Florida Man Invades Venezuela

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G'day, Matt Bevan here.

This is If You're Listening.

While writing last week's episode about Venezuela and a potential conflict with the United States, I had the very sad but familiar experience of cutting one of my favourite parts out of the script.

It's about an attempt by a group of American mercenaries led by a gentleman from Florida to invade Venezuela and kidnap President Nicolas Maduro and collect the very significant bounty he put on his head by the US Justice Department.

This raid or operation or attempted invasion happened in May 2020.

Now there was quite a lot of stuff going on in May 2020.

You may remember being unable to leave your house during that time.

You may also remember the Black Lives Matter protests kicking off after the death of George Floyd.

There was a lot going on, but I think this story

is so bonkers that it deserves more attention.

Now, while writing the episode and then cutting it out, I really felt like I was just scratching the surface of this story.

So I'll tell you what happened with the raid in a second.

But first of all, we need a little bit of background on the mastermind, and I'm using that term slightly ironically, behind this plot.

If your listening producer, Adair Shepard is here, she has been looking into a man named Jordan Goodreaux.

G'day, Adair.

Hello.

Yeah, I'm excited.

This guy is so mad.

The first twist in this story is that while he's Floridian in his soul, he is actually from a place that's almost the anti-Florida.

He's from Canada originally.

Okay, right.

So being a Florida man is kind of a state of mind.

I think so.

But it's not necessarily about where you grew up.

It's about where you end up.

He's definitely an American citizen now and definitely identifies as a Florida man.

Okay.

He's the final boss, Florida man, for sure.

Yeah.

He's a Florida man, all right.

Yeah.

But he grew up in Canada.

Yep.

And he actually first joined the Canadian military.

And he was only there for a a year.

And he was like, this isn't challenging enough for me.

And he went and joined the US military, which I think is just such a crazy thing to do.

I didn't even know that you could just go and be in the military of another country.

Like, I know that people, for example, at the moment, you got a lot of people that are going to Ukraine.

They're not being in the Ukrainian military.

There's sort of a foreign legion sort of set up.

But the fact that you can just switch from the Canadian.

military to the American military.

It's so wild.

So he didn't become a US citizen until after he left the military.

Yeah.

So not only was he in the military, but he was something called a green beret, which is like an elite unit that's in counter-terrorism and unconventional warfare is the term that they use.

Yeah, they're kind of commandos, basically.

They're part of the army, as opposed to being a Navy SEAL, which is obviously part of the Navy or a Marine.

They are army soldiers who are sort of commandos of some kind.

But I've been describing him as an American mercenary.

Am I right in that description of him in any way?

Yes.

So he served in the US military for 15 years and then he got medical retirement after an accident in 2016.

And he first dipped his toe in after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

He went there and worked as part of a private security firm and he realised like how much money he could make and that kind of gave him the bug, basically.

That is such a classic Hurricane Maria story.

I mean, I remember that it was 2017.

Yeah.

Hurricane Maria, there was quite a lot of money going

to interesting characters like Jordan Goodreaux.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Because the US needed all these jobs done and they put all these jobs out for tender and people could just tender and they could go, all right, well, I'll do it for this price,

even if they don't have any experience in it.

A lot of people, I think, went, oh my goodness, there's a lot of money to be made going to parts of Central America and the Caribbean and soaking the U.S.

government.

So he's just another one of these guys.

All right.

Yeah.

Fascinating.

He started this company called Silver Corp USA, which don't make your company sound like the baddie from a Pixar film, you know.

What are you doing?

And

how would you expect someone to advertise like mercenary services, do you think?

Dudes walking around, looking tough, holding guns, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

Is kind of it.

I've got a video for you if you could click on that link.

All right, let's have a look.

The world is dangerous.

Some problems can't be solved with conversation.

We manage risk.

Silver Core USA.

What I think I'm seeing here is shots of like body cam footage of like police operations and some military operations that may or may not have anything to do with Silver Core

interspersed with like just

shots of him dressed quite normally running in the jungle.

Yes.

There's so much running.

Also, really emotional music, right?

Yeah, yeah, super emotional music.

Yeah.

It's kind of so corporate.

And yeah, he was very into branding.

Apparently, he took a lot of like courses on branding and he was very into his Instagram presence.

Yeah, okay.

So he's an Instagram mercenary.

Got it.

I found that unexpected.

That's not how I would find my contract killers personally.

The tagline next to it says, Our elite staff bring unmatched dedication to building a safer world.

