Transcript of #674 - Scott Payne New

Today's guest is a retired FBI special agent who spent 28 years in law enforcement, a lot of that undercover. He infiltrated some of the most dangerous groups in America: motorcycle gangs, drug traffickers, the cartel. He has a book out called Code Name Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis. We go way down the rabbit hole in this one. We want to let people know that some of this, uh, the stories in this one can be a little bit graphic. I had a nice chat with today's guest, Mr. Scott Payne. Scott Payne, the author of Code Name Pale Horse. Uh, that's your book, and you've— you had some good names too. I saw that Big Country they called you.

Yeah. I'm more like medium now, but yeah.

Oh yeah, you coming down, huh? You de-escalating.

I'm aging.

Where are you from?

Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina.

Oh dude, that's a beautiful city.

Yeah, but born and raised there, lived in Charleston, played ball in Charleston, South Carolina, but I'm in East Tennessee now, man.

Amen, man. Well, welcome to Tennessee, dude. To catch our listeners up, for those who don't know, you spent 28 years in law enforcement, right? And so that was in police work, SWAT, FBI undercover.

Yep.

And that was undercover with drug trafficking, cartels, white supremacist groups. Yeah. What about your life before law enforcement made you think that that's a direction I want to go in?

Well, it's not— I mean, it's one of those things you look back and you go, oh, I can see what was happening. I didn't really know what was happening at the time, but I just love connecting with people. I mean, I go into great detail in the book, but like in high school, when I was in high school in the '80s, you had a smoking area. Oh yeah, you go out there with your cigarettes, you know, and then you had like— I could go, I could hang in, in almost every crowd. That's all. It's not saying I could be one of them necessarily. I could just be accepted. So potheads, I'm there. Jocks, I'm there. Musicians, I'm there. You look back and you see these things, uh, but something about— I don't know if it started when I became a cop, but Like some of my mentors, there's a guy named Gary Ward, uh, who was at the Greenville County Sheriff's Office in South Carolina, and he was the strongest man in the late '80s. So he came in after like Bill Kazmaier. He was, he was a Marine, former Marine, but at that time he was a Marine, and he won the heavyweight class in bench squat and deadlift.

So now he's on narcotics and he's this jacked big dude with that. Yeah, goodness gracious, that's him. Oh my goodness, baby. Dude, look at him. And he got bigger. And then what? Poor—

look at the thighs on— they would damn sell him at auction.

Yeah, when I met him, he had a— I mean, he had a beard and everything.

And yeah, dude, I bet he damn goes to the toilet and his yard just grows better.

Oh dude, you know, I used to ask him, I go— we'd be at the gym and I'm like, uh, I'm like, man, I never see you doing like this exercise or exercise like this, but man, your neck and your shoulders are— he says, son, when you pick that much weight up off the ground, something's gonna grow. I was like, all right, man. Yeah, he used to bust my chops, man. He helped me perfect my squat. Squat was my strongest lift. So, you know, so you had a role model like that kind of. And he had done undercover and biker stuff, and I was becoming a biker. I mean, I grew up on motorcycles, but I mean like riding like American-made, you know, Harley out there going to rallies and all that stuff. And, uh, he had done that. And I don't know if that's what gave me the bug. All I know is that like, it doesn't matter during that time frame, that '80s, '90s, it doesn't matter If it was the cheesiest undercover movie, I loved them all.

Amen.

Loved them all, man.

Things like that have an effect on your life. The people you meet in the gym have an effect on your life. Yeah. So you get into police work over there in Greenville, South Carolina. Do you remember a day that it just got real? You're like, oh, this is— now it really feels real, kind of.

Oh, man. If you're uniform patrol, I mean, most people, I guess if you're not a cop, you don't think this way or know it, but you just see so much trauma and stuff, and you get desensitized, sort of. I mean, we compartmentalize it, and we're not very good at it. And that's why first responders— and I'm including medic, fire, and military— if we're not number one, we're very high for divorce, suicide, substance abuse, and dying within 5 years after retiring. So it's a pressure cooker. But like, going in uniform, you can show up on all kinds of stuff, man. I've shown up and nothing more. There's plenty of men and women in law enforcement that have done more and seen more, but you go into a place and a trailer caught on fire and the person died in the position where they were trying to crawl out the— I mean, it's just all kinds of stuff. Somebody gets hit by a train, you're finding pieces of stuff.

Do you remember a day where you're like, I don't know if we're really trained for this?

Well, the thing that's jumping in my head right now is because I'm still a tactical instructor. I'm an instructor with ALERRRT. It's spelled with two Rs, A-L-E-R-R-T. But the FBI and ALERRRT married in 2013, and it's the national standard for training law enforcement how to respond to active shooter events. So we were just putting on a class last week in East Tennessee.

So that's a national organization, ALERRRT?

Yeah. So we do all kinds of stuff, stopping the killing, stopping the dying, and then you got to do casual evac. But what I was saying, if you were asking me about something like Greenville County, I had a good friend of mine die in the line of duty. And this is what we're trying to do. A lot of times we're training, we're just saying, man, just slow down just a little bit. I get it. Young gunning. I've still got plenty of testosterone in me. You want to just bust in there and run into rooms, and there's a safer way to do it.. But what happened to my friend is we weren't really getting the training at that time, but he was the city. I was county, but he was city. But the edge bumped up to each other, right? So he sees somebody that's got a lot of warrants on them, jumps out, chases them on foot, chases them into a building. Somebody clocks him in the head with a board, and now you got tunnel vision. Now he's like, all he's seeing is this. Even though he got hit in the head with the board, he calls it out, but he sees the guy running.

And Russ was in shape. Russell Sorrow. He was in shape, man. He took off after him, and we just hadn't had the training to slow down enough to stop and think, to pan and use distance and angles. And he ran right— because it was a hard corner— and he ran right past the bad guy, and the guy shot him in the back. And when he went down, he walked up and shot him 3 times directly in the back of the head, and they rolled him over and shot him in the mouth and in the eye. In broad daylight. But if we would have had that training and you got to get the reps and it's sad to say, but most places they don't have the budget anyway. But at least in my experience, when they're having budget problems, the first thing that gets cut is training.

Wow.

And then something bad happens and then you look and you go, how did that happen? And then you look and people that are out there in the industry that have the skill sets, they're like, well, there's a lack of training. They didn't know what to do.

Oh yeah, the rep. I mean, you say the reps, man, the muscle memory, just the idea. It's like, because otherwise I'm sure you're running on adrenaline and I don't know how much, I don't know chemically what is in adrenaline. If there's a part of it, like of the chemical.

It's going to be some endorphins. I mean, it's going to be like, it's going to probably be like an epinephrine or something.

Right. There's not something in there that's like, hey, relax.

Yeah, it's not that one. Yeah, it's the opposite of relax.

So we may need some new adrenaline. Yeah.

So when we're doing those trainings, we call it a stress inoculation. So out there on the range, get you— and, or maybe when we're doing force on force with the marking cartridges, you're in a mask, you're in a helmet, enclosed neck protector, and you'll hear people all the time say, man, I couldn't hear anything. When we're doing the test, say, hey, this is how you put the mask on. Put it on. You stand up there and you go, hey, can you hear the sound of my voice? And everybody raises their hand. It's not the helmet, it's your stress.

Wow.

So you do that, and we often refer to it as You bleed on the range so you don't die in the street, but it takes the reps. There's so many videos I can show you, military and law enforcement, where the officer has no idea how many rounds they've shot. They have no idea that they did it a magazine exchange. They had no idea that they did it behind cover, but they did it because they trained until it became instinctive, or like you said, muscle memory.

Yeah. When things get intense, man, yeah, it's hard to sit back and remember what occurred. Yeah, much less.

Yeah. Yeah. When you're having an adrenaline dump and it could be any traumatic experience, it could be your first car wreck. I remember my first car wreck. Everything goes to slow motion.

Yeah.

You're just like, whoa. And everything's time dilation.

Yeah.

So your eyes click. You're just getting screenshots because it's not a smooth transition. Your auditory exclusion, you sound like you feel like you're underwater. Everything's like you just hear, whoa, whoa, whoa. And it's just Everything slows. You can feel your heart beating through your whole body. I will say, though, studies have shown that the better physical shape you're in, the quicker you'll recover from those adrenaline dumps.

So adrenaline dump is a— it's a real thing that you guys get?

Yeah, that's what I call it. But I mean, there's probably another term for it.

But no, this is— let me see right here. It says an adrenaline dump is a sudden large release of the hormone adrenaline, epinephrine, from your adrenal glands that rapidly flips your body into fight or flight mode. Followed by a downshift once that surge clears and related stress hormones settle. Breathing rate increases and airways relax to pull in more oxygen quickly. Blood flow is redirected away from digestion toward muscles, heart, lungs, and brain so you can move and react faster. And that's on perplexity. Wow, that's interesting. Yeah, I just didn't know that.

And you can come in and out of it. You can be in a situation, have the adrenaline dump, and then you start, okay, things are calming down now, you're coming back to normal. And then something else happens and you're like, oh, dadgummit. And you're going right back down to another adrenaline dump.

So, and in your work, you've probably kind of ridden those like a lot over the years, almost like waves, kind of.

Yeah.

Like you're surfing a little bit.

Yeah. But I don't like that kind of surfing. Ooh.

Gosh, man. I never thought about like that. That's something. I mean, you always hear the term, oh, you have an adrenaline dump, but I've never really kind of looked at it as to see exactly what's kind of occurring in that, in those moments. So you end up moving, I'm assuming, from police work to SWAT. Is that kind of how it went? Because I remember I heard you talk one time about those Jump Out Boys, right?

Yes.

And I remember reading about Jump Out Boys, like even down in Louisiana and stuff.

Oh yeah.

It was like these sort of like, it was kind of this new thing that was happening. This is what we gathered is just regular—

Back in the Five-O days. Everybody was Five-O. Oh, everybody was Five-O.

Dude, anybody.

Yelling it on the corner, Five-O. I'm like, I'm not even in a Mustang.

Bro, dude, you see a white Dodge Neon and people yell Five-O. You just see a white guy that hadn't been out in a while. Yeah.

And people would yell, "Five-O!" Oh man, you're trying to earn some money on the corner by being a lookout.

Those were the days, bro. "Five-O!" "Five-O!" And everybody would run. It didn't even matter, dude. Nah. Um, but yeah, but the Jump Out Boys, it was, it was kind of an unmarked car group that was kind of taking on drug trafficking. That's what, that's how we always heard about it.

Like, so it's not SWAT, uh, at the sheriff's office. I didn't get on SWAT. I got on SWAT in the FBI.

Got it.

But I did make vice and narcotics investigator. And that's your jump out, boys. It's usually your narcotics unit.

It is.

We're rolling out. I mean, being young and dumb, you know, I'd be out late at night, single, partying. I'd come in and thankfully Gary didn't like beat me up or nothing. But I remember we've had to drive like 40 minutes to where we're going to do a jump out. I said, hey, I'm just going to nod off a little bit. About 5 minutes out, if you'll just wake me up, let me know. I wake up and I'd go, all right, all right. Because you're young. I mean, you're, you know, nothing's not popping when you stand up, you know. And you just go like, all right, man, we're rolling up. And van door opens, just start running from a dead sleep.

Yeah.

Chasing.

Yeah. And what— so I guess— I'm guessing they didn't breathalyze y'all before your shift.

I wasn't drunk. I was just tired.

Oh, damn.

The night before, I might have been a little schnockered, but yeah, you know, I'm just— I had the hair of the dog.

Amen. What were some of those calls like?

A lot of those— so the jump out stuff, you're going to be going to somewhere that's got a lot of reporting or incidents recorded of high drug trafficking. So you're going to be pulling up and it may be, it may be quick buys. You may run an undercover in to make a buy and then you, they either, they identify them or you've got it on camera and they're coming. So you go through and it's like, all right, the dude's wearing a yellow coat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they just pull in right for that and jump out and grab them because they just sold up. If you want to do it that quick. Other times it might be, for me, once I was in the FBI, it was really source development. I'd go out there with the state and locals and observe.

Just get involved.

Yeah, you hop in, you hop in and you go. Sometimes you can get some good information.

So as you're coming up through the police department, what makes you— is the police department, is the activity there kind of not enough, or is there like an— are you in a search for more? What makes you want to kind of evolve your career to try other genres? Conrad's a law enforcement.

There's a couple of things that happen. Uh, number one, the pay. Okay, you're at the sheriff's office for 5 years, you don't get any raises. County council gives themselves raises. Happens all over the United States. Oh, not just Greenville, South Carolina.

What we all getting, man? What we all getting?

Oh man, I don't know. I was a— that would have been '93 to '98 I was a cop, so I don't know, $50,000, $60,000, I don't— who knows, you know? But you know that as a cop you're also moonlighting, you're doing all kinds of side jobs. You know, you get— oh yeah, you get off of work and then you go to Frankie's Fun Park or some golf thing and you sit there. Or you go to, uh, the Dollar General and you sit, you know, for shoplifting and stuff like that, and you get extra money.

So working like security gigs, side gigs. Yeah, yeah, referee and all kind of stuff. Yeah, you forget that. I forget that the police officers do all kind of stuff. They would be umpires for our games a lot of times. They'd be refereeing basketball. I forgot about all that.

Or yeah, or that's your side. Maybe you're— if you're in uniform You might see the cop at the high school game. That's a side job.

Got it.

You're getting paid for that. But I looked at the pay because after 5 years, it was kind of like, man, I'm not making anything. Even though I was a two striper at that point. But it's like, you look, they would raise the— it was weird because they would raise the hiring rate, the pay for the hiring, so starting rate. But at some point, I probably could have literally quit, walked out the door, and came back in with a 4-year degree and make more than what I'm making, which doesn't make any sense. And you also look at it and you're like, I'm never going to max out my retirement. Look at how much we're making, how little we get. I'm never going to hit peak unless I live to be 100 and they let me work as a 100-year-old cop in a wheelchair. But I looked at that, but I was really starting to get a lot more exposure as far as I was learning more about the federal agencies because we would go out and help them with arrests and stuff. And I really didn't know. I thought the FBI just worked bank robberies because that's the only time I ever saw them.

And I had a sergeant, he said, And my nickname at that time was Kingpin. And he said, Kingpin, if I was you and I was a single man and I had a 4-year degree, he said, man, I would put in for the FBI and I'd list New York as my first office.

And I thought, you said I'd list New York as my first office?

Yeah, I'd put New York as— I want to go to New York. And that, you know, New York. And I told him, I was like, are you— what do you smoke? I'm like, there's no way I'd go to New York. What are you talking about? I started applying because I thought— I said, oh, they work. What do they do? And he goes, he says, Scott, they do everything. And I'd heard that it was harder to get hired with them, and I took it as a challenge. I filled out that one first, and I never filled out another one. Took about probably a year to get through the whole process, but the polygraphs and the physical fitness and all the backgrounds, and then there's tests you have to take, and then there's another interview test, and then you get to the academy. You get your letter, and I arrived— I arrived in Quantico, Virginia on 9/27/98, and 9/28 is your first day.

Dang. And before we go into your first day, when it comes to the FBI, what were some of the, like, the, the criteria that they were looking for? Were there unique tests and stuff that they had you do along the way that, that, uh, or even experiences that in hindsight may have been used to weed people out that you're able to notice now?

Oh yeah, I mean, there's all—

I mean The, like, the Phase 1 test, because you tickle me, I'll tell you what's going on.

Yeah, right, right.

You know what I'm saying?

That's— I mean, I was very truthful on the polygraph I did, but I sat in the box for like 3 and a half hours. I'm like, I don't know what you want me to tell you. I'm not lying, you know. Uh, but that Phase 1 test, it has like— there's like questions they ask you, you know, would you be more likely to, and they're giving you scenarios and stuff. But there was this math part And, and I had to go back and I had good grades in college and stuff, but I don't remember any of that. I didn't remember any of the geometry and all the other stuff. Algebra. I was like, I don't remember.

Yeah, nobody does it.

So I go— unless your job has you doing it for something, right?

Nope. If you walked up to 95% of people that graduated those classes right now, I bet they couldn't tell you shit. So they couldn't tell you.

I walk in and—

because nobody's using it. Because what it's sometimes it's like there's a missing dog or your neighbor or something. If somebody shows up with geometry to find a damn missing dog, I'm pointing at them, brother. They got that pup.

I look at it like this. It helps you find ways to solve problems is the way I kind of look at it.

That's a good attitude.

That's, that's, that's, you know, but my— so the middle section was math.

Okay.

Now they do look for certain backgrounds. When I was coming in, if you were an accountant, CPA, that's good. Attorney, you passed the bar, that's good. Former military intel. Foreign language speaking, and diverse. And I came in under diverse, so 4-year degree, 3 years of experience, but I was a former cop, so that helped if they're looking for that.

So they're bringing all types into the FBI?

Completely diverse. Yeah, I mean, you got former doctors, former biochemists.

Really?

Yeah, it's insane.

So it's not just police officers?

No, no, not especially not in the FBI.

Huh, I never thought of that. I always just feel like it's police and then it's, uh, and they—

military.

Yeah, yeah, or military, and they evolve into working with the FBI.

One of my best friends that went through the academy with me, he was a former Walmart manager and he smoked the fitness test and he was a great agent. So I mean, it's like, yeah, all kinds of backgrounds. Actually, I think that's one of the strongest points of the FBI, um, is the diversity. But sometimes we place people in the wrong places, you know?

Yeah. Oh, once they're in, you mean?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I could see that.

Like, you got knuckle-dragger like me and you want to stick me on some highfalutin, I don't know, Healthcare fraud squad. Yeah, it's not me.

Yeah, yeah. Now, but if you want to put somebody into the healthcare fraud squad that's familiar with rolling back prices—

yeah, an accountant or a former medical person, right?

Or a former Walmart employee.

There you go, there you go.

And that's the guy we need.

So I'm more of the greeter. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm that guy.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, oh, they got him out here for a reason, you know? Um, yeah, and sorry I interrupted you, man. So, so, uh, so you're going through the phase 1 test, right?

Yeah, so There's questions, there's, there's a— there was basically 3 parts, but the middle part was all that algebra and geometry and all this stuff. And I mean, I studied, I studied and studied, but as I walk in, I see I've already met some people and they're full-blown CPA accountants who've been doing this. When we walked out of that thing, I saw them going, I don't even know what that was, I think I failed. And I'm like, well, if you failed, I know I failed, man. Like, this— you're supposed— this is your world, man. But I just started just circling stuff when I was running out of time. So the law of averages was on my side that day.

And you passed?

Pick C. Yeah, I just went. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I did. I don't know. I don't know if it was something to break you, like to throw you off mentally, just to stress you out, because then the third part was back into questions again. So like, if you've ever taken the MMP2 for a job, it's MMP2 something. It's like 547 questions. And a lot of places have it, and even our psychological unit has it. And I think you have to take it like once every 2 years or 4 years. But I mean, it's like so many different ways to ask the same question. But if you are hiding something under the surface, I don't know, maybe when you get stressed somewhere in there psychologically, it's going to slip out on the back end.

Oh, that would make sense.

Yeah.

Because sometimes a simple word, one word changing something, a little change, a little bit of thing, an angle. How?

So you do find your mother sexy and you do like harming small animals and you are fascinated with fire because at the beginning of the test you weren't, you know? Yeah. Well, and then they walk you out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have some hobbies. Yeah. You know what? But, but no, I love what you're saying, man. The turn of phrase, a little bitty bit can lead to something so different. And also sometimes just waiting when somebody thinks you're going to talk, just waiting.

Yeah.

And then their energy sometimes.

Oh yeah. Starts eating them up.

Yeah. You got to fill the space. I got to say something.

Yeah. Because what does their silence mean? Is their silence Silence means something.

Yeah. You know, and then you start to interpret in your head, what does their silence mean? And that's kind of a crazy—

maybe I was— maybe I wasn't completely truthful.

Yeah. But, uh, maybe I wasn't completely clothed, you know. Um, yeah, man. Wow. Yeah, this is interesting stuff. Thanks for your time today, man.

Thank you for having me.

Okay, so you get through— you get through the testing, you pass that, and then you were in— when do people go to Quantico? Is that then?

Pretty much. I don't know, because that's what you hear about on all the movies. Yeah, if you do, it depends on I know you have to pass phase 2.

Okay.

But I can't remember when the polygraph falls in and when the physical fitness test. But basically all that you're going to go to phase 1, you're going to polygraph background, huge background, thorough, thorough background because you could— you're going to be going into a job where you could get top secret clearance. So yeah, it's like they know everything, every credit card you got, any, any debt you've got.

Did you have to sit and tell some secrets and stuff about yourself that you didn't want to tell or how?

Well, no, because I'm transparent. That's just me. I mean, I'll just tell them. I mean, I'm not going to hold it back. I'm not going to lie. And really, in the FBI, I don't know right now because I didn't work under Cash, but I retired under Ray and I came in under Louis Freeh. But if you lie under inquiry and that's recorded, you're kind of dead to us because you can't go testify anymore. You can't go build a case because you're going to have to release that you were caught lying. And then the defense is going to eat you apart.

So the truth has to— the truth is the only way to get there, right?

So I've seen some people do some, or I've read about in quarterly reports, some things that employees have done, whether they're gun toters or whether they're professional staff. But in mitigation, if they didn't lie, I mean, they're going to try to get you help and stuff. But then you read the next thing and it's like, oh, Somebody was called to the table on time and attendance fraud, like they were fudging the numbers. Under inquiry, they lied. Dismissed. Fired. And you're like, well, if I've learned anything, don't lie.

Don't lie.

Don't lie.

Wow. And it's crazy that you would then end up in a world where you're going undercover, where it's like, okay, now I'm lying.

Yeah, except for now. Yeah, now I'm going back to Scott. Yeah.

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So it's pretty standard, uh, test. It's like the Cooper Institute standard. But, but basically when I came in, you had to be able to pass a 2-mile run in a certain amount of time. You had to be able to do, uh, at a sprint course they called the shuttle run. You start on your back, you sprint like 25 yards, turn on a cone, back down, back down, that kind of stuff. And then push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups. Um, but But that's just the pass or fail stuff. And then you get in and you basically— I mean, Quantico, I look at it like the— remember that old '80s movie, The Bio-Dome with Pauly Shore? And everybody, right? That's what I look at it like, because I have been in that building for 4 days and realized I have not gotten fresh air. I've not stepped outside this building. Yeah. Yeah. So you can go from— yes, it's— so you can go from— that's Jefferson right there at the front. That's where I stayed. You can go in and from Jefferson you go down to the cafeteria. You get your breakfast and then you go to class, you go to lunch, you go back, you can go to your room, go to the gym, go to the boardroom at night, hit the bar, go back, and you never step foot outside.

Wow.

And that's our track at the back. It looks different now. Or you know what? No, they did put a building in the middle of it now. There used to be a nice ropes course and all kinds of stuff, but a lot of running, a lot more running than I ever did. I was, I was a lineman.

So, so once you were there, that became a big part of it was the physical conditioning.

