Seth Harp (on drug trafficking in the military)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert.

Experts on Expert.

I'm Dan Shepherd.

I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hello.

This is one of the craziest episodes we've ever done.

I could not believe the story that Seth has been investigating and is unfolding in this this book.

It's absolutely mind-blowing.

It really is such an upsetting but fascinating ride.

Oh my goodness.

Seth Harp is an investigative reporter, a foreign correspondent, and Iraq war veteran.

He was also a lawyer.

He was also an assistant attorney general in Texas.

Now he writes for Rolling Stone.

I mean, this guy, talk about a polymath who's done darn near everything.

His book is called The Fort Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.

Oh my god.

Really interesting.

Also, we have Armchair Anonymous prompts.

If you've got a story about moving, a moving story, a wedding disaster story, military stories, crazy babysitting stories, and of course, wildcard.

Chef's

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That's right.

Seth's Seth's choice.

Seth's choice.

Oh, look at that.

Please enjoy Seth Harp.

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Dex, you look so different from when you were in idiocracy such a long time ago.

You kind of look like you've been in Delta Force, to be honest.

Yes, I'm always trying to exude that, to imbue in people.

Thank you so much.

I'm not kidding.

You got a little bit of that vibe.

Wow.

I hang out with several.

Yeah, some of them find their way to Hollywood.

One of my really, really close friends who was Brad Pitt's trainer forever, this guy Duffy, he was a Navy SEAL, and he's just an incredible guy.

But I have to say, it was really tricky for me to read this book because I went to Afghanistan twice for USO tours.

Both times we met everybody, and both times I got to go specifically to the Special Forces firing range and interact with those guys.

And what I found was.

Look, it's a very diverse military, so I don't want to characterize, but there's like some blowhard guys, Trinac, Super Macho.

There's a lot of machismo.

Then there's a bunch of sweet guys that are there, men and women.

But almost without exception every special forces person we met was very calm very intelligent no machismo none of the toxic it was just like oh wow these guys are fucking like scientists in a way i found them to just be so impressive and so nice and smart and just kind of counter to what i thought i left there going like oh that's right when you're a real badass like when you really have the credentials you don't need to flex right yeah but of course i'm reading your book and i'm like oh no there's a big batch that are definitely caught up in that that cycle as well, I would say.

Yeah.

Certainly there's a mix.

That's something I do write in the book.

It's interesting.

My main character, Billy Levine.

Yeah, what a character.

Was very much not a macho guy.

He was very much a soft-spoken, just like what you're talking about, super professional, super nice.

And yet there were things going on, as we'll talk about with him, that didn't always show on the surface.

Yeah.

I will just give you one funny anecdote.

I went to a motorcycle race in Northern California and Duffy brought one of his Navy SEAL buddies.

And now this guy did not look the part, right?

Like, I wouldn't have picked him out as an operator.

He's skinnier and a little crazy look in his eyes, but these two started jumping in the pool, right?

And then one of them jumped in the pool, but five feet before the cement ended.

And then the next one was like, oh, that's nothing.

Seven feet, 10 feet.

And I'm watching these two, and they're just jumping over more and more concrete before they hit the water.

And I'm like, yeah, they're kind of nuts.

They need a little something to wake them up.

That's right.

A lot of them are adrenaline junkies and need stimulation, need challenge, and they're very competitive with one another, especially when it comes to like physical stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So let's go through your history a little bit because it's a very circuitous route.

Did you tell him about Delta?

My daughter's named Delta.

Really?

After Delta Force.

Tell the real story.

That's not entirely accurate, but it's very close.

Our first daughter's named Lincoln.

So my friends are mostly stunt guys, and we ride motorcycles, and there's some Navy Seals in the mix, and it's that kind of thing.

One of them was teasing me about basically having named our daughter Lincoln.

And so when Kristen got pregnant with the second kid, he wrote, what are you going to name this one?

Navy Seal, Delta Force.

And I was reading it to Kristen.

And I think we both were like, Delta is a fucking rad name for a girl.

Sure, yeah.

And how old is she now?

She is 10.

And she's really cool.

So she's living up to the name.

She is living up to the name.

I guess so.

But Seth, you have a very circuitous route to journalists.

So let's kind of start at the beginning because you've been a lot of things.

Where'd you grow up?

Austin, Texas.

And you left.

No, I still live there.

How often are you at Barton Springs?

I used to be there every day during the summer.

Nowadays, not so much because of the crowds and some of the deterioration of the environment as a result of the crowds.

They're awfully strict there about the crowds.

Monica was thrown out of Barton Springs.

Oh, do they control it?

Yeah, because we had some food they did not want

to have.

Yeah, we could not bring food, but they didn't.

want us to put it away.

They wanted us to go.

Yeah, the thing is the food attracts ants, and there's so many people there constantly.

It used to be a lot more chill.

I can remember a time when I was in high school getting approached by a lifeguard for smoking a cigarette at Barton Springs.

I have so many fewer people.

So you could just kind of go behind a tree.

Nowadays, that's inconceivable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How old are you?

41.

I'm trying to do the math.

I might have been there doing idiocracy while you were going as a kid.

That's when I discovered it.

So in 2004, I was there like three days a week.

Was it filmed?

In Austin, yeah.

Idiocracy was?

Yeah, yeah.

Because it's made by Mike Judge, right?

That's right.

Okay, yeah.

Well, it's a canonical film.

It only grows in importance with every passing year, unfortunately.

I sometimes think it was too subtle.

If I could vote for President Camacho right now, I would.

I know.

He seems like a viable option.

There was an amazing moment where Hulk Hogan had joined the scene in the last election, and he's tearing his shirt off in public.

And I was like, I mean, we're there.

All he needs is a machine gun and we're there.

We've been there.

We've been there.

So you grew up in Austin.

And did you go to UT?

You did.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

You're a Longhorn.

Went to UT, Austin.

You know, my route route might seem circuitous, but actually, it was always there.

I wrote for my student paper, The Daily Texan, and I was also in the Army Reserve.

And when the war in Iraq started, I got called up out of college to go deploy to Iraq for basically two years.

So it was during college.

Wow.

I didn't know they did that.

Were you excited or bummed?

I did not support the Iraq War.

I was completely against it even before I went there.

Being there really hardened my opposition to the war and to the Bush administration.

So you were on the Pat Tillman route?

Well, Pat Tillman was a famous NFL player.

I was nobody as a college student.

He signed up to go to Afghanistan and then he was deployed to Iraq.

He was like, what the fuck are we doing here?

I'm disillusioned.

I don't like this.

Right.

And then he was killed by friendly fire.

Yes, he was.

And his brother was in the mix as well.

Yes, the case of Pat Tillman, controversial to this day.

I made some comment the other day just making reference to the conspiracy theories around Pat Tillman's death.

And people I saw were online were responding and saying that I was trafficking myself in those conspiracy theories, which isn't true.

I don't know exactly the circumstances around his death, but because he was poised to become this incredibly prominent anti-war voice in the United States, he was corresponding with Noam Chomsky, discussing his anti-war views as they were evolving.

So he would have been the Pentagon's worst nightmare, but he was shot in the back, basically, by one of his buddies.

Most likely, it seems by accident, which does happen.

It happens frequently.

Yeah.

Very frequently.

Yeah.

Have you seen the footage of his brother at the funeral?

Because they really always wanted Tillman to be the the Mickey Mouse of the military.

It was this great opportunity.

And then when he died, initially, they acted like it was enemy fire.

Then it was coming out that it was friendly fire.

And then at his funeral, all these people showed up from Washington and the Pentagon, and they wanted to seize that opportunity.

And it was televised.

And his brother got on stage a little drunk.

And he said, Pat would have fucking hated this.

None of you should be here.

He let it rip in front of everybody.

And it was like, whoa, that family is so strong.

Good for him.

Yeah, good for him.

Incidentally, it's because the military lied about the circumstances of his death and said initially that it was enemy fire, but afterwards there became conspiracy theories when it emerged that in fact he was shot in the back by his buddy.

Yeah, yeah.

They're like, if they lied about that, then what else would they lie about?

So when you were in Iraq and you were not feeling terribly supportive of the mission, were you keeping that under your hat or were you being vocal and did that alienate you among your fellow troops?

How did that play out?

It didn't alienate me.

I was vocal enough.

You know, you're stuck together for more than a year, so you talk about everything.

There were plenty of people who felt just like me.

It was around the time of the 2004 presidential election.

So just like any other group of Americans, we were debating the election.

And there were people that agreed with me and people that supported Bush, 50-50 maybe.

So I was not alienated as a result of that.

I was even writing articles for the Daily Text when I could find the time.

And then considered going the route of journalism right then, but was concerned that I wouldn't be able to support myself financially.

So took the coward's way out and went to law law school.

Where'd you go to law school?

NYU.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Was that a fun cultural shift?

Intellectually, I was very interested in law.

I was a hardworking student.

I did like the subject.

I enjoyed studying it and to some extent also enjoyed practicing law, which I did for five years.

And how did you decide to pull the plug?

Because now if you were afraid you weren't going to support yourself initially, now you're making a living and you probably got a house or whatever you did.

Yeah, exactly.

Paid off my student loans and bought a house.

And then when I felt stable, I went to grad school for journalism.

Oh my gosh, you're all over the map in these things.

Over achievement.

Yeah.

I really wanted to be a writer my whole life.

And not coming from an immensely affluent background, I knew I would have to find a way to support myself.

That's why it was a bit circuitous.

Wow.

Okay, so ultimately this book stems from an article you wrote.

in Rolling Stone.

Yeah.

That's where this journey starts for you on this book.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think of the best way to roll out the very dense bit of research you did here, but I think maybe first and foremost, could we just start with what is Fort Bragg and where does it rank in terms of other bases and what's its history a little bit?

Fort Bragg is a very important military base.

It's the Army's largest base.

And it's also the center of the Special Operations Complex.

It's the headquarters of the Army Special Forces, and it's also the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command.

Which we'll call JSOC.

JSOC.

Yeah.

JSOC is not super well known, but it's a vital institution of the U.S.

government and it's headquartered at Fort Bragg.

How many people are there at any given time?

50,000 soldiers.

Okay, and it's in North Carolina.

Closest to Fayetteville or it's in?

Fayetteville is the military town that's right around Fort Bragg, surrounds it on three sides, and it's a town of about a quarter million people.

I think it could be helpful if we kind of went through, perhaps in an ascending order, these layers of specialty.

So we all know Navy SEALs are like the baddest of the bad in the branch of the Navy.

So what does the Army have to offer?

And what are the rungs of specialty?

Well the Army's equivalent to the Navy SEALs would be the Green Berets.

That's Army Special Forces.

So infantry soldiers or soldiers of their combat arms professions can try out for the Green Berets.

You know, they have to be in training for about two years.

It's fairly competitive.

It's more elite than the rest of the Army.

But how does it compare to Navy SEALs?

They're different.

The Navy SEALs have more of a focus on maritime operations, obviously being part of the Navy.

Amphibious landings and jumping out of boats.

I think the main difference is that the Army Special Forces, the Green Berets, have much more emphasis on language acquisition, learning foreign languages, and liaisons with foreign troops.

The mission of the Green Berets is to go to foreign countries where the U.S.

is at war, might be at war, establish relationships with forces that can support U.S.

objectives, train them, arm them, and then direct them in battle.

