Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Borderlands | 1. A Wild Place

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

It's the 1970s in Far West Texas, and local  bad boy Robert Chambers has always found his way to trouble—women,  drugs, rock stars, mountain lions. And when cocaine starts flowing  across the Mexican border like never before, Robert dives in headfirst. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Can't sight media. Lika Miller's dad was a smuggler. My dad was basically a small time border selling out to the locals type dude and he didn't really do it for money because we were always broke. Buddy liked to smoke and he liked to drink and he thought, smog on a little drug here and there, part of the adventure itself. That kind of amateur outlaw stuff was actually pretty common along the US-Mexica border in the 1980s. Lincoln was dad lived on that border, in a little village on the Mexican side called Paso Lejitas. It was literally a stone's throw from the Rio Grande,

next to an unofficial unpatrolled crossing, a place where you could just drive your truck through the shallow river to get to the other side. Life in Paso Lejitas, it seemed kind of timeless. People shared meals, took turns at chores, watched over each other, and they liked Lico's dad. He was worldly, and kind. Sometimes stepping in to teach the children,

when he wasn't off on some escapade. But this thirst for adventure, it would catch up with Liko's dad. He got in the way of the wrong people, and so did Liko. It was a balmy spring night in March 1987, and Lico had been out all day with his brother. When the two 15-year-olds got home, it was dark, and the boy sensed something was off.

Then they heard the voice of Lico's dad coming from inside their house. He basically came out and said, Hey, boys, is that you? We said, yes, he said, all right, things are going bad. You need to go over the other house. You know, keep a low profile. And what was going bad? They didn't know. But Liko's dad wasn't a guy who panicked. So they went to the house next door and waited. Then the shooting started. Just a bunch of shooting. Just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

It was coming from Liko's house. Then there was yelling. They could hear another voice. One they didn't recognize. But it sounded like someone giving orders. It began to dawn on Liko what was happening. A man was holding his dad hostage. More shots. Bam, bam, bam. on Lika what was happening. A man was holding his dad hostage, more shots,

bam, bam, bam. And at that point, that man took my dad's pistol and the shot holes on each side of his head in order to intimidate him. By now Lika was lying on the floor, hoping, praying the shooting would stop, that somehow his dad would be okay, and this guy would go away.

And the shooting did stop. Quiet now, a dog barking, the crackle of a far off radio. Then a voice, Likos' father's whispering, right next to the window. He had escaped his attacker. He needed his spare gun. Because Lico's dad knew this guy. He was a big time drug trafficker, and he was impossible to miss. Black cowboy hat, tall, broad shouldered, hulking. The rumor was that underneath his trench coat, he carried two cold 45 pistols. This guy was dangerous. Everyone in the Texas borderlands had heard the stories about what he'd done, his connections,

what he was capable of. His name was Robert Chambers. Liko's dad, waiting by the window, he wasn't going to wait for Robert to catch up with him. He ran off into the night. But just when it all seemed to be over. This is the point at which a flare goes up. Lights up the whole damn area. And then we hear a ruckus and then we hear some pickup trucks and noise lights on the American

side. A second stranger arrived at their family compound. This one appeared to be a cop, an American, with a badge and a gun, but he was accompanied by Mexican police. What was an American lawman doing in Mexico? The cop walked into the house. I remember him being wired, lean, carrying a submachine gun, and I remember him kind of being a little bit hunched, a little bit tense, extremely malty, violent, and I can't remember if he hit me once or twice, but he claimed he was Rick Thompson.

Rick Thompson, the sheriff of Presidio County, the vast area in Texas directly across the river. And the man who claimed he was the vast area in Texas directly across the river. And the man who claimed he was the sheriff wasn't looking for the drug trafficker Robert Chambers. He was after Lico's dad, demanding to know where he'd gone. But Lico didn't know where his dad was. And he had his own questions. Like, why did a drug trafficker and a sheriff seem to be working together? Were they on the right side of the law?