Yeah. And you're in class all day, you're learning all kinds of stuff. I mean, you're getting legal, you're doing this, and then we're in Hogan's Alley learning tactics, firearms range, learning how to be a better shooter.

What was one of the more unique classes kind of that you took that kind of stood out?

I always loved anything forensics. Like, even though we all know how the O.J. Simpson trial turned out and everything, but if you have a forensics person come in and break down exactly what was found at that it just got screwed up how it was collected. And then the defense did what they were supposed to do, they created doubt in the jury's mind. But you can— some stuff like that, if a forensics person comes in, they break that down on like, this is what we found here. And it's just getting better and better with, uh, like, I forget what it's called, but now they can take your D— there's something that's matching up your DNA. Let's just say they're clearing like a 30-year-old case. Yeah, because the DNA is there from that original collection before we even knew we were going to be able to test this kind of stuff. And then now they're going back and they can actually pull things. And you know how you kind of do that almost like a 23andMe or that genealogy thing? They're doing that and they can narrow it down to almost— that's it.

Testing DNA on cold cases uses CODIS. We know that.

Genetic genealogy.

Oh, genetic genealogy. There you go. If CODIS has no match, labs upload the profile. To public databases like GEDmatch. I'll tell you this out the gate, you do GEDmatch, you're gonna find some of my family.

I got that family too. Yeah, I'm first generation law enforcement, first generation 4-year degree, bro.

A lot of empty diploma frames in our area.

My dad dropped down to 10th grade.

Did he?

And he said he stopped paying attention in the 8th.

Oh, 10's good. Um, yeah. Oh yeah, GED was That was a popular pastime in our area.

So they just cleared— well, I was putting on training somewhere and somebody was telling me how they just cleared this case.

That's amazing.

And it was— they did that and they were able to use that family genealogy to narrow it down to, oh my goodness, this is one of the suspects that they interviewed. This is the one.

Wow. So yeah.

So 30 years later, somebody's getting cuffs put on. Dang. Let's do it.

I love that, dude.

Yeah.

I feel like you could feel the timeline of existence breathe a little deeper when justice is served. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I like a little bit of justice. Why? So, and so how long is the whole overall training for the— for, for FBI?

FBI, it's somewhere around 5 months. Sometimes it adds another month, and— but, but it's somewhere around 5 months.

And what percentage of people do they eliminate sort of along the way, or is that—

you know, well, it depends. It, it's a case-by-case basis. There was a time where I would go back and, and I would— because I was a firearms instructor, tactical instructor, uh, undercover guy and all that stuff— but I would be back at Quantico with my peers, uh, who were in those units, and you'd look at class and you'd be like, look at the last class and you see like half of them failed. I'm like, what, what is going on? It kind of ebbs and flows. I don't, I don't think half failure is normal, but I'm not there every day, so I don't know.

Got it. And when did your undercover work start? Did that start, uh, from the FBI?

No, it started at the sheriff's office. So once I made vice and narcotics investigator, um, you have an opportunity to go to undercover techniques or technical surveillance. These are classes that they would put on in Columbia, South Carolina at the Criminal Justice Academy. And once you get certified in that, then they'd let you go work undercover. But I mean, just picture me now. Number one, I don't want to mess up. Number two, you're around a bunch of older guys and gals who are seasoned in street-level buys and all this stuff. And I'm just trying to— you're going to have to show up. It's not up to them to like me. It's up to me to get them to like me.

Right? Got it.

Yeah.

You got to ingratiate yourself for sure.

Yeah. And it's a tough crowd. Usually is military, law enforcement. We're pretty, we're pretty tough crowds. So imagine me, number one, not wanting to screw up. Number two, being scared to death. And number three, thinking about them watching it and not wanting to screw up in front of them too. So my Gary Ward and some of those people, you know, but yeah, I mean, the first crack rock I bought, I was probably £275 with low body fat, you know, just jacked. And I'm like, I don't look like I smoke crack unless I just started. I just started back, you know, like buy a crack rock and drive around for 15 minutes and come back and buy another one. I'm not the guy smoking it, you know.

And so, so something like that, that's a real instance. You have to come back and buy another one. And would you have to seem cracked out when you came back around?

Well, what I was told, because I never smoked crack, was that it would wear off in 15 minutes. That's why they didn't care if you came back and bought again. So yeah. But they were probably giving me little slivers of soap or something. Who knows? But once I did it, the bug got me. Yeah, like the undercover bug. I don't know what it was. It's not lying. It's not like, you know, I used to like— it's the infiltration. Yeah. I mean, getting to know people. But during the book process, I can't remember what I used to term it as. But now I just realize, I go, holy crap, I just love connecting with people.

Wow.

I don't care. Even if you— even if I get called out at 3 in the morning. Because I was considered a good interviewer. So, you know, to either get information, a confession, or, you know, flip them and maybe they work with us. And I would go and, uh, I didn't mind getting called out like that. And, and I love it. The crazier the better. I mean, rich, poor, big, tall, smart, dumb— I love it all.

Did you guys have groups that would like, like, say you go on, uh, like you get put on an assignment? Is that what it's called, basically? Yeah, for undercover.

Yeah.

Um, and they could be very small or they could be bigger ones, deeper, deeper or shallow ones. Um, Do they— do you go to like wardrobe and stuff like that? Like, do they have all of that? Like, who creates your backstory? How does all that happen?

I say ultimately, ultimately it's on you. Um, and what I teach you, what I know, right? Yeah, you know, you're gonna come out. I, I believe I did used to call the unit and I'd go, when are you gonna call me for— because I was big country, even though I'm not big anymore. But they'd be like— I'd call headquarters and I'd go, when are you gonna let me do one of those Wall Street jobs, you know, one of these big old tycoon jobs? And they're like, No. And I'm like, I can say buy, sell, you know, put a big hat on and have that Boss Hog Longhorn on the front of my car rolling in. And they're like, no. And I go, fine, because it's my skill set. My skill set leads me to backwoods with meth heads and white supremacists and whatever else, you know.

Oh yeah, dude, those are some of my neighbors, probably. What were some of those early spots that you got put into?

Well, early on at the sheriff's office, it was the, you know, you got to go buy crack rock, which was terrifying to me. And then it might be— Yeah, because I never bought crack. I'm pulling down there, man, I barely cracked the window, you know. I was just like— they go, what you want? Because they come around the car, you know, what you want? I'm like, I want a $20, you know. He's like, roll down the window, you idiot, you know. I'm like, I'm sliding money through the—

let me Venmo you.

They didn't have no Venmo back then. That'd have been good though. What's your Cash App, bro? You know, I'll send it to you right now. Oh dang, man, that's pretty good. And then type in, what's it for? Drugs.

Yeah.

Crack. Uh, yeah, but that, that was the odd stuff there. But I started, I started cutting my teeth. But when I got in the FBI, um, my first long-term— I mean, I was doing some cameo stuff, which a cameo is basically what it sounds like, like on a TV show. You're there just to help somebody else, or it's a quick— it's not even a full-blown undercover operation. It's just going to be one meet.

Like, give me an example of that.

Like a, like a buy-bust, or we're going to deliver, uh, LA takes off a huge load of dope. Is supposed to be coming to New York. So LA gets on the phone with FBI New York. We're like, okay, what does it look like? We want measurements, all this. We would go build the exact same shipment, and then we would deliver it to where it was supposed to go so we can get the bad guys on that end. No. And that's just a one-time— dude, so I mean, I'm in a truck with NYPD detective, and we're just dirtied up and going to deliver.

So in that way, were you able to bust both ends of the—

of the— yeah, yeah.

What is the reason that they would do it like that as opposed to just showing up at the actual meet?

Because sometimes you don't know if it's getting delivered to a fictitious address or where is it going to go. But we were delivering it and it depends on the assistant United States Attorney because everybody's a little different. So maybe this one says, this is all I need to charge them. Somebody might be a little bit more thorough. They go, no, I want to actually know that they opened the box. Well, how can we do that? Well, let's build something so when we walk away, it's not enough that they take possession. We want to walk away and know that they pop the box before we hit it.

And how would you guys know that? Would you guys put cameras in the box or something?

Some tech guy is going to do something. I mean, there's so much technology now. I mean, I don't know what they can do. Yeah, but of course, more people watch TV and think we can do stuff we can't anyway.

Is that true?

Well, I don't know. It's getting better. I saw— I've seen some things since I retired. I'm not going to say what they are because it's tradecraft, but it really made me want to go back undercover just to use it for a recording device. I was like, I cannot believe— I'm like, you know, well, they just had those SUVs that they bought.

I think they had Israeli technology in them. I don't know if you saw that. There was these SUVs that allegedly can drive by an area and, and read your phone, basically. Can you bring that up, Trevin?

Uh, it's probably like if you're on Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and it's, it's pulling stuff off your phones.

Israel's Palantir rival is selling $1 million spy vans to U.S. cops. Is this a recent story? Because this was like 3 days ago. Oh yeah, this is good. There we go. Let me see. Cognite, which sells technology to snoop on phone locations largely in Israel and Europe, is making inroads in America by tricking out trucks spy tech. Texas State Police's purchase of 4 brand new Chevy Tahoes this March was unusual, not just because of the staggering $4.5 million price tag, but because the vehicles were kitted out with technology that could monitor the locations of nearby cell phones. Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognite, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity. Whether they're owned by a suspect in a case or not. Huh.

You're going to have some issues there. Uh, yeah, it sounds like I, I'm reading, I'm listening to what you're reading, but I'm telling you, you've got the Fourth Amendment protection. So if I'm going to be able to track you, at a minimum, I'm probably gonna have to get a court order. Uh, a lot of places, a lot of times now, you have to get a full-blown search warrant.

Do you think though that maybe they're buying these in advance and they know that The laws are going to change.

That could be. But I can tell you right now, if somebody is coming by and pulling your stuff and they're actually tracking you, I mean, like, you can— like, say if you've got a scanner and you're riding through apartment complex back in the day, you could pick up different cell phones and stuff. Is that— I mean, is that a Title III wiretap? I mean, if you're using it for evidence, it is. But for us, like, that's a huge invasion of privacy for me. Everybody listens to your phone. A pen register, trap, and trace, that's just going to let me track your phone and maybe see where you are off of towers. I'll get to see phone numbers coming in and calling in and calling out and texting and texting out, but I can't read.

Got it.

Well, I can't read the content.

Got it.

If you start getting into that kind of stuff, uh, like if somebody puts a camera in your house, that's a, that's a, that's a Title III, and it's, they're not— it's not easy to get. It's not TV. It's not like, hey, I need to be on this phone in 5 minutes.

It's different.

We can now You can track a phone in an emergency, or there are some— maybe it's harder, especially if you got a burner phone. But there are things like if somebody's missing or it's a threat to life, or maybe a cop goes down and we're trying— or somebody's got—

Amber alerts.

Yeah, we're trying to do that. We might be able to expedite it a little bit, but you're still going to get some type of order.

Got it. And now sometimes it seems like that police or FBI, they may use these tactics for the moment, knowing that they're not— just to, to behoove them to advance in whatever that moment is, to have strategy, knowing that it may not hold up in court later.

Well, I wouldn't do that, really. For me—

oh, but does it make sense what I'm saying?

I know it does, it does. But we're like— the way I've always done it, like, do it now, ask, ask permission later.

Like, that's forgiveness. Right.

Ask for forgiveness.

It seems like I could see that being a part of maybe this strategy. I don't know.

Well, that would be an on-the-spot kind of thing. But generally, or for, let's just say for the most part, I would not. I'm retired. I'm not bonded right now. But I wouldn't build a bad case or do something like that because that's a violation. But if there was a gray area, If, if this is just me personally speaking, I'm not saying it's covered, it's not covered by policy, but there have been horrific cases where girl, young girl goes missing. Uh, I'm kicking myself for not remembering her name right now, but she goes missing in Florida and everybody's looking for her. So you go out and you start canvassing the neighborhood. Well, you might look and you can see, hey man, we've got like registered sex offenders right here where she went missing. Well, that's the first doors I'm knocking on. Sorry if that offends you, but you're a registered sex offender.

Yeah.

And it's your trade. Yeah. And they're— and they, after the fact, they found her. She was dead. She was buried alive with her stuffed animal. But in the original canvas, they went and talked to the guy at the trailer that was holding her, but they never got in. So me That I would violate. I'm getting in there.

If you feel it.

Yeah, I'm getting— then, oh, you don't have a problem? You're not holding anything? You mind if I walk in here and look? And if you say no, well, okay, well, we'll find a way to get in here, right? But I'm not leaving.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Have you had instances like that where you had to trust your instincts?

Oh yeah. Yeah. As a case agent. Well, no, even as an undercover. But as an undercover, you're in a situation and you're You're basically playing chess. You're trying to be 5 steps ahead of them and their thinking. You're also like tennis, like I'm serving it to you and I have no idea which way you're hitting it back, but I'm over here going, you know, I'm that goalie. I don't know what you're throwing, but I'm trying to be ready. Um, as a case agent out there trying to, um, call a shot, call, call shots right there on the spot, you know. Um, I had a case, uh, in McAllen, Texas, where I was at for 6 and a half years. And what it was is that the, the, they were undocumented aliens being smuggled in. We get the call because the undocumented family is already in Virginia. They had paid for two sisters and a daughter to come through. And what happened is the smuggling organization got them across the river. So you get them across the river, at least in Rio Grande Valley, you get them across the river, and then they're usually at a staging location.

A house or something, because now they've got to get picked up by a coyote, a walker, and they're going to be handed off. And now they're going to be walked through the brush around the checkpoints to where they'll be picked up and then carried to wherever. Um, where this one happened was one of the sisters was physically and mentally challenged, and they left her in the brush to dry— to die. They left her in the brush to die, and Border Patrol found her. She was 16, but they couldn't figure out a lot. So they called Child Protective Services. They came over and were able to figure out you've got family. They actually figured out the other family was in Virginia and they were now being extorted. They got them across the river, got them into a house, and now they're calling saying, hey, we already dumped one of your sisters. Your 5-year-old daughter's sick and we're not getting her anything to make her better unless you pay us more money. So they're extorting them even though they paid. And in my mind, I think that's truly a victim. Even though undocumented alien is an illegal charge.

But I'm not working undocumented alien. I'm working kidnapping, extortion.

Well, yeah, especially if— I mean, I think there's a moral code inside of a lot of us.

Yeah.

Where you have to decide what's going on. Yeah. You know, and sometimes you can't even decide. It's just a built-in thing. You're like, this is how I'm going to operate in this space, right? It's a very human thing.

Yeah. So in that case, particularly, we're probably running for 3, 4 days nonstop because we're trying to find this phone. That they're calling on, that the bad guys are using to call the family. I've already hit FBI up in Virginia and said, hey, can you go over and give them recording devices, all that, all the stuff they need? And it was a Honduran family. And about that third day we're out and all we know is that the phone, like I said, just location stuff. I'm not giving away—

You're not getting text messages, you're just getting some location tags.

But it's not like— it's not always pinpoint. It's not like, hey, that's it moving right there, 10 feet away. That's not— at least when I was working it then. And we know pretty much that the phone is somewhere in the store and they're like, hey, it's moving. And then at the same time, 4 different people come out and they're all walking to the cars. And we've been up for 3 days straight and we're all— most of us are parents, which doesn't matter if you're a parent or not, you're still going to be like, But you're getting personally involved in this case because it's a 5-year-old girl. And I had to make the call. And like, what are you— because I was leading it. And they're like, which one? And I'm like, look, I'm going, oh, son of a— I'm going, okay, here we are. Here we are. Here we are.

Yeah. It's like the Masked Singer or whatever.

Yeah. I'm like, come on, Lord. I'm like, hit me. And then I'm like, let's go with that one. And we follow it away and get to a point to where that one stops. And then we were able to say, yep, the phone moved and it's somewhere close to there. So then we go in and hit the house. But the house didn't have the undocumented people in it. It had the guy, had the ledgers, had all the names. Of course, the phone was in there. They were trying to flush stuff and everything. We get in there and cut the phones on, and I call the bad guy phone and it rings and I go, it's you. So we do a long interrogation and luckily the guy broke and took us to the stash house and we recovered the girl and her sister. Yeah.

Amen.

And of course we're all crying, all the grown men. My friend who's a female Border Patrol agent, She's like, she's looking at all of us, we're like, you know, because we put the young girl on the phone with her Honduran mother and she's like, "Mommy," and you know, and she still had her schoolgirl outfit on. Man, they want to dry. They want to dry.

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Oh, it can. Yeah, that one did, because I mean, you know, it's like— but, but again, yeah, but think about it. Say you're— I'm like, I've, I've interviewed— not this, not that case, but you're interviewing somebody that's— his nickname's El Ocho. Once, because the cartel's already cut two of his fingers off, they've been tortured, they've been all that. Me yelling at them. How am I going to work this to where I can get something—

wow—

out of you? I can't, I can't chop your fingers off, right? We have a constitution. Yeah, that would be frowned upon.

Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, yeah, I mean, you gotta— you hope to play by the rules.

Yeah.

Did you see some pretty severe stuff that came across the border? Like, how, how intense is some of those scenarios and stuff down there? Like, you hear so much about the cartels and the level of violence that's like almost something that we can't even maybe fathom sometimes.

A lot of people don't. They value life a little differently. I'm not saying Hispanics because somebody's going to say, oh, you're saying all Hispanic. I'm not. I love— I mean, I got tons of Latino friends. And but the cartel at the time I was down there, Osiel Cardenas was running it. Which once Department of Justice took him off, it actually created a vacuum because now everybody's like, well, who's going to run the Gulf Cartel? And then you got the enforcers, the Zetas, that are saying, you know what, we're the ones that kidnap everybody and torture them, we're going to run it. And then you got maybe the government saying they're going to do it, and then Sinaloa Cartel comes in and says, we're taking over. And then you just end up with a bunch of heads and bags and vans. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's— you would—

is that a real thing, heads and bags and vans?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you like, it was getting bad enough to where this was shortly after I left, but it was getting bad enough to where because everybody's vying for the territory. If you're in a territory and you have a decent vehicle, like, it looks like you've got some kind of money because there's really not a lot of middle class. You're either low or high, and you're going through the wrong territory, neighborhood, whatever. And maybe it's the Zetas going, well, you're not one of us. Are you one of the Sinaloa Cartel? And they pull it over. And I mean, yeah, then there's been innocent bystanders lost, you know, because they didn't know any better.

And, you know, man, almost invested in a damn zoo down there in Sinaloa with a buddy of mine. We almost bought into a zoo down there.

Well, I mean, I've never been to Sinaloa, so there's probably like a lot of places that are outside the United States. There's going to be— well, it's just like in the United States, it's going to be good and bad. Yeah.

Oh yeah, my friend Andrew just went fishing down there and he said he had one of the best experiences of his whole life. Some of the greatest fishing he's ever done. Yeah. What smuggling did you see? Did you see any human trafficking? We hear about that term so much. What did you see?

So when I got there, I was working drugs. Obviously you're on the border, but you got every federal agency there. Legacy ICE, DEA, ATF, us, FBI.

DTF if there's some hotties, huh?

Yeah. I saw all kinds of stuff when I got down there. I was working drugs at first. I mean, it could be 50 kilos of cocaine in a tire. It could be—

see that much? What's the most you ever saw, man?

I personally probably getting to that 100-kilo mark.

How much is that? Show me with your hands.

Well, a kilo is 2.£2. So 100 of those. Wow.

I saw 2 8-balls once.

I know. Way bigger than that.

In Destin. It was in Destin.

Yeah, two 8-balls. I used to buy them 5 at a time undercover. Undercover?

Undercover?

Yeah, all the time.

Yeah.

But you get deeper and you get into the more serious. Now you're getting up to like ounces, you're getting up to kilo buys.

And so you'd see real— that much cocaine, you saw it real? Yeah, real cocaine.

Yeah, yeah. But that's—

was it hard? Was it hard not to smile when you saw it?

No, you smile after the takedown and then you get your— you get the— to get the photo. You go up there and do your trophy shot, you know, but, but that's nothing. Just picture if you were working in Miami and then like I'm saying where I worked, man, 100 kilos or you, but you go down the border. Well, man, you can trip over £500 just riding up and down the river. Yeah, because it's so porous and stuff. But the biggest weed seizure I got was £5,000. Wow. We literally filled up two trucks. I mean, my truck was loaded. I was sitting in the seat like this, just, I mean, I couldn't even, it was just packed. Then we loaded another truck. That's, it was a lot.

Did you even get a buzz driving with it? Could you smell it? Was it that strong of a smell?

No, it's strong. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, uh, dude, one time me and my friend Billy Conforto, RIP, and he was one of the, he was one of the first, um, gay male prize fighters in America. But he, um, we got taken out of a car. We had some weed on us, some pounds of weed. The cops pulled us over like, shit. So we put it in our front, like in our pants.

Yeah.

And the cop was like, I'm gonna sit y'all in the cruiser while I search the vehicle. So he sat us in there and we just had it.

Was it reeking though? Huh?

Which—

did you smell it?

I don't know why he thought that, but it was like, well, he just put us in there. We had it in our— so now we're sitting with it in the cruiser. He searched the car and then just said, okay, nothing to see there, put you guys back in it, you guys take it easy.

There you go.

So I don't know what made him think it. Maybe he did smell it originally, but you live to fight another day. We got lucky that day. Yeah, and we didn't do too much, you We weren't doing anything real heavy over there. And I think back then, if you were gay, you had to be high to even just get through it. It was just a different time.

Yeah.

If you're prize fighting too.

Yeah.

But anyway, what were we talking about?

So, so I've seen a lot of the dope stuff, but just picture if you're in Miami, like I just told you, 100 kilos and you think that's a lot. Well, what if you bust open the hull of a ship and you've got 2,000 kilos? I mean, you see that stuff and I'm like, I've never seen 2,000, but I've seen I've seen some big stacks.

Does it get competitive to be on a big bus?

Yeah, sure. Friendly competition, or, uh, I call it friendly, uh, you know, DEA versus FBI. Yeah, we always bust chops.

Yeah.

And you're working cases together. Um, but then I switched to alien smuggling because at that point in time in McAllen, it— well, I guess in the Bureau, it was becoming a serious topic to look at special interest alien smuggling. And it's not just— you're not saying, hey, I'm looking for the normal human trafficking. We are looking for people being smuggled in from threat countries. So like your threat countries, Russia, China.

And why would they be being smuggled in?

Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.

Got it.

Are they going to come in here with nefarious plans or are they legitimately trying to get out of where they're at? Feel better at life.

Got it. It's, it's interesting to me that like that, that would be kind of an assignment for you guys, right? Or like that would come down as part of the detail.

Yeah.

But then at the same time you would have the government that would like lackadaisically, it would seem, allow people to come into the country, right? Like it seems like they're trying to play both sides of the scale there.

Yeah, I don't like it.

Did it ever feel to you like, um like the government was starting some of the problems that they got, that you guys were then being hired to go and solve? Like, did it ever—

well, ATF's Fast and Furious, that would be a yes. I mean, you know, there's plenty of document— documentaries out there and some good books.

Uh, oh, is that— I'm not even familiar with that.

