Chris Feistl & Dave Mitchell (former DEA agents)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert.

I'm Buck Rogers and I'm joined by Gene Lightyear.

And we're in the cartel.

But don't tell anyone.

Keep it a secret.

Today we have two incredible DEA agents, Chris Feisel and Dave Mitchell, and they were sent to Colombia to bring down the largest cocaine cartel after Pablo Escobar.

This is such a good episode.

If you enjoyed the Scott Payne episode, you're going to love this.

This is very in keeping with that.

They've lived a crazy

moments.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah,

Dave and Chris have the most harrowing stories of penetrating and bringing down this cartel.

It's really, really interesting.

They have a super interesting book out right now called After Escobar, Taking Down the Notorious Cali Godfathers and the Biggest Drug Cartel in History.

And if you liked Narcos.

Well, one of the seasons of Narcos is based on this.

Exactly.

And they are played.

Well, one of them is played.

Yeah.

This is a great episode.

Please enjoy.

Chris and Dave buckle up.

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He's an object.

He's an object.

He's an object.

Yeah, I like your studio.

This is nice.

Oh, thank you.

Oh my goodness.

You have so much stuff.

The irony of me in a DEA shirt is rich.

It's rich.

Yeah, it's good.

This is the most amount of presents we've ever received.

Yes.

I'm going to put this here so people can see it.

Do you know how these work, Monica?

No, how do they work?

Challenge coins, they're popular in the military.

How's it work?

You set it on a bar.

Whoever picks it up last, they have to buy the round.

Everyone carries these.

I'm not a coin collector, but you're right.

That's how it works, right?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

They're kind of gorgeous, though, right?

I like the weight.

You could really think you've given us gold, which is the dream.

And you have a lot of people who collect those things.

They have stacks of them all over.

Thank you.

I wonder if there's one company that's making all of the coins or there's multiple.

There's certainly a few.

Okay, what a niche industry to find yourself in.

Challenge coins.

It is gorgeous.

So many ways to live a life.

Okay, so Dave and Chris, welcome.

Where are you from, Dave, originally?

Born and raised in Kentucky.

And what did mom and dad do in Kentucky?

Well, my dad worked for Louisville Gas and Electric, and my mom was a stay-at-home housewife.

And I have two older brothers.

Were you trying to get their approval all the time and earn your

good for you?

You were free of that.

My older brother, he's the type when my parents would leave to do something, he would come in, just move the furniture.

and says, okay, time to get it on.

My little brother's not going to be a wimp.

And we get in a fight, fight, but my middle brother watches us.

Sure.

Sure.

So when my parents came home one time, I'm thinking, oh, man, I got to get my oldest brother.

So we're watching TV.

I just jumped on his back and the stir hitting him in the head.

And he goes, I told you he was nuts.

And he framed you.

They thought I had an issue.

I said, no, when you leave, he beats me up.

You're a boy.

Listen, when you're the younger brother, you're forced into a situation where you have to be crazy and then you look insane to your family.

They push you to the limit.

And how about you?

Where are you from, Chris?

I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and then grew up in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Okay, great.

And what did your parents do?

My dad was a school teacher, very smart man, had master's degree, doctorate degree, and my mom worked in a library.

So no law enforcement in either of your backgrounds?

Zero.

My oldest brother became a police officer, but that's not the reason why I came on DEA.

Okay, so how did you find your way to the DEA?

I was in the military.

I was an officer because I was in ROTC in college.

So after I graduated in the military, I was in Greece.

And after that, I went to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

And it was peacetime.

I heard about DEA and found out about their mission and how they have offices throughout the world and domestically.

What year was this?

That was probably 87.

I got hired on in 88.

It took a year for me to get hired on.

Okay.

Obviously, the locations are appealing, but did you have any internal distaste for drugs in general?

Were you like, these are bad?

We got to clean these up.

Yes and no because i grew up in an area it's a rural area we weren't really exposed to overdose deaths like you would in the big cities yeah and you knew hey okay this is right and wrong maybe on the periphery but no one my immediate family had issues with narcotics of any type How'd you find your way into it, Chris?

In the summer of my junior year in college, a bunch of my friends said, hey, let's go down to the beach.

Let's go down to the shore to live.

And of course, you know, when you go down there, you got to have a place to live and you got to have some money to support yourself while we were hanging out surfing and doing some stuff.

I checked on a summer job and I went to the municipal building and they said we're hiring summer police officers or lifeguards.

So I said, what's this summer police officer thing?

So I was in college and I called back to my one of my professors and I said, hey, can I turn this into an internship or something?

And they're like, yeah, absolutely.

You get credit for it.

So I applied for that summer police officer job.

I got it.

And then I was in a bar one night and some girl came up and asked me to buy methamphetamine.

Oh, so we set up this little undercover deal, and you know, I met her up on the boardwalk.

And then that's what got me interested in law enforcement because I was going to go to law school.

I played basketball in high school and college.

I wanted to be like a sports agent and stuff.

And that put me on the law enforcement track.

So I started looking into DEA.

They have offices all over in foreign countries.

So I applied there, CIA, you know, FBI, and I got hired by DEA.

Because did you get a little, pardon this pun, but high off of that undercover exchange?

It was interesting.

I thought it was pretty cool to be able to do that.

That's when I looked into DEA.

I really didn't know much about it back then.

I saw what they did and the mission, and I thought, hey, that's pretty good.

It's better than me sitting in an office.

So he was 86 or 87, did you say?

88.

I came out of 88.

And how about you?

Same.

Yeah, he was a class right behind me.

Oh, he was?

Yeah.

So that's kind of interesting because we got hired in DEA at the same time.

We got out of the academy at the same time.

We went to Miami at the same time.

We worked there together.

And then we went to Bogota at the same time.

Oh, wow.

Okay, so you guys were working together in Miami.

There's different groups that you work in.

We never worked together, but he was in a different group.

But we knew each other, but we knew each other.

Okay.

And obviously, if you join the DEA, or at least my assumption would be if you join the DEA in the 80s, your fingers crossed, you get sent to Florida.

I mean, this is where everything is happening.

That was my dream spot.

That was my number one choice.

Yes, this is the era of Cocain Cowboys.

You got the

widow down there.

You got a lot of shits popping in 88.

Don Johnson.

Yes,

put a huge spotlight on South Florida.

I'll tell you one thing about Don Johnson.

If he realizes in the late 80s, he's probably one of the number one reasons why so many people joined DEA.

Even though he was a cop, right?

He somehow worked for

the DEA of the Scarab Boat for our.

I heard first they're going to make it a DEA, but DEA said we don't want nothing to do with that.

So they made it a cop show.

Big mistake.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, they say that too about Top Gun, like the recruitment for Air Force.

They didn't even need to advertise for 10 years.

And then you saw it dissipate as that movie's popularity waned.

He brought it back.

I've just been going down a Dakota Johnson rabbit hole.

So this is quite timely.

Very sim for you.

Yeah.

So what was happening as new agents in South Florida in the 80s?

What kind of activities were you guys engaged in?

That was the place to be.

We felt we're so lucky being in Miami because you had so much cocaine coming through.

It was coming through.

Kelly Cortel was bringing it in through the container ships.

They were known for that.

They'll have it in concrete posts and wooden planks.

And then the Medellin guys, you know, they were bringing it up by air, dropping off the Everglades or flying it over northern part or central part of Florida.

You name it, it would come in.

People don't understand the context of Florida in the late 80s.

At a certain point, there was more money in the Federal Reserve, cash.

You're absolutely right.

I want to say than every other Federal Reserve combined.

10 times more than 10 times.

The whole room was full of dollars.

Oh my God.

I mean, think about that.

You have where all the cash is stored for the government, and you have one area of the country that has 100x everywhere else.

And then also like exotic cars are being sold.

They can't keep them down that there's a recession.

Those cars are flying off the shelves.

There's cash in abundance.

It's so in everyone's face.

Clearly, we know.

There's billions and billions of dollars flowing through Florida in cash.

I think in the reserves, there is like 6 billion surplus because they look at the surplus and know where the money laundering's been.

Because later in the years that $6 billion went down to $4 billion.

They notice, oh, we have some action in LA.

Their surplus is up.

Oh, and that's the best.

So that tells you now they're getting dope money in L.A.

Yeah, it's like a very transparent metric for how much cash is being put in the economy.

But you're exactly right about buying cars, restaurants, because you have trickle-down economics.

I can tell you it works with dope money.

Right.

You know, because in some of these countries, you have the rich and the poor.

With narcotics, you start seeing a middle class.

Well, you need a lot of lawyers, you need bankers, you need finance people, and they're getting paid well.

Yeah.

And that was the place to be.

Like, if you wanted to be a DEA agent in the 80s, you wanted to go to Miami, right?

Because Cocaine Cowboys, Miami Vice, everything was happening.

All the action.

All the action was happening there.

So what kind of missions were you on as a DA agent down there?

Well, that was a good thing about Miami because you got exposed to every type of investigation that you could think of, from street-level deals to marijuana cases to cocaine importation cases.

I worked a lot of maritime smuggling investigations, which meant that we had good undercover setup with these coastal freighters and these houses, like you would see on Miami Vice down in the Florida Keys that we used as potential stash houses.

And we would pose as transporters and bring the cocaine for the cartels into the U.S.

and then turn it over and then try to identify those cells.

All right, so stop there.

That's of great interest to me.

first of all there's a great doc on a guy who was a kentucky boy who came down to florida and he started importing on big cargo containers marijuana and then funded his indianapolis race team do you know this guy he ended up racing in the indianapolis 500 as a rookie wow he just was doing it to pursue his race dreams but at any rate what are the mechanics of providing transportation to the drug cartel so two of the vulnerabilities that these cocaine trafficking organizations or marijuana trafficking organizations always have is transportation and communications.

Those are always areas that they're looking for people to get the drugs into the U.S.

And we would have these assets that we would use who would be undercover, basically working as informants.

And they would say, hey, I have an organization that can transport your cocaine or your marijuana from Colombia into the U.S.

And they would say, well, how would you do that?

And then we would explain to them, look, we have access to coastal freighters.

We have access to speed boats.

We'll bring it in.

We'll offload it to these houses in the Florida Keys.

We'll transport it up into the Miami area and we'll turn it over to you.

Yes.

And then what we do is we would get paid for our transportation fees, which would be $2,000, $3,000 a kilo.

So that's how we would make money technically as transporters.

Yeah, so that's already an interesting aspect.

So now the transporters make a good deal of money.

Correct.

But do you ever feel like I'm making more money doing this than my actual job?

Oh, yeah, they were making 10 times more than that.

But I mean, for DEA agents, when they're hiring them, how do they know that your morals are so good that you're not going to like turn?

Well, that's a good question.

You go through a battery of different tests, especially now.

You'll do a written test.

You'll do oral interview panels.

You do polygraph examinations.

They do periodic background checks on you now.

And they would also do a whole entire background check before you got hired to make sure that you were never in trouble.

We both know when we first got into Miami, there was several people who were arrested.

They went to the dark side.

I imagine it's barely tempting.

So just because they're an agent doesn't mean, okay, he's not going to take money.

Unfortunately, sometimes that one person may take it.

And that one person is going to ruin the reputation of DEA for the other 99%

that's working hard.

A friend of ours is in the FBI.

Every time he takes money out and gives it away to the informant, when he comes back, all the accounting, he is hooked up to a polygraph.

Like every time there's money involved, he's on the polygraph.

They're monitoring that pretty closely, at least in the FBI.

And there's a lot of safeguards, too.

We have to take money out.

We have to sign for it.

We have to pay assets or informants with two people.

We have to have them sign forms saying that they received the money.

But again, it still happens.

So back to when you guys, the DA, is transporting the drugs and it's two, three grand a kilo, you guys are receiving a ton of cash.

Sometimes.

You receive some of it beforehand.

We call it trafficker funds.

Okay.

So they'll say, you know what?

We're going to give you $50,000.

$80,000.

And you say, okay, and you can actually use that to fix your undercover boat, to buy the fuel, to buy food for the crew, to prep for the trip.

But a lot of times, though, it never gets that far, right?

And not to give away too much on the sources and methods part, but

many times, if not most of the times, we arrest the people involved

before we're actually able to get paid because we can't give them the cocaine, right, or the marijuana and let them take it away and go, right?

We have to arrest them.

We're not allowed to let that walk.

You can't follow that around.

We can, but ultimately, the potential of losing.

Yeah, if some people die,

Yes, correct.

Is it fair to say, is my understanding correctly?

Like, ultimately, the overarching strategy is we're getting our foot in the door.

We're hoping to

expose ourselves to the people we've made contact with, leverage that to get them to go up a rung on the ladder and climb the ladder.

Is that part of the process where you're kind of trying to get people involved so that you can get them to turn on someone above them and so on and so on?

Well, that's exactly right on your street level type cases.

Yeah.

But when we went to Bogota, started working, at Cali, we were dealing with the top people.

You don't get any art.

That's exactly why I bring it up is I want to establish like the known trajectory of it versus what you guys had to do.

It's a whole different strategy.

A whole different strategy.

So when do you guys get sent to Columbia and are you sent now as a pair?

Pretty much we were.

I got selected first.

It was only like a week, but we both put in and we finally got selected.

We had to go to Leightonwood School and learn Spanish.

It's about three, four months.

Oh, God.

That is not enough time.

Well, we both had a background.

Oh, we you did.

And you had to like score a two.

You talked to somebody on the phone.

So it wasn't you can write or anything.

You just had to speak on a two level.

Yeah.

So a two level, well, it got up to five.

Oh, five.

A five is a native language.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Really, if you get a three, if you're a three, you're a good Spanish speaker.

You're another good Spanish speaker.

And now when they send the two of you, did they say to you, okay, here's our strategy down there?

This is what you guys are going to do when you get there.

Or were you guys sent and basically like, figure this out for us?