So, this is kind of more of an

intellectual pursuit, and Navy SEALs feel more like a physical.

Is that right?

Not really.

There's definitely an element of that perception.

The special forces will call themselves armed anthropologists sometimes.

Uh-huh.

That's probably a little bit of self-mythologizing.

Sure.

They can be just as much door-kicking, knuckle-dragging, meatheads as the seals, but certainly the seals have more of that reputation than the Green Berets.

As far as how many people enter versus how many make it to Navy SEAL versus how many people enter and make it to Green Beret, like is one harder than the other?

That I'm not sure about.

They can argue that.

What I can tell you is the hardest thing of all is to make it from the Green Berets or from the Navy SEALs to JSOC.

And that selection rate is also unknown, but I think probably less than 10%.

What do they do?

They're a collection, right, of these many different special force units under one umbrella.

So you have CIA, you have Navy SEALs, you have Green Berets, yes, and JSOC.

Well, the CIA is a separate agency, but they work closely with JSOC all the time.

But the way it works is that, say, you're on a Green Beret team and you want to go farther.

Maybe you're the best guy in your A team.

At that point, you would try out for what's called a special mission unit.

That Army Special Mission Unit is Delta Force.

Okay, so that's like the elite group within the Green Berets.

Right.

Significantly more elite because I'm not exactly sure how many Army Special Forces soldiers there are, but there are thousands, possibly more than 10,000.

Whereas the number of Delta Force operators is like 300, 400.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And then SEAL teams were in the hundreds as well?

JSOC is a collection of special mission units.

The main Army one is Zelta Force.

The Navy also has a special mission unit called SEAL Team 6.

And so the very best SEALs get selected for SEAL Team 6 and then become part of JSOC.

Is the Air Force offering anything?

The Air Force does have, they call it a SMU of special mission units, kind of a weird acronym.

Isn't that very intimidating?

Watch out, there's SMUs.

Oh, I want to hug one.

Yeah, just so cute.

So those three together make up JSOC.

There's more than three.

The Air Force one is called the 24th Special Tactics Squadron.

They do very specialized things involving surveillance, para-rescue, target acquisition, long-range reconnaissance.

There's another Army special mission unit called the Intelligence Support Activity, sometimes just called the activity.

It goes by other names as well.

Also dedicated to surveillance, long-range reconnaissance.

I hate to say it.

I think it's so cool.

It's very interesting.

It's interesting.

It's getting better and better and better and just the notion to be the best of the SEALs is so cool.

To be the best of the SEAL.

Yeah, it's, yeah.

I'm drawn to it, of of course.

And then there may be other smooths that we don't know about, but those are the four that are known.

Okay, now, this was a revelation to me reading this.

Within Delta Force, they are conducting missions that would mirror what we think of some CIA missions, where they have a lot of money.

They're sending people plain clothes undercover on commercial airlines, posing as businessmen, ambassadors, landing in places and doing very covert operations, assassinations, capturing people.

Initially, I'm like, well, I don't know what your beef is with that because that's what the CIA CIA does.

But then I learned CIA legally has the obligation to report all that to Congress at some point.

And this Delta team does not have to do that.

Well, congressional oversight over covert action is complex, but what you said is broadly accurate.

I think it's important to understand that most people, they're aware of what a Navy SEAL is.

They know what a Green Beret is.

Most people don't know that JSOC even exists.

So this is this additional tier of the military that's dedicated exclusively to covert operations.

So things that the U.S.

government actually denies responsibility for.

We're getting into Mission Impossible a little bit.

Very much so.

I'm talking about things where if a reporter asks an official representative of the U.S.

government if they had a hand in it, they will deny it.

And it's by design, it's made to be denied.

I mean, that's something that's defined in federal law, covert action.

Now, for the CIA to carry out a covert action, they have to have something called a presidential finding.

That means the president has to sign essentially an executive order authorizing that covert action.

In addition to that, there's oversight laws that were written in the 1970s after the worst CIA abuses came to light.

The MKUltra stuff, the assassinations, the LSD experiments, the torture, mind control.

We've done a couple episodes on MK Ultra.

After that, the CIA was required to begin briefing its covert actions to a select group of congressional leaders.

Now, the military doesn't have to do that.

So I write in the book that after the church committee and after the Intelligence Oversight Act and other oversight laws went into effect around 1980, late 1970s into 1980, immediately afterwards is when Delta Force was formed.

Oh, and this immediately went into Contra.

They just kicked it over to a different division, basically.

It seems like that.

That's my analysis.

Kind of like when you step on a balloon, you know, the air goes out here and then comes up over here.

So the CIA had its wings clipped, but then the military got all these new freedoms and capabilities to do the same type of thing.

JSOC may have some reporting requirements.

Like I said, it's complex.

But as a general matter, the military is not as subject to oversight as the CIA.

Yeah, and just to remind people what happened in the 80s, in addition to arming the Contras, you also had a lot of CIA involvement in allowing drugs to be sold to buy guns.

I mean, there was great involvement in the drug trade at that time between Colombia, Nicaragua, all these South American countries with the oversight of the military.

Yes, it's interesting you bring up the war in Nicaragua because the New York Times article that disclosed the existence of JSOC years after it was formed actually took place in the context of that war.

And one of the things that they disclosed was that there were plainclothes, secret military operatives who were working with the Contras in Nicaragua.

And several lawmakers who spoke to the Times for that article expressed their concern that this was becoming a uniformed CIA.

They don't actually wear uniforms, but the idea was that it's a military version of the CIA.

This critique or this analysis is nothing new that I'm making.

It's just been forgotten for years and years.

I think before we find out all the abuses, I wonder theoretically how the three of us feel.

Because I have some appetite for this, right?

Like I have some belief that there are ugly things that need to get done that people don't really want to know about.

I think that's the reality of the planet we live on.

And I think there have been certain covert operations or clandestine operations that were probably incredibly beneficial to the safety of Americans.

And I think there's been a ton of blowback and they've gone sideways a bunch.

In general, do you think there is a time and a place for covert and clandestine operations that people aren't going to be privy to?

Or do you think it's so ripe to be abused that it can't really exist?

I don't know of any JSOC operations that I would support.

All that being said, in theory, if we have a good government, a democratic government that's responsive to the electorate, if we have a foreign policy that's restrained and that's carried out by intelligent and wise people, which is wholly lacking in the U.S.

government now, I don't have an objection in principle to having a strong military and to having elite military forces.

It's all a question of how they get used.

Yeah, some provision to be checked by some outside body.

But here's an example.

Like you were in Ukraine right away reporting and you ran into American soldiers.

I ran into Americans.

I don't know exactly their military affiliation.

I did report that there were JSOC forces in Ukraine from the beginning.

I didn't see them personally.

And if I had, I probably wouldn't have even known who they were.

So for me, who is very supportive of Ukraine and absolutely hates what's going on, I would love for our experienced people there helping.

So, that's a prime example of one that I would be very supportive of.

Well, again, you know, it's agree and disagree because having spent time in Ukraine with a lot of Ukrainians, I absolutely sympathize for their desire for autonomy, for independence, for self-determination.

I don't want any country to be occupied by foreign powers.

But at the same time, the more you learn about the history of Ukraine and the United States and the history of U.S.

intervention in that country, you realize that the present-day conflict, including the invasion that the Russians carried out, was originally precipitated by aggressive U.S.

action.

Most particularly the coup in 2014 that overthrew Ukraine's democratically elected government that was openly backed by the United States.

Without that, there wouldn't be the war we see today.

I'm with you.

I don't think the public needs to know everything that's going on in the government or the military.

I do think think all of those people need checks.

Yeah, I think there needs to be checks and balances.

And I do have an appetite for some clandestine stuff that I don't think in general people are fit to evaluate, nor do they need to know.

I do think there needs to be an elected

check and balance on that.

Yeah.

Maybe there's the best of the business.

There needs to be some oversight.

We shouldn't have anything that has no checks and balances.

It's dangerous because JSOC is vertically integrated directly under the presidency.

And the absence of any checks and balances, as you say, on that makes it ripe for abuse.

Yeah.

Okay, so Fort Bragg, where they're training a lot of the Delta Force and the special ops, it starts with a murder.

Is that what brings your attention?

Yeah, I was just reading the newspaper and saw that two soldiers have been murdered on Fort Bragg.

Two veteran special operations soldiers.

Their bodies were found in a remote training range of Fort Bragg in December 2020.

And one of the soldiers, I learned shortly after that, was a member of Delta Force.

And the the only thing the police were saying was that they believed it was a double homicide from a drug deal gone wrong.

Yeah, and it's a straight execution.

That's obvious from what happened.

One of the guys, Billy Levine, had been shot multiple times, wrapped in a blanket, and placed in the back of his own truck.

which was driven out to this remote lake on Fort Bragg and abandoned.

There was a second soldier who was left there who looked like he was killed at that site, execution style with a shot to the head.

So this is some gangland stuff that's going on, obviously.

And then I find out that one of the guys is a member of Delta Force.

So the entire time I have been working as a war reporter and before that, having been in the military myself, I had never heard of a Delta Force operator being in the news for any reason, positive or negative.

They stay out intentionally.

Right.

At that point, I knew that there must be more to this story, especially because that same newspaper article disclosed that the Delta Force soldier, Billy Levine, had previously killed a guy in the living room of his house just 18 months earlier.

His best friend, he shot and killed his best friend, fellow Green Beret, in his house, and it was immediately ruled a justified homicide.

That didn't come out until he himself was found murdered 18 months later.

So I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking, there's a big story here.

There's a lot of messiness happening over there.

Yeah.

Okay.

Also, what constitutes a justified homicide?

Well, we'll tell that story in length, I think.

But in order, so you read that, you get curious.

And then at what point do you learn of the insane amount of casualties that's happened at Fort Bragg between 2020 and 2021.

That wasn't for a little while.

Okay, so take me in order, I guess.

It was just one thing after another.

No sooner did I learn about this case of Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas than I found out that another soldier at Fort Bragg named Enrique Roman Martinez had gone missing on a camping trip with several of his friends from his same unit.

He was a soldier in the 82nd Airborne Division, which is conventional military, also based at Fort Bragg.

It's kind of the farm team for the special forces.

This is a good way to think about the 82nd Airborne.

They're not special forces, but they are the most elite conventional division.

They're America's contingency force.

It's the 82nd that always deploys whenever something happens and they need to deploy at a moment's notice.

They're the ones that are first to get down.

Famous, famous division, the 82nd Airborne.

So that's a little parenthetically to explain who this kid was.

I say kid, he was 21 years old.

Yeah, yeah.

For a while, that's all that anybody knew is that this kid had gone missing on a camping trip.

But then his severed head washed ashore on a nearby island off the coast of North Carolina where they had been camping.

And a medical examiner determined that he had been beheaded with an axe or a hatchet, but it was something that a person had done to him.

It wasn't a boating accident, it wasn't a shark attack.

As soon as I started investigating that case, I realized it also had something to do with drugs because Enrique, by all accounts, a really nice kid.

He was different from the other guys that are in my book.

He was a drug dealer on Fort Bragg.

He didn't want to be in the military anymore.

He injured his legs.

He wanted out.

He made money on the side by selling drugs on the base, especially LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, those kind of things.

