Transcript of The Coast Guard Unit That Hunted Drug Traffickers | Giuseppe Weller

¡Hey everyone! Welcome to The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy, and today we have an episode that I have wanted to do almost since this podcast started. It is a very unlikely and relatively unknown story about the U.S. Coast Guard, and many of you would probably be surprised to hear that in the 1990s the Coast Guard was down in Central America and South America conducting operations that you would normally associate with Special Forces going down there and training local units and accompanying them out into the jungles and destroying drug labs. Giuseppe Weller, our guest today, was one of those individuals assigned to what was called the DIAT, the Drug Interdiction Assist Team. They worked hand in glove with the DEA and other agencies. The program went on, you know, through the late '80s into, I guess, the mid to late 1990s. But we'll get into the whole history of it. But I mean, I think it's a fascinating story and I think more people need to know about it. So I appreciate you coming on the show today.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

So if you could tell us a little bit about your own kind of upbringing and how that sort of took you towards eventually the Coast Guard.

So I was originally born in Italy. My father was a U.S. Army staff sergeant, so we met my mother there. I have 2 other brothers. So I spent 14 years between Germany and Italy on American bases. And then, you know, it's a little sad story. My father, you know, Vietnam veteran, got in trouble in the Army. So they separated. My mom separated. And the only thing that the Army did was send us back to the United States. So I was never back in Italy. I was pretty much, you know, a soccer player back in those days. So when I came to the United States, we bounced around from Maryland to D.C. and Virginia. And I was going through high schools, and, uh, the only way back to Italy was to try to get into, like, the military, uh, to go back. And that's what I was trying to do, is to go back home. And, uh, you know, I was 17 then, and my, uh, you know, my mother was like, no, no army, you have got to stay in, uh, you know, something else. And I remember going out to the recruiter for the Air Force.

My brother was in the Air Force, my older one, so I didn't like the recruiting side of it. Uh, you know, I wanted him to give me something like I was going to be on shore patrol doing some kind of police work He wouldn't guarantee it. And so when I went back home that day, my mom was like, hey, the Coast Guard called. And so that's what got me to the Coast Guard. So I went to go see the recruiter down in Alexandria, Virginia, and I spent a few days down there. And then I realized, you know, what they did, not just Coast Guard, you know, there was a bunch of drug war pictures that the recruiter had on his, you know, on his board and stuff. So that's what started everything. And then, you know, I just, I enlisted. I forget what they called it, but I enlisted before I came out of high school. So in January, I enlisted in January of my senior year. I was only 17. And then once I left high school, I went to Cape May, New Jersey, did my recruiting there. And I got my first station down in Key West from like 1986 to 1990.

I was on a surface effects ship, which was a hydrofoil, basically. There was 3 of them down there, the Petro, Shearwater, and the Seahawk. So once I got down there, that's where my law enforcement piece started to come together. And, you know, started to experience how law enforcement worked in, in the maritime side of things. And, you know, I was an E-2, became an E-3 there, and then I struck my Boatswain's Mate, you know, rating. And I was asked to stay one more year from the billet officer if I could help out because they had nobody come in as an E-4. And I did that. And that's how things started to turn around. In my last year, my commanding officer was Bickham was his last name. He was a Law Enforcement Detachment Team Captain for the LIDET down in Miami. And he had asked me, you know, if I wanted to stay in law enforcement, he could get me to a unit that was very special in the Coast Guard and it was unheard of. The only problem was you needed to be an E-5 and above and I was only an E-4. So the billet officer basically gave me a guarantee that if I did one year for him in Key West, he would send me there without their knowledge and that would be my orders.

So that's how it all worked out. So in 1990, I basically flew into Portsmouth, Virginia. That's where they were stationed at. They had a, they had an office building away from the District 5 headquarters in Portsmouth. So it was on top of a bank. So they were segregated there. We still wore uniforms, but I showed up there basically and That's how it all started. So when I walked in the office as an E-4, my commanding officer, Imhoff was his name, was like looking at me kind of strange, and my orders were in place. And that's how it started. So they had, he had to take me in, and we started going from there.

So before we get into this sort of like Coast Guard special ops, if you will, um, can you tell our audience a little bit about the more like historic normal role of the Coast Guard and what their job is, what your job was, so that they can kind of understand how different and unique this specific program was.

So basically, the Coast Guard, you know, you go out there, search and rescue was the primary missions. You know, you have small stations all over the United States and abroad. You have some in Italy also. You have those times and you have— they do a lot of navigation, buoy tending. So all the nav lights in the lakes in Michigan around the borders of the United States, they patrol the small side of the United States. They have small boats to ships that are about 375 feet long. You can be on a cutter for a while, but they have all kind of ratings, mechanics and bosun's mates and all kind of different job aspects to it. But your primary mission is search and rescue. And plus they have avionics, they have people who have diving techniques and all these little pieces. And your basic job is search and rescue. And then buoy tending or navigation. That's kind of like the two little primary areas you're into, and that's what you do pretty much for your career. You kind of pick and choose your routes, what you want to do, what your rating is, and you kind of grow yourself through, you know, through rank all the way through.

So I, you know, I always wanted to stay in the law enforcement mission. You know, you're always tasked to do some law enforcement and some, some search and rescue and some other things that are required, but you're basically a search and rescue kind of guy.

Did the Coast Guard, or do they have a sort of mission of like border security, so to speak, that they are kind of like protecting America, you know, our East and West Coasts and have like that sort of interdiction mission also?

Yeah, so we do a lot of maritime interdiction. It could be human trafficking, you know, immigrants coming over. We do the, you know, we're small. And I think if I remember when I was in the academy there in boot camp, I think we're at 36,000 total at the time in the '80s. And I think the New York Police Department was like 38,000.

Yeah.

So a lot smaller. So we kind of try to do those tasks. And, you know, we have a lot of mileage, the miles around the United States to cover. But we also have, you know, places abroad that we go also in other places. So we're very like small when it comes to it. Kind of like, you know, not in maritime. It's not so elite. Nowadays it is because it has changed. But in those days, your primary mission was always search and rescue and then law enforcement, you know, assisting in immigration work. That was just always secondary, but search and rescue was always the first primary.

And so when you walked through the door as an E-4 to this highly specialized unit and kind of secretive unit in the Coast Guard, what was your conception of what they did?

I had no idea. Zero. I had, when I got the orders to go, I remember my commanding officer basically saying, hey, you're going to have fun. And I had no idea what I was going to get into. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't like, you know, one of those in the Coast Guard, basically, you know, you're not into this elite mode where you're always training every day. You're in the gymnasium, you're doing this, you're doing that. You're in, you're on the range left and right. We did small things, qualifications. We did some small things, but nothing to that scale. So I had no idea what I was walking into, except that go to this unit and you're going to figure it out then.

And what did you learn when you got your in brief?

I was, first of all, I wasn't in good shape. That was my biggest thing. I was like, wow, I got to get in shape because once I got there, I started to learn about who was there. It had been in place since 1988, basically when they put the first guys in place. And then when I got in there, my basic instruction was, hey, you got to get ready for Ranger School. This is what we're doing. Here's what we help the DEA. We're going to go to South America. This is what we do down there. You know, you assist all the boating mechanics that we have to figure out, the instructions also to the host countries. So what the basic thing was to— you need to qualify yourself through Ranger School and other programs that we have to make yourself that we can get down there together and safe. And then I recognized real quick, like, this is real. And, you know, a little nervous about going to Ranger School, obviously.

I want to ask you about that for sure. But also, I guess maybe we should take a second to explain to folks, why was the Coast Guard doing this in the first place? Because as most of us understand, yeah, you have the DEA, they have the counter-drug mission, makes sense. You have Special Forces that goes down there and they'll train the local military. Okay, got it. The Coast Guard, you know, the search and rescue mission, the sort of interdiction on our coastlines, that's one thing. But now we're talking about you guys. I mean, primarily you were in a— it sounds like the landlocked country of Bolivia. So, I mean, it's very interesting. Like, how did the Coast Guard end up down there doing this?

So from my knowledge that I knew from before, basically what happened was they used to have the U.S. military down there. So doing kind of like some kind of narcotics enforcement down there, they figured out that, hey, listen, we can't really do that in host countries like an act of war. You can't be down there doing some of those missions. So at the time that the Coast Guard was with the Department of Transportation, so it wasn't the Department of Defense. So that was one of the pieces to get DOT in. And then also they realized that DEA was like, we have a ton of rivers down here and we don't have riverine expertise. So they needed a bunch of guys to show up basically that had like small boat knowledge of how to run boats, repair boats, navigate, and help out with, you know, taking a team from one point to another point in those riverine waters. And there was no mapping system down there. So you were kind of in the middle of the jungles and the Amazon basically. And that's how it all pulled out. So once they got the DOT in there, which was the US Coast Guard then, then it was easier to facilitate the mission to to help out, and DEA had requested that.