When we were both in Miami, we both worked investigations that targeted the Cali and the Mini In cartel.

So we had a pretty good background on who the players were and what they were doing at that time.

And since we were in Miami, a lot of our cases, we would follow leads that would go back into Central America, into South America, right?

Because we were dealing with the upper echelon cartel leaders.

So we knew some of the agents in Bogota that were there, and they knew some of the work that we had done.

And since we had that background on working against those cartels, they assigned us to work in the Cali group that was to go after the Cali cartel.

Because at the time, most of the resources of the Colombian government and the U.S.

government were dedicated to going after Pablo Escobar.

We all know about Pablo Escobar.

Can we take one second?

Because I don't think people really understand the magnitude of Pablo Escobar.

And I think it's fun as we talk about what was happening in Miami.

So, some quick facts about Pablo Escobar, I think blow people's mind.

In the 80s, Forbes listed Escobar as the seventh richest person in the world this is a dude that had a 30 billion dollar net worth in the 80s which would be like 70 billion today he was making 420 million dollars a week he spent twenty five hundred dollars a month on rubber bands to wrap the money he lost 10 of the cash to rats and mold he lost two billion a year to rats eating the money had his own private zoo offered to pay off columbia's national debt wow was in a position to pay off his own country's national debt he bombed a commercial airliner.

He built a ton of neighborhoods.

He was loved.

25,000 people attended his funeral.

Like, this is the scenario you're walking into.

This has become such a business that this is the seventh richest man in the world.

And you guys arrive almost immediately after he's been killed.

Yeah.

A couple months after, right.

So obviously, Medellin was this big power source.

And when he dies, what happens?

So even before Escobar.

was killed and you go back until the 1989 and some of the stuff that you brought out they were actually assassinating presidential candidates They had killed the Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara, in 1984.

I'll add, they were going to try him.

And in the courthouse, he sent in tanks to drive through the fucking courthouse, grab all of the evidence and files, and then just leave.

That's the kind of shit he was doing.

Right, the Palace of Justice attack, which was another terrorist activity, as well as blowing up the Avianca flight.

Yeah.

He was a dictator almost.

He was a narco-terrorist.

Yeah.

That's what we say.

He was the world's first narco-terrorist.

And as a result of that, the Cali cartel was like in the shadows because all these resources were going after to try to eradicate Pablo because he was this evil, evil person.

They had to be so grateful for him on one hand.

And that's why they were smart because they learned about that.

They saw what had happened, right?

The Colombian security forces, the national police hunted Pablo down like a dog and killed him on top of a rooftop barefoot.

And the Cali cartel wanted no part of that.

So they learned.

Their weapon of choice was the bribe, right?

They paid everybody.

They owned businesses, banks, soccer teams, a drugstore chain.

They owned everything.

They had 4,000 legit employees.

Yes, just in the drugstores alone.

Yeah, yeah.

They were massive.

But the point is, is that while the Colombian government was at war with Pablo Escobar, Cali started to rise.

They took advantage of it, and they were quietly making billions and billions of dollars a year.

They say narco-democracy.

So that came from the Cali cartel because they paid everybody off from the foot cop in Cali all the way up to the administration of the president.

Well, they built police stations.

40% of the economy in Cali was their money.

That's like General Motors being in Detroit.

40% of the economic development in Cali during that time, they were responsible for.

So you see, it's just like Pablo.

They had the will of the people behind them, right?

They were bringing in money.

They were bringing in construction.

They were bringing in jobs.

And they were doing it how?

Quietly, right?

They weren't killing people.

And who was they?

There's four folks at the top.

Four leaders of the Cali cartel.

Tell us about how they knew each other how they were organized how they were able to be peaceful like that i noticed a couple were classmates so you had the two brothers were hilberto rodriguez the older brother and his younger brother miguel rodriguez onuela they were the two principal de facto leaders of the cali cartel the number three man in the cali cartel was jose santa cruz londono aka chuppy and the fourth person was pacho herrera the cartel started with the two rodriguez brothers and jose santa cruz they formed this criminal gang called los Chamos.

And they had been classmates as kids, no?

They knew each other from childhood, the three of them.

And they formed this criminal gang, which ultimately evolved into more criminal activity, then drug trafficking.

And then lo and behold, Hilberto drives a couple of kilos back in the early 70s up into New York.

And boom, Cali cartel is born.

What qualifies it as a cartel?

Does it have to be a certain amount of money?

Oh, what a cartel is, you have independent organizations, smaller organizations below, and they're all working together for for the same goal.

For narcotics, okay, we're moving dope into the United States or to another country.

So they use the same resources.

They might use the same routes to transport the dope.

Because many times we get a large load, there'd be different emblems, maybe

Flintstone.

So that's one.

They would brand their product.

Yeah, they would brand their products so you know.

where it goes once it go to the states.

But they would share their own assets.

They would share like laundering money.

So everything is shared.

It's a full business.

It's a huge

organization.

You have growers that are loyal to just that.

You have the labs that are theirs.

But what made Cali different, Cali was considered one of the most sophisticated drug organizations.

Chris couldn't explain it better.

They had four different areas, just like IBM.

They have their trafficking organization, their military organization, their financial organization.

But up in the States, they will work out of cells.

And a cell would have anywhere, say, from 10 to 25, 30 people.

But one cell would not know another cell so if they got arrested that other cell wasn't caused

very departmentalized almost like a terrorist organization right so if you take down one person he only knows who's in that one cell so if you have 15 or 20 different cells working in one city he can't jeopardize any of the other cells wow and then the cali cartel was noted they really made narcotics cocaine worldwide yeah because at one point the cali was responsible for 85 percent of the cocaine in the united states but 90 percent of the cocaine worldwide and we always say the Cali Cartel dominated the cocaine trade on six continents.

And if Antarctica had a drug problem, it would have been seven continents.

Yeah, yeah.

They were global.

Yeah.

Did you ever find yourself just admiring it?

Many times.

You had to respect them.

Yeah.

If you did respect them, I mean, you can't do your job.

I've had a long obsession with Pablo Escobar.

He's a terrible, terrible person.

It's tens of thousands of people suffered, maybe more.

But if you're not mildly attracted to see someone's will

take them somewhere on a ride, a poor kid becoming the seventh richest man in the world through his own will.

It's minimally fascinating.

That's quite an accomplishment to come from a barrio and become the seventh richest man in the world.

People always ask, what is the fascination with Pablo Escobar or even some of these other drug cartels?

And I think that's part of the reason is you say, how does somebody get that big?

How does somebody get that violent?

What in their background?

Where did they start out as a poor person?

But there's also a lot of administration and bureaucracy.

It's in a huge organization.

The quintessential ingredient isn't crazy or brave.

It's like, no, no, you kind of got to be a good manager.

You got to be a good delegator.

This is a huge business.

It's just really impressive, even though we don't like it.

No, but if you look at the sophistication and everything about these guys, just like you said, you'd have to sit back and go, man, these guys are good.

This is just making our job so difficult to try to penetrate that infrastructure and their security network and their intelligence.

They're a worthy fucking adversary.

Extremely worthy adversary.

They had the will of the people.

and you can't really blame the colombian people pablo was putting bombs everywhere everywhere they go my kid gonna die today with a bomb kelly cartel didn't do that kelly cartel was supporting the pepis to go after the medellin

so

if you're there and you know okay there's a demand for cocaine in the united states so there's going to be somebody yeah you know serving it so wouldn't you rather have Kelly Cartel who's not putting bombs anywhere?

Of course.

That's why they kind of had to put it in.

Those were the choices they had.

This is probably a question for the end, but we're kind of here, which is another fascination I think people innately have.

Certainly mine is like,

why don't they quit?

That's a very good point.

Poplar.

Could you have stopped being the eighth richest man in the world and like let all the problems go away?

Or these guys could have just pulled up stakes and been like, okay, great.

We did it.

We got our billions.

We're out.

And none of them can do it.

Yeah.

It's not about the money at that point.

It's about money.

It's about power.

It's about control.

But then also, once you're in that far, you can't get out.

How do you get out?

Because if you try to get out, what happens is, and you see this a lot in the organized crime and in the mafia, if you try to get out, they think that you're going to turn informant and you're going to rat people out.

And the minute that you try to get out, that's when they kill you because they're worried about everything that you know.

They can't risk it.

And you're a liability, which then becomes a great tool for you.

That's right.

That's exactly right.

It's a blessing that they won't let these guys retire.

If they had just let these guys retire, you guys would probably have a lot less to work with.

You never see anybody really retire.

Yeah, you retire retire in the ground.

That's how you retire.

Okay, so you guys land in Colombia and you go to Cali, the city.

And how do you design your approach?

Where does one start trying to cut off the head of the serpent?

We really started from crawling to walking to running.

When we were told, hey, you guys are going to be working Cali.

We couldn't leave the embassy to go to Cali.

They said, no one's allowed to Cali.

It's too dangerous.

So eventually we were allowed to go to Cali only for a day.

And I said, you have to be back.

Here's the outline.

So we roll into Colombia.

At that time, Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world.

It's led the world in homicides.

It's led the world in kidnappings.

Car bombs were going off all over the city until Pablo died.

So we walk into that.

We try to go to Cali.

As Dave said, they won't let us go.

It's too dangerous.

Two agents who were working there previously had their photos taken.

The photo came back to the embassy and it was perceived as a threat.

You guys can't go.

They were Hispanic agents, though.

They fit in.

And they still caught them.

Cali, zero American presence.

Who do they send to Cali?

The The whitest two guys they could find.

Me and Dave.

The whitest and the biggest, right?

Because we're both the good 6'2, 6'3.

Dave looks like he could play tight end for, you know.

That was the environment that we were walking into.

And we were extremely security conscious.

We were always worried about our safety.

We all knew the story about Kiki Camarena, what happened to him in Mexico.

He was kidnapped and killed.

He was a cartel.

He was a DEA agent.

He's portrayed in season one of Norcos Mexico.

So that's always on the back of your mind.

We're operating in this very inhospitable, hot environment, which was Cali.

And you're not going to be able to do anything covertly.

Everyone knows you guys are DEA.

I think that's important.

We were embedded with the police and the military.

So we actually lived with them on their base.

So when we first got there, we started staying with the military.

Then the colonel said, hey, you guys are DEA.

I'm going to bring my friend down.

He's with the Columbia National Police.

So we met him.

So then we started staying at the police base, even though we were told they have more Cali snitches in there, infiltrators, than Swiss chiefs.

Right.

So that's exactly what I want you guys to talk about, which is I want to know how the fuck you even evaluate who's helping you there.

Because as you say in the book, the place is almost universally corrupt at that point.

They got a president elected.

That's right.

How on earth do you know when you're talking to the friendlies who you can share information with, who you can't, who you can actually trust?

How do you sniff that out?

Well, you don't know who the friendly is.

So when we were working at the police space, you can kind of stand off.

And what I would do and Chris would do, all right, if I was a bad guy, who would I go after?

Who has all the information?

And unfortunately, it was one of the liaison captains that was assigned to us.

He was their top source.

But we had to operate.

We get criticized for this, but it was the only way that we could protect ourselves.

as well as our sources and methods and our assets that we were using is we had to operate under the assumption that everyone was corrupt.

And we knew that that wasn't the case, but in order to do what we had to do, we had to operate because we could not take that chance.

Why do you get criticized for that?

That's the same thing.

Because they say, well, you can't lump everybody into that category as being corrupt.

We're going to assume some very innocent people are guilty.

We knew that.

And look, Colombia sacrificed more than any other country on earth in terrorism.

Because of our fucking strike, and the narco-violence

and the narco-trafficking.

And there were a lot of, just for the record, a lot of hardworking and honest Colombian men and women who went out there every day to try to do the right thing, right?

And a a lot of them lost their lives doing it.

Even up to today.

Thousands of officers.

To be safe, though, we had to operate under that assumption that everyone was corrupt.

So we only shared part of the information that we had.

If it came from A, we told them it came from B.

But how do you even orchestrate any kind of action?

Because you're going to need them and you're going to be immediately telling them what you're going to do.

How did you navigate that?

And that's how we learned.

to navigate that system because raid after raid after raid that we did, we found that it was compromised, right?

And we knew like, hey, this was really good information.

Something's wrong.

Some of the stuff, too, it was like you'd see in the movies, we'd come in and there'd be a half a cup of coffee there and it'd still be hot, but there'd be nobody in the apartment, right?

Or there'd be some toast there, half eaten, and he'd be like, somebody was just here and they just left.

So it was up to the film.

Still filming the bathtub.

Like Miguel had a problem with his low sugar level, so he'd have a lot of fruit or something.

So we'll see all kinds of fruit, that type of diet he was eating.

Oh, I got a wow.

And you know, he always had, we call it a switching station, 25 lines.

So if somebody picked up the phone, they wouldn't know it's going to that port.

You know, they would do a raid over here.

So we knew the info was good.

But everyone you're dealing with, from the military to the police, they are all expressing the goal to bring down the Cali cartel.

Yes.

Stay tuned for more armchair experts.

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Okay, so work me up to, I guess, the breakthrough for you guys, and maybe there's one before that, but I'm thinking the breakthrough is getting in touch with Celcedo.

Calcito.

Other things that Kirk.

Get us up to that point.

Okay, so the real break comes in June of 1995.

So by this time, Dave and I are on the ground almost one year.

Can we add one thing?

I forgot one.

Yes, sir.

The Cali cartel has an edict, do not kill the DEA agents.

Oh, really?

That's what we thought.

That's what we hoped.

Yeah.

Which obviously was the case because you guys could have been killed on day two.

Absolutely.

So you have to reverse engineer that.

That is why you got to respect them.

What's their reasoning?

Well, they saw what happened when the agent Kiki Kamarena was kidnapped and killed in Mexico, and they saw the response

from the U.S.

government, but from the Mexico government, they shut the border down, and they did not rest until every one of those guys, as best they could, was prepared.

That's why you don't want

to be.