Or were they both bad guys? Before Lico could think too much about these questions, the sheriff turned Lico and his brother over to the Mexican police. And they took the boys to an abandoned hotel. For days, ask them the same question, where is your father? When Liko and his brother couldn't answer, the cops beat them, but eventually they gave up and released the two boys. And the whole thing started to seem like a bad dream. One Liko still can't shake. One of the things to remember is all these events transpired when I was 15 years old and I'm 49 now. So it's been an hour or two and I still have fears. I still have

things that don't make sense that can be attributed to the time in my life when it happened. That's why since then, Liko doesn't talk much about the things that happened that night. Well, when you're 15 and you get rated by somebody who claims to be the law and they beat you up and you end up chained to a hotel bed and they threatened to pull out your toenails and rough you up a fair amount and you end up a little bit insecure about it. I would say what happened to me caused a fair amount of PTSD if that's what they call it now. And I think one of the things I learned early in this area was all publicity is bad. That's what I learned. And so that's kind of the rule I live by.

I don't do interviews and stuff like that. This, you've courted me long enough. I need to give you something because you've earned it. You've been a sinely persistent." And the reason for that persistence? I knew that Likho's story was one piece in a jigsaw puzzle of a far larger story about how a sleepy, isolated region was dragged into a large, complex war. And I was being dragged into it too, tracking two men from that one strange night on the border at Paso Lehedas, Robert Chambers, and Rick Thompson.

I had first heard about their story years ago, as some local gossip told it a dive bar, and I immediately got to work, putting together any scraps of information I heard around town. Digging deep into the yellowing pages of small town newspapers. My tasks seemed simple enough. Peas together the lives of chambers in Thompson. Try to make sense of why they joined forces. But I discovered their bond was something nearly everyone wanted to bury.

Because it forced the tight-knit communities of far-west Texas to question who they could trust, their government, their law, even one another. That bond between the notorious outlaw and the iconic cop, it unleashed a saga that reverberates to this day. And it would all come to a head on a cold winter night in an empty fairground where a horse trailer sat stuffed with a billion dollars worth of cocaine. From campsite media, the first season of witness. This is Borderlands. I'm Rob Domingo, Chapter 1, a wild place. These days Rod Pontin is a country lawyer. White hair, glasses, a little stooped,

with a poker face that every so often breaks into a sligh grin. Rod works in Alpine, Texas, in an area downtown that's a jumble of two story buildings. Red break, stucco, brightly colored murals of the high desert landscape. And entering his office, it's a throwback. Wood panels, salo lighting paper's cluttered everywhere. He shows me around.

Oh, this is my office and alpine. I've got a wall with all of my diplomas and law licenses. Most of the work he does now, handling legal matters for Presidio County or as a solo practitioner for clients, it's not making national news. Some nice old cowboy pictures from some cowboys branding on a ranch near here and the corner, there's some folk art of the patron saint of lawyers to look after lawyers in the downtrodden. You might already know Rod because today he's best known for a famous technical gaff. Mr. Ponte, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings.

You might want to take a look. We're trying to, can you hear me, Judge? I'm prepared to go forward with it. I'm here live, that's not a cat. Yep, that's Rod. He was the cat lawyer. 2021's viral internet sensation. But looking around his office, you soon realize that Rod used to be well-known for very different kinds of legal appearances. There's one pretty notable black and white photograph on the wall. Autograph picture of Henry Lee Lucas thanking me for getting him off of a Captain Murder Case.

Henry Lee Lucas. He was a serial killer who confessed to hundreds of murders. Back when he was a rookie, Rod was thrown in this case that no one wanted. But he took it and recognized something a lot of people didn't. That Lucas who had confessed to 300 murders, really didn't commit them. When that Lucas was confessing anything that Texas Rangers were giving,

but the Rangers knew that Lucas couldn't have done these murders. It was nearly all bull. Lucas had made up wild stories and told them to cops and prosecutors who were only too happy to close their unsolved cases. Rod was able to show in court that Lucas simply couldn't have been responsible for dozens of killings he'd confessed to. And Lucas was just the start. After this, Punt made a career for himself defending clients that a lot of lawyers might choose to steer clear of.