So once it all went through headquarters and they figured things out, and our admiral at the time was Admiral Yost, he put things together to assist. And I don't remember what the unit looked like when it first started, but I think it grew to about 20 to 22 total staff between some officers and the enlisted. So then they put us together to where we came together and just had enough different expertises, you know, from mechanics to boatswain's mates to gunner's mates to people like that that can navigate certain things. And then some officers in place to take the team down as commanding officer. They put it all together and they figure things out who would deploy when and where after you pass these courses, basically.

And the commandant you mentioned, the commandant of the Coast Guard, Joost, he had a special ops background. And so he was very like, like when he got a sense that this could be a Coast Guard mission, he was all about it, wasn't he?

Yeah, 100%. You couldn't have a better support system than that commandant sitting in there running that show. You know, just to realize how far up the chain it went all the way up to Washington, like where we were at in this unit, it was very special.

And so the DEA is already down there. The early operation was Blast Furnace and then the next one was Snowcap. And so they're down there doing their thing with the host nation partners. And that interfaces with the Coast Guard. Well, let's talk a little bit about the training pipeline that you went through. You're a young Coastie, E-4, all of a sudden going through all this tactical training.

You know, qualifying on an M16 at that time, we also had the old Colts and switching things out to, we went into Beretta and then the Glock. So when we went to Ranger School, everything was brand new. My biggest thing was I wasn't in shape. I didn't know, you know, and I was the youngest. So I believe I was either 21, 22. 22. So when I walked into the unit, I was the youngest one there. Uh, obviously, you know, it was pretty big to me because I recognized real quick, like, hey, you have a lot of mature people down here that know what they're doing. And the risk was different. You know, as a young person, you don't have the risk so high in your head.

Sure.

As you get older, you know, the risk is there. You see it more often. Uh, so the Ranger School was the biggest thing that— that was the biggest hurdles. I knew I needed to go through that and pass that because they had two different things. So If you arrived at the unit at a certain time, Ranger School was the piece you were going to. If you arrived late into the unit and Ranger School was already— I think they did one a year, I believe— you had to go to Marine Recon School. So I had a couple guys go to Marine Recon, and which one did you want at the time? It was easy to go to Ranger School because we went in more of a pack, of a group. And then if you went to Marine Recon, you only went as, you know, whoever it was, you could have been going by yourself. And that training is you were just by yourself when you went there. You didn't have a team next to you. So you had to deal with the actual Marine Corps was different because you were dealing with the Marine Corps guys.

There was no other Coasties, but in Ranger School, it was a, it was a pack, right? We had Coasties in there and we had DEA agents mixed in together to work together at Ranger School.

And it was like a familiarization with patrolling, if I understood correctly.

Yeah, so we did all of the phase except for jump school, and I believe it's the desert phase they called it. So, but everything else was in place. We did all of the other pieces that were necessary to put things together. A lot easier for us to do a lot of the, the military side of things, and DEA had a— it was struggles the way the military did some of the work because DEA's structured differently than law enforcement, right? Outside, it's a little bit more technical on things, and the military is pretty, pretty much a little bit more like you know, just go in and take, just take over everything. But the law enforcement side of it had a little bit of a problem to it because there was a lot of rules that they weren't allowed to engage in as the military would.

Yeah, no, absolutely. But the point is to give you the patrolling skills, but also so that you can teach it, right?

Yeah, correct. Everything that we did, the biggest piece was to take everything that we were trained for, take it down there to the host nation and train with, in Bolivia they were called the UMAPAR and the naval side of it to make sure that they received the same training we did to help them navigate whatever piece that they needed to do within their system, whether it was on boats or patrolling or just operations and mapping and putting, you know, clandestine operations together. We were supposed to teach everything.

And after, other than Ranger School, was there anything else they put you through before you were deployable?

Yeah, so my background, obviously I was Puerto Rican-Italian. I didn't, I didn't speak a lick of Spanish. Uh, so after that training school, we, we were deployed. Uh, my partner that went to recon school, uh, we came back, they put us in 3 months to Guatemala. Uh, we went down to Guatemala for 3 months. They put us with a host family and we went one-on-one with, uh, an instructor or a teacher at a school for 3 months. And in those 3 months, you learn, you obviously live with them. So it was a lot, you know, just being immersed so deep, you learn the language really quick. And then on that one, you know, for me, I came out, I qualified as a translator for the Department of State because you could actually get a test down there also. And that's what I did. Wow. So once we got that piece done, yeah, because it was big. I think the DEA guys went to another school wasn't as, as intense as ours. But our biggest thing was to make sure we spoke the language before we went down there.

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Um, for a limited time, our listeners get 50% off for life plus free shipping and 3 free gifts at mengotomars.com. That's mengotomars.com for 50% off and 3 free gifts when you check out. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please show support for the show and tell them that The Team House sent you. Thank you, everyone. And to talk a little bit about this mission, you know, before you get down there in 1991, when the first teams got down there, it sounds like from the book that I read behind you. What is it? Not Your Father's Coast Guard?

Correct.

Very interesting book. They talk about how they get down there and the State Department or maybe the DEA had bought these piranha motorboats, but they had all kinds of maintenance issues. And then the mothership, which you guys nicknamed the Africa Queen, I guess after the Bogart movie, was just like eaten through by termites and needed to be dry docked. So it's kind of an uphill battle from the get-go, wasn't it?

Yeah. First of all, we had, you know, when we got down with the boats, the biggest thing was to figure out what we can do mechanically-wise to keep them running, the engines correct. Like it was, we did everything we could do. Like, for example, when we got these 22-foot Piranhas, they had twin engines on them. They were outfitted with, you know, like, I think an M60 on one side and some other stuff, some small technical or some armament on the other side. But even like just fiberglassing, learning how to fiberglass boats and putting all those things together. Then, you know, you want to stay in camouflage mode, right? You're in the middle of the Amazon, right? You're trying to go for drug labs. But some of these engines, we would get them and they actually had like an Evernude white and red, black, you know, you know, uh, uh, what do you call, shell on it. So when you're navigating through the river, you got these white engines showing up. So nothing was really like, you know, camouflage or anything. We had to deal with a lot of that and then trying to help them make these piranhas work all the time.

So we were instructing them, but it was very, very difficult. You didn't have a lot of tools, the electrical, the motherships were really hard to work with because they had to do a lot more work and bring in some better infrastructure for the boats to be able to travel down these rivers and then, you know, tow these piranhas so we can get far down the rivers because there was no navigation. There was no maps.

Maybe we should also talk a little bit about what the mission actually was and why these drug labs were upriver where they were. You know, as the river changes course, I think, are they called oxbows where it's like the remnants of the old pathway of the river?

Yeah. So there are the two seasons, dry season, wet season, right? So the dry season, you could be looking up 20, 30 feet up into the mainland. Because the waters dropped so, so much. And in the wet season, there was just rivers everywhere. So, you know, you had to know how to navigate, especially at night. The daytime was a lot easier. A lot of the naval, it's called the Naval Narcotics guys that ran some of these boats understood a little bit where things were at. Most of the time we were hand-drawing maps. So when we would go up certain rivers, so there's a couple rivers that were pretty big that we knew what they were. But once we went down another river, we were trying to figure things out. So, you know, the canvas on these jungles is pretty deep. So it wasn't like you can get out there and run a plane around and find some kind of lab out there. You had to go, you know, build information, you know, meet the people who lived on the rivers. You met a lot of people that were just Indian, never seen like a white man before.

Right. You had to figure that out. And then you had to figure the relationship out, how you could get to certain pieces. But these rivers were— it was intense when you— when the water was high.

So let's talk about when you arrived in 1991, when you arrived and walked onto that situation, what did you find down there?

So when I first got down there, I had just, I was on the, I think the second tour. So the first one before me in that year, they had just did a raid. I think the raid was like, I think it was one of the biggest raids ever on a town. It was like 630+ officers, everybody included. That raided a narcotics town called Santa Ana. So I forget how many small planes and things that they seized. It was a massive operation. So when I get down there, everything kind of like was really quiet because there was nothing going on. So we had to build certain things to figure things out. So by wiping that city out, it stopped a lot of the movement for those 3 months that I was down there. So when I got down to that first year, it wasn't pretty because there was nothing going on. The other problem we had is that I don't know if you remember Peter Jennings, the reporter. That same time frame, ABC comes down there to work on the drug wars, and now they find themselves like without having any kind of like, you know, anything to really report because everything had been kind of like quieted down and ceased.

