Who Trolled Amber? - The Gas Man: Episode 2 - The Sting

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Special Agent Bass has his target in his sights but he’s on another continent. If he wants him to talk he’ll need a clever plan – and maybe a bit of luckTo find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail]: Chloe Hadjimatheou Producer: Claudia WilliamsEditor: Jasper CorbettNarrative editor: Gary MarshallSound design: Hannah VarrallOriginal theme music: Tom KinsellaOriginal artwork: Jon HillFX credit: Boeing 737-800 Fly Over 3.wav by soundslikewillem at freesound Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A-Cast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has... Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry and a performance enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. I remember being a kid sitting on my parents' comfortable sofa in London in the 80s, watching news reports about the Iran-Iraq war on TV.

Oil facilities on both sides burned as the Iraqi invasion ground to a halt and hostilities entered a phase of sporadic war. At that age, a lot of it went over my head, but I do remember the brutality of it all. My entire life, my worst nightmare was to see a scene like this. The unbearably young Iranian soldiers looking terrified. How old is he? How old is this guy?

14 or something. Does he come here to fight? Dusty Iraqi tanks rolling across the desert, AK-40 gunshots ringing out in the background. More than a million people died during that war. For 45 minutes, Saddam Hussein's planes bombarded Al-Abjah with some of the most toxic agents known to science. Nerve gases and old fashioned mustard gas. Chemical weapons were responsible for tens of thousands of those deaths and a hundred thousand survivors.

The United States government is convinced that Iraq has used chemical weapons. The TV screen was filled with them in their thousands. Children and babies littering the streets, frozen in their tracks, a white film covering their eyes and foam crusted around their mouths. The bodies which litter this town were those of people who ran out of their houses to try to escape the gas. It filled the air around them and there was no escape. It had this nightmarish quality that conventional weapons didn't. And then there were the main players.

Their faces were on the evening news almost every night. The belligerent Saddam Hussein in his military uniform and mirrored shades. And impeccably dressed in a long black robe and crisp white collarless shirts, the severe looking Ayatollah Khomeini. Back then I didn't really understand what they were both so angry about, but I did get that it was these men calling the shots, making military decisions which would end with those thousands of civilian bodies in the streets. What I never saw on TV was any reference to where all the weapons came from. You could have leaders who intend and want to gas innocent people. If they don't have the chemicals needed to make the gas, then they can't do it. To get the chemicals, those leaders needed someone like the gas man.

Someone who had the ability to manipulate export controls in the United States to illegally export them. People like Peter Valischek are easy to overlook. They're not the ones on TV handing out orders. They're not there on the battlefield or even in the country where the war's going on. They're never at the centre of the action. And that's just fine as far as they're concerned. It means they get to stay in the shadows. The fact that Peter Wolecek may have worn a suit

and may have spent his days sitting behind a desk and talking on the phone, it doesn't diminish the fact that his conduct was essential. I certainly thought of Mr. Wicek as an enabler. Nowadays, when I take myself back to my childhood sofa watching the war play out on TV I'm willing the camera to swing round in a different direction to show for once those quiet people who handed over the bullets and the chemicals with a smile and an invoice. So that's what I'm doing here, pulling focus on the enablers, on those who like to sit just outside the frame.

People like the gas man, Peter Valaschek. How does someone like him go about his business? The only way to find out is to turn the lens from the leaders at the center of the drama and point it at what's going on out of shot on the sidelines. I'm Chloe Hajimathau from Tortoise. This is The Gas Man. Episode 2 The Sting Around the same time as I'm watching the Iran-Iraq war unfold on my family TV, Special

Agent Dennis Bass is at the Customs Office in Baltimore. He's been sifting through the files he lifted when he raided the offices of Alkalac, the company whose chemicals have ended up in Iran. He knows that a German man, Peter Wallischek, placed the order and lied about the final destination. At the moment, that's all he knows. Peter Wallischek is still just a name on an order form, a silhouette against a blank wall. But Special Agent Bass is getting closer. He's going to bring him into the light to find out who he really is. So he starts looking into the guy.

He had been a pharmacist in Germany, but he did something wrong. I don't remember what it was and they revoked his pharmacist's license. And so he sort of became a jack of all trades, I mean, whatever he could do to make money, but he seemed to be making money. So that was all I knew of him at that point in time. What I can't get my head around is how Peter Wallischek persuaded this pretty reputable company to sell him such a dangerous chemical. He's ordering these things and they're telling him this is great, you know, tell us what you want. What Peter Wallischek wants from Alkalac is thiodglycol, used in ink but also to make mustard gas. It's cheap to manufacture, so these large orders are bringing in a nice profit.