So that's another case that came out literally within days of the other two murders.

And then no sooner did I get to Fayetteville to report on this that there was another soldier in the special forces, a medic in the special forces named Sergeant Keith Lewis, who shot and killed his wife and then killed himself in a neighborhood of Fayetteville.

And he too was dealing drugs on Fort Bragg.

He was dealing steroids on Fort Bragg.

All this happened within the space of a few weeks.

Can you imagine whatever their public relations department is at that base as these things are coming in and they're like trying to spin each thing?

And now it's just like, wow, is that getting out of control in a hurry?

And just before this was all happening, Fort Hood was in the news for months because of so many murders and deaths that were taking place.

There were multiple congressional investigations of Fort Hood, and it concluded with the entire chain of command at Fort Hood being relieved.

But actually, the reaction to stuff going on at Fort Bragg was quite different.

To my knowledge, I was the only reporter who was working on this.

I didn't get the sense that the public affairs office had their hands full at all because no one was really asking about it.

Really?

Why they got such a pass was a question that always eluded me.

I could never figure that out.

But you learn pretty soon, though, right, that 109 people from that base had died or some number like that.

Yeah, in two years.

So these murders that I'm talking about, there were other deaths.

I'm looking in the news archives and I'm counting.

I'm thinking, wow, there's been a lot of soldiers who died at Fort Bragg.

I asked the press office office how many and they told me 38 which was exactly the same amount that had died at fort hood that year so i thought well okay this is a big problem because that was treated as a catastrophic meltdown of good order and discipline at fort hood i submitted a request for the casualty reports that year through foia and was very surprised when they came back and i saw that actually 54 soldiers had died at the base so the public affairs officers there had lied to me in writing about the number of deaths that there had been and then after that were not forthcoming at all but over a period of two years, 2020 to 2021, 109 soldiers at Fort Bragg died.

Oh, my God.

Only four.

Four of them were overseas in combat in Afghanistan and in Syria.

All the rest took place on Fort Bragg itself or in Fayetteville.

And suicide's the number one leader of that, yes.

Suicide epidemic on the space.

And then a comorbidity of probably drug use within that suicide number, right?

Absolutely.

A lot of that.

I have to ask about CTE.

Go ahead.

I feel like that could be playing a role.

I don't know what happens in these trainings.

You think that's...

It could play a part.

I think they're too young to do that.

I think it really starts pronouncing itself more in your late 20s, 30s.

These are like 21-year-olds.

No, but there are kids who die by suicide at a young age because of CTE.

But I mean, you're going to tell us what happened, so it's probably not them.

But there's ODs.

That's another big contributor, yeah.

Second leading cause of death was overdoses.

Like you said, a lot of comorbidity.

I do think that physical injuries, CTE, that's a little harder.

I would need access to people's medical records.

I don't have that.

They'd have to go to the brand.

They'd have to,

but I can tell you that it's very hard in your body to be a paratrooper or a special forces soldier, and especially to be an operator on Delta Force.

That's very, very hard in your body.

And again, and I say this without judgment, this is just a fact because I do think there's probably a time and a place for it.

But they do prescribe the operators.

a version of methamphetamine at times.

There are missions that require you to be awake.

So you're getting introduced to some stuff.

You're also getting injured.

They're keeping you going.

So you're probably on one side being introduced to some stuff.

And then you're also in some areas, as we'll get into when we talk about Afghanistan, where it'd be impossible not to bump up against it.

So, you learned this number in 109.

What are you thinking at that point?

Like, how on earth did Fort Hood get shut down?

And now, this place, really, no one's talking about it, and it's 3x the number.

It was baffling to me, but you know, I can't control what the rest of the media does.

So, I just stayed in my lane and kept reporting the story and worked on it for basically the next three years.

Stay tuned for more armchair Expert

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And so, of the two guys, Levine and the other guy who is a staff sergeant, he was a supply guy who was executed, the bodies that were found.

Now, he was involved with supplies.

He wasn't a Delta or a Green Beret.

No, he was a member of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade.

That is a civil affairs organization that often does missions in conjunction with JSOC.

So, there's a lot of soldiers on Fort Bragg, a lot of organizations, units on Fort Bragg that are not necessarily special forces, but support the special forces in a whole variety of ways.

Because the Green Berets, you know, the individual special tabbed special forces soldiers, they're only the sort of the tip of the spear.

They have a lot of people supporting them.

Right.

Many of them are psychological operations specialists.

Others are medical, of course.

This soldier, he was a chief warrant officer.

Timothy Dumas was his name.

He was a supply guy.

And that turns out to be an instrumental fact in the story because there's a lot of crime in these secretive units.

And one of the big types of crime that you see frequently is theft from military supply because there's an enormous amount of money and material, weapons, ammunition, things like gasoline, and just straight up cash.

Yeah, talk about the cash because I doubt people would know how much cash is entrusted to these people when they get in these countries to train these soldiers.

They have to buy equipment.

They have to pay people off.

They do got to throw a lot of money around.

Just like the CIA, the main thing that they do is throw money around.

There's hundreds of millions of dollars that get thrown around.

I don't think people understand the scale of it.

There's billions of dollars.

A lot of it, we know, was stolen directly by the soldiers who are entrusted with these stacks of cash.

You know, I interview military wives in Fayetteville who talk about how this is kind of a thing.

Your husband comes back from a deployment and he's got several thousand dollars taped to his body when he gets off the plane.

Just skimmed off the top of the op fund, is what they call it, the operations fund.

Wow.

By the way, I would do it.

I'm like, I'm going to give this bozo $60,000.

I'm going to take four.

I mean, it's not hard to imagine how one finds themselves skimming when you're giving it to shitheads a lot of the time.

It's not hard to imagine, especially when you know, hey, there's almost no accountability over this.

This is just a handwritten receipt that I'm signing off of.

Nobody cares.

I have a friend who's an FBI agent.

He too has to pay informants and stuff.

And he said, you know, every time we come back, they have to polygraph after every single time they bring back the money.

And I don't think that's happening here.

No, I don't think so.

No, there's so much less oversight over the military than an agency like FBI.

Right.

It's so huge.

I'm also sympathetic to it.

It's like when you're over there, it's like, what a fucking machine that's trying to run and keep up.

Yeah, and they spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan.

And so the cash is just a tiny fraction of that.

Yeah.

Yeah, hard to detect, I'm sure.

But we do know there were quite a few cases of special forces soldiers being caught.

arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for stealing six-figure sums of cash.

This is not just an inference or a suspicion.

Do you know the most?

Yeah, I saw one that's like 210,000.

Actually, no, you know what?

There's significantly more because there's all different kinds of diversion from the supply lines.

There was one Fort Rag soldier who got caught smuggling $1 million in cash.

A female soldier named Tanya Long.

Go get it, girl.

$1 million.

$1 million that she was smuggling back in like VCRs or some kind of electronic equipment, likely with co-conspirators, had taken that money not from the op fund, but through a kickback scheme.

whole different type of corruption that also exists.

The war in Afghanistan was an incredibly corrupt enterprise.

The Afghan client state was staggeringly corrupt.

And it's no surprise that some of that blew back and rubbed off on our own people who are the ones pumping all the money into there.

And one small part of it, but which ends up being important for the culture of the Green Berets, is the theft of cash.

I was going to point to a study done, not a study so much as a count.

of all the cases that had been adjudicated, and they totaled $52 million in thefts that U.S.

soldiers were convicted of stealing.

Oh, my God.

But that's just a drop.

The conviction rate, I'm sure, versus incident rate is probably single-digit percentage.

A final fact I can tell you about this is that the largest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve was, I think, 343 tons of cash.

That's how much it weighed.

Yeah.

$100 bills.

They were put on planes and flown into Iraq.

And all of it went missing.

Billions of dollars.

Whole pallets of shrink-wrapped cash went missing.

Went missing.

Say that number again

Here's what I know is accurate.

It was the largest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve.

And you wonder where it all went, all these shadowy fortunes that were made out of the war.

And a lot of people that make a bunch of money and decamp for Dubai and never come back, well, they came up through Special Forces or JSOC or the CIA.

Wow.

Okay, back to Dumas.

Dumas had a conviction.

No.

So he was the guy who controls these supply lines.

Good guy to know.

Very much.

He did four tours in the Kandahar airfield in Afghanistan.

Dumas, during his entire career, because I've seen his separation packet, he was constantly losing stuff, losing track of sensitive items, losing paperwork, losing documentation.

I know from interviews of people close to him that he was stealing stuff his whole career, chiefly weapons.

He was pilfering weapons from the military and selling them on the black market.

Something that happens a lot around Fort Bragg, including plastic explosives and military weapons, machine guns, that kind of thing, ammunition as well.

So he was kicked out of the military in 2016, not for any of that, but just for drug use because he was also doing a lot of cocaine.

And that was his backstory, you know, the soldier that was found dead next to Billy Levine.

So let's now introduce Los Zetas because I think we got to figure out where all this cocaine's coming from.

Los Zetas, they're a Mexican drug cartel.

Now.

Right.

They started off as an elite unit of the Mexican military.

The Grupo Aeromobile de Fuerzas Especiales.

Or Gigafe.

That one.

Really good job.

Yeah.

We were talking before about how the Green Berets trains foreign armies.

So Mexico is an allied country with close security cooperation with the United States.

Like many other countries, the Green Berets went there and trained up a unit in their own mold, essentially.

They made a Delta Force to fight the cartel.

And they also were trained in the United States at Fort Bragg, also trained at Fort Binning.

And around the year 2000, the Gaffe went rogue and defected wholesale from the Mexican state.

This is one of the most catastrophic events in all of Mexican history because these were guys who realized, oh, we're the baddest gunslingers in all of Mexico, best armed, best trained.

Maybe we should just be calling the shots in this whole drug game, which is exactly what they went on to do.

Oh, no.

So they're like the craziest, lethalest cartel imaginable.

So we made them and then they

this precipitated the homicide crisis that has been going on in Mexico for the last almost 20 years now.

All of the horrible cartel wars of the present day.

Losedes have since been supplanted.

They're no longer the dominant organized crime force.

Other paramilitary cartels in the same mold have arisen, but the Los Cetas still exist, particularly in Nuevo Lorelo, which is just on the other side of Laredo, Texas.

I guess it's kind of ironic or fitting or in some way illustrative that my guys, the special forces soldiers who are trafficking drugs at Fort Bragg that I write about in the book, their supplier was these remnants of Losetas that are still in northern Mexico.

And it's safe to assume these were connections they made throughout the training.

No, that's not what happened.

All original Mexican special forces soldiers who created Los Setas, they're all dead.

They're all dead.

Yeah, these guys didn't live for very long.

High turnover, to say the least.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So their contact, I actually identify him by a pseudonym in the books.

He's a real person.

And to my knowledge, he's not been convicted of anything, but he is the brother of Miguel Ángel Trevino Morales, who is one of the most notorious crime bosses in Mexican history, who is currently incarcerated.

His brother, though, was selling hundreds of kilos of cocaine to a corrupt state trooper in North Carolina named Freddie Wayne Huff.

Who is also a DEA agent, task force agent.

Yeah.

We just had these DEA guys on who were talking about this, that they do go rogue often.

Often.

Yeah.

I guess they didn't say often, but they were like, it happens.