Fast and Furious, that's when the movie— no, no, no, no, no, no, that was their Operation Fast and Furious where they were— it was, it was alleged that they were allowing guns to go to the cartel, and then those guns would show back up. Yeah, those guns would show back up, and one of those guns killed a Border Patrol agent.

Wow.

But you're smuggling— so look at it like this, and I'm not trying to bash anybody.

I mean, no, it doesn't seem like it.

Everybody, everybody's got— every agency has their black eyes. But just look at it this way: if I released a kilo of cocaine into the streets and it came from me, an FBI agent, anybody gets sick, hurt, killed over that, that's my fault. That's a liability. So I'm looking at it the same way with fully automatic weapons and stuff.

Yeah.

I just know that— I know as a case agent working what I've worked, how hard it is to get approvals for anything close to that. So I was a little dumbfounded at how that worked out, how the heck that happened.

Just so our listeners know about it. Operation Fast and Furious, a controversial 2009 and 2011 Bureau of Alcohol, uh, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives sting operation, used a gun walking tactic, letting illicit firearms pass to Mexican cartels to track high-level leaders, which failed when tracked weapons were lost and used in violent crimes. Wow. So they let them through to be able to kind of maybe— I guess they would tag them or find some way to follow them so they could know who these people were that were getting them the high levels. But then those were used to kill our own people.

Yeah.

Led by the Phoenix, Arizona field office under Project Gunrunner, um, allowed straw buyers to illegally purchase thousands of weapons with the intent to trace them to major cartel leaders. Um, agents were ordered not to interdict or seize weapons during purchases, losing track of roughly 2,000 firearms. They were exposed after the Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was killed in 2010 by rifles tied to the operation. Resulted in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress in 2012 for withholding documents through a Department of Justice report, cleared up— though a Department of Justice report cleared him of direct knowledge of the tactic. So was this— this was happening while you were working?

Yeah.

Um, and did that scare you?

I'm probably going to get a lot of hate from ATF. I'm sorry about that. I love ATF. I got a lot of friends at ATF.

Well, I have a lot of friends that do a lot of things, and it doesn't mean that their bosses or the people above them might not be having some separate interests at times.

Right. And the FBI, we're an easy target too. They can name plenty of things that organization's done too. But yeah, I was just thinking off the top of my head, like, and you got to be careful because, like, let me use an example. Like, I'm a vice and narcotics investigator. So in Greenville, South Carolina, at the time I was there, it was illegal to gamble.

Okay.

So maybe we identify 3 major gambling operations. Well, maybe we pop one of the ones or go and interview them and flip them, but the head of that one is now giving us information on the other two and we're working the other two. But you don't want a Whitey Bulger situation where you're letting this, your source, go and wreak havoc for free while— so it's always a, you know what I mean? It's, it's, it's a balance. Yeah. And that's, that's why when we do stuff like that, if, if you're providing information, we let you know what you can and can't do. And I've told many, many sources that I've had for 28 years of career, I'll be like, look, if you do this, I cannot take up for you at all. But if you call me before it happens, I can take up, you know what I mean? It's kind of that thing.

Understood. Oh wow. Yeah. Are there— so when dealing with informants, this has got to be pretty fascinating. So you dealt with a lot of informants?

A bunch. For me, operating an informant for me is a lot like undercover, and they mesh because when I'm an undercover, I'm essentially being a source for another FBI agent It's just that I'm not a criminal. I don't have a felon on my record. I'm actually a bonded law enforcement officer, but I'm still going in and getting the information. I'm still getting the recorded stuff. I'm still that person. So for me, when I'm dealing with sources, I go, you're doing what I do on other cases, but I'm asking you to do it for me.

First of all, what, what people in like towns and regular towns in America are actually being like informants or narcs or whatever? Because dude, when I was in school, you always hear like, Ricky's a narc or whatever.

Narc.

Yeah, dude. Bro, Ricky, it would be like one kid like wore the wrong PE outfit and like, that guy's a fucking narc. Narc was the biggest thing, bro. And people were— and sometimes you'd even find somebody who got it. Yeah, snitch who got a little card from like the local police department that said they were helping them and stuff. Like every now and then they had like this, like, I don't even think it was laminated, bro. That bitch got wet and it didn't exist.

Yeah.

Um, but what types of people like in towns are actually are the first types of people you would get as informants for, for certain things? Or is that not even a real thing? Like, or like at a high school? I'm just trying to think where—

like, I would say it depends on what violation you're working.

Okay.

If I'm working gangs and I'm working transnational organized crime, uh, which is what I worked for a long time, well then maybe I'm gonna try to find and develop a source that can give me information on this, like this car, this whatever, this, this group that's been bringing in drugs that we've heard about. Or what if it's multiple robberies? We're trying to find somebody that knows something about— have you heard any scatter? I mean, any skeletal butt? Maybe you, maybe you talk to ladies of the night, some prostitutes, escorts, and say, hey, if you know, you know, things like that. But you can also be a highfalutin case. I'm saying highfalutin because look at me, I'm not highfalutin. That's bad. But it could be like a an espionage case. It could be like a white-collar case. And maybe, maybe the sources for those are very upstanding members of society, and you can go talk to them and say, hey, I was wondering if you could give me some information. They'd be like, I would love to give you some information. Me, I'm talking— when I say developing sources, when I was working, I'm like, I'm talking about going to somebody that you may never would hang out with, that you may think is a piece of trash or not.

But those people have never liked law enforcement. And I'm talking to that person. And after our conversation, I've heard things. You hear things like, man, for a cop, for a cop, you're not that bad. Or I didn't know there were cops like you. So it's on you. But yeah, I mean, that's the way I would do it. And I do think it goes hand in hand. But if you don't know, in my opinion, if you don't know how to develop and operate sources, I don't think you're probably going to be an awesome undercover.

Undercover. Did you ever have to pick like, uh, disguises, or was there like a— like, yeah, did somebody help like fit you for a scene? Did they give you a photo or like a lookbook, like, hey, here's what you can wear and not wear? Were there like— was there ever a thing where you couldn't wear a certain patch, like if it was like a, a certain gang affiliation?

Of course.

Like, how did you manage that? Take me into a little bit of that.

It really comes down to the intelligence of the case team that's bringing you in. Hopefully they've done their due diligence, and as an undercover, you can ask those questions. Now, is there a wardrobe department No, but do we have things in the undercover program where maybe you could get some jewelry and stuff like that? Yeah, we've got that. But as far as like wearing the wrong patch or not, that's going to be— again, ultimately it's on me as the undercover. Um, like if I— but if I want to know— if I, if I want to know, like if I ask for a weapon that doesn't come back to law enforcement, well, I shouldn't just take their word for it. I probably need to run that number in NCIC to make sure it doesn't come back to FBI Quantico, because I've been on cases that that happened.

Like, what does that mean?

Like, it means like, so you got serial numbers on your weapons. If they check that in NCIC, it's going to come back to something, right? Well, sometimes bad people have contacts that can run that kind of stuff, whether it's through corruption or whatever.

Oh, I see.

So if your weapon has your number on it and they see that and they run it and it says, oh, this is a Glock 22, uh, FBI Quantico Right. And that's how I was undercover. And I'd requested a fully covert weapon, whatever it was supposed to be, working with ATF and everything. And I was probably 6 months into the undercover, and somehow I was on the call with Quantico and asking how we get the— it's drawn out, but basically the guy's like, whoa. At that point in time, he goes, we really don't have any covert weapons. I looked, I said, go run this weapon right now to the trainee. And they ran it and said FBI Quantico. And I'm like, I'm like, bro, I mean, I could have just carried my normal weapon. Yeah, that goes back to Quantico too. But really, it's on you. But for me, now I'll tell you what I have done. If I go in and I meet a source, I'll ask them, like, sometimes my beard's this long and long hair, which is getting less and less now. I'm going to be thinning out here even more soon.

But looks healthy, man.

But you go, the thing is, is they'll go I'll ask them, hey, I was on an undercover, meet the person, we talk for hours. I'll come back and meet them again because I'm trying to figure out, hey, am I the right fit? Is this going to work? Because we're going to be basically undercover today. Yeah, we're basically going to be undercover together. And I'll say, does this work? And they would look and go, nah, man, that's too dirty. We're rednecks, but we're clean-cut rednecks. And I said, well, what do you do? I said, how about like a nice goatee? Because I get a normal haircut. They're like, yeah, that'd be perfect, man. Button-up shirt, shirt untucked. I'm like, cool. Now I'm just doing that so I don't look like a— like way out of place. I want to look— I'm mirroring them.

Got it.

But for me, I always stuck really close to who I was. I was always Scott, different last name, but I may or may not have played football in college. I may or may not be a musician and a singer, may or may not be married with kids or 4-year degree, but you can bet most likely I ride motorcycles and I lift weights.

Got it.

And then you just kind of go from there because my jokes are literally the same. I'm just twisting them because that— I'm— it's real to me, you know. I tell the true story.

Have you ever been in an instance where you weren't even the best choice for the role but you ended up in it?

Yeah, absolutely. Um, we call— I mean, you can word it, a right case wrong undercover, right undercover wrong case. But, uh, I had a buddy of mine and he was running— he's an undercover as well, but he was the case agent, and he was running this undercover on like a dirty doctor selling pills or giving pills for sex and stuff like that. The idea was, because of my background, to come in and be the closer to get this doctor on drug trafficking, right? Got it. And I came in and I basically said, I, uh, I'm a competitive powerlifter, but I'm getting older, bills are getting tight, and I need something for the pain kind of thing. I was trying to do that because they'd already had a bunch of reporting of like this, this doctor like You know, a woman goes in for a visit, she— he prescribes her a bunch of pills or whatever, she leaves, and there's a used condom in the trash can.

Got it.

And you're like, okay, all right. And then maybe somebody reports, hey, this doctor tried to do this to me, or something like that. So now I'm coming in as a new patient, and I knew a lot of the pill mill stuff because I was working it as a case agent as well. Um, but, um, yeah, I was just the wrong guy. Like, I did the first meet, and then the second time I came back, he starts telling me, well, you know, Scott, sometimes people come in here and they get these and they go sell them on the street. And I was like, I never said I was going to do that. I said, I'm in pain, man. He's like, what? And I, I left the meeting that day, and I went to hand over the recording of the case agent, who was my friend, and I told him, I said, I'm not the right guy, man. You don't need me to send me back in there. I said, I don't know what it is, but he does not like me.

It It just didn't fit. Yeah. Can you feel when something doesn't fit?

Yeah. Yeah. Because if you— yeah, you can feel it, especially if you're trying to force it. And I tried a little bit that day with that guy, but he was not— something about me. I don't know whether he thought I was a snitch or a fed or something or something, but maybe he didn't feel he could control me. But I was not the right guy for the job.

What are some things as an undercover, just like general rule of thumb that you don't want to do? Do you not want to talk much? Is there like— I guess, is it case-by-case basis, I guess? Yeah.

I mean, it depends on— I mean, there's actually Attorney General guidelines on what we can and can't do. Like, we can't be involved in an act of violence unless it's self-defense. Um, you can't like instigate the crime, you know, because that'd be entrapment, you know what I mean? Um, instigate and run the crime, and then all of a sudden, oh no, you're under arrest, you know?

Have there ever been romantic things that happen along the way where it's like there's almost temptation for that? Like, or you met somebody, you're like, well shit, I'm spending half my days in this environment, you know?

Uh, I've been in situations where, yeah, uh, but that's— you don't do that. You don't do that. I've seen other things where, you know, maybe people fall in love. It's just— think about it like this: if you've got my luck and I'm doing a deep undercover and I'm at this bar and you start hitting on me and I actually is a single man and, and, and we end up hooking up and dating My luck, that's going to end up being the target's sister or something, you know what I mean?

Is that frowned upon? Can you legally do that though?

No, it'd be a policy violation.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, it'd be a, it'd be a policy violation. Now maybe in like, if you go super spy, I don't know, you know, I don't know all the CIA's rules, I don't know MI5 and MI6's rules, but yeah, that would be, it would just be a bad foundation, period. Even if that person ended up not being I'd rather you bring in your real wife who isn't also an undercover FBI agent.

Yeah.

Then y'all just be you if you got that.

Do you think that most of us interact with undercover officers or agents within our lives without even realizing it?

I wouldn't say that because literally in the biker world, they call it— you got the 1%er biker clubs. They say that if you're an undercover in law enforcement, you're a 1%er because there's like 1% of law enforcement that does undercover work.

I see. So you don't think most of us have interacted probably with an undercover agent without realizing it?

You might have based on some of your history. Oh yeah. You know what I mean? Depending on where I'm at, I might have.

But I'm surprised we haven't met.

I know, right? But if I was at the Oak Ridge Laboratory, no, I'm probably not running into an undercover, I don't think. Yeah, I don't know, maybe you could be— if you're trying to sell, you know, uh, uh, classified material, then yeah. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't— I don't walk around like that. Yeah, I don't.

But it's not that common that most of us, just regular people, have interacted with an undercover agent in our life. You don't think so?

I don't think so.

Got it. What—

yeah, I don't think paranoid either. There are some people like, what if everybody in this room is an intelligence officer? I'm like, what if they are, right? They're trying to get information, I'm trying to get information. Buy me a drink. Yeah, you know, pay for this steak.

Um, yeah, what is a one-percenter? You hear about that term a lot, and that's a gang, uh, motorcycle clubs.

If you are considered a one-percenter motorcycle club, let's see, after Vietnam War, um, and everybody should— well, I don't know about these days, who knows if they know about Vietnam War, but you— they would come in, uh, soldiers were coming back and they weren't treated very well, and there was no kind of a transition thing, you know, or decompression. And a lot of the motorcycle clubs, I mean, they started back in World War II and stuff like that, but a lot of these motorcycle clubs were forming and they were doing some, you know, rowdy stuff. So the president of the American Motor— American Motorcycle Association, I think, is what it was called— comes out and does this media blitz to say, hey, 99% of all motorcycle riders are good law-abiding citizens. So they took that as a badge of honor and said, we're the 1%. We're 1%ers. And it's a patch on there. On there. Yeah. So it's your— like, you see 1%er, you're going to see the big ones. Hells Angels, Outlaws, Mongols.

They like to be the out— they like to be the— well, we're not the one. We're the non-law-abiding. We're doing our own thing. I like that.

So am I saying— yeah, that's the patch right there. Everybody always asks, they're like, well, 'Are you saying all 1%er biker clubs are criminals?' I go, 'No, but it kind of goes with being a 1%er.' I mean, you know what I mean?

If you're not—

I mean, I'm not saying that means you got to go break the law, but you're definitely not—

it's just saying you got an edge.

Yeah, you don't care about the law, basically.

Yeah, you like a little— or you like to— you got some of your own laws as well. Yeah, yeah, that's what I think.

A 1%er.

Yeah, this is— it's all interesting because some of these terms I've heard before, and it's nice to just kind of get to like hear them in the use of the world that they're from. Yes. Take me into your experience with the Outlaws. That's a biker gang you were involved with where you went undercover.

Yes. That was the longest one I did, 2 years.

Okay.

I've done— if I look back at my career, I could be like, yeah, there was a year and a half case. That was a year and a half case. You go where the case takes you a lot of times, or the case ends because something happened. They're like, mm, we're not doing this. Like somebody got hurt or something. But for the Outlaws, I was already a certified undercover. I'd already done several undercovers in the Bureau, but I had all the state and local experience too. And I was already role-playing and helping at the undercover school that we have.

And this is in South Carolina?

No, no, no, no. By the time I was doing that, I was living in McAllen, Texas.

Okay, got it.

Yeah. So when I got hired out of the FBI, or when I got hired out of South Carolina for the FBI, when I came out of Quantico, my first office was in New York City, which goes back to the sergeant, which is funny because I did not pick it as number 1. It was like 36 out of 56. So when I went back for my pick up my clothes and have the after— have the going away party for Scott, I went up to him, I go, dude, you jinxed me, man. I'm like, I got New York City, what is wrong? Um, but I was actually assigned to New York when 9/11 happened, but the day of I was undercover. I was in Texas. So now I'm moved down to Texas. I'm in McAllen. I'm a case agent, so I'm still doing that stuff. Firearms.

Okay, so you're down in McAllen?

Yeah. And then as a certified undercover, I can't remember if they canvassed through an email or did I get a phone call from somebody? Because once you start going back and role playing and teaching at the undercover school, I mean, the best way to describe it is, let's just say, well, it scared me, man. I thought something bit me. My phone vibrated. So I get a call because you're starting to get known if you're role-playing at the school.

And what do you mean at the school?

So there's an undercover school to get certified, just like to become an FBI agent. I mean, it's not 5 months.

Hold on. So there's an undercover school? Yeah, an academy.

2 weeks. Yeah.

And you learn how to be undercover.

Well, you got to pass.

Okay.

It's not so much that you're learning, it's just that you're learning techniques and stuff. But You got to pass.

And what are some of the techniques you learn there? Sorry that I didn't grasp onto this before. Is it almost acting teachers that are there teaching?

No, no. So I won't give away everything for the school, but I'll give away what's kind of out there. The FBI Undercover School is considered one of the toughest certification schools the FBI puts on. Some say it is the toughest. I'll say HRT is the toughest because HRT is tier 1 SWAT on steroids. Uh, it's 2 weeks as well for the tryout.

What does it mean, HRT?

Uh, hostage rescue team. Okay, so you can be SWAT in all your divisions. Like, I was SWAT in McAllen, San Antonio division. I was SWAT in Knoxville. Um, but HRT is at Quantico, based out of Quantico. Hell yeah, hostage rescue team. And I mean, they're hot too. They train with the tier 1 teams. It's high speed, my high speed, you know, helicopters, all that stuff. Um, but But that one is also a 2-week tryout, very physical and mental. A lot of times, at least from what I'm understanding, HRT is— yeah, HRT is like you just want to get through the 2 weeks without getting injured.

And you went through it?

No, no, I was going to. If I wouldn't have got out of New York City, I was going to diet down to probably around £250. And then because there's a lot of running and I was going to go try out. Does that mean I would have made it? No. A lot of people don't ever— I don't know if— I haven't known anybody that made it their first time.

But wow.

But the undercover school. It's 2 weeks.

Yeah. What are some of the courses? Like, what do you guys—

so you're gonna— the gist is this: big on sleep deprivation, no days off. That sleep deprivation brings out weaknesses, right? So you're going to be getting training during the day. I might teach a block on the Outlaws. I might teach a block on white supremacy cases that I've worked. Maybe somebody else is teaching, maybe it's the legal person, whatever. You're going to get training during the day, and at night Generally, the way it was run when I was in it at night, you're going to be doing role-playing scenarios. You're probably going to get 2 a night and everybody goes through every scenario. That way there's no liability. In other words, you can't say, hey, that person's background is drugs and you only gave them undercover drug scenarios.

Got it. You know what's like an example scenario you would probably go through?

They probably wouldn't want me to say that's fair because it'll give it away.

That's fair.

But would you say this? You're getting tested. You may die. You may die miserably in a scenario, and then you got to turn around and go, all right, buck up, little camper, we've still got one more for the night. You know, bro, if you go 0 for 2 in one night, bro. Oh yeah, yeah. And then, and I will tell you this, uh, I got certified in '02, 2002. I started role-playing in 2003, and I probably only missed a handful of schools in my 23 years of the FBI, and I never knew or heard of a 100% graduation That doesn't mean that it's hazing and none of that stuff. It just means that it's a great certification school and not everybody's cut out for undercover.

Understood. What do you think is the number one thing that blows an officer's cover?

Blowing the COVID Oh, man. There could be— I mean, bad backstopping, having a bad legend, you slipping up and not knowing your stuff.

Like your story or whatever.

Yeah, you need to know it. And picture, picture if you're undercover for 2 years. I'll meet you on day 1. Whatever I say right now, I need to remember 2 years from now. So that's why I stuck close to who I was, bro. And as I got older, now in early in the game, oh man, I was making like— I'd be undercover and I'd be signing my name Scott Payne. And undercover, the P would form and I'd go, yo, I'm Callaway. And I'd do— but then I'd be home as Scott Payne and I would sign Scott Callaway. And you're like, dadgummit, But lucky for me, I ended up getting better at it. And by the time I was— when I retired, I think I had like 8 phones. I had like one FBI, one personal, everything else was undercover. And I just, I just get so— I got so good because I'd be like— or I'm gonna say good because it sounds like I'm chest beating, but it just, it was easier for me to do. Like, the phone would ring and I'd see the skull and the color and I go, okay, that's that case.

What's up, brother? How's it going? Blah blah blah. You know, that's that case. Yeah. Yeah.

Dang, man.

Yeah.

So at one time you were actively involved in how many cases?

Oh man. So there are, again, I'll say it again, there are men and women out there that have done way more than me. For sure. But I will say that for my 23 years in the FBI, if you were a full-time undercover, like you're not doing anything else but undercover, that was pretty rare as an FBI agent. Because as I said, I was still expected to run cases. Do whatever back in my office.

Right. So, but you were working full-time undercover?

There was— I know I can remember twice, maybe there was a third time that I was listed full-time undercover in the FBI. But all the other times I would— it might be 2 weeks undercover, but I go back home and then I'm a case agent again and I've got to run training for everybody and firearms and tactics.

You ever do like chef work? You ever been like a— because I could also see you. I just thought of this, man. I'm thinking of ways I could I could see you doing undercover, and I'm thinking dessert chef.

Yes, with the hat.

Because a lot of those guys, you know, they'll have a beard, they'll have some facial hair, they have tattoos, because it's a lot of art.

Oh no, y'all can put the hairnet on. It's totally—

yeah, it's artistic people that are our kind of chefs, you know what I'm saying? It's like, that's kind of like an artistic sort of style. Yeah, yeah, that frosting pipette.

You like it? The pepper?

You put it—

you want the pepper?

You put a set of handcuffs on an eclair, you know? Yeah, I could see you. I could see you doing something.

Law enforcement thief, that's pretty good.

Was there pretty— but, but most of the ones that you did, it was pretty close to who you were though?

Yeah, the exception would be when I got called for murder for hire, because I'm a jokester. Uh, I got a pretty sick sense of humor. Um, I may know— not— I usually say this like, I might not know a lot, but I know funny.

Yeah, that's fair.

So, uh, sense of humor, jovial. But when I'm doing a murder for hire, or what I would call a closer— like, if, like, if you're somebody wanting to do something bad and you're meeting me and you want a bomb, I call that like a closer. Like, I'm providing you with a gun that you want to go shoot up a synagogue or something like that.

Got it.

I call that a closer. So those— my jovialness goes away. I never— I mean, I wouldn't— there's no point in me really building rapport with you because you think I'm a stone cold killer.

Got it.

And the stone cold kill, that's usually quicker cases too.

Have there been some murder for hires that you got involved in?

Oh yeah.

Really?

A lot.

And who's often trying to kill whom? Uh, is there a commonality there?

Uh, well, I would say it would be spousal, right? Would probably be the most, but it would be like wife, cheating wife, and her, the man she's cheating with. Solicit me to kill the husband because there's like a $92,000 life insurance plan.

Got it.