The files also reveal that the shipment of this stuff that Dennis Bass followed to Iran, it wasn't the only one. It turns out the previous year Peter Valaschek ordered at least two other shipments of the same restricted chemical and those made it to Iran without a hitch. And they were done gradually and they were done different ways and I can also see that they've gradually upped the quantities. So this isn't just a one-off, it's part of a pattern. It wasn't until we looked at the documents that we seized that we realised the magnitude of the violations that took place and the amount of chemical that was exported and where it went and how it went. What Special Agent Bass has stumbled on

is a chemical trafficking network operating at a level way beyond his initial expectations. And at the heart of it, a non-descript second floor office full of chemists and salespeople on the outskirts of Baltimore. Really, the investigation's just getting going. The key to unravelling this case seems to be Peter Walaszczek. If only there was a way to question him.

But he's in Germany, and that's way out of Denis Bass's jurisdiction. If he wants to speak to the gas man, he's gonna have to get creative. And so the investigator hatches a plan to lure Peter Valacecek to the United States. To do that he's gonna need some help. He knows exactly who to recruit. The woman in charge of international exports at Alkalac, Leslie Hinkelman. Extremely friendly and probably the worst record keeper. Not the brightest woman I ever met but nice, cooperative she seemed. She's a high school graduate who's somehow gone from typist to export manager in just

a few years. And she's the one who filled out the shipping license for Peter Walaszczuk's order. She's scared she might be in trouble. So when Dennis Bass tells her his plan, she's tripping over herself to help. And I said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to contact Peter Walaszczuk and I want you to offer him to represent Alkalac

in all of Europe. So initially they offered that to him and he really wasn't that keen about it. No dice. Peter Valaszczuk just doesn't seem bothered with this offer. He's clearly got bigger fish to fry. He's not interested in being a salesman for a company like Alkalac. But Special Agent Bass and Leslie Hinkelman are not going to give up that easily. So then I said, tell him you'll pay for his trip over here

and all his expenses. So we sent him a plane ticket. And he said, OK, I'm on my way. So one July morning in 1988, a plane takes off from Germany bound for Baltimore. On board is the gas man, Peter Falischek. I can't really get my head around why he went to the US. He didn't seem to need a job at Alkalac. Who knows, maybe he just couldn't resist an all expenses paid holiday. Back at the customs office, Dennis Bass is chewing his nails. He's sent some of his guys down to the airport to wait at arrivals and as soon as Peter Falaszczak

clears passport control, he's put in handcuffs. I think he was sort of in shock, to be honest with you. He was totally shocked. Four months after he first started looking into this case, special agent Dennis Bass has the gas man in custody. And you know he's handcuffed he was brought down to the custom house where we process and we fingerprint him and photograph him. He's pulled it off again. He swapped out chemicals for water, followed a shipment halfway across the world, and now he's got

this wanted man to come to him, all without ever leaving Baltimore. It's pretty audacious. And really, this could have so easily been the end of the story. Except it doesn't quite work out that way. So when did you first lay eyes on him, do you remember? Hour or so after he was arrested. Yeah, we had like a little lockup kind of room and he was sitting in there and I told him who I was and I explained to him why I was there. Peter Wallischek's furious he's been arrested.

He really didn't want to talk very much. But the wall of silence Dennis Bass meets in that interview room, it gives him the chance to size the German up, to fill in that mysterious silhouette. Peter Wallischek's starting to come into focus. He's middle-aged in his mid-40s. He was really well-dressed, expensive suit, and reddish-tinted glasses. He was very chic and stylish, and, hair cut and all that.

But he wasn't happy, I can tell you that. Martin Himmels is a lawyer based in Baltimore. Back then he was prosecuting attorney on the case. And Peter Walaszczuk made an impression on him too. I remember him having sort of a general appearance that looked like he was presenting himself as as a cool high-flying businessman. I've seen his mugshot from that time. Peter Valaszczuk stares grim-faced into the camera lens. He has these large glasses that take up most of his face.

They must have been pretty on trend back in the 80s. But the thing that really gets the hairs on the back of my neck standing up is what's behind those glasses? His eyes. They look totally empty, void of emotion. It could just be a bad photo, but I can't help feeling I'm seeing something sinister. Well, first of all, there is no other person who is like Dennis Bass. As the prosecuting attorney, Martin Himmelas worked closely with Dennis Bass from the start of the investigation. He asked me if I was interested in working on this case with him, this investigation,

and I didn't need to hear much more than that it was Dennis. He was one of a kind. He was just a terrific investigator. Good enough to trick Peter Valischek into coming to the US. But Special Agent Bass can't make him talk. He just denies knowing his shipment would be used to make mustard gas. He said, well, I didn't know that they were going to use it to make chemical weapons, because if I did, I would have charged them more money. You know, that was, I mean, that wasn't his attitude. That's what he said.