So it was really hard in those 3 months. We just learned a lot of things, went on patrols, uh, there were some missions out there, but A lot of it was really, really dried up. And then it comes back around again after 3 months.

Interesting.

Yeah, it was really— it was a— it's— I remember seeing it on TV at ABC. It was really like it was a shot at Snowcap that all the money put into this is now seeing like, hey, there's nothing really going on.

Well, I mean, that's what, you know, in Special Forces, they talk about working yourself out of a job. And, you know, if you're doing that, actually, you're doing a great job. But as we know, you know, the drug trade's never going completely away and will always come back. And when— what did you guys do as it started to pick back up in Bolivia?

So for us, COSIs, the DEA guys were in charge of all the operations, basically what came in, the informants. Like, we didn't have expertise in that. We had, you know, that's not our job title, like to bring an informant. How do we interview? We had no interview skills when it came on to all that stuff. So basically what happened, once stuff came into the, into the, well, let me bring it back. We actually stayed at a hotel down there. We had a place called the Ganadero. It was a 4-story, 5-story hotel. They lopped off one section of the hotel for us. So we had rooms all the way down, communication centers and everything we needed., and we had trucks down below, and we would venture out of that hotel and get into the airport to get on any helicopters or whatever. But they brought all that information in, and then they would call us basically, or they would say, hey, I need 1 Coastie, 2 Coasties here. We're going to go, especially if it had the rivers that we had to get on those boats. We didn't do a lot of like, let's get in a helicopter with DEA agents, or let's go out on a CASA mission with their plane.

We did surveillance, we would do stuff like that, but they did all the missions. We only got on board once we had some riverine aspect to it that we had to actually help them out with.

The DEA had a whole kind of other piece of this that you could do another podcast on, really. But as I recall, the DEA was down there and they had to get tactical training, as you mentioned. And there was— I wish I could remember the gentleman's name. There was a Vietnam-era long-range reconnaissance patrol guy, Ranger, that brought a lot of the tactical expertise. To the DEA. And then they also had contracted pilots that were flying Huey helicopters, I think, in both Bolivia and Peru, if I recall correctly, or maybe it was Peru and Colombia. But some of the contracted pilots were indeed Vietnam veterans.

Yeah, correct. I forget the name of this. They used a contracted side piece to support the mission through DEA, and they were Vietnam veterans. Some of the helicopters that we had in Trinidad and Bolivia were Vietnam helicopters that they used. And so we, you know, they had the, you know, like, you know, the ballistic shield on the side of the pilot that they would pull. But these pilots would come down, they flew everything from all the helicopters to the Casas, whatever was needed, they came down. They were, I think they came in every like 2 to 3 weeks and they would switch them out.. So that's what, that's what they did. So they had a big mission on this whole thing. But, you know, like anything else, I was always like, hey, call me. I'd love to go on one of these missions. But when you look at the tactical side of it, about a Coastie and a DEA agent in the middle of the jungles, the Coast Guard doesn't really know much except for the waterways of things, right? Because, you know, law enforcement is a little bit different how they act and how they maneuver things.

So we were more in a support staff. Than anything. But I always volunteered for every mission. I was trying to get on every mission that I could because I just thought DEA was like, wow, what a place to be if I could be there.

But I think the DEA also had to kind of like hang back, like they weren't supposed to be out in the front shooting, right?

Yeah, everything was supposed to be basically the responsibility of the UN part, the host nations, to help them out. You know, it's kind of difficult because there was a lot of corruption in the whole thing. So you couldn't You know, when information came in, they were really like, there was a few people that they could trust and they knew who they were. But even like when they would go out on missions and when we went out on missions, we just pulled them along with us. The minute that that mission needed to go, we would pull them in and brief them on that way out what we were doing with them. Right. Because a lot of times if you gave them the briefing the night before, the mission wasn't going to happen. It was going to, you were going to go to a spot and everybody was gone. So they had a lot of that piece in there. They had to make sure that, you know, if you wanted to get a successful mission, you had to kind of like get them to tag along after we were on the way out and then brief them.

Right, right. Like tell them you're going on a training mission and then brief them on the road.

That's it.

Yeah. And so what was your first experience like kind of going upriver and doing these riverine operations?

Yeah, you know, I was young and some of the DEA guys used to tell me, listen, you're young, like, you got a lot of energy, you know, be careful when you're out there because it doesn't look like what it really is. I mean, if you look back then till now, you realize that the risk level was really, really high compared to then. We didn't have all these, these shootouts going on, right? Didn't have all these things. They was kind of a little bit more respectful. If you got into a lab someplace or you found something, they used to just scatter on you and not fight back. I think there was one incident where one of our, two of our unit guys got into a big shootout down there. And there's an episode on Cops where they fly down there to put that episode on Cops about the Bolivia side of it. It was a huge cache of weapons and stuff. But I went in after the shootout also. When I got to the lab, they were all gone already, but shots had been fired and you just kind of get there and they're just scattered.

That was basically it. We didn't have much. A lot of times it was just like we, not on our side of it. Trinidad was different. Then we had the other group of DEA agents that were in Chimoré, we're down in the south part. So we had two groups in Bolivia. Now the south part, which I never went to because I was always in Trinidad, a couple of the Coasties were in Chimoré also to help. They got into a lot more beef with traffickers than we did because down in the Chaparra region, it was way different than in Chimoré. They actually lived in a, like, in some shape little camp in the middle of the jungle. And that's how they lived for 3 months. Like, we were living in the city in a hotel, which was like, you know, there was a lot of poverty around, but we actually had structure around us, hot water. They had it too, but they lived like, you know, they were at Fort Benning in one of those little, you know, huts out there, you know, just hanging out. And then they would take their missions out. They lived in the dirt basically.

When they went outside, it was all jungle.

The, in the labs themselves, if, as I understood it, it's mostly the cultivation of coca leaves and sometimes they're being processed there and sometimes they're being taken further upriver to be processed in plants because there's a chemical process that they have to go through to manufacture cocaine.

Yeah, correct. We saw this was the beginning stages a lot of times what we would see. So our job, a lot of times we would see like the beginning stages. Like, you know, you would, you would have generators, you would have ether. You would saw, you saw a lot of guys that, you know, like the farmers that were out there that were helping out in the labs, you'd see the lesions on their legs from all the acid burns. A lot of the stuff would be the paste of the coca leaf, and then once they got out, they would, they would send it upriver to get it up to Colombia or beyond so they could keep producing it, or, you know, cultivating refining it. So we found a lot of base labs and stuff, and we found, you know, we were dealing with chemicals a lot of times because they needed chemicals to bring them into the lab to process this stuff.

And you guys had to have demolitions training too, right? Because you're supposed to blow these labs up.

Yeah. So obviously in Ranger School, we went to demo school for whatever, however long it was. And, you know, me as a youngster, I was like, wow, this is amazing. You know, it just all the different things, tools that we had to have underneath us. I didn't, I didn't expect any of that. So dynamite, TNT, claymore, shaped charges. We were blowing up airstrips. And then they had some other stuff. We dealt in M16, M60, AK-47s, grenade launchers, things like that. So just to help us out, we had grenades and stuff like that. So they equipped us pretty good to go down there like it was going to be real. Obviously it was.

Were any other operations during that deployment that kind of like stand out for you that were interesting?

There's a few of them out there. I remember going on a mission, talked about the boats. We actually had— when we were— when on my first trip down there, I remember meeting a bunch of Navy SEALs. They were down in country also. They did a lot of training on the outside and helped, you know, some of their elite teams go on. So they didn't get involved in missions. Obviously, they weren't happy about that. And then we had the, I think, the Navy Seabees. I think they're called Seabees. They came down there and they used to put camps together for the military there, the host nation military. So they were building like barracks and stuff like that. So they were down there too. But operationally-wise, they didn't get involved. But I remember taking— we had some of those old RHIs, pontoon boats with the Navy covers. Elite, you know, quiet motors. I remember taking a group up there. I was on a mission with my chief and some DEA agents and some UMAPAR. We went on like a, I think it was like 36-hour trip. They had information on, I think it was the number 3 narco-trafficker for Bolivia.