They didn't want the heat.

Plus, they saw what happened in Panama with Noriega.

The U.S.

invaded the country to go after Noriega.

So they were concerned.

The Cali cartel was always concerned of military action.

Whether or not that would have ever came about, they were concerned about that.

So that was always in the back of their minds.

Don't harm the DEA guys because we don't want that added heat.

Don't wake the tiger out.

I thought the 82nd Airborne were flying into Dutch Black Dave.

You get to hear that.

I would tell them that all the time.

If we get hurt, 82nd Airborne standing by.

But there were three keys to us being successful going after the cartel leaders.

And again, this was after a year on the ground, failure after failure after failure, compromise after compromise, corruption, systemic throughout the service.

Yeah, how you guys stayed optimistic, I don't know.

That was our job.

We had to keep pushing forward.

But there were three things.

One was the use of these special polygraphed and trained units that were in Bogota in Colombia that were trained by the intelligence community.

And I think we all know who we're talking about when we talk about the intelligence community, the CIA.

Yes.

We started to use these specialized groups.

And that would be to deal with your counterparts in the military.

And the corruption.

So they would come from Bogota.

They weren't stationed in Cali.

They would come over land in Bogota.

So nobody knew that they were there.

The second one was the recruitment of assets that we had.

Salcedo was one of them.

But before that, we recruited two other assets.

How do you get in that door?

It's complicated.

There's a couple of different ways.

Salcedo is a long story, and we can get to that.

But we're able to recruit these two assets that provide us with really good intelligence about where Hilberto Rodriguez is and we're able to surveil one of his executive secretaries back to where Hilberto is because you need to get one of these four heads involved in some criminal activity when you approach them right well they're already wanted in close

for drug trafficking money laundering oh so they're already crime charges the charges already there so it's really just finding them yeah that's right a manhunt this is terrorism this is a hundred percent the same finding osama yeah yeah that's exactly what it is it's a manhunt and then the third key thing was dave and i being able to work unilaterally.

Because of the systemic corruption, we started to do everything unilaterally.

And what does that mean?

We were operating on our own, independently from the Colombian units.

We were living in safe houses away from the base because it was infiltrated.

We were debriefing our own assets throughout the city at nighttime.

We are doing our own surveillances.

We were doing our own reconnaissance.

You said the daytime was just a fake.

Like all day, you were with the government people, and your real job happened at night.

That's right.

There's one thing, even though we're working unilateral, doing surveillance, doing interviews at night, debriefing, we don't have arrest powers.

And in the United States, we have arrest powers.

So what our goal is to come up with intelligence information and have a package.

And figure out who the right official is to give it to that you trust.

We want to use it.

Which one are the teams that we use from Boas?

So this is Kafka.

It's very complicated.

Kafka asks.

So listen to our instructions when we go back to our first trip to Cali.

So they say, okay, you and Dave can go to Cali, but there's three rules you have to abide by.

And this was the first trip.

One is you had to be back by nightfall.

You couldn't stay overnight.

The second was we could never leave the police or military base without a police or military escort.

And the third thing was, because you know the reputation that DEA has, no cowboy shit, right?

No unilateral activity.

Yeah, yeah.

So what did we do?

We violated those rules on a daily basis because that was what we had to do to get the job done.

Yes.

I imagine grooming an asset would be so hard because, again, everyone in town knows your DEA.

Anybody you approach is like, well, the DA wants to talk to me.

You know, we were followed.

Not to cause harm on us per se, but they wanted to see if we were meeting anyone.

And that might be a source.

And then they'll go after that person.

Well, you were being followed by police officers.

You were being followed by taxicab drivers.

A couple guys on a motorcycle.

You know who they are.

And that's what made meeting these assets super difficult because we had to do it at night, right?

We couldn't do it during the day because we would stand out like a bunch of sore thumbs, right?

And they always told us at the embassy, you guys don't blend in.

Because I used to have real long hair before I went to borrow, I had it down to the middle of my back.

I looked like an extra at a point break, which

next to Swayze and Giannaries.

But we would have to do that at night, not only for our safety, but for the assets' safety, too, right?

Because we didn't want them to be exposed.

Where are you meeting them at night?

Like in the woods?

Cane fields, construction areas.

Even logistically getting to them, we need to meet here feels hard.

Well, we had a whole process of communication.

We would communicate by beepers.

We would send coded messages.

If I put in 555-1212 to call me at that number, we had a prearranged plan where we would subtract one number from each digit.

So it would be like 444.

If anybody intercepted the number, they wouldn't know what they were looking at.

And also keep in mind that our main source, Jorge Salcedo, he was the main security guard for the Cali Cartel for Mingo Rodriguez.

He is high up.

How do you meet him?

He would tell us where to meet him because he would put security forces somewhere else.

He'll say, hey, meet me in Seattle at the Canefield because I don't have anybody there.

Or, hey, you guys can drive by this location and check it out.

I'll pull my forces out and I'll give you a 15-minute window, but only 15 minutes.

He had control of eyes and ears, luckily.

He might have been the only person that could have come and worked with you in a way.

He knew where everybody was at, where the security, where the patrols were.

But we came into contact with him because he had a long past in the cartel.

So he gets recruited into the cartel because he has contacts with these British mercenaries because he was a captain in the Army Reserves.

And while he was in the Army Reserves, they did an operation against the FARC, which was a left-wing Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that was fighting against the government.

So the Cali cartel leaders asked him to bring in these mercenaries.

It's right out of a movie.

These mercenaries into Colombia to launch a helicopter assault operation against Pablo Escobar at his Finca where the zoo was, Hacienda Anapolis.

So they bring these guys in.

They train for a couple months they launch this operation because they know pablo's throwing a party for his soccer team and these two helicopters go over to hacienda napolis but on the way they hit bad weather one helicopter crashes it's like black hawk down yeah a couple of the pilots killed so salcedo is recruited for that mission to kill pablo escobar because of his contacts but as time goes on right he starts to see what's going on.

He sees the murders.

He sees the bribery.

He sees the corruption.

Well, he can't leave, he can't get out.

Right.

So that's the point he's going to say, guys.

I don't want to do this.

Yeah, I'll be killed immediately.

When he got into the cartel with Callie, the agreement was that after Pablo was dead, he goes, I will help you kill Pablo because he's an enemy of the state.

He's a terrorist.

The world's a better place without him.

Under one condition, that once Pablo is dead, I'm allowed to go back to my civilian life.

He was an engineer.

Oh, man.

So, of course, what happens?

Escobar is killed.

Senor Miguel.

Pablo is dead.

My work here is done.

Yeah, right.

I'm going back to private life.

No, you're not.

plus so mean plus he went over to el salvador to pick up four bombs and they wanted to get a particular plane this is when pablo was in prison they want to fly over drop these bombs on his prison so this is the sequel to the yeah the helicopter movie part

so he realizes that his only way out of the cartel is either He's going to get arrested or he's going to get killed.

But does he find you or do you find him?

It's kind of both.

One of his associates gets, not associates, a contact.

He was an attorney in the United States who used to come down to do legal affairs for the Cali Cartel.

And they struck up a friendship and Salcedo would act as a translator for these American attorneys that would come down because they didn't speak Spanish.

And he struck up a friendship with them.

This attorney ends up getting indicted in an Operation Cornerstone case with 59 other people.

And Salcedo starts to think, hey, this might be a way for me to maybe get out because otherwise I'm going to be dead.

So he sends them a message basically saying like, hey, I think we we might be able to help each other i'll help you maybe you get your sentence reduced you help me he says that to the lawyer yeah kind of hook me up with somebody in the government where maybe

we can do something how much money does he have jorge is he loaded no we asked him that question when we first see your bosses have hundreds of millions of dollars a month so in our first meeting just to jump ahead we asked him that like hey how much money do you get paid by miguel rodriguez is the head of security for the cali cartel and he didn't even blink an eye he said i make a $1,000 thousand a month and get a take-home car.

Oh, that's so dumb of them.

You'd think you'd be afraid of that.

But some of these guys are really frugal.

While hundreds of millions are rotting in a hole that they've forgotten about.

It's like this dichotomy of frugality.

They're totally happy.

That's crazy.

It's like great psychology that emerges when people find themselves in this situation with too much money, too much power, like all these other things that get predictable.

And in the book, we outline our first meeting with Salcedo and everything that happens after that point.

It's very well detailed.

It's very well documented because Dave kept an incredible journal of when we were there.

And I would always tell him, Dave, what are you doing?

Right now, this shit.

So every day he would tell me.

Remember you, Dave.

We did this.

We did that.

Because people say, you didn't do that.

Where were you?

And we say, on this day, we were here.

On this day, we did this.

So we were able to fill in with a lot of details about meetings like this.

He called for a meeting in a sugar cane field, and you guys had to go there a few hours ahead of time and scope it and then act like you've arrived.

That first meeting must have been.

We're in the car, and Chris is talking to him.

He has an intercom.

He goes, Let's meet at Siat.

Siat is an agriculture location, and that's where the Canefield is.

I looked at Chris.

I said, Chris, we can't go no Siat.

First of all, we have no protection.

Yeah.

They could have anybody there to kill us.

Are you even allowed to carry guns while you're in there?

We're allowed to carry guns, but remember, we're not supposed to leave the police base.

So we're running around doing all these things.

Oh, my God.

So here's the head of security for the Cali cartel.

First, he tells me, let's meet at Siap, but come alone.

I'm like, I'm not coming alone.

Are you crazy?

I have to come with my partner.

And then he finally says, you can come with your partner.

And then he says, no Colombians, right?

Because he was one of the guys that was paying off a lot of the Colombians.

So he knew about the corruption.

So if I see anybody who's even looks Colombian, the deal is off.

Even if they brought you, Monica,

you might have said too broad.

So we're sitting there thinking like, it's the head of security for the Cali cartel.

He wants to meet us an hour outside of Cali, telling me to come alone and not to bring any Columbians.

And we're thinking, like, dude, this could be a trap.

This could be an ambush.

We weren't sure what to expect.

We're not even supposed to leave the base.

And then here we are going to go meet this counterintelligence officer

in the middle of a cane field an hour outside of Cali.

So it was pretty hairy.

I think we outlined that pretty well in the book, how we felt, because honestly, we were pretty scared.

It's funny when we're there.

Everything's funny now.

At the time, it wasn't.

But I looked at Chris, I said, Chris, have you ever seen that movie, Onion Fields?

This could be our Onion Field.

Why?

I haven't seen one.

that actually happened in california yeah

that's where some police officers were killed in the onion field and they made a movie about it okay so you meet with him and do you like him he's not at all what we thought just to backtrack a little bit he says meet us at the cane field at three o'clock right we get out there at 12 because we're terrified it's going to be an ambush or they're going to set us up and try to kill us or kidnap us or whatever so we're out there in this blistering heat like sitting around for three hours waiting but we had a good vantage point so at least we can see everything coming for a while so if anybody came in we were prepared and we were pretty heavily armed like we looked like neo and trinity when they went into the government control building to get morpheus we were loaded but as we were there nobody came maybe this guy's for real yeah and i think we all have preconceived notions we're thinking head of security for the Cali cartel it's going to be like a really bad guy something out of the movies exactly he's going to look a certain way he's going to talk a certain way and when we saw him he was the exact opposite of what we thought.

Came alone.

He wasn't armed.

We made sure Dave, you know, patted him down.

We checked the car.

We were still wary for a trap.

And he said our names first.

We went to introduce ourselves.

Yeah, he knew who we were.

They knew everything about us.

They had nicknames for us.

We were called Los Monos.

What is Los Monos?

Los Monos is a monkey.

But what they would use it for is if somebody is

fire-conflicted, like the gringos.

We're the gringos.

Like the gringos that sporn, they would call them los monos.

Oh, that's interesting.

It's almost a universal racial slur.

Yeah, for real.

There's something comforting about that.

That was what the cartel called us.

They referred to us as the monos.

But he talked real softly, like with a very low voice.

An imposing manner was that he wasn't sure.

No, he was just very normal looking, the clothes that he wore, the way he walked, like not trying to make a sound or an impression.

So I look at David, like, man, this guy is like the exact opposite of everything that we thought.

And then, of course, the first thing he says to us is like, hey, this is going to be a one-time meeting and it's going to be real real quick because I got to get back to Cali because I'm on standby for Miguel, the head of the cartel.

But as we started to talk and go over things, we ended up being out there three hours that first meeting

until it got dark.

Was your mind being blown?

Were you learning things that were unimportant?

I'm like, you open up the book.

We learned more in those three hours than the whole year on the ground.

Wow, absolutely.

Can you remember one of the most shocking things you heard during that?

There's one thing I looked at him.

I said, Hey, I just need to know: is DEA a threat?

He looked at me just like a father would would and says, you and Chris, you work very hard.

Oh, so patronizing.

No, he felt bad.

You guys are hard workers, but no, DEA is not a threat.

And this is why.

You and Chris can go out, talk to anybody you want to gather information, intelligence, but at the end of the day, you don't have arrest powers.

You have to deal with the Colombians, and that's where we got you.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, it all unravels a second.

You got to get official.

And by that point, we were very well aware of the systemic corruption that existed within not only the security forces, but in the government.

But just talking to him and how

plainly and how simply he would just put out there, oh, yeah, well, you can't deal with this person because he's corrupt and the cartel's paying that guy.

And we paid this guy.

It was overwhelming the amount of corruption that we were dealing with.

Ask, why should we trust you?

We did.

We talked all about that.

But then when we started to hear his story, which we got involved in the cartel and that he couldn't get out.

I'd have such a hard time believing it really you don't have a choice

you don't have a choice and then also i think you'd be reasonable to conclude it's not worth them fucking with us as he said they're not a threat they don't have to be appeased they could be ignored so why do this they already know where you're at i would trust it because there's almost no incentive for them to be keeping an eye on you they're already doing that and at that point we were pretty well versed on the cartel and what they were doing but talking to him it just took us to a whole nother level but we would ask a lot of questions that we knew the answers to, just trying to bet him.

