Transcript of Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer

How do you cope? So we just got in a Mexican standoff with him, and I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood.

Why do you think there were no shots fired?

We were being hunted. The older guy said, The body is a gift.

Being recruited by the cartel.

That's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this. I resigned that day. She said, There's no such thing as going back home, man. Either you change on your way back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone, and you don't recognize it when you come back. How How long into your career, to your law enforcement career, in Tijuana, did it take for it to become real?

Where you were like, This isn't a fucking game.

As soon as I got out, probably the second day on the job, we were spread out in Baja State. I got to see immediately the no fucks given by the cartels. So I remember me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown Tijuana in full kit, driving around in some marked vehicles and getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us. We parked aside, and everybody ran out of the cars and adopted defensive positions. And A convoy, I'd say, probably somewhere, 15 vehicles just passed right next to us. A few of them armored. All of them were the AK-47s. Some of them had federal police uniforms. Some of them have army uniforms. We didn't know who they were. We're getting calls from the 911 service they have down there from the municipal police that they were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't municipal cops. We just got in Mexican standoff with them. Nobody shot around, but they just passed by us. We called for support from the local police, and nobody showed up.

How many of you guys were there?

Probably nine.

Nine? What's that? Two cars?

That's two cars, yeah.

And they had 15 fucking vehicles.

Yeah. That's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this. Fuck, man. There's no winning. Not like this.

Why do you think there were no shots fired?

They didn't feel threatened by us. They didn't have any fear. They just passed by and they actually went to a local restaurant there in an adapted position. Decisions around it, had dinner, and then went back to your cars and left. No support came on our end. So that's when you realize how fucked you are and how no support and how there's just no backing there. This was before the Philippic Health Iran administration. Slightly but surely, things changed. We started getting more support, started getting more vehicles, more people coming in. We started working directly with the military and directly with some federal operational police forces, eventually getting fear put into the opponent, the enemy, the cartel guys. It took some time. At the start of it, it It was just hopeless. It was hopeless. Going through the motions, I think, took about a year into it that a few of my friends were killed. They used to rent out hotels for us to stay in. We had this buddy system going on. If you wanted to go outside, you had to have a buddy system. But you would have to inform that you were going out.

They didn't inform. They went to the store, thought it was easy, so they crossed the street Went to this convenience store, and they got picked up by some cartel guys, dressed as federal agents. They had the blue uniforms and everything with the patches, everything, down to every detail. They were taken. They were zip-dyed and put into a van. They were found 24 hours later. One of them had his ID screwed to his forehead. They were We're being hunted.

Yeah.

That's when paranoia.

Less than a year.

That's less than a year. I came out of there in a generation of 32 people, and a lot of them are gone. But those were the first really close ones to me that I saw, but just leaving in a horrible way. They're all young. I knew I'd just been to a party with the girl, and I met the girlfriend of one of them. It was a thing. I told her, Don't marry, don't get girlfriends because You don't want to leave widows. Just for perspective, it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide if your profession is a cop, or at least it was back then. Because we're not the... Depending on where you were, cops are despised.

Wrapping up your career, you talk about being recruited by the cartel. I wanted to go a little deeper into that. I would imagine that you were recruited several times or you had already said that you had friends that have been recruited out of the police or maybe the military into the cartel.

I mean, the offer was an offer. They were always... You would always get intermediaries approaching you like, Hey, Ed, this is much money. All It takes is for you to work with us. But it was obvious to anybody. As soon as you take an offer like that, you're owned, you're theirs. If you fuck up, if you're not useful, or if somebody finds out you're working for somebody that they're not a part of, you'll either get arrested or get killed by the rival group that you're working against or your career ends. I got a lot of offers, a lot of them. Never took any of them. A lot of my friends and a lot of the people that I used to work with did, or eventually would put into a position where there was no choice. Plata or plomo, silver or lead. Colombian term, but it's popular in Mexico. Another code for it, it was one finger up and one finger down. What do you want? You want plata or plomo? You want to be on the ground or you want to stay up here in the world of the living. I wasn't greedy. There's a lot of people that went into policing in Mexico.

They wanted to find a million dollars and bury a wall or something or just be on the payroll of somebody. I remember going to some of the meetings at the office and seeing some new Hummers outside and some of the guys owned. It's scratching my head at it. A lot of us went through a certification process called Kalia. It's an American certification process. With that, a lot of confidence exams, polygraph testing, all this type of stuff. All of us went through it. A lot of people got kicked out or fired after they went through that process, which to us, to me, I passed, so I stayed on. I figured that all the people that had passed stayed on. They were on the up and up. But people can be corrupted from one day to another. We were careful about everything, but I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it. Administration ends, another administration comes in, and a landmark case declares everybody that was fired based on the polygraph exam or the confidence exams as unconstitutional. All of a sudden, you have six years' worth of people that were kicked out of the job, coming back into the job, their wages being paid forward.