Well, this is one of them.

Yeah.

Freddie Wayne Huff, although he never served in the military, I end up dedicating several chapters to him because he turns out to be a key figure in this.

And also his trajectory kind of parallels the military guys.

So he was a hard-charging state trooper, one of the best at what he did, pretty young.

He was great at asset forfeiture.

He was a guy who was bringing in millions of dollars.

He just had a preternatural ability to suspect who might be carrying cash for the cartel because, you know, there's people going back all the time to Mexico with cash from drug sales.

We should say I-95, Dixie Highway, the drugs are largely coming in through Florida and they're making their way all the way north.

And so they're going to go through North Carolina.

So Freddie Wayne Huff would pull over some completely inconspicuous person driving like a Mazda minivan and find $200,000 in cash.

He just had a knack.

He had a knack.

He brought in millions of dollars.

He got seconded to the DEA, deputized by the DEA, was down there working on the El Paso border.

But something happened to him that derailed his whole career, which is that he gave a DWI ticket to a businessman who was a donor to the North Carolina governor.

All through the traffic stop, this businessman was telling Huff, I'm going to have your job, man.

You better not give me this ticket.

Being a straight arrow cop, he did it anyway and was almost immediately fired from the state patrol.

So corruption created the vendetta.

The vendetta.

That's how he turned.

Which is exactly what happened.

He had a vendetta.

He was unemployed.

He's embittered.

And he decides everything I've learned about the drug trafficking industry, how to get away with it, I am going to use now against them, which is exactly what he went on to do.

He forged their relationship with that Trevino Morales brother and started importing huge amounts of Coke into the United States.

And I detail in my book exactly the technical methods that he used

to do that.

Well, I go into it.

Defeating drug-sniffing dogs is a big part of it.

Yeah.

How does he do that?

He said that he would first wash all the kilos in ammonia.

They're in shrink-wrapped plastic.

He put a layer of shop towels that have been soaked in ammonia around that kilo and then wrap it in another layer of vacuum sealed plastic to create a dual fail-safe layers of ammonia because it's very painful for a dog to smell ammonia.

They will do anything to avoid it apparently.

So that was just one of his methods.

Then there's ways that he went on to hide those kilos.

One of the things he did was to hide the kilos in a axle of an 18-wheeler that had been hollowed out and lined with lead.

He said it's a $50,000 custom job.

They could stick a bunch of kilos into the axle, the rear differential

of this 18-wheeler.

They also use diversion tactics.

I talked to one of his associates named Jaime Rosato who told me, you know, Freddie Wayne Huff is a six-foot-something white dude with a high and tight haircut who almost always wore a suit.

So he does not look like someone who's suspected of trafficking drugs.

And then what he would do is get his associate, Jaime Rosato.

who definitely looks like a big pothead,

to drive up to the border in a car, a couple of cars in front of him, smoking weed in the car but then he would throw it out right before they got to the cbp checkpoint so when he'd roll down the windows there'd be like billows of marijuana smoke coming out of the car obviously obviously all the cbp officers come around step out of the car sir bring the dogs meanwhile freddie wayne huff with 10 kilos of coke is just cruising by showing them you know his police id badge in the next lane over so they use that type of diversionary tactic too there's something so fascinating about someone who flips and who knows the other side so well i mean what it takes

right thing.

And then some rich ass

in some ways I kind of get it.

He's like, well, if doing the right thing doesn't work, why won't I do the wrong thing?

Yeah.

So he's getting successfully hundreds of kilos into North Carolina.

And how does he meet our other characters?

All the guys that Freddie Wayne Huff worked with were former cops, former sheriff's deputies, Marines from Camp Lejeune, or soldiers from Fort Bragg.

So he was working with other police or military, obviously, at some point.

And in 2018, he met with Timothy Dumas, that supply officer we're talking about.

By this time, he's already a big drug trafficker in his own right.

The value that Dumas brought for Huff was that he could unload an incredible amount of cocaine because it's one thing to bring Coke over the border, then liquidating it into cash is often more fraught and difficult thing to do, to actually sell it and turn it into money.

And Doomas was able to sell almost half of the Coke that Freddy imported, which was a lot.

We're talking about hundreds of kilos, but it could have conceivably have been thousands or tons of cocaine.

The estimates in the court documents vary, but on the upper end of the estimates, it might have been three tons of Coke.

And is he selling it primarily on the base?

Dumas was offloading the Coke to other Special Forces soldiers who were in turn distributing it on the base.

And because Fort Bragg is a huge cocaine market, Freddy was based in the Piedmont Triad is what they call it.

Pretty densely populated part of North Carolina.

But Fort Bragg, with just 50,000 troops, because it's all young men, mostly young white men, because the infantry and special forces are very much white.

And high-risk-taking behaviors, lots of alcohol consumption, lots of drug use.

It all kind of goes hand in hand.

And so as soon as he could hand it off to Dumas, that stuff was gone.

And Dumas told Freddie that there was a cartel on Fort Bragg.

This is where the title of the book comes from.

An an informal group of special forces soldiers who went over to the dark side in Afghanistan and are now controlling the drug business in this part of North Carolina and policing one another and enforcing debts among themselves.

And so, multiple people told me about that group of guys, but Huff was the only one that I interviewed who actually knew them personally and had sold drugs to them.

And Levine was one of them.

Levine was one of them.

Okay, so now let's talk about Levine a bit because Levine's buddy.

Mark Leschaker.

So Mark Leschaker and Levine are very close.

Have we met him yet?

He's the friend he killed.

Oh, the friend, right.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

These are much different guys.

At least when I'm reading your book, I feel like I know exactly what archetypes both of them are.

So Levine has been Delta for a long time.

It was almost four years of deployment.

The cumulative amount of time that he had spent in combat was like four years.

That's a lot when you're in Delta Forest.

The deployment I did was 15 months.

However, that's a low intensity 15 months.

When you're in Delta, every single day you're fighting because they put you into the middle of the fight.

So their deployments only last four months.

So the fact that he had done like four years in combat, it's impressive.

It's a lot.

This story is neither here nor there.

This is one of the weirdest and neatest things that happened to me is we were flying from one base to another and we hopped onto like a C-130 and we're sitting in these little nets.

I'm talking to the dude on my right.

And then I look over on the guy left of me.

I go, how come you have so much cool gear?

Like this guy had such different gear than everybody else and he didn't answer me.

And then I turned back to the guy on my right who was friendly and I go, well, he's really friendly.

And he goes, oh, he's not here.

Right.

Yeah.

And I go, what do you mean he's not here?

He's right here.

And he goes, no, no, he's special forces and he's not on this flight.

He's not on an itinerary.

He's not on a manifesto.

He's not here and he's not going to talk to anybody.

If you're not on the manifesto, if everyone's treating you like you don't exist, that's JSOC.

I was like, wow, this is wild shit.

The collective understanding of all that, the culture of what it was, was fascinating to me.

For sure.

Mark, on the other hand, explain Mark.

Mark Leschaker was a Green Beret in the 19th Special Forces Group.

So although he was a highly trained Special Forces soldier, he was actually a National Guardsman.

So he's not even on active duty.

He had tried out for Delta a number of times, which a lot of people do.

People have to try out multiple times before they make it.

It was his goal to be on Delta Force.

And who knows, maybe he one day might have attained that, but he wasn't there yet.

He was younger than Billy, but they were best friends because one thing that they shared in common was they both really liked to do drugs.

But I will just say that Mark is your absolute definition of toxic masculinity, trying to be a badass at all times, getting violent when he's drunk, grabbing his sister at one point.

You know, he's in a bad spot.

He's insanely addicted.

I want to say about Mark Leschaker, because I know his mom and his sister and his ex-wife, that although i agree with what you just said about him i try to not portray any of these guys as monsters and to understand always what made them the type of person that they are and in mark's case he was someone who had grown up without a father and his mother was a single mother who kind of struggled and so mark from an early age had to be the man of the house she was also law enforcement right she was a cop i think that mark may have overcompensated to a degree with some of the macho stuff that's probably why i'm judging him so harshly because i have the same situation.

We often judge people

that remind us of ourselves.

Yeah.

I just think the most dangerous person to be around at any time is the dude trying to prove he is Levine.

Well, that was Mark.

On the positive side, he was a very loyal husband to his wife.

He was, by all accounts, a great dad, and he was also a great son to his mom.

However, he had issues.

Yeah, let's go through the day at Disneyland.

They were on all the drugs that day.

Every single drug, and some drugs I never even heard of, but they decide they're going to take their two daughters to Disney World.

Sounds really nice.

Mark had tried to sober up.

He had had this incident with his sister, and it was a bottom of sorts, and he was desiring sobriety.

And they get down to Disney World, and they are at the park, and they're both getting hammered drunk.

They just were at Disney World getting drunk and high the whole time.

And then on the way home is when they start to have problems.

They're on MDMA.

They are on tons of cocaine.

They are on benzos.

They are on opiates.

They're on bath salts from a smoke shop.

I don't know where the bath salts came from.

One possibility is that the MDMA was cut with bath salts.

These are guys with access to good drugs.

Right.

I don't know that they went to a smoke shop and asked for whatever it's called.

Yeah, phenell.

I just, I've been there, and what I know immediately is everything stops working, and you just start stacking and hopes that something will work because nothing really works anymore.

And I can just know that's where they were at.

That's not a good place to be at.

And so one thing that bath salts can do is cause hallucinations.

And that's what happened to Mark.

He started hallucinating.

He came to believe that their car was being followed.

I got to add, Levine's smoking crack even while working.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He is a hardcore functioning.

Active duty operator in Delta Force, smoking crack every day.

Smoking crack every day.

And keeping it together.

I mean, the constitution you have to admire.

Most people who smoke crack don't show up for work and train guys.

That's exactly the sort of army physical fitness you see in units like Delta Force.

Guys who can run two miles in 12 minutes, but still smoke a pack a day.

Yeah, and be hammered the night before and maybe be gacked out of their mind.

It's unreasonable.

Yeah.

But Levine's handling it a lot better than Leschaker.

And he tells him, you know, there's somebody following us, chill out.

This dispute between them or this argument escalates.

And when they get back to Fayetteville.

They have their little girls in the car.

Yeah.

They got in a physical fight in the driveway.

I don't want to go into every last detail.

In the book, I do exhaustively step by step.

It's so well written.

It's fucking nuts.

It's like reading as like the most incredible, captivating crime article you'd ever read as it's unfolding.

But I think it's relevant to say Levine's smaller than Mark, but he's Delta Force and he does get the upper hand and he gets inside of his house and he locks all the doors.

But you should know Mark is tearing components out of the engine convinced there's like recording equipment inside.

But what Billy doesn't realize when he's going around and locking up the house is that Mark's little girl hears her dad calling, let him in, and she's like six years old.

So she naturally opens the door for her dad.

And then when Levine sees him coming through the foyer of the house unexpectedly, unexpectedly, at that point, he just drew his personal weapon and just shot Mark multiple times right in front of his daughter.

Why?

Because of all the drugs he's on, or he just feels like this is so crazy and chaotic.

What?

I'm going to make a good faith argument.

If you're not coming back through the door, you're gone.

And God knows what you grabbed.

That's a dangerous situation.

And now this guy is trained to the hilt.

They've trained you not to think.

They train you to react.