I never— the stuff you see in the movies, and I mean, I've known some of my mentors that have done those $100,000 payment hits. I'm like, I ain't— no, not in my world, man. It was, yeah, it was $10,000. I'll give you 10. Yeah, I'll give you $12,000. Yeah, after we collect the money, the insurance policy. And I'm like, you're telling me you want me to go kill somebody on your word. Wow. And we know that's not how this works.

Yeah.

So give me something.

And where would they meet? Where does somebody like that usually try to meet you at for the first time? Is there a general place? No.

I've met them in hotel rooms. I've met them at their place.

Right.

One of the ones that's in the book, they believed we were bikers. I brought in a task force officer. They believed we were 1%er bikers and they were hiring us to do 4 home invasions and murder, I think, 2 or 3 people. But what they do is they knew where the dope was because the son was running the dope and the money. So he knew of 4 different drug dealers and he knew where the cash was at, where the guns were at, where the dope was at in every house. Oh, so the plan was to do 4 home invasions and then murder 2 of them, and then I get some money, I guess.

I don't know. That seems like a lot.

And she was, she was a wild one, man. Yeah. This is later in my career, and like I told you, I would joke around and be like, with headquarters, I'm like, how come I don't get to go overseas? And how come I don't get to get on big boats? Yeah, I can get on one if I'm cleaning it. You know what I mean? I'm getting the chum out the back.

Yeah. Why don't I get the big deal?

What is this? Oh, I get to carry the luggage. That's cool.

Yeah.

If I'm in a fancy environment, it's because I was muscle for the main person there. That's it.

Amen. Yeah.

Sometimes you need that guy to stand next to the guy in the back, you know? But was there ever—

were we ever in an environment where somebody pulled out a weapon and it was really—

oh yeah, yeah, I have been. But let me tell you about Tammy real quick though.

Okay. So yeah, tell me about Tammy.

So we go for this one case and it was in Ohio and this lady, we think we're We know we're going to meet the husband, and we thought it was the husband's plan because we've talked to somebody that's talked to them, and then we know that they're looking for somebody to do this kind of thing.

You thought it was the husband's plan?

Yeah. So we go to the garage and we're talking to the husband, and he's like, well, it's not my plan, it's my old lady's. And I'm like, well, why are we talking to you then? Where's the old lady? She's like, oh, she's sleeping. We're all staring. Awkward silence. You think I should go wake her up? I said, I didn't drive all the way out here to talk to no one. Yeah, we're gonna do business. Let's do business. He goes and wakes her up. She hops in the truck in the front passenger seat. They're in the back. She is tweaking. She's clawing herself. Flakes of skin are going everywhere. We're probably inhaling it, you know.

Oh yeah. Oh, you can cook up a little bit of that skin. You can grill you up a little bowl of pork rinds. Yeah, hit it. Smoke that shit.

Oh, that's some real pork.

Yeah.

So we're driving, and as she's showing us all these spots, she's like talking all fast. She's kind of tweaking a little bit. At least that's my opinion. I don't know if she was on drugs.

And she's hiring to kill the husband?

No, she— it was her idea. She just— she— I mean, the husband's involved, but it was her idea. So she's the one that gets in the car because it's her son that's driving around the dope for these people.

Got it.

So she's showing us these spots, but while she's showing us these spots, she starts talking all this crazy stuff. She's like, she's like, um, you know, I'm really into torture. So if you need anybody tortured that you bring, if you— I'm really big into it. And I'm like, okay, driving, I'm like, all right. And again, it's later in my career, I'm just kind of— I don't know if I'm nonchalant or desensitized or whatever you want to call it, but I'm driving. She says, you know that you can take, uh— I can get graphic on here, right? Because it's graphic. Okay. So she sits in the book anyway, she says You know, you can take a hanger and bend it on the end and shove it into the man's penis. Sorry, I hit the microphone. So I said, it's all right, bend a hanger on the end, shove it into a man's penis, rip it back out, and then pour salt in the wound. Now the guys in the back are going, oh goodness gray, oh man. And I'm like, literally 2 weeks prior to that, I'd had my second lumbar fusion. The surgery was great and an easy recovery, but they had messed up.

I had to get dry cath So as she's describing that, and I'm like, that's pretty much what I felt 2 weeks ago.

So it's hitting home with you.

Yeah. So then she's like, and then you can take— there's another one you can do. You can take a PVC pipe and shove it up somebody's anus, run barbed wire up in it, and rip their anus from the inside out.

Well, that's insane, right?

And I'm looking at her and I'm going— we pull up to the red light and I lean over and I go, why are you so angry? And she's like, yeah, she said— I think one of the lines, she don't know if she used it right then or later, she said, I've been unlucky in love. Wow. So as we're—

she's talking damn— I mean, she's looking at— she's doing like— it sounds like she's doing side quests from Home Depot or something in Laredo or whatever, like, because that shit's—

I mean, undercover in Laredo.

What is she talking about, dude? She sounds just like an angry ex-Lowe's employee or whatever.

So we're driving and I'm like, are you sure you don't want to kill these people? She goes, no, no, everybody knows me around here, but if you need somebody tortured, I can torture them. And I'm like, oh my gosh. So we pull up to the next red light and she says, you know, my husband, I told him never go on a bender again. She said he was gone for 3 or 4 days, up all the time. I can't think it was cocaine she said he was using, but went on a cocaine bender. She said he came back, she couldn't find him. He came back, she said he passed out so hard he didn't wake up. You know what she did to him? And he's a skinny man. She said, so I went and got a 2x4 and I shoved it under his legs and I took an industrial stapler and stapled his scrotum to the board. And he didn't even— when he woke up from it, he's trying to stand up, but it's stapled to the board behind him and he's trying to move and he's screaming for her to take it out. She said no.

He had to call his friend over to do it. We confirmed it with the husband. No, I thought, man, she's got to be full of it. He said, nope, she did it. And I said, and you're still with her? He said, I ain't never had nobody do nothing like that to me. And I'm like, well, dadgum.

Sometimes love is just— so it's violent.

I know. And she's— and so when she said that part, as we're pulling up to stop, um, because one of the, the task force officer, he was like, he goes, man, remind me never to piss you off, you know, one of those things, you know. And, uh, when we pulled up, you know, all that stuff's running through my head, all the scenarios. And when we pull up, I go, you watch a lot of slasher flicks? And she goes, that's all I watch. And I went, now it's making sense. She's talking about Human Centipede, like, so a body into a body. And I'm like, good gravy. I'm like, but in my mind I'm laughing to myself because I'm going, these are my people. Yeah, this is what my skill set leads me to, you know what I mean? I go back in the backwoods and somebody's talking, not trying to chastise anybody, but they're talking, they don't have any teeth and their lips aren't moving. I had to revert back to my family, some distant people in my family, to go No. Okay, now I know what they're saying.

This is where I belong.

Now I know what they're saying because at first I'm like, what? And I'm going, oh, I know what you're saying.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, I'm translating.

Oh yeah. Well, you never really lose where you're from, you know?

Uh, just start hanging out with them. Hey, I'll get more and more country.

Oh dude, yeah, that happens quick. You go home, you just back down, and home comes back to you, you know, because it's always been there. Sometimes it's just like, uh, sits on the sidelines sometimes, or it's intermingled with the new places you're at. Was there ever any spaces where you got involved and there was any type of sacrificial or ceremonial stuff that kind of went on?

Yeah. So working domestic terrorism, we started seeing a shift where a lot of the white supremacist groups were claiming to be Odinists. They were claiming to be pagans, but that's not illegal. And I've got some very good friends who are pagans and they are Odinists.

Odinists, bring that up.

O-D-I-N-I-S-T-S.

Okay. Odinism is generally a racialist-oriented practice that places the highest fundamental view on the figure of Odin. Uh, Odinist pagan usually refers to a Norse-Germanic pagan who centers their practice on the god Odin, but in modern usage, the term Odinist is heavily entangled with far-right radical— far-right racialist groups. In a straightforward religious sense, Odinism is a form of Germanic Norse paganism that honors Odin as a chief deity, along with other Norse gods such as Thor, Freya, Freya, Freyr and Frigg. Can you give me any better information about it?

Yeah, because I'm going to disagree with what that just said, because that's what I was getting ready to say.

Okay.

The pagan part right there, relationship to pagan, that would read that.

Okay.

Because maybe they're tying the word Odinist to white supremacy, but that was what I was going to say, that true pagans are upset because Hitler used a lot of Odinism stuff. You would see the Stalingrad, you would see all the, all the, uh, Norse-type runes and stuff, but that doesn't mean that they're white supremacists. So maybe you want to do that.

Odinism is a modern neo-pagan religion that revives the ancient Norse and Germanic worship of deities like Odin and Thor, emphasizing personal honor, bravery, and a connection to nature. While many practitioners view it as a universal nature-based faith, specific branches and extremist groups have co-opted the movement as a racially exclusive white supremacist ideology. Does that sound—

Yes, that's what I was talking about.

Okay, got it.

So we started seeing a shift back, I guess you can say, because even under the Hitler neo-Nazi stuff, you would see a lot of Norse runes and Norse mythology and stuff like that.

But what years was this when you were seeing this?

Well, I mean, so the base case that I'm going to talk about was 2019. We took it down in 2020.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, took it down in COVID year. So you start seeing that, and I've got close friends who are pagans, and you look at the Asatru community, they are unhappy.

The Asatru community?

Asatru is pagan.

Asatru.

Yeah. Asatru.

Asatru.

So they believe in the Norse pantheon. So what you read, Thor, Freya, Freyr, and Frigg, and Odin is the Norse.

Forget about it.

Yeah, forget about it.

That's the Italian word.

There are other pantheons where people might be like, oh, I'm an Egyptian pantheon or whatever. But we started seeing this stuff. And if you go and look at pagans, like back, well, I mean, you can find it in Christianity too. There were sacrifices. Right?

We have the Bible that sacrifices in it.

Yeah. Old Testament. So one of the cases I did, I whistled, sorry. So one of the cases I did, uh, was into an accelerationist group. So I go into great detail in the book, but it's like, if you ask the average person in America, you know, what do you think a white supremacist is, a lot of them, they may know neo-Nazi, they may know like a skinhead, or they're going to say like KKK, Ku Klux Klan, hoods and robes and stuff. That's not what this is. These are accelerationists, and they don't believe that there's a political solution to save the white race. They believe that society is going to collapse either on its own or from man-made events, and they want to speed that up. They want to speed it up through guerrilla warfare tactics, like just small hits. Just picture like power grid goes down over here, water systems poisoned over here, train derailed over here, anything to create chaos.

Got it.

Um, I'm not saying it's the best game plan in the world, and it may be hard to wrap your mind around, but but they came onto our radar from being online and recruiting.

So they were recruiting online.

And a lot of your accelerationist groups were big on what we call flyering or stickering or postering. So you'll put up a flyer and it'll be like, save your race, join the base, survivalist group. There you go. And see that QR code? So you'd scan that QR code and it takes you right to BitChute and there's a recruitment video right there. And that's my picture right there. I mean, that, that— those are Bibles being burnt right there in that fire.

They are?

Yeah, if you blow it up, you'll see Holy Bible on that picture.

Oh, you can dim it down. I don't even want to see that, but I believe that it's happening. And so, and who's the people on the left? Is this— that's not the Christmas thing they do on the levee over there in Lafayette, is it?

No, that'd be a 20 to 30-foot cross on fire with diesel fuel.

I don't understand it, man.

I know there's a lot of history in the Ku Klux Klan.

Um, I wonder if we should have someone on sometime just to learn even about it. And there's Matt Damon. Obviously he was involved. Um, sorry, Matt.

That's clean-cut, that's clean-cut Scott Payne.

Is it really?

That's a Polaroid picture.

Yeah, bro. Oh my God, I just realized.

Yeah, that's not— bro, dang, I do look like Matt Damon right there, bro.

You look like Matt Damon right now.

No way.

I'm not even joking. Bring up— people must tell you this all the time.

No, I used to get confused for Toby Keith all the time.

No, B. Keith, dude, you look like Matt Damon.

Dude, that's crazy, bro. That picture does actually look like Matt Damon.

I didn't ever realize that Matt Damon's gonna play you in your life story one day. That'd be pretty wild. Pretty good. Okay, so you're infiltrated. So you get into this group with the base and, and yeah, so yeah, how do things escalate and what are you learning once you get in? And you were telling me that before I interrupted you. Go on.

Um, so I'm going in to where they're posting because they're trying to recruit. And it would be like, you know, if you're interested, contact us at thebase_1@protonmail.com. Again, ProtonMail, thinking that it's fully encrypted. Uh, I think that was based out of Russia. I'm not sure, I can't remember right now. But, um, so I, I start liking some of their stuff, they start responding back, and then I start emailing. So I go through like a week to a week and a half of emailed questions, pretty thorough. What can you bring to the table? This, that, and the other. And then I'm instructed to— I mean, my height, weight, ethnicity, all that stuff. Um, and then it says, uh, um, if you want to read that— oh, Geneva, Switzerland. All right, Proton Mills in Switzerland.

Okay, go on.

All right. Um, thank you. So then I'm instructed to download the app, the Wire app. It's called Wire. Operates a lot like WhatsApp.

Okay.

Um, so I'm told to download it, reach out, and then on a Friday afternoon in July of 2019, I did like an hour and 15-minute panel interview. I couldn't see them, but I could hear like good 4 to 5 voices.

Really? And it was—

it—

were you guys standing on two sides of a fence or something, or what was going on?

I was just on the app.

I was online.

Yeah. So I'm, I'm just listening to them and they're asking questions. And like I said, I don't know if they're gonna tell me to cut my phone on, show myself. And so I was in —of the club.

I'm picturing some damn Home Improvement type shit where you're standing over the fence.

I jumped in my truck and drove to an abandoned parking lot, and I was making sure I had anything— I cleaned it, make sure there's nothing in there that says Scott Payne or anything like that.

They don't see anything, they know where you're at. Just an old truck, you know.

So I did that interview, and there was a lot of stuff because the Accelerationists, their Bible is Their Bible is basically a book called Siege. That book Siege was written by James Mason. He's a longtime white supremacist. He created Atomwaffen, another accelerationist group. Um, but it's, it's essentially a bunch of interviews, but he idolizes— like, there's a lot of Satanism in there. He idolizes, uh, um, Charles Manson, things like that. But there's a lot of For instance, accelerationists— let me say this. So accelerationists, you know, you've seen the white supremacists that are out on the streets with picket signs and yelling during pride rallies or whatever. That's not accelerationist. Per the Siege method, number one, that makes you a target. Number two, lets everybody know who you are. Got it. Number three, it does nothing for the cause, is what they're saying. So we're going to do those guerrilla warfare hits. Okay. That kind of thing.

Bring it up again. See, just want to see that real quick and Uh, cite it. Uh, Siege. Siege: The Collective Writings of James Mason, an anthology of essays by the neo-Nazi James Mason. After growing disillusioned with the mass movement approach of neo-Nazi movements, Mason began advocating for white revolution through terrorism. Bam. Um, the book was reviewed in several periodicals upon its release and was praised and distributed by the influent— influential white supremacist Tom Metzger. Most neo-Nazis at the time either ignored or criticized the book. Um, uh, in 20— in the 2010s, the book found a new audience among online younger neo-Nazis due to the book's republic— republication by the neo-fascist forum Iron March. In addition to its promotion of neo-Nazism, it lionizes serial killers, mass murderers, and Charles Manson. Siege advocates neo-Nazi lone wolf terrorism.

Yep. So, so let's, let's, let me go off of that. Okay. So the base, I'll do that interview, uh, they ask me all kinds of stuff, I answer best I can. Um, again, tennis, right? I don't know what they're throwing at me, I'm just gonna be ready, right? Um, and then he tells me, I could tell who the leader is on there because it's the deeper voice, but it was Ronaldo Nazaro. After they've explained to me what Accelerationist is, what the base believes Siege culture. They gave me a 24-hour rest period, and they said, because now I know what they're about, I can decide whether I really want to be a part of it, and they can talk about whether they want me to be a part of it. Got it. And true to the word, 24 hours later on the Saturday, I got hit, ping, uh, something to the effect of, we'd like to have you in the organization. And I said, I'd be honored. So they tell me, um, they go, where are you at? I said, East Tennessee. And they said, well, the closest cell, C-E-L-L, because I know I got a country accent C-E-L-L.

The closest cell to me was in North Georgia, and then I was contacted by the cell leader. But to parlay off of what that said, terrorism siege. He said, forget all this grandstanding, go more terrorism, lone wolf attacks. So a lot of people don't know this. Al-Qaeda translated to English is the base. Al-Qaeda's MO, MO was 3-to-5-man cells all over the world training for D-Day, waiting for the phone call. The basis MO, 3-to-5-man cells all over the world training for that, what they call the Boogaloo, if they're still calling it that. I've been retired for 5 years.

So, um, and when you met them, are these guys, are they aggressive like males? What kind of energy did you feel overall when you met these guys?

It depends. But it wasn't like back in the Hammerskin white supremacy, heavy metal mosh pit crowd. But I don't want to get too much on a tangent, but I will say this. When I'm instructing, number one, we don't like to say the names of the mass shooters. We don't want to give them any credit. Amen. I'll name every victim from Columbine. Yeah. I'll name every victim from Charleston. Every victim from Buffalo, don't want to say the kid's name or the shooter's name, right? But sometimes when I'm teaching undercover, I have to because we're talking about a certain thing. But, um, what I'll say to people, because it sounded like you were like, hey, were these like jack dudes or whatever? Um, all shapes and sizes. But what I tell people is, I said, don't underestimate. If I showed you a picture of the kids from Columbine before Columbine happened, what would you say? If I showed you a picture of the kid from the Aurora theater shooting orange and yellowish hair. What would you say before that happened? Charleston, bowl haircut, skinny kid, but they still killed a lot of people, right? So don't underestimate, because dead is dead.

Amen. We had a shooting here in Nashville. Yeah, my buddy— I'm buddies with the guy that had the pistol, the two shooters. Um, I met him through some other trainings, and I just seen him like within a month of that shooting And, you know, just don't underestimate, you know. So I meet them, and when I'm— they call me.

And would you wear to meet them? Did you have to— I mean, how do you even pick out an outfit?

I mean, I wore like maybe like some hiking type pants, you know. I didn't show up all bikerish. But I go to meet them, and they tell me, they instruct me, you come to Rome, Georgia. I want you to park here. I want you to take a picture of the statue downtown. And then I want you to send it to me. And they're watching. I don't know how many, because at that point we knew we were going to meet somebody who called themselves TMB. I didn't know he was bringing a guy named Pestilence with him. I didn't know. They're trying to cover me. And I met the case team that I— even though we talked on the phone, I'd never met them before. So I drive down to Rome, Georgia, because now I'm being— this is crazy. I know, because now I'm being invited to meet them for a face-to-face vet. I like the vetting in real life because I passed the other one. I passed the emails, I passed the interview panel. Now I got to pass a face-to-face meeting. And when I met the case team again, we don't know really who we're meeting or where we're going.

We got an inkling, I think, but I know we didn't know everybody in the group. We did not at all. And the weather was bad, so it's like, I don't know, can you get any kind of aerial surveillance? Not when it's not when it's raining and stuff like that.

And it's hard to light a cross in the rain too, so you're not really going to see—

well, the— okay, Accelerationists don't do the cross lighting. The KKK does. Got it. Um, so these guys are hiding. They're all wearing Flecktarn camo because the Flecktarn pattern is German. They're neo-Nazis, so they wear nothing but the German pattern. That does not mean if you have Flecktarn that you're a white supremacist. No, it just means that that's what they wear. Yeah. So I pull up, uh, meet the case team,, and they're like, hey, they want to slap a GPS tracker onto my truck just in case. And I'm like, yeah. So your squad says that? Yeah, yeah, it's my team, my cover team. And because let me explain it this way, I was assigned to Knoxville, so I'm a, I'm an FBI agent in Knoxville. Yeah. But because the targets lived in Georgia, yeah, well, now you got Atlanta field office and the Rome RA, which is the satellite office out of— so that's who's going to be working that, those targets, right? So I go down there to meet that cover team or case team and we talk about some stuff. I'll make some phone calls and I see them kind of go under the back driver's side quarter panel.

So I don't know where they put it, but I know it's somewhere up in there. I pull up, I can't find a parking spot. I'm going back and forth on wire. Hey man, I'm here. Okay, look, I found a spot, but it's behind a coffee shop. I'm in a— I think I was in a white Ford or something. I can't remember what truck I was driving on that trip, but give them the description of the truck and then they go, okay, I see you. Um, and I see them come walking. So what comes walking up is about a 21-year-old and soon to be 21, and a 19-year-old kid. TMB is Luke Lang. He's about 6'2", maybe 220, 225, but kind of frumpy. And then Pestilence is Jacob, and he is kind of more not goth but more like black metal. But he's got BDUs bloused into his 8-inch tactical boots and then a tank top of some black metal band, you know. Shaved around the sides.

Probably Gwar, one of those. Instant Pussy, one of those ones.

No, I went to— no, I'm talking like, we're going to talk like probably like Hellwitch, Sabbat, Satanic Goat Ritual, those kind of bands, you know, that kind of shit. Yeah. And all it is, if you've ever been to a concert like that, it's like, it's just constant.

It's a lot of Home Depot noise.

Yeah, it's like what I've seen played when they're trying to break people at Guantanamo Bay. That's what they're playing. Got it. Yeah. Yeah, uh, with flashing lights and stuff, or like The Accountant, like The Accountant, you know, like Ben Affleck when he's in there cuts it on. Yeah. Um, so they come walking up and, uh, you know, it's first meet, so clearly I'm clean because I don't know what they're gonna— I mean, if they're doing their wherewithal, they're gonna check me, right?

How many times in your head do you go over, okay, is there nothing, like, am I missing anything? Like, that would have a lot, you know?

And like, I'll self-check. I may even have somebody check me for sure. I may clean my truck, but I mean, Hey, search my truck.

Is there anything on here that would let you know anything about—

Yeah, I mean, what if you just got dry cleaning and your tag's in there, you know? Oh yeah. Or prescription medicine and it's in your real name, you know?

So they're walking up there, you guys are behind the coffee shop.

Yep. And he comes up and he says, you know, I'm like, hey, I came in as White Warrior 88. I'm like, hey, I'm White Warrior. He's like, I'm TMB Specialist. I mean, cool, little niceties. And then I need you to put your phone in airplane mode. I said, okay. I put it on airplane mode and he pulls out this thing. It looks like the Geiger counter, man. Had like a triangle card on it. It was big, all kinds of lights and stuff on it. I'm like, what the heck is that? So he wands me and nothing. I'm cool. He starts wandering inside the truck and I'm like, all right. As he's walking down the side of the truck, that thing starts going nuts. It's getting louder and louder and lights are going off on it. And I'm like, oh no, it's picking up the GPS tracker. And he's walking. He gets right to the back fender. And I'm like, I've already eased my right leg back. I'm starting to get in that stance because I'm like, it's getting ready to go because who knows what's going to happen right now? I don't know if they're armed or not.