You had people that were suspected of seeing a lower cartel participation in the office now, back at the office. It got really bad. Basically, brought into the office all the work that I was doing and I got an offer to work for a single side of it, basically. They told us, Hey, remember you're working here? Yeah. Well, we're going to work against these guys over here only. We want you to come in. Okay, let me think about it. Basically, we want us to work against one side, which means you want us to work for this side. I resigned that day. There was just no getting out of it or squirming out of it or going somewhere else. I didn't have any... All the people that I wanted I knew within high-level government were gone because the administration changed. All the people that I knew in the leadership in the office were moved around, and I just had no choice. So I went outside, got my resignation Bring it out, signed it, handed everything in in the duffle bag, handed in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio. Got myself into a car, called some of my friends, my American friends.

Actually, two Two of them went down there, helped me out to get out of there. Marines. God bless the United States Marine Corps. They helped me cross the border. Family in tow by this point, which was probably the hardest part.

I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us. I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth in what's going on in the country and in the world. One thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter. The first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targetter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams. Call sign super bad. She made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show, and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind going. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. It's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the Southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. Here's the best part, the newsletter is actually free.

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I had choices in the US, and I didn't have it in Mexico.

It sounds like China has taken a major interest in the cartels in Mexico. And I've operated around China, overseas, several times. Those motherfuckers are just as ruthless, if not more, than some of the cartels. Why is China's interest in Mexico becoming so strong?

It's your Achilles heel as a country. It's your number two largest consumer of American products in the world. It's a very destable place that's getting destabilized. Destabilize even more. So there's this whole weird thought process that Americans have that the cartels are getting their fentanyl from China from some criminal element within China. Let's be clear, nothing comes out of China, nothing happens in China without Chinese state being involved or knowing about it. This is a place where Big Brother is the real thing. Everybody's monitored. You saw it during the COVID shutdown. You saw it with the way they're handling the Uyghur population. So nothing coming out of China is coming out of China without them knowing so. So all that fentanyl being brought out of China into Mexico that's being put into a heroine or of these fentanyl fabrication sites that are being found in Mexico now with clear instruction by Chinese laboratory specialists, that's not a private entity. That's not the triads or that's not a criminal activity. That's a Chinese state-sponsored activity. It's clear state to anybody that looks into this. One thing is regional destabilization. That usually happens when they want something from that country.

So one thing happened politically within the US and Mexico relationship, the Trump phenomenon. Trump came into office and said, We're going to take a lot of our business out of Mexico. I'm going to bring it back. That was one of the things that he said that was going to happen and did happen. A lot of businesses took their plants, and American business took their plants and companies out of Mexico. Instead of it affecting Mexico in a negative way, Chinese plants and Chinese companies implanted them immediately.

No shit.

So something happened in that interval where somebody on this side figured out that was probably a mistake. And things started balancing out. Interesting thing to note, we currently have in Mexico a leftist president that is open, Chavista, that's open, Maduro supporter, but somehow there's an open and really friendly relationship with the US when it comes to the president, and Trump and the President down there. I think Trump is very much aware of the danger that Mexico is in with the Chinese influence and the foreign influence within the country. Another factor that doesn't get talked a lot about is that Mexico has probably the largest minable deposit of lithium right on the border. China, through a Canadian company, actually won the rights to mine that a few years back, and their mining rights got canceled. I'm not going to go into Alex Jones territory. I mean, the conspiracy part of it. Right where that mining discovery was made, that's where the the the Norman Massacre happened. It's a key place and things happen there. It's a very strange environment for all the influences and all the pushing and pulling that's happening in that area. Some of the people that I've I've talked to in the security field, some of the people that I've talked to in the security field, outside of the friendly neighbors of the US.

In Mexico, there's a lot of Cuban intelligence service operations going on all over the place, just like places like Venezuela. You can see a clear partnership and influence with China there. It's in their best interest to gain ownership or control over a place like Mexico, which is currently going through a lot of bad stuff, a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swaths of Mexico that are controlled by cartels. The new generation cartel, I think, in a way, is a product of that outside influence. It's the only cartel that grew during the COVID epidemic shutdown. That tells me that there's some outside influence from China there.

Are you seeing a lot of Chinese coming into Mexico and setting up shop?