Well, I can just do it in your best for these people. They certainly deserve a defense. These people? Well, he's not only talking about serial killers. Because after Lucas, Rod made his name defending high-ranking drug smugglers, often facing decades of prison time. Too many people think that a drug lawyer must be involved in the drug trade. And I never was involved at all with any of my clients. Rod became a go-to guy for the car tells that operated just across the Rio Grande.

He broke her deals for lesser charges. He figured a way to get traffickers out of the stiffer sentences. Back then I was just trying to be the best lawyer I could. Worked for my clients. You know, I wasn't losing a lot of sleep over what other people thought. In fact, you could say Rod leaned into this reputation. He dressed in black, all black, black cowboy hat, black suit. He had a bushy black mustache, the cover on the corners of his mouth.

But Rod didn't defend drug smugglers because he liked playing the bad guy. This period of time was the first step of the cocaine explosion into the United States. And for the right kind of criminal defense lawyer, this cocaine explosion was going to be really good business. Some experts say cocaine, not coffee, is Colombia's biggest export earner, contributing as much as 25% of the country's overseas earnings.

The sheer size of the drug's industry tends to distort the economy. By and a condominium unit in Val Harbor that allegedly housed visiting traffickers all belong to Pablo Escobar Gaviera. Escobar indicted for smuggling nearly 60 tons of cocaine into Florida, hit ownership in Panamanian. Miami was kind of wild last, because it was the point of entry for so much of the cocaine. So you'd have great chases across this game, Bay and cigarette boats with customs.

Miami used to be the cocaine capital of the United States. The cocaine started pouring through here in the 1970s, as two things happened. Coke got popular in the United States, and Colombian drug cartels got better at making it and transporting it. You've heard some of the names, real and fictional, Pablo Escobar, the colleague cartel, Scarface, Miami Vice.

Yeah, well, I mean in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, the Columbia cartels were smuggling a lot of their merchandise through the Caribbean routes, which the DA started focusing on and started shutting down. That's award-winning journalist Melissa Del Bosque. Once the DEA shut down the Caribbean cocaine route through South Florida, the Colombian cartels simply relocated their operations. And so they started moving their business through Mexico using Mexican drug organizations as middlemen helping them transport the cocaine to the United States. Melissa reports on immigration and US Mexico border policy.

A beat that includes drug cartels and smuggling networks. And they're devastating human costs. And those Mexican drug cartels, they got a lot more powerful than the 1980s when they started smuggling a new product, cocaine. But the cartels couldn't distribute that cocaine throughout the US themselves. They needed organized manpower. Really drug smuggling is all about transportation.

It's about the movement of trucks and planes. It's like a FedEx business basically. And cartel FedEx, it needed helpers on the American side in places like far west Texas. They were recruiting for a range of positions, drug mules to bring shipments across the border, customs agents to look the other way, truck drivers to take big loads deep into the US. The approach is usually fairly casual. You just go out for drinks, you go to see a baseball game, it starts off slow, sort of like a courtship,

and they sound you out to see how amenable are you to helping them out for a price. And it sort of builds from there. I mean, this is where I've heard it described by many people who got into smuggling business and before they know it. They're in the middle of the business and it's too late to get out. And all this is why I came to be sitting in the office of the cat meme lawyer, Rod Pountain. I was trying to understand how a remote region with a tiny population and a laid-back vibe had become an epicenter of the international drug trade and how one particular Texan, part of an old ranching family with deep ties to the Borderlands, had gotten in the middle

