talk to them and we know that they're looking for somebody to do this kind of thing. You thought it was husband's plan. Yeah. So we go to the garage and, you know, we're talking to the husband and he's like, well, it's not my plan. It's my old ladies. And I'm like, well, why are we talking to you then? Where's the old lady? She's, oh, she's sleeping.

Starting point is 01:24:10 we're all staring awkward silence you think I should go wake her up and I said I didn't drive all the way out here to talk to no one we're gonna do business I'll do business

Starting point is 01:24:20 he goes and wakes her up she hops in the truck in the front passenger seat they're in the back she is tweaking she's clawing herself flakes of skin are going everywhere

Starting point is 01:24:28 we're probably inhaling it you know it's water right oh you can cook up a little bit of that skin you can grill you up a little bowl of it pork rinds yeah hit it

Starting point is 01:24:37 smoke that shit some forkram That's a real important So we're driving And as she's showing us all these spots She's like talking out fast She's kind of tweaking a little bit At least that's my opinion

Starting point is 01:24:49 I don't know if she was on drugs And she's hiring to kill the husband No She, it was her idea She just she I mean the husband's involved But it was her idea So she's the one that gets in the car

Starting point is 01:24:59 Because it's her son That's driving around The dope for these people Got it So she's showing us these spots But why she's showing us these spots She starts talking all this crazy stuff She's like

Starting point is 01:25:07 She's like you know, I'm really into torture. So if you need anybody tortured that you bring, I'm really big into it. And I'm like, okay, driving. I'm like, all right. And again, it's later in my career. I'm just kind of, I don't know if I'm nonchalant

Starting point is 01:25:21 or desensitized or whatever you want to call it, but I'm driving. She says, you know, that you can take, I can get graphic on here, right? Because it's graphic. Okay. So she says, it's in the book anyway. She says, you know, you can take a hanger

Starting point is 01:25:36 and bend it on the end and shove it into the man. man's penis. Sorry, I hit the microphone. That's all right. Bend a hanger on the end, shoving into a man's penis, rip it back out, and then pour salt in the womb. Now, the guys in the back are going, oh, goodness, great.

Starting point is 01:25:52 Oh, man. And I'm like, literally two weeks prior to that, I'd had my second lumbar fusion. The surgery was great in an easy recovery, but they had messed up. I had to get dry cath. So as she's describing that, and I'm like, that's pretty much what I felt two weeks ago, right? So it's hitting home with you. Yeah. So then she's like, and then you can take, there's another one you can do.

Starting point is 01:26:10 You can take a PVC pipe and shove it up somebody's anus, run barbed wire up in it and rip their anus from the inside out. Well, that's insane. Right. And I'm looking at her and I'm going, we pull up to the red light and I lean over and I go, why are you so angry? And she's like, she said, I don't know if she used it right then or later, she said, I've been unlucky in love. Wow. So as we're getting. Well, she's talking, damn.

Starting point is 01:26:32 I mean, she's doing like, it sounds like she's doing side quest from Home Depot or something. in Laredo or whatever. Like, because that shit's, I mean, it's like, I was undercover in Laredo. What is she talking about, dude? She sounds just like an angry ex-Lose employee or whatever. So we're driving, and I'm like, are you sure you don't want to kill these people?

Starting point is 01:26:53 She goes, no, no, everybody knows me around here, but if you need somebody torture, I can torture. I'm like, oh, my gosh. So we pull up to the next red light, and she says, you know, my husband, I told him never go on a bender again. She said, he was gone for three or four days up all the time. I can't think it was cocaine.

Starting point is 01:27:07 She said he was using, but went on a cocaine bender. She said he came back. She couldn't find him. He came back. She said, he passed out so hard. He didn't wake up. You know what she did to him? And he's a skinny man.

Starting point is 01:27:17 She said, so I went and got a two by four, and I shoved it under his legs. And I took an industrial stapler and stapled his scrotum to the board. Oh. And he didn't even wait. When he woke up from it, he's trying to stand up, but it's stapled to the board behind him. And he's trying to move and he's screaming for it to take it out. She said, no, he had to call his friend over to do it. We confirmed it with the husband.

Starting point is 01:27:38 No. I thought, man, she's got to be full of it. He said, nope, she did it. And I said, and you're still with her? He said, I ain't never had nobody doing nothing like that to me. And I'm like, well, dad, come. Sometimes love is just so, it's violent. I know.

Starting point is 01:27:52 And so when she said that part, as we're pulling up to stop. Because one of the task force officer, he was like, he goes, man, remind me never to piss you off. You know, one of those things, you know. And when we pulled up, you know, all that stuff. running through my head, all this scenario is. And when we pull up, I go, you watch a lot of slasher flicks? And she goes, that's all I watch. And I went, now it's making sense. She's talking about humid centipy, like sewing a body into a body. And I'm like, good, gravy. I'm like, but in my mind, I'm laughing to myself because I'm going, these are my people.

Starting point is 01:28:26 Yeah. This is what my skill set leads me to. You know what I mean? I go back in the backwoods and somebody's talking, not trying to chastise anybody, but they're talking. They don't have any teeth and their lips aren't moving. I had to revert back to my family, some distant people in my family to go, okay, now I know what they're saying. This is where I belong. Now I know what they're saying. Because at first I'm like, what?

Starting point is 01:28:48 And I'm going, oh, I know what you're saying. Yeah, this way. I'm translating. Oh, yeah. Well, you never really lose where you're from, you know. Just start hanging out with them. I'll get more and more country. Oh, dude, yeah, that happens quick.

Starting point is 01:29:01 You go home and you just. Back home. And home comes back to you, you know, because it's always been there. Sometimes it's just like it sits on the sidelines. Sometimes it's intermingled with the new places you're at. Was there ever any spaces where you got involved in there was like human sat, like any type of like sacrificial or like ceremonial stuff that kind of went on? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:29:25 So working domestic terrorism, we started seeing a shift where a lot of the white supremacist groups were claiming to be Odinist, right? They're claiming to be pagans, but that's not illegal. And I've got some very good friends who are pagans, and they are Odinist. So if... Odinous, bring that up. O-D-I-S-T-S. Okay. Odinism is generally a racialist-oriented practice that places the highest fundamental view on the figure of Odin. Odinist pagan usually refers to a Norse Germanic pagan who's their practice on the god odin but in modern usage the term odinist is heavily entangled with far-right radical far-right racialist groups in a straightforward religious sense odinism is a form of germanic norse paganism that honors odin as a chief deity along with other norse gods such as thor

Starting point is 01:30:24 freya fraya and frigg um can you give me any uh any more better information about it yeah because i'm going to disagree with what that just said because that's what i was getting ready to say Okay. The pagan part right there, relationship to pagan, that would read that. Okay. Because maybe they're tying the word odinist to white supremacy, but that was what I was going to say, that true pagans are upset because, you know, Hitler used a lot of odinism stuff. You would see like the Sonangrad. You would see all the Norse-type runes and stuff.

Starting point is 01:30:59 But that doesn't mean that they're white supremacists. So maybe you want to read that. Odinism is a modern neo-pagan religion that represents. that revives the ancient Norse and Germanic worship of deities like Odin and Thor, emphasizing personal honor, bravery, and a connection to nature. While many practitioners view it as a universal nature-based faith, specific branches, and extremist groups have co-opted the movement as a racially exclusive white supremacist ideology. Does that sound?

Starting point is 01:31:25 Yes. That's what I was talking about. Okay, got it. So we started seeing a shift back, I guess you can say, because even under the Hitler, neo-Nazi stuff, you would see a lot of Norse runes and Norse mythology and stuff like that. But what years was this when you were seeing this? Well, I mean, so the base case that I'm going to talk about was 2019. We took it down in 2020.

Starting point is 01:31:48 Okay, got it. Yeah, it took it down in COVID year. So you start seeing that, and I've got close friends who are pagans. And you look at the Asatra community. They are unhappy. The Asatra community? Asatru's pagan. Asatru.

Starting point is 01:32:02 Yeah. Asatru. A sat true. So they believe in the Norse pantheon. So what you read, Thor, Freya, you know. Friar. Friar and Frig and Odin as the Norse. And forget about it.

Starting point is 01:32:18 Forget about it. That's the Italian one. There's a, there are other pantheons where people might be like, I'm an Egyptian pantheon or whatever. But we started seeing this stuff. And if you go and look at pagans, Like back, well, I mean, you could find it in Christianity too. There were sacrifices, right?

Starting point is 01:32:39 So. We have the Bible that sacrifices in it. Yeah, Old Testament. So one of the cases I did, I whistle, sorry. So one of the cases I did was into an accelerations group. So I go into great detail in the book, but it's like, if you ask the average person in America, you know, what do you think of white supremacist it is? A lot of them, they may know neo-Nazi. They may even know like a skinhead.

Starting point is 01:33:03 are they going to say like KKK, Ku Klux Klan, hoods and robes and stuff. That's not what this is. These are accelerationists, and they don't believe that there's a political solution to save the white race. They believe that society is going to collapse either on its own or from man-made events, and they want to speed that up. They want to speed it up through guerrilla warfare tactics, like just small hits. Just picture like power grid goes down over here, water systems poisoned over here, train derailed over. hear, anything to create chaos. Got it.

Starting point is 01:33:35 I'm not saying it's the best game plan in the world, and this may be hard to wrap your mind around, but they came onto our radar from being online and recruiting. So they were recruiting online. And a lot of your accelerations also groups were big on what we call flyering or stickering or posturing. So you put up a flyer and it'll be like, save your race, join the base. you know, survivalist group. There you go.

Starting point is 01:34:04 And see that QR code? So you'd scan that QR code and it takes you right to bit shoot and there's a recruitment video right there. And that's my picture right there. I mean, those are Bibles being burnt right there in that fire. They are? Yeah, if you blow it up, you'll see Holy Bible on that picture.

Starting point is 01:34:18 You can dim it down. I don't even want to see that, but I believe that it's happening. And so, and who's the people on the left? Is this? That's not that Christmas thing they do on the levee over there in Lafayette, is it? No, that'd be a 20 to 30 foot cross. on fire with diesel fuel. I don't understand it, man.

Starting point is 01:34:35 I know. There's a lot of history in the Klu-Clux Klan. I wonder if we should have someone on something just to learn even about it. There's Matt Damon. Obviously, he was involved. Sorry, Matt. That's clean-cut, Scott Vang.

Starting point is 01:34:49 Is it really? That's a Polaroid picture, yeah. Bro, oh my God, I just realized. Yeah, that's not... Bro. Dang, I do look like Matt Damon right there. Bro, you look like Matt Damon right now. No way.

Starting point is 01:34:59 I'm not even joking. People must tell you this all this. No, I used to get confused for Toby Keith all the time. No, B Keith, dude. You look like Matt Damon. Dude, that's crazy, bro. That picture does actually look like Matt Damon. I didn't ever realize that.

Starting point is 01:35:14 Matt Damon's going to play you in your life story one day. That'd be pretty wild. Okay, so you're infiltrate. So you get into this group with the base. And yeah, so how do things escalate? And what are you learning once you get in? And you were telling me that before I interrupted. You go on?

Starting point is 01:35:27 So I'm going in to where they're posting because they're trying to recruit. And it would be like, you know, if you're interested, contact us at the base underscore 1 at protonmail.com. Got it. Again, proton mail, thinking that it's fully encrypted. I think that was based out of Russia. I'm not sure. I can't remember right now. But so I start liking some of their stuff.

Starting point is 01:35:49 They start responding back and then I start emailing. So I go through like a week to a week and a half of emailed questions. Pretty thorough. What can you bring to the table, this that and the other? And then I'm instructed to, I mean, my height. weight, ethnicity, all that stuff. And then it says, if you want to read that. Oh, Geneva, Switzerland.

Starting point is 01:36:10 All right, Proton Mills and Switzerland. Okay. Go on. All right. Thank you. So then I'm instructed to download the wire app. It's called Wire. Operates a lot like WhatsApp.

Starting point is 01:36:23 Okay. So I'm told to download it, reach out, and then on a Friday afternoon in July of 2019, I did like an hour and 15 minute panel interview. I couldn't see them, but I could hear like four to five voices. Really? And was it, were you guys going on two sides of a fence or something? I was going on.

Starting point is 01:36:40 I was just on the app. Oh, it was online? Yeah, so I'm just listening to them and they're asking questions. And like I said, I don't know if they're going to tell me to cut my phone on, show myself. And so I was in a club. I'm picturing some damn home improvement type of shit. Well, you're standing over the fence or whatever. I jumped in my truck and drove to an abandoned parking lot.

Starting point is 01:36:58 and I was making sure I had anything, I cleaned it, make sure there's nothing in there that says Scott Payne or anything like that. Yeah, they could see anything to know where you're at. Just an old truck, you know. So I did that interview,

Starting point is 01:37:11 and there was a lot of stuff because the accelerationists, their Bible is basically a book called Siege. That book, Siege, was written by James Mason. He's a longtime white supremacist. He created Adam Woffin, another accelerationist group. But it's essentially a bunch of interviews, but he idolizes like, there's a lot of Satanism in there.

Starting point is 01:37:36 He idolizes Charles Manson, things like that. But there's a lot of that, for instance, accelerationists, let me say this. So accelerationists, you know, you've seen the white supremacists that are out on the streets with picket signs and yelling during pride rallies or whatever. That's not an accelerationist. per the siege method, number one, that makes you a target. Number two, let everybody know who you are. Got it. Number three, it does nothing for the cause.

Starting point is 01:38:03 That's what they're saying. So we're going to do those guerrilla warfare hits. Okay. That kind of thing. Bring it up again. See, I just want to see that real quick and cite it. Siege. Seed, the collective writings of James Mason

Starting point is 01:38:17 and anthology of essays by the neo-Nazi James Mason. After growing disillusioned with a mass-moving approach of neo-Nazi movements, Mason began advocating for white revolution through terrorism. Bam. The book was reviewed in several periodicals upon its release and was praised and distributed by the influential white supremacist Tom Metzger. Most neo-Nazis at the time either ignored or criticized the book. In the 2010s, the book found a new audience among online younger neo-Nazis

Starting point is 01:38:48 due to the book's republication by the neo-fascist forum Iron March. In addition to its promotion of neo-Nazism, it lionizes serial killers, mass murders, and Charles Manson. Siege advocates neo-Nazi lone wolf terrorism. Yep. So let's let me go off of that. Okay. So the base, I'll do that interview.

Starting point is 01:39:14 They ask me all kinds of stuff. I answer best I can. Again, tennis, right? I don't know what they're throwing at me. I'm just got to be ready, right? And then he tells me, and I could tell who the leader is on there because it's the deeper voice, but it was Renauda Nazara. After they've explained to me what acceleration this is, what the base believes, siege culture. They gave me a 24-hour rest period.

Starting point is 01:39:38 And they said, because now I know what they're about, I can decide whether I really want to be a part of it, and they can talk about whether they want me to be a part of it. Got it. And true to the word, 24 hours later on the Saturday, I got hit, ping, something to the effect of, we'd like to have you in the organization. and I said I'd be honored. So they tell me, they go, where are you at? I said, East Tennessee.

Starting point is 01:39:58 And they said, well, the closest cell, C-E-L-L, because I know I got a country accent, C-E-L-L, the closest cell to me was in North Georgia. And then I was contacted by the cell leader. But to parlay off of what that said, terrorism, siege. He said, forget all this grandstand and go more terrorism, lone wolf attacks. So a lot of people don't know this. Al-Qaeda translated to English is the base. Al-Qaeda's M-O was three to five-man sales all over the world training for D-Day waiting for the phone call.

Starting point is 01:40:33 The base is M-O, three-to-five-man sales all over the world training for what they call the bugaloo. If they're still calling it that. I've been retired for five years. And when you met them, are these guys, are they aggressive, like, males? What kind of energy did you feel overall when you met these guys? It depends. But it wasn't like back in the Hammerskin, white supremacy heavy metal mosh pit crowd.

Starting point is 01:41:02 But I don't want to get too much on a tangent, but I will say this. When I'm instructing, number one, we don't like to say the names of the mass shooters. We don't want to give them any credit. Amen. You know, I'll name every victim from Calabine. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:17 I'll name every victim from Charleston. every victim from Buffalo don't want to say the kid's name or the shooter's name, right? But sometimes when I'm teaching undercover, I have to because we're talking about a certain thing. But what I'll say to people, because it sounded like you were like,

Starting point is 01:41:30 hey, were these like jack dudes or whatever, all shapes and sizes. But what I tell people is I said, don't underestimate. If I showed you a picture of the kids from Columbine before Columbine happened, what would you say? If I showed you a picture of the kid from the Aurora Theater shooting,

Starting point is 01:41:46 orange and yellowish hair, what would you say before that happened? Charleston, bowl haircut, skinny kid, but they still killed a lot of people. Right. So don't underestimate because dead is dead. We had a shooting here in Nashville. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:01 My buddy, I'm buddies with the guy that had the pistol. The two shooters, I met him through some other trainings, and I just seen him like within a month of that shooting. And, you know, just don't underestimate, you know. So I meet them, and when I'm, they call me. And would you wear to meet them? Do you have to, I mean, how do you even pick out an outfit or whatever?

Starting point is 01:42:22 I wore like, maybe like some hiking tight pants, you know, I didn't show up all bikers, but I go to meet them and they tell me, they instruct me. You come to Rome, Georgia. I want you to park here. I want you to take a picture of the statue downtown. And then I want you to send it to me. And they're watching. I don't know how many, because at that point, we knew we were going to meet somebody who called themselves TMB.