He was basically doing the same thing to us.

Like, hey, you guys are kids.

You know, we were 30 years old at the time.

You know, and he's like, you guys are here trying to bring down the head of the Cali cartel.

Look at you guys.

So he was like, how can I trust you?

How do I know that you guys are

able to handle it?

Right.

Then he asked this.

He goes, listen, it's not only my life, but my family's life.

Yeah.

So it's my family's life is in your hands.

Can I trust you?

Well, what's funny is you already answered a question inadvertently earlier, which is my first thought when I thought of Jorge joining witness protection, which he has now done here in America, I thought, what a demotion in his lifestyle.

But now that I know he made a thousand bucks a month, it's not a demotion.

If I'm him and I'm high on the hog and I got to consider moving to St.

Louis and living in a track.

But you're worried about your life.

You're living in fear.

Trusting him initially was difficult, but as we started to talk and we got more into details, like I said, and we were asking questions that we knew the answers to, and he was being honest and upfront and forthright.

plus we were there three hours with we think this guy's above board but that still doesn't mean that we didn't take precautions every time so we met him numerous numerous times after that one one time okay now what is mind-blowing is you guys do find out where miguel is and you raid his place and you don't find him

Is that correct?

The first raid, he's in a wall.

Yeah, there was actually two raids even before that.

Oh, without Jorge.

Without the one where he's behind the wall, that was with Jorge.

Okay, so the first big solid tip with this new asset.

Jorge during all of this.

Are you guys present for that?

Anybody who's seen Narco season three, it focuses on the Cali cartel.

This scene is very well done by Netflix and it's very well outlined in the show.

To make a long story short, we're in this apartment looking for Miguel Rodriguez, at the time now, the head of the Cali Cartel.

How nice of an apartment?

This one was very modest.

Here's the other thing when you learn more about these things, like it's such a dream to live this way.

And then you find out half the time these people are running through tunnels and they're in shitty apartments.

It's like they can't enjoy any of it.

At that point, they were on the run and they were hiding.

You go back years before, they were living in the big walled houses, the Miami Vice-style homes with the pools.

But now they were continually moving because we're hot on their trail.

We're raiding place after place after place.

And while we're in the apartment, we're in contact with Salcedo.

And he keeps relaying information to us because he's at another meeting with other cartel members where he's getting this real-time intelligence and he's forwarding it to us.

So the first thing he tells us is that he's there, he's in a coleta.

It's a secret hiding spot.

It's like you see in these old movies where you push the wall and it opens.

Highly sophisticated.

So he tells us, is there a big red desk in the apartment?

Because there's these really sensitive documents.

So we're looking around for latches.

We're pushing.

We can't find shit.

And then one of our partners who's there, Jerry Salome, he comes and he picks the desk up and he just turns it over and it smashes on the marble floor and it breaks open.

And in the back of the desk is a hidden compartment in a desk.

How do you do that?

With three briefcases.

And in these briefcases, check this out.

This is staggering, are all these super sensitive files, corruption-related information, letters from the president's office about money that they had donated.

And there was a list of 2,800 corrupt officials

just in those briefcases.

2,800.

Good luck finding a straight man.

So we find that that buys us a little more time.

Then he tells us, look, he's in this secret compartment in the bathroom.

He's hiding.

He's in the bathroom.

He's there.

So he's been there for the last 12 hours.

How is he telling you this?

On the phone?

Well, we were going outside, making phone calls.

He was at a pay phone.

Oh, okay.

And we were at another phone about 100 yards away.

We didn't even know.

We didn't know we were that close.

Oh, my God.

And then he would go back in and get more information to come out.

As the head of security, he was able to get out and to relay, hey, I got to go check on my guys.

They're telling me this.

So it didn't cause a lot of attention.

So finally, there are like four bathrooms in the apartment and we're knocking out walls.

We're thinking, how the hell can there be a hidden compartment in the bathroom?

Finally, we take measurements of the apartments below and above.

We were in the bathroom.

We got, this bathroom is smaller.

This is the only one that doesn't make sense.

And we open the sink cabinet and it hits us.

Keep in toilet.

We're going days and days with our limited sleep.

We're not at our best.

We're exhausted.

Chris and I, we're in the restroom.

We had the sink right here with the door right under it, and it doesn't open all the way.

It hits the toilet.

And we are so exhausted.

We go, look at this.

Who would make something like that?

You're just shooting, man.

Of the construction.

This is the vetted.

And then we saw a little yellow hose over there.

This is it.

And that's when we started getting the drills.

So you start drilling into the walls.

And you break three drill bits.

Right.

You run out of drill bits.

Corrupt captain that was supposed to have been our liaison, who was the main source for him, he grabbed me by the arm.

This guy was literally in a panic.

And he goes, who's your source?

Who's your source?

How do you know this?

How do you know this?

Who's your source?

Mine your business, bitch.

There's a space not counted for.

And then once we started drilling through the walls, he looked at their lawyers for the government and said, the Americans are doing

prosecutors, are doing unilateral action.

So that's when they detained us.

Some say maybe arrested us.

They got everyone out of there.

They had drilled holes right next to him.

Imagine his experience in the wall.

He's just staring at the wall.

Listening to you guys bitch about the

construction.

Just wondering, like,

are they going to get it?

I mean, I can't imagine what his body was.

Yeah, he just like dodging

in there.

And now drills are coming in.

That's what I'm saying.

Wow.

The prosecutor is getting this information that the Americans are conducting a unilateral operation.

He comes in, shuts the entire operation down.

We're within a minute of accessing this apartment.

This is no lie.

You couldn't have drawn it up any better in a movie script if you tried.

We were literally a minute away from grabbing this guy.

And the prosecutor came in, he shut it down, he brought us out to the living room, took the keys, locked the keys to the door, put them in his pocket, typed up a formal complaint against us, and then escorted us and made us leave the apartment.

This is full corruption.

And we said, can we leave?

No.

I said, so we're arrested.

No, you're not arrested.

You just can't leave.

What new word are you going going to say?

Exactly.

So we left and jumped in.

One of our friends, he worked for the intelligence community.

He had a truck of ready for us.

But when we went to Bogota that night, we were out of the news.

I mean, our names.

And were they saying you guys had gone rogue?

Yeah, they were saying that we conduct an operation.

I thought, tomorrow I'm leaving Colombia.

I'm going to be PNG'd.

I'm out.

We got our asses handed to us by the ambassador.

He said, like, I thought you guys weren't.

participating in operations.

You weren't supposed to leave the base.

You're conducting unilateral action.

Remember the three things that we broke every day?

We warned you you about?

Even though we were in a lot of trouble, the only thing we were worried about was Sal Sato.

He potentially blew his cover in that.

At that point, we thought they're going to kill him because even if they don't know that he was responsible for that raid, he was one of the people that technically had access to information.

I'm sure it's a narrow group.

That sort of provided the info, and they're going to go through that list.

And they could just kill everybody.

And then we didn't hear from them for a couple of days.

So that was more sleep that we didn't get.

I mean, we had lost 20 pounds by this point each because of the stress and the crazy work hours that we were working in Cali's.

This is the end of the second act in a movie.

Yeah.

So you guys are ready to quit.

So how do you then go from that failed mission where you guys are accused of all these crimes against the state to building another raid where you get him?

So we're in Bogota.

We're thinking, oh man, what's going on with our source?

So we had a meeting and we said, listen, we haven't heard from this guy in about three days.

Hey, we're going to have to go down to Cali, pretty much meet with the captain who's dirty couldn't really go bad but fortunately he gave us a call and says hey i'm still here i'm gonna send you some photos

of the new location so we got those photos and we're looking at it and we said okay let's meet up he said okay you guys come on down And that's when we met him in a Kanefield again.

We always mean the Kanefield, it seems like.

He had other photos, which Chris had under the seat of the car.

And I don't know if you want to get into that now.

That's when we had to bribe our way out.

Yeah, tell us.

So we're in the Kanefield, and at that time, and you see all these taxicab drivers everywhere.

I'm saying, what's going on with these taxicab drivers?

Then you see the Columbia National Police with their lights on.

But it turned out somebody killed a taxicab driver.

This happened to be right when we were in the area.

Just by coincidence.

Yeah, we said, let's get deeper into the Kanefield.

So we were.

And we're talking about, you know, okay, the raid, where is your security?

What's the entry points?

points, how can we get in?

We're trying to talk so fast so we get the information.

Is he mad at you guys?

Is he like, why didn't you

get this done?

I mean, he was disappointed, obviously.

Yeah, he knew the lay of the land.

He knows there's people on the inside of that raid working for the cartel.

It's just his life is the one most in danger.

So we're talking to him, try and get this information.

And all of a sudden, we see a Columbia National Police van pull up with his lights on.

So he gets out.

First thing he does is separate us.

Now, they separate Chris from me.

They put Chris next to the car.

there is a lieutenant and a sergeant the sergeant is searching the vehicle luckily he didn't look under seat so me and jorge we are with the lieutenant you guys got put as a pair yeah and the lieutenant's looking at us going what are you guys doing here does he know jorge exactly no he doesn't that's why we met where we met because we were an hour outside of calendar

because he'd be dead if that's even more immediately yeah he goes i'm gonna have to take you guys in to the police station and we knew our lives could be jeopardized but really jorge lives.

Yes, exactly.

And there is no way we're going to let that happen.

So I had like $600 of operational fees with me.

I gave it to Jorge.

I said, go ahead and bribe him.

So he gave me the $600 and he goes, whoa, I'm not taking that.

If you're not doing nothing wrong, why are you bribing me?

I'm thinking, man, we got the only legit copies.

The only two, the only two I was going to do.

So what we did before they came, we had all of our IDs and our guns.

We put in a cane field.

Because we couldn't be identified as DEA, right?

Because if we said we were DEA, it would compromise him immediately.

Exactly.

So we had to go into our whole undercover cover stories that we were German scientists, that we were working at this agricultural center, which is where we were meeting.

We were researching alternative crop development.

It didn't go that far.

I mean, because he realized, no, no, these guys are Americans.

So at that point, he goes, why are you trying to bribe me?

You're going to go to the police station.

I'm thinking, you ain't going to take us to the police station.

You'll probably take the money.

But he kept on saying, go into the police station.

Oh, boy.

So I'm trying to get get Chris's attention.

I'm thinking, okay, what can we do?

If he tells us to get in that van.

Yeah, we're not going.

We're throwing down at that point.

Trying to come and dream or do something.

Yeah, we're going to be doing it.

So weird.

That close.

Weird.

That close.

And he hosted his Bretta.

And I'm thinking, okay, I can take him, but I hope Chris can take him.

They had Uzi's too.

With Uzi.

Oh, God.

Oh, my God.

All of a sudden, I heard Jorge scream out, Somos homosexualis.

We're gay.

That means we are homosexuals.

Oh!

And I went, holy shit.

And I looked around.

That lieutenant's eyes got really big.

And he goes, We just want to be left alone.

The Americans want to be left alone.

We've just come here.

We want to just have a lone time.

Just some gay sex.

Brilliant gay sex.

This is real gay.

It was probably so uncomfortable.

Brilliant.

This is something that he never in the car now.

Well, for him, then that makes total sense.

Like, well, yeah, now I get why they want to be alone.

So my eyes are like this.

And the lieutenant and sergeant walked over to me and Jorge, and they look at us up and down.

They walk over to Chris.

Chris had longer hair.

Yeah.

Looked him up and down.

This checks out.

And they were worried I wouldn't blend in and Columbia, right?

Took the money, said, you guys leave.

So when we were walking out, I said, Jorge, man, that's great.

How do you come up with that?

He goes, look at Chris's hair.

I thought it would work out.

That is so odd.

It was brilliant.

It was obviously something that they weren't expecting, and they hadn't gone over that in their police academy training thing because they didn't know what to do.

And as bad as that situation could have been, you know, Kiki Camarena, right?

We're worried they're going to take us and they're going to kidnap us and kill us.

And that was some of the best undercover work that me and Dave did during that meeting.

Because when he said we're gay, none of us batted an eyelash, right?

You would think we would laugh or something or smirk, but we were like, oh, that's our way out.

Oh my God, that's brilliant.

But yeah, we couldn't be identified as DA.

We had to throw our weapons, our IDs.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert

if you dare.

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Okay, so with that information, now who do you approach that you can trust with it to initiate the next raid?

By this point, we had started work with two of these specialized units attached to the intelligence community.

By this point, based on the information that we were getting from Salcedo, Dave and I are working 100% unilaterally.

No one in the Colombian government has any idea what we're doing at this point, right?

It's the three of you.

Jorge, once we get back to Cali, he can't be seen with us.

No, I'm just saying you three are the only humans that know.

Yes.

So we're watching these suspected buildings where Miguel was at because he sent us two photographs.

He goes, I think he's in one of these two buildings because where I have security stationed.

There's only one way in and one way out, and it has to be these two buildings, right?

So we were focused on those two buildings.

And then we started to get a little bit more information.

And we knew that Miguel had fired all of his domestic staff after the last raid, right?

So he got new maids, he got new executive assistants, and he brought in these two Afro-Colombian maids to do his meal prep and stuff because of his hypoglycemia.

So one night at about one o'clock in the morning, we're doing our own surveillance and we looked through the binoculars.

What tunnel were we doing surveillance?

We were at a statue.

It's like a little park.

And we would sit there and we would drink beer and hang on.

There's a bunch of locals around.

You could see a cane field from the distance and they were burning the cane field.

So it was actually nice.

So people would just lean against the hill, drink their beers, and watch the cane field.

It was like a hanging.

So you're occasionally looking through binoculars?

We're looking through binoculars.

Yeah, but we would pretend like we're looking at the burning sugar cane field because other people were doing the same thing.