of that business. You never found him without a 45 stuck in his belt and his small of his back trying to work he was in on the river was kind of work where you needed to be armed I think. This was one of Rod's clients and he helped make sure the cocaine explosion kept expanding across America long after the DEA crackdowns in South Florida. Someone who by the time he came to know Rod Pountain didn't want to just dabble and smuggling. He wanted to be a player. He was doing other things that if you're living the high life with no visible means of support,

we have a pretty good idea out here on the border what you're doing. Yep. Robert Chambers. That's after the break. Uncover from CBC podcasts brings you award-winning investigations year-round. Infiltrate an international network of neo-Nazi extremists. Discover the true story of the CIA's attempts at mind control. Their objective was to wipe my memory. Or dig into a crypto-king's mysterious death and a quarter billion dollars missing.

There are deep oddities in this case. With episodes weekly, uncover is your home for in-depth reporting and exceptional storytelling. Find uncover wherever you get your podcasts. En el episodio de la semana, un cover es tu casa para la deputación de la deputación y la excepcionalidad de la historia. Fíjate en el cover, donde tienes las podcastes. personalizadas para mejorar el contenido de tus corvíos electrónicos, segmentar tu público, entre muchas cosas más adivina menos y vende más con Intuitimale Sim, la marca número 1 en email y marketing y automatización. Empezado hoy mismo en mailsim.com. Vas a vender a tus públicos de marcas competidoras en número globales de clientes en 2021-2022. Hi, I may speak to Susie. This is Shane. Hi, this is Rob DeLito.

I'm a journalist based in Austin, Texas, and I'm doing a podcast on the old Sheriff Rick Thompson and Robert Chambers case. Susan Woodward Sp oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, up on Woodward Ranch, which is about 80 miles from Mexico, and grew up out Wild West, and it was wild. Robert Chambers was raised in a place like this too. And Susan and Robert, their families knew each other, faced similar hardships. Back in the 1960s, during their childhoods, ranching was no longer bringing in much money. There's not much opportunity for young men out here, while they're on the border. You're either come from a family that's got money or you try to find other ways to make money. But for kids like Susan and Robert, the old ranches were still every bit as vibrant as

they'd ever been. Playgrounds for exploration were towering mountains of red rock, framed vast expanses of grassland, and there were arid stretches full of cacti, agave, and aquatio. It was a beautiful way to grow up, lots of creeks, lots of horses, lots of caves. I'd go out and hike naked in my hiking boots, full moon, so I could do that on the ranch, right? There's nobody else around.

I knew that. I wasn't scared. Lots of places for a child to be wild and free. Susan describes it almost like a children's picture book. The wild animals weren't wild. They were friendly house guests. But almost like a children's picture book, the wild animals weren't wild. They were friendly house guests. I mean, it wasn't uncommon for ranchers to have pet wild animals.

They had raised and pet deer and pet havelina that unfortunately slept between my parents. Oh my god. Wait a second. What is a havelina? They resemble a wild pig. Where did the havelina sleep? In bed with my parents. They kind of stinky. They have a musk to them. So even now, if the windows are open or something, I can smell them out in the wild, part of my wild childhood. When Robert was a kid, he spent time on his family's own ranch, living wild and free. But

for high school, he went up to the biggest town in the region, Alpine, which is where he met Susan and became close friends with Susan's older brother, Tray. Alpine High School, back in the late 60s and early 70s, it was a little rough, and Robert and Tray stuck together. Robert was huge, even in grade school, tall, blonde, and I think that's where they made friends on the playground. They befriended each other so that they could kind of survive in that environment. All I ever remember hearing was them getting into fights and coming home.

Black eyes, that got a thing. But Susan really didn't pay attention to Robert until a few years later. It was the mid 1970s. She was in early 20s with a kid on the brink of a divorce. Robert was around the same age and he was hard to look away from. He was back from the Marines, so there he was. And my state of mind was not good. I was pissed. So it was real easy to have an affair with him. Oh, he was tall and blonde and tan and handsome.