Starting point is 01:42:45 I didn't know he was bringing a guy named pestil. with him. I didn't know. They're trying to cover me. And I met the case team that I, even though we talked on the phone, I'd never met them before. So I drive down to Rome, Georgia, because now I'm being, this is crazy. I know, because now I'm being, now I'm being invited to meet them for a face-to-face vet. I like vet in real life. Because I pass the other one. I pass the, I pass the, I passed the emails. I pass the interview panel. Now I've got to pass a face-to-face meeting. And when I met the case team, again, we don't know really who we're meeting or where we're going. We got an inkling, I think, but I know we didn't know everybody in the group.

Starting point is 01:43:19 We did not at all. And the weather was bad. So it's like, I don't know, can you get any kind of area of surveillance? Not when it's raining and stuff like that. And it's trying to light a cross in the rain, too, so you're not really going to see. Well, the accelerations don't do the cross. Got it, my bad. Lightings.

Starting point is 01:43:36 The KKK does. Got it. So these guys are hiding. They're all wearing fleck-torn camo because the fleck-torn pattern is German. They're neo-nodon. so they wear nothing but the German pattern. That does not mean if you have Fleckton that you're white supremacists. It just means that that's what they wear.

Starting point is 01:43:52 Yeah. So I pull up, meet the case team, and they're like, hey, they want to slap a GPS tracker on in my truck just in case. And I'm like, yeah. So your squad says that. Yeah, yeah. It's my team, my cover team. And because let me explain you this way.

Starting point is 01:44:06 I was assigned to Knoxville. So I'm an FBI agent in Knoxville. Yeah. But because the targets lived in Georgia, well, now you've got Atlanta field office and the ROMRA, which is the satellite office out of. So that's who's going to be working that, those targets, right? So I go down there to meet that cover team or case team, and we talk about some stuff.

Starting point is 01:44:26 I make some phone calls, and I see them kind of go under the back driver's side quarter panel. So I don't know where they put it, but I know it's somewhere up in there. I pull up, I can't find a parking spot. I'm going back and forth on wire. Hey, man, I'm here. Look, I found a spot, but it's behind a coffee shop. I'm in a, I think I was in a white forward or something.

Starting point is 01:44:45 I can't remember what truck I was driving on that trip, but gave him the description of the truck, and then they go, okay, I see you. And I see him come walking. So what comes walking up is about a 21-year-old and soon-to-be-21 and a 19-year-old kid. TMB is Luke Ling. He's about 6-2, maybe 220, 225, but kind of frumpy.

Starting point is 01:45:06 And then Pestilance is Jacob, and he is kind of more, not gauph, but more like black metal, but he's got BDU, bloused into his eight-inch tactical boots and then a tank top of some black metal band you know shaved around the sides probably guar one of those instant pussy one of those ones no you i went to no i'm talking like we're we're gonna talk like probably like uh hell witch sabot uh satanic goat ritual oh yeah that kind of shit yeah and and all it is if you've ever been to a concert like that

Starting point is 01:45:38 it's like it's just constant wala wala wala wala wala wala wala wala wala it's a lot of home depot noise yeah Yeah. It's like what I've seen played when they're trying to break people at Guantanamo Bay. That's what they're playing in the background. Got it. Yeah. With flashing lights and stuff. Or like the accountant, like the accountant, you know, like Ben Affleck when he's in there, cuts it on.

Starting point is 01:45:57 Yeah. So they come walking up and, you know, it's first meet. So clearly I'm clean because I don't know what they're going to. If they're doing their wear with all, they're going to check me, right? How many times in your head do you go over, okay, is there nothing? Like, am I missing anything? Like, that would have to be. A lot.

Starting point is 01:46:13 and like I'll self-check. I may even have somebody check me. For sure. I may clean my truck, but I mean, hey, search my truck. Is there anything on here that would let you know anything about me? Yeah. I mean, what if you just got dry cleaning and then your tags in there, you know? Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:28 Or prescription medicine, and it's in your real name, you know? So they're walking up there. You guys are behind the coffee shop. Yep. And he comes up and he says, you know, I'm like, hey, I came in as white warrior, 88. I'm like, hey, I'm white warrior. He's like, I'm TNB, it's specimens.

Starting point is 01:46:43 I mean, cool. little niceties, and then I need you to put your phone in airplane mode. I said, okay, I put it on an airplane mode, and he pulls out this thing that looks like the Geiger counter, man, had like a triangle card on it. It was big, all kinds of lights and stuff on it. I'm like, what the heck is that? So he winds me, nothing, I'm cool. He starts winding the inside of the truck, and I'm like, all right, as he's walking down

Starting point is 01:47:02 the side of the truck, that thing starts going nuts. It's getting louder and louder, and lights are going off on it, and I'm like, oh, no, it's picking up the GPS tracker. And he's walking. And he gets right to the back fender. And I'm like, I've already eased my right leg back. I'm starting to get in that stance because I'm like, it's getting ready to go. I'm just, who knows, what's going to happen right now.

Starting point is 01:47:23 Yeah. I don't know if they're armed or not. I'm going to assume they are. And right when it was going to do, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, that's going nuts. Pestolence says, you think it could be the power lines? Because where we were, it was a steep hill there were power lines right there. So he walks over and that thing goes nuts. What I found out is that thing picks up.

Starting point is 01:47:42 It's a $500 piece of equipment in 2019. $500 piece of equipment that picks up everything. Every airwave there is Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, R-F, whatever, and it'll color code and different sounds. Just somebody whispering loud. Cellular, yeah, whatever, yeah. So I lived to fight another day. He said, hey, follow us to another place.

Starting point is 01:48:02 So at that point, I'm calling the case team, and I'm like, you need to shut the tractor off. I'm like, you need to shut it off. And they're like, whoa, we're not sure if we can shut it off remotely. And I'm like, well, you need to try. and they're like, well, if we shut it off, we don't know if we can get it back on. I said, what I'm telling you is, whatever he's got. Shut it off.

Starting point is 01:48:16 It's finding it. And if you don't shut it off, it's going to be a quick undercover. And it should be your choice. Well, I mean, they were saying technically, like they were saying, can you cut it off from a remote? And if you did, could we get it back on? And I'm getting a concern. You don't want to lose me, but I'm like, hey. So luckily that...

Starting point is 01:48:33 I don't want to lose me either. I know, right. Luckily, they got it off, and I pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned concrete plant. And I'm like, pull in, and I'm like, looking up to the... the Lord, I'm like, that's funny. How many people have I seen die in a movie at an empty-a-comcrete plant? But they wanded me and it didn't go. They wanded the truck and it didn't go off.

Starting point is 01:48:51 And I'm like, cool. So then I go and that's when I start meeting everybody. And then as the months went on, you would go and train. Are we ever play ball together or anything? Would you guys do any social excursions, field trips or anything like that? All shooting. All training. Really?

Starting point is 01:49:05 Yeah, because Luke's dad had a hundred-acre property in Rome, Georgia. got it. And that's where we did a lot of our training. That cell and the Maryland cell would come down and train. And then at one point, we started finding all kinds of things like, you talked about sacrifices. That's what gets me into it. So I'll speed up to that. During the case, you start identifying more and more people. And those people are, some of them are outside of the United States. So our world working partners are opening cases on them. Some of them are in all kinds of states in the U.S., but as I explained before, that means that maybe Seattle, FBI's open in a case on the person that's in their AOR, maybe Detroit's opening

Starting point is 01:49:47 cases, Georgia's open in multiple cases, Alabama's opening a case, it just goes, because at any given time, there was a good 50-something people in the base. But the base was more like an umbrella group because every member that I knew that was in the base, they were also a part of another white supremacy group, whether it be Adam Woffen or Green Brigade or, or, or, um, um, um, um, um, Oh, man, was it Sunning? I can't remember the name of it right now. But so you were a member of another group as well. But we did training.

Starting point is 01:50:20 And that first weekend, and remember, I'm a firearms instructor certified of the FBI. I was the lead tactical instructor for my division. And a 19-year-old kid led Carbean and it led shooting and tactics. He led the training. And it was good. It wasn't bad. And I'm thinking, man, how did you learn?

Starting point is 01:50:40 I mean, you're not, you didn't run the military. You're too young to be getting in and out to learn this. He said, no, it was, I think it was mainly gaming, and then his dad took him to arrange. But he worked on it, you know, and I was glad that they were safe with their weapons because I didn't know who, you know, what their shooting was. I was standing back when we started. I was glad that they were good and safe, but I was also scared

Starting point is 01:51:05 because if they were planning on doing something bad, they were pretty good. be so be spooked, man. So one of the big things, like, with undercover, you go in there, you've got enough to go in. It's all been approved. There's a, we've got the reporting and people are predicated, so we're going in, but do you have enough to charge them? Well, in instances like this, you've been spewing a lot of hate online. You've been saying a lot of crazy stuff, but is what you're doing just First Amendment

Starting point is 01:51:33 protected, or are you actually planning on doing something bad? So sometimes we go in and you might just be in there for six months trying to, to figure out if they're doing, I've been in cases for five, six months, and I come back to the team and go, they're not doing anything illegal, man. It's all First Amendment protected. And we're just spinning our wheels at this point, you know. And when did that turn for the base? When did that kind of, so I got, we were already talking about a bunch of stuff, and I was

Starting point is 01:51:59 starting to get the DM conversations going on where it's more private, direct messaging for those that don't know. And what is your wife thinking when you get home on the weekends and shit and you got like a lot more white laundry or whatever. No dark stuff. Like is she a... Or I come home smelling like diesel fuel from the Clutch Clan.

Starting point is 01:52:17 They call it Clan Cologne because you can't stand that cross-up without the diesel fuel pouring all over you, unless somebody was holding an umbrella over you, I guess. Oh, damn. Yeah. But okay, so tickets back in? So at one point, there's a...

Starting point is 01:52:31 There's somebody that gets doxed, and for those that don't know what doxing is, it's basically outing you, right? And the far left is very, very good at it. They're really good at doxing you, showing up to protest at your kids' school, at your business, at your home, your parents, whatever. And the right, far right, from what I experienced, can't stand that because they feel like they're losing their life and their identity. That's why they're huge on anonymity. So all these pictures you see, if you pull up the base stuff where the BBC and the Guardian was blasting all this stuff, I mean, I'm there, but we're wearing balaclavas.

Starting point is 01:53:06 That one, right, I'll show you one. It was me. Yeah, that's me right there. I'm on the far right. You're in that group photo? Yeah. And who took the pictures? Did you guys go to a place?

Starting point is 01:53:17 No, no, no. Just one of the guys that didn't suit up because you're always trying to recruit. How was recruiting going overall, did you feel like? I mean, ebbs and flows. You get people coming in, and then you vet them, and then some people might drop. Some people might get docks. Got it. Any women in it?

Starting point is 01:53:35 No, none. Which was something I kind of. There was a lot of the guys that did not have partners. Oh, you'd have more men in it if you had more women in it. Yeah, what they don't have partners. So think about this. We were talking early about radicalization online. Picture, for these cases, I'm just to say it's a young white guy.

Starting point is 01:53:55 Young white man who's probably an outcast. He's most definitely been bullied. Can't get a date. And they're just hating. So then you go on in these groups at night. And this works on the other side too Far left, Black separatists, radical jihad, kind of the same thing.

Starting point is 01:54:12 You're looking for somebody that's like-minded individual. Yeah. And that's how they start getting you. Do you think that the media ostracizes white people? Do you feel like it's... Boy, I'm not answering that.

Starting point is 01:54:28 Is that a tougher question? Is that a bad answer? No, that should probably give you my answer. There you go. No, it depends. Look, you don't have to. I was just thinking about it. Like, you know, I feel like there's a lot of like, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:54:40 It's a tough one. It's a tough question. I mean, I'm white. So what am I supposed to say? I mean. Is it a good point. Am I privileged? Am I privileged?

Starting point is 01:54:47 Did I get stuff for free or did I have to bust my ass to get it? So I don't, I just try not to answer that. Yeah. I mean, I know personally what I've had to do to be where I'm at. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point, man. Somebody else might not believe that. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:55:00 And it's in the eye of the beholder, no matter what I say. I can talk to I'm blue in the face. If you don't believe me, then that's it. Yeah, we'll think about it another time. But pitcher, you're in there, you're lonely, and you're looking for, you want to belong. You want to belong. It's human nature to want to belong. Yeah, and it's a part of something to feel like.

Starting point is 01:55:17 Brotherhood. Same thing, same thing with gangs, same things with Colts, biker clubs, it's my brotherhood, your brother. You know, now you're one of us. Oh, dude, it was not like when you were growing up just having your friend. It's like going to the gym with a friend that go lift with. Anything that gives you some connection becomes a huge part of your life. Yeah, so you get that, and I'm glad you said that, because another way to describe what I was describing is isolation.

Starting point is 01:55:42 Yeah. Oh, it's, that's a devil. And if you're a believer, when you get isolated, let's look at the jungle, Africa. If you're a zebra that gets isolated, you're a lot easier to pick off. You know what I mean? Just say.

Starting point is 01:55:54 Undeniably. Yeah. Isolation is for the devil, man. Yeah. I believe that. Yeah. You know, it's like, even though, like, there's things, even in my own life, it's like, man, I don't want to go.

Starting point is 01:56:02 I don't want to do that. That is the, that is not. the best parts of me talking or communicating to me. Yeah, I'm with you on that. Anyway, carry on. So this guy, a guy gets doxed. He's a member in South Africa. And he gets doxed.

Starting point is 01:56:17 And then at that point, one of the members in the base is like, how many of our brothers do we have to watch fall before we do something? And he called for Operation Christelot, which was an actual operation in World War II. Essentially, what they did is if you were not white, you were Jewish, you know, anti-fascists, whatever, they would go down and smash your windows of your business, slice the tires on your car,

Starting point is 01:56:42 set stuff on fire. So that's what he was calling for. And some members did do it. They went out and tagged some synagogues with some, you know, hate symbols. I'm trying to remember if anybody said anything on fire or not. I remember it being called for or slashing tires. But so now we're starting to get a little bit more.

Starting point is 01:57:00 People are actually doing overt acts in furtherance of hate, right? Even though it was just painting. And I mean, but, you know, like I've had some people say, hey, man, I mean, they just painted a synagogue, you know. I mean, to be looking at this many years for a hate crime or whatever. And I'm like, yeah, but what if you were one of those Jewish people that went to that synagogue? And now every time you go there, you're scared to death because you've seen active shooter. You've seen mass shooter events.

Starting point is 01:57:27 Yeah. Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, you know. And I know a lot of those people now because I've helped out with eradicate hate and eradicate hates based out of Pittsburgh, and I've actually met, and I'm friends with, family members of the people that were murdered at Tree of Life. Yeah, my friend Michael the other day was talking about the shooting that had happened in Australia.

Starting point is 01:57:50 New Zealand. No, I think it was in Bondi. Okay, I was thinking of the New Zealand Christchurch. No, I think it was in Bondi Beach. Oh, there we go. Yeah, this was in December. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sad to say that these shootings happen more and more often, and they start blending in my head.

Starting point is 01:58:07 Which shootings do you mean just overall? I mean just like active shooter events. Yeah. Yeah. I do remember that. That was the Sikh temple or something. They shot up. You'd feel like people, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:58:21 Evil's always going to be around, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of interviews. And do you think a lot of this of new age stuff, like say a lot of like, if there's anti-Semitic, if it's Jewish specific hate, do you think a lot of is coming from, like, people who have, or do you know, actually, if a lot of it's coming from, like, people who have Nazi ideology from, like, Hitler Nazi ideology? Or is it people that are having reactions to some of Israel's tactics and, like, their government's tactics? It's going to be both, because if you're pro, if, I got to figure out, I want to word it right,

Starting point is 01:58:59 because I want anybody to say, you're saying all pro-Palestine people or no. But if you're on that extreme side that's pro-Palestine over Israel, well, a lot of those people aren't white. So you couldn't be identifying with Hitler because Hitler's more of the white supremacy, but it's definitely anti-Semitic. Wait, wait, hold on a second. They're hating the Jews, too. Do you think that's an extremist view that people are pro-Palestine? No. No, not at all.

Starting point is 01:59:22 But if you are going to go, again, if you're going to go to extreme or are you going to be happy that people are being slaughtered and murdered and raped and tortured, you know, and you're anti-Semitic, then you're probably more of that extremism side. Got it. But you were asking me if it was like, is it Hitler driven or is it pro-Palestine or anti-Israel driven? Yeah, anti-Israel government driven. Like, yeah, just to be super clear. Yeah, man, I think it's just scary.

Starting point is 01:59:49 Like, I have Jewish friends that have been, like, who have spoken out about, like, just, like, being in fear and, like, they're, like, you know. Going to class, you know? And I'm like, I don't, I mean, Hitler wasn't even solid white. I think he, I mean, you can pull it out. I think it was determined that he had some Jewish in his blood. And then there's probably other ethnicities who are scared of our relationship with Israel

Starting point is 02:00:11 and what could happen to them in the future. I get scared sometimes. I think with the surveillance state now, I feel like everybody's getting scared. Oh, my goodness, I know. And now the big, I think the fresh topic right now on surveillance is those flock cameras. Yeah. It's like, I... A lot of my black friends are starting to fuck them up.

Starting point is 02:00:29 Yeah, I'm not hating on that. I'm not saying, do it. I'm just saying that. The block versus flock, bro. That's where I'm at, dude. You see a flock camera on a cul-de-sac. One cul-de-sac. Why do you need a flock camera?