They had a location where he was at up on the border with Brazil. So I knew the rivers because I had gone up to those sites before. I knew what we were doing. Uh, so they had asked me to say, to, to, to lead the boat crews up there. There was 4 boat crew. Um, we, we landed like one of the, I think it was San Joaquin, like the little town, put the boats down, put them out. Uh, they went back, the helicopters went back to the city to go pick up the rest of the crew because there was just too much weight on these helicopters. So around midnight, 2 o'clock in the morning, as we departed to go to a location where they thought he was at. I had to put cam lights all the way up the river. Every time we made a turn, a chemical, you know, one of those infrared cam lights.

Yeah.

Because we couldn't return. We didn't know if we could return correctly in the middle of the night. There was no, there was no moon or anything. Right. So, you know, I'm thinking to myself, I'm only like 22, 23 years old. I was like, wow, this is this. I've got to get this. Like, this is real. I remember my heart beating, I think, for the entire 36 hours because I'm like, I've got to lead this crew to where we need to go. I know where the city's at, this little point. We need the entrance. Nobody's been up there before from the DEA guys. They didn't know it. They didn't get on boats with us. So I think it took us 4 or 5 hours and we got up to this region and then it went, once the Umo Park got off the boat, went into this little town. I think it was like 6 hours of silence. You know, it's like a movie. You know, you just kind of, there's no radio chatter and everybody's just sitting in this boat and your heart is beating because, you know, if something goes wrong, you've got to go inside and, you know, rescue.

So eventually, you know, the radio clicks back on and it's like, you know, basically, hey, we got them. We're on our way back. So we knew that he had a bunch of bodyguards and everything else. And we're like, okay, well, here's the extraction side of it. So we got to get ready. So once they hit the beach, when they came down with, with, with, with, with the person of interest on the boat, everybody out trying to get back to the base, to the extraction point that was like 4 hours away on these, on these RHIs. I think I blew, I blew a piston on one of the engines. So, you know, The 3 lead boats that had the person of interest in it kind of make it back like 2 hours before us. I just wanted to make sure we weren't being followed, you know, or targeted because your heartbeat is going. You don't really know. There's no real intel about that like there is nowadays. You get so much information. Back in those days, you didn't have it. You were out there by yourself. I mean, you know, I knew that I had a personal EPIRB, you know, responders.

Like if something went down, turn the responder off, they can pick you off on the satellite. That's all we had. The radios were okay and they didn't really communicate great. You're basically on your own. So once we made it back, took the person of interest, loaded everything up, did a couple of trips back and forth. I remember landing, landing at the base or at the airport in Trinidad with the person of interest and getting off the helicopters. And, you know, as soon as we landed, this Learjet landed and the person of interest went to the Learjet with a couple of guys. I think they handed him off to their special, probably their CIA and our CIA, and he was gone. Never saw him again. Wow. That's how quick that— it was like a movie. I remember sitting at that airport going, wow, I've never seen that before. You know, as a first coastie, you're like, it's real.

Yeah. And I mean, it's pretty cool that it sounds like the Bolivians picked him up without a shot fired.

Yeah. Yeah. Of course, you never hear back on what happened, but the mission was successful. Everybody's like, Hey, good job. Good job. Next. Yeah.

Yeah.

But you know, it's one of those kinds of things as a coach, you say to yourself, like, I never knew for one second that I would ever be part of this and in this system. And I was, I was trying to take up so much to understand how to work law enforcement because I wanted to venture into law enforcement after the Coast Guard, obviously.

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So, you know, you bring up a good point because I remember when we were, you know, to figure out our land nav, we had the old green boxes, the latitude longitude would come on, right? The military satellites would hit those boxes and we could figure ourselves out pretty good. Not even the helicopter pilots would use them on our routes. We had to use them for them because they were, they never believed in them. So sometimes they would do everything by map on air. You know, you got these, you know, Bolivian pilots trying to do all these things by, you know, they have this lap map and they were trying to navigate themselves with compass. And, you know, we have the GPS going. So, you know, at that time we had that too. And then the other thing that we had back in that day, which I always bring up to people who ask me, I said, I had a digital camera. There was a mini disc. So DEA had a— I had a big lens camera. So we would leave on a Cessna to do a, you know, if I would try to go find a lab or doing some information.

I remember going up with the lieutenant from the UMO part, the narcotics team, and an informant in the back of the Cessna. I'm going all the way up back to that Brazilian border, which I knew pretty well. And and circling the Amazon trying to take photos of a lab that you couldn't see from up there. And remember, you know, I was getting sick up there going in circles trying to take photos. There's nothing down there. But that, that disc was a reminder, like, wow, this is amazing. Because when I got back, they just took the disc, they stuck it in that printer, and they started, you know, they had analysts down there, they started pulling all that data out. I was just, you know, I was like, wow, this is amazing what's going on. So that's how that whole disc thing got— and it was It was just digital for me. I'd never seen that before, but that was like 1991, '92. It was amazing to me that that existed then.

And how many trips did you make down there with the drug interdiction force?

Either 3 or 4. So I got there in 1990, '91 I started deploying. So I got there to like '93, '94, and then things started to change. I didn't stay too long in that unit, so there were some imbalances that— not your father's Coast Guard, which is behind me. That's where this is all coming around, why this thing is changing on us. So Soldier of Fortune magazine was down there for a period of time. They interviewed a couple of the guys that were partners that were down there. And that's one of the quotes that's in there from the magazine. That not your father's Coast Guard. And as the admiral was coming out, the new admiral coming in, that it was like a shot at the, you know, US Coast Guard basically. And it was like, it didn't mean anything wrong. It's just like we were beyond the usual Coast Guard duties and it wasn't a shot at the Coast Guard. It was just like, hey, it's not your father's Coast Guard. It's not an old thing. It's a new thing. We're trying to— it was getting more modern. Right. And that kind of turned us a little bit.

That Soldier of Fortune magazine kind of turned the events in Washington for us and things started to change. So I think in my third tour, we had some big orders going. You will not get off that boat. You will not support DEA. You know, we started to get this imbalance and things. So all the guys in that unit were all about DEA and supporting no matter what the mission was. You know, the guys were just so bonded that we were going to support them. We knew them pretty much when we came back in country. We stayed in touch. I have some friends still out there today. And we just knew that anything that happened, we were going to support them and make sure that they had us 100%. But what happens is we started getting this piece going, hey, don't get off the boat, be in big trouble. Things are going to happen. Your job is to be on that boat. If things go wrong, then, you know, think about what you need to do. But it was a big thing on the turn. It kind of like started to change the unit.

Yeah, like risk aversion. I remember there's a quote from one of the guys in the book that I thought was pretty good, where he says, I wasn't going to let the mission fail because of a rule. So what was it like going down on your second trip down there then? How had it changed?

So once I went down on the second trip, I recognized that, hey, we can do a lot of work down there. We can do things down there. Obviously, you want to make them better because you realize You know, down there they don't have much. So outside of the city, you know, there's a lot of poverty, right? They need a lot of work. They're trying to, you know, we're trying to help them out. We had, I think it was called the Narcotics Affairs Section. That was where a certain amount of money would come into like an admin group. And this admin group was creating things around cities and helping like, you know, gas fuel tanks, helping them out with, you know, repaving like the airstrips, you know, all this. They would help out the, you know, the locals and try and get things up with the money for support. So that allowed us to help out and do what we needed to do down there. But there was a lot of influx money coming in to help all these, you know, places to help them military-wise, you know, whatever they needed, like more boats and more of this.

The— they were getting BDUs, they were getting training in M16s, they had M203s, they had dogs, they had a bunch of training. So the US was supporting the Umm al-Bar in the narcotics trafficking trying to help them grow and kind of like, you know, make this thing go away if we could ever do that and teach them how to do things on their own way. So, um, the pilots would come. I forget where they used to— they used to take the pilots, whether they were a plane pilot or a helicopter pilot, and bring them up to the States, United States. I forget what, what base trained them for helicopter piloting and for Cessnas and DC-10s and stuff like that, but a lot of them would fail, so they would send them back. So that contracting group I told you that we talked about with the— that had Vietnam veteran pilots, they would send them down to Bolivia and they would do like on-the-job training with these pilots. So that was a, you know, you talk about, you know, risk missions, you know, there was a couple times— well, we've had some incidences where you know, we were on flight and things were going wrong on our flight because the, the, the US pilot would be in the middle and then the two other pilots from the Bolivian side would be flying that plane and things were going wrong.