I'm going to assume they are. And right when it was going, it's going nuts. Pestilence says, you think it could be the power lines? Because where we were was a steep hill. There were power lines right there. So he walks over and that thing goes nuts. What I found out is that thing picks up— it's a $500 piece of equipment in 2019. $500 piece of equipment that picks up everything, every airwave there is, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, RF, whatever. And it'll color code in different sounds. Somebody whispering loud. Cellular. Yeah, whatever. So I lived to fight another day. He said, hey, follow us to another place. So at that point, I'm calling the case team and I'm like, you need to shut the tracker off. I'm like, you need to shut it off. And they're like, whoa, we're not sure if we can shut it off remotely. And I'm like, well, you need to try. And they're like, well, if we shut it off, we don't know if we can get it back on. I said, what I'm telling you is whatever he's got— shut it off— is finding it. And if you don't shut it off, it's going to be a quick undercover.

And it should be your choice. Well, I mean, they were saying technically, like they were saying, can you cut it off from a remote? And if you did, could we get it back on? And I'm getting concerned. You don't want to lose me. But I'm like, hey, so luckily—

I don't want to lose me either. I know, right?

Luckily they got it off and I pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned concrete plant. And I pull in, I'm like looking up to the Lord, I'm like, that's funny. How many people have I seen die in a movie at an empty concrete plant? But, uh, they wanded me and it didn't go— they wanded the truck and it didn't go off. And I'm like, cool. So then I go, and that's when I started meeting everybody. And then as the months went on, you would go and train.

Um, and we'd ever play ball together or anything, or like, would you guys do any social excursions, field trips, or anything like that?

All training. Really? Yeah, because Luke's dad had a 100-acre property in Rome, Georgia. Got it. And that's where we did a lot of our training. That cell and the Maryland cell would come down and train. And then at one point we started finding all kinds of things. Like you talked about sacrifice. That's what gets me into it. So I'll speed up to that. During the case, you start identifying more and more people. People. And those people are— some of them are outside of the United States, so our world working partners are opening cases on them. Some of them are in all kinds of states in the U.S. But as I explained before, that means that maybe Seattle is— FBI is opening a case on the person that's in their AOR. Maybe Detroit's opening cases. Georgia's opening multiple cases. Alabama's opening a case. It just goes, um, because at any given time there was a good 50-something people in the base. But the base was more like an umbrella group because every member that I knew that was in the base, they were also a part of another white supremacy group, whether it be Atomwaffen or Green Brigade or— oh man, was it Sonnen?

I can't remember the name of it right now. But so you were a member of another group as well. But we did training and that first weekend And remember, I'm a firearms instructor certified at the FBI. I was the lead tactical instructor for my division, and a 19-year-old kid led carbine and it led shooting and tactics. He led the training and it was good. It wasn't bad. And I'm thinking, man, how did you learn? Did you— I mean, you didn't run the military. You're too young to be in and out to learn this. He said, no, I think it was mainly gaming. And then his dad took him to to a range, but he worked on it. And I was glad that they were safe with their weapons because I didn't know who— what they're shooting was. I was standing back when we started. I was glad that they were good and safe, but I was also scared because if they were planning on doing something bad, they were pretty good. I'd be spooked, man. So one of the big things with undercover, you go in there, you've got enough to go in. It's all been approved.

We've got the reporting and people are predicated, so we're going in. But do you have enough to charge them? Well, in instances like this, you've been spewing a lot of hate online. You've been saying a lot of crazy stuff, but is what you're doing just First Amendment protected or are you actually planning on doing something bad? So sometimes we go in and you might just be in there for 6 months trying to figure out if they're doing— I've been in cases for 5, 6 months and I come back to the team and go, they're not doing anything illegal, man. It's all First Amendment protected, man. We're just spinning our wheels at this point, you know. And when did that turn for the base? When did that kind of— so I got— we were already talking about a bunch of stuff, and I was starting to get the DM conversations going on where it's more private, uh, direct messaging for those that don't know.

And what did your wife think when you get home on the weekends and shit and you got like a lot more white laundry or whatever, no dark stuff?

Like, yeah, or I come home smelling like diesel fuel from the— for the Ku Klux Klan. They call it Klan Cologne because you can't stand that cross up without the diesel fuel pouring all over you, unless somebody was holding an umbrella over you, I guess. Oh damn.

Yeah. But okay, so take us back in.

So at one point there's somebody that gets doxxed. And for those that don't know what doxxing is, basically outing you, right? And the far left is very, very good at it. They're really good at doxxing you, showing up to protest at your kid's school, at your business, at your home. Your parents, whatever. And the right, far right, from what I experienced, can't stand that because they feel like they're losing their life and their identity. That's why they're huge on anonymity. So all these pictures you see, if you pull up the base stuff where the BBC and The Guardian was blasting all this stuff, I mean, I'm there, but we're wearing balaclavas. That one, right, I'll show you one. It was me. Uh, yeah, that's me right there.

I'm on the far right. You're in that group photo? Yeah. And who took the pictures? Did you guys go to a place?

No, no, no, just one of the guys, one of the guys that didn't suit up, um, because you're always trying to recruit.

How was recruiting going overall? Did you feel like, uh, I mean, ebbs and flows.

You get people coming in and then you vet them, and then, and then some people might drop, some people might get doxxed. So, uh, so any women in it? No, none. Um, which was something I'd kind of There was a lot of— there was a lot of the guys that did not have partners.

Oh, you'd have more men in it if you had more women in it.

Yeah, but they don't have partners. So think about this, we were talking earlier about radicalization online. Picture for these cases, I'm just gonna say it's a young white guy, one young white man who's probably an outcast. He's most definitely been bullied, uh, can't get a date. And they're just hating. So then you go on in these groups at night, and this works on the other side too. Far left, Black separatists, radical jihad, kind of same thing. You're looking for somebody that's a like-minded individual. Yeah. And that's how they start getting you.

Do you think that the media ostracizes white people? Do you feel like it does it?

Boy, I'm not answering that.

Is that a tough request? Is that a bad—

No, that should probably give you my answer. There you go. No, it depends.

I don't— look, you don't have to. I, I was just thinking about it, like, you know, I feel like there's a lot of, like, I don't know, it's a tough one, it's a tough question.

I mean, I'm white, so what am I supposed to say? I mean, it's a good point. Have I— am I privileged? Am I not privileged? Did I get stuff for free, or did I have to bust my ass to get it? So I don't— I just try not to answer that. Yeah, I mean, I know personally what I've had to do to be where I'm at.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good point, man. Somebody else might not believe that.

Yeah, and it's in the eye of the beholder. No matter what I say, I can talk till I'm blue in the face. If you don't believe me, then that's it.

Yeah, we'll think about it another time.

But picture you're in there, you're lonely, and you're looking for— you want to belong. You want to belong. It's human nature to want to belong.

Yeah, and want to feel a part of something, to feel like brotherhood.

Same thing, same thing with gangs, same things with cults, biker clubs. It's a brotherhood. Your brother, you know, you're now— you're now you're one of us.

Oh dude, there was not like when you were growing up just having your friend. It's like going to the gym with a friend to go lift with. Anything that gives you some connection becomes a huge part of your life.

Yeah. So you get that. And I'm glad you said that because another way to describe what I was describing is isolation. Yeah.

Oh, it's—

And if you're a believer, when you get isolated, let's look at the jungle, Africa. If you're a zebra that gets isolated, you're a lot easier to pick off.

You know what I mean? Just saying. Undeniably. Isolation is for the devil, man. I believe that.— even though there's things even in my own life, it's like, man, I don't want to go. I don't want to do that. That is not the best parts of me talking or communicating to me.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. Anyway, carry on. So this guy, a guy gets doxxed. He's a member in South Africa and he gets doxxed. And then at that point, one of the members in the base is like, how many of our brothers do we have to watch fall before we do something? And he called for operational Operation Kristallnacht, which was an actual operation in World War II. Essentially, uh, it— what they did is if you were not white, you were Jewish, you know, anti-fascist, whatever, uh, they would go down and smash your windows of your business, slice the tires on your car, set stuff on fire. So that's what he was calling for. And some members did do it. They went out and tagged some synagogues with some, uh, you know, hate symbols. I'm trying to remember if anybody set anything on fire or not. I remember being called for slashing tires. But so now we're starting to get a little bit more— people are actually doing overt acts in furtherance of hate, right? Even though, even though it's just painting. And I mean, but you know, like I've had some people say, hey man, I mean, they just painted a synagogue, you know.

I mean, to be looking at this many years for, for a hate crime or whatever, and I'm like, Yeah, but what if you were one of those Jewish people that went to that synagogue and now every time you go there, you're scared to death because you've seen active shooter, you've seen mass shooter events. Tree of Life in Pittsburgh. And I know a lot of those people now because I've helped out with Eradicate Hate and Eradicate Hate's based out of Pittsburgh. And I've actually met and I'm friends with family members of the people that were murdered at Tree of Life. Yeah.

My friend Michael the other day was talking about The shooting that had happened in Australia. New Zealand.

No, I think it was in Bondi. Okay. I was thinking of the New Zealand Christchurch.

No, I think it was in Bondi Beach. Oh, there we go. Yeah, this was in December.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sad to say that these shootings happen more and more often and they start blending in my head. Which shootings do you mean? Just overall? I mean, just like active shooter events. Yeah. Yeah, I do remember that. That was the Sikh temple or something they shot up.

You'd feel like people, um, I don't know, evil's always going to be around, you know. Well, you know, a lot of interviews, a lot of this of New Age stuff, like say a lot of like, um, if there's anti-Semitic, if it's Jewish-specific hate, do you think a lot of that is coming from, um, like people who have, or do you know actually if a lot of it's coming from like people who have Nazi ideology from Hitler Nazi ideology, or is it people that are having reactions to some of Israel's tactics and their government's tactics?

It's going to be both because if you're pro— I got to figure out, I want to word it right because I don't want anybody to say you're saying all pro-Palestine people or no. But if you're on that extreme side, that's pro-Palestine over Israel. Well, a lot of those people aren't white, so you couldn't be identifying with Hitler because Hitler's more of the white supremacy, but it's definitely anti-Semitic. Wait, wait, hold on a second. They're hating the Jews too.

Do you think that's an extremist view that people are pro-Palestine?

No. Yeah, no, not at all. But if you were going to go— again, if you're going to go to extreme, are you going to be happy that people are being slaughtered and murdered and raped and tortured, you know, and you're anti-Semitic? Then you're probably more that extremism side. Got it. But you were asking me if it was like, is it Hitler-driven or is it pro-Palestine, anti-Israel-driven? Yeah, anti-Israel government-driven.

Yeah. So just to be super clear. Yeah, man, I think it's just scary. I have Jewish friends that have been, who have spoken out about just being in fear and they're like—

Going to class. Yeah. And I'm like, I don't— I mean, heck, Hitler wasn't even solid white. I think he— I mean, you can pull it up. I think it was determined that he had some Jewish in his blood.

And then there's probably other ethnicities who are scared of our relationship with Israel and what could happen to them in the future. I get scared sometimes. I think with the surveillance state now, I feel like everybody's getting scared.

Oh my goodness, I know. And now the big— I think the fresh topic right now on surveillance is those flock cameras. Yeah.

It's like a lot of my Black friends are starting to, are starting to fuck them up.

Yeah, I'm not hating on that. I'm not saying do it.

I'm just saying that the block versus flock, that's where I'm at.

You see a flock camera on a cul-de-sac, one cul-de-sac. Why do you need a flock camera? I agree. Were you— are you reading plates? What's going on? Or does it pick up phone stuff? And it's the third party. Here's my concern: third-party company that's not law enforcement. I agree. What are we doing? So what oversight do you have? Do you have policies stopping? I mean, we've got a Constitution. That is our— that's our law. That's our Bible. If you— which it goes back to, you know, you're talking about the border and stuff. Listen, if I'm a law enforcement officer, number one, I'm a peace officer. Yeah. Most of the cars used to say, to protect and serve. That's your job. You're a shepherd. You should be. You're protecting the sheep. Yeah. From the wolves. That's— I mean, I'm not trying to be all have, you know, Jack Nicholson on the wall and be, uh, no holier than thou. It's just my job is to enforce the law. So I used to tell people, I'm like, well, don't hate me because I'm enforcing law. There's been so many people I've arrested or sat down at a table with after they've been arrested, and I'll say, man, you know, I'm not saying I disagree with what you did.

I'm not saying I think you're a bad person. I'm saying you're an adult and you made the choice to break the law and you got caught. So here we I'm not hating.

Did you ever get so deep entangled during like a, um, during, um, like a sting or during an operation or during an undercover where at the end you were like, damn, this is gonna be a long day when this bust happens?

Yeah, because it's gonna bother you.

Yeah. Sorry, and I'm kind of taking us off, uh, off a base, or I'm kind of taking us— yeah, off a base a little bit. So let's get back. Um, so there was the doxxing going on. Yep.

So they did— some people tagged some stuff. And also during that time, we had a base member who went out in Canada. He was Canadian, and he went and put flyers up to try to recruit. And then somebody answered the recruitment. They had to go through the emails like I did. They had to go through an interview panel like I did on audio, on wire. And then they went and had the face-to-face meet. So this guy that got recruited one of our members who ended up being called Punish Snake. His name is Pat Matthews. Punish Snake? Yeah. So Pat Matthews, uh, he changed his name several times, but he was— I think it's the Canadian version of our National Guard, kind of. But he was being trained, he was military, he's being trained, um, and he's the guy. So we get a new member coming in, hey, welcome new member, blah blah blah, from Canada. I think his name was Mark or something. And he's in the main chat group for about a week, maybe 2 weeks. I don't think— definitely, I don't think it was more than 2 weeks.

And are you in the chat group every day? Kind of. Yeah.

Imagine if I wasn't. So I work my job as an FBI agent. I go home, I might have dinner with my family, and then I'm back out on the porch answering stuff, or I'm checking in during the day. Right. But they also knew I was a—

what's up, fellas? Everybody still racist or whatever? Shit like that.

You're gonna commit some hate crimes. But so this Canadian, he meets this guy, this guy gets into the group, and after about a week or so he comes out and it turns out that it was a journalist for a paper. Gay? No, no, he's a— I guess these days that's probably what the people are thinking. He was a journalist for a newspaper up there. He went and met Pat on his own, and after about a week or two they were like, hey, this is too deep, you pull the chocks, write it. So this article comes out. And it's basically doxxing Pat. So Pat, they come, the RCMP, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP, comes to his house, takes his guns. He's booted from the military thing. His parents now hate him. I think he lost his job. And all of a sudden he disappears. Wow. His truck is found at the border, the border of Canada and the United States. So we're pretty sure he's here. But we don't know where, right? Eventually we find him, and he ended up being down at my cell. He was renting out one of the horse stalls under the barn, under the residence on that 100-acre property.

So I got to go sleep in there. Yeah, so I got to go spend a lot of time down there training, and it just got crazier and crazier, man. It was like—

and what kind of stuff were they saying? Or like, how crazy was it?

Everything's preparing for the— preparing for the boogaloo. Building your kit. I mean, a lot of these kids didn't even have— I say kids, I mean, I was 48. I lied and said I was 44 at the time because literally there was like one other 40-something. I think Nazaro was 40-something, so the leader was 40-something. There was one other dude that was in his 40s. There might have been two 30-somethings, and everything else was 20s and teens. Wow. A lot of these kids, they didn't have a job, they didn't have a car. They had to borrow a car to come to the training. But they were wearing Crye Precision plate carriers. Same thing the FBI SWAT team wears. Got it. They're building their kit up, their pistols, their semi-automatic rifles, their ARs or their AKs. And we're coming out and training, man. Wow. Moving drills. And I may not be the best, but still, I mean, I was looking at a lot of them going, holy crap, man, if they wanted to take on some— if they wanted to do something, they're probably going to get the drop on a lot of people, right?

You know, so scary, dude. It's so— it's fascinating to think that that goes on.

So once we found Pat, um, and we had him locked down, so we're like, okay, we feel like we're in control of the situation because we were finding out more and more stuff. Uh, are they plotting something or they're not? There was inklings of things being whispered and said, and we're as a case team and an undercover— all the case teams, I mean, at one point we had 100 people on a call once a month. That's how many case teams there were in the United States working this stuff.. And it was just kind of like, did they mean that? Did they not mean that? You're trying to find out, are you going to do something bad or are you not? Are you just talking trash, First Amendment protected? And then you're waiting for the D-Day and then it's purge. So we get this all started because you asked about the sacrifice thing. So a lot of these guys believed in the North Norse, Norse pantheon. So they were claiming pagan, but they're white supremacists. They're not true pagans. Got it. They're white supremacists. And we've already had a couple of blots, B-L-O-T. That is the ceremony, the worship ceremony.

Did you ever go to those? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd already been— well, I mean, I had to participate. I had to mirror. So I would pray to a god. There were some that we had that had some people leading it that was really, they were— some of them were actually priests in the Asatru family. Just doing what, side jobs or whatever? No, no, no, no. I'm just meaning they've obtained the rank to basically be a preacher. They are a priest and they can run a block. So I'd attended some and it might be in the middle of the summer and you go down there and you paint runes on your chest and we do the whole ceremony and there'd be like a take a piece of wood and carve some runes in it, which were pagan. R-U-N-E-S. Yeah. And then it would be— but then there would be swastikas and white supremacy stuff on there too. Oh, I got it. And then you would cut yourself and bleed on the wood. And then we set the wood on fire and pray to our gods until the wood stopped burning. So I was getting in closer.

Yeah. And then, and then it was just going so fast, Theo.

I'll tell you how you ever wake up believing it.

No, no, not this. No, no. I mean, some of these cats were— cats? Some of these guys were saying that Hitler's still alive in Hollywood and he's hanging out with 15-foot giant white dudes with red beards and they're just waiting to come back. And I'm like, for what? Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, come on back if you're saying we need to fight right now. What are they— what's Hitler waiting?

Yeah. Were they milling around?

Yeah. Yeah, come on, you know.

Yeah, unless he's waiting for NIL money or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. I'm switching teams.

Somebody give him a deal, probably.

Um, but so we get to this point and it's Halloween of 2019, and we're gonna have a basically what people refer to as a hate camp. We're going to be there training and training. I did some hand-to-hand combat training there. We'd already started doing firearms, but that, that Halloween night was Thursday night in, uh, in 2019. So we have a few drinks. I go back to my, uh, I go back to my truck. I'm actually charging my phone up because the battery's dying. You know how it is when you go from like sleet, ice, freezing cold, and you hop in that warm vehicle and you kind of just defrost and then you nod off a little bit. I nodded off a little bit, um, and I wake up to the pounding on my door because I was already pale horse by this time. I switched my code name and they were like, "Pale Horse, Pale Horse, wake up, wake up." I'm like, "What's going on?" They're like, "You got to see this. You're not going to believe it." I come out and they go, "Hey, remember us talking about sacrificing a goat?" And I'm like, "Vaguely." And they're like, "We got one." And I'm like, "Oh." They went, I mean, not far down the road to a guy who had 3.

And turns out that he came out because he heard them. They were armed. They had their flecktarn camo on with the balaclavas over their face. I mean, it's a wonder nobody didn't get shot right there. But they steal a goat or a ram. I don't know that. I mean, I've asked people the difference. It was big. It had horns. I don't know if it was a goat or a ram, but they, uh, I walk up and they're like, uh, had it in the back of the truck. And one of the members who went by, uh, Dima, Dima says, Man, this goat's shitting all over the truck. And I said, well, hell, I would be too if a bunch of Neanderthals with flecked horn and balaclavas just jerked me out of the backyard at gunpoint. I'm like, daggum, you know. And, uh, and then Eisen was going to be running the blot on this one, and I see him over there and he's petting the goat and he's like, it looks like he's showing it love and stuff. And I walked up and I said, hey man, is it bad that I feel sorry for the goat?

He says, hey, pale horse, don't let it hear the goat.

Eisen was the guy's name?

Yeah, it was his code name. His real name was William Bilbro.

Oh, I'm gonna say, because Eisen sounds like a Jewish name. It seems like a weird name to have.

I think, I think it was actually a rune.

I can't remember what Eisen stands for, but anyway, Eisen is German and Ashkenazi, US surname meaning iron. There you go. Eisen. Okay, go on.

Sorry, so I didn't know that. See, I should have looked that up. I spent 7 months with a guy. Well, shit. But, uh, I'll be like, oh, Iron. I got it. So he says, hey, don't let the goat hear you say that. And I'm like, okay. He's like, this goat, we're showing this goat love. We're going to sacrifice it to start the wild hunt, and it's going to Valhalla. It's going to be with Odin tonight. This is a good thing for the goat. No negative energy, basically. And don't let the other people hear you with negative energy. I said, got it. Push that beach ball down. Never think of it again. You know, underwater, let's go push it down. So So I walk over to— oh, let me say this. The Wild Hunt in Norse mythology is essentially Odin and other gods going out in the middle of the night and laying the smackdown to all their enemies. But in the version of the white supremacy, he's saying that this sacrifice is going to start the Wild Hunt for us to cleanse the world of darkness. So if you're anti-fash and you are non-white, when Boogaloo happens, they're saying— what they were saying is If you were not fascist, you were automatically anti-fascist, and the penalty is death.

I mean, these dudes would talk about shooting their own dads. Like, I'd have to kill my dad if he doesn't switch to be fascist. I'm going to have to kill my dad. Wow. And then one would be like, I'd cry myself to sleep if I did. Another would be like, well, I could never kill my parents, so you guys are way ahead of me. So you're hearing all this crazy stuff and you're hearing Pat down under the barn saying, I'm a ghost. My life is over.

I don't exist anymore because that's the guy that got doxxed out of Canada. And so can't y'all bust the group at this point or no?

We could, but I'm going to tell you, in my opinion, as a case agent on long-term cases and as an undercover, that's the heart's decision to decide when do we have enough or, oh, this new guy just came in, one more buy and we can get—

because at what point are you just like playing house or whatever? It almost seems like a White House, right?

But what would we charge them? With other than assisting getting an undocumented alien in right now? Right now, what charges are you going to come up with? Because there's no federal domestic terrorism charge. Okay, there are federal international terrorism charges, but there's not for domestic terrorism. Got it. Um, so I'm, I'm hearing all this crazy stuff, like, I mean, we can form— everybody's been doxxed— we can have like a staging location or, or, uh, you know, a clubhouse somewhere where it's all us and we're all Ghost and we just go out and murder. I mean, it's talking about laying out like a homeless person, learning the pattern of the lefty journalist, and then just popping them in the back of the head with a .38 one day and just walk off. Wow. That's guerrilla, that kind of small hit kind of thing. So we've got them, and then we get to that Halloween weekend. So they tell me they got the goat, and I go to my, my listening device, and I'm like, hey, talking to the case, and I'm like, if you can hear me, I'm pretty sure we're gonna go down here and slaughter this animal.