Starting point is 02:00:41 I agree. Are you reading plates? What's going on? Or does it pick up phone stuff? And it's the third-party. Here's my concern. Third-party company that's not law enforcement. I agree.

Starting point is 02:00:49 What are we doing? So what oversight do you have? Do you have policies stopping? I mean, we've got a constitution. That is our law. That's our Bible. Which it goes back to, you know, you're talking about the border and stuff. Listen, if I'm a law enforcement officer, number one, I'm a peace officer.

Starting point is 02:01:05 Yeah. Most of the cars used to say to protect and serve. That's your job. You're a shepherd. You should be. You're protecting the sheep from the wolves. I mean, I'm not trying to be all, you know, Jack Nicholson on the wall and be holier than now.

Starting point is 02:01:22 It's just my job is to enforce the law. So I used to tell people, I'm like, well, don't hate me because I'm enforcing law. There's been so many people I've arrested or sat down at a table. after they've been arrested. And I'll say, man, you know, I'm not saying I disagree with what you did. I'm not saying I think you're a bad person. I'm saying you're an adult and you made the choice to break the law and you got caught. So here we are.

Starting point is 02:01:42 I'm not hating. Did you ever get so deep entangled during like a, during, like a sting or during an operation or during an undercover where at the end you were like, damn, this is going to be a long day when this bust happens? Yeah, because it's going to bother you. Yeah. And I'm kind of taking us off a base. I'm kind of taking us, yeah, off a base a little bit.

Starting point is 02:02:04 So let's get back. So there was the doxing going on? So they did some people tag some stuff. And also during that time, we had a base member who went out in Canada. He was Canadian. And he went and put flyers up to try to recruit. And then somebody answered the recruitment. They had to go through the emails like I did.

Starting point is 02:02:24 They had to go through a interview panel like I did. on audio, on wire, and then they went and had the face-to-face meet. So this guy that got recruited, one of our members who ended up being called Punished Snake, his name was Pat Matthews. Punished Snake? Yeah. So Pat Matthews, he changed his name several times. But he was, I think it's the Canadian version of our National Guard kind of, but he was being trained.

Starting point is 02:02:47 He was a military. He was being trained. And he's the guy. So we get a new member coming in. Hey, welcome new member, blah, blah, blah, blah, from Canada. I think his name was Mark or something. Yeah. And he's in the main chat group for about a week, maybe two weeks.

Starting point is 02:03:06 I don't think it definitely. I don't think it was more than two weeks. And are you in this chat group every day, kind of? Yeah. Imagine if I wasn't. So I work my job as an FBI agent. I go home, I might have dinner with my family, and then I'm back out on the porch, you know, answering stuff.

Starting point is 02:03:18 Or I'm checking in during the day. Right. But they also knew I was a... What's up, fellas? Everybody's still racist or whatever? Like shit like that? You want to commit some hate crimes? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:26 But, so this Canadian, he meets this guy, this guy gets into the group, and after about a week or so, he comes out. And it turns out that it was a journalist for a paper. Is he? No, no. He's a, I guess, these days, that's probably what the people are thinking. He was a journalist for a newspaper up there. He went and met Pat on his own. And after about a week or two, they were like, hey, this is too deep. You'd pull the chocks right up, right.

Starting point is 02:03:55 So this article comes out, and it's basically doxing Pat. So Pat, they come, the RM's Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP, comes to his house, takes his guns. He's booted from the military thing. His parents now hate him. I think he lost his job, and all of a sudden he disappears. Wow. His truck is found at the border, the border of Canada and the United States.

Starting point is 02:04:21 So we're pretty sure he's here, but we don't know where. Right. eventually we find him, and he ended up being down at my cell. He was renting out one of the horse stalls under the barn, under the residence on that 100-acre property. So I got to go. Is it sleeping there? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:37 So I got to go spend a lot of time down there training, and it just got crazier and crazier, man. It was like... And what kind of stuff were they saying or like how crazy? Everything's preparing for the... Preparing for the buglea. Building your kit. I mean, a lot of these kids didn't even have...

Starting point is 02:04:52 I say kids. I mean, I was 48. I lied and said I was 44 at the time because literally there was like one other 40 something Nazara was 40 something so the leader was 40 something there was one other dude that was in his 40s there might have been

Starting point is 02:05:06 2 30 somethings and everything else was 20s and teens. A lot of these kids they didn't have a job they didn't have a car they had to borrow a car to come to the training but they were wearing cry of precision plate carriers same thing the FBI SWAT team wears they're building their kid up their pistols their semi-automatic rifles,

Starting point is 02:05:26 their ARs or their AKs. And we're coming out and training, man. Moving drills. And, you know, I may not be the best, but still, I mean, I was looking at a lot of them going, holy crap, man. If they wanted to take on some, if they wanted to do something,

Starting point is 02:05:41 they're probably going to get the drop on a lot of people. Right. You know? That's scary, dude. It's fascinating to think that that goes on. So once we found Pat, and we had him locked down, so we're like, okay,

Starting point is 02:05:53 we feel like we're in control of the situation because we were finding out more and more stuff. Are they plotting something or they're not? There was inklings of things being whispered and said and we're as a case team in an undercover, all the case teams. I mean, at one point, we had 100 people on a call once a month. That's how many case teams there were in the United States working this stuff.

Starting point is 02:06:11 And it was just kind of like, did they mean that? Did they not mean that? You're trying to find out. Are you going to do something bad or are you not? Yeah. Are you just talking trash, First Amendment protected? and then you're waiting for the D-Day, and then it's purge. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:27 So we get this all started because you ask about the sacrifice thing. So a lot of these guys believed in the North, Norse Pantheon. So they were claiming pagan, but they're white supremacists. They're not true pagans. Got it. They're white supremacists. And we've already had a couple of blots, B-L-O-T, that is the ceremony, the worship ceremony. Did you ever go to those?

Starting point is 02:06:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd already been. Well, I mean, I had to participate. I had to mirror. So I would pray to a God. There were some that we had that had some people leading it that was really, they were, some of them were actually priests in the Asatru family. Just doing what side jobs or whatever?

Starting point is 02:07:09 No, no, no, no. I'm just meaning they've obtained the rank to basically be a preacher. They are a priest and they can run a block. So I'd attended some and it might be in the middle of the summer and you go down there and you paint ruins on your chest and we do the whole ceremony and they'd be like a take like a piece of wood and carve some rooms in it, which are pagan.

Starting point is 02:07:32 Are you in E.S? Yeah. Yeah. And then it would be but then there would be like swastikas and white supremacy stuff on there too. And then you would cut yourself and bleed on the wood and then we set the wood on fire and pray to our gods until the wood stopped burning. So I was getting in closer Yeah And then

Starting point is 02:07:54 And then It was just going so fast Theo, I tell you You ever wake up believing it? No No Not this, no Right

Starting point is 02:08:03 I mean Some of these cats Were cats Some of these guys were saying That Hitler's still alive And Hollywood And he's hanging out With 15 foot

Starting point is 02:08:11 Giant white dudes With red beards And they're just waiting To come back And I'm like For what? Yeah, that's crazy I mean come on back

Starting point is 02:08:18 If you're saying We need to fight right now What's Hitler waiting on? Yeah, where they milling around for? Yeah, come on, you know. Unless he's waiting for NIL money or whatever. Yeah, exactly. I'm switching teams.

Starting point is 02:08:29 Somebody'd give them a deal probably. But so we get to this point, and it's Halloween of 2019. And we're going to have a basically what people refer to as a hate camp. We're going to be there training and training. I did some hand-to-hand combat training there. We already started doing firearms, but that Halloween night was a Thursday night. in 2019. So we have a few drinks.

Starting point is 02:08:54 I go back to my truck. I'm actually charging my phone up because the battery's dying. You know how it is when you go from like sleet, ice, freezing cold, and you hop in that warm vehicle and you kind of just defrost and then you nod off a little bit. I nodded off a little bit. And I wake up to the pounding on my door because I was already Pell Horse by this time. I switched my code name. And they were like,

Starting point is 02:09:19 Pale horse, pale horse, wake up, wake up. I'm like, what's going on? They're like, you got to see this. You're not going to believe it.

Starting point is 02:09:24 I come out and they go, hey, remember I was talking about sacrificing a goat? And I'm like, vaguely. And they're like, we got one. And I'm like,

Starting point is 02:09:33 oh, they went, I mean, not far down the road. Yeah. To a guy who had three and turns out that he came out because he heard them,

Starting point is 02:09:42 they were armed. They had their fleg-torn camo on with the balaclavas over their face. I mean, It's a wonder nobody can get shot right there. But they steal a goat or a ram. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:09:51 I mean, I've asked people the difference. It was big. It had horns. I don't know if it was a goat or a ram. But they, I walk up and they're like, had it in the back of the truck. And one of the members who went by Dima. Dima says, man, this goat's shitting all over the truck. And I said, well, hell, I would be too if a bunch of Neanderthals would flak,

Starting point is 02:10:13 Tarn and Bala clavis just jerked me out of the backyard at gunpoint. I'm like, that gun. you know and uh and then eisen was going to be running the blot on this one and i see him over there and he's petting the goat and he's like it looks like he's showing it love and stuff and i walked up and i said hey man is it bad that i feel sorry for the goat he says hey pale horse don't let hear the goat izin was the guy's name yeah it was his code name his real name was william bill bro oh i'm gonna say because izen sounds like a jewish name it seems like a weird name to handle i think i think it was actually a room i can't remember what eisen stands for but anyway

Starting point is 02:10:45 Eisen is German and Ashkenazi U.S. Her name meaning iron. There you go on, sorry? So I didn't know that. So I should have looked that up. I spent seven months with the guy. Well shit.

Starting point is 02:10:57 But I'll be like, oh, iron. I got it. So he says, hey, don't let the goat here. You say that. And I'm like, okay. He's like, this goat, we're showing this goat love. We're going to sacrifice it to start the wild hunt. And it's going to Valhalla.

Starting point is 02:11:12 It's going to be with Odin tonight. This is a good thing for the goat. No, negative energy basically. And don't let the other people hear you with negative energy. I said, got it. Push that beach ball down. Never think of it again, you know, underwater.

Starting point is 02:11:23 Damn. It's going to push it down. So I'll walk over to, oh, let me say this. The wild hunt in Norse mythology is essentially Odin and other gods going out in the middle of the night and laying the smack down to all their enemies. Okay. But in the version of the white supremacy, he's saying that this sacrifice is going to start the wild hunt for us to cleanse the world of death.

Starting point is 02:11:45 darkness. So if you're anti-fash and you are non-white, when bugaloo happens, what they were saying is if you are not fascist, you are automatically anti-fashion and the penalty's death. I mean, these dudes would talk about shooting their own dads. Like, I'd have to kill my dad. If he doesn't, if he doesn't switch to be fascist, I'm going to have to kill my dad. Wow. And then one be like, I'd cry myself to sleep if I did. Another would be like, well, I could never kill my parents, so you guys are way ahead of me. So you're hearing all this crazy stuff. And you're hearing Pat down under the barn saying, I'm a ghost.

Starting point is 02:12:23 My life is over. I don't exist anymore. Because that's a guy that got docs. Docks out of Canada. And so can't you all bust the group at this point or no? We could, but there's, I'm going to tell you, in my opinion, as a case agent on long-term cases and as an undercover, that's the heart's decision. Got it. To decide when, do we have enough?

Starting point is 02:12:42 Or, oh, this new guy just came in. one more buying, we can get, you know, it's tough. Yeah, because at what point are you just like playing house or whatever, it almost seems like, or White House anyway? Right, but what would we charge them with other than assisting getting an undocumented alien in right now? Now, what charges are you going to come up with? Because there's no federal domestic terrorism charge. Okay.

Starting point is 02:12:59 There are federal international terrorism charges, but there's not for domestic terrorism. Got it. So I'm hearing all this crazy stuff. Like, I mean, we can form, everybody that's been docks, we can have like a staging location or, or, you know, a clubhouse somewhere where it's all us. and we're all ghost and we just go out and murder. I mean, it's talking about laying out like a homeless person, learning the pattern of the lefty journalist,

Starting point is 02:13:21 and then just popping them in the back of the head with a 38 one day and just walk off. That's gorilla, that kind of small hit kind of thing. So we've got them, and then we get to that Halloween weekend. So they tell me they got the goat. And I go to my listening device, and I'm like, hey, talking to the case, and I'm like, if you can hear me, I'm pretty sure we're going to go down here and slaughter this animal.

Starting point is 02:13:43 I'm racking my brain trying to think if there's anything I'm definitely not seeing anything federal in my head and I basically just tossed it to them do you want me to shut this thing down or you'll me just drive off to come up with a ruse and kind of drive off I said if you want me to you need to let me know and I waited and I stared at stared at my device I waited and I waited waited for my phone to ring I waited

Starting point is 02:14:06 waited nothing and I went okay I guess I'm heading down in the woods so we head down we carry the goat down It's probably about 12 of us there. And Is it a goat sleeping or it's loud? No, no, we're walking it down. You know, yeah. So we get down there and... Just doing goat shit.

Starting point is 02:14:24 Yeah, doing ghost shit. Yeah. So we get down there to what was referred to as a holy spot. The torches are lit. Eisen leads to the blot. Talks about, hey, we're going to sacrifice this goat to Odin. It's going to go be with the elves and everything. And is he pretty organized or is the guy like reading notes off of his phone and shit?

Starting point is 02:14:40 No, he wasn't the best. Now, the other guy I told you. about when we were in the summer, I think he was a legit Asa-Tru. Got it. I mean, it was, it was led very well. This one was a little choppy, you know. Yeah, that's crazy. But, but they're believing it.

Starting point is 02:14:58 They're believing it, right? So then he has like a, it's bigger than a machete, but it's not quite a sword from what I remember. We're all around the goat. He's already given the whole speech about the wild hunt and we're going to start killing all anti-fashioned and, um, whites um because if everybody's white that'll definitely save that'll that'll solve the problem no I won't no I won't you know crazy you're still gonna be fighting yeah gonna be cheating yeah what are we talking about

Starting point is 02:15:26 here but uh so I end up we're all in a circle around the goat and somehow I ended up at the back legs and he's already given the speech and now he's got this blade and he's he's like he's bringing it back with his hands and he's coming down practice swing practice swing taking a breath you can hear somebody say, just do it, you know. And he comes down, and I'm holding the back of that goat. He comes down with everything he's got. And all I heard was thunk. I don't think it broke a single hair.

Starting point is 02:15:53 I don't know if the blade was dull or the backstrap of the goat was so strong. And for that second, I was like, in that split second in my mind, I'm like, oh, this is going to be bad. It's going to get bloody. Because I'm holding it. Yeah, and then you hear, it may take two swings. Do it again. You always yelling. And then somebody says, does anybody got a gun?

Starting point is 02:16:12 I think it was pestilence. Does anybody have a pistol? Fucking pestilence. The rule was, is we weren't supposed to bring any weapons down there, but the one guy, Zoom Nat, says, I got mine. I mean, me and Luke, TNB, both were looking at going, this is like the least qualified guy to be holding a weapon. This dude's been up for like two days straight on Adderall.

Starting point is 02:16:32 He worked third shift in Austin, Texas, and drove straight to Rome, Georgia. And I'm like, and not coordinated, I mean, guns, stuff. I was like, oh, my goodness, man, you're the last person down here. What the heck, dude. He hands the pistol over. Luke takes it from him. This is like Assassin's Creed.

Starting point is 02:16:48 Oh, yeah, yeah. So he takes the weapon, hands it to Eisen. Eisen chambers around, kind of points towards the goat and then turns completely away to pull the trigger. And I just want to look the instructor in me. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's like, what? And I go, man, look at what you're shooting at. Bro, we're all in a circle on our knees, man.

Starting point is 02:17:06 He's like, oh, okay. I know, man. I feel like this is a Larry David's scat. I know. I mean, part of the. you in the comical side, you're like, I'll let him go ahead and shoot. I'm over here, you know?

Starting point is 02:17:16 He's aimed that way. I see he takes out, you know? But, yeah, so he puts one right in his head, and then it goes down and it twitches for a while. And I coax him to, I said, man, why don't you go ahead and put another round in it? Because it was debate of, is it after death twitches, or is it still alive?

Starting point is 02:17:32 I said, just go ahead and put it. I said, for the sake of the goat, because you want it to show up happy, right? It's going, I mean, it's a good thing. I'm using his words against me. Right, for sure. Let it get there quick. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:17:42 I mean, you know, I thought, so he did it. And then you get here somebody saying, now it's definitely dead. Oh, are we done? No. Now they slice the throat of the goat, fill up a cup full of blood. No. Yeah, and we're all in a circle. And is it warm out or cold out?

Starting point is 02:17:56 It is chill. It's cold. Oh, that's cold. Yeah, it's cold because it, the, whatever happened at Halloween in 2019, it had been like 60s or 70s, and that day, a cold front of, it dropped to like 10. So we're down there. and he they slice it, they fill the cup up with blood. Everybody's still in the circle, except me.

Starting point is 02:18:18 I'm holding the flashlight because Eisen decided to bring acid to help with the spiritual journey. LSD? Yeah, yeah. Had a sheet, had a sheet. You all took a head or what? No, I didn't. And that was funny because they were like, one of the guys was like, hey, I'm a, how do you worded it? I'm a very experienced, highly experienced psychedelic or something.