I mean, and he wasn't joking. At first, I thought maybe he was kidding, but he was serious. It was like, I don't care that that's what they're doing, but it would have been worth more money to me had I known that. This is the first time I feel like I get a real flavour of who Peter Valischek is, how he thinks, how he feels. Maybe that mugshot wasn't such a bad photo after all. The revelation that his business deals could potentially have led to chemical attacks and to those desperate, twisted bodies in the streets, it seems to mean nothing to him. He's focused on the cold, calculated bottom line. It's a sign of the type of operator Dennis Bass is dealing with. But how to get him to spill the beans on the people buying the stuff in Iran? It turns out a few nights in the Baltimore jail would do that. Yeah, I mean, I would say the

city jail was closer to a zoo than, I mean, because it is rough. It's a rough institution. It's really bad. But I guarantee you he was scared. When we picked him up to bring him to the US Attorney's Office and to the US Marshals, yeah, he was disheveled and I mean he just looked beaten down, you know. Peter Valaszczuk suddenly has a change of heart. He cooperated and told us about all his Iranian friends and how he was ready to give up his mother if he had to, to keep him out of jail as long as he could or to have the least amount of jail time. He commits to helping Dennis Bass in his investigation into the traffic chemicals, and even agrees

to go undercover to wear a wire if he needs to. In return, the state attorney's office drops some of the charges against him. There was no way to charge him with the chemical weapons themselves. The crime is the export violation, and there were additional crimes for falsifying documents and things like that. To me, an export violation doesn't seem very satisfying, especially after all that effort. But Martin Himmler says these kinds of laws are important. The regulations were designed to ensure that this chemical, to obtain the

supplies needed to make mustard gas. Peter Valischek agrees to plead guilty to the lesser charges and he's giving them lots of information. So the idea was that he would help you get other people who were connected to this case, that the investigation could throw its net wider. I don't want to get into the specific details of this investigation but of course there were ongoing investigative activities.

Even after so many years he's still cagey about the details. They have Peter Walaszczyk but they don't want to stop there. They want to go higher, to go after the handlers who are putting in the orders from Iran. And in return, the German is pushing for more concessions. His attorney said, if we pay for the hotel and a guard, can we keep them in the hotel across the street from the courthouse? And so we wanted his cooperation and we said yeah. And then he brought his girlfriend over. He had a girlfriend at the time.

When I first hear this, I'm pretty shocked. It's taken so much work to catch him and now this guy's suddenly out of jail and living it up in a hotel and flying his girlfriend over from Germany. Dennis Bass is at pains to explain that Peter Valascheck paid for the ticket himself and he tells me these kinds of deals are pretty common when someone's cooperating and giving investigators good intelligence. I mean there have been cases, particularly that I work with DEA drug cases, where we got large drug smugglers.

And so DEA might pay to bring their girlfriends over or their wives over just to keep them happy, to keep them corroborating. Still, to me, it all seemed like a bit of a risk. In going after those higher up the ladder, are they taking their eyes off the prize they've worked so hard to get? Peter Valischek's obviously pleased with his situation. He conveyed this sense of being happy that he was who he was, being happy with himself.

He had a self-assured air in the way he carried himself even in the midst of this criminal proceeding. Special Agent Bass knows it's dangerous to loosen their grip on Peter Valaszczuk, especially with his girlfriend on the scene. So he takes precautions. She came over and stayed with him and we watched her because we were afraid that they still might try to, he might try to flee. And she took a train to Niagara Falls. On her own? Yeah. And we had agents follow her because Canada is easy to get into.

It would be a good place to flee through. And we watched to see if she went to a travel agent and she didn't. Peter Valischek's girlfriend isn't planning some great escape. She actually just goes to the bar and gets pretty drunk. And Special Agent Bass can breathe a little easier knowing his guys are watching. But now the German's got one concession, he's going to want more. And that will prove tricky. Hello, I'm Alexi Mostros, host of Who Trolled Amber?

The podcast that investigates whether there was an organised trolling campaign against Amber Heard. I'm excited to announce that on Wednesday 12th June I'll be hosting a live event to discuss who trolled Amber, with Jen Robinson, Amber Heard's lawyer and Gina Neff from the Mindaru Centre for Technology and Democracy. It's a great chance to hear insights into the world of celebrity PR, online disinformation and its effect on all our lives. You can book your place at torturesmedia.com forward slash book. Acast powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.