And then a light came on in the kitchen at about one o'clock in the morning and we started to look through the binoculars and I was able to see these two Afro-Columbian maids.

So that was a key that we saw the maids working at one o'clock because we knew they're making him meal to control his hypoglycemia.

So we called for the raid and we brought these teams in from Bogota, 210 miles away, and they came over.

We didn't tell them what they were doing.

We actually lied to them.

We told them that we were going to hit a location over here, which had nothing to do with Miguel, but actually we were going after the head of the county.

You didn't have a lot of people with you, did you?

There were four DEA agents, one or two Intel community guys.

I can back up just for a minute because we kind of narrowed down.

Where it was at.

And he goes, there is a concrete channel for water to flow through.

You can go through there and go through the back way.

So Chris and I, we actually went up there and walked it discreetly.

And yeah, it opened right up.

But the operation involved coming down the side of a mountain after we transited through that foot control channel.

So these people were like, I thought this way we were raiding a chemical company.

Where are we going?

Why are we climbing mountains and stuff?

So nobody knew anything about what we were doing or where we were going.

There was repelling involved?

We had to come down the side of the mountain.

But we didn't have to rappel, but a lot of people fell and jumped and slid.

It was pretty hectic.

When we did our little recon beforehand, just me and Chris, we weren't able to see the very end the drop-off.

Down the side of the mountain.

And Jorge told us, tell them to take a rope.

So we told the Navy commandos, we said, hey, take a rope.

So they did take a rope, but I guess it didn't help out.

Well, it was pitch black, right?

The terrain was super rugged and treacherous.

It was pitch black at night.

We did the raid at four o'clock in the morning.

People were falling.

They couldn't see.

The prosecutor we were with broke her heel.

Oh.

People had to help her out.

Other people couldn't make it down the hill.

So it was pretty, pretty treacherous descent down the side of the mountain.

All right.

So you get into this apartment and what happens?

We spread out.

We start going room to room.

Now, this is a very nice place, right?

This one is about 4,000 square feet, very modern, one apartment per floor.

19-story building, very nice.

So we start running through the apartment, turning on lights, looking in the rooms.

And one of the Navy commandos we were with, we hear him yell from the back of the room, I got him.

I got him.

And I looked at Jerry, who was with us, Jerry Salome, and then we ran into the back of the bedroom where he was.

He was holding him by the shirt.

Miguel Rodriguez, the commando, was holding him, pulling him out of the hidden compartment in the closet.

He was just getting ready to get in.

It was a concrete door about six inches thick.

So what he would do is he would slide the door closed and lock it from the inside with horizontal bars.

And then he was with one of his ex-wives.

So you always had to have somebody else there in the apartment to close the collecta and seal it up, right?

Because what this one was is imagine two file cabinets, two dressers side by side.

You would have to take the drawers out

to access the collect.

So once you got in and locked the doors, his ex-wife or the assistant would come and put the drawers back in.

So when you walked into that closet, you would just see a dresser.

You would never think to take the and even if you took the drawers out, it was so perfectly constructed, you would just see the back of the wall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But inside there, you would have an oxygen tank, water, food.

My God.

The amount of preparation to stay on the run.

Yeah, so it was a walk-in closet, and it was basically three feet shorter than it should have been.

They built out the back wall of it.

And the only reason that we were able to grab him was because we had spoken to the Attorney General in advance of Columbia, and we got special permission to do like a no-knock search warrant to knock the door down.

I wasn't even heard there, which they didn't want to do because these are very extravagant apartments and houses and millions of dollars.

So we were able to get up there and knock the door down after a couple of whacks and get in there very quickly.

So he didn't have enough time to get into that collecta, that hidden compartment and put the drawers back.

But if we were probably a minute or two, he would have already been sealed up.

Still till this day, we would be in there

knocking and looking for stuff.

He would have never found him because this was probably the most highly sophisticated compartment that we had had found in.

Did you just think of the logistics of this man's life?

Like,

all of these safe houses need to be being built around the clock because he's got to move non-stop.

They all have to have the colletta.

That's right.

The amount of staff required and the construction and all this shit to stay ahead of it.

Yep.

And these were very skilled architects and carpenters that were building these.

Now, some of them were pretty rudimentary.

I mean, they weren't that great.

The last couple we found were highly sophisticated, and we would have never found them.

They were very, very skilled.

skillful.

Unlimited budget.

A lot of times they go inside the hidden compartment.

You might know he's here.

We just have to find him.

But after you've been there for an hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, you know, the Columbians might lose interest.

Well, I was going to say, you're against the clock of when does someone high enough up the chain of command kick you out before you can find them?

Which happened several times.

The first one, when he got out, the captain who was our liaison, He actually just went in and took him, put him in the back of his car and drove out.

That's what happened after we left.

Oh, my God.

He went back in, extracted him out of the compartment, and took him to the new place.

You're a liaison.

Now, we didn't know that at the time.

How much were those guys making?

So you got the head of securities making a grand a month or the payoffs?

Great question.

For that extraction alone, he got $50,000.

Wow.

But that's fucking those days.

1995.

Also, if I'm Jorge, I'm furious.

The most offensive part of this whole story is what they were paying Jorge.

I'm more appalled by that than the drugs.

I mean, I'm glad because otherwise he would have had more of an incentive to just stay and deal with it.

Yeah, he might have been like, I'm stuck in this life, but damn, it's good.

I got hippos like Pablo.

Yeah.

And that's what's good about the book because we go into excruciating detail about all of our time on the ground operating in Cali, all of the raids that we did, what we did, why we did what we did, why we didn't do this and why we did this.

And it's from our point of view, right?

So you're on the ground.

You're kind of like with us through this journey that we're taking.

And you're getting a lot of inside information about the operations that we did, which is pretty cool because there hasn't been anything other than Narcos, which is 50-60% true, about the Cali cartel.

And it's much lesser known than Pablo, right?

You know, Chris is one of the leads of Narcos 3.

I mean, he's not an actor, but the lead actor is playing.

There's an actor who's me.

The LBI is playing me.

He doesn't have my name, though.

I was still in the job.

Yeah.

Were you a little resentful that he was getting all this love and you're like, hey, he had a partner, and his name's Dave?

If you can make it work for yourself, go ahead.

Can you quantify or make the experience relative to other experiences in your life the moment where you walk in the room and you see he's actually being held?

And that barring some crazy intervention, you have him.

And I'll add, I think more rewarding than for the guys that are working on Pablo, which is like he got killed in front of them.

You're not going to get to talk to him.

There's not going to be a prosecution.

What was that?

sensation when you see he's right there we have him thank god it's over first thing i said because at that point we were on the ground in cali 15 months or so and we were exhausted.

We were happy because it was over because now Salcedo can get him and his family out into Witsack in the U.S.

When they brought him, the Navy SEAL, Columbia Navy SEAL, dragged him out, and he pretty much plopped him right in front of me and Jerry.

I was only a couple feet away from him.

Well, if he said, oh my gosh, the homosexuals I heard about.

Yeah,

I know.

But he had the deadest eyes, like that thousand-yard stare that you can just look into and go like, man, this guy's killed a lot of people or ordered them to be killed.

It was pretty chilling to actually sit there and I just told him, Sekabo, send your second, like it's over.

But relief, thanks, and that Salcedo was safe because you imagine every day we had to bear that burden of getting this guy killed.

Exactly.

And after that first failed raid, we thought, oh man, we got him killed.

Yeah.

Yeah, the stakes.

The stakes.

That wasn't the final, though.

I mean, we still had other work to do.

We told Salcedo, all right, get your family we're going to start pulling you out he goes no we still have more work to do oh and he goes we have to get palomari he's a hero yeah absolutely he did not become a suspect after no gal was caught so how did he help with the other

he just told us where palomari's wife was working tell them who palmari was oh palomari was the accountant And he was the accountant that knew all the skeletons.

It was Palomari who we needed after the arrest because all the books were coded.

and he can cipher all the codes, tell you where all the money went.

Keep in mind, Paul Amari, he was from Chile, so he can be extradited.

So that's why the Cali Cartel wanted him dead.

And pretty much he kind of made some stupid comments before during one of the police raids.

I worked for the Rodriguez's.

He shouldn't have been sane.

They knew that he would talk.

We got with the wife.

She met us at Bogota and they decided to cooperate.

The cartel was actively trying to kill the accountant because he had been indicted in the U.S., so he wasn't a Colombian national, so he was eligible to be extradited back to the U.S.

And plus, they had raided his office, and there were these highly sensitive documents that were seized out of his office related to corruption, the cartel.

So he was like number one on the cartel hit list.

Shocking, they didn't kill him.

Well, we got to him first, and we were able to extract them, exfiltrate him out of Cali, and ultimately back into the U.S.

Now, you were there for 12 years, Columbia, yeah?

Off and on, correct.

And you.

Three years.

So what were you doing the remaining 10 and a half years?

In Columbia?

Yeah.

We all left Columbia about the same time in mid-1997.

We either got promoted or we went back to the U.S.

on different assignments.

I went back to Columbia a couple of years later for a three-year tour to work against the North Valley cartel and some of the other organizations that were popping up.

And then I went back to the U.S.

for a cup of coffee, and then I went back to Columbia again for just over six years.

Right.

And we worked on investigations targeting, again, the North Valley Cartel, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, which was a designated terrorist group at the time, which was a left-wing group, as well as a paramilitary group, which was also the AUC, designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

And I had been promoted, again, up.

Did you have a good life in Colombia those years?

Yes.

You know, you get a nice apartment.

You're treated like a diplomat.

Yeah.

It's affordable there, too.

Do you miss it?

Because I heard you went back for Narcos 3.

And you were like, yeah, cool.

That's it.

And I want to get out.

No, I mean, I went back to Columbia recently.

I did a six-episode show with the discovery channel yeah called finding escobar's millions we went all over columbia tearing up the ground

we didn't find anything

i know that would be the next big treasure hunt yeah but people have been looking for that for 30 years so i went back to columbia there and then on narcos too when i was on set in cali but what we're talking about here is that cali had changed a lot places where me and dave would meet people or we would do our surveillances it was completely different everything was built up but some of the stuff we saw we went back to some of the buildings where we actually did raids that still belonged to the cartel that they couldn't sell.

So being back was kind of surreal.

And then going out, filming on set right in the cane field.

Yeah.

We had met Salcedo in the same place.

That was pretty cool.

Yeah.

But it was a little different, though, going back.

What a story.

What a story.

It's not shocking they made a hit TV show out of it.

It's hair raising.

Okay.

Now, these are my questions, not specifically about the work itself in Columbia, but just whatever overall tensions you were or weren't managing.

So just in general, what is it like to do that job knowing whoever you grab means nothing?

You kill Pablo, Cali's on top.

You get rid of the Cali guys, this group's on top.

What is it like to have such a Sisyphician task?

It's like, so long as Americans want to snort cocaine, it is what it is.

You're exactly right.

Now, what was told to us at the Academy by one of our instructors, he goes, you'll never solve this cocaine or narcotics problem.

Our job is to slow it down.

Because there's only like, it floats around what, 5,000 DEA agents.

There's not that many, and that's worldwide.

Yeah.

He goes, we put our finger in the dike, but anything behind us is chaos.

Yeah, so how do you keep your dedication and your enthusiasm and your passion for it knowing, I mean, I hate to say it so cruelly, but just the second you get the guy, there'll be another guy right there.

We always had a saying in DEA that you may lose the war, but we'll win every battle that we choose to fight.

Cali Cortel is a battle.

But that was our job, though, right?

That's what we signed up to do and that's what we were sent there to do.

You take pride in what you do.

Like my dad used to tell me all the time, whatever you do in life, do it to the best of your ability.

Yeah, you're kind of forced into a bit of Buddhism with the whole thing, which is like, I think you have to, I would imagine you'd have to get purposely myopic.

Like, yeah, I'm not actually going to focus on that bigger strata.

It's just like, this is the guy today.

This is the mission.

This is the job.

That's what I'm focused on.

You're absolutely right.

But when you were burnt out and it was towards the end and as you're worried about Jorge, in those moments are you like, what the fuck is this all about?

Like, I'm about to kill myself.

We're going to get Jorge killed.

And everyone's going to snort the same amount of cocaine.

Well, you know, it did affect the cocaine trade for two days.

Sure.

Oh, my God.

It's very admirable.

It really is.

I think a lot of people would be like, I'm done now.

We just had to see it through, right?

We had invested so much time and energy.

And at one point, I told him, like, you know what, dude, I'm tired of this.

Let's just pass it on.

And he wouldn't let me.

He's like, dude, this is what we we were sent here to do this is our job we have to see it through and by that point it had become pretty much an obsession for us because right we were finishing that one way or the other whether jorge got killed whether something happened to us or we got thrown out of the country one way or the other we were going to finish you compartmentalize it and say okay this is our battle this is what we're focusing on we're not looking at the whole scope of things just this

didn't have families at the time like kids or i didn't

i was married but probably

At one point in the book, too, we make a vow.

This is before we started to get successful.

We'd been on the ground probably, I don't know, six, eight months at this point.

And we had just launched these operations at the airport because the cartel was flying in these plane loads full of money, like $50, $60, $70 million at a shot.

And we went out three separate times and we missed everyone.

And we can tell it was obviously compromised because of some stuff.

And we outlined it in the book.

And we sat there and we made a vow.

And we said, we are not leaving this country until every one of those four motherfuckers are dead or in handcuffs.

And that was the vow we made and we stuck to it.

I was in an off-road race.

And another guy that was also in the race, he was a retired DEA agent.

And I got talking to him.

And he was talking about marijuana as if he had just seen Reefer Madness.

Like there was.

This crazy kind of Pollyanna belief in whatever he was taught about the DEA and marijuana is killing people.

And he's very troubled that his daughter smoked marijuana.

And I'm like, well, would you prefer she was drunk?

And he's like, absolutely.

And I'm like, okay, even though you know that alcohol is probably worse for her and she'll probably drive and crash or there'll be violence.