Starting point is 02:18:40 professional psychedelic because we think you'd really like this pill horse i said let me tell you you have no idea what's in my brain you have no idea what i've done on this planet in my lifetime i don't do that stuff if somebody slips one on me and i go on a bad trip every single one of you are going with me damn you know that's the only like i did that's your call yes i'm gonna use that and then one guy was like he was like yeah don't do it don't put nothing in pell horse's drink but i went around and i was shining he would tear a tab put it under your tongue chase it with the blood now you Now we're signifying the sacrifice. We're closing the deal here.

Starting point is 02:19:13 Yeah, now you're a sick app. Yeah, so now it gets to me, and I'm one of the last ones. Well, by the time it gets to me, Theo, I look down and it is clotted, it is chunky. And I'm looking at it going, man, I really don't want to drink this, man. You know, I'm like, but I think pestilence, or I don't know if he said it or I thought of it, but I just stuck two fingers deep into the blood, pulled out my fingers and sucked the blood off my fingers. and luckily I'd carried a beer down there and I chased it with that.

Starting point is 02:19:43 What kind of beer was it? That night it might have been Bud Light. Before the controversy. Yeah. Oh, I think, yeah. No, I think it was a Bud Light. But I, if it wasn't a Bud Light, it was a Yingling Lager, which is what I like.

Starting point is 02:19:58 Yeah. That's nice. Damn, brothers, y'all down there eating blood and freaking doing LSD. I mean, what in the fuck is going on? I know, right? So we're supposed to get up the next day and train. training was shot. What?

Starting point is 02:20:11 Because only like two or three people didn't do acid And everybody else was up all night staring at a fire. I don't even know what y'all are training for it. This feels like the New York Jets kind of dude. I'm like, what the fuck is going to go? So the second, they're like, we're not going to go handle weapons and be running across fields. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:20:25 Because they'd been up all night and they were hot. And I'm like, great. You just shot an entire day of training, you know? But I went to go get biscuits for everybody. I went to the bojangles. Ooh, they're good. I just had one the other day, actually. Apparently in Rome, Georgia.

Starting point is 02:20:38 Bojangles is where it's at because cars will be backed all the way down the main street, directly across the street from Bojangles of McDonald's. There was no cars in it. But I went and I picked up about 30 bacon, egg and cheese biscuits. So I'm coming back and all I can smell is that butter, that bacon, that cheese and them eggs, that biscuit. God. I go to get out of my truck. Punished Snake says, pale horse, you got to try this goat.

Starting point is 02:21:03 It is good. He's been holding that raw goat over a fire. it was not prepared at all. I've had some gamey stuff in my life. That was the gamiest tasting meat I'd ever put in my daggone mouth. Yeah. And as soon as I started biting it,

Starting point is 02:21:17 after smelling the butter, and as soon as I bit into it, man, I was like, oh, I was like, oh, I was like, that's not too bad. As soon as he turned his head, I tossed it to the farm dogs. I was like, yeah, dude, I've had bad meat on some LSD

Starting point is 02:21:28 and that's, you never forget that. You never forget that. Jamie? Yeah, I mean, I've just cooked, I've eaten undercooked duck on LSD. Yeah. And I never forget. that shit. I still, sometimes I still floss my teeth years later just to get the, just, I feel like some of it's still in there.

Starting point is 02:21:44 So, so after the sacrifice, uh, the chop the head of the goat off and we're carrying it around. What the hell is going on? We took a picture, um, because the, the recruitment process was this. Whatever video, whatever new recruitment video we're doing has to be better than the last one. Got it. Every time the base got infiltrated by either a journalist or whatever and their offset got better and better. How did that happen? How did we get infiltrated?

Starting point is 02:22:09 How did we stop it from happening again? So Saturday night comes. Saturday comes now we can start training again. So we're out there shooting and running and stuff. And now it's warming back up. And we go down Saturday night to the Holy Spot and build a bonfire. We burn American flags. There it is.

Starting point is 02:22:30 Now, here's the thing. He nicknamed that goat Gar. His name is William Garfield, Billbro. his grandfather's name is Garfield so he named the goat Gar. So everybody talked about Gar after that. I am back row two left

Starting point is 02:22:46 from the flag. You can see my neck. There you go. Yeah, that's me right there. Showing a little neck. A little neck. Well, yeah, the Bala Klava didn't go all the way down. Dang. Somebody should have caught that and been like, Pell Horse, your neck's chilling. You bought that baby clobber with you. I didn't know. They give it to you. That's part of your initiation.

Starting point is 02:23:03 When you made it in, they gave me the Bala clava in the three runes. That smaller clava that gave you, bro. That's a little small for you. I got a horse head. So then we go down and we burn American flags and we burn Holy Bibles. And I remember coming back after that weekend and I remember just feeling kind of dirty. I mean, maybe that's because I'd been up for four days or whatever.

Starting point is 02:23:27 I don't know. The raining on or not. But just the act and just the feeling of that. I was like, man, I just feel weird. Yeah, your spirit. Yeah, because I'm like, yeah, that's it. Because I'm like, man, I come back to the office and I go, I've been working undercover since 1996, off and on, started street-level narcotics.

Starting point is 02:23:45 I said, I have never had to burn American flags. I've never had to burn Holy Bibles. And I definitely wouldn't with a group of people that went and stole a goat, sacrificed him, we drank his blood at a ritual, you know? Because even though they're saying pagan, some of those dudes are praying to Satan. Some of those dudes are playing to, like, order of nine angles where it's a lot more satanic. and yeah it's but that weekend I guess I had passed the benchmark of trust because that Saturday night after everybody's going to bed it's me pestilence and TMB and I kind of ask

Starting point is 02:24:21 him a question I go you know a while back of course I know what I'm asking about because we're trying to figure out what it is but I was a recording that I'd gotten of the case teams and myself we were trying to figure out what they meant and I kind of circled back on that and I said what were we talking about there? And they kind of whisper and I hear pestling say, yeah, I think we can trust him. So, hey, phone and airplane mode, cool. And we start talking.

Starting point is 02:24:43 And they start telling me about that they've been, they're talking about wanting to do bigger things. They didn't necessarily say we were going to kill people yet, but definitely enough to lead us to believe that we need to stay in this longer because we've got to figure out what they're talking about. Yeah. Right. So let's just fast forward.

Starting point is 02:25:01 fast forward because this was a fast-paced case it was only seven months long but I'm telling you it was like no sleep for seven months you know yeah and and just running and gunning so what I find out is the Georgia cell has identified a couple

Starting point is 02:25:21 a couple counties over in Georgia that they believed were active members of Atlanta Antifa and and anti-fascist right so they wanted to murder them. And so when you find out that somebody's getting ready, we're like, man, what is it that they were supposed to do?

Starting point is 02:25:38 And I'm like, Luke would never answer me on the phone. He would just giggle. And he goes, look, I'll tell you to your face. I'm just going to do it on the phone. I said, you know what? I'm cruising through there tomorrow. I wasn't, obviously. I'm like, I call the case team, you ready to go to Georgia tomorrow?

Starting point is 02:25:50 Are you ready for me tomorrow? Yes, so I go down, wake him up. I'm like, okay, you know, I like to joke. I like to have fun. But when it's time to do business, I'm serious. I said, so what the F are we doing? Because he wouldn't tell me they called us. They sent out a thing like, hey, training this, we're going on a camping trip, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 02:26:08 It looked like he was talking about going out and putting up stickers, posters, flyers. But then he said, make sure you bring your weapons. And they were all like, what does he mean? What would we be going on? So when I met him that day, I said, when I said, what the hell are we doing? He says, essentially, we're going to whack some people. And I said, well, that's way different than putting up stickers. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:26:27 And it's something I definitely would not want to drive my personal truck to. That's why I'm asking you, what are we doing? Do I need to bring something that doesn't come back to me? Right, get a rental or whatever. Yeah, so he says, he starts laying it out, but now I'm thinking, because the case team's thinking this too, we've got to slow this down. We've got to slow this down. Because if we wouldn't have found out, I would have been finding out at a camp on a Friday night. And how am I letting my cover team know?

Starting point is 02:26:55 Right. You know what I mean? So, yeah, you've got to hurt you can. Yeah, I pointed out to him. Because you need some space for everybody to figure. things out. So you got to slow it down. Got it.

Starting point is 02:27:02 So I'm like, I told them, I mean, sometimes the case doesn't allow for that. You got to take it down right then and there. For sure. But I pointed out to him how little planning he had put in to this murder he's talking about because the planning he drafted on putting up flyers was like insanely operational security. I'm like, what's the biggest? I'm just tired of waiting. And I said, look, I'm a side.

Starting point is 02:27:27 I played a. And did he send you a JPEG over it? or what do he just draw it on something? No, he was just telling me. Okay, so there's no drawing of it. Yeah, nothing. Oh, you got to at least damn draw it up. So, well, and that's what I told him.

Starting point is 02:27:38 I was portraying a site survey, a site survey specialist, and I said, do this is what I do. I said, I can go in and pull demographics, homes, schools, crime rates, everything. And I said, let me find out what's all at this house. I mean, have you even been by it? He said, no. So we start building that. I come in with fake plates. I say, I just took these off of a car in Florida, throw those on.

Starting point is 02:27:58 We go by, we case the place. I'm not leading it. They're leading it, right? And meanwhile, punished snake has now gone back to the Maryland cell. He's up there with a guy that goes by, can't go back. Can't go back was the only one that I really knew in our proximity that actually had a job too. He was a truck driver.

Starting point is 02:28:18 And he had a $6,000 thermal scope on a 6.5 Creedmoor. And they were talking about now they're up there, they're plotting the kickoff of the buglew because there was going to be a Second Amendment gun rights, gun, gun, uh,

Starting point is 02:28:31 second amendment rally for gun rights in Virginia in 2020, January of 2020. And they thought, okay, you're going to have Antifa, you're going to have three percenters, militia types, anti-government types,

Starting point is 02:28:44 you're going to have law enforcement. What if we start popping rounds into the crowd from our sniper rifles? And then nobody knows who's shooting each other and they start shooting each other. What if that's the kick off to the bugle of, I know it's not a lot of forethought or a lot of afterthought, but this is what you're dealing with.

Starting point is 02:28:58 with, right? And I'll say this, that's a good plan. Yeah. For what they're trying to do. Yeah. Create chaos. It's like when you tap somebody on the shoulder over here and you're standing over here. Yeah, exactly. You know, which dude, Victor Wimbignani, you know who that is? Basketball guy? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tallest guy ever. Imagine if he does that to people all the time where he would like tap somebody way over there. Yeah. And nobody knows. And he's three people over, dude. Yeah. Imagine in kindergarten or whatever, he must have been able to have the most fun. Anyway, back into the story. So yeah, That's absolutely insane. So then we start casing that,

Starting point is 02:29:31 but meanwhile, we're finding out more stuff on these, the sale up in Maryland, and what the Baltimore division does is they do a Title III wiretow. And they put cameras in that apartment. If I thought, if what I thought they were talking about

Starting point is 02:29:46 was crazy face to face, the stuff that they were sending me that they were saying in that apartment was just them two going. I'm like, holy crap. They're talking out, breaking out the saints. And what they refer to the saints

Starting point is 02:29:57 as your white supremacy mass. The Charleston guy, the New Zealand guy, the Norway guy. I'm not saying their names on a purpose, right? But they actually have a scoreboard, and it says the scoreboard, and it's got the mass shooters, the White Supreme Court says, 77 and 0, that's the Norway guy. I think it's 55 and 0 is New Zealand. You go all the way down, Pittsburgh, 7 and 0, 9 for Charleston,

Starting point is 02:30:21 and it says, when will you make the leaderboard? Wow. You know, these are the dark. Yeah. So on the anniversary of those maps, murders, they'll say, happy saint. Right. Whatever.

Starting point is 02:30:33 If it were me, it'd be happy Saint pain day, you know? And it's just crazy. So, but again, are you just talking to trash? Are you going to go do something? Right. So now we're diving down to the end of this case. And we're on a time, we're trying to make sure everything gets together. And I'm running nonstop.

Starting point is 02:30:49 I go to Baltimore. I drive up and shoot all day with the Maryland crew trying to tighten things up, make sure we got everything, settle for that, go down. to the Georgia crew have cased the place with everybody in the in the I mean you got guys saying like hey are there any kids and another dude saying I don't have a problem shooting a comic kid you got another dude saying oh I'm perfect I'm an IT I work nine to five I look like a normal citizen but I've been I've been wanting to do this for two years damn can I pop my cherry I'm like my popping your cherry means something to me what are you talking about yeah oh he actually wants to put a bullet in one of his head he doesn't want to just be standing guard so for this Georgia crew that They had it down to where all four were going to go in. Yeah. One was going to post in the window. Me, and this is what I was instructed to do.

Starting point is 02:31:37 Me and TMB were going to go down and murder the family and anything else. But if they want to put a bullet in, too, we'll let them take a shot. And then Pestolence was going to set the house on fire and we were going to leave. And that was number one because they had already started forming a list of liberal journalist anchors. And I'm like, you tell it. I said, you're telling me that you want to start taking out people. who were like popular popular. They go, yeah, and I go,

Starting point is 02:32:01 well, it's a good thing. We got this family to start and get a little practice run. So you're trying to keep them locked into this so that you guys can, you guys can take action. Right, and you're looking at over at X. Okay, so what did you do?

Starting point is 02:32:13 So if you want to come back and say, oh, we were just talking trash. No, you bought catch bags to put on ARs. So when you shoot, if you have to shoot, it catches the brass. You don't leave brass. Created a silencer for a gun. other things like he told us the way he was going to work is we were going to go to a camp

Starting point is 02:32:30 leave all of our digital footprint all media all phones everything there go to a pay-by-the-hour motel scrub all our loose skin off we're going to put on BDUs or whatever we're going to tape our pants to our boots tape our gloves to our wrist even this he was instructing even put Vaseline on your facial hair so you don't drop anything and he'd even done enough research to where he had read that, this would be Luke, TMB, who was telling me this. He had read that for a lot of people the first time they murder somebody, they lose control of their bowel. So he was suggesting we wear depends.

Starting point is 02:33:07 What do you mean? Diapers? Yeah, diapers. Oh, my God. And I looked at him and I said, I'll be all right. I didn't say I killed anybody. I'm just saying I don't need a diaper. Wow.

Starting point is 02:33:15 You know, I'm like, I'll be okay. Just letting them. Let it marinate. So we were able to pull it all off. We came in on Wednesday. A diaper, man, yeah. Yeah, we came in on a Wednesday, started the arrest. I picked up Luke because we figured that would, I mean, sneaking up on a hundred acre.

Starting point is 02:33:31 What the fuck? Hold on a second, man. Yeah. This is gone so fast, man. I mean, it's taken a long story, but it's gone so now it's at this crescendo where it's like, this kind of. So what are you, like that day do you like? I was running on fumes, man. I think I had the flu at the time.

Starting point is 02:33:48 My back was spasming because what I didn't realize. Yeah. Well, if you're going to murder someone, I pick you damn. That's an L5S1 issue. I know, you're right. Yes, I'm like, I had a lumbar fusion in 2002. After this case in 2020, I found out that my lumbar fusion had broken approximately three to five years after.

Starting point is 02:34:06 So they were telling me for like 15 years I was going around with a dislocation. I mean, a back that's disconnected. Just a bad hitch or whatever. Yeah, I mean, broke. There's nothing in. There's no cadaver bone. There's no disc. It's just floating.

Starting point is 02:34:19 He'll floating spine trick. That sounds like. So every. would hear me on the recording and they was like, was that, you making that sound? I said, yeah, and they go, what happened? I'm, because I'm my back jerked. You know, I'm walking. I'm like, I'm walking, I go, like, like, ugh, like that, you know, I'm like, uh. Brother, you just, you barely keep it together. Okay, so let's get to the end of this story just because we should. Yeah. Um, you guys are driving over there. You're driving. Yeah, so I drive. And you

Starting point is 02:34:44 know what y'all's playing is. You know what yours. Yes. Yeah, because I, for me, personally, I was dealing with SWAT teams because they were going to let a SWAT team hit us. Um, so I made sure that, I mean, I go and meet them. They tell me what they're planning on. And as long as I'm okay and I don't disagree with safety stuff, being a SWAT guy myself, you know, and I'm like, okay, I looked at it. And I'm like, oh, these dudes are squared away. So I go and pick Luke up for lunch, but I've already, we've already laid out all this

Starting point is 02:35:07 stuff to where I'm like, hey, man, we're getting close to this thing. He's like, yeah, I said, you know, I've been thinking, the last thing we need to do is be riding around armed and get put on the radar, but the cop stopped us like, and he goes, you know, that's a good idea. So when I picked him up that day, I said, hey, you're not packing, right? He goes, no, no, no, I left it inside. I said, me neither, man. So I'm getting the information, getting the intel that he's not carrying.

Starting point is 02:35:30 Yeah. We pulled around, like my truck has a problem. I pull over. I go, I go, I said, if that damn, because literally it did happen to my truck, the calipers froze. They got locked and froze and smoke was going everywhere. I said, if that damn caliber is locked again? And he's like, man, I pull over and I get close to the fence to where he can't get out. and then I go around the back of the truck,

Starting point is 02:35:52 act like I'm looking, and another truck pulls up. Well, it's actually an FBI agent, but he pulls up and he goes, hey, man, you need me help, and I look up, and I came up with the whole ruse. We practiced it. And he says, hey, man, you need any help?