Every sport has their big juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. It was a year I'd like to forget.

Broomgate, available now. ACAST helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. acast.com Hello, it's Tomony from Tortoise. We'll be bringing you a new investigation soon, but in the meantime, we thought you'd enjoy this new show from our friends at Campside Media. It's called White Devil. Late at night in May of 2021,

a single gunshot shattered the silence along the beach at the luxurious Elia Resort in Belize. In White Devil, journalist Josh Dean dives into one of the biggest, splashiest and most perplexing crime stories you've never heard of. The death of renowned cop Henry Jamott, shot by a Canadian property developer. Over two years of reporting, the depths of Belize's dark underbelly are brought to the surface. It's quirks, it's corruption and the incredible power of one family in particular. You can listen to White Devil wherever you get your podcasts.

The investigation into Peter Falaszczuk's Iranian handlers is coming together nicely. But Dennis Bass hasn't stopped there. He's looking into the company that sold the chemicals, Alkalac. It's a part of the investigation that's intrigued me too. When I first started looking into what happened at Alkalac, I was doubtful I'd find anyone to talk to me after all this time.

We contacted anyone we could find that used to work there. And finally, someone replied. David Gleason. Alkalac had a good reputation. Basically, we'd consider them in the special chemical sector. Back in the 80s, he was a manager at Alkalac. Infloculants for water treatment. He's retired now but as you can hear he's still really into chemicals. Coatings for radiation curing. Not only does David Gleason remember the incident he was actually one of a group of senior staff who gave the green light for the deal with

Peter Wallischek's company. I had been contacted by them by telephone and agreed to meet with them. I immediately wonder if one of them could have been Peter Wallischek. As I recall there were three of them. Were the individuals Americans or were they from abroad? Do you remember? No, they were German. It's frustrating, but David Gleason can't say for certain

whether Peter Wallischek was in the room. Perhaps he sent some people to set up the account with Alkalac on his behalf. If it was him, he didn't stand out. But the former Alkalac manager does remember the order. They were interested in buying a lot of thiodiaglycol. We spent a lot of time quizzing and discussing that exact issue that we had not seen any usage of that size.

An order that size was rare. Usually factories making ink might buy five or six barrels at a time. Peter Walaszczak's final order was for 430 barrels. So it stood out to the team. And that makes me wonder why they didn't realize that something was so clearly wrong and put a stop to it. Sitting in that meeting, David Gleason and his colleagues know that the chemical could be used to make mustard gas.

They see all these red flags. But the Germans insist there's nothing to be concerned about. Did it raise any further alarms or was that enough? Just somebody saying that seemed to be enough for the order to go ahead? Uh, I guess you would say that we took them at their faith and worked out a business arrangement. The company would later issue a statement saying that no one at Alkalac knew the chemical was to be diverted to Iran. But someone at Alkalac had to have known it wasn't going to Europe

because the only way to get a mustard gas precursor to a sanctioned country is by fudging the details on the shipping forms. And Dennis Bass thinks he knows who at Alkalac had a hand in that. He just needs some help to prove it. So he contacts Telex, a wire service used a lot at that time. He wants to see the original messages between Peter Walaszczuk and Alkalac. He has a hunch that one of the wires he picked up in his raid at the company has been altered. When he gets the originals, it's there in black and white. A direct message between Peter

Wallischek and Leslie Hinkelman, the ever so helpful export manager who helped him carry out the sting operation to get the German to the US. In the original wire, Leslie Hinkelman discusses trying to obscure where the order was really heading. She'd edited her copy of the Telex to hide the truth before handing it over with her other files to Dennis Bass. Leslie Hinkelman admits she did try to help the order get past customs, but she says she only did it because the customer, Peter Walaszczak, asked her to. She just wanted to be helpful. And she's adamant she never knew the order was going to end up in Iran. Why do you think she did that? I can't answer what her motivations were. All I can tell you was that she was very thoughtful

in trying to see the customers were taken care of. We wanted to talk to Leslie Hinkelman, but she says she doesn't want to rake up a difficult time in her life. Eventually she's sentenced to 18 months probation. Years later, she'll say she wasn't the only person at Alcalac who knew what was going on, that she tried to flag the dodgy shipments to her superiors, and as far as she understood, they deliberately looked the other way. But Martin Himmelis, the prosecutor, never has enough evidence to bring any other

Al-Qalqaq employees to court. It was difficult to put your finger on any single person who had all of the knowledge that would have been needed to be guilty of a crime. In law enforcement the goal is always to charge individuals whenever possible rather than just corporations but in this case we reluctantly concluded that the conduct was fundamentally corporate at Alkalac and not individual. Instead, the company pleads guilty to an export violation

and agrees to pay a fine of almost a million dollars. After so many decades, I wonder whether David Gleeson has any regrets. You felt like you'd done your job properly? At that point in time I would say yes, we did. And now? And now? Hindsight's 2020. I suppose if you look at it from a hindsight position, we probably should have done a better job and investigate any actual uses.