And I was just kind of shocked with how rigid he was in the wake of us having loosened up as a country and the results being in.

They teach you at the academy that marijuana is a gateway drug.

That if you smoke marijuana, your odds are going into a higher type drugs, cocaine or heroin.

So if you don't smoke marijuana, you won't do that.

But you have to really look today at what does marijuana provide?

Does it provide any health benefits?

That needs to be looked into.

Because, you know, the THC level today compared to 30 years ago, it's a lot higher.

So, I mean, if there is a way to help like cancer patients, let's look into it.

Or just people are going to recreationally get fucked up.

We can evaluate which one's more dangerous.

Police don't arrive to domestic disputes after people have been smoking weed.

They arrive after a fifth of Jack Daniels has been consumed.

I mean, that's why everybody says, hey, my back hurts, and they get prescription to get legal weed.

There's a comedian I'm friends with, and his joke was he went to get his weed cart and the doctor said, are you having trouble sleeping 16 hours a night?

He said, yeah, I can only sleep about 12.

He said, perfect.

I get it.

I think you have to buy into that.

If this is your life, this is what you're doing daily.

You have to stand by that i am curious what the tension is because also you have the war on drugs you have this insane explosion in incarceration rates we know it's very asymmetrically affecting black folks the war on drugs itself has got some troubles yeah of course and i just wonder what it's like for you guys who have dedicated your lives to it as we reframe it and start to question some of the things are you at all caught in that like huh well first of all it's not a war on drugs it never was it's more of a skirmish right because there's a lot of resources and a lot of stuff that we don't do to go after the problem.

But there's a lot of true believers out there in DEA and else that they're firm believers that, you know, no, it's illegal, can't use it.

And then you have other people at the other end of the spectrum that are like, whatever floats your boat.

We're not going to rest ourselves out of this issue.

We don't have enough people who are arresting anyone.

But I don't think legalizing everything per se would be an issue.

So let's say if you say, okay, drugs are legalized.

Instead of McDonald's, you're going to have McDrugs and people just go in i have reversed my position so growing up i was very libertarian i was very much like you know what it's victimless in that you've decided to take drugs and i think if you want to pursue that great i did it myself i had to get sober because of it but i always had a pretty much let's legalize this stuff.

Why have it on the black market?

Why have criminals control it?

Let's get the tax revenue.

I have now seen the experiment run in Oregon, and I don't think that's a good idea.

I don't think meth should be legal or decriminalized.

I don't think heroin should be.

So I find myself in an interesting reversal of my position.

And then I start wondering, is this weirdly the best approach?

Is it like we want to keep it hard enough to get that it's not the explosion of availability?

We do know availability does impact.

Look at the opioid epidemic.

Of course.

It was around.

So we all got addicted to it.

So that's undeniable.

It's really fascinating.

And we got to acknowledge that.

So it's like, what is the fucking approach to this?

Are we doing the right approach?

Is it just like, keep it hard, keep it expensive?

Look at it this way.

We came in 1988.

And at that time, I thought, you can't have any more drugs and i mean it falling out of the sky and the traditional drugs was cocaine heroin but if you look at it today there's more drugs today because you have all the synthetic drugs yeah and the mexican cartels make more money off these synthetic drugs than the regular traditional drugs chemistry is cheaper than agriculture yeah absolutely and more dangerous so what do you think what is the strategy it's like just keep it kind of pinched it's kind of a no-win situation but i think you have to attack it on all fronts enforcement treatment, education, everything like that.

But like we always say, you brought up Portland or Seattle.

Imagine that times 50,000 if it's in every city throughout the United States.

No, we were in San Francisco.

That guy had a card table set up, literally a card table with Kraken Ruin for sale.

I was like, well, that can't be where we're going.

I mean, imagine the healthcare system would be overrun, overwhelmed with overdoses.

Crime would explode because you'd have more people committing crimes to get money to get more drugs.

So I think you just have to try to contain it.

You have to try to hit it on multifacets.

The other thing, too, is education.

Instead of going after high school or middle kids, let's go after the kids in elementary school.

Let's get them young.

Well, the other unavoidable reality is it's also been very disproportionate who gets criminalized, which is the consumer walks scot-free for the most part.

The consumer of the drugs doesn't really do any jail time.

So you have this consumer base, and then you have a group of people that are going to meet the demands of this market.

But these people create it.

Dealers and growers can't create a market.

The consumers have to create the market.

True, very true.

Yes, and no.

Tell me.

Who can create the market?

It's say the Mexican cartels, because you say, okay, what's the market?

Is it cocaine?

Well, they will hold back the cocaine and say, no, we're going to send in more methamphetamine or something else.

So if you're using cocaine, you don't have access to cocaine.

you're going to go to another drug.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's how the cartels are managing,

you know, manipulating the the drugs.

But still, if there's not a demand,

exactly right.

So it's like when you really chase it down in a logical experiment, you recognize the problems of the consumer.

And the dealers are the desperate ones.

They're the ones that are doing it because they need the money.

So they're doing for a livelihood, not exactly.

That's why going back years ago, and we were talking to the Columbians, that's why they're saying, Callie Cartel, they have the will of the people because it's you Americans who have the demand for this.

If I were them, I would feel guilt-free and totally like I have the moral high ground.

We're not addicts.

Y'all are the fucking junkies.

If there was no demand, these cartels wouldn't exist.

Exactly.

I admire what it takes to fight your hardest for it, given the overall context.

Don't you think our society is where big pharma can kind of advertise directly to the client?

I think it started legal in 1985 when they can do that.

Well, you can put ads on.

You turn the TV.

If your back hurts, take this pill.

If it hurts, take this pill.

In the late 70s, New York had a really bad heroin problem.

But if you wanted heroin, you actually had to go in to that area.

It was a bad stigma.

There was a barrier of entry that

you had to inject it in your veins.

But nowadays, you can go on social media and get these pills with fentanyl and take it mouth.

You can go to your doctor.

I mean, the opioid crisis started because of doctors, not because of the street.

So we have to change the mindset.

Hey, take a pill, I'll be okay.

Yeah, yeah.

But there is no good answer.

There isn't.

Some of these problems, you have to have a certain tolerance for the messiness of them.

Now, I had a grand conspiracy theory cooking.

It's like the only one I've ever been able to buy into.

I was like, well, the drug cartels are not incentivized to put fentanyl in Coke.

It's not good for the people buying the Coke to think they might overdose on fentanyl when they didn't know they were getting it.

I don't understand the incentive of putting fentanyl in cocaine.

I never understood that either until it's explained to me how much money.

that they can make and just the people that's overdosing.

They'll say in the United States, we have an endless supply of clients.

Yeah, I just, I'm confused as an ex-drug addict.

If I go buy cocaine, I'm not trying to buy an opiate.

So if I buy cocaine and you give me an opiate and then I almost die, I don't want to fucking buy from you.

So then I was like,

you know, the ultimate Machiavellian move for the DEA would be to just be putting fentanyl in Coke because then make it so fucking scary.

Everyone's afraid to do Coke.

That would be.

so highly illegal.

But I'm like, if anyone has an incentive here for fentanyl,

it would have to be the DEA.

I just don't know how it benefits the consumer or the supplier.

Fentanyl is one of our biggest issues right now.

Oh, yeah.

Because when you go eat at a restaurant, you know, you have that gram of sugar.

That would be enough to kill 500 people.

Yeah, it's insane.

There was a 60-minute segment on fentanyl, and they showed this little tiny pile of grain, and they said this would be enough to kill an elephant.

And then the bag, it said, would be enough to kill a city of 50,000 people.

But now you have car fentanyl.

This car fentanyl is.

It's even worse.

Yeah.

What is that?

Carfentanol.

It's stronger than fentanyl.

Carfentanyl is used to put down elephants.

I agree with you.

I don't understand why anyone...

It's like, why would we kill our clients?

It really doesn't make sense.

They have so many clients.

But a lot of it goes to, though, is that they have to put in the precise amount.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And you're talking about granules of salt.

So you're having these people who are not chemists.

Is fentanyl?

Because then that makes sense to me then.

You want to put the exact amount so that people are extra addicted so they keep coming

opposite highs.

It's really weird.

Like, if you went to order a glass of wine and I said, well, I gave you marijuana.

People love marijuana.

You'd be like, I would have got marijuana.

That's the part that I, as a drug addict, I don't really understand.

Now, if you were selling it as a speedball in a bag, that's a great prospect.

I was going to say, I thought that was good speedball shit.

Yeah.

But I think you'd want to know you're taking a speedball.

You got to plan your night accordingly.

Wild.

Oh, well, guys, this is fascinating.

i can't believe you really lived these lives it's absolutely worthy of a tv show and it was but your book is incredible after escobar taking down the notorious cali godfathers and the biggest drug cartel in history so what a fucking feather in y'all's cap brought down the biggest cartel in history congratulations thank you pretty gangster couple of white bozos coming out

exactly you guys are great thanks so much for coming in this is really fascinating yeah i hope everyone checks out the book it's out now take care

hi there this is hermie and permium if you like that you're gonna love the fact checker miss monica

hello hi i have an update okay let's hear it so this i'm kind of famous for this right um i've done this once before you may recall i was in italy and a man offered me his leather jacket so i invited him to our home and he stayed with us for a week and he didn't speak english and kristen was like that was a pretty wild invite She was lovely to him and it was fine.

But, you know, wild invite, stranger for a week.

Normally something she would do, not you.

So it is weird.

I know.

I get these weird moments of like great optimism and humanity.

And I think,

I don't know what I think, but all to say,

about three months ago,

Freddie, who you've, I've told you about a million times, Delta's buddy, who I adore Freddie.

I think he's the greatest little boy.

So popular and confident.

And

so he's over all the time.

And then I see his mom quite often, well, almost every morning at drop off.

And she's lovely.

We chat every time we've talked, you know, we see each other.

And then the dad, Blake, I've seen just a few times at like, you know, the big

run at the back of the school or whatever the big school events are.

And I say, three months ago, you guys should come to Nashville this summer with Freddie and bring all the kids and it felt so good when i said it and i just was like this is going to be great

and then you know for the next couple months i was like well that was a pretty big swing we've never ever hung out with anyone other than freddie and so we had like a dinner before we left a couple months ago we're like you know minimally we should all go out to dinner and uh So we went out to dinner, but I, you know, this whole summer, we've had visitors the whole time, but they've been family, our old friends.

And then this was just looming that this family I've invited to live with us for a week, who we don't really know, is coming.

And so I had anxiety about that.

And

Delta and I picked them up from the airport on Friday.

Kristen and Lincoln had flown back to L.A.

to see the Hollywood Bulls Cynthia Rivo thing.

Jesus Christ.

It was just D.

Money and I, the big man upstairs superstar.

And

so they arrived.

Again, I don't have Kristen there as a buffer or helper.

And it's just Delta and I.

And it started off immediately, really well.

Great.

And then it just got better and better and better.

And Blake and I were broing out so hard.

He's a drummer, it turns out.

He was super into the punk.

punk scene like I was.

We had all this in common.

He's a rascal.

The kids, the other two kids who are tinier, I I completely fell in love with.

One of them is a raccoon animal, the little girl.

She's a vampire and a raccoon.

And she said, we were watching

Tom Cruise.

Oh, we were watching Days of Thunder continuing the Tom Cruise's Cruises party.

And someone in the movie said, fuck.

And then you hear her go,

he said, fuck.

I love swear words.

I like to say fuck.

Oh.

Tiniest little, I laugh for 20 minutes straight.

This tiny

cute little raccoon set I like to say.

Oh my God.

What makes her raccoon-like?

Oh, my God.

Well, she's a couple things.

She's definitely Arya Stark, too.

She's always got like a knife in her hand and a weapon.

Oh, my God.

And she wants to.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

She's like Feral and impossibly cute.

She looks a lot like Vinny.

She's like the girl version of Vinny.

Way too big of eyes.

You got to see her.

She's incredible.

And then the little boy Sal is just just so sweet.

Oh, my God.

So, my God,

it was such a fun visit.

And I said to them the night before they left, can we all acknowledge how high risk this was for everyone involved?

And they both came clear and they're like, oh, yeah.

We were like, what did we say yes to?

We don't even know these people yet.

All of us were like, what is this Hail Mary Pass we all committed to?

But with high risk came great, great reward.

And it was so fun.

And Delta was,

she was driving Freddy around on the golf cart the whole time.

Like she was a little boss.

And she had the run of the, yeah, run, you know, run of the roost.

Is that an expression?

She was just on fire.

And now here's where it's going to get controversial.

Okay.

And I'm just going to, I'm going to ask you

to give it a shot.

Oh, what am I saying?

You already went.

Never Never mind.

We're not going to have a dust up.

We took them to Brick Tops.

Oh, yeah, great.

Great restaurant.

So I think I have this right.

People could correct me.

I believe the founder of Houston's

and this person were partners and they split up.

And the man who didn't stay with Houston's in Hillstone started Bricktops.

I'm pretty sure that's the history.

Okay.

Maybe Rob will check it while we're on the.

Yeah, Rob, check it.

I didn't ask,

and I got conflict.

I got different information.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

But as everyone knows, Houston's is our favorite restaurant.

But I have to say, and this is crazy to say,

Brick Tops is better.

I disagree.

You disagree?

I love Burton.

Did you order at Kristen's birthday party?

I got a burger.

It was incredible.

It was so good.

And I.

You have the deviled eggs and bacon.

Yep.

So good.

I thought it was an incredible meal.

I would love to go back there.

And I think Houston's is better, personally.

Just

a little bit.

Yeah.

We're split.

Well, I'm not finding any connection between Houston's owned by Hillstone Restaurant Group and Brick Top is owned by a separate guy named Joe.

Well, I guess, could you ask if those two are ever partners?

That was my search.

Yeah.

My guess is, and this happened, has happened with Houstons a lot, that people work for Houstons or like their managers or whatever, and then they start their own restaurants.