Starting point is 02:36:04 And I look up and I go, holy shit, what are you doing here? And now we're acting like we know each other. He goes, what are you doing here? I go, man, I ain't seen you in forever. I didn't know you lived around here. I go, man, this is a nice truck. And as I'm walking at the talk to him,

Starting point is 02:36:17 Luke's looking at us. And then what he doesn't see the bear cat, which is the military vehicle the SWAT team uses, and it's coming over the hill. So he's focused on us, and I jump into the truck right when they pull up, right when I'm jumping into the truck going, go, go, go. They're right there. They got, I mean, rifles. They're up on a turret.

Starting point is 02:36:33 Don't move, and they got him out, no issues. Arrest with no, nothing wrong. And then while that happens, and then they go pick up pestilence at his house, they pick up Helter-Skelter, who was the Popma-Chairie guy. They pick him up at his work. He's wilding. And then we keep it quiet because Thursday morning. He's just still more to bust.

Starting point is 02:36:55 Yeah, because that was Wednesday. Thursday morning, the Washington field office SWAT team hit Bill Bro. The Baltimore SWAT team hit Can't Go Back and Punish Snake. And then now it starts coming out. So now it's Friday. And I'm still in the group. I'm just monitoring. And it's Friday.

Starting point is 02:37:12 And now the arrest are starting to come out. Like, holy crap, did you see this? Did you read this? And now the affidavits are starting to pop up. And they're like, wait, it says here that there's a Fed that infiltrated this group. And they're like, who's the Fed and the group? And everybody's like, has anybody heard from Pale Horse? No, no, no, no.

Starting point is 02:37:27 And it goes on and goes, I'm just watching. I'm watching. Somewhere around 5 o'clock on Friday, Nazaro, Roman Wolf, aka Roman Wolf, comes on and goes, he says something to the effect of, I'm not sure we could have done anything to pick him up because he was one of our best members. and I was like, oh, he knows it's me because he's going back and I'm sure he keeps recordings

Starting point is 02:37:49 of all the interviews he's done and stuff or at least say, on this date I did this and they figured it out and I was like, oh, he's got me. And it says, boom, you've been removed by Roman Wolf. I screenshotted it and I sent it to all the case teams, headquarters and everything and I go, and I'm out.

Starting point is 02:38:07 But they were talking, we had some other coverage in there that people reported and it turns out there was another dude that it infiltrated that group, not law enforcement, though, was doing it, helping, you know, reporting to, you know, I don't know, whether it be the Guardian, something. Paper, yeah, BBC, something.

Starting point is 02:38:26 So we got copies of what the chatter after I got booted. And some of it, my case team printed it for me. And when I came in, it was highlighted it up on my desk. It says something like, was, are you saying the Fed was the guy with a deep voice on the cause? And they're like, yeah, and they go, there's no way, dude. that's one of the most solid neo-Nazis I've ever been around, you know? And then the other one would be like, oh, there was something really endearing about him, you know? Oh, that you're right.

Starting point is 02:38:51 And I look at the squad and I'm like, see, they do love me. These are my people, you know. Oh, damn, bro. Yeah. And then you get home and you go, ah. Now I take a shower. Yeah, how long do you take off after that? It depends.

Starting point is 02:39:07 Because I used to not take any days off. But that ended up being my downfall. and then I learned how not to do that to myself. So by that time, I'm longing the tooth. I could have worked until I was 57. That's the cutoff for the FBI, but I was 50 at this point. Or at least I retired at 50.

Starting point is 02:39:25 Why, you look great, man. Yeah, so it was like, you know, I was like, that one I probably took a week off, you know, just relax, chill. Called my pastor, though, especially after that Halloween weekend. I was like, man, I feel kind of, like you said, my spirit. I was like, I feel kind of dirty, man. Am I praying over me? You know.

Starting point is 02:39:41 And do you have a family during this? Yeah. Do you still have a family? Yeah. Yeah, but I'm going through a divorce. Are you? We didn't make it. Not going to talk about it because it's still going through, but...

Starting point is 02:39:52 I'm sorry to hear that for you and your wife. Yeah. We're a statistic now, you know? So kids have grown up and moved out. And then I retired and, yeah. Do you feel like the job had an effect on your marriage? I'm sure. because my wife

Starting point is 02:40:11 was not law enforcement. This was not her world. Essentially, I was her world. So she married me, but you married me, yeah, you married the Bureau too. I mean, you look back and doing the book, he had to dive back in

Starting point is 02:40:28 because I wanted to be transparent. That's the only way I know how to be. But I don't want it to be all cakes and pies. I want to tell you when it was sad too and when it was messed up. So even though we were happy at the time, we were doing this book to dive back into times where we weren't happy. That was tough.

Starting point is 02:40:43 That was tough, man, to put your mind back when, oh, my gosh, you know, 9-1-1 hang-up call, cops show up at the house, I got to call my supervisor, you know, whatever, whatever's going on. Me, me, going through, you know, getting stripped in a basement at gunpoint and all this stuff. It's just, yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it did. Well, I know it did because especially during some of the cases early on when our kids were young, like three and one. Man, just to get rid of her nervous energy,

Starting point is 02:41:11 she'd be moving furniture and stuff. So I'd come home and, you know, you walk in the door and trip over something. I'm like, why don't we put the couch here, you know? Really? There's that much anxiety. Yeah, and the way she tells it is that she finally just had to give it up to the Lord because she's, she could worry about me all the time.

Starting point is 02:41:26 But I told her, I said, when it's my time, it's my time. I think I'm good at what I do. I'm not laxidized ago. I've been blessed with this skill set and with this, you know, whatever. I've been blessed with all this. Man, that would be so tough. To take somebody you love every day and just let and know that the whole day there is a risk. Well, welcome to first responder in military.

Starting point is 02:41:47 Yeah. I'm thank you for saying that. No, you're right. Yeah. I mean, it's like I said, man, if you're, you think a pitch to hire people is like, hey, we're real high in suicide, substance abuse, divorce, and dying within five years after retiring. Who wants in? Yeah. Sign me up.

Starting point is 02:42:04 I hate to even laugh at that. I know, but it's like, you know, like. So we got to get better. And you're seeing a lot more stuff. You're seeing a lot more. I don't know if law enforcement is going to open up about it. They should, but you see a lot of spec ops, former spec ops, former law enforcement. And they're getting these plant-based treatments, you know.

Starting point is 02:42:24 Yeah, I can't even imagine. I never thought about the stress that spouses and children must feel with a member of their family being involved, like in a service. in life-risking service, you know? Yeah, I think there should be more. Actually, my wife was saying it from the jump because in the FBI, we have a psychological unit that was specifically created for undercovers. It's called Safeguard.

Starting point is 02:42:52 So if I'm an active undercover, I have to be psychologically assessed mandatory. Got it. And then we expanded it out, and it's being used to do a lot of things. So, like, if you're an agent or a task force officer and you work innocent images, Crimes Against Children, we get you assessed because it's tough to look at that stuff

Starting point is 02:43:10 and see that kind of stuff on a daily basis. Had to take a little bathroom break there, man. That's cool. This is the longest episode we've ever had, I think, man. So thank you for your attention to detail and just taking us down some... Being a slow talker. Hey, just taking us down some memories of yours, man. It's nice.

Starting point is 02:43:30 It's nice to listen to a storyteller, you know, someone share their story. and share stories from their book. And I know you had mentioned earlier, we talked a little bit about the one percenters. And you had a pretty famed case with the outlaws. Can you take me into that? Sure. Again, longest undercover I did, two years.

Starting point is 02:43:55 The infiltration, I kind of got, I can't remember again. If I got recruited or I saw a canvas, but it was probably just a phone call. because as I said, working at the UC school, at the undercover school, in the bureau, if you say, all right, we've got 600 certified undercovers, how many of those undercovers have been the primary undercover on an operation, on one that's going to dwindle down. More than one less than five, it's going to dwindle down.

Starting point is 02:44:21 More than five less than ten. Now it's really getting dwindled down. If you get to like that 10 and overmark, it's generally we all know each other because we all go back to the program. We all help out with the school and stuff. and you know who's active and who isn't. So if somebody reaches out, I went up and did the interview in Massachusetts in Boston, and I got the gig.

Starting point is 02:44:44 We talked about all kinds of things on, like, ways to go in, ways to not go in. I preferred to go in cold, which means I'm not being introduced by source. Go into. To try to make that bump. In other words, the outlaws were already predicated. And the outlaws are a. The outlaw motor. cycle club is a 1% or club. It's probably the second largest. Hells Angels is probably the largest.

Starting point is 02:45:07 Okay. But worldwide, and that's their, that's their calder's right there. They refer to the skull as Charlie. Okay, the AOA American Outlaws Association. They started in McCook, Illinois, 1935. The Outlaws MC is the oldest outlaw biker club in the world with 441 chapters located in 43 countries. The club is also the second largest in the world behind the Hells Angels. And what made you, is it still active? Oh, yeah, the outlaws are still going strong. And what made you want to infiltrate them? Well, it's the case team.

Starting point is 02:45:44 It's not necessarily me. It's that there's a case team and the task force and state and local law enforcement that have been working up there and they've got different over, they've got different crimes, they've arrested people, but they're at a point now in their investigation where they feel like they can get an undercover, or that's the next step to do. Got it. And the whole group, Outlaws, is not a criminal organization.

Starting point is 02:46:05 There was just somebody that was doing crime in it. Correct. Got it. That's the argument. Like I said earlier, somebody's like, we're all one-percenters criminals? Like, not necessarily, but it's kind of the point of being a one-percenter. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 02:46:16 Yeah. But, like, all bikers, you know, I've heard them say, or not all of them, but the ones I amput trade is like, I didn't join the outlaws to be a beta. Right. I joined the Outlaws to be an alpha. Right. I'm going out here.

Starting point is 02:46:28 I don't care what I'm doing. I'm an outlaw. Yeah, all private, equity people, criminals. Yeah. But so these guys were predicated, the Taunton chapter specifically, Taunton, Massachusetts. And I went up, I interviewed, and I said, look, okay, my idea was just let me go in there. So what I did, because I used to work at gentlemen's clubs, which is an oxymoron, in my opinion, because there's no gentleman in there. And neither was I back then, living in the flesh, as they say.

Starting point is 02:47:01 Amen. I know, right. And then you have two daughters and it's all girl dogs. I'm like, y'all stay away from any pole in this house. I swear, no, just kidding. But I knew how those establishments worked. So I went, I would go in when, like, day shift, when it wasn't, and the outlaws weren't all in there.

Starting point is 02:47:23 Because we knew that they told me the bar they were at and stuff. So that's what I did, maybe two, three times because human nature is to exaggerate. You know? So the night that they're finally coming in, the outlaws are finally coming in. Coming into the strip club? Yeah, because I'm there now. All right. So they have a lot of your biker clubs, 1% or clubs, have a mandatory meeting every week.

Starting point is 02:47:44 They refer to that as church. Some clubs, that's where they talk dirty business. You know, you leave your phones outside, all that thing. Or it just might be shooting the bull. It might be time to collect the dues, whatever. but the surveillance team was on them. I'm already at the Foxy Lady, which was the strip club. And that's in Oregon?

Starting point is 02:48:02 It was in Brockton, Massachusetts. Got it. So Taunton and Brockton are right next to each other. Okay. But the strip club's in Brockton. So I'm already at the Foxy Lady. I'm getting some drinks. I'm telling jokes.

Starting point is 02:48:12 People are laughing. And then here comes like 13, 15 outlaws. And they take the whole back wall in the back bar. See a black leather and testosterone, right? And originally I'd been told that they weren't allowed to wear their color. which is the vest with the moniker you saw. That's their cut. And that was one of my first questions.

Starting point is 02:48:30 I'm like, hey, man, can they wear their colors in the bars? And they're like, no, they're not allowed to. And I'm like, oh, okay, that makes it easier for me. Yeah. Because now I'm just a tattooed dude drinking whiskey, looking at naked people, listening to heavy metal music. It's the same thing the guy next time is doing. But when they come in and they're all wearing their colors,

Starting point is 02:48:46 that changes my approach. Because listen to me, do I sound like I'm from Boston? Absolutely not. As soon as I start talking, they're like, where the F are you from? You know, and I'm like, you know, deep south, south. I'm from South Boston. I'm a Southie.

Starting point is 02:49:03 Southie Carolina. Yeah, Southie Carolina. That's it, you know, cackalacky. So, you know, do you walk over around the bar and go, hey, fellas, y'all ride? No. I'm going to take a butt kicking or something. So I started working, doing what I do, I guess. there was one guy that they had said

Starting point is 02:49:23 that was in the group and they had the intel perfect on him. He loved to be surrounded by big dudes. He liked to be the center of attention. So I'm laughing it up and I'm cutting it up and it's getting louder and louder but I've got people around me

Starting point is 02:49:35 that I can see him. You know, it's like fishing. Like I can see him looking. You know, and I'm like, okay, all right. He's paying attention now. I was a bigger dude, six four, probably 280 then and holding it very well.

Starting point is 02:49:46 And he, I see him talking to the bartender. Well, what's he saying? Who is that? Oh, that dude's from Texas. Man, he comes here all the time. All the time? Two, three times, you know, whatever.

Starting point is 02:49:58 Eventually, he yells at me and he says, yeah, yeah, there I am, right there after a shoulder surgery. He yells at me and he says, hey, where the F of you from? And I'm like, man, down near the border of Mexico. What? So we started jucking back and forth. I think he sent me a drink first, called me over. I won't ever start talking.

Starting point is 02:50:19 And next thing you know, we're hitting it off. He's giving me cards for the lobster festival, which is lobster fest. Yeah, they love it. Yeah, lobster. And it was going to be like the next month. And he said, just tell him you with me. And so then you start, you start ingratiating, and you start getting trust. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:37 And they love a lobster, man. They love a fish that can pinch you. Yeah, man. And I'm a bottom feeder. All of them, man. All of them shrimp and crab legs, I can eat my weight in that stuff. Yeah, I'm a top. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:50:50 So eventually you get in and you make more and more acquaintances. And I came in as a site survey specialist, the same kind of thing I did on the base case. But that allowed me to travel. It allowed me to be there and not live there or whatever. You know, I found quickly when I started flying a lot that even in Houston, when I was based in McAllen, there's people that don't live in Houston, but there's so many dagum flights, they literally fly in. work, fly home. Or they might come in for the week

Starting point is 02:51:21 and then go home on the weekend. So I said, well, I can sell that because it's true. I mean, I've seen plenty of people doing it. So that's kind of what I was doing. You're living in Texas and flying in for work? Yep. And then eventually they find out

Starting point is 02:51:33 that I'm also a criminal. Shocker, right? Because they're already predicated. And what were you flying it for just to be part of the group? No, I originally said, I'm there doing site survey specialist work for investors that are looking to buy a property.

Starting point is 02:51:46 Got it. And I would go do that. And I would actually go legitimately, go down to the clerk of court and pull records and stuff. Because, again, you want it to look, smell, taste, feel real. But what they eventually learned or what I portrayed and what they believed was that I was a high-ranking, if not the leader of an high-ranking member, if not the leader of an international theft ring. And I was moving stuff into Mexico. So it started with some insurance fraud.

Starting point is 02:52:18 They were report vehicles stolen, motorcycles. And this is all based on the truth because at that time, when I was living in the border, I'd already learned through auto theft groups, task forces and stuff, and from the insurance company, that Harley Davison's and V8 4s, man, the cartel of, they would steal them all the time. So I'm telling the truth, and they do motorcycles first. So they report three or four hardly stolen. So they get the stolen money from their insurance company. I pay a stolen price, which is usually around 20% of what the real price would be.

Starting point is 02:52:54 And then I'm off. Well, they don't get arrested. And then the next thing you know, it's a truck. And the next thing you know, and then we get full-fledged. Now it's like, when you're coming back, Tex, when you're coming back, I got three things lined up. So you pull up, and man, we would load F-350s. Yeah, steal my wife. Yeah, F-350, stuff like that.

Starting point is 02:53:13 But even if you were worried about predication, like if you're predicated and for the people that don't know that, it just means that we've got evidence that you either talked about it or they're doing it. So if we have nothing on you, and I'm coming up to bump you, and I just come and go,

Starting point is 02:53:31 hey man, you want some marijuana or you want a kilo of Coke? That's odd, and that's not right. I'm now leading it. But when the first time I walk outside with the president of the Outlaws chapter who went by Joe Dogs, so he's the chapter president,

Starting point is 02:53:45 it. We walk outside and he goes, where you live? I said, McCallon. He goes, where's that? It's right on the border. Next question. How much can you get a kilo of cocaine for? I'm like about 13 right now.

Starting point is 02:53:56 Between 11 and 13 on the border. He goes, man, if I could get them for 13, I said, no, you don't get them for 13. Unless you come to the border and then you drive them back up. The reason they cost 25 to 30 up here is because it has to make it here from the border. Not a good drug dealer. Or his math was off. Yeah. Not a good businessman.

Starting point is 02:54:15 I'm like, no, that's not how it works. There's risk involved. Well, it's a good pitch. I want to get it for the same as you. I know, yeah. So the next thing you know, like I said, F350s, four by four of Tahoe is whatever. So it's a lot of insurance fraud at first.

Starting point is 02:54:30 At first. Got it. Then I've gained trust. Now they carjacks somebody. And they're calling me texts. We got one that is hot. I mean, it is on fire right now. We just took this dude at gunpoint.

Starting point is 02:54:39 We almost killed him, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, don't worry about it. I got it. And now I'm moving that. Now I'm gaining more. trust, right? So as the case goes on... And are y'all using code language?