So we had a plane crash on one of us. Nobody, nobody died, obviously. I was on a DC-10. We were leaving the strip in Trinidad, and I remember we were going down the airstrip, we're fully loaded, and then, you know, the tail comes up And what happened, he hit the rudder too hard. And, and I, and I thought we, we almost spun out on the airstrip. And we, we got it off the ground. And, you know, when we got to the, the Brazilian border, I remember the, the agent in charge for DEA going, oh, we are not on that plane anymore. We are coming back on helicopter. So he rerouted the helicopters, come through for 6 hours and pick us up to take us back. There was a mission where 2 of the Coasties were on a Cessna. It was overloaded. So when they went up, when they tried to land in Chimoré, the Cessna bounced 2 or 3 times on that airstrip, which was a dirt airstrip, and it went up. They tried to pull it back up and it stalled. So when they— when it stalled, it just flipped over. So when they came down, they landed, you know, upside down.

So nobody injured, but enough to, you know, do some damage to everybody. Um, that was the pilot stuff. Like, it was really, really scary because, uh, that, that That session that went down that my partner's in is the week before myself and my partner Mike, we had went on a, uh, they gave us like an R&R in Santa Cruz. It's like the city away from all the cities and it's beautiful, right? It's got everything up there. You can go to a hotel. They give us 2 days off. You know, you reset yourself. You sit at the pool for a couple of days. But when we left Trinidad, we were also overloaded and I didn't know how much weight we could take, but the pilots going down the airstrip, I remember the pilots telling us, Mike and I, to stand up in the back seat because, you know, it's only a 4-seater. So we would stand up and they would say, hey, hold, grab us, grab the pilot and the copilot, grab us and put your weight forward so the tail could rise. So, you know, you don't, you don't think much about that. But when you're up in the air, you say to yourself, okay, well, this is crazy.

And I think we only flew like 1,000 feet off the ground for like 4 hours all the way down to Santa Cruz with all this gear. You know, you kind of did things like that. You're like, wow, this is— is this the way it's supposed to be? You know, there was trips like that. And then speaking of that same session, when I was doing that trip up in— up in the— the Mamoré, which is the river on the Brazilian border, I remember like after doing all those photo shots of the digital camera, you know, on the way back I had fell asleep. I was nauseous as could be. And when I fell asleep, I woke up to the engine stopping. You know, it's a single engine. And the first thing I grabbed was my EPIRB going, uh-oh, where's my MRE, where's my EPIRB, make sure I have my weapons. When we landed, when this plane hits the ground, I'm jumping out. Like, it's survival mode. They forgot to switch the fuel tank. So they went dry for like 10 minutes. And then I couldn't figure out why the pilot underneath was kind of like, it looked like a lawnmower.

He was trying to, you know, prime the engine back up with the gas because he forgot to switch the fuel tanks. But, you know, in those moments, you don't know what's going on. You're thinking like, oh, we're in big trouble. Plane is going down, they always say it can glide. I wasn't up for that, but yeah, he turned it back over. It took him 10 minutes. Yeah. So it was, it was kind of strange, but I got back to the base, you know, back to the office and I was telling the agent in charge, like, can't do that again. He forgot to switch fuel tanks. We went dry. You know, like you're trying to go home.

Yeah. I mean, years later when those Dynacor guys went down in Colombia because of mechanical failure, I think like one of the big like after action, you know, points was No more single-engine aircraft ever.

Yeah, that's right. That's the name I was— remember Dynacor? That's the same guys in there.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. They were great. They were really great. They were great to have the mechanics who come down there and everything. I just knew that these training days, like when we were up there, they would be in there going, gosh, you just got to make it through the flight because even the Dynacor guys were trying to make it right. So, and then, you know, and the helicopters, they tried a couple of times, they tried to do an auto rotate on, I don't know, I'm sure you know what that is, an autorotate, where they stop the blade and they want to do whatever and autorotate for a training mission. I never want to be part of that. So anytime we went up, I made sure there was no autorotation going on. Like, we're not doing that. It's scary. You know, you're trying to, you know, also come home.

And as, as the mission is going on, you know, on your now second trip down there, how are you perceiving the sort of efficacy of the operation overall? Because I mean, on paper, it's very smart to go after the drugs at the source. That's probably the smartest way to handle it. Did you think it was being effective? What did you think of the program?

So, you know, not knowing much about the narcotics, like the piece of it of how much actually being produced and where it's going and coming up, like DEA would have that information. They know a lot more. I remember that second one. So my My lieutenant then was Bob Adedero. He had a great mission. What we did, we started doing Coast Guard stuff on those boats because we knew that we were getting pulled away from being on certain missions. So at that time, I think they had 3 motherships at that time. I forget the names of it. I got some photos of them. He decided— we put up an operational plan and they decided to kind of like shut the rivers down so nothing can move except for by plane. So we went up there. I think it was like, like a 2-week or 2-and-a-half-week patrol where we took all the Coast Guard guys, took 2 DEA agents or 3, put them on the ship with us, and the mother boat took the 4 Piranhas out. Everybody had Piranhas. We went out and we just locked everything down. So we started boarding and moving anything that moved on the river.

We just grabbed whatever it was. Interesting. So we were slowing things down, making sure there was no movements. You know, you find some kilos here and kilos there, people moving small little loads, but we weren't inside of those labs, but it was shutting things down on the rivers and it was a big impact at that one time. So we realized that we had to generate Coast Guard missions to help them out, understand how to navigate the rivers. And that's what we started doing. So, and then we started just going on any, like, we would just take a patrol and leave the mothership and 2 piranhas go one way, the other 2 piranhas go the other way. We had everybody we needed, and we would just patrol the rivers and try to hit every single little smaller river, go down the stream and see what we can do. And then, you know, like, you know, drop the engines down, listen, see if we can hear like labs and talk to people, pick up information. Is there anything out there? Is there not? We also— I think we made my second, my third, I think my third one, I started to tell myself Well, why, why are you guys walking so much to get to a lab?

Because one of the biggest problems we had is that if you find a person had information on the lab, they would take you there, right? That's your informant. But they would always say, yeah, it's just down, it's just down over here to the bend. And then you leave 4 hours later, you're still walking. He's like, yeah, it's not too far away. And I used to say to myself, well, why would you do it that way? So we started bringing in, uh, I think I think we were able to get NAS, Narcotics Affairs, I can buy like 6 cross bikes. And I said, why not buy cross bikes and try to make it a little easier? So we started taking these motorcycles, cross bikes. I got a great photo of one of them. Obviously they weren't camouflaged. They were red in color. So, you know, there's nothing you could do.

But like Kawasaki dirt bikes.

Yeah, that's it. That's it. The cross bikes. And we would load it on front of the Corona, and we would go out, and then when we hit a certain place, we would drop those bikes down, we would get on those bikes, and we would patrol. And that's how we did a lot of that stuff. We got more coverage and stuff like that because, you know, the information was only so much that we could get. So, um, and when we had good information, it basically did an operation. They would, they would get it right where DEA would really take over and really run that operation with helicopters and hit it, like hit a ranch or a lab that was really deep. But we did a lot of information gathering for DEA too. So we just knew that our mission was probably more to, hey, get what we can get to them, let them do their job. And then, you know, that way we would, you know, we would be good at headquarters. We didn't want any problem at headquarters.

The impression I got from reading the book, it seemed like the operation was effective enough that it actually pushed a lot of the drug trade further upriver, that they were transporting the coco leaves upriver, I believe, into Colombia for processing as opposed to doing it, you know, in your area of operations.

Yeah, we were pretty dry. We didn't get a lot when we did that. I believe the Team Ray guys, the other guys, they were doing a lot more than us. Even in Peru, they were hitting a lot. When we did our side of it, it was like it just seemed like it was compressed somehow. I don't know if we were doing a good job or not, but it was just hard to figure it out where everything was at. The people were easy to speak with. You know, you didn't have this whole thing, you know, because, you know, they just lived out in the middle of fields. And we figured a couple of little things out. We would hit some airstrips. I think there's one of them— I wasn't part of it, but they had found that they actually dismantled a Cessna and walked it through the jungle and put it back together. And flew it out of the jungle. That's what they were doing. They were like, they were trying to be so creative that it was unbelievable. I think it was in Chimoré, you know, they would walk the wings in, you know, they have these farmers that they would pay or whatever, and they would do all the work.