That's not an inconceivable situation given what had transpired just before.

It's not right.

It's horrendous, but it's not outside the realm of my understanding.

It feels strange because he just locked him in there to, I assume, protect him.

You stay there.

So then to immediately go from like, that's your mindset to.

Well, no, you just fist fought almost to the death in the front yard, a bigger guy.

And you somehow got it.

I'm just saying he was definitely in the mindset.

De-escalating.

De-escalating.

Yes.

You stay there and you get better overnight.

To the point where their training is, I think, so on display is once he shoots Monica, now it's the full package.

It's everything he would do overseas.

Yeah, he blasted him a couple times and then stood over him and hit him with a kill shot, put him down.

Oh, my God.

I mean, just as much carnage as you can imagine.

His daughter didn't speak for one year afterwards because she was so traumatized by that.

Regarding the legality of it, there's also something called the castle doctor in North Carolina, which gives you an enhanced self-defense privileges.

Kind of a stand-your-ground type of a rule.

Yes, it is a type of stand-your-ground law.

All that being said, this was not a case of self-defense because Mark was not armed.

He had no weapon in his hand.

Levine was armed.

He had a gun.

He didn't need to shoot his friend.

Also, because Billy had taken Mark's daughter inside the house, Mark had a right to come inside the house to get his daughter.

I mean, look, guys, this is a fucking terribly toxic mess.

No great resolutions coming out of any of this.

But justified homicide, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Yeah.

No, I think he needs to probably go to jail for that.

You are so incapacitated from your addiction and all the other things.

Yeah, I'm not saying he's not culpable.

Or if not go to jail, at least be kicked off Delta Force.

But none of those things happened.

Oh, my God.

And that's what I really focus on in the book is how the cover-up was effectuated.

Exactly what the authorities did and how they made this case go away.

Because as I said before, Delta guys, guys they're not supposed to exist you're not supposed to be in the news for any reason right can I ask quickly there's zero drug testing policy clearly every member of the military is subject to randomized drug testing but there's ways around that and these guys are not too worried about it yeah if you can be smoking crack for a long long time and still be working right so this case needed to go away and it did billy was arrested He called the police on himself, and they came out and put him in handcuffs and took him downtown, accused of first-degree murder.

But at the jailhouse, he was not fingerprinted, photographed, or formally placed under arrest ever.

I should mention, by the way, that his immediate superior on Delta Force was one of the first few to arrive at the scene.

Who he had called and initially said Mark killed himself.

He also told the 911 dispatcher that Mark was a stranger and that he had shot someone.

Yeah, he's on crack and a billion other things.

I'm not surprised by anybody.

And he just killed his best friend.

In front of his own children, too.

Right, in front of his own daughter.

Which I was also witnessing.

This is such a mess.

No, this is as carnal as it gets.

Keep in mind, this is all just a prelude to the events that happened later.

This is just what puts Billy in the mindset that he had later on down the road.

So Delta Force is tracking what's going on.

Their phone calls are being made.

And by the time Levine gets to the police station, those gears are turning.

The right arms have been twisted.

I think it's fair to characterize it that way.

Yeah, to not get photographed tells me either it's such a company town that they understand.

And he says, I'm Delta.

And they go, okay, we know to handle this a certain way.

Or someone intervene.

One of those two things seems pretty likely.

So he just undergoes a gentle and formal questioning at the hands of a detective, tells him, Mark came out with me with a screwdriver.

I shot him in self-defense.

And they pretended to believe that, even though the medical examiner who arrived at the scene wrote in her report that no weapons of any kind had been found on Mark's person or anywhere near his body.

And that screwdriver that he had been using to take apart the car was found right where he had dropped it in the driveway.

So Levine's self-defense story was inconsistent with the physical evidence, and he had given multiple accounts of the shooting.

Had there been the prosecutorial will to charge him, they could have definitely charged him with first-degree murder.

More likely, a good attorney could have gotten him to plead that down to some kind of manslaughter, but you don't normally get to walk away from a situation like that.

Also, crucially, he was not drug tested, even though he had just killed a guy with his personal firearm.

Anybody else in that situation at a minimum is getting a blood draw to see what their state of sopriety at that moment was.

Now, listen, you had a lot of integrity in defending Mark's character, and I respect and appreciate that.

I just can't resist

considering the state of mind of Levine the next day as a full-blown addict.

He knows his life is completely unmanageable, and he just killed his best friend in front of his kids.

His mental state going forward, I just can't even imagine.

I don't know how anyone bears that.

Add in his four years of frontline action.

It's insane this guy is even

because it's one thing to be let off the hook by the authorities, but it's another thing to deal with your own conscience.

Yes, exactly.

And he was already in a bad place.

He had already lost faith in the post-9-11 wars that he was fighting in.

That's something we haven't really talked about.

Another aspect of Levine's personality is that despite his elite status in the military, at a certain point, he had come to turn against the wars, just like a lot of combat veterans do.

Not uncommon at all for someone who served in the military.

Well, there were people that witnessed these conversations at bars where Mark's going, we should drop a bomb on all the Middle East and wipe it the fuck out.

And then Levine is saying, no, that's ridiculous.

We might not live like them, but we need to leave.

He was weirdly on what we would think of as our side.

Exactly.

So he's a complex character in his own right, but he's got the PTSD.

He's got this disillusionment.

He's got this terrible drug addiction.

And now he's killed his best friend.

I don't think a human could get lower.

It's irresponsible for him not to put him in jail.

Like, it would have been doing him a favor, honestly, to have put him in jail.

I've got to

put him out of his own misery.

Let him go be.

It would have been an act of compassion for them to have prosecuted him.

Could have gotten a chance to be sober, could have gotten a chance to repair his relationship with his daughter.

But that's not what happened.

And that's at the point when Billy really goes over to the dark side and starts getting in with these drug traffickers that are connected to the Mexicans.

Through Huff.

Yeah.

Okay.

And part of me sometimes wonders, you know, this is purely conjectural.

I'd never met Levine.

I don't know this.

I I kind of wonder if he wanted to die.

I was just going to say, a series of events does end up with him dead shortly thereafter.

We know people do death by cop.

There's a lot of ways to manifest what you want.

Well, he definitely didn't.

care about living anymore.

Whether he wanted to die or just there's nothing left to care about.

Right.

That's how he was.

And he didn't live much longer.

What do we know about his activities between getting executed and killing his best friend?

So that felony charge, first-degree murder that they dropped against him, was only one of six felony charges that were dropped against Levine.

Over the next 18 months, he was repeatedly arrested for manufacturing drugs because he was cooking crack in his house, harboring an escapee.

I never figured out what that was about.

Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon because he shot at a guy in the streets of Fayetteville.

After like a bar argument or something?

No, it was either a rip-off or it was some drug deal.

And some other drug deal ended with Levine whipping out his firearm and busting shots at a guy.

He didn't kill him.

The other guy lived, but he was arrested for that and let go.

Every time he was let go.

We just interviewed Amanda Knox.

The diametric opposition.

Literally the opposite where this person clearly could not have done anything and is being held in prison for no reason.

And yet this is going on.

Well, it's because Levine is a black operations super soldier, literally.

And someone like that, they can't go to prison.

You can't have a guy like that in a courtroom.

That's just too much of a liability.

Not to mention the investment, the value value they place on these people.

And literally millions of dollars of training by the time you're SEAL 6.

Right.

That's probably the least important factor in this scenario, but it's still an important one.

In general, they don't get kicked off because he also stayed on Delta Force in the midst of all this.

After a certain number of arrests, I think after his fourth arrest, he was kicked off of Delta Force finally, which just consisted of him being moved over to the headquarters of the Army Special Forces and put in like a do-nothing position.

So eventually it was enough that he was kicked off the unit, but killing Mark Leschiger wasn't enough.

He stayed on active duty.

Six more arrests.

Six arrests total.

That's just in Cumberland County.

So I don't know he could have been arrested in other counties because he was traveling widely, including down to Texas.

And Timothy Dumas, by the way, probably don't want to switch tracks, but he was arrested seven times on felony charges and also was never prosecuted or convicted.

We cannot have people

in this country who can't be prosecuted.

We can't have that.

I agree.

No one should be above the law.

Yes.

But in Fort Bragg, in Fayetteville, in Cumberland County, special forces soldiers, especially JSOC operators, are effectively above the law.

I document case after case in my book.

The double murder of Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas, it's an important chunk of it.

It's a narrative that goes from the beginning to the end.

But as you guys know from reading it, there's lots of other cases that I talk about.

Ultimately, there's a trial that'll take place in 2026.

They hang those murders at Fort Bragg of Levine and Dumas on a 20-year-old black kid who seemingly has no connection to them, lived two counties over.

Explain their suspect.

So I don't want to spoil the ending of the book.

I'll talk about it, but as a way of prefacing my answer, and I also don't want to prejudice this guy's trial because this is a death penalty case.

This is a serious, serious criminal justice situation.

Current situation.

Current situation where it's still open.

This guy is accused of killing Timothy Dumas and William Levine.

For the reasons you just said and for other reasons, the sources that I've interviewed have a hard time understanding how the person who's accused could have been responsible.

He just doesn't fit anyone's idea of who they suspected.

He's not a part of any kind of drug trafficking mega scheme.

He was a guy who's already facing life in prison for another murder.

We're talking about a 20-year-old stick-up kid who lives two counties away, has no connections to the military, has no connections to Fort Bragg.

But for some reason, the Department of Justice is saying he's he's the one who did this, who came onto Fort Bragg and did this incredibly professional hit.

Knew the base well enough to go hide it in a place that was desolate.

I have to believe the Department of Justice does not simply frame people.

I can be cynical about some of our government institutions, but I haven't gotten to that point.

And so my question is, what evidence do they have?

None of it's been made public.

And secondly, even if this kid did have some involvement, who else was he working with?

In particular, did someone put him up to this?

What you're objecting to is if he's involved, it has to be related to the much bigger drug trafficking scheme that's going on.

Stay tuned for more armchair experts.

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Okay, so now let's touch on Afghanistan.

So there's a lot in this book that would shock people.

The narrative that we were told during our 20 years in Afghanistan was that some single digit percentage of the heroin that was making it to the U.S.

was in fact from Afghanistan.

But in point of fact, 90%

of all the world's heroin during our 20 years there was coming from Afghanistan.

It's more than 100% in a certain sense because during the 20 years that Afghanistan was occupied by the United States, it produced more heroin than the whole world could consume.

There are still stockpiles somewhere of Afghan heroin that has not even been sold.

But according to the DEA, only 1% of the heroin consumed in the United States during the many years of the terrible heroin crisis that we suffered in this country that was nearly the leading cause of death for years and years and directly led to the fentanyl crisis that we have now, which is the leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45.

We're at like 500,000 in the last six years or something.

It's like hundreds of thousands of ODs right now.

I know the OD number surpassed 100,000 at a certain point.

Yeah.

And I think it's probably stayed above that.

I think it was in 2020 that it hit 100,000.

Yeah, it's outrageous.

You know, vehicle deaths are like 52,000.

I think it's a really fair question.

What are the origins of this crisis in the United States?

And the traditional answer is that it has its roots in the over-prescription of opioid painkillers in the 1990s.

I think both are true.

That was what was going on that created this large demand for opiates in the United States.