Just real handsome, just irresistible, unfortunately. The Robert that Susan knew then in the mid-70s, he graduated from his tough high school reputation to something of a local bad boy, not much more, but even back then he had his own self-serving moral code. Robert played the guitar beautifully and was a good singer too. Really? In fact, that's probably why I stopped seeing him because he played your cheatin' heart for me. Actually, you know, I don't think he approved of us having an affair because he knew my husband

to high school. It wasn't like he was going to stop me, you know, but he played your cheat in the heart. The time will come when you'll be blue. Your cheating heart will tell on you. It was like Robert knew the rules, could even sing about them. But those rules were for other people, like Susan. And if the rules got in the way of what he wanted, he wasn't going to bother with them. In that same era, Robert also dated a woman named Nancy Burton.

When I first contacted Nancy, she'd been reluctant to talk to me. We would exchange text messages, she'd give me a little information, she'd text that she might be willing to talk, and then she'd disappear. Went on like this for over a year. Then one day, she invited me to her home in Alpine and started to tell me all about her memories of Robert Chambers. Okay, so my sister and I were at a fourth of July dance and my sister met Robert's roommate and then I met Robert. I was young and dumb. The rest is history.

Nancy met Robert Chambers when he was in his 20s. And Nancy? Nancy was still in high school. Yeah, it was. Oh, my parents had a connection, Fiat. This was the 70s in Texas, Willie Nelson, Chris Christopherson, Wailin Jennings, Shaggy Redneck iconoclasts were big, and Robert Chambers was like a local version of those guys. He drove around the big band in his pickup, wearing a pair of blue jeans and no shirt, showing off his muscles.

And he seemed to have connections all over. Like if the rock band passed her town, Robert would be hanging out with them. And he'd take Nancy along. I met the Eagles, met Don Henley, as a young, punk girl. I had no idea who they were. My stepmother would be waiting for me when I'd get home, tapping her foot. I got in a lot of trouble. Other times with Robert were much more low-key.

There were lazy days down on the border. We hung out, we'd go down to the river. It's been a lot of time in flatbed boats fishing down on the river. I think he's the first person I ever got on the Rio Grande in a motorboat with. So there was the Robert who hung out at the cool parties or relaxed down on the river, but even to Nancy it was clear there was another side to him too. Perhaps a darker side. His reputation preceded him and then the group that he ran around with were also known in this area, you know, the term outlaw.

That's what we used. You were outlaws. And spending time with Robert? Nancy saw what being an outlaw meant. I'm talking about drugs. They were everywhere. Yeah, I can actually see it in my head right now. The place that he lived downtown was full of it, full of pot, full of cocaine. When you walked upstairs, it was a big open room, big open room, and then the kitchen, and then when you walked in the back is where the bedrooms were. He would have bundles of pot, and then he would have the smaller packages of the cocaine.

Always in a ziplock baggy or the corner of a bag and we would have these parties and just bags of powder would get poured out on the table. And we would smoke and party and drink and And we would smoke and party and drink and do stupid stuff. When Robert went out on the town, you couldn't miss him because of his lion, a pet and mountain lion, named Miko, that he took around on a leash. Robert and Miko could be found at a honky-tongued canal pine the shoot. A place with a big open dance floor, bars on either side, buggered some beer. Robert owned it with another one of the outlaws. Because it was Roberts and Jack's bar, they could do anything they wanted. Robert would show up with the guys in his outlaw crew.