Whether inadvertently or through naivety, David Gleeson and Leslie Hinkelman and all the others at Alkalac who gave the green light for the shipment were enablers. You find them everywhere. People who defer to others even when they have a feeling something's not right, because they want to please their bosses or the customer or they're hoping for that promotion. They might not have bad intentions but the harm's done just the same. Peter Valaszczuk, he's not in this category. The gas man is a very different type of en police guard. But he's pretty comfortable. He's sitting in his hotel room in Baltimore, his girlfriend's there.

All things considered, his luck has turned. You know, he just thought he was better than everybody else. He was a real cold guy. I mean, you know, there's some defendants I've had in cases that I've gotten to know and I like them. I mean, heroin smugglers. They're bad people criminally but personality-wise what I can remember a guy They put him in a witness protection program And so they gave him a new identity and now he's smuggling heroin again under the new identity But he cooperated so we put him in a hotel he was the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet and so we take turns watching him in the hotel and

Rich this my partner was watching him on a Sunday. And he liked him so much. He said, Booney, have you ever eaten turkey? And he said, No, he said, Father's Day, my wife's making a turkey, go in shower up, I'll take you to my house and you'll have turkey unheard of. So he says, Okay, thanks, Rich goes in. And Rich is waiting, waiting. He doesn't come out. He says to the maid, give me the passkey, opens the door, and he sees a knot behind the bathroom door and Booney had hung himself and he was dead. And we were sad about this guy.

He was a nice guy. We were eating, you know, watching him and staying with him and we just got to like the guy. I mean, you know, Peter Walczek was not that kind of guy. If he had hung himself, I wouldn't have lost a wink of sleep, believe me. The feeling, it turns out, is mutual. I hate Americans. A good American is a dead American?

In all his hours of interviews, Denis Bass never really got to understand Peter Wallischek. He was more concerned with how his orders happened. I wanna go one step further to understand not just how he did it, but why he did it and how he feels about it now and for that there's only one person who can help. After more than 35 years I've persuaded that enabler to step out of the shadows to tell his side of the story. Coming up in episode three of the story. Coming up in episode 3 we meet the gas man. And then I was waiting for that the judges are saying what we will do with it. Trialled, you were waiting for the trial. I was not waiting. Because FBI and the Americans are stupid.

I was escaping. Thanks for listening to The Gas Man. It's reported by Chloe Hajimathayu and produced by me, Claudia Williams. It's written by both of us. Gary Marshall is the narrative editor and Jasper Corbett is the editor. The sound design is by Hannah Varrell. Original theme music by Tom Kinsella. With thanks to Kavita Puri, Matt Russell and Katie Gunning. You can listen to more episodes today by subscribing to Tortoise Plus or by downloading the Tortoise

app. You can listen to our previous investigations right here on Tortoise Investigates while you wait for the next episode. And to hear more from our award-winning newsroom, search for Tortoise wherever you get your podcasts. ["Tortoise"] Tortoise. Hello, it's Tomony from Tortoise. We'll be bringing you a new investigation soon, but in the meantime, we thought you'd enjoy this new show from our friends at Campside Media. It's called White Devil. Late at night in May of 2021, a single gunshot shattered

the silence along the beach at the luxurious Alaia resort in Belize. In White Devil, journalist Josh Dean dives into one of the biggest, splashiest and most perplexing crime stories you've never heard of. The death of renowned cop Henry Jamott, shot by a Canadian property developer. Over two years of reporting, the depths of Belize's dark underbelly are brought to the surface. Its quirks, its corruption, and the incredible power of one family in particular. You can listen to White Devil wherever you get your

podcasts. Hello, I'm Alexi Mostros, host of Who Trolled Amber, the podcast that investigates whether there was an organised trolling campaign against Amber Heard. I'm excited to announce that on Wednesday 12th June I'll be hosting a live event to discuss Who Trolled Amber with Jen Robinson, Amber Heard's lawyer, and Gina Neff from the Mindaru Centre for Technology and Democracy. It's a great chance to hear insights into the world of celebrity PR, online disinformation and its effect on all our lives.

You can book your place at torturesmedia.com forward slash book.