It introduced a lot of folks to opiates.

But then something happened.

They cracked down on overprescriptions.

They put certain coding on the pills.

That might have been the end of it, except that that move coincided with a massive influx of very potent and very cheap heroin to the United States, particularly the China white-type heroin.

Also increasing supplies of black tar from Mexico, but primarily China white heroin.

So where did all of that heroin come from?

The answer is Afghanistan.

And what we're told, to the extent that anyone talked about this during the 20 years that the U.S.

occupied Afghanistan, we were told, well, it's the the Taliban that's doing this.

They're narco-terrorists.

Or to some more sophisticated audiences, they would say, you know, it's just kind of a dirty game over there.

Everyone's in the business, the heroin industry.

But the reality is that heroin production in Afghanistan directly results from U.S.

intervention there from the very beginning to the very end.

What are the mechanics of that?

I will try to keep it as brief as possible because we're talking about a 30-year history of one of the largest and most significant phenomena in the world, which was how Afghanistan became the biggest narco-state in history.

But briefly, the CIA armed and funded the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russian occupiers who had invaded to prop up a communist government.

But after those mujahideen won in what we call Charlie Wilson's war, perceived as this great CIA success, those warlords are the ones who originally turned Afghanistan into a narco-state.

They're the ones who planted poppy everywhere and forced people to toil in these fields making heroin because poppy grows very well in Afghanistan.

It's like perfectly suited for poppy.

This made them very unpopular with the Afghan people because nobody likes that.

It was terrible.

These people were also doing a lot of child sex trafficking.

The dancing boys of Afghanistan.

So one of the gnarliest docs I've ever seen.

I'm going to write something about that next.

Yeah.

There's a great front line on it.

Yes, there is.

I've seen that.

Really disturbing stuff.

I have to be careful so that I don't come off as like a Taliban sympathizer.

I'm absolutely not.

Their morality and ethics of the Taliban are totally alien to my own sensibilities.

Nevertheless, as much as we heard about their oppression of women and stuff, which they're definitely guilty of, the reason why the Taliban were popular is because they suppressed crime, including drug trafficking.

They had an anti-drug agenda and their ideological DNA from the very beginning.

And they were successful in totally eradicating.

the heroin industry from Afghanistan.

In fact, they eradicated it in the summer of 2001, just a few months before the U.S.

invaded after 9-11.

And when that happened, when JASOC and the CIA invaded Afghanistan in 2001, they immediately teamed up with the same narco-warlords that have been displaced by the Taliban.

And that's the group of people that became what we call the Northern Alliance and that became the Afghan client state.

One of their first actions once they were installed in power was to legalize poppy production.

And over the next few years, poppy production exploded exponentially.

They increased something like 7,500%.

And Afghanistan became by far the world's largest supplier of opiates, not just heroin, but morphine and opium.

The statistics are so staggering, it's hard to know where to start, but it became the biggest business in Afghanistan by far.

The whole country was totally dependent on the drug trade.

Every level of the U.S.-backed client state, from Hamid Karzai to the people that were his defense ministers, and police commanders, and militia commanders were allied with him, they were all in on the heroin industry.

Essentially, the U.S.-backed client state state that we supported for 20 years was the world's biggest drug cartel.

I mean, it's such a repeat of the 80s.

Well, people talk about Nicaragua and they talk about the Dark Alliance thing.

That was Mickey Mouse compared to what went on in Afghanistan.

You're talking about a very small amount of cocaine in comparison to 1,000 metric tons of pure heroin produced per year in Afghanistan.

Again, that's more than the whole world can consume.

Yeah.

And it was all being produced by the client state.

Define client state.

Client state is the government that we were supporting over there that was supposedly elected.

The one we were hoping to turn the country over to.

Exactly.

That was a giant drug cartel, among other things.

It was one of the most corrupt organizations in human history.

And that's nothing new, by the way.

The South Vietnamese government that the U.S.

tried to stand up in Vietnam in that war was also mind-blowingly corrupt and involved in the drug trade.

These are good companions.

That's right.

People that work for outside powers that are willing to work for, you know, an occupying military power are often motivated by mercenary motivations.

If they want something in return, why on earth would they cooperate?

That's what was going on for 20 years.

And again, to the extent it came up in the press, to the extent it was talked about, we were always told that it was the Taliban.

And people will still say that.

But something happened that made that argument essentially indefensible, which was that the U.S.

withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021.

The Taliban took over again, and they did an exact repeat of what they had done in the 1990s and 2000, which was to totally eradicate heroin from Afghanistan.

Wow.

Which they had accomplished by 2023.

It's all gotten rid of now.

It's all gone now.

Yes.

So isn't that fucking nuts?

It's so complicated.

It's just like everyone's bad.

Everyone's not bad.

And also there are bad people.

Not even bad people.

There are people that are in desperate situations that pursue the best for themselves, which hurts other people.

Well, so much of the time we're told there's this dictator over here.

There's this terrible country over here.

They're oppressing their people.

They're supporting terrorism.

But the response has to be every time, what do you plan to do about it?

How are you going to make that better?

You're going to go over there and topple that dictator.

You're going to go there and stand up a foreign government.

We have seen again and again that that doesn't work.

So my argument would be that we should stop being such busy bodies in world affairs, but I digress.

I'm on both sides of that.

You also need to be very involved, and I agree.

Yeah, you can just start.

They just arbitrarily start with the afghan russian and you follow all the blowback that we're still contending with to this day and the stuff we're doing now there'll be further blowback we'll contend with and you do wonder when do we try another approach my guys the ones we're talking about earlier mark leschecker billy levine timothy dumas they all serve tours in afghanistan during the peak of all of this drug trafficking.

And the Green Berets are working closely with Afghan drug traffickers.

So I trace some of the origins of the blowback in terms of the drug trafficking taking place around North Carolina to the war in Afghanistan.

And even Mark Mark got deployed to a neighboring state of Afghanistan.

Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan.

He went to both.

And when he returned from Tajikistan, his family said he was different.

His eyes were droopy.

He blamed it on a completely fabricated roadside attack that was never documented.

And he clearly came back as an addict.

That's right.

And Tajikistan is a country that the U.S.

used for years as a staging grounds for the war in Afghanistan.

It is where most of the heroin was smuggled out.

About 50%, give or take, about half the heroin went through Tajikistan in the north.

Tajikistan is an incredibly mountainous and remote and cold country that most people have never heard of.

But the U.S.

also invested a great deal of money and training standing up the security forces of Tajikistan in order to protect its supply lines into Afghanistan.

And lo and behold, we look at this Tajik security forces, and once again, we see one of the biggest drug cartels in the world.

Oh, man.

They were the ones responsible for moving most of the drugs to Kyrgyzstan, to Uzbekistan, ultimately bound for Russia or for the Baltic Sea.

So Tajikistan comes up again and again.

I see it on these guys' enlisted records.

If I had more time to investigate, I would want to know more about what's going on.

Yeah.

Wow, this is so fascinating.

Now, of course, the heroin industry has gone away because it's been totally replaced by fentanyl.

There are even people who are really conspiratorial who say that the U.S.

withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 because now this giant heroin cartel is no longer profitable for the U.S.

government.

I don't subscribe to that point.

I don't know.

I don't.

Because in fact, heroin had been supplanted by Fentanyl before that.

And also, it's my point of view.

We don't have to get into this, but I don't think the U.S.

is doing this intentionally.

They just don't care.

Exactly.

What is so unfortunate is I get so frustrated with these conspiracy theories.

And then on the other hand, I have to acknowledge we do do shady shit up to a point.

It's not.

confusing to me why they take the ball further down the yeah where's the line unfortunately yeah i don't think there's some war chest of money that the u.s has made off of heroin.

I think these decisions, people are regularly choosing what they think is the less of two terrible options.

You're going in there.

Who are we going to turn this place over to?

Well, who has the respect of the people?

You know, you just start kind of reverse engineering this.

The whole situation starts fucked and it continues to get more and more fucked.

I have known nothing about the case and I don't want to taint anything.

But again, if I'm like, okay, I've got these soldiers.

This guy's already going away to prison forever.

Yeah, I don't think they frame people.

And also, if I'm in the position where I've got to do some kind of damage control and I go, well, this guy's already going away for life.

That's horrible.

It is.

No, it is.

That's like exactly Amanda's situation.

But it's different than I want to go fuck with a stranger and destroy someone's life.

That's a different thing.

Yeah, you can justify your way out of all of it if you want.

But no, there's people that are responsible and there are people that aren't to just be like, this is convenient.

Yeah, I'm just saying.

It's not okay.

Yeah, this thin line, though, between a conspiracy, which is I'm going to go do this evil thing versus I see an opportunity that's unethical that could solve a lot of my problems are weirdly two different things.

You don't think so.

Really?

They are so different.

See what I'm saying at all or no?

I see what both of you are saying.

But I will say that, you know, as a lawyer, I believe in conspiracies.

Conspiracies happen all the time.

Conspiracy is a legal term.

That just means the group of people that are...

in a conspiracy or that are working together to achieve a goal that's criminal.

I don't find the term conspiracy theory to be very useful at all.

I'm only concerned with what the facts are.

Many times the facts do show a criminal conspiracy.

For what it's worth, if you're looking at individual actors, it doesn't matter what your intention is.

That's not a good defense to go in front of a judge and say, well, you know, I just had two bad choices.

Yeah.

And so I had to help the drug traffickers.

No, but that's not true.

Your intention is very much on trial.

Did I intend to kill this person or did I accidentally kill this person?

Those are dramatically different sentencing and classifications of murder.

You're right.

It would matter in the context of murder.

It would depend on the crime, but it certainly wouldn't matter in drug trafficking.

If you were saying, you know, I had to feed my sick kids or I had to help this guy or the other guy and they're both bad.

There would be what's called strict liability.

We're talking about whether the U.S.

government, the degree of awareness, degree of complicity, degree of intentionality.

Yes.

And I'm just saying that doesn't matter if you're going to analogize that to the case of like individual liability for drug trafficking.

I agree.

Kind of a philosophical discussion.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

Yeah.

I hate to use the word, but it says a thrilling read.

You write with such a page-turning pace.

You're such a great writer.

There's so much stuff in here.

Oh, the only question I forgot to ask is, what is Delta Force's G Squadron?

G Squadron is a compartmented element of Delta Force.

As little has been written about the unit, practically nothing has been written about G Squadron.

So it's even morally...

Oh my God.

Right, right.

Also, sorry, it's kind of laughable.

It's like this part, then this.

It just keeps funneling.

These guys love that.

It's a competitive environment.

You want to be a little better than the next guy.

These are people who have devoted their entire lives.

And I want to say, because we're being critical, I appreciate the fucking sacrifice, what people go through.

Also, in the book, you have one of the guys talking.

I think it's worth saying, he's like, there's two camps in special forces.

There are some guys that are like God-driven saviors, clean as a whistle.

They hate these other guys.

And then there's other guys that are like.

No, we're getting nasty and we do a nasty job and we're going to profit a little bit from it.

Even within there, you have these factions.

Of course.

And I have incredible gratitude for the people who go live on the top of a mountain for 12 days.

Again, intention, I do things relevant.

With the mindset of trying to keep me safe, I am deeply grateful for that.

So those people do exist.

I can't acknowledge often enough that there are people in these units.