Basically, that's who did all the work. They weren't really the traffickers, they were just being run by the traffickers. So somebody in there was actually showing them how to do things, and then, you know, they would, you know, give them whatever they would give them to keep them going. But you know, it was the people who run the planes. They had the ranches, had the farms. It was one of those kind of areas where you didn't have a lot of intel about, you know, what plane here and what plane there, what airstrip there. You just had to get what you had to get and then give it back to the DA, let them assess it through their analysis.

And then what was it like going down there on your third trip? Were you in the same place generally?

Yeah, I've always went back down to Trinidad, so I had a good routine. I thought as a young guy too, I had to build my reputation up too because, you know, I wasn't great in Ranger School. I was struggling. I got through it. After Ranger School, I was putting things together for myself. So it made it. And I wanted to help those DEA guys so much. I was so about this drug wars thing because it was like, you know, you don't really see it much. I came from the Miami area in the Coast Guard. So I knew what, you know, the 1980s and '90s looked like in Miami, Key West. Big-time drug zone. So when I was down in Bolivia, like, I was like, wow, this is amazing. I really took— I was grateful for where I was and what I was doing. And obviously my mom was like, oh, I can't wait till you're done because you're down there. You know, today you see TV all the time, all these shows. It's something that we were doing way back when, before anything existed. We had good— we had good partnerships with DEA. BORTAC was down there with us too.

I forget how many BORTAC officers came down there. So, you know, Border Patrol Tactical Units. And then being stationed in Portsmouth, Virginia, which is, you know, it's the, it's the, they call that area the Tidewater area. Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach. We had connections to the Navy SEAL team that was there too. So anytime I came back, I always used to try to, you know, figure my gear out because my gear wasn't right. And how do I hold this? And how do I do that? Because we didn't have all that tactical gear. So I would design some of the gear stuff and I would go with Navy SEALs and I'd say, hey, can you construct this for me? I'll pay you for it. And then they would do their own thing. If they liked it, they kept the design, it was theirs. But I remember doing like M16 magazines because I didn't like them on the belt anymore, like the old style. I put them up on my chest. So I needed somebody to create me a belt that can hold my magazines. So that was the other thing too, is to create things to make it easier for us to do our job down there, whatever it was.

You know, just out of curiosity, you know, I was wondering if you ever came across, uh, one of the SEALs that I know was down there at that time frame, Hershel Davis.

This is— yes. So my chief, Chief Davis, knows Hershel, and I, and I know who Hershel is. I did not— I, I think I met him once, but on the side. Does that make sense? Because I do know he, he, he's that guy. He's that like he was that guy down there that was running the show for sure. Very well respected. Yeah, we all knew who he was and, you know, his, his knowledge was absolutely amazing.

Yeah, yeah, we've had him on, on the podcast, uh, a couple years ago. Great guy.

Yeah, yeah, it has a lot going, you know, back in those days, they, those guys were doing some things we'd never heard of, right? So yeah, we met a Navy SEAL back then. Now, you know, they're more exposed because of the, the, the the social media that's out there. But back in those days, you didn't know any Navy SEALs unless you personally met one.

Right.

Yeah.

And I mean, this is also the time frame where all of this is happening, but also things are starting to really heat up with the Medellín Cartel in Colombia and all the stuff that— Killing Pablo, everything we know today about what was going on down there. And the book, you know, Not Your Father's Coast Guard also gets into how the Coast Guard was not just in Bolivia, but also in Colombia, in Ecuador, in Panama, a number of different countries, not necessarily doing the type of stuff you were, but they're still pretty active.

Yeah. So in this story, we would do 3-month tours, right? So within those 3 months, I also went to Panama and I also went to Costa Rica. So the Snowcap had a team in in, in Bolivia. They eventually went to Guatemala, and they were also, um, we were down in Ecuador. So even though that was, that wasn't the Snowcap thing in Ecuador, we would send guys down to Ecuador and they would do whatever they needed to do down there. So we were all over the place. So we had guys everywhere. I never went to Ecuador, but I went to Panama and I went to Costa Rica on the side with, uh, um, my lieutenant who eventually passes away, Joe Rodriguez. He's a He went to Marine Recon. He was a lieutenant. We went down to Costa Rica. We went on the south side, the Pacific side, to help out their Coast Guard trying to figure things out, what they had going on for like a week. We didn't really do much. And then we ended up in Panama to help the Panamanians out in their, in their waterway things. And we were down there for a little while.

I never went to Colombia. I think one of the guys went to Colombia, but we were basically— our biggest hubs were Bolivia. And Ecuador. That's where our hubs were. So every 3 months when we would go back and tour, we would have to go to Quantico and requalify, uh, with DEA. And then when we would leave Andrews Air Force Base at that time— if that was the name, right— they would take us out on the C-141, all packaged up. We would go to Guatemala first, drop a team off there, you know, go to Panama, stay overnight. And then— or I'm sorry, Panama, Guatemala, however the tour was. We stay overnight in Panama, and then we would actually go into Peru, drop a team off, and then we would go to Bolivia and drop a team, and that was the last team we get dropped off. So that's how they, they routed everything. So that's— everything was out of Andrews Air Force Base.

Uh, so what were you kind of observing on that, on that last trip down to Bolivia? How had things changed, and how was things changing for the, the Drug Interdiction Assist Team?

So my last tour was probably the worst tour. Because we had to be— the bosses are now being switched. The one bosses that we have now, we have, I believe it's a commander in right now at that time. So we're getting that switch. And basically on that switch, we're basically, hey, you're going to go down there, you're going to do nothing but mission support for the teams down there, but you're not going to be staying with DEA anymore. We used to stay together. So we had a Coast Guard liaison commander down there that stayed at the embassy. They set us up in an old narcotics house, traffickers' house, and they had like 7 bedrooms. So all we did with that, we didn't even have weapons anymore. So our last tour, we went down there, we didn't get on a C-141. We didn't go to Quantico. They really cut us off. The Coast Guard did not— DEA, they cut us off. And basically flew us down there on a commercial jet, stay down there, wear your BDUs and stuff. And your job every day was to go out there and help the host nation on anything they needed.

No more operation. We were done. So we would go see VA guys. They had moved over from a hotel. They had their own little area. Now they had like another home and they had this warehouse basically. And we would go in there and try to help them out whatever they needed. Port here and there, whatever. We did all that stuff, but they were cutting us out because they were cutting that unit out. That this DIAT unit was being cut out, and you could see it. Uh, I felt it because I felt, you know, later when I get back, I knew I was getting cut out because I only been there 3 and a half years and they were not going to retain me on my next, my next billet. They didn't want to retain me. They wanted me out. So everybody that was basically in there was being shoved out, and they brought in new staffing because the whole mission was changing and they didn't want the old guys, or the guys that had history with DEA and Snowcat, confusing their new mission, like we were going to make it worse, right? We were coasting.

I mean, we're military guys, why would you, you know? So I could, I could feel the cut coming out. It wasn't pretty.

What did they do?

A lot away from us. I think, I think a lot of the DEA guys, like the bosses— I was really good with the GS-15s, and I, and I had, you know, you sit down with them, you And they were really disappointed why the mission was changing for us when, you know, we were always good for them and helping them out a lot. We did a lot of work. We did the grunt work, basically, you know, when we were refueling, putting ammunition on the planes or on the helicopters, you know, moving these RHIs from one helicopter to another, doing all that work for DEA. That's what we did. We were supporting the mission and we were getting cut out. So it was not great. You know, we weren't part of that anymore. So when we went, we went to our own little home and VA was in another location in the same city. It was, it was tough. I didn't, I didn't like it. I was like, it's not good anymore. Obviously the commandant was switched out and, you know, they were taking everything from us because the name was going to change eventually.

Yeah. What did this unit eventually turn into?

So it's International Maritime Law Enforcement Training Team, basically. IMLET. It went from Drug and Addiction to International Maritime Law Enforcement. So, and they were changing everything that, you know, they were going to support it that way, cut the name out. You know, you get rid of the name, you get rid of everything old. Yeah, I was like, I could see it. I could feel it. But I knew that, you know, it would never be the same unit again. It was going to change its mission out. And it was time for me to find something else to go to.

And the new mission was basically going to be strictly like training Coast Guards of foreign nations.

Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, no more like, you know, M16, Glock, cowboy, cowboy. That stuff is gone. No more BDUs. You'll be back in your blues. Um, you know, they used to tell us, hey, you guys gone too native. You know, we weren't native. Like, we always, we did the military job. When we came back, you know, we were always in uniform. We put clean shaven. We didn't do all that crazy stuff like people thought. I mean, I think, like I said, that Soldier of Fortune magazine pushed too hard, I guess. People have this idea what we were doing, but it wasn't really like that.