I can tell you that when we get to their activities in 2020,

I wouldn't say that they bring unmatched skill

to their operations, but go on.

So before Silver Corp USA got into the invading foreign countries business, they tried something also very interesting, but it's a bit different.

So the company was founded in March 2018, just a few weeks after the Parklands school shooting in Florida, which killed 17 people and wounded 17.

And basically, Goudreau decided that he had a solution to the school shootings crisis.

Yep.

And if you haven't picked up the vibe, it's not gun controlled.

Sure.

Yep.

Yep.

Basically, he pitched this at a Orlando Expo for school security products.

A thing that America has.

School Security Expo.

Yep.

This is in 2018.

And they were like, it's grown by 75% this year.

Like, yeah, because of the school shooting that you had.

Sure.

So his pitch is basically 21 Jump Street except with soldiers.

Okay.

It's basically him and his mates will pose as teachers inside schools to protect students and his pitch is so bizarre so he's saying firstly like you know they'll cozy up to the kids and get information and his quotes about this are so hello fellow kids energy

how do you do fellow kids yes yes that's it that's it he was like the kids are just going to think you're a cool shop teacher and you're like hey what's up fellas i got to sit down with the kids who are alone playing d dnd

and just try to see what their problems are alone playing dnd

that doesn't work but anyway true

very much a group game that's so true

those nerdy kids they're really the ones who are going to open up to the armed shop teacher exactly

Sounded like a pretty expensive operation.

Is the government going to pay for this?

How was he expecting for this to be funded?

No, this is the best bit.

He was going to get the parents to pay for it, pay a $8.99 fee a month.

He likened it to a Netflix subscription.

And then when at this expo, when his PR person was like, oh, I mean, we probably could get involved with like the school board and get some government money, he was like, no, it's going to be way too slow doing it that way.

This is the model.

Subscription model to mercenaries in your school.

A subscription to...

Your children being alive.

Okay.

So yes.

I don't know how successful that was.

He did do a few other things with this company.

He did security for at least one Trump rally and perhaps a few others.

And that connection to the Trump administration might come up a bit later.

And then also in 2019,

he did security for a concert on the Colombia-Venezuela border that was organized by Richard Branson.

And it was in support of Guaido.

Right.

So this is Juan Guaido, who, if you haven't heard the episode or can't remember, there was a lot of new names in that episode.

Juan Juan Guaido was the Speaker of the House in the Venezuelan parliament following the 2018 election, which was allegedly

rigged in favour of the President, Nicolas Maduro.

Guaido in early 2019 basically used his powers as the Speaker to claim that the election was null and void and that he was in fact the legitimate president of Venezuela.

Yes, yes.

So he made an Instagram post.

Of course, Pixar didn't happen.

Could you open up that post and read the caption for me?

Venezuela Aid Live, controlling chaos on the Venezuela border, where a dictator looks on with apprehension.

Man, that is good branding, isn't it?

Yeah, it's really good.

And so this is where he met

some key Guaido supporters who supported him in his mission later that Matt's going to tell you about.

And it's where it clicked that there was a business opportunity in Trump's desire to oust Maduro.

Yes, and the massive $15 million at the time bounty that had been put on Maduro's head.

Yes.

So this is the point at which we get to this raid.

So I'm going to start the story on the 1st of May 2020.

So remember that date, the 1st of May, okay?

There was an article published in the Associated Press by reporter Joshua Goodman.

It says, quote, the plan was simple but perilous.

Some 300 heavily armed volunteers would sneak into Venezuela from the northern tip of South America.

Along the way, they would raid military bases in the socialist country and ignite a popular rebellion that would end in President Nicolas Maduro's arrest.

What could go wrong?

It turns out, pretty much everything.

The failed attempt to start an uprising collapsed under the collective weight of skimpy planning, feuding among opposition politicians, and a poorly trained force that stood little chance of beating the Venezuelan military.

Now, the article says, is talking about this camp that the AP had found out about, which was run by Goudreau

and his new friends that he'd met at that concert in Colombia.

It is

a camp that's in Colombia, and they've got all these ex-Venezuelan military guys, and they're training them to carry out this operation where they were going to attack Venezuela and take Nicolas Maduro hostage.

But the article says that the operation was unsuccessful because it had been infiltrated by Maduro's intelligence network early on.

They quote the head of Maduro's intelligence network as saying, we knew everything.

Oh my God.

And saying that they actually financed some of the meetings that the leadership did with each other.

just so they could spy on them.