And a lot of them are very based off of Houston's.

There's one here in L.A., I don't know if I'm allowed to say what, that's like definitely that.

I found something.

A brick tops owner, Joe, was one of the original co-founders of Houston's.

There we go.

Yeah.

That's what I

thought and I've been told.

With George.

By reputable people.

Yes, George Beale.

Yeah, George Beale, yeah, is the founder.

George Beale and Joe Ledbetter and Vic Brainstetters.

The first Houstons ever was in Nashville.

It closed, but it was there.

1977, the first Houstons in Nashville, 77.

Yeah.

Wow.

They've been at it.

I know.

Well, anyway.

So then

I was right.

So, yeah, it's got some shared dna vibe definitely uh

yes uh so great okay

so that was that what a win so sad sad to see him leave yesterday now last night we had a very unique experience i have heard of the grand old opry through many a whalen jennings songs many a hank jr hank sr

Don't you know they fired him from the Opry and that caused his greatest shame.

I've never been to the Grand Ole Opry.

I've only heard of it.

And we went last night.

And what a place.

Have you been?

I don't think so.

There were multiple acts.

Everyone did like three songs.

You know, these are all like, like, several of the people that played had written a bunch of Miley Cyrus songs or had written all these hit songs.

So it's mostly like the songwriters who are also performers.

And so, you know, it's just like premium musicians, not the stars, but the song.

That was really fun.

And then,

yeah, Leanne Morgan, who I'm new to, but she's so radical.

She's 59.

She had been doing comedy for like 25 years and was going to quit, basically.

And in the last few years has just exploded.

She had a Netflix.

one hour special she's got a show with chuck lorry now on netflix

and she's like 59 and it's just so rad and life affirming and then

who who came out, Monica, after her?

Jelly Roll.

Ah, yeah.

Jelly Roll, who we were so close to interviewing here in Nashville.

And then he was just on tour.

I got to meet him backstage.

He's so lovely.

What a sweet dude.

And what a performer.

Oh, my God.

I recommend everyone see Jelly Roll.

What a monster.

And then, okay, beyond that, you know what I was noticing, which my continual kind of like just observing the culture and how it's like different down here.

And it's really genuinely different.

And especially at a place like the Grand Ole Opry, right?

Where it's just like, it's tradition.

It's Hank Sr.

It's all these famous,

it's a hollowed venue.

Yeah.

And you've got a host of the night

and she is like bringing out the different acts and then she'll interview people for five, ten minutes after.

And then she'll like

read some stories of people in the audience, whatever.

All to say,

there was

this.

I was like, having a hard time pinpointing what was going on.

It all just felt so nostalgic.

It felt like we were seeing this in the 70s or 80s.

And

there was like, she had a delivery

that

just made you feel good.

Like it was outdated, I guess, in some sense, but it just felt so good and positive.

And what I was really detecting is I was like, you know what?

It is, there's just a real absence of cynicism.

That's kind of like one of the,

that's one of the ingredients I've kind of isolated is like, there's really just a much lower

rate of general cynicism,

which is interesting to observe and

quite pleasant.

And,

you know, everyone's talking about Jesus, right?

Like, and obviously that's not my bag.

But even Jellyroll is talking a lot about Jesus and how Jesus helped him get his life together.

And everyone's on board.

And I was a little bit like, yeah, I mean, you come to atheism through cynicism.

I do.

That's how I got there.

I'm like kind of cynical of this story.

I'm skeptical.

It doesn't hold water to me.

That's not, yeah.

I disagree.

I don't think being, I think cynicism isn't the same thing as critical thinking.

Cynicism

has a negative streak through it.

Let's, I'm going to get the real definition just so we can, we can, we can read it and see what we think.

I think you're right, but what's the definition of cynicism?

A cynical person tends to believe that people are primarily motivated by self-interest and distrust others' sincerity or integrity.

Philosophical origin.

Cynicism was originally a school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece.

The cynics rejected wealth, power, and social conventions, believing virtue was the only good and that it came from living in accordance with nature.

Huh.

Well, let's just say that we would agree, probably the line between skepticism and cynicism is pretty thin.

Or not,

sure.

I think that's.

Yeah,

I think that's right.

I also think it's a little

dangerous because cynicism

is,

to me, a pejorative.

And I don't, to me, skepticism is not.

To me, skepticism is

a smart way to go through life.

Like is required, actually, to,

I don't know, like come to your own real beliefs about everything, anything.

Yeah, so it's interesting.

So, so Kristen had a long follow-up on the ride home because it was like very palpable and it was interesting and it was much different than anything you would see in los angeles and that was fascinating and worth talking about and

what's interesting is like it's a two-sided coin so one thing is like kristen's like well i don't like that the notion of like you're an addict because the devil's a liar and evil tempted you and sin found you because the devil's at work and evil's at work like that really um takes away your own personal responsibility from your addiction or your cheating or whatever the thing is.

You're saying, oh, the devil found me.

So that's true.

But on the flip side, that wasn't rubbing me the wrong way.

What was rubbing me the wrong way is, dude, you can't give this

guy in the sky credit for your sobriety.

Like you did that.

God did not come down and take a bottle out of your hand.

I want you to own that you did that.

So it's interesting because, so on one side, there's a lack of humility, which is like, I'm not even responsible for this.

But then on the, on the success side, there is great humility because he's, he's not even taking credit for it.

It's like he's saying God intervened and did something for me I couldn't do.

So that's an interesting mix, right?

It's like, which side of this equation are you going to be really humble on?

The fact that you own your responsibility in causing it, and then by which you get to own your success in conquering it, or are you going to say, I'm not fully responsible for it, nor am I responsible for the solution?

So I think it's like, it's kind of a net, it's net the same, which is interesting.

Yeah, it's it, but it's similar to me, not similar, it's exactly the same as the sim conversation we had with Riz and your problems with it, right?

Where you're like, if we just say we were assigned a character in a video game, that's so problematic because what about all these other characters that are suffering?

Like, so God gave you this thing, but isn't giving another person

the same?

Like,

it breaks down so quickly.

Because even if they're like, well, God made me sober,

there is still a,

I agree that there's a humility because you're not taking any credit, but it's also like God chose me to be sober.

Yeah, so it's just interesting.

You already know how I feel, which is like, I don't believe in God, but I am seeing, I'm just recognizing what is the outcome of it.

And that's interesting.

And it's interesting that there's not humility on one side, but then there's a lot of humility on the other side.

And then flipped for someone like me who's an atheist.

That's interesting.

But I think the bigger, so then it led to

Chris and I saying, oh, what's interesting is

she's like, no, I would come to that.

realization I need to get sober and here's the technique I needed to use and

I would credit that for it.

And I said, yeah, but you know what?

We're really just arguing between is like, what mechanism do you want to choose to get there?

So it's like you could choose my version, but the result's not drinking and taking pills.

His can be God, and the result is not taking and drinking pills.

Like we're really kind of just debating what mechanism you want to use to get there.

And if both are valid, that's interesting.

And then, but deeper than that, and this runs the risk of offending some people, I had this moment where I was like, you know, I'm on the outside thinking, oh,

they just lockstock believe that God invented all animals in seven days and that

Jesus is the son of God and they're the same person and there's no women involved.

And somehow they think all that is accurate.

But I got a different sense sitting there last night where I was a little bit like,

no, I think it might more be just a choice of a holistic worldview and you're not necessarily the whether I believe in every aspect of it isn't what's important the importance is

I have this declaration of humility to this thing and that's this really bonding thing between all of us and I guess I think I thought it was a little more literal than maybe it might be, if that makes any sense.

yeah that makes sense I think that's true for a lot of people I don't think everyone believes every single word to the letter I do I think some people do and they say it right they're like the Bible says this so you can't do this like and it's all and it is often used to tell other people

what they're doing wrong or right which I oh it's it's weaponized yeah for sure yeah for sure but it's definitely religion is a community it's an in-group it's yeah it is that.

I mean, and the result for them, which again is like, you're kind of arguing over mechanisms to get to a result.

And the result for them is like this real sense of shared community.

And

in my like,

you know, it's just kind of unfolding a lot of things sitting here, which is really fun to have as an experience, which is like, I also.

The other thing I've been aware of since I've been here is like, I'm so used to being in LA where there's 12 million of us and we're really packed packed in on top of each other and resources feel very scarce and water is sometimes an issue.

And, you know, we have fires, we have a lot of this stuff.

That is the world we live in.

And we're very worried about being sustainable because there's so many of us in this little area.

And I was thinking, Yeah, if you're sitting here where I'm at, it's just endless trees and lush and it rains nonstop and everything's growing and there's a cabillion insects.

And it's like here,

everything feels quite healthy like this place is thriving you know like nature's on fire here I understand if you're sitting here and you're like I don't know whatever what they're all so freaked out about like everything's fucking great

I mean because what are you surrounded by you know what you're surrounded by is gonna definitely impact how you think the world is or isn't really vulnerable or on the brink or teetering, you know?

But it is.

It's not the same.

It's not fires, but there's other disasters that are happening over on that side of the country as well.

And like, you know, there's hurricanes, there's tornadoes, there's the Asheville situation.

Like it's still happening.

It's just not, it doesn't look the way it looks here.

I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're in Michigan and you're surrounded by the Great Lakes and you're hearing the rest of the country freak out about fresh water, intellectually you understand that they're, that that's their experience, but your day-to-day experience is like, no, water actually isn't a problem at all.

I see it everywhere.

And I'm just, I'm not, I have no emotional connection to that because that's not at all what I'm experiencing.

I would just have to be like intellectually traveling to where you're at and thinking about all that.

But just my day, day-to-day, if you're in Michigan surrounded by the Great Lakes, I understand why you're not thinking about water.

Yeah, I mean, I don't, yes, I agree.

And I think it's not, we're not obligated to be like constantly thinking about

other people's plights, but we are obligated when those come up to have empathy and sympathy for them and do force yourself to put yourself in those people's positions across the board for everyone, us too.

Like everyone needs to be doing that.

I mean, we're just talking about this country, let alone like the world.

Oh, yeah.

I just, um, I've, I, I'm experiencing the, the massive different mindset you have if you're in a rural area versus an urban area, you know, and I grew up in a rural area and then I went to an urban area for 30 years and now I'm back in this rural area.

And I'm just realizing, like, oh, yeah, you feel a lot differently.

You think about different things.

There's not people everywhere.

There's no traffic.

You're not like,

you know,

a lot of these concerns, you just have to know exist, but you're not having any

experience.

Or even like when I look at the rural response to COVID, like, yes, that makes sense to me sitting here.

When we were in LA and you're just like packed on people, you're like, oh, this thing's gonna fucking explode like an atom bomb.

And it's true because you're and just, yeah, you're gonna have different mindsets if you're living in tons of ample land or you're really packed in on each other.

And it's kind of predictable, you know, right?

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

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Speaking of being packed in,

did you hear that in Harlem, there's a big breakout of Legionnaire's disease?

Oh, no, that's the one you get from AC.

Yeah, it's in the air.

Yeah, yeah.

Like 58 people have it, and a couple have died.

I have a friend who got it two years ago from a hotel with a stanky air conditioner.

And he was telling me that.

And Aaron and I were in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

We're in a restaurant.

I'm looking at this AC vent on the ceiling, and it's just like black mold, mud,

just all caked all around the register from whatever the difference in moisture level between the AC.

And I was like, oh my God, that thing is just spewing Legionnaires disease.

I'm overly worried about Legionnaires disease.

Well, I'm glad to hear that because yesterday I was like, oh, I definitely got it in New York.

Like, I definitely got Legionnaires because I have like a little bit of a cold or like I'm a little under the weather.

So I was looking it up and then, you know, it's like Hanus,

headache, things I have.

So we can't.

Double H's.

Hanus and headache.

We can't rule it out.

2H.

It is a scary one because it's a silent killer just pouring out of an AC unit.

Yeah, I know.

So that's bad.

I hope I'm not.

I will say, though,

as we've talked about, some diseases are terribly named.

Like my penis penis disease i had for a year peironis that's a don't do that on top of having a penis issue carbuncles pepperonis disease carbuncles at least legionnaires feels like it has some pride and glory like you got it maybe in battle it look it sounds like it was in war yeah for sure

Yeah, yeah.

So you're not like as embarrassed to go like, I had a pad case of Legionnaires.

But I also like, I like that it's Legionnaires because it also has the

transmission element included in the name Legionai's so it it is transported by air and it's easy for me to remember that way it's kind of a built-in mnemonic device okay great I hadn't even considered that part of it yeah um I speaking of luck It's lucky that I probably don't have Legionnaires.

So that's my transition.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I had a moral dilemma.

Oh, fun.

Yes.

So I was staying at the Bowery Hotel.

At the Bowery, they give you the key is a, is on this tassel.

It's this like old school, huge red tassel with like gold top, and it has the number of your room engraved in there.

You, it's, it's like, it's a thing at the Bowery.

And

you can't take it, right?

Like it's, it's not like a regular key.

Now, I can already feel where this is going, but go ahead.

Okay.

I was in room 1111.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Okay.

Okay.

That's

huge for so many reasons.

One, it just is.

Like, 11-11 is such a cool room to be in.

Two, 11-11 is my thing.

Like, I'm always seeing 11-11.

I'm always wishing on 11-11.

It's like, it's part of me.

It's very lucky.

So I go through this whole trip and it's like, wow, this is so, so cool.

And then the day on the, before I left, I was like, looking at the tassel and it has engraved in it 11-11.

And I was like, oh my, I need this.

Like, I have to have it.

But I also knew,

well, fuck, if I take it, is it going to have the opposite effect?

It's there for luck.

luck but if i steal it like am i gonna be cursed yeah i think i i mean yes is the answer to that oh but also i knew they would say no if i asked like i was like they're gonna say no i know people who've asked and it's like you can't you can't have it and they won't tell you who makes them I don't because why don't you just have one made?