And he held court, left no doubt about who was in charge of the place. The group had their own corner of the bar. They called it the penalty box. Because we were such trouble makers maybe? You know, nobody messed with us. Nobody messed with us. Nancy ended up marrying a guy named Les Brown. One of Robert Chambers self-proclaimed outlaws. But Nancy and Les kept hanging out with Robert. And when you were around Robert

or Les, violence was never very far away. My husband at the time, he and another guy were always fighting. If they ever saw each other, they would get into a fight. They used to have shootouts. Whenever we would walk out of the bar, they would shoot at each other. I really don't know how I'm still alive. Nancy knew that less than Robert were involved in drugs. After all, she'd been to Robert's house in Alpine. She'd seen what was there. And as she got older, as she became a little more clear-eyed about what was going on,

she started having a different perspective. I was probably 18, 19 years old before I figured out, you know, this just doesn't seem right. We're in the hell that he he get all the money from? Where is this coming from? What did you do to get this? It wasn't just that Nancy was getting older. As the 70s came to a close, the border was changing, on both sides. And the life that Robert and his outlaws were living, it was getting more intense.

There was a lot of smuggling going on. To what extent I really don't know. Stuff like that really frightened me. For as long as people could recall, smuggling had been a part of the culture of the borderlands. As Susan Woodward sprigs remembers, in the Big Ben region a lot of people did it. Most of them, like Lico's dad and Pasa Lejitas, not serious criminals. People just trying to get by and sure, every so often getting high too.

Running guns and drugs and whatever across the border. And when I talk about breaking down pounds, they were key lows, I mean. We didn't care because we were smoking pot like it was going out of style. To break down that much marijuana in the middle of a room was like, we were party and it was a beautiful thing. But what did seem to Susan like a beautiful thing back in the carefree 70s?

By the 80s was mutating into a darker, more violent reality. So we spent time at Robert's ranch and I remember Robert was driving a truck that they had a bullet hole in it. That should have been my first. That should have been a wake up call, but no. More after the break. Caribbean to Mexico in the early 1980s, a few cartels consolidated power. Journalist Melissa Del Bosque knows that history well. While a hara cartel in the west,

the Gulf cartel in the east, and they were family alliances, and you see a lot of these cartels based around singular figures and families, basically, who have sort of united and created these cartels with the help of the police and the military. The drugs entered the U.S. through key border towns. In the drug world, they're known as plazas. And oddly, one of the most important plazas in Mexico was a remote city of some 20,000

residents directly across the river from the big bend region of Texas. The cocaine coming in from Florida moved to all places, oh, Hinaga, because Pablo Costa ended up being the guy that could bring it across the border in large quantities for the little lower cartel that was working with the Colombians. Rod Pountain, the former drug lawyer, he knows O'Nigah well. Texans visit O'Nigah all the time, with its rows of palm trees, bustling shops, and a mission-style church on its town square. They call it OJ for short. And when Rod was starting his legal career in the early 1980s, a man named Pablo Acosta ran the plaza there. By that time, Acosta was something of a legend on both sides of the border. He had grown up in poverty and worked his way up through the Narco ranks, slowly, biting his time,

doing stints in prison, and staying alive through fused until he became an honest to goodness drug lord, overseeing a 200 mile stretch of the border like it was his personal property. In the 80s, he was shipping 60 tons of cocaine a year to the United States. A coastal was short and stocky, with scarred cheeks and a bushy mustache. And he had a nickname, the Oonaga Fox. And he was wily, yes, but also ruthless. The DEA pegged him for at least 20 murders and figured the real number was at least double that.

He would gun you down if you broke his rules. What that doesn't mean he was totally unhinged. He obeyed a code. No, he struck me as one of those guys that was an old school smuggler who, you know, he gave his word and it was a word and a handshake. And if, you know, when I was starting off in border reporting in Mexico, I was always told that you could just say, you know, so and so. Pablo Costa said I could be here, and then everything would be fine. And I think he was that kind of guy.

When Nancy was dating Robert back in the 70s, she knew about Pablo Costa's reputation, pretty much everyone who lived in the big bend region did. But one day, around 1980, Nancy got a little more insight than she wanted. It was a little after lunchtime, and she and her husband Les got a visit from their friend, Robert Chambers. Robert came by the condo and asked Les, or told Les, hey, come on, go with me. Let's go to O.J. So Les said, come on Nancy.