Starting point is 02:54:49 We've got a bad lobster up here or something like that. You can, but what's comical about that, Theo, is I've sat on so many wiretaps, and we've run wiretaps, and you're listening, or you get on the phone yourself as undercover, and you're being all, like, super operational security. You're like, okay, the bird is in the cage. Right.

Starting point is 02:55:06 I've got three cheeseburgers out back. Five minutes into the conversation, I'm telling you, 99% of the time, they're just talking openly dirty. Yeah. It's like they start with it, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, there's like a whisper in the wigwam or whatever.

Starting point is 02:55:20 Right? Yeah. Like I had a guy on another case. I won't go into it because I will stay on the outlaws. But this is what he's like, no, Scott, you know, I don't do cocaine anymore. And I'm looking at him going, I know, man, I know. He goes, I used to do a boatload of it, but I don't do it anymore. I said, I know.

Starting point is 02:55:36 He said, this right here. That's just a bump. And he goes on and I go, you just did cocaine. And you said, okay. And he says, you know what? don't sell it anymore either. I said, I know, Mike. He said, I used to sell truckloads of it, but I don't anymore.

Starting point is 02:55:49 I said, I know, man, he goes, but if you want them five eight balls, I'll get him for $7.50. It's just like, I'm like, what? Your little team. I'm like, I am confused. So during this case, a guy I didn't tell you about, I was actually a picture of him in that picture you pulled up, the red shirt, red t-shirt, a Scott Town. I talk thoroughly about Scott Town in the book.

Starting point is 02:56:11 Again, I told you, I worked undercover from 96 to 206 to 2022, roughly. And how much cocaine on right there with that bad arm, brother? Look at you grinning. That would be muscle relaxers and pain fills. Yeah, my God, boy. I'm like, I'm like less than a week out, I think, right there. Your smile did a gram at least, brother.

Starting point is 02:56:31 No, I did not. This joke. It's joking. Yeah, I know. Okay, so Scott Town. So this is legitimately the closest relationship I've ever built undercover. we bonded so well. It was scary.

Starting point is 02:56:47 Like, I mean, I'm talking like we could complete each other's sentences. We thought the same. It was literally the story of that proverbial fork in the road. He went that way, and I went that way, and I easily could have gone his way. And maybe that's why I was good at my skill set in these types of environments. And y'all was just friends? Well, he went to jail. He was a target.

Starting point is 02:57:09 I mean, he was not a patch member. his story was he was going to be patched, but he was also doing some stuff for the mafia. And somewhere his group got pinched, and he was looking at time. And at that point in time, he had four daughters. And he said, I don't want to go to prison with my four daughters. And I was like, hey, man, cool.

Starting point is 02:57:29 But they would be like a lot, they would be talk like, man, grenades, bazookas, whatever, rocket launchers, not a bazook, rocket launcher. Yeah. But those things would talk and then it wouldn't come to. or somebody would come in talking big and we'd like, oh, this looks good and then it wouldn't come through. But after the carjackings and thing like that,

Starting point is 02:57:47 we start getting more and more because the case team is also running the Title III wiretap. And eventually, we got to the point in the case where I let them know, not all at once, but I let them know that, yes, I did used to be in the drug trade. Got it. But heat was getting close. People were getting pinched,

Starting point is 02:58:06 and I backed out of it because running everything south, most of the time law enforcement is looking for money or guns going south to trade for dope or buy dope. Got it. I'm like, if you got a stole, this is my story to him. I'm like, if you've got a truck full of stolen vehicles of the Bill of Layden, I mean, what's the truck driver now?

Starting point is 02:58:24 He sees a Bill of Layden, he does what he does. I was just talking, blowing smoke, but it kind of making them comfortable, relaxed, I think, enough. But I eventually let them know I did just to be in the dope game. Because from day one, they were hounded me. When you're going to introduce to somebody down there? When you're going to, because think of it, what does a drug dealer want? They want the purest dope they can get at the cheapest price they can get.

Starting point is 02:58:48 So that way you can step on it and make some money, right? So imagine having a pipeline in Little Old Tonton, Massachusetts, directly from the cartel. Let's go. Yeah, right? You're getting keys. So that's what they saw in you. Yeah. Got it.

Starting point is 02:59:01 Yeah. And that was all fictional. That was my backstory. Yeah. That was my legend. Yeah. But it wasn't really happening. right? And like all the stolen vehicles, they would think they're going to, no, we'd make sure

Starting point is 02:59:12 nobody's following them. But then that semi would turn around and head up north of Boston or something to a warehouse. And by the end of the case, you got a warehouse full of stolen parts and cars and motorcycles and stolen cars and whatever. Big trucks, big trucks. But so the case gets to a point like, yeah, sorry. It's good. So I'll start laying out that I wasn't a dope game. and Joe Dogs is chomping at the bit, man. He's like, he's like, dude, if I, you got to introduce me. I started saying, my guy's Mani, Mani, Mani, Mani. And they're like, man, if I can meet Mani, well, the whole ruse was, and this technique's been used.

Starting point is 02:59:50 And it was a drug protection. I said, look, here's the deal. I laid it out over a long period of time. But I'm like, look, Mani reached out to me. He wanted my truck drivers to deliver a load into Canada. And the reason I told them that a white guy, the gringo, never. got kicked out of a Mexican drug trafficking organization or international theft ring is because I was the guy with the dirty contacts at the port of entry and at the checkpoints. And yes, there's

Starting point is 03:00:15 corruption. Not all, but I'm saying it's, there's corruption cases on the border. I mean, think about this. You get, somebody offers you 15 grand to do this next. I know, I know, if you're broke. I mean, you know what I mean? So not saying everybody's dirty, but I'm saying And that was my story. And they believed it because why else would they keep me in? So when I did that story about going to Canada, I said, hey, does your guy, do you still have your people at the checkpoint or at the point of entry? No, they fell through.

Starting point is 03:00:47 I said, I'll not let my truck drivers do it. I said, but I've been being hounded. We just want to meet them. And I'm like, what if they come here? And we just meet and we help this because we want to make sure nothing's getting ripped and all that stuff. And they're like, yeah, man, that'd be awesome. So that's what we started laying out.

Starting point is 03:01:03 Now, Scott Town jumps on him. And Scott Town, I even look at him and I'm like, dude, why are you doing this? You told me you didn't want, no, there's a strong argument to be made that the reason he did that is because he liked me so much. No way. Because he. So you kind of let him into it even just by being buddies. It's not an entrapment thing, but it's like if you ask him, he's probably going to say something like this. I didn't want to do it.

Starting point is 03:01:30 And I was suspicious. but he knew Joe dogs and the other people involved could screw it up really bad and if I got hurt and he wasn't there he'd never forgive himself you see what I'm saying? Y'all were close, huh? Yeah, tight, real tight.

Starting point is 03:01:45 But so there's a point in the case and I'm bouncing his daughter on my knee. His daughter's won, my youngest daughter's one. So they kind of are making the same noises and moving the same, but I'm not at home. with my daughter, I'm there with his. And, you know, you're looking. I know the training.

Starting point is 03:02:04 I know, I'll put the training on. But I'm looking over going, man, I love this guy. I mean, yeah, I mean, if he does criminal stuff, okay, but I mean, we think the same. He likes to do this. I like to do it. We work out, fight, ride, all that stuff, man. And, uh... Do you miss him?

Starting point is 03:02:24 Yeah. Yeah. He still keeping in touch with him? Maybe. Maybe now. after all this came out. Yeah. It's pretty amazing, actually.

Starting point is 03:02:38 I've also been trolled by people we put in jail too. It's pretty funny. But maybe I'll end it on that. So I'm looking at the refrigerator, and I'm thinking all these thoughts, and I'm like, man, I'm looking at the refrigerator. He's got all kinds of stickers and magnets and stuff, and I saw one that said WWSD.

Starting point is 03:02:57 Now, if you're in the Christian faith, You see WWJD a lot. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? Wrist bands and stuff. And I looked there and I got, WWSD. And I looked and it said,

Starting point is 03:03:07 what would Satan do? And I went, oh, no, he's different. He's different. But it was just like a tough guy thing. And then... So he wasn't a real Satanist. No, no. He was just bolstering.

Starting point is 03:03:18 Just joking around with magnets. Yeah. But that was like, oh, no, we're not the same. You're going to jail. But I... But is that weird, man? be hanging out with somebody and always thinking back your head, they're going to go to jail. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:03:33 It sounds like a fucking power trip. No, actually, it could be, it could give you some stress. It could give you some PTSD. You can start getting anxiety because you're sitting there going, okay, you're fearing the end of the case. You're fearing them finding out who you are. You're fearing of this relationship that you built. And I know there'll be plenty of maybe law enforcement or even people on the case. It'd be like, I can't believe you're talking like that.

Starting point is 03:03:53 Look, man, I'm human. I love that guy. Yes. Would it ever be weird? Like if you were leaving a room together? there's something and like you wouldn't want to walk out first? That would be my fear all the time. I'd always be like, I got to walk behind because I don't want to, you know what if they

Starting point is 03:04:06 know something or they're leading me somewhere? Well, I'll say this. A lot of cops, a lot of cops sit in a restaurant, they keep their back to the wall because you want to see everything. Yeah. When you're undercover, can you do that? I mean, can I come in there and hug the wall with my back the whole way through or do I just got to look like I'm a normal person?

Starting point is 03:04:21 People would catch on. Yeah, so you don't want to look, you don't want to raise suspicion. Got it. So the case is going and we get to the point where we're going to do the drug deal. Got everything lined up months and months and months. Scott's in. There's some outlaws from Brockton that are in it. There's some outlaws from Taunton that are in it.

Starting point is 03:04:39 And, you know, you ask that one percent or are they all criminals? I mean, you look at the Brockton chapter. Let's say most of them had day jobs. Maybe they bent. Maybe they did time. Maybe they didn't. But you go to the Taunton chapter and out of like 13, 13 at 15 outlaws, one and a half had a job.

Starting point is 03:04:56 I say half because that guy was a tattoo artist and a piercer. but I don't think he worked, you know, nine to five, seven days a week. It was more like a part-time thing. The other guy had a towing company. Everybody else was a straight thug. All criminal activity didn't make money, whether it's robin, home invasion, carjacking, theft, dope, you know? Yeah. So.

Starting point is 03:05:17 I would do the dope. Yeah. Yeah, I'd probably do that every car theft, for sure. But I... Because I don't even like driving at night that much. Really? I don't love it. But anyway, guys.

Starting point is 03:05:29 on. We get to the night before. We've lined everything up. And the assistant United States attorney is like, hey, they're talking about, are they talking about this in the clubhouse, you know, kind of thing about this drug deal that we're getting ready to do and all this? I said, yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it. And, you know, from an investigative or evidence standpoint, it would be good to have because if they're talking about that planning and all that, that'll help with, like, asset forfeiture and getting search warrants for the, for the, uh, property and stuff. So just having recordings of them talking about. Yeah, yeah. So I go to the house, Joe Dogs tells me to come over. It's the night before we're going to do the big drug

Starting point is 03:06:08 deal. They don't know it, but we've got 50 kilos of real cocaine, and we've got 1,000 pounds of real wheat. Let's go. And we're going to have to move it from one truck to another. Now, snipers are up on the roof. I mean, we got SWAT all in the hotel. I mean, I literally did like the TV thing where you walk in and you can't see nothing because the projector's on your face and they're like, this is the guy that's going to be the undercover, you know. And I'm like, yeah, I look a lot like the other dudes. Don't shoot me. Just tell me, I'll be real still, man.

Starting point is 03:06:38 You know. Yeah, dude, I'd be like, like, I'm the guy wearing, like, a special neck brace or, like, maybe like a John Elway jersey or something. I would wear something to stand out, dude. I would wear, like, a, yeah, like a Mason Crosby jersey. I would wear something that, like, do not shoot this guy. Test dummy full jumpsuit, you know, bright reflections on it. Yeah, like a suicide boy shirt or maybe not that.

Starting point is 03:07:02 That might not help. That might not help. So I remember here's a funny one Joe dogs. I said, hey, man, we got to be nonchalant. We're going to be out here doing all this stuff. I was like, hey, wear something that doesn't attract a lot of attention. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:07:18 Not the way he dressed. You walk out there with a shirt that says, F that bitch. Oh, yeah. In all caps. And I'm like, that's low key. All right. Well, I mean, who knows what he'd sold her before that. I know, right?

Starting point is 03:07:30 So it's the night before. I get there, and they're having church. They're still having church. I'm banging on the door, and it's weird, man. Nobody's coming, and all of a sudden, Joe Dawks, does that, you know, like, hey, we're not ready yet. And I'm like, well, why did you call me every year? Yeah. I'm not thinking nothing.

Starting point is 03:07:47 I go, he tells me to take a probate, which would be somebody on probation, or they call them prospects. You're not a full-patch member yet. you've advanced from hangarround status, you're trying to become a full patch member. So he says, hey, take probate, Oby, y'all go get something neat. So we went down to the restaurant, got a couple of drinks, something that he came back,

Starting point is 03:08:09 and I go into the clubhouse. And when I go in the clubhouse, I've been in that thing like umpteen time, I don't know. There's one door I'd never been in. Now, for the listeners that may not know, at least with this chapter, If you weren't a patch member, which I wasn't, you're not allowed to touch the door. You're not allowed to touch the phone.

Starting point is 03:08:29 But they're giving you drinks for free, right? I had been asked and actually been told that I need to become an outlaw. But I painted it as like, I travel all over the country, man. I can't have that bullseye on my back, you know, but I'm very humbled by it kind of thing. But so I'll go in there and at this point in the case, it's been a year and a half. I'm a year and a half in, and my closest relationship is Scott Town. My second closest relationship is at point is the enforcer who went by the street name Closeline. The real name is Brian Delavega.

Starting point is 03:09:05 So that was my second closest relationship. My third closest was the president, Joe Dawks, and then it just trickled down from there. But by this time, I've been all over the country. I've been to Sturgis. I've been to, you know, Daytona, wherever, riding all over the place. So I've met outlaws all over. Actually, I met outlaws from all over the world. And they were actually recruiting myself in Scott Town because I was bigger then, too.

Starting point is 03:09:31 But Boston's a little weird because Boston and North is Hells Angel territory. Boston and South was Outlaws territory, and they were arts rivals. And then you get to Cape Cod and Hells Angels had a chapter there. Got it. So the outlaws were looking to set up a chapter in Cape Cod, but they wanted to fill it with big, strong dudes that can handle themselves. Okay. And they were recruiting us for that, you know.

Starting point is 03:09:56 So, I go into the clubhouse, door shuts behind me, dead bolts, still-framed door. The door you'd never been in? No, no, no. This is just the entry door. Got it. Right. So if you get inside, you'll see that they've welded metal hooks to the steel frame of the door and put a steel bar across it.

Starting point is 03:10:17 So that's going to, from a breacher standpoint, it's going to be a little harder to, be tougher to breach. Got it. So I'm in there. I'm having some drinks, and I've been there, like I said, maybe 20 times. Who knows? There's one door I'd never been in. And clothes line, my second closest friend, says, he's not a friend, right?

Starting point is 03:10:37 Friend. He liked Scott Calloway. I don't think he likes Scott Payne too much. But he says, hey, Tex, can I talk to you for a minute? Or he says, do you got a minute? Either can I talk to you for a minute or you got a minute? I'm like, yeah. So as I'm walking, he grabs an ashtray and a lighter, or he tells somebody to, and we turn in, and it is a very tight stairwell.

Starting point is 03:10:58 It's a very, to call it a basement down there is being very generous, more like a cellar. Got it. Cross base. I couldn't stand up straight in it, but it's a northeastern home kind of split level. And as I'm walking in, Chocolate Scott, another member comes in right behind me. Chocolate Scott? Yeah, Chockech, Chockech. Yeah, Chalkin'Cock.

Starting point is 03:11:16 Yeah, they call him Chocolate Scott or. or black Scott. But the thing is, is he looked like a black guy, which you can't be in the outlaws. Oh, yeah. He can't be. I guess how. I was assuming he.

Starting point is 03:11:27 No, he said he was. He semi looked like one. He said he was Indians, but they named him Chocolate Scott. Oh, yeah. That would be my name. Yeah, so I follow, as soon as I turn in behind, close line, and Chocolate Scott comes in right behind me,

Starting point is 03:11:41 I know something's not right. And now it's really tight, and you get down there. It was a little bit of a false start, because there was something down. there that another member of VEG did not want me to see. And they come down. So going down those steps, I'm already getting an adrenaline dump, like I was talking about earlier,

Starting point is 03:11:55 right? We come back up, I'm not free to leave, outlaws everywhere. They're hiding whatever they needed to hide. I'm not sure what it was. But then it's like, okay, let's go back down. So I get down there and

Starting point is 03:12:11 So they take you half a down and they take you back up? Yeah, they take me down. That would be weird. Oh, it's terrible. It's almost like you're surprise, probably but then out ready? Yeah, yeah. Because if they just walks down there, he's doing this, I see him doing a movement that's like, hey, get out. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on, but I'm looking.

Starting point is 03:12:28 I'm looking for plastic on the floor. I saw a rope. And I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah. Like, and I'm like, oh, man. And you got to be thinking I'm getting out of here then. No, I wasn't. What did you think they were going to do? I didn't know yet, but.

Starting point is 03:12:42 But even if you saw a rope. Even if I tried to leave, I mean, think about it. Like, if I see a rope at all, I never see a rope, right? 13 outlaws, but I'm, and they got guns. They already showed me their guns. Oh, got it. Yeah, so I'm basically at gunpoint, you know? Okay.