There are people in Delta Force who, even though I don't agree with the sort of work that they do in the sense that I don't support their mission, if their mission is assassinating people in Iraq and Syria, I don't support that.

However, by their own internal lights, they have a sense of ethics that's consistent and it's it's not hypocritical.

Like you said, they're clean living.

They're oftentimes quite religious.

But obviously, my book focuses not on the good guys.

That's right.

I'm focused on the bad guys for a reason.

I just wanted to say out loud because, again, I went over there, I met a lot of those people, and there's so many fucking great people.

And there's a lot of people that they walk into a situation that they're learning is corrupt and they're in a very tricky situation and they might die in that situation.

I take the weight and gravity of that.

It's an incredible book.

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces.

Seth, I can only imagine this story is nearly over.

I don't think it is.

I think you'll be reporting on this for a while.

Not only because of that trial that I mentioned, but also because since the publication of the book, I've been getting new tips.

One thing was that Billy Levine was known to be writing a book, and you're not supposed to do that when you're on Delta Force.

Right.

I recently heard from someone who went to rehab with them who has a copy of the book that Billy was writing and informed me that it describes scenes of Billy doing Coke with higher level officers on Delta Force.

He said that on three occasions, special operations officials came down to that rehab facility in Texas and tried to convince Billy or tried to instruct him or direct him not to publish this book and that he refused because of the terrible place he was at emotionally.

And so that is another wrinkle, I think, in the story.

So I agree that it's not a liar.

Are you ever worried about you?

Are you like, is me talking about all this and exposing all this, putting myself in danger?

You're picking a fight with probably the toughest people in the world scariest people

literally I'm really grateful and glad you're doing it but I would be like

I am not the one trafficking drugs and killing people I haven't done anything wrong the stuff that I'm reporting on are crimes and if things are so far gone in that community that people there want to actually kill me to shut me up for that.

I mean, that's so far off the rails that I don't even know how to think about that.

Like we were saying before with the DOJ, I have to imagine that we're not at that point yet.

Whatever I perceive as the risk or danger that might exist, I don't let that affect what I write.

I don't even think about that when I'm writing a report.

I'm thinking about it now a little bit.

But I wasn't thinking about it when I wrote the book.

Well, if something happens to you, we have all this.

If you ever need someone to think of something that's scary that could happen to you, just call Monica right away.

She's really good.

I don't want to do that.

No, I'm protecting you because now we just said it.

So if anything happens to you,

people did it.

Yeah.

It's all there.

I hope that people in this community will share my desire to see it reformed.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

And restore it to this incredible thing it is.

Thank you so much, Seth.

I'm very much yourself.

Thank you guys.

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

Unfortunately, they make some mistakes.

I have an update.

Okay.

So remember when I was wrong about my period and you were right?

Yeah.

But then turns out you were wrong and I was right about my period.

That's right.

Turns out neither of us were right.

Never came.

It did come eventually.

But that day that it started, that was the day that I was right.

I was like, oh, yeah, this is the day it's supposed to come.

And it came.

Yeah.

That

lasted only just like two hours.

Two inches.

It was only two inches deep.

Okay.

Two hours.

And then it went away.

Yeah.

And then I started to panic.

Uh-huh.

Because a lot of days were going.

At first, I was like, oh, okay, well, whatever.

It'll come tomorrow or the next day.

A lot of days

were going by.

And I was definitely past the point

of when I should have started.

So then I was like,

oh boy, you know, what do I have?

What's going on?

What's going on?

I'm not pregnant.

I haven't hung out with Gor yet.

So I'm not pregnant.

Okay, with Blarthy the Bleserka.

Yep.

So,

yeah, I

was like, it's the Triz.

Ah,

that's what you concluded.

Is that a side effect?

It's not that I could find, but weight gain and loss can affect your periods.

Okay.

So I was like, it's this peptide.

It's this GLP-1.

I found it.

I found the issue.

Fixed another thing.

No more periods.

Oh, no, no, no.

You know, I'm on, because then I'm like, well, I'm in a menopause.

Right, right, right.

I have no more periods.

And

this sucks.

Yeah.

I was like, I'm going to have to get off of it, I guess.

Or I don't know what I'm going to do.

And then it came.

And in full fashion.

It came in full fashion.

Okay, right.

It came a full week late

from the

date that was already a little pushed.

Right.

So it was weird.

Yes, that is interesting.

I did love it.

But I wondered if maybe it was the sim that didn't want you to be right and didn't want me to be right and wanted to have it neutral.

Just to squash it.

Yeah.

Yeah, let me squash this for you guys.

You're both wrong.

Although you got a little, you got two hours of being right for sure.

I did, but

it was a tease.

I had that feeling.

I had the, I sang out loud.

It's such a good feeling to know that you're right.

Remember, I told you my mother made that song.

Yeah.

And I got to experience that in Nashville because, you know, I had this theory that I could park the bus and the tri-toon tri-toon next to each other after months of thinking I fucked up and built the barn nine inches too short.

I did that.

Also,

and do you have these days, or is this a guy thing?

Because I definitely, I asked my friend Chris, who was our builder, I said, does this happen to you?

Where I get a, I get a fever.

I start cleaning one thing.

And then I go berserk, bloth or the berserker.

I go bloth or the berserker.

So

before we we left, I was like, am I going to

leave the boat in until October or whatever?

And then I was like, I'm going to pull it out.

And I just want to get it out of the water, get out of the water really.

Oh, it's just covered in the thickest muck from sitting in a lake.

Yep.

The engine and everything else.

I'm like, no problem.

I have a sweet power washer.

I got

45 minutes.

This is my pattern.

You know, I'm the worst.

I'm the most optimistic estimator of how long it'll take me to use a power washer.

Okay.

I'll look at the driveway.

I'll go, oh, yeah, I could probably power a driveway in 45 minutes.

It's five hours.

Right.

Similarly, the pontoon boat was a three-plus-hour thing.

Okay.

And I'm sitting there and I'm getting spray all over the Corvette.

So I think, well, you're might as well.

You're going to put that thing away.

Let's do a full detail on that.

Let's get the car cover.

And then I was like, and then Monica just went crazy.

And I just, I detailed everything in the barn for

seven hours.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Went and met Chris at a salad bar.

And this, I want to say, is one of the best.

Spring earth power washer.

I rode my power washer there.

Great.

This is the compliment of all compliments to me.

There was a salad bar.

That's why we went there.

Great salad bars of America.

It's making the list.

Love it.

And I was taking a lot of runs at it.

I think most people make one salad, then their entree comes.

Okay.

I got in two full trips.

Great.

Ate my whole entree, steak, and then I'm like, I'm going back.

And when I went back up for the third time, a waiter who was not even ours, he said to me, You're really giving that salad bar a beating tonight, huh?

Oh.

And I go, Yeah, oh my God, yes.

And thanks for noticing because that's what I want to do when I go to the sale bar.

It's like, I want you guys to regret that it's all you can eat.

Oh, you want to punish?

I want the chef to have a tear in his eye when I walk out.

Like, fuck, we took it on the chip.

We lost money on that one.

Yeah.

Yep.

Okay.

And then that leads to

Crazy Sim

moment,

which is the table next to us, this lovely couple on a date, literally, lovers, stand up as they're leaving.

They said, hey, just wanted to say we love that story of you over at Sperry's with buying the other guy's dinner.

Oh, but do you think that was a way of asking you to buy their dinner?

The opposite.

They just brought that up and I said, oh, that's funny.

Deep cup, blah, blah, blah.

Nice to meet you.

Yeah.

And then when we were leaving, our server told us us they bought your dinner.

Yes.

I was like, oh, it's a direct one-to-one.

That's why he brought up Sperry's because he now bought our dinner.

Yeah.

What a blessing.

You didn't think you, you thought

you're so naive.

You heard that and you didn't think like this is going to lead, this has to lead to one of us doing this.

No, because people have said to me, I heard your Sperry story, but I wasn't at a restaurant.

They just heard it.

Okay.

So I wasn't putting together that he was then going to buy our dinner.

But what a, what an incredible gesture.

I think you're becoming a more and more naive.

It's possible.

Yeah.

I hope so.

I spent a lot of years being scrutinizing and cynical.

Yeah.

Sure, I was right all the time, but

whatever the song is.

It's

such a good.

Yeah.

So anyways, when those two vehicles were next to each other, I sang out loud by myself in the barn.

It's such a good feeling to know that.

That's awesome.

Yes.

That's how cleaning works.

Like

you start doing something and then the whole

house has to be perfect.

You just keep going.

I just keep going.

When you did all that and you're going to stop and not wipe the motorcycles down.

Yeah.

You're going to do that and you're not going to park them all.

Yeah.

I staged everything.

That's fun.

That feels good.

Yes.

It feels what it is.

Control.

Control.

Control.

Remember her?

JJ Jana Jackson?

Oh, no.

Control.

JJ to me is Jagers.

Jagers.

Yeah, yeah.

Jake Jonah.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

If you dare.

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Okay, I have a game, and this is sort of in keeping with what you just said.

Okay.

I have a new game I want to teach the world.

Okay.

Okay.

And Rachel taught me this.

It's called Wavelength.

Okay, great.

It's really fun.

So, I'm not very good at explaining.

Okay, great.

It's a new game I won't be able to explain.

So I'm going to think of a number in my head, one to 10.

Yeah.

10 being the most, one being the worst, basically, the least.

And I'm not going to tell you the number.

Okay.

But you're going to try to guess my number.

And how you're going to do that is by asking me questions.

You're going to say vegetables.

Okay.

And I'm going gonna let's say i picked the number three

i'm gonna think of a vegetable that i rank as three

okay okay so then oh this is fun yeah it's i'm trying to guess your number yes you're trying to guess my number and so i would you know i'd say like carrot and then you ask you know you can ask like five questions and then you have to guess my number Okay, okay.

Do you want to play?

Sure, I'll play it.

I would feel like it, I could observe it better one round if I had the number.

Okay, great.

And I'm just, if you say carrot, I'm saying how much I like that out of 10.

So I would say vegetable.

I would ask you vegetable.

And then if you in your head had the number three, you have to tell me a vegetable that you rank as number three.

Got it, got it.

Me, carrot is a three.

So I would say carrot.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah.

That would be hard because I got carrot up around six, probably.

See?

Okay, so we will try try it yeah let's try it and you pick and if you want to do your number okay i feel like it could be harder or easier depending on what it's hard you'd be shocked uh okay let's go okay um

fragrances

fragrances like we could you know vanilla musk amber spicy how much do i like fragrances

well

No, so the fragrance you know, this is hard.

So the fragrance you like the most would be a 10.

So right, I'm giving you, okay, I'm giving you a specific item from that category.

Yes.

Fragrances.

Lemon.

Okay.

Lemon.

Okay.

I think it's

mid to low.

Okay.

I think.

Los Angeles neighborhoods.

West LA.

Oh, no, no, no.

No.

Okay.

Cheviot Hills.

Okay, I think we're, I think we're in a four-ish.

Maybe, maybe lower.

Oh, Chevy.

Okay.

Okay.

I could ask something really bad.

Okay.

I won't because it's mean.

But I could ask

episodes.

Of our show.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I know that way.

Okay.

We can't do that unless you pick the high number.

Out of respect for the dead.

Okay.

Appetizers.