The largest One of the largest cash seizures was done on a guy, Jan Li Saegon, a Chinese-Mexican national, somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million cash found at his house. He was trafficking legal legal fentanyl, legally, and meth precursors into the country under some paperwork legality, so there's some shady stuff going on there.

How long has this shit been going on with China?

As soon as the US got a taste for meth, I I think that's probably the start of it.

When was that? Ten years ago?

Probably a bit more further back than probably 15 years ago. Fifteen years? Yeah. Then this has just been exponentially growing.

Is it weird?

How do I phrase this? Are you seeing more and more Chinese people? Is it becoming a common thing to see Chinese- One of the largest communities of Chinese nationals is are growing all along the border. Wow.

Again, this is not something the realm of this conspiracy. This is clearly happening out in the open in a lot of regards. People can research this and see it for themselves. To deny that the largest cartel in Mexico has grew during the COVID epidemic because they clearly had a supply chain from China is to deny what's right in front of your face. To deny that more and more Narenco made military-grade stuff is popping up in print places in Mexico is also missing something that's in front of your face. To deny that... How many people die from fentanyl-related issues here in the US?

Tons.

If you want to confront a military... The US is a superior military force. How can you corrode that?

It makes perfect sense. Generational. The thing with China is they're fucking extremely effective-No way. Whatever they do. No way.

They have a lifetime president.

Yeah. And one being, they don't fucking play by rules either. China will come in and they'll open a whorehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because people are going to go to the fucking whorehouse. They're going to fuck a Chinese hooker. The hooker is going to milk them for information. The information gets to where it needs to go. It happens like that.

It's the Cuban intelligence services that are operating all over Central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act. People are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess, and they play the long game. That's something I think the US doesn't get. Example, China has a lifetime president. Cuba has a lifetime regime with the Castro's. They're playing a really long game against a country that has elections and politics change every four, eight years. They see the clear line and divide. I mean, there's blood in the water. I think they can smell that.

Everybody's taking advantage of it.

Yeah. And again, foreign eyes. I'm new here. I'm trying to earn my way into becoming an American, but I still have that outside perspective. People getting offended by the whole Chinese virus wording or China isn't the villain of the country. People coming into the defense of that. People within the NBA are not wanting to speak up about China because the Chinese are one of their best clients as far as buying some of the rights to watching some of these NBA games. Disney. You can't say anything wrong. How surreal is it that you can't speak critically about China if you work for the NBA? That is outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was.

Yeah.

Right? So I don't know. It's a weird time. But I think they're clearly waging some long term war campaign against the US. And Mexico is being utilized as a tool for that.

Yeah. How do you cope with all the shit that you've seen? We talked about some of the stuff you've seen. We've talked about the disposing and some of the gruesome stuff that you've seen the cartel do down there. We covered the fact that you've gone on 2,700 fucking fits.

There's no numbers. It's just a blur of years of blurs. I don't know how many of those.

Well, nine years.

That whole experience. Humor, the big part of it, I think. One of the things I always recognize with all the people that I meet that have people like you that have an experience base. Other people like that went through their own thing. There's certain commonalities that I see in people like that. Humor is one of them. Usually, I can tell a lot about somebody if they don't have a sense of humor They take themselves too seriously. There's something a mess there. Humor is one of those big things that has helped me out. It's a good mask. It's a good cloaking device, humor.

It helps get through the misery when you're in the middle of it, too.

I had this one of my closest friends when I was working. His name was Haramio. Very infamous name. I've made him famous. It's my way of keeping him alive. He was one of the older guys I worked with. He was a mess. I mean, he was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire of a person. But he He was very loyal and he was a very good guy. He gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional. He'd always basically keep me laughing. He would push me into going into weird places and getting out of my comfort zone and just taking every day as if it's the last one. We went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into. We would always get shit-face drunk every time we would come back from something. There's a word that I've discovered or learned about up here in the US called PTSD. It's not a word that we know down there in Mexico. There's no concept of a veteran or a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through. A lot of people that go through those experiences.

Now, there's no talk about that. There's a sense of machismo. You just take it. It's fine. Just don't go crazy. You'd get a few days off. You get to leave and you would go get drunk and come back. You would get to ask if you were okay, and you would lie your ass off and say yes, and just go through with it, go through the I'm into history, and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did things that they had to do. Ptsd has always been with us. It's been, this is what you talked about, your experience is what I'm talking about. We're not talking about anything new. This is the history of the world. But I think there's something happened culturally that separated us from how people used to handle some of these things or how some people would talk about some of these things.

From spirit quest as they used to kill them or finding yourself or going off on these pilgrimages or whatever form they took. Ceremony.