Starting point is 03:12:55 So I go back up, and we walk back down, and that's when we get down there, and close line says, hey, there's a lot of shit going on. It's my job to take care of my brothers, because he's the enforcer. And he says, I need you to take all your clothes off, everything, boats and everything. And we'd give them boots or sneakers? I had boots. And he said, I need you to write down your full name. name, your date of birth, your address, your wife's name.

Starting point is 03:13:23 He goes, I'm not going to ask for your kids' names, even though I can find them out if I need to. And he goes, everything, social security, everything. I said, okay, but you can hear my voice already because I'm having an adrenaline dump. My voice is higher, my throat's tighter. I'm hearing that underwater auditory exclusion is going, woof, woof, bro. Oh, I would be so scared. My time dilation, my eyes are clicking.

Starting point is 03:13:45 everything I'm hearing is going I need you to write down your That's what I'm hearing It's like on one of those boxing video games When you're about to get knocked out or whatever And you're like And it starts to get kind of walking Yeah yeah

Starting point is 03:13:57 And did you write your real stuff on there? Yeah No no no I didn't I didn't but I forgot my middle name Because of this dress I forgot my middle name was Andrew Did you just make one up? No

Starting point is 03:14:09 No I should have That'd have been a smart thing to do But then again maybe not If they were really going to run it Yeah Right? So I'm like, I'm going Scott Calloway, Scott Calloway, Scott Calloway, and I go Scott Joseph Calloway, and I'm like, nope, I'm going through this roller decks in my head. It feels like it's eight minutes, this is a couple of seconds. And then I remembered my initials, and I remembered, oh, I'm Scott Andrew Calloway. But what I did is, like when we talked about shootings and stuff and officers not knowing that they did it, certain things, the same thing happened to me, but it was on a verbal thing. I would have never known I said this unless I didn't listen to the recording. unless I listen to the recording. But while I'm forgetting my middle name,

Starting point is 03:14:50 I turn and I go, and what else do you need? But it sounds like this. And what else do you need? Because I'm freaking out. All right. Yeah, my diction's terrible, talking through my nose,

Starting point is 03:14:59 higher pitch voice, and then I hear them yell. What do you need for that website? I go, okay, because I'm listening. I'm still listening, even though I'm freaking out. I'm like, oh, okay, they're going to write this down.

Starting point is 03:15:08 They're going to run me. They're going to Google me. And back then they had like a who's a rat. com you could go to and run. Were you on there? No, no. But I said, okay, I'm feeling better. Feet finder they had, too.

Starting point is 03:15:20 Yeah, right? So then he says, and then I need you to take all your clothes off, everything. Oh, damn, they want you on feet finder? He says, he says, because I got to check you for a wire. Here's the issue that I was wired to the hill. No-uh. I had two recording devices on me and a transmitter. And I won't say where, what, but.

Starting point is 03:15:39 Fuck, use a damn iPhone at that point. Yeah, well, back then. No, I mean, you were one. Yeah, yes. And all that shit you had on you. And back then, that was been like circa 2006-ish, 7-ish. They were big on NextTales. So, you know.

Starting point is 03:15:55 I know, yeah. Great radio. Yeah. But terrible to call somebody on. Bring some milk on. Yeah, I could key you up in Japan and it'd be like, it'd be like, what's up? Hey, you know, fine.

Starting point is 03:16:06 But if I tried to call you, we couldn't hear nothing. I'm like, I don't know. It sounded Japanese. Yeah, I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. So, damn, so they're trying to strip search you. They did. And when you're wearing underpants or boxers, you think? Boxer briefs.

Starting point is 03:16:19 Nice. Yeah. The comfort of a boxer, but the support of a brief. Yeah. Look, I got them on right now. I do too. Pretty cool. And much like that night, they're not white, which I was happy.

Starting point is 03:16:31 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, if you'd have sold them up. It sold them up, yeah. You know what I'm saying? A little that back bay chattice out. I tell them, I say, I say... So were you joking at this point or were you scared? No, I'm scared to death.

Starting point is 03:16:43 I was scared to death. I joke about it now, but I was scared of that. So you took your clothes off? So what I did is I took my coat and it was cold because it was like November, so I probably had like more than one T-shirt on. Took all that off, took my boots off. And I dropped my underwear and jeans down to my ankles. I never kicked them off.

Starting point is 03:17:00 So from the ankles up, I'm completely naked. They checked me for a wire. He missed one thing that was, that was I had in my sock. It was a device, but, you know. So I go he passed me down and I'm having that adrenaline dump, right? Everything's slow motion. I can feel my heart beating. My man parts felt like they were in my throat, you know.

Starting point is 03:17:28 And are they calling you f***ing it or anything? Do they call in your names? No, no. But during the talk, that's a good question because we, at least the way I was trained, you just don't want a vapor lock. You don't want to get the deer in the headlights. Luke's at least keep talking. At least keep trying to find something.

Starting point is 03:17:42 Find a way up, get some information. What are you doing, guys? What's this about? I did. I go, should I ask what's going on? And they're like, hey, man, there's just some precautions, blah, blah, blah. And what he says to me, and he goes, trust me, man. He goes, I like you a lot.

Starting point is 03:17:54 He goes, but I've got my doubts too. He said, if somebody accused me of being a fed, I'd probably smash him in the effing mouth. And I said, I'm not, I looked at him. I said, I'm not happy. And he goes, I wouldn't be either. But what you can't see is because we know each other, even though my words may be saying one thing.

Starting point is 03:18:09 What my face is saying in the close line is, tell me I'm okay. Tell me I'm going to be all right. His facial expressions back to me were, it's okay. But I was, in fact, undercover, and I was wired. And if he found it, I don't know what's going to happen. So I pull my pants back up. I think I'm putting my boots on. And he grabs a piece of clothing.

Starting point is 03:18:30 And it had something in it. And he says, I'm not going to find anything in here. I don't want to, like some pictures of my old lady. And he laughs. And he goes, ha, ha, ha. And I go, I hope not. Now I'm standing there. I can't stand up straight.

Starting point is 03:18:44 I'm on the wall. And I'm watching him need this piece of clothing with his hands. He's doing this. And I know, circa that year, what our equipment was and all that stuff, he would have felt it. Now, he misses it. He looks right at it. He misses it. And even while he's searching it, I don't know I'd do it, but you can hear me because I'm just standing there and you can hear me go.

Starting point is 03:19:11 Because I'm like, what am I going to do? right so here's the thing um he misses it he hands me back my stuff i immediately go into joking because that's not only me it's also a defense mechanism when you're scared right been juggling my whole life cracking right i'm cracking jokes like like i said yeah i'm glad i didn't wear white underwear yeah you know and uh and we go back in the business and i just keep saying that glad it didn't wear a white you just keep glitching yeah right glad I didn't wear a point in it And it's like, what the fuck is you know? What's wrong with him?

Starting point is 03:19:42 He's a robot. Yeah, yeah. Bring in choco stain or whatever that guy's name was. Chocolate Scott. Chocolate Scott. So people always ask me, what would you have said if clothes line would have found it? And I said, well, I remember it like it was yesterday. It also helps that I teach it all over the place and I still relive it all the dagum time.

Starting point is 03:20:03 So there's really little air, room for error there as far as exaggerating and stuff. So I Or remembering it wrong I I said man I remember it like it was yesterday Maybe my first response Would have been I don't know

Starting point is 03:20:18 If he said if he said what is this Maybe I would have said I don't know Some pictures of you old lady As a joke because he already threw that line to me You know am I going to find anything in here The only other thing that I had in my head And again I remember like it was yesterday I would have looked at him and said

Starting point is 03:20:32 The gig is up I'm an undercover FBI agent And we can I can walk out of here and we can see each other in court, or all hell is going to break loose. The problem is, is that would have been a bluff on my part because as far as I knew,

Starting point is 03:20:44 every time I'd been in that clubhouse, my cover team couldn't hear me. Whether it's equipment, walls, whatever. I mean, it's 2026, and I've got first net and I can walk into a building and I can't get out, you know? And I'm like, I don't. So it's above my pay grade,

Starting point is 03:20:57 but as far as I knew. I kept sending it in there. Well, I mean, they had surveillance, you know? Right, right, right. But as far as I knew, they can never hear me. That night, At the end of the shift, you know, you go meet somewhere at a predetermined location,

Starting point is 03:21:12 and I'm turning over my recording equipment to the case team and whatever. Maybe they're giving me more money for the next day or whatever, and they do a debrief. Well, when I got there that night, what I found out was is that the first two guys covering me were part of the main case team. It was Sergeant Higginbottom from Massachusetts state troopers. Everybody called him Higgy, and then Detective Cummings from Brock. and PD. And because they had known me for a year and a half or a little more, whatever happened at that first interaction with Joe dogs at the door and made them think something was up. And they had pulled close enough or whatever. They were able to hear everything. When they heard me getting stripped, of course they can hear that I'm scared because they know my voice, right? They're radioing back to Boston saying, hey, anybody and they'll get down here. And as far as the way I was told is everybody was coming, blue lights and siren. down there. Wow.

Starting point is 03:22:09 And they didn't hit it. They went ahead and they had a plan because they've been in that clubhouse on other law enforcement activity. And they know how it set up and they knew how that door was fortified. So their plan, they put their vest on everything. And their plan was if they felt like it was time to pull the trigger to save me or whatever, they were going to drive the van into the cinder block wall beside the door to kind of breach the wall. So you're standing there. That's what you're thinking.

Starting point is 03:22:32 If he knows what's going on, that's what those are your two plans of action. and they and they're out there waiting on. And your case team is out there. Listening. Is out there listening and there's help on the way? Yes. Okay. Because clothes line didn't find it.

Starting point is 03:22:47 And also because that case team, Higginbottom and Cummings, they knew me and they didn't pull the trigger. They were like, hang on, he's still okay. He's still okay. Got it. So we go out that night. What? And it's me, Joe Dogs, and Scottown, and I am livid.

Starting point is 03:23:04 I'm raising hell. You know? And even Joe Dogs is like, text, you got to understand. This has happened to other brothers, other people where everybody shows up and it's just, you know, we're the only people there and everybody else is an undercover. You know, and I played it off. I'm like, who the hell would spend that kind of time and money and try to, you know. Yeah, for sure. Besides us, you know, besides me. But I go back, I probably sleep maybe 30 minutes at night.

Starting point is 03:23:27 I go and meet everybody. I think it's outside of I hop. I hand out the radios and I tell them where we're going to go. And it's pretty comical on recording because I say, all right. We're going back up to the Westgate Mall in Brockton And Chocolate Scott starts bitching He goes, man, I live right next to there I could have slept another 40 minutes

Starting point is 03:23:45 Oh yeah And Joe dogs He goes, you guys are the lazy He goes, you guys Let me get it right Yeah He goes, you guys are the laziest bunch of damn criminals I've ever met my entire life, you know

Starting point is 03:23:58 And I'm even bust in the child I go, hey, I thought I left my wife at home Can you stop complaining, you know? Chocolate Sky. Yeah, so we go We do the deal. One truck pulls up. It's fake drugs?

Starting point is 03:24:11 No, it's real. It's real drugs. So, I mean, they're smelling the weeds. You almost have a good budget up there then. Well, I don't know where the case team got it. It might have. It's probably evidence from another case. Got it.

Starting point is 03:24:23 And it gets signed out. But can you imagine if we lost that? FBI loses 50 kilos of cocaine. Are you kidding me? So, yeah, snipers are up and everything. So the truck's back up. The undercover's, Joe dog's on the truck. Obie's on the truck.

Starting point is 03:24:36 We're covering stuff. They're pulling surveillance, you know, and just like normal surveillance, I mean, they got people going to, I've been burnt, I've been burnt, there's a guy staring at me. Calm down, dude. Yeah. You know? And if a cop shows up, let us know, we're going to pull the trucks away. And we pulled off the deal.

Starting point is 03:24:50 And then I went and paid everybody. So y'all did the deal. Yeah, it went. It went across. They got to meet Mani. Joe Dawes wanted to meet Mani, who, of course, was an undercover. But he is a Hispanic guy that did all kinds of cartel stuff. Shout out Manning.

Starting point is 03:25:03 Yeah, shout out Manny, man. Martin Suarez. He's actually got a book out too. Oh, wow. It just, and it's, it's really. Martin Suarez. Martin Suarez. You do the deal.

Starting point is 03:25:15 Yeah. And this is, we get up the next day. And like I said, we do the deal. And then that night, maybe I slept a little bit, you know. I'm going to eat a massage after all, just in the ear and all it is. And then I fly home and I get, I miss my flights. They're delayed, canceled, whatever. And then I go home to, uh, when I land.

Starting point is 03:25:36 in McAllen. I drove straight to the house. I brushed my teeth, changed my shirt, loaded up my daughters, my wife, and my mother-in-law, and we went to the Rio Grande Valley FBI Christmas party for Laredo, Brownsville, and McAllen offices, and I was Santa Claus for the kids after being stripped in a basement at gunpoint about two nights earlier. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I don't stop. So what happens, if you fast forward a little bit, now we're doing all this stuff. We're still getting more. things. We got the big dope deal. I'm getting trust here. During that case, a president of the Hells Angels was murdered. Riding down the road, we knew that it was a green truck with Florida

Starting point is 03:26:18 plates. We knew that we had outlaws from Florida up there. And the case kept going. And eventually, I end up down in Daytona at a world run. And by this point, I'm kind of a zombie. Because my ammo always was, I'm a workaholic. I get it honestly for my parents, but my, my MO always was like, look, if I can be above average, or if I can, on the squad that I'm on as a case agent, or if I can have some good cases and good sources, maybe that lets my management not be able to say no to me. Like, you know, hey, you're a top producer, Scott, so you can't say, no, you can't go on that SWAT call out, or that SWAT school, or that undercover, or that undercover school. But what I was doing to myself is I was taking the warrior mentality, which I think is imperative for the line of

Starting point is 03:27:08 work. The warrior mentality? Yeah, the war mentality. And I think that's imperative, but I was applying it to every situation in my life. So I was not taking days off because I didn't want management to get mad. I was not sleeping, hardly at all. I got to the point to where I was drinking, I wasn't a big energy drink guy. But you were huffing him, huh? Well, no, what it was is I was drinking like a pot of coffee and taking hydroxy cuts with a fedron in them, and I was still falling asleep. So I get down to Daytona. We've got murders that have happened. We've had Sturgis where I arrived, and the day I arrived, the Hells Angels shoot five outlaws, point-blank range.

Starting point is 03:27:44 I think it was two-patched, one probate. In Sturgis that happened? Yeah, in Sturgis. And then two, they were referred to as old ladies. And it was some serious wounds, like people were paralyzed and stuff. It's just dangerous. Put them on a gold wing, you know? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:28:02 you know, hopefully they turned out okay. But so they got all that going on and now we're winded. We're kind of winding down towards the end of the case. So I didn't know. You're still going, but I'm in Daytona. And again, by this time, here's my cocktail. I woke up one morning, I could still feel the whiskey and egg swishing in my belly. I felt like a piece of trial.

Starting point is 03:28:26 I'm like, all right, this is it. I'm working out. So I did like an in-room workout, something like a P90X kind of deal. I'm doing push-ups. sit-up, squats, burpees, mountain climbers. But before I did that, by this time, I wake up, I take antihistamines, decongestants, hitting an inhaler, which is also a vasiodilator, makes you shake and stuff, opens up your lungs. Then I drank two cups of coffee, the strongest coffee I can possibly make.

Starting point is 03:28:55 And then I hit three hydroxycuts with a phedron in them. Yeah. So as I learned later on from the... You're a damn jet. Well, from what the doctors told me, they go, Scott, that is a cocktail for an anxiety attack. And that's what happened. I started working out and all that shit hit me and I was so beat down.

Starting point is 03:29:12 Like I started hyperventilating. I mean, it's humid. It's Daytona, you know. But I'm in there. But whatever. I came up and I forgot all about combat breathing. I forgot about, you know, some people call it, what is it, like four? Box breathing.

Starting point is 03:29:27 The box breathing. Same thing. You know, I forgot about a paper bag. I turn as white as your shirt and an undercover, knocks on the door. He was the guy that was playing the truck driver. And he sees me

Starting point is 03:29:39 and I'm just pouring sweat out of every pore, white as your shirt, my lips are all tight? And he's like, are you okay? And I'm like, I don't think so. So we start talking.

Starting point is 03:29:48 What I should have done, it said, I don't feel good. I think I'm heading home, but I didn't. I took a nap. I got up, self-medicated, went back out with the outlaws.

Starting point is 03:29:58 Mongols were there, fights breaking out, all kinds of stuff. And, but when I flew home from that trip, I didn't know it, but my body was already done. They wanted to expand the case because the guy that was now went by the road named Hillbilly, who I knew through the case, and he liked me and I liked him, he was the southeast regional president at that point. And they wanted me to come down to, they wanted Boston not to take the case down and for me to move to Florida and patch under Hillbilly. Dude, I don't care if you're meeting damn Sam Elliott from Mask, bro.

Starting point is 03:30:32 You got to- Love that role. Dude, I love- I've always loved him as a biker, but anything else. It was a good role. But damn, man, to keep pushing yourself out there like that. Yeah, well, I wasn't smart. And I mean, I lied.

Starting point is 03:30:43 And I'm not judging you, man. No, I'm just saying, I lied to safeguard. Like, I took the psychological test and I lied. I knew I was exhausted. I knew I didn't know how to relax anymore. Even as, because it's almost like I'm reading the story, and it's like, you know, it's like, oh, man, it's just, that's harrowing. It's harrowing. And it reminds you.