I'm racking my brain trying to think if there's anything. I'm definitely not seeing anything federal in my head. And I basically just tossed it to them. Do you want me to shut this thing down or you want me to just drive off, come up with a ruse and kind of drive off? I said, if you want me to, you need to let me know. And I waited and I stared at my device and I waited and I waited, waited for my phone to ring. I waited, waited, nothing. And I went, okay, I guess I'm heading down in the woods. So we head down, we carry the goat down. There's probably about 12 of us there. And Eisen— is the goat sleeping or it's loud? No, no, we're walking it down, but you know. Yeah. So we get down there and, uh, just doing goat shit. Yeah, doing good. Yeah. So we get down there to what was referred to as a holy spot. The torches are lit. Eisen leads the blot, talks about, hey, we're gonna, uh, sacrifice this goat to Odin. It's gonna go be with the elves and everything.

And is he— is it pretty organized, or is the guy like reading notes off of his phone? And no, he wasn't the best.

Now That other guy I told you about when we were in the summer, I think he was a legit Asatru priest. Got it. I mean, it was led very well. This one was a little choppy. Yeah, that's crazy. God dang. But they're believing it. They're believing it, right? So then he has like a— it's bigger than a machete, but it's not quite a sword from what I remember. We're all around the goat. He's already given the whole speech about the wild hunt and we're going to start killing all anti-fascist and non-whites. Because if everybody's white, that'll definitely save— that'll solve the problem. No, I won't. No, I won't. You know, crazy. Still gonna be fighting. Yeah, it's still gonna be cheating. Yeah, what are we talking about here? But, uh, so I end up— we're all in a circle around the goat, and somehow I ended up at the back legs, and he's already given the speech, and now he's got this blade, and he's, he's like, he's bringing it back with his hands, and he's coming down, practice swing, practice swing, taking a breath. You can hear somebody say, just do it, you know.

And he comes down, and I'm holding the back of that goat. He comes down with everything he's got, and all I heard was thunk. I don't think it broke a single hair. I don't know if the blade was dull or the backstrap of the goat was so strong. And for that second, I was like, in that split second in my mind, I'm like, oh, this is going to be bad. This is going to get bloody, um, because I'm holding it. And yeah, and then you hear It may take two swings. Do it again. You're always yelling. And then somebody says, does anybody got a gun? I think it was Pestilence. Does anybody have a pistol? And we're fucking pestilence. The rule was, is we weren't supposed to bring any weapons down there. But the one guy, Zoom Nat, says, I got mine. I mean, me and Luke TMB both were looking at going, what? This is like the least qualified guy to be holding a weapon. This dude's been up for like 2 days straight on Adderall. He worked third shift in Austin, Texas and drove straight to Rome, Georgia. And I'm like, and not coordinated.

I mean, gun stuff. I mean, I was like, oh my goodness, man, you're the last person down here.

What the heck, dude?

He hands the pistol over. Luke takes it from him.

This is like Assassin's Creed.

Oh yeah, yeah. So he takes the weapon, hands it to Eisen. Eisen chambers a round, kind of points towards the goat and then turns completely away to pull the trigger. And that's when the instructor in me, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah, he's like, what? And I go, man, look at what you're shooting at, bro. We're all in a circle on our knees, man. He's like, oh, okay. I know, man.

I feel like this is a Larry David sketch. I know, dude.

I mean, part of you in the comic, comical side, you're like, I'll let him go ahead and shoot. I'm over here, you know. He's aiming that way. Let's see who he takes out, you know. Uh, but yeah, so he puts one right in his head, and then it goes down and it twitches for a while. And I, I coax him to, uh, I said, man, why don't you go ahead and put another round in it? Because it was debatable. Is it after death twitches or is it still alive? I said, just go ahead and put it. I said, for the sake of the goat, because you want it to show up happy, right? It's going— I mean, it's a good thing. Yeah, I'm using his words against him for sure.

Let it get there quick. Yeah.

I mean, you know, I thought, you know, so he did it and then you could hear somebody say, now it's definitely dead. Oh, are we done? No. Now they slice the throat of the goat, fill up a cup full of blood. Yeah. And we're all in a circle. And is it warm out or cold out? It is chill. It's cold. Oh, it's cold. Yeah, it's cold because it the— whatever happened that Halloween in 2019, it had been like 60s or 70s, and that day a cold front came, it dropped to like 10. So we're down there and, uh, he, um, they slice it, they fill the cup up with blood. Everybody's still in the circle except me. I'm holding the flashlight because Eisen decided to bring acid to help with the spiritual journey. LSD? Yeah, yeah, had the sheet. Had a sheet. So y'all all took a hit or what? No, I didn't. Um, and that was funny because they were like— one of the guys was like, hey, I'm a— I don't know how he worded it— I'm a very experienced, highly experienced psychedelic or something. I'm a professional psychedelic because we think you'd really like this pill, horse.

I said, let me tell you something. You have no idea what's in my brain. You have no idea what I've done on this planet in my lifetime. I don't do that stuff. If somebody slips one on me, and I go on a bad trip, every single one of you are going with me. Damn. You know, that's the only thing I do.

I just say, oh yes, I'm going to use that.

And then one guy was like, he was like, yeah, don't do it. Don't put nothing in Pale Horse's drink. But I went around and I was shining and he would tear a tab, put it under your tongue, chase it with the blood. Now you're saying, now we're signifying the sacrifice.

We're closing the deal here. Yeah. Now you're a sick app.

Yeah. So now it gets to me and I'm one of the last ones. Well, by the time it gets to me, Theo, I look down and it is clotted. It is chunky. And I'm looking at it going, man, I really don't want to drink this, man. You know, I'm like, but I think Pestilence— or I don't know if he said it or I thought of it, but I just stuck two fingers deep into the blood, pulled out my fingers, and sucked the blood off my fingers. Damn. And, uh, and luckily I'd carried a beer down there, and I chased it with that. What kind of beer was it? Uh, that night it might have been Bud Light. Bud Light before the controversy. Yeah. Oh, I think— no, it's a— I think it was a Bud Light. But, uh, I, uh, if it wasn't a Bud Light, it was a Yuengling lager, which is what I like.

Yeah, that's nice. Um, damn, brothers, y'all down there eating blood and freaking doing LSD. I mean, what in the fuck is going on?

I know, right? So we're supposed to get up the next day and train. No, training was shot. What? Because only like, only like 2 or 3 people didn't do acids, and everybody else was up all night staring at a fire.

I don't even know what y'all are training for. This feels like the New York Jets kind of, dude. I'm like, what the fuck is going on?

So they're like, we're not going to go handle weapons and be running across fields. Yeah, because they'd been up all night and they were high. And I'm like, great, you just shot an entire day of training, you know. Um, but I went to go get biscuits for everybody. I went to the Bojangles.

Oh, they're good. I just had one the other day, actually.

Apparently in Rome, Georgia, Bojangles is where it's at because Cars would be backed all the way down, down town. I mean, down the main street, directly across the street from Bojangles and McDonald's. There were no cars in it, but I went and I picked up about 30 bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits. So I'm coming back and all I can smell is that butter, that bacon, that cheese, and them eggs, that biscuit. God, I go to get out of my truck. Punished Snake says, Pale Horse, you got to try this goat. It is good. He's been holding that raw goat over a fire. It was not prepared at all. I've had some gamey stuff in my life. That was the gamiest tasting meat I'd ever put in my daggum mouth. Yeah. And as soon as I started biting it, after smelling the butter, and as soon as I bit into it, man, I was like, oh, I was like, that's not too bad. As soon as he turned his head, I tossed it to the farm dogs.

I was like, yeah, dude, I've had bad meat on some LSD, and that's— you never forget that. You never forget that. Jamie? Yeah, I mean, I've just— I've eaten undercooked duck on LSD. Yeah. And I'll never forget that shit. I still— sometimes I still floss my teeth years later, even just to get the— just, I feel like some of it's still in there.

So, so after the sacrifice, uh, they chopped the head of the goat off and we carried it around. What the hell? As a matter of fact, uh, we took a picture, um, because the, the recruitment process was this: whatever video, whatever new recruitment video we're doing has to be better than the last one. Got it. Every time the base got infiltrated infiltrated by either a journalist or whatever, and their OPSEC got better and better. How did that happen? How did we get infiltrated? How do we stop it from happening again? So Saturday night comes, Saturday comes, now we can start training again. So we're out there shooting and running and stuff, and now it's warming back up. And we go down Saturday night to the holy spot and build a bonfire. We burn American flags. There it is. Now here's the thing. He nicknamed that goat Gar. His name is William Garfield Bilbrough. His grandfather's name is Garfield. So he named the goat Gar. So everybody talked about Gar after that. I am back row, 2 left from the flag. You can see my neck. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that's me right there.

Showing a little neck.

Little neck. Well, yeah, the balaclava didn't go all the way down. Dang, somebody should have caught that and been like, Pale Horse, your neck's showing.

You bought that baby klawba?

I didn't know they give it to you. That's part of your initiation. When you made it in, they gave me the balaclava and the 3 runes.

That's small. A klawba? Yeah, bro, that's a little small for you.

I got a horse head. Oh yeah. So then we go down and we burn American flags and we burn Holy Bibles. I remember coming back after that weekend and I remember just feeling kind of dirty. I mean, I've been— maybe that's because I'd been up for 4 days or whatever, I don't know, the rain and on and on. But just the act and just the feeling of that, I was like, man, I just feel weird. Yeah, your spirit. Yeah. Because I'm like, yeah, that's it. Because I'm like, man, I come back to the office and I go, I've been working undercover since 1996, off and on, started street-level narcotics. I said, I have never had to burn American flags. I've never had to burn holy Bibles. And I definitely wasn't with a group of people that went and stole a goat, sacrificed it, and we drank his blood at a ritual. Because even though they're saying pagan, some of those dudes are praying to Satan. Some of those dudes are playing to Order of Nine Angles where it's a lot more satanic. But that weekend, I guess I had passed the benchmark of trust. Because that Saturday night, after everybody's going to bed, it's me, Pestilence, and TMB.

And I kind of ask him a question. I go, you know, a while back— of course I know what I'm asking about because we're trying to figure out what it is, but it was a recording that I'd gotten. The case teams and myself, we were trying to figure out what they meant. And I kind of recircled back on that and I said, what were we talking about there? And they kind of whisper, and I hear Pestilence say, yeah, I think we can trust him. So hey, phone in airplane mode, cool. And we start talking and they start telling me about that they've, they've been— they're talking about wanting to do bigger things. They didn't necessarily, they didn't necessarily say we were going to kill people yet, but definitely enough to lead us to believe that we need to stay in this longer because we got to figure out what they're talking about. Yeah, right. So let's just fast forward. Fast forward, uh, because this was a fast-paced case. It was only 7 months long, but I'm telling you, it was like no sleep for 7 months, you know? Yeah. And just running and gunning. So what I find out is the Georgia cell has identified a couple, a couple of counties over in Georgia that they believed were active members of Atlanta Antifa and anti-fascists.

Right. So they wanted to murder him. And so when you find out that somebody's getting ready to be like, we're like, man, what is it that they were supposed to do? And I'm like, Luke would never answer me on the phone. He would just giggle. And he goes, look, I'll tell you to your face. I'm just going to do it on the phone. I said, you know what? I'm cruising through there tomorrow. I wasn't, obviously. I'm like, I called the case team. You ready to go to Georgia tomorrow? Are you ready for me tomorrow? Yeah. So I go down, wake him up. I'm like, okay, you know, I like to joke. I like to have fun, but when it's time to do business, I'm serious. I said, so what the fuck are we doing? Because he wouldn't tell me. They called us, they sent out a thing like, hey, training this, we're going on a camping trip, blah, blah, blah. Bring it. It looked like he was talking about going out and putting up stickers, posters, flyers. But then he said, make sure you bring your weapons. And then we were all like, what does he mean?

What would be going on? So when I met him that day, I said, when I said, what the fuck are we doing? He says, essentially, we're going to whack some people. And I said, well, that's way different than putting up stickers. Yeah. And it's something I definitely would not want to drive my personal truck to. That's why I'm asking you, what are we doing? Do I need to bring something that doesn't come back to me kind of thing?

Get a rental or whatever.

Yeah. So he says, he starts laying it out. But now I'm thinking, because the case team's thinking this too, we got to slow this down. We got to slow this down. Because if we wouldn't have found out, I would have been finding out out at a camp on a Friday night? And how am I letting my cover team know that? You know what I mean? So yeah, you got to hurry. So yeah, I pointed out to him, because you need some space for everybody to figure things out, so you got to slow down. Yeah, so, so I'm like, I, I told him, I mean, sometimes the case doesn't allow for that, you got to take it down right then and there for sure. But I pointed out to him how little, how little planning he had put into this murder he's talking about, because the planning he'd he drafted on putting up flyers was like insanely operational security. I'm like, what, what's the thing? Because I'm just tired of waiting. And I said, look, I'm gonna say I played a—

and did he send you a JPEG of it, or what? Would he just draw it on something?

No, he was just telling me.

Okay, so no drawing of it?

Yeah, nothing. Oh, you got to at least damn draw it up. So, so, well, and that's what I told him. I was, I was portraying a site survey, a site survey specialist. And I said, dude, this is what I do. I said, I go, I can go in and pull demographics, homes, schools, crime rates, everything. I said, let me find out what's all at this house. I mean, have you even been by it? He said no. So we start building that. I come in with fake plates. I'll say, I just took these off of a car in Florida, throw those on. We go by, we case the place. I'm not leading it, they're leading it. Right. And meanwhile, Punish Snake has now gone back to the Maryland cell. He's up there with a guy that goes by Can't Go Back. Can't Go Back was the only one that I really knew in our proximity that actually had a job too. He was a truck driver and he had a $6,000 thermal scope on the 6.5 Creedmoor. And they were talking about— now they, they're up there, they're plotting the kickoff of the Boogaloo because there was going to be a Second Amendment gun right— gun, uh, Second Amendment rally for gun rights in Virginia in 2020, January of 2020.

And they thought, okay, you're going to have Antifa, you're going to have three percenters, militia types, anti-government You're going to have law enforcement. What if we start popping rounds into the crowd from our sniper rifles and then nobody knows who's shooting each other and they start shooting each other? What if that's the kickoff to the boogaloo? I know it's not a lot of forethought or a lot of afterthought, but this is what you're dealing with, right?

And I'll say this, that's a good plan. Yeah. For what they're trying to do. Yeah. Create chaos. It's like when you tap somebody on the shoulder over here and you're standing over here. Yeah, exactly. Which dude, Victor Wiminyani, you know who that is? You know who he is? Basketball guy. Oh yeah, yeah. Tallest guy ever. Imagine if he does that to people all the time where he would like tap somebody way over there.

Yeah, and nobody knows. And he's 3 people over, dude.

Yeah. Imagine in kindergarten or whatever, he must have been able to have the most fun. Anyway, back into the story. So yeah, that's absolutely insane.

So then we start casing that, but meanwhile we're finding out more stuff on this, these, the sale up in Maryland. And what the Baltimore division does is they do a Title III wiretap.. And they put cameras in that apartment. If I thought— if what I thought they were talking about was crazy face to face, the stuff that they were sending me that they were saying in that apartment was just them two going, I'm like, holy crap, they're talking about breaking out the saints. And what they refer to as saints is your white supremacy mass shooters. The Charleston guy, the New Zealand guy, the Norway guy.— I'm not saying their names on purpose, right? But they have— like, they actually have a scoreboard, and it says the scoreboard, and it's got the mass shooters, the white supremacists, 77-0. That's the, uh, that's the Norway guy. Um, I think it's 55-0 is New Zealand. You go all the way down— Pittsburgh, 7-0, 9 for Charleston. And it says, what— when will you make the leaderboard? Wow. You know, these are the Saints. Yeah. So on the anniversary of those mass murders, they'll say happy Saint Right. Like, if it were me, it'd be Happy Saint Payne Day, you know?

And it's just crazy. So, but again, are you just talking trash or are you going to go do something? Right. So now we're diving down to the end of this case and we're on a time— we're on— we're trying to make sure everything gets together. And I'm running nonstop. I go to Baltimore, I drive up and shoot all day with the Maryland crew trying to tighten things up, make sure we got everything settled for that. Go down down to the Georgia crew, have cased the place with everybody in the— in the— I mean, you got guys saying like, hey, are there any kids? And another dude saying, I don't have a problem shooting a comic kid. You got another dude saying, oh, I'm perfect, I'm an IT, I work 9 to 5, I look like a normal citizen, but I've been— I've been wanting to do this for 2 years. Damn, can I pop my cherry? I'm like, well, popping your cherry means something to me, what are you talking about? Yeah, oh, he actually wants to put a bullet in one of them's hit. He doesn't want to just be standing guard. So for this Georgia crew, they had it down to where we all four were going to go in.

Yeah. One was going to post in the window. Me— and this is what I was instructed to do— me and TMB were going to go down and murder the family and anything else. But if they want to put a bullet in too, we'll let them take a shot. And then Pestilence was going to set the house on fire and we were going to leave. And that was number one because they had already started forming a list of liberal journalist anchors. And I'm like, you tell— I said, you're telling me that you want to start taking out people, uh, who are like popular, popular? They go, yeah. And I go, well, it's a good thing we got this family to start and get a little practice run.

But so you're trying to keep them locked into this so that you guys can— you guys can, can take action, right?

And you're looking at Overdax. Okay, so what did you do? So if you want to come back and say, oh, we were just talking trash— no, you bought catch bags to put on ARs.. So when you shoot, if you have to shoot, it catches the brass. You don't leave brass. Created a silencer for a gun. Other things like he told us the way it was going to work is we were going to go to a camp, leave all of our digital footprint, all media, all phones, everything there, go to a pay-by-the-hour motel, scrub all our loose skin off. We're going to put on BDUs or whatever. We're going to tape our pants to our boots, tape our gloves to our wrist. "Even this." He was instructing, "Even put Vaseline on your facial hair so you don't drop anything." And he'd even done enough research to where he had read that— this would be Luke TMB who was telling me this— he had read that for a lot of people, the first time they murder somebody, they lose control of their bowels. So he was suggesting we wear Depends. What do you mean, diapers? Yeah, diapers.

Oh my God. And I looked at him and I said, I'll be all right. I didn't say I killed anybody. I'm just saying I don't need a diaper.

Wow.

You know, I'm like, I'll be okay. Just letting them let it marinate. So we were able to pull it all off.

We came in on a Wednesday, man. Yeah, yeah.

We came in on a Wednesday, started the arrest. I picked up Luke because we figured that would— I mean, sneaking up on a 100-acre—

fuck, hold on a second, man. Hold on a second. Yeah, this has gone so fast, man. I mean, it's gone. It's taken— it's a long story, but it's gone. So now it's at this crescendo where it's like Like, that's kind of— so what are you like that day? Do you like— I was running on fumes, man.

I think I had the flu at the time. My back was spasming because what I didn't realize—

yeah, if you're gonna murder someone, I think you damn— it's L5-S1. I know you're right.

Yeah. So I'm like, uh, uh, I had a lumbar fusion in 2002. Uh, after this case in 2020, I found out that my lumbar fusion had broken approximately 3 to 5 years after fracture. So they were telling me for like 15 years I was going around with a dislocated— I mean, right, a back that's disconnected.

Just a bad hitch or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, broke. There's nothing in there. There's no cadaver bone. There's no disc. It's just floating. And the old floating spine trick.

That sounds like—

so you would hear me on the recording and they was like, was that you making that sound? I said, yeah. And they go, what happened? I said, my back jerked. I'm walking, I'm like, I'm walking like that.

Brother, you just— you barely keeping it together. Okay, so let's get to the end of this story just because, uh, we should. Yeah. Um, you guys are driving over there. You're driving?

Yeah. So I don't— you know what y'all's plan is?

You know what? Yes.

Yeah, because I— for me personally, I was dealing with SWAT teams because they were going to let a SWAT team hit us. Um, so I made sure that they— I mean, I go and meet them, they tell me what they're planning on, and as long as I'm okay and I don't disagree with safety stuff being a SWAT guy myself, and I'm like, okay. I looked at it and I'm like, oh, these dudes are squared away. So I go and pick Luke up for lunch, but we've already laid out all this stuff to where I'm like, hey man, we're getting close to this thing. He's like, yeah. I said, I've been thinking the last thing we need to do is be riding around armed and get put on the radar that the cops stopped us. And he goes, you know, that's a good idea. So when I picked him up that day, I said, hey, you're not packing, right? He goes, no, no, no, I left it inside. I said, me neither, man. So I'm getting the information, getting the intel that he's not carrying. Yeah, we pull around, I act like my truck has a problem.

I pull over, I go, I said, damn, because literally it did happen to my truck. The calipers froze, they got locked and froze and smoke was going everywhere. I said, if that damn caliper's locked again, and he's like, man, that's— so I pull over and I get close to the fence to where he can't get out, and then I go around the back of the truck, act like I'm looking, then another truck pulls up. Well, It's actually an FBI agent, but he pulls up and he goes, hey man, you need me help? And I look up and I came up with the whole ruse. We practiced it. And he says, hey man, you need any help? And I look up and I go, holy shit, what are you doing here? Now we're acting like we know each other. He goes, what are you doing here? I go, man, I ain't seen you in forever. I didn't know you lived around here. I go, man, this is a nice truck. And as I'm walking up to talk to him, Luke's looking at us. And then what he doesn't see is the Bearcat, which is the military vehicle the SWAT team uses.

And it's coming over the hill. So he's focused on us and I jump into the truck right when they pull up. Right when I'm jumping into the truck going, go, go, go, they're right there. They got, I mean, rifles. They're up on the turret. Don't move. And they got him out. No issues. Arrest with no nothing wrong. And then while that happens, and then they go pick up Pestilence at his house, they pick up Helter Skelter, who was the Pop My Cherry guy. They pick him up at his work. He's wildin'. And then we keep it quiet. That because Thursday morning he's just still more to bust. Yeah, because Wednesday, that was Wednesday. Thursday morning the Washington field office SWAT team hit Bilbro. The Baltimore SWAT team hit Can't Go Back and Punish Snake. And then now it starts coming out. So now it's Friday and I'm still in the group, I'm just monitoring. And it's Friday and I'm now, now the arrests are starting to come out like, holy crap, did you see this? Did you read this? And now the affidavits are starting pop up. And they're like, wait, it says here that there's a fed that infiltrated this group.

And they're like, who's the fed in the group? And everybody's like, has anybody heard from Pale Horse? No, no, no. And it goes on and goes. I'm just watching. I'm watching. Somewhere around 5 o'clock on Friday, Nazaro Roman Wolf, AKA Roman Wolf, comes on and goes— he says something to the effect of, I'm not sure we could have done anything to pick him up because he was one of our best members. And then, and I was like, oh, he knows it's me because he's going back. And I mean, I'm sure he keeps recordings of all the interviews he's done and stuff, or at least say on this date I did this. Yeah. And, and they figured it out. And I was like, oh, he's got me. And, and, and it says, boom, you've been removed by Roman Wolf. I screenshotted it and I sent it to all the case teams, headquarters, everything. And I go, and I'm out. Damn. But they were talking, we had some other coverage in there that people reported and It turns out there was another dude that had infiltrated that group, not law enforcement though, was doing it, helping, reporting to, I don't know whether it be the Guardian, something paper.