A ceremony is simply performing an act with a symbology just to convince your subconscious mind of something. From going to mass and eating a cracker that's supposed to be the body of Jesus and drinking wine that's supposed to be the blood of Jesus. There's a symbology there to getting handed a silver coin at the start of a leadership position and getting told that you were going to get another one because you go into it knowing it's going to end.

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I think some of those things are missing in our modern way of approaching some of these things. Some of these things have been amputated from us. We're suffering from phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things, what happens after. I grew up having parties at the cemetery during the day of the Dead. I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries with no people there. It's like a forgotten space. There's no relationship there. I don't know. I think that whole culture of suck it up, be a man, go through it. I get that. It worked.

It fucking worked. It works when you're in. It works when you're in it. It makes you effective.

But when you're off the bus.

When you're out, you're fucked.

Yeah. My mom used to say that I'll quote that. I'll get that quote again. I went through a horrible, a few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones The war that I fought was at home with an enemy that spoke the same language that I did. Every now and then, we would share funerary homes with the enemy. The counter guys were being mourned over on that side of the street, and we were having our services for our guys over here. It was different in that way. I had a very horrible thing happen. Very dramatic. I lost a few people. I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood. My sneakers in my socks, feel in my toes, and blood has a tendency to dry out and crest a little bit. I remember I wrote the reports that I had to write and talk to the people that I had to talk, and I was told to go to the hotel and wash up and come back the second day. I got in the car and drove straight home. Unconsciously, just drove to my parents' house. I drove probably three hours in the night straight there.

I showed up sometime in the early mornings, and my mom opened the door. She saw. She didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off, put in the washer, and made me some coffee. She didn't ask anything. The next morning, I passed out for a bit. She asked me, What do you want to do? I said, I want to go home. She said, There's no such thing as going back home, Either you change on your way back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back. She told me, Going back home is that train has left the station. There's no going back home. You have to figure out what that looks like for you next. I was very mind-altering. She lived through a lot herself, so she was very wise.

Sounds like it.

In her own way, she told me to suck it up. I stood up and I remember smelling my clothes. They were like a downy fresh. She bagged me a lunch, got in the car. I saw all the missing missed phone calls on my cell phone. People were angry. I went back and faced the music. She told me, Why don't you go? I just needed a moment. I got reprimanded for leaving.

Damn.

But I realized that there was no going back home. That gave me focus on going straight Surviving, figuring out what that road would lead me. That was aimless.

It fucking changes you.

Yeah.

How long did it take for you to realize your mom was fucking right on the money?

Probably a few days after she passed away. She She struggled for a long time with a few issues. Before she went, she told me to leave that job, leave that thankless job. Leave that thankless job, Ed. That's no longer the war you should fight That's not your war anymore. She passed away, and I did a lot of self-reflection. Again, I got two days off to warn my mom.

Damn.

She She got to meet my kid, which I think was very soothing to my morning process. Everything aligned after that. She passed away and a few things shifted politically down there and I had to leave. She gave me that push at the end, I think. I remember thinking back to that moment and I wrote it down. I've shared that on. I've shared that openly a few times. Every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment. It brings me back to that weird moment where there's no more innocence. You're facing your mom and you're not what you were.

Yeah. I know that feeling. Sorry to hear that, but it sounds like she was looking out for it, Yeah.

Yeah.

Sounds like she still is after she passed.

She's always here.

Yeah.

Everything I do, she's always been a big inspiration. It's one of those teachers that you don't recognize as a teacher until they're not there anymore. One of the things she used to do and push me to was the volunteer work. We would go and feed some of the people at the Tijuana Canal, the heroin addicts. She gave me the eyes to see humanity, even at the lowest levels. I remember one of the first self-defense classes I gave was through a church group that would work with some of the prostitutes in Tijuana. That was my mom pushing me to do that. You're not even doing all this cool shit. You think you're some expert and stuff like that. Go teach them. They need it. She gave me eyes. Instead of dehumanizing people, I think that's one of the probably biggest things she gave me was the human factor. I could relate to people, I can talk to people despite that they were trying to kill me. Only a few moments later, I could sit them down, give them a phone, have them phone maybe a family member to tell them that they're okay, give them a cigarette, give them a swig of tequila, and talk to people.

That was a powerful armor that she gave me with that. It's something I've been using to try and process that whole life that I left behind. Again, the world has ended for me a few times over.

Yeah.

Part of process to... There is no getting better. There is no healing. There's learning how to live with things. There's learning how to find a new normal, how to find a new center or a new base. That's what I think I'm looking towards.

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