So they were like, you know, let's all meet up at this hotel in Bogota and we'll pay for the meeting room.

Oh my God.

And so they all meet to discuss the plans, and Maduro's people have actually organized the meeting so that they could be across it.

Wow.

It had been discussed on Venezuelan state TV in April, so the month before this article came out, as an example of US military and CIA provocation.

Although the AP says that there's no evidence that the CIA or the US military was involved,

but by then, you know, what had initially been a group of 300 men in training, purely due to Goudreau and and his co-leaders'

dysfunction and competence, had basically been whittled down to about 60 men.

So that was this story that was referring to the operation as a failed attempt with everything written in the past tense, and it was published on the 1st of May, basically saying, you know,

what a mistake.

Yes.

But on the 2nd of May, they went ahead with the operation anyway.

Oh my God.

So it has already been published in the world's media.

What?

The Venezuelans have all said we know everything that's going on here, and they launched the operation anyway.

Godreaux started posting videos about it on Twitter, and we've got one of those videos here.

At 1700 hours, a daring amphibious raid was launched from the border of Colombia, deep into the heart of Caracas.

By the time he'd posted that video, six of his men were already dead.

Oh my gosh.

So the plan initially had been, you know, to go through the jungle border between Colombia and Venezuela but instead of that they'd gone to the very northeastern tip of Colombia which is this peninsula that's weirdly a desert I don't really understand why it's a you know it's like this weird little desert peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean they'd gone there they had one motorboat and one fishing boat that's mad a fishing boat

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So the advance party, you know, the first guys

would go in the motorboat and they would launch off from this spot at the northeastern tip of Colombia.

And their plan was both the boats would sail along the Venezuelan coast.

And the thing is that the capital of Venezuela, Caracas, is on the coast.

But it's quite a long way from Colombia.

We're talking a 16-hour boat trip is what they were planning to do.

So they would sail along the Venezuelan coast for 16 hours,

land near Caracas.

In fishing boats when they know you're coming.

Yeah.

Well, their plan was basically that they didn't know that they were coming by boat.

Okay, okay.

They think that the Venezuelans think that they're coming by land.

Sure.

They've done all their training to do a land operation.

They've loaded onto these boats.

Now, these guys are not Navy officers.

The weather is bad.

They load onto the boat.

They all immediately get seasickness and they are just spending the full trip vomiting.

Oh, my God.

They are so sick.

But the other thing was the motorboat was so much faster than the fishing boat.

The motorboat went off over the horizon and lost contact with the fishing boat because they were so far away that their radios couldn't talk to each other, right?

Yeah.

And they were off the coast and so they didn't have any internet.

And so they lost contact with the motorboat.

They're still chugging along.

There's 10 men in the motorboat and 50 guys, including two american mercenaries are in the fishing boat this is the kind of logistical problems that you'd have like on a trip with your mates yeah yeah yeah oh man oh the first car

oh we got a reception what do i do when he stayed with us anyway so they couldn't communicate with each other the motorboat was intercepted by the Venezuelan military and six men were killed on that boat.

The rest were captured.

Oh, wow.

The fishing boat found out about this from Goureau, who was still in Florida.

What?

He He wasn't there?

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

Goudreau is not with them.

Goudreau is in Florida.

I can't tell whether he was meant to be with them and they just decided to go with the operation because of the Associated Press story being published or something.

Okay.

They potentially saw the Associated Press story, but go.

I mean, either way, not a good look.

No, no, not a great look.

Anyway, so he's sort of trying to puppeteer all of this and he says, look, the motorboat's been taken.

You guys in the fishing boat should try and make landfall.

so the fishing boat just drives to the beach drops off all of the venezuelan expats but the two american mercenaries and the leader of the fishing boat group captain antonio sakia

they decide that they don't want to go into venezuela anymore fair enough and they try to make a break for it they tried to make it to international borders okay they didn't make it they were intercepted

by the venezuelan military but this is what goodreaux posted.

Our men are continuing to fight right now.

Our units have been activated in the south, west, and east of Venezuela.

Commander Niato is with me, is co-located, and Commander Saka is on the ground now fighting.

Wait, so that video was from Florida?

But they're like posing in the jungle.

Yeah, yeah, they're in the...

It seems like he's wanting to show that he's there fighting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.

He's just like in his backyard in Florida, yeah.

That's so funny, okay.

So obviously, Commander Sakia is not on the ground now fighting.