Yeah, BBC, something. So we got copies of what the chatter after I got booted and some of my case team printed it for me when I came in. It was highlighted up on my desk. It says something like, was Are you saying the Fed was the guy with the deep voice on the calls? And they're like, yeah. And they go, there's no way, dude. That's one of the most solid neo-Nazis I've ever been around, you know. And then the other one would be like, oh, there was something really endearing about him, you know. And I look at the squad and I'm like, see, they do love me. These are my people, you know. But yeah, damn, bro. Yeah, fuck. And then, and then, and then you, then you get home and you go, ah, now I take a shower. Yeah.

How long do you take off after that? It depends.

Uh, because I used to not take any days off, but that ended up being my downfall. And, uh, and then I learned how not to do that to myself. So, uh, by that time I'm long in the tooth. Um, I could have worked till I was 57. That's the cutoff for the FBI, but I was 50 at this point. Uh, or at least I retired at 50.

Well, you look great, man.

Yeah, so it was like, uh, you know, I was like, that one I probably took a week off, you know, just relax, chill. Called my pastor though, especially after that Halloween weekend. I was like, man, I feel kind of Like you said, my spirit. I was like, I feel kind of dirty, man. You mind praying over me?

And do you have a family during this? Yeah. Do you still have a family?

Yeah, but I'm going through a divorce. Are you? We didn't make it. Not going to talk about it because it's still going through.

I'm sorry to hear that for you and your wife.

Yeah, we're a statistic now. So kids have grown up and moved out, and then I retired.

Do you feel like the job had an effect on your marriage? I'm sure.

Because my wife was not law enforcement. This was not her world. Essentially, I was her world. So she married me. But you married me. Yeah, you married the Bureau too. I mean, you look back and doing the book, we had to dive back in because I wanted to be transparent. That's the only way I know how to be. But I don't want it to be all cakes and pies. I want to tell you when it was sad too and when it was messed up. So even though we were happy at the time we were doing this book, to dive back into times where we weren't happy, that was tough. That was tough, man, to put your mind back when, oh my gosh, you know, 911 hang-up call, cops show up at the house, I got to call my supervisor, you know, whatever, whatever's going on. Me, me going through, yeah, getting stripped in a basement at gunpoint and all this stuff. It's just Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it did. Well, I know it did because especially during some of the cases early on when our kids were young, like 3 and 1, man, just to get rid of her nervous energy, she'd be moving furniture and stuff.

So I'd come home and you walk in the door and trip over something. I'm like, who put the couch here?

Really? But then she's— There's so much anxiety.

Yeah. And the way she tells it is that she finally just had to give it up to the Lord because she, she's— she could worry about me all the time. Yeah, but I told her, I said, when it's my time, it's my time. I think I'm good at what I do. I'm not lackadaisical. I've been blessed with this skill set and with this, you know, whatever. I've been blessed with all this. So, man, that would be so—

it'd be tough to take somebody you love every day and just let— and know that the whole day there is a risk. Well, welcome to first responder and military. Yeah, thank you for saying that.

No, you're right. Yeah, I mean, it's— God, like I said, man, if you're— you think a pitch to hire people is like, hey, we're real high in suicide, substance abuse, divorce, and dying within 5 years after retiring. Who wants in? Yeah. Oh man, sign me up.

I hate to even laugh at that.

I know, but it's like, you know, like, so we got to get better. And you're seeing a lot more stuff. You're seeing a lot more— I, I don't know if law enforcement is going to open up about it. Uh, they should. But you see a lot of spec ops, former spec ops, former law enforcement, and they're getting these, uh, they're getting these plant-based treatments, you know. Yeah, I can't even imagine.

I never thought about the stress of that spouses and children must feel with, uh, a member of their family being involved like in a, in a service, in life-risking service, you know.

Yeah, I think there should be more. Actually, my wife was saying it from the jump because we in the FBI, we have a psychological unit that was specifically created for undercovers. It's called Safeguard. So if I'm an active undercover, I have to be psychologically assessed, mandatory. Got it. And then we expanded it out and it's being used to do a lot of things. So like if you're an agent or a task force officer and you work innocent images, crimes against children, we get you assessed because It's tough to look at that stuff and see that kind of stuff on a daily basis.

Had to take a little bathroom break there, man. It's cool. This is the longest episode we've ever had, I think, man. So thank you for your attention to detail and just taking us down some— being a slow talker. Hey, just taking us down some memories of yours, man. It's nice. It's nice to listen to a storyteller, you know, someone share their story and share stories from their book. I know you had mentioned earlier, we talked a little bit about the 1%ers, and you had a pretty famed case with the Outlaws. Can you take me into that? Sure.

Again, longest undercover I did, 2 years. The infiltration, I kind of got— I can't remember again if I got recruited or I saw a canvas, but it was probably just a phone call. Um, because as I said, working at the UC school, at the undercover school, um, if you in the Bureau, if you say, all right, we've got 600 certified undercovers, how many of those undercovers have been the primary undercover on an operation? On one, it's going to dwindle down. More than one, less than five, it's going to dwindle down. More than five, less than 10, now it's really getting dwindled down. If you get to like that 10 and over mark, it's generally We all know each other because we all go back to the program. We all help out with the school and stuff, and, and you know who's active and who isn't. So somebody reaches out. I went up and did the interview, uh, in Massachusetts, um, in Boston, and I got the gig. Um, we talked about all kinds of things on like what ways to go in, ways to not go in. I preferred to go in cold, which means I'm not being introduced by a source.

Go into to try to make that bump. In other words, the Outlaws were already predicated. They've already got— the Outlaw Motorcycle Club is a 1% club. It's probably the second largest. Hells Angels is probably the largest. Okay. But worldwide, and that's their colors right there. They refer to the skull as Charlie.

Okay. The AOA, American Outlaws Association, they started in McCook, Illinois in 1935. The Outlaws MC is the oldest outlaw biker club in the world. With 441 chapters located in 43 countries. The club is also the second largest in the world behind the Hells Angels. And what made you— is it still active?

Oh yeah, the Outlaws are still going strong.

And what made you want to infiltrate them?

Well, it's the case team. It's not necessarily me. It's that there's a case team and a task force and state and local law enforcement that have been working up there, and they've different over— they've got different crimes, they've arrested people, but they're at a point now in their investigation where they feel like they can get an undercover, or that's the next step to do. Got it.

And the whole group Outlaws is not a criminal organization, there was just somebody that was doing crime in it? Correct. Got it.

That's the argument. Like I said earlier, somebody's like, we're all 1%ers criminals. Like, not necessarily, but it's kind of the point of being a 1%, you know what I mean? Yeah. But like all bikers, you know, I didn't— you know, I've heard them say, or not all of them, but the ones I infiltrate is like I was like, I didn't join the Outlaws to be a beta, right? I joined the Outlaws to be an alpha, right? I'm going out here, I don't care what I'm doing, I'm an outlaw.

Yeah, all private equity people criminals.

Yeah. But, uh, so they— these guys were predicated— the Taunton chapter specifically, Taunton, Massachusetts. And I went up, I interviewed, and, and I said, look, okay, my idea was just let me go in there. So what I did because I used to work at gentlemen's clubs, which is an oxymoron in my opinion because there's no gentlemen in there. And neither was I back then, living in the flesh as they say. Um, amen. I know, right? Then you have two daughters and it's all girl dogs. I'm like, y'all stay away from any pole in this house, I swear. No, uh, but I, uh, I knew how those establishments worked. So I went, uh, I would go in, uh, when like day shift when it wasn't and the Outlaws weren't all in there because we knew that they told me the bar they were at and stuff. So that's what I did maybe 2, 3 times because human nature is to exaggerate, you know. So the night that they're finally coming in, the Outlaws are finally coming in, coming into the strip club. Yeah, because I'm there now. Okay, so they have, uh, a lot of your biker clubs, 1%er clubs have a mandatory meeting every week they refer to that as church.

Some clubs, that's where they talk dirty business. You know, you leave your phones outside, all that thing. Or it just might be shooting the bull. It might be time to collect the dues, whatever. But the surveillance team was on them. I'm already at the Foxy Lady, which was the strip club. And that's in Oregon? It was in Brockton, Massachusetts. Got it. So Taunton and Brockton are right next to each other. Okay. But the strip club's in Brockton. So I'm already at the Foxy Lady. I'm getting some drinks. I'm telling jokes. People are laughing. And then here comes like 13, 15 Outlaws, and they take the whole back wall in the back bar. See a black leather and testosterone, right? And originally I'd been told that they weren't allowed to wear their colors, which is the, the vest with the moniker you saw. You got— that's their cut. And I'm— that was one of my first questions. I'm like, hey man, can they wear their colors in the club, in the bars? And they're like, no, they're not allowed to. And I'm like, okay, that makes it easier for me. Yeah, because now I'm just a tattooed dude drinking whiskey, looking at naked people, listening to heavy metal music.

It's the same thing the guy next to me is doing. But when they come in and they're all wearing their colors, that changes my approach. Because listen to me, do I sound like I'm from Boston? Absolutely not. As soon as I start talking, they're like, where the F are you from? You know? And I'm like, you know, deep south, south, south. I'm from South Boston. Um, I'm a Southie, but, uh, South Carolina. Yeah, South Carolina. That's it. You know, Cackalacky. So I, you know, do you walk over around the bar and go, hey fellas, y'all ride? No, I'm gonna take a butt kicking or something. Um, so I started working, doing, doing what I do, I guess. Uh, there was one guy that they had said that was in the group, and they had the intel perfect on him. He loved to be surrounded by big dudes. He liked to be the center of attention. So I'm laughing it up, and I'm cutting it up, and it's getting louder and louder and— but I've got people around me that I can see him, you know. It's like fishing, like I can see him looking, you know.

And I'm like, okay, all right, he's paying attention now. I was a bigger dude, 6'4", probably 280 then and holding it very well. And, uh, he, uh— I see him talking to the bartender. Well, what's he saying? Who is that? Oh, that dude's from Texas, man. He comes here all the time. All the time? 2, 3 times, you know, whatever. But then eventually he yells at me. And he says, yeah, there I am right there after shoulder surgery. He yells at me and he says, hey, where the F are you from? And I'm like, man, down near the border of Mexico. What? So we start joking back and forth. I think he sent me a drink first, called me over. I went over, start talking. Next thing you know, we're hitting it off. He's giving me cards for the lobster festival, which is Lobsterfest Uh, yeah, they love it. Yeah, lobster. And it was going to be, you know, like the next month. And he said, just tell them you're with me. And so then you start, you just start ingratiating and you start getting trust. Yeah. And they love a lobster, man.

Yes, they love a fish that can pinch you.

Yeah, man. And me too, I'm a, I'm a bottom feeder. Hello, man. All them shrimp, shrimp and crab legs, I can eat my weight in that stuff. Yeah, I'm a top. Yeah. So eventually you get in and you make more and more acquaintances. And I came in as a site survey specialist, the same kind of thing I did on the base case. But that allowed me to travel, it allowed me to be there and not live there or whatever, you know. I found quickly when I started flying a lot that even in Houston, when I was based in McAllen, there's people that don't live in Houston, but there's so many daggum flights, they literally fly work, fly home, or they might come in for the week and then go home on the weekend. So I said, well, I can sell that because it's true. I mean, I've seen plenty of people doing it. So that's kind of what I was doing.

And you were living in Texas and flying in for work? Yep.

And then eventually they find out that I'm also a criminal. Oh, shocker, right? Because they're already predicated. I mean, what were you flying for, just to be part of the group? No, I originally said I'm there doing site survey specialist work for investors. That are looking to buy property. And I would go do that, and, and I would actually go legitimately go down to the clerk of court and pull records and stuff. And because again, you want it to look, smell, taste, feel real. Um, but, uh, they— what they eventually learned, or what I portrayed and what they believed, was that I was a high-ranking, if not the leader of an— high-ranking member, if not the leader of an international theft spring, and I was moving stuff into Mexico. Um, so it started with some insurance fraud. They would report vehicles stolen, motorcycles. Um, and this is all based on the truth because at that time when I was living in the border, uh, I'd already learned through auto theft groups, task forces and stuff, and from the insurance company, that Harley-Davidsons and V8 4x4s, man, the cartel, they would steal them all the time.

So So I'm telling the truth and they do motorcycles first. So they report 3 or 4 Harleys stolen. So they get the stolen money from their insurance company. I pay a stolen price, which is usually around 20% of what the real price would be, and then I'm off. Well, they don't get arrested. And then the next thing you know, it's a truck. And the next thing you know, then we get full-fledged. Now it's like, when you coming back, Tex? When you coming back? I got 3 things lined up. So you pull up and man, we would load F-350s. Yeah. Steal my wife. Yeah. F-350s, stuff like that. But even if you were worried about predication, like if you're predicated, and for the people that don't know that, it just means that we've got evidence that you either talked about it or doing it. So if we have nothing on you and I'm coming up to bump you and I just come and go, hey man, you want some marijuana or you want a kilo of coke? That's odd. That's not right. I'm now leading it. But when the first time I walk outside with the president of the Outlaws chapter who went by Joe Dogs, so he's the chapter president.

We walk outside and he goes, where do you live? I said, McAllen. He goes, where's that? I guess right on the border. Next question, how much can you get a kilo of cocaine for? I'm like, about $13 right now, between $11 and $13 on the border. He goes, man, if I could get them for $13. I said, no, you don't get them for $13. Unless you come to the border and then you drive them back up. The reason they cost $25 to $30 up here is because it has to make it here from the border. Not a good drug dealer, or his math was off. Yeah, not a good businessman. I'm like, no, that's not how it works. There's risk involved. Well, it's a good pitch.

Yeah, I want to get it for the same as you.

I know. Yeah. Um, so next thing you know, like I said, F-350s, uh, 4x4 Tahoe.

So it's a lot of insurance fraud at first.

At first. Got Then I've gained trust. Now they carjack somebody and they're calling me, Tex, we got one that is hot. I mean, it is on fire right now. We just took this dude at gunpoint. We almost killed him, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, don't worry about it, I got it. And now I'm moving that. Now I'm gaining more trust, right? So as the case goes on—

and are y'all using code language? Like, we got a bad lobster up here or something like that? You can.

But what's comical about that, Theo, is I've sat on so many wiretaps and we've run wiretaps taps and you're listening, or you get on the phone yourself as undercover and you're being all like super operational security, you're like, okay, the bird is in the cage, right? I've got 3 cheeseburgers out back. 5 minutes into the conversation, I'm telling you, 99% of the time they're just talking openly dirty. Yeah, it's like they start with it, you know, like, you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, there's like a whisper in the wigwam or whatever, right?

Yeah, so like I had a guy another case. I won't go into it because I will stay on the Outlaws. But this is what he— he's like, you know, Scott, you know I don't do cocaine anymore. And I'm looking at him going, I know, man, I know. He goes, I used to do a boatload of it, but I don't do it anymore. I said, I know. He said, this right here, that's just a bump. And he goes on. And I go, you just did cocaine. And he said, okay. And he says, you know, I don't sell it anymore either. I said, I know, Mike. He said, I used to sell truckloads of it, but I don't anymore. And I said, I know, man. He goes, but if you want them 5 8-balls, I'll get them for $7.50. It's just like, I'm like, I'm like, I am confused. So, so during this case, a guy I didn't tell you about— it was actually a picture of him in that picture you pulled up, the red shirt, red t-shirt— that's Scott Town. Uh, I talk thoroughly about Scott Town in the book. Again, I told you, I worked undercover from '96 to 2022, roughly.

And how much cocaine are you on right there with that bad arm, brother?

Look You grinning. That would be muscle relaxers and pain pills.

Yeah, my God, boy.

I'm like, ah, I'm like less than a week out, I think, right there.

You smiled at a gram at least, brother.

No, I did not. Uh, just joking.

Yeah, I know.

Okay, so Scott Town, uh, so this is legitimately the closest relationship I've ever built undercover. We bonded so well It was scary. Like, I mean, I'm talking like we could complete each other's sentences. We thought the same. It was literally the story of that proverbial fork in the road. He went that way and I went that way, and I easily could have gone his way. And maybe that's why I was good at my skill set in these types of environments, because y'all was just friends. Well, he was— he was— he went to jail. He was a target. I mean, he, he was not a patch member. Um, his story was he was going to be patched, but he was also doing some stuff for the mafia, and somewhere his group got pinched, and he was, he was, he was looking at time. And at that point in time, he had 4 daughters, and he said, I don't want to, I don't want to go to prison with my 4 daughters. And I was like, hey man, cool. Um, but there would be like a lot, there would be talk like, man, grenades, bazookas, whatever, rocket launchers— not a bazooka, rocket launcher.

Yeah. But those things would talk and then they wouldn't come to, or somebody would come in talking big and we'd like, oh, this looks good. And then it wouldn't come through. But after the carjackings and things like that, we start getting more and more because the case team is also running a Title III wiretap. And eventually we got to the point in the case where I let them know, not all at once, but I let them know that yes, I did used to be in the drug trade. But heat was getting close, people were getting pinched, and I backed out of it because running everything south, most of the time law enforcement is looking for money or guns going south to trade for dope or buy dope. Got it. I'm like, if you got a stolen— this is my story to him. I'm like, if you've got a truck full of stolen vehicles, if the bill of lading— I mean, what's the truck driver know? He sees a bill of lading, he does what he does. I'm just talking, blowing smoke. But it kind of making it— making them comfortable, relaxed, um, I think enough.

But I eventually let them know I did used to be in the dope game because from day one they were hounding me. When you're going to introduce to somebody down there, we're going to— because think of it, what does a drug dealer want? They want the purest dope they can get at the cheapest price they can get, so that way you can step on it and make some money, right? So imagine having a pipeline in little old Taunton, Massachusetts directly from the cartel. Let's go. Yeah, right. You're getting keys.

So that's what they saw in you. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And that was all fictional.

That was my backstory. Yeah, that was my legend. Yeah. But it wasn't really happening, right? And like all the stolen vehicles, they would think they're going to— nah, we'd make sure nobody's following them. But then that semi would turn around and head up north of Boston or something to a warehouse. And by the end of the case, you got a warehouse full of stolen parts and cars and motorcycles and stolen cars and whatever. Dang, bro. Big trucks, big trucks.

But so the case gets to a point like— yeah, sorry, that's good.

So I'll start laying out that I was in the dope game, and Joe Dogs is chomping at the bit, man. He's like, he's like, dude, if I— you got to introduce me. I started saying, my guy's Manny, Manny, Manny. Um, and they're like, man, if I can meet Manny. Well, the whole ruse was— and this, this technique's been used, uh, And it was a drug protection. I said, look, here's the deal. I laid it out over a long period of time, but I'm like, look, Manny reached out to me, wants to know— he wanted my truck drivers to deliver a load into Canada. And the reason I told them that a white guy, the gringo, never got kicked out of a Mexican drug trafficking organization or international theft ring is because I was the guy with the dirty contacts at the port of entry and at the checkpoints. And yes, there's corruption. Not all, but I'm saying it's— there's corruption cases on the border. I mean, think about this. You get somebody offers you $15 grand to do this, next, I don't know, if you're broke, I mean, you know what I mean? Um, so not saying everybody's dirty, uh, but I'm saying that's why— that was my story and they believed it because why else would they keep me in?

So when I did that story about going to Canada, I said, hey, um, does your guy Do you still have your people at the checkpoint or at the port of entry? No, they fell through. I said, I'm not letting my truck drivers do it. I said, but I've been being hounded. We just want to meet them. And I'm like, what if they come here and we just meet and we help this because we want to make sure nothing's getting ripped and all that stuff? And they're like, yeah, man, that'd be awesome. So that's what we started laying out. Now Scott Town jumps on, and Scott Town, I even look at him and I'm like, dude, why are you doing this. What? You told me you didn't want— no, there's a strong argument to be made that the reason he did that is because he liked me so much. No way.

Because he— so you kind of let him into it even just by being buddies?

It's not an entrapment thing, but it's like, if you ask him, he's probably going to say something like this. Um, I didn't want to do it, and I was suspicious, but he knew Joe Dawgs and the other people involved, could screw it up really bad. And if I got hurt and he wasn't there, he'd never forgive himself. You see what I'm saying? Y'all were close, huh? Yeah, tight. Real tight. But so there's a point in the case, and I'm bouncing his daughter on my knee. His daughter's one, my youngest daughter's one. So they kind of are making the same noises and moving the same but I'm not at home with my daughter, I'm there with his. And you know, you're looking— I know the training, I know I put the training on, but I'm looking over going, man, I love this guy. I mean, he's— I mean, yeah, I mean, if he does criminal stuff, okay, but I mean, we think the same. He likes to do this, I like to do— we work out, fight, ride, all that stuff, man. And, uh, do you miss him?

Yeah, yeah. You still keep in touch with him?

Maybe, maybe now after, after all this came out. Yeah, it's, uh, it's pretty amazing actually. I've also been trolled by people we put in jail too. It's pretty funny. But, uh, maybe I'll end it on that. But so I'm looking at the refrigerator and I'm thinking all these thoughts and I'm like, man, I'm looking at the refrigerator, he's got all kinds of stickers and magnets and stuff, and I I saw one that said WWSD. Now, if you're in the Christian faith, you see WWJD a lot. What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? Wristbands and stuff. And I looked over, I go, WWSD? And I looked and it said, what would Satan do? And I went, oh no, he's different. He's different. But it was just like a tough guy thing. And then—

So he wasn't a real Satanist?

No, no, he was just bolstering.

Just joking around with magnets.

Yeah. But I was like, oh no, we're not the same.

You're going to jail. But, uh, I, uh— but is that weird, man, to be hanging out with somebody and always thinking in the back of your head they're gonna go to jail? Yeah, it just sounds like a fucking power trip.

No, actually, it could be— it could give you some stress, it could give you some PTSD, you can start getting anxiety because you're sitting there going, okay, you're fearing the end of the case, you're fearing them finding out who you are, you're fearing this relationship that you built. And I know there'll be plenty of maybe law enforcement or even people on the case would like, I can't believe you're talking like that. Look, man, I'm human.

I love that guy. Yes. Well, would it ever be weird, like, if you were leaving a room together or something and like you wouldn't want to walk out first? That would be my fear all the time. I'd always be like, I gotta walk behind because I don't want to— you know what I'm saying? What if they know something or they're leading me somewhere?

Well, I'll say this, a lot of cops, a lot of cops sit in a restaurant, they keep their back to the wall. Yeah. Because you want to see everything. Yeah. When you're undercover, can you do that? I mean, can I come in there and hug the wall with my back the whole way through, or do I just got to look I'm a normal person. People would catch on. Yeah, so you don't want to look— you don't want to raise suspicion. Got it. So the case is going and we get to the point where we're going to do the drug deal. Um, got everything lined up, months and months and months. Scott's in. Uh, there's some outlaws from Brockton that are in it. There are some outlaws from Taunton that are in it. And, uh, you know, you asked the 1%er, are they all criminals? No. I mean, you look at the Brockton chapter, let's say most of them had day jobs. Maybe they bent, maybe they did time, maybe they didn't. But you go to the Taunton chapter and out of like 13, uh, 13 to 15 Outlaws, 1.5 had a job. I say half because that guy was a tattoo artist and a piercer, but I don't think he worked, you know, 9 to 5, 7 days a week.