No, that's not lucky to have it made.

It's like, you got this and like, that's the luck.

You know, you can't manufacture luck.

So I was in a huge moral dilemma.

I asked a bunch of people their thoughts on this.

This is a recurring.

You recognize this is recurring.

You wanted to steal the mugs.

Sure.

You want to steal everything from places.

No, I don't.

No, I don't.

I want to have.

You want to steal plates.

You wanted to steal a candle holder once and I tried to find it for you.

Wait, what candle holder?

You want to steal it?

You wanted to steal this candle holder and I found one for you.

You don't remember.

It was like a tutor kind of.

I don't remember.

Yeah, that.

You wanted to steal it from like an English restaurant, maybe.

Oh, yeah, that sounds so cute.

Yeah.

It's not that I want to steal things, hence the dilemma.

I want the thing.

And

I don't want to steal it.

I want them to give it to me.

I want permission.

Like, I want...

Think of that was your defense when you got in trouble for stealing a car and you said in court.

Well, what I wanted was them for to give it to me.

I didn't want to steal it.

Listen, normally I

ask, I'm like, how can I have this?

Tell me how I can have it.

And then when they say you can't, that's when the stealing starts to come into play, right?

But I'm actually

haven't, I didn't steal those mugs.

Remember, I wanted to, but I didn't do it.

I wanted to steal the candle from the restaurant and I didn't do it.

Like I normally have the instinct, and then I don't see it through.

This was

the height, though.

Cause I was like, I

have to have this.

Like, there's no

reason

for me not to do it.

What did you do?

What do you think I did?

I want you to guess.

I think you turned it in.

Rob?

I think you returned it too.

Okay.

I

took it.

Oh,

wow, I didn't see that coming.

Hold on.

I did it.

I did it properly.

I went to the front and I said, I know you're going to say no, but I'm in a very lucky room and I

really want the tassel.

Is there a way for me to have it?

They said what?

They said, they laughed.

And they said, the tassel.

Yeah.

So if it is taken.

If you lose it, we charge you $60.

She said, if it is taken, there's a blank charge.

I'm not going to say the amount.

So they said, so there is a way to take it.

Okay.

And then another person next to her laughed.

So that was permission to me.

That was permission granted.

Yeah, that was somewhere in between begging for forgiveness and asking permission.

That's like in the middle somehow.

Yeah, because I knew.

You threaded the needle.

Yeah, because technically I know what they're supposed to say is like, no, you can't take it.

Right.

and i knew that so i had to yeah no one's got time to be replacing all these like if all the guests want their keys they need a whole new department now right that's just replacing the keys every day right but also i'm a little bummed you took it because as you're telling the story i'm like okay great i'm gonna ask ai

who makes these keys hopefully they can find out your birthday's around the corner finally i have something to get you for your birthday and now i don't Yeah, so I'm like, happy for you and resent.

I resent you.

I understand.

I think that's how a lot of people feel about me.

It's definitely good luck.

And I feel good.

I feel like it was definitely permission granted and I paid for it.

I assume.

I assume I got charged.

And great.

And you love it.

Have you looked at it and held it since you got home or did you move on to the next?

No, I love it.

Do you ever like rub it on your neck, like tickle your neck with the tassels?

Like, are you ever laying in bed and just kind of tickling yourself with the tassels?

No, it's probably a little dirty for that.

I don't think I'd put it on my face.

Okay.

Or clothes.

Maybe your heels, like your tickle your feet.

Oh, speaking of, tomorrow I'm going to get a medical pedicure.

What on earth does that mean?

It's like at a podiatrist, they're going to give me like a real pedicure.

They're going to make my feet look good again for Eric.

Oh, okay.

Like dig out like ingrown nails and stuff?

Everything.

They're going to make them babyish again.

Well, I hope they don't make it literally a baby toe like I have.

I just had to go through that whole thing with our guests because my feet were exposed a lot.

And I had this hunch that they were dying to know why I had a baby toe on one foot.

Right.

And to be for people who forget, you like your middle toe is a baby toe and it sticks up a little bit and it's tiny.

It's super tiny.

And then the second toe has a comb over it.

It's completely curved to the side.

It's confusing for them when they see it at this stage because they're like, wait, he shortened that one in half and then turned your other toe to the right.

I'm like, no, no, that happened on its own.

Yeah.

And it's probably getting worse.

And then Blake said, oh, he's trying to protect that little toe.

That's what I was thinking.

No, I think it's more of a stability issue, but he saw it as him like, oh, that little guy's tiny.

Let's protect him.

The little piggy, the runt piggy, needs protection.

Yes, yes.

I think that's also what it's a mess.

What a mess.

Yeah.

All right.

Should we do some facts?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay.

All right.

Let's, Okay.

Yeah.

Let's do some fackies.

Chris and David, our cartel guys.

What an episode.

What a couple fun-loving guys.

They were so fun.

And

what a story.

I love when we have people on who have all these really crazy stories to tell.

They've been in movies, basically.

Yes.

Yeah.

Like our FBI.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Scott Payne.

Yes, in the outlaw basement.

Yeah, so good.

All right.

Couple facts.

How many companies make challenge coins?

Wait, really quick.

I know it was probably stated in the episode, but the notion of sending those two guys to blend in in Columbia is really fucking funny.

They couldn't have picked two more standouty guys.

I agree.

Yeah.

Okay, there are many companies that do this now and can custom make them for the general customer, too.

So it's not just one company.

Lots of companies do these.

Okay, great.

Air Force recruiting stats after Top Gun movies.

Oh, good.

I was just going on about this the other night again without the numbers.

A statistic often repeated without attribution is that the 1986 Top Gun films led to a 500% increase in naval recruiting.

But that figure has been debunked numerous times.

Following the original Top Gun, there was a bump in recruiting, but it was much more modest.

8%,

according to a recent fact check from the Australian Associated Press.

But the Australian, what are they?

How would they have our info?

They're really good at it.

But the C-Service also began advertising two years prior to the original Top Gun: $13.3 million in 1984 and 19.9 million in 1985.

So it's unreliable how much the movie was responsible for the uptick in recruiting versus advertising.

I got to stop saying that then.

Did Maverick have any impact?

Oh, I don't know.

Because Maverick was huge.

Oh, this says, yeah.

Will Top gun maverick boost Navy recruiting?

History says probably not.

Yeah, I've been repeating that.

I've been overseas and had generals tell me that.

You should have told me that.

So at least we're all fucking wrong.

Who is the Indy 500 racer who funded his career by smuggling marijuana?

I love this guy.

Richard Lanier.

Guys, watch this.

It's called, it's part of the bad sports series on Netflix, which is a great

sports doc series.

1986 Indy 500 rookie of the year was secretly funded by marijuana smuggling operations.

He started running small loads of weed via speed boats and barges from the Bahamas, but later started shipments weighing over 100,000 pounds hidden under legit cargo.

It's expected around 600,000 pounds were transported in total.

He was indicted in 1988 for distributing over a thousand pounds of marijuana under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Act.

He received a life sentence without parole, which was later commuted to 20.

Yeah, it says commuted.

Oh, it does?

I thought it was communed.

It's commuted?

I don't know any of these words.

Yeah, maybe it is commuted.

To 27 years behind bars.

They found $2 million in cash buried in his father's lawn inside PVC pipes, which his dad was also sentenced for.

He's such a good time, Charlie, that guy.

He's the most likable criminal I've ever seen.

Yeah.

And he was a fucking hell of a driver.

Yeah.

It sucks.

Why didn't he just do that?

Because you can't make any money doing that.

Like.0001% of people in Racy make money.

Yeah, that sucks.

Yeah.

Okay, I get why he did it.

Yeah, he had to.

How many Colombians lost their lives fighting cartels or were victims of cartels?

It is estimated that the Medellín cartel was responsible for over 4,000 Colombian deaths, including authority figures like police officers, judges, and the presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galan.

Okay.

Okay.

What is the Onion Field cop killing movie mentioned?

The Onion Field, 1979 movie directed by Harold Becker, starred John Savage, James Wood, Franklin Seals, and Ted Danson, his feature film debut.

Oh, Papa Ted.

This movie centered around

friend.

This movie centered around two LAPD officers who were kidnapped by ex-convicts who feared returning to prison.

One was murdered.

Ted Danson, spoiler.

Oh, no.

In an onion field while the other escaped.

An onion field, to me, is a seahorse to you.

I can't picture what that is at all.

I just think that's picturing, you know, when you let an onion live too long in your cupboard and it sprouts an enormous green thing.

Yeah.

That's what I'm picturing, but I have no basis for that other than my cupboard.

That's probably right.

Okay.

What is the average THC level in weed today versus back then?

Reports list modern-day cannabis to have significantly higher THC levels than in prior decades.

According to the Cannabis Museum of Amsterdam, average THC levels were

1 to 3% in the 70s, 3 to 5% in the 80s, 5 to 10 in the 90s, 10 to 15 in 2000s, and 15 to 20 percent since 2020.

This is validated by a University of Mississippi study, the National Library of Medicine, and other studies.

I mean, on one hand, you could look at that as a negative.

But on another hand, you could go, well, people were always going to get high.

So should should they have to smoke a ton of carcinogens to get the THC, or is it better if they're smoking less?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I'll tell you this, though.

The recruitment went through the roof after the first hot gun.

That I do know.

Oh, boy.

Kidding.

Okay.

How long does it take to manufacture a plant-based drug versus a synthetic?

And what are the profit margins?

Well, it was a really in-depth question you've asked.

I'm so upset

about this is such a good

fact check.

I didn't do this.

Oh, you didn't?

No, because I would have to be getting so far ahead to get this, but I knew this was the opportunity for us.

So I had Sophia, our incredible intern,

listen for facts on double speed.

And she did this.

Oh, wow.

And it is so much better than anything I do.

And it is very ensembling.

My facts are more like playful.

Yeah.

Okay.

How long is this?

That is really fun.

That's really funny that it just was revealed.

I mean, I've been thinking it this whole time.

She sent me like such a

really, really good.

Really good job.

But is she checking, like, is my dad the sim lord?

Like, no.

Is she exploring whether or not she has acne or not?

Exactly.

Exactly.

There's pros pros and cons.

She does not.

She does not.

The indoor cannabis life cycle from germination to flowering can take anywhere from six to twenty weeks.

Different sources say different things.

Then the drying, curing, testing, packaging, and distribution processes can take anywhere from a week to four to five weeks.

Outdoor growth can take up to six months.

Synthetic drugs.

chemical synthesis takes a few days.

Purification, testing, packaging, and distribution can take anywhere from a few days to two weeks, depending on level of quality assurance and testing.

This is an extremely high-potency program for many synthetic drugs, making it very scalable.

Cocaine's kind of a hybrid of that.

You've got to grow the coca, but then you have to process it chemically.

And you know, that's what's wild.

Have you ever seen that?

They put in some kind of petroleum, like a turpentine or something, all over all the leaves.

And they have people, so when you're starting cocaine, you're getting some of their feet in your nose.

They stomp on it.

Like the grave?

Yes.

And they're walking around all day long and they get sores on their feet, but they're absorbing cocaine.

So they don't mind at all.

Did you think about putting some cocaine on your farm uncle?

I didn't because

I know I couldn't be trusted to apply it to my carbuncle.

I've always said this, like, I don't even, I don't think about drinking Tetall.

I'll be at a bar.

I don't even know, you know, it's just, I don't.

You don't care.

I don't care.

I've not seen a couple grams of cocaine laid on a table in 21 years, and I'm very glad about that.

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad that you're aware of that.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

The legal cannabis market has a gross profit margin of around 45 to 55 percent.

Dispensaries typically earning net profit margins of around 15 to 21 percent in modern day.

What year did they legalize big pharma marketing directly to the consumer?

1985 was said in the interview.

In the early 80s, pharma companies started exploring TV ads aimed at consumers.

In 83, the FDA imposed a moratorium on DTC direct-to-consumer ads to study the implications.

In 1985, the FDA lifted the moratorium given they comply with advertising rules, which were in line with rules put on physicians at that time.

Okay, so 85 is right.

But then in 97, saw another policy change that loosened the guidelines.

This is a tricky one.

Yep.

Because if you are poor and you have no insurance and you don't go to the doctor and you have a condition,

how are you to learn there is an immune suppressant that could fix it?

How are you to learn?

So in that way, if you at least go like, oh, there's a solution to this,

now it's worth me going to pay the doctor to get the solution.

That's great.

Yep.

But also advertising works.

Yep.

And we are so over-medicated, it's insane.

Yep.

I agree.

It is complicated.

Trade-offs.

Trade-offs.

This is what I think about non-stop.

What's my new obsession?

Trade-offs.

Yeah.

There's no such thing as wins.

There's just trade-offs.

We've had guests say that, but I really have to do it.

Now you're taking it on.

Yeah.

Okay.

What is the difference between carfentanil?

Carbuncles.

Carfentanil and normal fentanyl.

Yeah.

Okay.

Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine.

It drives 70% of opioid overdoses deaths in the U.S.

as of 2023.

Carfentanil is 10,000 times stronger than morphine.

No.

Making it 100 times more potent than fentanyl.

Oh my god, you have a micron of it in your carfentanil is not approved for human use.

It is a veterinary tranquilizer for animals like elephants.

A lethal dose of fentanyl is around 2 milligrams, while carfentanil can be as low as 0.02 milligrams.

Ew.

Ew, it can cause an overdose through skin or airborne exposure.

Well, sure, those patches, fentanyl fentanyl patches.

Biggest organ of the body, the skin.

The human skin.

I did that fact.

That was me, not Sophia.

She would never do that.

She wouldn't know about skin.

She wouldn't know.

She doesn't have acne.

So, how would you have?

She doesn't have acne.

That's it.

That was great.

Yeah, good job.

Yeah, good job, Sophia.

That's great.

All right.

Love you.

Love you.

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