And as all of these changes are coming and you're kind of feeling that you have to go somewhere else, I mean, what did you end up doing with the rest of your career?

So, you know, when I— so when I reached this unit, I just was like, wow, this I, I was going back to the Coast Guard going, what else is out there? And realistically, uh, well, let me take this back. When I— they didn't re-up me to stay, you know, I make E-5 in that unit, you know, I, I, I took the test in there, so I was an E-5 then, um, within the unit. They got me to do the testing and do things. I went back to Key West as, uh, what was the official word, at base security. Basically, back to Cuba. So I went right back where I came from. I was ecstatic. I was like, wow, going right back. You know, I'm not looking at a ship or anything. I was on base security when I went back down there. Obviously, what I was doing, I was picking up all the Cuban immigrants that would land on the beach, you know, from morning to night. And I would get called out. I would work with Federal Police Service, FPS. So I would drive up the Keys. It was a Federal Police Service. We would pick up, put them in a van, drive them all the way back down to Key West.

INS at the time, Immigration and Naturalization Service, would show up, cart them all up, put a fingerprint, and send them up to Miami. I did that for a while. So my lieutenant that I went to Panama with and Costa Rica, he became the lieutenant in charge for the law enforcement detachment team in Miami. So as I was getting close to 19 nights, so I stayed at that DIAT unit for 3 and a half years. I only had a year and a half left on my billet, basically. And I was like, why aren't you just extending my stay in Portsmouth? They didn't want to do that. They're like, no, no, you're out. You're going back to Key West for a year and a half. So I went back to another base for only a year and a half. And then at my extension time, Joe Rodriguez was going to pull me up into Miami to be part of that lead unit again. Again. So it was the— this the highest unit that the Coast Guard has when it comes to law enforcement. And they travel, they jump on the ferries with the Navy, they do all this law enforcement, interdiction.

So when I got to the end, my base XO wouldn't, wouldn't confirm that I could go to Miami once I re-enlisted. He wouldn't guarantee it. And, and Joe Rodriguez trying to get me up there. If I re-enlisted, I was going to Miami, but the base XO froze that. He goes, hey, listen, you re-enlist, there's no guarantee you're going. So I didn't re-enlist. So once that happened, I was on my way out. My process was, hey, U.S. Marshals, I can't get in DEA. I only had a high school diploma. So I didn't have a lot of that upper education that you needed. So when I got out, I stayed up in the Miami area, Fort Lauderdale area. Within a year, I got hired in the Broward Sheriff's Office. And that's where I went for 22 years.

Wow.

So I, you know, I was 28 years old. I went to the academy for 6 months. I blew right through the academy. I went to the academy. Like, because, you know, the academy to me was, I've done all this stuff and that DEA Snowcap mission taught me so much about how to do things in law. So when I went to the academy, like, I had no problems. I was in and out real quick. As soon as I graduated, I did my first 6 months as a patrol officer up in Deerfield Beach. And within the 6 months, I was already, I was on probation for what, a year plus. They took me right off the patrol car. I was in the detective bureau. And then 3 years later, I found myself doing undercover work. I was off the streets and I worked in a specialized unit that was just organized crime. And that's where I was. I did that for almost 2002 to like 2017. Never came out of it. Never wore a uniform again. I was a detective then. I did a bunch of wiretaps. I learned to do wiretaps. I was an athlete. I did wiretaps.

I did all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, and then I became a supervisor, I became a sergeant, and that's how I ended my career. I retired like that as a sergeant. But that background of those 4 years or 3 and a half years with that DIAT unit pushed those pieces why I became— and I always ask myself, oh, how is it possible you never got— even when I got promoted in the sheriff's office, they were supposed to kick you to the streets. Because that's— you got to go as a sergeant, you got to get back to the streets and learn to be a sergeant on the streets. I never went back. From the sheriff down, they were like, nope, you're going right into this unit, this is your unit, you handle it. So, you know, I work with SWAT teams, I work with narcotics teams, I did all that stuff. So I was just in that phase, like, you know, this is what I wanted. I wish the Coast Guard could have kept what they had, right? They just lost me because I wanted more law enforcement.

Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. And so you were doing like a lot of like undercover drug buys and stuff like that.

Yeah, I did. So I found out real quick that I wasn't a good liar because, you know, to me that's a hard trade. You got to be like deep in that stuff. Like it's like you just got to really work on it. So when I first started, that's where I was at. I was doing undercover stuff. I bought some kilos, you know, I was running around. I was a cigarette dealer for a while. You know, I was truckloads of cigarettes. You know, when you get into the street stuff at a local place, you have a lot more access to do things and how you're doing things, right? You get all this, you know, these pieces going on. And then after a while, I found myself being more of a, you know, I was better as a case agent than I was as an undercover. So, you know, I would pull a group together, good detectives, good undercovers, put the case together and put it, you know, to the US Attorney's Office. That's what we usually work with and just grab these organized crimes. I worked the mob, basically, mafia for a while, uh, because down here in South Florida, that's where everybody comes to vacation.

So I worked that for a while. I did, uh, you know, some big-time, uh, you know, wiretaps. You know, I did it for months, you know, as an Afghan in wiretap. I, I've always been told, like, listen, not everybody can do a wiretap. You know, you'd be part of one, you know, you can be part of a wiretap case But when you put it together and put your name on that dotted line, that changes everything because, right, because the liabilities go way up and you got to make sure everything's done. I did, I think, 6 of them. So they were great. I mean, you just learn how to do things at another level. And I always go back to my Coast Guard background because that's where it comes from.

This was also mostly counter-narcotics.

Yeah, counter-narcotics. Yep. And then my last 10 years, I went into the, yeah. Human trafficking, internet stuff. So I did a lot of human trafficking too at the end. So I was part of the Violent Crimes Against Children Squad at the FBI. So I was sworn in with them too. But, you know, I did the human trafficking stuff. You know, that's what I was doing in the Coast Guard basically. But now working with Border Patrol was a lot easier for me because I had a background from previous with BORTAC. So when I went to Border Patrol here in Dania Beach, Florida, like with the bosses and the majors and stuff, to me doing the job that they were looking help for, because, you know, they don't have a lot of people. The staff. So us supporting their, their, their, their, their, their, their, their coastal and intercoastal areas of, you know, this human trafficking side of things, it was easy for me. I put a ton of groups together, patrol here, patrol there, organize, get this, get that, whatever they needed just to support their missions too. So it wasn't hard.

Yeah, it sounds like the Coast Guard set you up for success.

I always grateful, you know, I did my 9 years. I was so grateful that that piece, especially in the academy, was like, wow, you're moving quick than usual. So, and I thought that was a good thing because you learn, you know, I tell you a funny story. Um, when I put my first, my first 2 days of leave in with the sheriff's office, I had given it to the sergeant. My, I gave him 48 hours of leave. So I was on patrol. He calls me in one night and he goes, 48 hours of leave and you got 2 days? That's not 2 days, it's 16 hours. I'm like, what do you mean 16? It's 1 day's 24. He goes, no, 8 hours, right? You know, you're military, right?

You think you're always on duty.

Yeah, I think I only had like 60 hours of leave on the books at that time. It was new. I walked out of there going, wow, this life is good. It's only 8 hours and I asked for 2 days. I take 16 out of 60, I'm good. I got it like out. I can take a lot of leave. Yeah, because you know, in the military One day's 24 hours. Yeah, yeah. Let you leave. And that's a funny story because I just felt like how grateful that I am. So you learn a lot.

I heard a story years ago about a, this was back in the day and it was a dude, a special forces guy who was on a mission supporting the CIA down in Central America. And at the end of the trip, all the CIA guys start filling out their per diem. And the SF guy goes and he starts filling his out. He's like, whoa, you're in the military. You don't get per diem. And at that point he made the decision to get out of the SF and go to the CIA.

Well, you know, that's a funny story too, because when we were down there, we got per diem too, military-wise, right? And we made a little bit more money than usual because we had the, we got some extra hazard pay, whatever. But when we found out what those DEA guys were making to go down on those operations, You know, you handle, you know, you touch a grenade, there's your demo pay. You put your foot on top of the helicopter and never go anywhere, that's your flight pay. You have, they had, they, you know, they were making way more than we were. And I was like, I don't know if I want to be here that long because I got to, you know, doing these missions, I probably need to make a little bit more money than I'm doing because the risk factor is way up there. But, you know, you start to learn a lot what, you know, how it really works for people when they, you know, they put their lives on the line. It's not, you know, money is not everything. Yeah. You realize quick, we were cheap, really cheap.