Ooh.

Okay.

Chips and salsa.

Chips and salsa.

Yeah.

Chips and salsa.

Yeah, it's not your.

You don't love it.

You like guac,

but chips and salsa,

I don't hear about much.

I never see you getting it.

But I don't think you hate it.

So,

okay.

I'm not allowed to respond.

No, you're not.

Three.

I think it's a three or four

or a two.

I don't know how to.

Hold on.

What?

Anything below five, you don't want to eat it, right?

Oh, not to me.

Interesting.

Uh-oh, okay.

Well, you kind of gave me a clue.

Yeah, I mean, okay.

I get two more questions.

Okay.

Like, like, if you put

pickled herring out there, that's a zero.

No, there's a one.

That's a one.

Okay, okay.

And then I can think of a lot of appetizers that I just want to eat.

But those would all all be like oysters are going to be

two.

Okay.

Shrimp cocktails at three.

I won't eat.

I don't really want to eat it.

But shrimp, cocktail, and like all that, they don't, it doesn't have to be like there's 10 in your ranking.

It's just like.

No, I know.

If it's below a five, I probably would pass.

No, like a four or a

four is like a little below average.

Like five is mid, right?

Like totally out of it.

Above five is I enjoy it.

Below five, I don't enjoy it in descending order.

This is granular.

Okay, okay.

So, I just wanted to, I feel like you needed the framing of how I think before you're noticing a trend.

Okay, because you're worried because I'm going lower, I need to be going higher.

Okay, um, like I don't walk in a room and smell lemon and go, like, oh, right, it's not okay, you're saying too much.

Okay, um, books of all time, yeah,

okay, boy, that's something,

Isn't that fun?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really fun.

Books is hard because I don't, I like, I make sure everything's vetted.

It's rare that I read a but if you read

probably that you're like, yeah, that was like a fine book.

Or yeah, I would say Lolita.

Okay.

Okay.

I think I get one more question, but I think I know where we're at.

Okay.

What do you think it is?

I think it's a five,

but

okay.

I'm going to go

physical traits on your body.

Okay.

Okay.

I'll say legs.

Okay.

I'm going five.

Okay.

What was it?

Six.

Oh, shit.

Six?

Cheviot Hills.

Yeah, it's a nice neighborhood.

It is, but you can't.

Like, I don't want to be on the west side, but it's a nice neighborhood.

When I'm there, I'm like, this is very nice.

I could, I could.

Okay, I could live here.

It's on the wrong side of the town.

And then lemon smells clean, but I don't love it.

Okay, right, right, right,

right.

Right.

Only the six.

I mean, I reckon.

You barely.

I recognize it's well written.

Okay.

And that maybe that was

a bad one.

All right.

So I was, I don't like losing.

Okay.

You usually get it.

I get it sometimes.

Uh, you got a number?

Yeah.

Okay.

Um, female clothing brands.

Okay.

I'm going to go

St.

Laurent, YSL.

Okay.

I have it.

Let's.

Feel free to speak aloud.

That's

part of the.

I mean, in my mind, I think

I don't know much about fashion, but I think that's an eight.

Okay.

Car.

Car.

You're pretty limited, right?

In the car.

A Lexus suv okay

movie movie

um

yeah

i know why interstellar

oh

huh that that

that's got me now um

yeah i think it's eight it's eight

It's eight.

I was a little with Lexis.

I was like, could be a seven.

Uh-huh.

I love this.

YSL, I was like, it's either an eight or a nine.

I don't think it's a seven or an eight.

So I was like, is it nine or is it seven?

Sure.

It's a good game.

It's fun, right?

I like it.

So now we taught the world.

So you guys can play with your friends.

It's really fun.

That is.

It took a second conceptually, but I did get it.

Yeah.

You get to learn about people.

I feel like there was one.

Oh, I did want to tell you one other story from Nashville.

Okay, great.

Let's hear it.

Which was

this was the

this was the funnest day there.

This, this was, we knew we were going to brick tops at night.

Uh-huh.

So I think everyone was just really excited about that.

Their fun meal.

We had a great day on the boat.

We played some cards while the kids explored.

They're in the mud.

It's great.

And then

we go to brick tops.

We We have the most incredible meal.

Our dude, Dan, who we've now had like five times, he's like, Jess, this guy is as good as someone can possibly be.

Oh, that's great.

At one point, I looked to my left, and there is a champagne bucket full of ice and four Ted Seekers sitting there.

And I'm like, how did they fucking?

That's crazy.

So, anyways, we just had a ton of fun there.

And then we decided we're going straight to DQ.

And

I had, let's be clear, I had overeaten at Brick Tops.

Sure.

Those deviled eggs and candied bacon.

Holy smokes.

So then

when we're in line at DQ, both of my children tell me they're going to want bites of my banana split blizzard.

Okay.

They want to order something different, but everyone wants a bit of that.

So I would have normally gotten a small.

This is my move at Dairy Queen.

Small banana split blizzard, add butterfinger.

Yep.

I decided, let's go large.

They're going to be eating on.

And then I also get a hot fudge Sunday with extra fudge.

Small.

Yep.

Okay.

So small blizzards, if i'm going hard which is but i ended up with the hot foot sunday and this large well and they didn't take

many bites okay but you finished it i finished it i finished my uh uh you know hot food sunday i had some bites of other people's stuff it was unhinged

and I went outside because Kristen was going to take a photo with one of the people working there, but they were so understaffed.

There was like two women working and 100 people in there.

It was Sunday before Labor Day.

I think they were planning on a normal Sunday.

Anyways, so she's waiting till one of this gals got a break, right?

So I'm outside and I'm walking.

I'm quite uncomfortable.

And then I have a burp that is immediately more than I bargained for.

And I'm trying to be very discreet.

And I'm walking like in front of a car in the grass and I'm having some burps and some issues.

And now everyone's outside watching me, right?

Except for Kristen, who's inside waiting to take this picture.

And I'm now getting really sweaty and I'm having lots of burps.

And I take my shirt off at one point.

Now everyone's really having a field day laughing because I'm in quite a state.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm sweating bullets.

I have my shirt off.

I'm just roaming the parking lot looking for secret places in case I get sick again.

This man and this woman come out and they're also with some like younger people, like maybe early 20s.

It's clear to me that they're the parents, and then they have an adult kid and a friend or whatever it is.

And I happen to be parked directly in the middle of their two cars.

So they split as they're coming to their cars.

And I'm just standing next to my car with my shirt off.

And the mom says loudly to the son, Are you coming over?

And I go, I might.

What's the vibe?

Like, am I going to have to put my shirt on?

Oh, that's funny.

And it was so funny.

And they cracked up.

Oh, yeah.

I was a mess, but I really got something out of it.

Wow.

It was so fun.

Now, did it subside?

Do you know you have these memories of your parents?

I just, I'm guaranteed.

I guarantee you that this is one of these memories.

Lincoln and Delta will be like 30 million.

Remember that time dad was like rolling around the parking lot shirtless?

Sure.

Yeah.

Sure.

I don't have those.

You don't?

When mom or dad would act crazy?

I mean, I have plenty of like,

I'm embarrassed by my parents' story.

Sure, sure, sure.

But.

yeah, that would have killed you if you looked outside and your show was fucking stirling the bargain with his shirt off.

Yeah, they,

to their credit, behaved pretty, um, kept it together a lot better,

yeah.

Kept it together, uh, and then went home and watched Jack Reacher.

Oh, nice.

I'm gonna say it again, Tom Cruise.

You gotta, let's just come in here so I can celebrate you.

Yeah,

we'd love to have you, Tom.

What a guy, man.

Jack Reacher.

I don't think I've seen that one.

It's great.

I believe it.

Yeah.

Second one, we, we,

you know, that's a three.

First one is great.

Yeah, great.

Okay, here are our facts.

Okay, yeah, let's do some facts.

Only a couple facts for Seth.

Great episode.

Fantastic story.

Yeah, once in a while, we have one where I can't stop telling every single person I see about this episode.

We got I went on a hike with the Castro, and we have the mutual friend that's in, that was Special Forces.

Yeah.

And I had to tell him every single thing.

Ma'am.

And then randomly, my friend Kevin Seegers is reading the book.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

I think it is a bestseller.

Yeah.

Which it deserves to be.

Yeah.

It's so fucking well written.

It's like one of these super dense, twisty-turny type articles that suck you in.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I brought up potentially that something could be going on in the CTE realm.

So I asked Chris, Chris Nowinski, who we had on, the CTE expert,

because you said it comes on later than that.

He said, the earliest case we've diagnosed was 17.

It starts while you're playing and continues to get worse after you stop getting hit in the head.

Most people aren't symptomatic until over 50, but a heck of a lot of people struggle in their 20s and 30s, die by suicide, and have significant CTE.

Yeah, he said he could go into more detail, and then he sent a study.

Oh, September is our concussion awareness month.

Oh, ding, ding, ding.

Ding, ding, ding.

What timing?

Okay.

Now, what's the true name for bath salts?

The drug name.

Okay, so the group is called synthetic cathinones.

I might be saying that wrong, but I think it's right.

Synthetic cathinones.

And then there's mephedrone, methylone, MDPV, and flaca.

or flaca.

Do you remember when the whole bath salts thing was really in the news every day and people were eating other people?

It was like turning people into cannibals.

I know.

Zombies.

It took me so long to realize bath salts wasn't bath salts.

Right.

I thought they were just bath salts and people were like huffing them or eating.

You need a

code word to sell it at a head shop.

You can't say euphoric powder.

Right.

You gotta say bath salts.

It says they're sold under many different street names, including Bliss, Cloud9,

Drone, Ivory Wave, Meow Meow,

Vanilla Sky, and White Lightning.

I mean, as someone who loves drugs, these don't even tempt me.

It just feels like you're going to eat a fucking battery and find out what happens.

I mean, it just sounds so weird.

Oh, it's also a lot of fun.

At least cocaine starts as a fucking plant.

Right.

Oh, yo, yoi.

Oh, the number of ODs, fentanyl ODs.

This says ODs 2021, 60,674.

2020.

How many?

60,674.

2022, 63,674.

2023, 76,282.

2024, this says 48,422 provisional estimates subject to change.

It's a big drop.

Yeah, there was a big drop there.

That's good.

Yeah.

Yeah, U.S.

overdose deaths decreased almost 27%.

Oh, my God, though.

There was a 1,160.9%

increase in deaths that involved fentanyl from 2014 to 2023.

And now there's like super fentanyl.

There's something like

a thousand times stronger.

The DEA guys were telling us that there's one molecule of it.

That's so scary.

That's it for Seth.

Great episode.

I really hope people listen to that and he's really doing some

intense work.

And I really, if anyone is thinking about taking him out,

don't.

And we will find you.

We'll find you.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's you wrote that check.

I'll find you.

Monica's going to find you.

And I can do some damn thing.

You think you can find

people trained in hiding?

Yes.

Okay.

I mean, if anything happens to him, it is clear that there was something

someone took him out.

Yeah.

Don't you think?

Yeah, I just don't like this topic of him getting taken out.

Well, he needs, I'm just being careful for him.

Like, this is scary stuff.

Yeah.

And some journalists are at risk.

Yeah.

So just don't do it.

Protect Seth.

Yeah, protect Seth.

Okay.

Okay.

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