They drove west a little over an hour, then headed through customs and over the bridge into O.J. Robert drove them to the edge of town to what appeared to be a guarded compound. drove them to the edge of town to what appeared to be a guarded compound. It was a really, really tall, tall, cinder block fence and it had like rebar sticking out of the top of it. And I saw machine guns and men on the ball. We pulled up and Robert got out of the blazer, opened the door and stepped down and took a couple of steps to the front of the blazer. A man emerged from inside the compound. And came out with all those men around him with those big guns. He had scars on his face, had a mustache,

blue jeans on, pointy pointy pointy cowboy boots on, and his pearl snap shirt on. And a hat. When I saw all the guns, when I saw all those men with all those guns, it scared the crap out of me. I honestly thought we were dead. The Scarface man walked over to Robert. They couldn't have looked more different.

Robert, tall, blonde, in his 20s. And this other man, a couple decades older, short and wiery, but exuding swagger. A couple decades older, short and wiery, but exuding swagger. They started talking, and had dawned on Nancy who this other man was. He was Pablo Acosta, the O and I of Fox. Pablo started thumping on Robert's chest with his finger. I remember hearing, I don't go through that country, I go over that country. Meaning Pablo didn't drive the drugs, he flew over. Nancy couldn't make out the rest of the conversation, but she could see their faces.

And Robert, her friend, the guy she knew was a local drug dealer, the self-appointed boss of a bunch of small town outlaws? He didn't seem scared. Not by the biggest drug lord in northern Mexico thumping on his chest. He wasn't back and down. In fact, he seemed visibly angry. And Pablo looked pissed off too. To Nancy, that seemed very dangerous.

And voices started going louder and louder. And I do remember the men on the wall turning around and looking at us. And all I could think about was, what's my dad going to say? What's my dad going to think when they find my body? Nancy was bracing for the gunfire. The end. As Robert turned his back to Pablo, took a few steps toward the pickup.

Pablo's men, the guys with the guns, stared on. But Robert made it to the truck, slammed the door, ignition, stepped on the gas. And we got out of OJ as quick as we could. We went straight to the bridge. What had been decided back at the compound? Nancy didn't know. In that moment, the only thing that was clear to her was that Robert had bigger ambitions than she'd ever imagined. And for now at least, he hadn't gotten what he wanted from Pablo. How did Robert seem when he on the right back? Angry. He was mad. Very, very, very angry. If Robert got upset, first off his face would turn just bright red. And he was real blonde, blonde. If you upset

him in any way, he would get angry. God, he would just fly off the handle. Literally, he would just fly off the handle. This temper of Roberts, it would become his calling card. Something I'd hear about from almost everyone I spoke to. But in the blazer fling, O'Naga, Nancy was even angrier. And I think I did tell Robert, don't you ever do this to me again, don't you fucking ever put me in that position again.

How did that change the way you looked at Robert, did you think about it more, or were you still just kinda young and naive? I thought Robert was a dumbass. And I did not realize he was playing with fire like he was. And he was kind of slipping into a real violent world at that time. That's when I figured Robert was in really, really deep. Nancy was the only one who saw where Robert was going. As Robert got deeper into that violent world, American law enforcement was also starting to take notice. Rob, I can't talk about

that one. Okay. Is it sensed? Can you tell me why it's sensitive? Well, the source is still out there, so the source is still at risk on that one. That's next time on Borderlands. Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob Domingo, and written by me, Eric Benson and David Waters. Eric Benson is our supervising producer. David Waters is our executive producer. At Campside, the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriatus, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher. Our field producers are Ryan Katz and Travis

Pupenek. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith. Fact checking by Alex Yablon, special thanks to Rajiv Gola and Ashley and Krikbom. Scoring and sound designed by Ian Chambers and Rod Sherwood is our engineer. Original Music by Julian Lynch If you enjoyed Borderlands, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show. And make sure to subscribe or follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.