But it's a quality of life thing. You know, I think there are some special operations commanders out there who really don't want to let their guys go and be attachments to a DEA or FBI or whatever it is, whatever CIA, whatever it is, because they'll see what the other side is like and get out pretty quick. But as far as, you know, the, the DIAT and this whole Coast Guard mission we're talking about, I mean, it's interesting, and it's, it's kind of obscure. There's only a few stories in Special— or Soldier of Fortune magazine that you mentioned that you sent to me, actually. And then the book, Not Your Father's Coast Guard. So there's not a lot out there about you guys.

No, and I think, you know, the book came out because they were doing a history on where it's at today, right, with the units that are out there. And you got a couple guys that graduate SEAL school now, and, you know, they've moved it around. You see it now with these, these, these narcotic submarines, the Coast Guard guys up there, you know, they look like some special forces unit jumping on top, you know. It's amazing where it's at, right? I'm super happy for that because they, they evolved it a lot more. So, but it's one of those kind of things where I, I try to, you know, I'm still connected with all the guys I try to get, you know, they're trying to do some things at the Coast Guard Historical Museum, wherever that's at. That's been a little bit of a nightmare trying to get our piece in there. And I've always said, look, today the way things are, you don't have to wait for a museum to put your stuff in because most people see it online now, right? You can— that's why I started doing that Instagram. Literally, I started putting little pieces out there trying to get things together.

I got a lot to do, but I was like, hey, get it out there where somebody can see it. Right, where somebody can kind of recognize what this was way back then, because nobody really knows. And if you put the story right, you know, you'll see there's a lot of guys in there that did a lot of good work in there, from chiefs down to like, you know, us, you know, petty officers, all the way up to the, to the bosses that were in there fighting to do things right and trying to get things to a good spot. So, you know, I said don't, don't, don't wait on something military-wise, you know, it takes a long time for them to figure things out. So, and you know, get it out there as much as you can. So there's some videos on YouTube you can find. It's some, you know, some old videotape stuff that they put out there, but it's not like, you know, it's not cut up or anything like that, but you can do a good job at it if it comes out right, for sure.

I'm looking forward to seeing whatever you guys put together. Is there anything else you want to talk about before we get going today? Is there anything that I didn't ask that you really would like to get into?

No, I just thought that, you know, just exposing it. I said to the guys too, look, you there's a, there's, there's a handful of us still out there, like 20 of us. I said, try to expose it for yourself. And, you know, you got more than I do. When you read the book, the one thing about the book, see that cover on the book? I think it was Bob Addadero, I think my old boss, had asked me for some photos, and I sent them some photos like that. That, that's a gray and white or black and white, but it's actually, there's a, uh, there's a colored one. Those photos came out on our first tour when everything dried up. We went out with our lieutenant. They said, hey, let's go take some photos with Bob out here, you know what I mean? Let's remember these memories. You know, obviously had the old 35mm. You don't have like a, you know, a phone to do it on. Remember these moments. So basically that's how we got that photo out there. And then in that book, we never got interviewed. So me and Bob's team never got interviewed.

So in that book, you hear things and you see things, but there's a lot of other things that are just missing in the whole thing. So, and then I found out from the author that basically, oh, I didn't have enough time. I didn't call you up. They got the photos in, which was great. But if you look at Cops also, there's a series of Cops where they do, I think they go to Guatemala. They're obviously in Bolivia and they show the firefight, the post-firefight that happened down in Bolivia. And basically it's, it's, it's the, it's the Coasties that are down there. I think the Coasties even, I think they were actually a couple of guys that got shot up. They actually, you know, gave them medical, rendered medical service to them, you know, patched them up real quick. And I think that one too threw off the Coast Guard and the beach, but it's, it's all cops. You know, they, they, they froze everything. They basically said, you know, don't move the lab around. Don't mess with anything. They'll fly. They— I think they flew Don Ferrone, I think his name was. He was the head of DEA at the embassy.

COPS flew down there and then they flew back out there. They went out to that lab and you can see the whole piece. It's on COPS. You know, it's pretty intense looking, you know, the amount of weaponry that was down there and the lab that was down there. But those, those Coasties deserve a lot of credit, too, because they were actually in the firefight. Like, you know, I have their One's not here anymore. That's Joe Rodriguez. But the other one is still around. He lives close down to me. So they're still around. Like, that's amazing to me that they were able to get through that. Yeah. You know, it was never really on TV or anything like that, and nobody really said much about it.

I think we have a question from one of our viewers.

Yeah. Somebody asked Giuseppe, what's the biggest or one of the biggest cases you worked on as a detective? Like a wiretap mob case, something like that?

Well, a double case, uh, mob stolen. Uh, I think we were working on a— we were working on, uh, on us. We started getting these stolen cars. So my background is like, I could go down the street, I still do it now today, I can, I can figure out what the car is and why it's stolen because I can just see it from— I have all these little cues that come up. So I started doing a lot of like stolen car stuff. Like I would recover them, you know, I think my best was 11 in a month. And then when I got to that special unit, I had information on some stolen car stuff nobody could figure out. This is when they had the, uh, uh, the emergency boxes in it where you could, you know, satellite in and say, hey, my, you know, I'm stuck. What happens, they were removing all these boxes and I was trying to figure out why they removed these boxes. Well, little by little, I figured out. So I was dealing with Durangos, I was dealing with Hummers, I was dealing with Mercedes, I was dealing with Lamborghinis. I started putting things together within that system.

One of my players showed up that was in the mob, Philadelphia mob, and that's how that started out. So I had an auto theft case switching into a mob case at the same time. So I had the, the organized crime group with me and the auto theft group that I was part of, and I mixed it together. I think we filled the garage up with like 30 or 40 cars that were stolen. And then I had like 10 motorcycles that they were just ripping people left and right. So on wiretaps, that's what it just grew to be huge. So I had to hold on to everything. I just couldn't, you know, once you take it, you know, you get a stolen car, you got to take it out of the system, right? Now the system goes back to the insurance company whatsoever. We couldn't do that because we didn't know if they were insurance jobs, right? We had to hold on to everything. So it came to a point 6 months later where we had to make the arrest. I think at one point, the attorney always, you know, says something to me. I think we started with 34 suspects, turned out to be 19 at the end.

One of the best moments is when I went up to Daytona, Florida, and we had to keep the cars hot because we didn't know who was involved or not. I think we drove 3 Stollens down. I was in a car that wasn't stolen because I was leading the group. And we stole it up. We also brought a stolen Donzi down, or a Scare, one of the two. We had to make sure that Florida Highway Patrol didn't come by us and try to run one of those tags or the boat number, because they would have been hot. Trust me, they would have had to stop on us. And, you know, when I worked in that unit, guys have beards, you know, they don't look like cops. So we were taking everything back down to our warehouse where we had warehouse. But that case was amazing to me because it was just, it just highlighted where we were at on things. Things for sure. So, but I did some mob cases up in, you know, New York, Philly for sure. Uh, always interesting, you know, so, but, uh, you know, I still watch myself today. So I always watch the rearview mirror.

Well, I'll be keeping, uh, my eye out to see, you know, what you and your, uh, former teammates put together on all of this. Um, the book, you know, Not Your Father's Coast Guard, you guys can find that on Amazon or wherever. If you want to give it a read. Is there anywhere— are you on— why don't you plug your Instagram and send people there?

Yeah, well, basically I got it under DIA, you know, Drug Interdiction Assist Team. It's kind of brand new. And that's what I put on that whole thing is Drug Interdiction Assist Team, DIA, D period, I period, A period, T period, and then team. So that's it. So I put it out there. I'm trying to do more to it. So I, you know, I have a bunch of stuff that, that if I don't get it out there, it's probably gonna die with me. Nobody's ever going to see it. And I— that's what I tell the guys, like, hey, try to get it out there so it's— people could see it out there. Because if you leave things like they don't see it, it's nobody gonna see it. So I always say, hey, send it to me, I'll get it out there eventually.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. I'm really glad that you're doing that. And, um, again, Giuseppe, thank you for doing this interview. Really appreciate it.

And I'm grateful and humbled that you reached out to me and super grateful that I can get this story out and I appreciate it very much.

Oh yeah, absolutely, man. And everyone else, thank you for joining us today. Hope you enjoyed this slice of Coast Guard history and we'll see you next time.

Thank you.