He was trying to make a break for it, trying to escape

and had been captured.

Goudreau later said that he was being deliberately misleading in order to try and give his men the chance to escape.

The whole thing fell apart.

Everybody was arrested.

Goudreau has continued to do interviews and he has this fantastic quote from an interview that he did with Venezuelan journalist who asked him why he had attempted to invade by sea, which is a lot easier to detect than trying to sneak in through the jungle.

And I've got a link there for you if you want to watch what he said.

Are you familiar with Alexander the Great?

The Battle of Galgamella.

He's completely outnumbered.

He struck deep into the heart of the enemy, and that's how he won.

Oh my God.

Amazing.

But he didn't win.

He didn't win.

Okay.

He's not Alexander the Great.

No, okay.

He's Jordan Goudreau.

A little bit different.

So the whole thing was an utter, utter catastrophe.

Everyone involved is dead or in jail, apart from the two Americans who have been released in a prisoner swap.

Also, a couple of the Venezuelans, the ones they dropped on the beach,

they've managed to escape into Colombia.

being charged with crimes in Colombia.

Oh my God.

Because the Colombians are like, please don't launch coups from our territory.

Yeah.

So what's Goudreau up to, though?

Because as we said, he was in Florida the whole time, so he didn't get caught.

Yes.

What's he been up to since this unbelievable operation?

So pretty soon after that, he says he was contacted by the FBI for a meeting.

But then the morning of that meeting, the FBI raided his house and he was woken up to guns knocking on the door.

They love doing that.

They love it.

They really love.

So here's my theory.

Because I've now been covering people who've had their houses raided by the FBI.

It's kind of our specialty here on, if you're listening.

They love to be like, oh, yeah, if you could meet us tomorrow at this place in order to make sure you're in town.

Wow.

And then they're like, knock, knock at 6 a.m.

After that, he fled the country.

He fled to Mexico.

As you do.

As you do.

And so he kind of was on the run, but then he did come back into the States to look after his sick mum.

And it seems like they weren't really after him because he was just living his life then for four years being a florida man for another four years yep and then last year they finally arrested him and they charged him with weapons smuggling so that was smuggling the weapons to colombia yeah for this operation yes right orchestrating a coup maybe isn't there's not a specific legal thing for that that they can charge him with so they were like weapons that's what we can charge you with if there was laws against americans uh attempting to trigger coups in central america yeah and northern South America and in the Caribbean, then the CIA wouldn't have any staff.

Yeah, this is true.

This is true.

It would be a bit hypocritical of them.

So he is arrested.

He's now out on bail and he's awaiting a trial next year, but he's still really active on social media.

And I've got a video for you.

Oh, okay, cool.

I'm being prosecuted because I

launched an

executive branch-sponsored mission into Venezuela to get Maduro out four years ago

and

powerful opponents of Donald Trump and the CIA and FBI sabotaged me to hurt him.

Got it.

Oh,

okay.

Yeah.

He's basically claiming that the FBI and the CIA worked to sabotage his mission that was an executive branch directed mission.

And his lawyers have also stated in court filings that he was recruited by a personal bodyguard to Donald Trump and that the operation was sanctioned by the Trump government and specifically by Vice President Mike Pence at the time.

Yeah, yeah.

They deny all of this, obviously.

Mike Pence specifically has denied it.

They definitely deny this.

I don't think, look, look, I have read more about the first Trump administration than most people.

Yes, I'm sure.

And I really don't think Mike Pence

was the guy that was like organizing the Venezuela coups.

Not really his vibe, is it?

I really don't think that Mike Pence was in on that sort of thing.

Yes.

But that's where he's at.

And the trial will be next year and there'll probably be more to come out in that.

Are there claims also that he had some sort of a connection with Juan Guaido as well, the apparently legitimate president of Venezuela?

Yes, definitely.

So the claims are that originally when he was planning the plot, there was a connection and then they kind of cut ties as they realized how mad he was.

But that's like the speculation.

Oh, you want to do a coup on Maduro?

Sounds good.

Can I tell you a camp?

Oh, oh,

okay.

We would rather not have anything to do with this.

Okay.

Excellent story.

Oh.

Really, really excellent.

And looking forward to finding out more from the trial next year.

Adair, thank you so much.

Thank you.

We're taking a few weeks off from new full scripted Thursday episodes.

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On Thursday, we're going to be replaying an episode that is all about how China cooked the books when it came to their population data.

How can you make plans for a country when you don't know how many people you have?

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