Starting point is 03:30:58 to remind me at times that I think a lot of us, probably a lot of listeners can relate to when they just, you know, just this thing I got to keep going. Yeah. And at what cost. Doesn't matter what you. You could be a doctor. You could be whatever. Yes, for sure. That's what I'm saying.

Starting point is 03:31:10 You can put, yeah, you can, you can wear yourself out. So what happens is I go home, I sleep the first day I probably slept 20 hours. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't sick. I know what they both feel like. For the rest of the week, I slept over 16 hours. a day. So come Friday, I still love this guy. I don't think he loves me anymore. It is what it is. But we were friends at that point and he calls me. And my again, country, he's like, he goes,

Starting point is 03:31:43 how are you doing country? And that was all he said. And I said, I'm not doing too good. So for the next hour, we talk on the phone. I'm explaining to him everything is going on and he basically let me convince myself, I need to call safeguard. So I called and I knew one of the psychologists personally and I called and I said, hey, I don't know what's going on, man. I'm 30-something years old. I'm crashing. I don't know what's happening. So they came out and did a on-site.

Starting point is 03:32:07 In other words, I didn't have to fly to them. They flew to me. They did the test. I answered it honestly. Amen. And I got put on timeout. But what they did is they said, and by time-out, I mean no more undercover for at least six months. But what they did is they said, hey, for the purpose, for this case, specifically, we'll let you stay on the

Starting point is 03:32:27 phone. So I make a ruse. I'd already told them that I'd gotten married. So I'd make up a story that, hey, me and my wife are getting divorced. Her family's in El Paso. I got to get this house finished. I got to relocate her and the kids out there because I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror again if I didn't. Got it. And you got, you got father, Scott Towns, a loving father, four daughter. You got, you know, they're like, they're like, oh yeah, we got it, man. I said, but as soon as I get them there, I'm coming north. I'm sick of this heat. So we just kept talking. and during that there was one other guy that we didn't get, but he was calling me. And he was like, he just got out of prison recently.

Starting point is 03:33:03 And he was an outlaw. And he's like, hey, man, I heard about, you know, we'd met before. Scott Town introduced us. But he's like, I got a Hummer. I got this $100,000 BMW I need to get rid of. And he starts talking about cocaine. And he's like, hey, you know what kind of business I'm in? I said, I can maybe take a guess.

Starting point is 03:33:20 And he goes, I'm into that magic powder. And I said, Dwight? And he said, yeah. And he said, yeah. And he said, yeah. He says, how much can you get me basically a kilo for? And I said, he said, if you can get me a kilo at 18 apiece, I got enough to buy 10 right now. He had 180 grand, ready to go.

Starting point is 03:33:38 And, of course, I call the case team. And I go, do you guys want me to pursue this? And they said, yeah. And this is your friend, though, right? Well, this guy I met. He wasn't like a club. Scott Town introduced me to him. His name was Tim Sylvia, not UFC Tim Sylvia.

Starting point is 03:33:53 But who is a friend? But Tim Sylvia, the outlaw. And so what happens is, is I broker the deal for my truck driver and another undercover who always just, he didn't always, but by half of the case, he would sit in the passenger seat. And they go, like, I'm literally in my garage in McAllen, and I'm on the phone with Tim Sylvie, and I'm on the phone with him. I'm going, he's over here, and I'm guiding them in to meet each other. Well, when they meet each other, you can hear the other undercover's talking, even if you see the recording from the, from the, back of the semi truck. You can even hear me on the phone.

Starting point is 03:34:29 They're calling, the truck driver calls me. He's like, text. Like, hey, what's going on, man? We're calling him Tony. Hey, Tony, man.

Starting point is 03:34:36 He's like, yeah, he goes, I'm here. And he goes, what's your name again? Tim Silly. He goes, tell him his big Timmy. I go, okay.

Starting point is 03:34:43 And he says, they're going back and forth. He goes, he wants to talk to you. So Tim gets on the phone. And I say, hey, you got the same vehicles? Yeah, I'd agree to pay him

Starting point is 03:34:52 $21,000 for the vehicles that I was buying from him. stolen. And he says, I said, when are you going to report the BMW stolen? Because I had a tracker on it. He said, Friday. I said, can you make it Saturday? I'm just trying to make it real, right?

Starting point is 03:35:05 I said, can you make it Saturday? It gives me one more day and it'll be in Mexico for sure. And he said, absolutely. So then I get back on the phone with the undercover. And the undercover says, how much am I supposed to pay him? I said, 21 grand. So when they go to load the vehicles on the stolen vehicles onto the truck, Tim hits them and says, can you guys get 10 kilos at 18 apiece?

Starting point is 03:35:25 And they said yes, and that's how we ended the case. I was drawing up diagrams of all the clubhouses and houses I'd been in for all the SWAT teams that were going to be hitting it and stuff, which was nerve-wracking to me because I'm a tactical guy. And I'm like, well, what if I get this wrong? And somebody gets hurt. And then also Scott and myself with another guy were creating our own motorcycle club called The Righteous Feud. It had already been approved by the president, the national president of the outlaws to be the number one support club for the outlaws. the Northeast. All I had to do was go back up one more time and I'd have got my cut.

Starting point is 03:35:59 But, you know, it is what it is. Yeah, you were also at a, you were not even... That was done. Yeah, I was done. You weren't even being real. It would have been cool. Yeah, you know, ego-wise. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 03:36:09 Yeah. Damn, bro. This whole thing's insane. So we're taking down the case. I'm actually at an undercover school teaching. I wasn't there. I'm pretty sure safeguard said I couldn't go. And this one you're just doing stuff on the phone still.

Starting point is 03:36:22 Yeah. Yeah, and how do we get to the end? This is it. Okay. because they said they were going to deliver the 10 kilos, that's going to be a reversal, and that's going to be the first arrest, right? So when they show up,

Starting point is 03:36:32 when Tim Sylvia shows up to deliver the Hummer and to get whatever, SWAT team's going to take him down, right? He's got the money and all this stuff. Swat team's going to take him down, and that starts all the arrest happening. So I can't tell you what time it was in Nevada, where I was at,

Starting point is 03:36:50 versus what time it was, I don't know if that's three hours behind or whatever. from Massachusetts, but I go back to my room. And these are long nights at the UC school, like I told you. I go back to my room and my phone's chirping. And I listen and it's a message from Scott Town. And I chirp him up. And I go, hey, what's up?

Starting point is 03:37:08 And he says, he's all raspy boys. He goes, hey, I just want you to know. Somebody just called me. Your truck drivers, Tony and that other dude and Big Scotty, big Timmy. They got locked up. And I'm like, okay. And he goes, I just wanted to let you know. And I said, well, you know, they're not up there for something for me.

Starting point is 03:37:27 I said, but sometimes they do things on the side for themselves. He said, listen, I'm going to go to something defect it like this. He said, listen, I'm going to get up. I'm going to get showered up. And I'm going to find out what's going on. I'm going to call you back. And I said, okay. And our last words to each other.

Starting point is 03:37:43 He said, I love you, brother. And I said, I love you too. And about 40 minutes later, a SWAT team hit his house. And he went to prison. They all pled guilty. You ever talk to him again? It's very possible. I can either confirm or deny.

Starting point is 03:38:00 Okay. But since the New York Times bestseller and being on a podcast or two, yeah. The bond was real. The bond was real? Was real. Like how happy is the ending? Like, I'm just fond of like... It's pretty good so far.

Starting point is 03:38:23 Is it? Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, really good. So you guys still communicate often? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like in what type of manner do you feel like? Call me.

Starting point is 03:38:34 Whatever. I will tell you that Chocolate Scott started troubling me, and he'll probably get a kick out of this. He did? Yeah, he started all of us. You know how somebody finds you on Instagram and they start liking all your stuff and it's like from six months prior,

Starting point is 03:38:47 but you start getting all these dings, ding, ding, ding, ding, like they liked your real, like your, well, it was like, this guy sucks. Screw you. Oh, Chocolate Scott. Yeah. Tuckus Scott's like that, dude. So he's... Chocolate of Scots be

Starting point is 03:39:00 Chuck Las Scott, you know. So... I almost wish I knew him, actually. So here's the thing. He's like, he's like hitting me with like, yeah, you suck, you F this, you know, this, and the other. And I saw it and it was like, I could kind of see the picture, but I saw that it was Doom 666. And I'm like, who the hell is it?

Starting point is 03:39:17 I don't respond to negative stuff, but I'm like, because most of the time you're arguing with an algorithm anyway. It's some AI you're arguing against. It's not even a real person, yeah. Some pervert. But I click on it and I open it up and it's chocolate. Scott. And for his Instagram it says, F you, Scott, Payne,

Starting point is 03:39:32 you big bitch. Damn. So he really, but he's got a right to be pissed, right? I know, I know, man, but I giggled because I could totally see him high laughing, typing that stuff. Yeah. But the last thing he put out there that before I blocked him, as he

Starting point is 03:39:47 put, he actually validated me, because a lot of people are like, oh, you're making this up. I'm like, dude, pull the court records, pull the reports, it's in there. The recordings that happened. I don't know what you mean to tell you. I'm not making it up. It's there. But he put, he found another one.

Starting point is 03:40:04 He goes, I've seen this guy naked in the basement. Not much there. All right? So I so wanted to respond. Because the first thing I was going to say is you're still picturing me naked in the basement from 2006. Yeah. Must have been tough in prison. Second thing I would have said is I don't find you or clothesline attractive.

Starting point is 03:40:23 The third thing I would have said is it was very, very cold in that basement. Yeah, and it's in Massachusetts. Yeah, and the fourth thing I would have said is I thought I was getting ready to die, and that's a whole new level of shrinkage. The last thing I was concerned about is what I looked like naked, so. Oh, I can't even stay erect around damn broken glass. You know, I hear a wind of shatter. Dude, I won't get hard for a month.

Starting point is 03:40:49 That's just who I am. My dad was the same way. Yeah. Did towns go to jail? Yeah. Yeah, we pretty much, we pretty much dismay. the whole Taunton chapter. I don't know if it's back up, but yeah, we pretty much got everybody.

Starting point is 03:41:01 Have you seen him since he went in? Mm-mm. Nope. No. How long will he be in for? He's out. Oh, he's out now? Yeah, he's out.

Starting point is 03:41:07 Yeah, he's out. Yeah. He's out. Okay, got it. No. How long has you been out for? I don't know. I don't know if he did six or eight.

Starting point is 03:41:15 And let's just say, I think we arrested. I think we took that case down in 2008. Got it. But let's see if it says. The outlaws M.C. Taunton chapter is no longer active, having been effectively dismantled following a major federal sweep. Woo-hoo.

Starting point is 03:41:29 There you go. Do you have to miss a lot of things? Yeah. Like a lot of family stuff? Yeah. You missed a lot of birthdays, like, birthdays, things like that. I did pretty good with that, but I missed, like, some recitals and stuff like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:41:43 Or Father's Day, you know, because it might be putting on the undercover school. It might be being on the case, because, like I said, you kind of go where the case takes you. If you get an opening to go to Sturgis with the, I mean, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's all, it's just so fascinating, you know, because life itself, you're kind of, we're all trying to be ourselves and, and then to go into life and then go into another life, kind of, you know, like an other exist, you know, like. Yeah, my big, my big, I guess my, my Clark Kent walking into a phone booth and coming out of Superman is I have a cross on my necklace. And before I would go undercover, I'd take the cross off. And it would either be a Norse, you know, like Thor's hammer. But for most of it, it was just a skull.

Starting point is 03:42:32 But that was kind of my thing. Like I'd go back in. I'd take the skull off, put the cross back on. It was kind of like me saying, trying, trying to leave it there. And now I'm Scott again. But truthfully, the job creeped in all the time. I mean, how's it not going to? When I'm on a undercover call and my daughter's chasing me through the house

Starting point is 03:42:51 and I'm trying not to let her hear me cuss because I'm on the phone with a bad guy, you know. Sure. Are you ever, before you go, Scott, are you ever worried about somebody coming back from the past? Something coming back to haunch? It could happen, yeah. Retaliation. Yeah, you know, I'm not trying to be a tough guy or nothing like that, but I do have a belief system. And for me, I mean, I wouldn't want any family members or anything like that to be in fear.

Starting point is 03:43:19 Usually, for me, your best defense is a good offense. That's me. like just being a uniform cop how many people in your town do you think you arrest in a year and do you I mean they're not all like felony charge they back out that's a good point so how many times as a uniform cop

Starting point is 03:43:35 do you go to the mall or to a movie theater or to the grocery store and you run into people that you've like it might have been somebody you had to fight amen you know so I never thought about that and I just I just walk right up to them that's me I'd see them and I'd go if they're eyeballing I'm not even going to let them to plot I'm just going to go

Starting point is 03:43:49 good game hey no I'm gonna be like brother how are you doing When did you get out? How's the family, man? Hey, are you clean right now? Are you good? How you doing? Listen, as long as you're on that up and, you know, straight and narrow on the right path, I'll help you.

Starting point is 03:44:03 And I have. I've actually people that I put in jail that I amultrated, put in jail, but they've taken a turn for the better. I, at their sentence, I wrote an acknowledgement letter or a letter for their character. Amen. And they got probation instead of going to jail. So that's not a, I mean. No. You know, it's, you know, if you.

Starting point is 03:44:21 If you get, for me, for the most part, what I've found, because I do really make friendships. I mean, you're creating relationships. Sure. You're betraying them a little bit. I mean, you're going to be betraying them if you're undercover. Yeah. But it's almost like the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. You got the sheep dog and you got the coyote.

Starting point is 03:44:40 And it's Ralph and Sam. And they clock in in the morning. And all day the coyote is trying to steal a sheep. And all day the sheep dogs beating the crap out and at the end of the day, they clock out. See you in the morning. and Sam, see in the morning, Ralph. It's just, you know, I've been told, I've been told this. If you were a biker and you were a part of the club and you snitch, they'd never forgive me.

Starting point is 03:45:03 But I was just doing my job. So you see that a lot. Professional snitch. I'm not snitch. I'm not, you know, I'm a bonded law enforcement officer. And we had reports of you doing criminal stuff and I infiltrated you and or somebody did. And we found evidence of that criminal stuff. If you're not doing anything wrong, don't worry about it.

Starting point is 03:45:23 Yeah. Do they ever, oh, this is kind of like a question, almost like the movies. Do they ever bring retired agents in for like, you know, they ever try and get you back out there for one more show? Oh, yeah, yeah, but you would be, if you're a retired agent. Because you're retired now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could come back in as a source. That's a whole different ballgame, though.

Starting point is 03:45:43 But they're never like, yeah, we've got to wheel you out one more time here, you know? Not now. I'm overt now, man. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. People know now. Yeah, I know. Anybody ever tells you you like Matt Damon?

Starting point is 03:45:54 You know, what is a matter of fact? The other day somebody did. And as soon as they pulled up the picture, I went, dang, you know? Yeah. it could happen, but once I was done, I mean, obviously, I mean, you do Rolling Stone magazine and this and yeah. I thought I'd be the undercover coordinator for the state of Tennessee. And maybe I could extend, you know, because that's a skill set that is, that a lot of people don't have, you know, in the Bureau, as opposed to being a tactical instructor. I mean, there's a lot of tactical instructors, but I thought I was going to stay at a 57.

Starting point is 03:46:38 But after the base case, I was like, man, I had to get the back lumbar. I got the lumbar fusion, a week and a half after the lumbar fusion, I got Tammy talking about PVC pipes and everything else in my truck. And you just start thinking. She loves to torture people. Yeah, I know. I like torture. You like torture? I like torture.

Starting point is 03:46:56 I love it. You need somebody to torture you. You call me. I swear, I know that torture me. But the thing is, is I was 48 going on to 50. How many more? Oh, how many more bait? Like, I can't go.

Starting point is 03:47:11 I mean, okay, now I'm going to look like a pedophile. Oh, there's an old dude buying beer for young boys, and he's teaching them whitespring. No, I'm not, but how can I infiltrate the 17-year-olds? Right. You know, and you just start realizing just one day it hit me. And it was right after the base case. It was in February. We took it down January of 2020.

Starting point is 03:47:29 February of 2020, I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. We're putting on training. We're training online-covered employees for domestic terrorism. And I don't know what we were discussing about. I don't know what it was. I know it was my birthday. But this overwhelming feeling hit me in the face like a brick. I can't remember what we're talking about,

Starting point is 03:47:48 but I remember like everything just kind of going calming down. And me saying this in my head, I'm satisfied with my career. Never said it before. Not saying I've done everything, but if I do something now, I'm just starting right back over. I'm like, I think, holy cow. I'm okay. I think I'm okay. Amen.

Starting point is 03:48:05 Yeah. Well, Scott Payne, man. Boom. Big country. It's medium country. Thank you so much for coming in, man. Scott Payne, bitch. Codename Pale Horse.

Starting point is 03:48:17 That's his book. how I went under a cover to expose America's Nazis. I was going to say, and the paperback's out now, sorry. Oh, nice. And the paperback is out now. Is that true? Yes, true. Thank you so much for being here today with us, man.

Starting point is 03:48:31 Thanks for sharing your stories. Yeah, dude, what a fascinating existence you've had so far, man. We appreciate your time, brother. Thank you so much. Give our best to your family, man. We'll do. Yeah. Scott Payne.

Starting point is 03:48:44 Thank you, bro. Thank you, man. It's all it must be.

This Past Weekend - #674 - Scott Payne

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