It was more like a part-time thing. The other guy had a towing company. Everybody else was a straight thug, all criminal activity to make money, whether it's robbing, home invasion, carjacking, theft, dope, you know. Yeah, so Um, I would do the dope. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd probably do that over car theft for sure. Um, but I—

because I don't even like driving at night that much, really.

I don't love it. So we—

but anyway, go on.

We get to the night before, we've lined everything up, and the Assistant United States Attorney, um, is like, hey, they're talking about— are they talking about this in the clubhouse, you know, kind of thing, about this drug deal that we're getting ready to do and all this. I said, yeah, I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about it. Hey, you know, and from an investigative or evidence standpoint, it would be good to have, because if they're talking about that planning and all that, that'll help with like asset forfeiture and getting search warrants for the property and stuff.

So just having recordings of them talking about it.

Yeah. So I go to the clubhouse. Joe Dogs tells me to come over. It's the night before we're going to do the big drug deal. They don't know it, but we've got 50 kilos of real cocaine and we got £1,000 of real weed. Let's go. And we're going to have to move it from one truck to another. Now, snipers are up on the roof. I mean, we got SWAT all in the hotel. I mean, I literally did like the TV thing where you walk in and you can't see nothing because the projector's on your face and they're like, this is the guy that's going to be the undercover, you know? And I'm like, yeah, I look a lot like the other dudes. Don't shoot me. Just tell me. I'll be real still, man.

Uh, you know, yeah, I mean, I'd be like, I'm the guy wearing like the— I would wear like a special neck brace or like a, um, maybe like a John Elway jersey or something. Yeah, something to stand out, dude. I would wear like a— yeah, like a Mason Crosby jersey. I would wear something that like, do not shoot this guy.

The crash test dummy full jumpsuit, you know, bright with reflections on it.

Yeah, yeah, like a Suicide Boys shirt. Or maybe not that, that might That might not help.

So, so, uh, I remember here's a funny one. Joe Dawgs, I said, hey man, we got to be nonchalant. We're going to be out here doing all this stuff. I was like, hey, uh, wear, wear something that doesn't attract a lot of attention. Yeah, yeah, not the way he dressed. You walk out there with a shirt that says F that bitch. Oh yeah, in all caps. And I'm like, that's low-key. All right, well, I mean, who knows what he told her before that. I know, right? So So it's the night before, I get there and they're having church. They're still having church. I'm banging on the door and it's weird, man. Nobody's coming. And all of a sudden Joe Dog does that, like, hey, we're not ready yet. And I'm like, well, why'd you call me over here? Yeah, I'm not thinking nothing. I go, he tells me to take a probate, which would be somebody on probation, or they call them prospects. You're not a full patch member yet. You've advanced from hang around status you're trying to become a full patch member. So he says, hey, take Probate, Obie, y'all go get something to eat.

So we went down to the restaurant, got a couple of drinks, something to eat, came back, and I go into the clubhouse. And when I go in the clubhouse, I've been in that thing like umpteen times. I don't know, there's one door I'd never been in. Now, for the listeners that may not know, um, at least with this chapter, if you weren't a patch member, which I wasn't, You're not allowed to touch the door, you're not allowed to touch the phone, but they're giving you drinks for free, right? I had been asked and actually been told that I need to become an outlaw, but I painted it as like, I travel all over the country, man, I can't have that, right, that bullseye on my back, you know. But I'm very humbled by it kind of thing. But so I'll go in there, and at this point in the case, it's been a year and a half. I'm a year and a half in. And my closest relationship is Scott Town. My second closest relationship at that point is the enforcer who goes by— he went by the street name Clothesline. His real name is Brian De La Vega.

So that was my second closest relationship. My third closest was the president, Joe Dollacks. And then it just trickled down from there. But by this time, I've been all over the country. I've been to Sturgis, I've been to Daytona, wherever, riding all over the place. So I've met Outlaws all over. Actually, I've met Outlaws from all over the world, and they were actually recruiting myself in Scotttown because I was bigger then too. But it's— Boston's a little weird because Boston and North is Hells Angels territory. Boston and South was Outlaws territory, and they were arch rivals. And then you get to Cape Cod and Hells Angels had a chapter there. Got it. So the Outlaws were looking to set up a chapter in Cape Cod, but they wanted to fill it with big, strong dudes that can handle themselves. And they were recruiting us for that. So I go into the clubhouse, door shuts behind me, deadbolts, steel frame door.

They had a door you'd never been in?

No, no, no. This is just the entry door. Got it. Right. So if you get inside, you'll see that they've welded metal hooks to the steel frame of the door and put a steel bar across it. So that's going to, from a breacher standpoint, it's going to be a little harder to be tougher to breach. Got it. So I'm in there, I'm having some drinks, and I'd been there, like I said, maybe 20 times. Who knows? There's one door I'd never been in. And Clothesline, my second closest friend, says he sounded friend, right? Friend. He liked Scott Callaway. I don't think he liked Scott Payne. Too much. But he says, hey Tex, can I talk to you for a minute? Or he says, do you got a minute? Either can I talk to you for a minute or you got a minute. I'm like, yeah. So as I'm walking, he grabs an ashtray and a lighter, and— or he tells somebody to— and we turn in, and it is a very tight stairwell. It's a very— to call it a basement down there is being very generous. More like a cellar, crawl space. I couldn't stand up straight in it, but it's a Northeastern home, kind of split level.

And as I'm walking in, Chocolate Scott, another member, comes in right behind me. Yeah, Chocolate Scott.

Chocolate Scott.

Yeah, they call him Chocolate Scott or Black Scott. But the thing is, is he looked like a Black guy, which you can't be in the Outlaws.

Oh yeah, you can't be. I'm guessing, I was assuming.

No, he said he was— he looked like he said he was Indians, but they named him Chocolate Scott. Oh yeah, that would be my name. Yeah, so I, I follow. As soon as I turn in behind clothesline and Chocolate Scott comes in right behind me, I know something's not right. And now it's really tight, and you get down there. It was a little bit of a false start because there was something down there that, that another member, Veg, did not want me to see. And they come down. So going down those steps, I'm already getting an adrenaline dump like I was talking about earlier, right? We come back up, I'm not free to leave. Outlaws everywhere. They're hiding whatever they needed to hide. I'm not sure what it was, but then it's like, okay, let's go back down. So I get down there and—

So they take you halfway down, they take you back up.

Yeah, they take me down. Oh, it's terrible.

It's almost like your surprise party, but they're not ready. Yeah, yeah.

Because if Veg just walks down there, he's doing this. I see him doing a movement, uh, that's like, hey, get out. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on, but I'm looking, I'm looking for plastic on the floor. I saw a rope rope. And I'm like, oh, you saw a rope? Yeah, yeah. Like, and I'm like, oh, you gotta be thinking I'm getting out of here then. No, I wasn't.

Uh, what'd you think they were gonna do?

I didn't know yet.

But, but even if you saw—

even if I tried to leave, I mean, think about it.

Like, if I see a rope at all— I never see a rope, right?

Because I'm 13 outlaws, but I'm, I'm— and they're— they got guns. They already showed me their guns. Oh, got it. Yeah. So I'm basically at gunpoint, you know? Okay. Um, so I go back up and we walk back down And that's when we get down there and Clothesline says, hey, there's a lot of shit going on. It's my job to take care of my brothers because he's the enforcer. And he says, uh, I need you to take all your clothes off, everything, boots and everything.

And would you have on boots or sneakers?

I had boots. Um, and, uh, he said, I need you to write down your full name, your date of birth, your address, your wife's name. I'm not going to ask for your kids' names even though I can find them out if I need to. And he goes, everything, Social Security, everything. I said, okay, but you can hear my voice already because I'm having an adrenaline dump. My voice is higher, my throat's tighter. I'm hearing that, I'm hearing that underwater auditory exclusion. It's going woof woof. Oh, I would be so scared. My time dilation, my eyes are clicking, everything I'm hearing is going, I need you to write down your— that's what I'm hearing.

It's like on one of those boxing video games when you're about to get knocked out or whatever and you're like like, and it starts to get kind of blurry.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and did you write your real stuff on there?

Yeah.

No, no, I didn't. I didn't. But I forgot my middle name because of the stress. I forgot my middle name was, uh, uh, Andrew.

Did you just make one up?

No, no, I should have. That'd have been a smart thing to do. But, but then again, maybe not if they're really going to run it. Yeah, right. So I'm like, I'm going Scott Callaway, Scott Callaway, Scott Callaway, and I go Scott Joseph Callaway, and I'm I'm going through this Rolodex in my head. It feels like it's 8 minutes. It's a couple of seconds. And then I remembered my initials and I remembered, oh, I'm Scott Andrew Callaway. But what I did is, like when we talked about shootings and stuff and officers not knowing that they did it, certain things, same thing happened to me, but it was on a verbal thing. I would've never known I said this unless I didn't listen to the recording. Unless I listened to the recording. But while I'm forgetting my middle name, I turn and I go, and what else do you need? But it sounds like this, and what else do you need? Because I'm freaking out, right? My, yeah, my diction's terrible, talking through my nose, higher pitch voice. And then I hear them yell, what do you need for that website? And I go, okay, because I'm listening, I'm still listening even though I'm freaking out.

I'm like, oh, okay, they're going to write this down, they're going to run me, they're going to Google me. And back then they had like a whosarat.com you could go to and run. Were you on there? No, no. No, um, but I said, okay, I'm feeling better. Feet Finder they had too. Yeah, right. So then he says, uh, and then I need you to take all your clothes off, everything. Damn, they want you on feet. He said, he says, he says, because I gotta, because I gotta check you for a wire. Here's the issue, Theo, I was wired to the hilt. I had two recording devices on me and a transmitter, and I won't say where, what, but, uh, fuck, he's a damn iPhone at that point. Yeah, well, yeah, back then.

No, I mean, you were one.

Yeah, yes, yeah, all that shit you had on Yeah, uh, and back then, that would have been like circa 2006-ish, '07-ish, they, uh, they were big on Nextails. So, you know, I know, yeah, great radio. Yeah, uh, but terrible to call somebody.

Yeah, bring some milk home.

Yeah, I could key you up in Japan and it'd be like, it'd be like, what's up? Hey, you know, fine. But if I tried to call you, we couldn't hear nothing.

I'm like, I don't know, it sounded Japanese. Yeah, I'm like, I don't know what you're talking So damn, so they trying to strip search you?

They did. Um, and were you wearing underpants or boxers, you think? Uh, boxer briefs. Um, nice. Yeah, the comfort of a boxer but the support of a brief.

Yeah, look, I got them on right now.

I do too. Uh, pretty cool. And, uh, and much like that night, they're not white, which I was happy.

Oh yeah, if you just soiled them up, sold them up.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying?

Uh, a little of that back bay chow to sell. Well, I tell them, I say, I say, uh, So were you joking at this point, or were you scared?

No, I was scared to death. I was scared. I joke about it now, but I was scared to death.

So you took your clothes off?

So what I did is I took, I took my coat, and it was cold because it was like November, so I probably had like more than one t-shirt on. Took all that off, took my boots off, and I dropped my underwear and jeans down to my ankles. I never kicked them off. So from the ankles up, I'm completely naked. They checked me for a wire. Um, He missed one thing that was— that was— I had in my sock. It was a device, but, you know, um, so I go, he pats me down, and I'm having that adrenaline dump, right? Everything's slow motion. I can feel my heart beating. My, my man parts felt like they were in my throat, you know.

And are they calling you fuckhead or anything? Are they calling you names?

No, no. But during the talk, there's— that's a good question because because we, at least the way I was trained, you just don't want to vapor lock. You don't want to get the deer in the headlights looks. At least keep talking. At least keep trying to find something, right? Find a way out.

Get some information. What are you doing, guys? What's this about? What's the big— I did.

I guess, should I ask what's going on? And they're like, hey man, this is some precautions, blah, blah, blah. And what he says to me, he goes, trust me, man. He goes, I like you a lot. He goes, but I've got my doubts too. He said, um, if somebody accused me of being a fed, I'd probably smash them in the effing mouth. And I said, I'm not— I looked at him, I said, I'm not I'm not happy. And he goes, I wouldn't be either. But what you can't see is because we know each other, even though my words may be saying one thing, what my face is saying, the clothesline is, tell me I'm okay, tell me I'm gonna be all right. His facial expressions back to me were, it's okay. But I was in fact undercover and I was wired. And if he found it, I don't know what's gonna happen. So I pull my pants back up, I think I'm putting my boots on, and he grabs a piece of clothing. And it had something in it. And he says, I'm not going to find anything in here I don't want to, like some pictures of my old lady.

And he laughs and he goes, and I go, I hope not. Now I'm standing there, I can't stand up straight, I'm on the wall, and I'm watching him knead this piece of clothing with his hands. He's doing this. And I know circa that year what our equipment was and all that stuff. If he would have fell felt it. Now, uh, he misses it. He looks right at it. He misses it. And even while he's searching it, I don't know I do it, but you can hear me because I'm just standing there and you can hear me go, uh, because I'm like, what am I gonna do, right? So here's the thing, um, he misses it. He hands me back my stuff. I immediately go into joking because that's not only me, it's also a defense mechanism when you're scared, right?

I've been joking my whole life, cracking, right?

I'm cracking jokes like, like I said, yeah, I'm glad I didn't wear white underwear. Yeah, you know, and, uh, and we go back in the business and you keep saying that, glad I didn't wear it, you just keep glitching, right? Glad I didn't wear a pointy— and it's like, what the fuck is— what's wrong with him? He's a robot.

Yeah, yeah, uh, bring in Choco Stain or whatever that guy's name was.

Chocolate Scott. Chocolate Scott. So people always ask me, what would you have said if Clothesline would have found it? And I said, well, I remember it like it was yesterday. It also helps that I teach it all over the place and I still relive it all the daggum time. So there's really little room for error there as far as exaggerating and stuff. So I— or remembering it wrong. I said, man, I remember it like it was yesterday. Maybe my first response would have been, I don't know, some pictures. If he said, what is this? Maybe I would have said, I don't know, some pictures of your old lady, as a joke, because he already threw that line to me, you know, am I going to find anything in here? Uh, the only other thing that I had in my head, and again, I remember like yesterday, I would have looked at him and said, the gig is up, I'm an undercover FBI agent, and we can— I can walk out of here and we can see each other in court. Or all hell's going to break loose. The problem is, is that would have been a bluff on my part because as far as I knew, every time I'd been in that clubhouse, my cover team couldn't hear me.

Whether it's equipment, walls, whatever. I mean, it's 2026 and I've got FirstNet and I can walk into a building and I can't get out, you know? And I'm like, I don't— so it's above my pay grade. But for as far as I knew, well, I mean, they had surveillance, you know? Right, right, right. But, but, uh, as far as I knew, they can never hear That night at the end of the shift, you know, you go meet somewhere at a predetermined location and I'm turning over my recording equipment to the case team and whatever. Maybe they're giving me more money for the next day or whatever, and they do a debrief. Well, when I got there that night, what I found out was is that the first two guys covering me were part of the main case team. It was Sergeant Higginbottom from Massachusetts State Troopers Everybody called him Higgy. And then Detective Cummings from Brockton PD. And because they had known me for a year and a half or a little more, whatever happened at that first interaction with Joe Dogs at the door, it made them think something was up. And they had pulled close enough or whatever, they were able to hear everything.

When they heard me getting stripped, of course they can hear that I'm scared because they know my voice, right? They're radioing back to Boston saying, hey, anybody in there, get down here. And as far as the way I was told is everybody was coming blue lights and siren. Wow. Down there. And they didn't hit it. They went ahead and they had a plan because they've been in that clubhouse on other law enforcement activity and they know how it's set up and they knew how that door was fortified. So their plan, they put their vest on everything and their plan was if they felt like it was time to pull the trigger to save me or whatever, they were going to drive the van into the cinder block wall beside the door to kind of breach the wall.

So you're standing there, that's what you're thinking. If he knows what's going on, those are your two plans of action. And they're out there waiting on— And your case team is out there listening and there's help on the way.

Yes. Okay. Because clothesline didn't find it. And also because that case team, Higginbotham and Cummings, They knew me and they didn't pull the trigger. They were like, hang on, he's still okay. He's still okay. Got it. So we go out that night and it's me, Joe Dogs, and Scott Town, and I am livid. I'm raising hell, you know? And even Joe Dogs is like, Tex, you got to understand, this has happened to other brothers, other people where everybody shows up and it's just, you know, we're the only people there and everybody else is an undercover, you know? And I played it off. I'm like, who the hell would spend that kind of time and money and try to, you know? Yeah, for sure. Besides us, you know, besides me. But I go back, I probably sleep maybe 30 minutes that night. I go and meet everybody, I think it was outside of IHOP. I hand out the radios and I tell them where we're going to go. And it's pretty comical on recording because I say, all right, we're going back up to the Westgate Mall in Brockton. And Chocolate Scott starts bitching. He goes, man, I live right next to there.

I could have slept another 40 minutes. Oh yeah. And Joe Dogg's Zurdoch starts, he goes, you guys are the lazy— he goes, you guys, let me get it right. Yeah, he goes, you guys are the laziest bunch of damn criminals I've ever met in my entire life, you know. And I'll even bust in the jogger, hey, I thought I left my wife at home, can you stop complaining, you know. Talk to this guy. Yeah, yeah. So we, uh, we go, we do the deal, and one truck pulls up. Um, it's fake drugs? No, it's real. Yeah, it's real drugs. Uh, so I mean, they're smelling the weed.

You almost have a good budget up there then.

In? Well, I don't know where the case team got it. It might have— it's probably evidence from another case. Got it. And it gets signed out. But can you imagine if we lost that? FBI loses 50 kilos of cocaine. Are you kidding me? So yeah, snipers are up and everything. So, uh, the truck's back up, the undercovers— Joe Dogg's on the truck, OB's on the truck. We're covering stuff. They're pulling surveillance, you know. And just like normal surveillance, I mean, they got people— I've been burnt, I've been burnt! There's a guy staring me, calm down, dude. Yeah, you know, and if a cop shows up, let us know, we're going to pull the trucks away. And we pulled off the deal, and then I went and paid everybody.

So y'all did the deal?

Yeah, it went, it went across. They got to meet Manny. Joe Dawgs wanted to meet Manny, who of course was an undercover, but he is a Hispanic guy that did all kinds of cartel stuff.

Shout out Manny.

Yeah, shout out Manny, man. Uh, Martin Suarez, he's actually got a book out too. Oh wow. They just— and it's, it's Martin Suarez. Martin Suarez.

Um, you do the deal.

Yeah. And this is, uh, we get it the next day. And, uh, like I said, we do the deal, and then that night maybe I slept a little bit, you know.

I'm gonna need a massage after all this.

I know, right? And all of this. And then I fly home and I'll get— I miss my flights, they're delayed, canceled, whatever. And then I go home to, uh, when I landed in McAllen, I would drive straight to the house. I brushed my teeth, changed my shirt, loaded up my daughters, my wife, and my mother-in-law, and we went to the Rio Grande Valley FBI Christmas party for Laredo, Brownsville, and McAllen offices. And I was Santa Claus for the kids after being stripped in the basement at gunpoint about 2 nights earlier. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't stop. So what happens if you fast forward a little bit? Now we're doing all this stuff. We're still getting more things. We got the big dope deal. I'm getting trust here. During that case, a, uh, president of the Hells Angels was murdered, uh, riding down the road. We knew that it was a green truck with Florida plates. We knew that we had Outlaws from Florida up there. And, uh, the case kept going, and eventually I end up down in Daytona at a world run. And by this point, I'm kind of a zombie. Because my MO always was— I'm a workaholic.

I get it honestly from my parents. But my MO always was like, look, if I can be above average, or if I can on the squad that I'm on as a case agent, or if I can have some good cases and good sources, maybe that lets my management not be able to say no to me. Like, hey, you're a top producer, Scott, so you can't say no. You can't go on that SWAT call out or that SWAT school or that undercover or that undercover school. Um, but what I was doing to myself is I was taking the warrior mentality, which I think is imperative for the line of work. The warrior mentality? Yeah, the war mentality. And I think that's imperative, but I was applying it to every situation in my life. So I was not taking days off because I didn't want management to get mad. I was not sleeping hardly at all. I got to the point to where I was drinking— I wasn't a big energy drink guy, um, but you were huffing them up. Well, no, what it was is I was drinking like a pot of coffee and taking hydroxy cuts with Ephedrine in them, and I was still falling asleep.

So I get down to Daytona, we've got murders that have happened. We get— we've had Sturgis where I arrived, and the day I arrived, uh, the Hells Angels shoot 5 Outlaws point-blank range. It was— I think it was 2 patched, 1 probate in Sturgis. That happened? Yeah, in Sturgis. And then, um, and then 2, 2 what they would refer to as old ladies. And it was some serious wounds. Like, people were paralyzed and stuff. It's just dangerous.

And put them on a Gold Wing. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, hopefully they turned out okay. But so they got all that going on and now we're— we're kind of winding down towards the end of the case. So I didn't know. You're still going. But I'm in Daytona. And again, by this time, here's my cocktail. I woke up one morning, I could still feel the whiskey and eggs swishing in my belly. I felt like a piece of trash. I'm like, all right, this is it, I'm working out. So I did like an in-room workout, something like a P90X kind of deal. I'm doing push-ups, sit-ups, squats, burpees, mountain climbers, uh, and— but before I did that, by this time I wake up, I take antihistamines, decongestants, hitting an inhaler, uh, which is also a vasodilator, makes you shake and stuff, opens up your lungs. Then I drank 2 cups of coffee, the strongest coffee I can possibly make. And then I hit 3 Hydroxycuts with Ephedrine in them. Yeah. So as I learned later on from the—

You're a damn jet ski.

Well, from what the doctors told me, they go, Scott, that is a cocktail for an anxiety attack. And that's what happened. I started working out and all that shit hit me and I was so beat down. Like, I started hyperventilating. I mean, it's humid, it's Daytona, you know. Yeah, but I'm in there. But whatever, I came up and I forgot all about combat breathing. I forgot about, you know, some people call it— was it like forward box breathing? Box breathing, same thing, you know. I forgot about a paper bag. I just— I turned as white as your shirt. And an undercover knocks on the door. He was the guy that was playing the truck driver, and it just— he sees me and I'm just pouring sweat out of every pore. White as your shirt. My lips are all tight. And he's like, are you okay? And I'm like, I don't think so. So we start talking. What I should have done is said, I don't feel good, I think I'm heading home. But I didn't. I took a nap, I got up, self-medicated, went back out with the Outlaws. Mongols were there, fights breaking out, all kinds of stuff.

And, uh, but when I flew home from that trip, I didn't know it, but my body was already done. They wanted to expand the case because the guy that was now— went by the road name Hillbilly, who I knew through the case, and he liked me and I liked him, um, he was the Southeast Regional President at that point. And they, and they wanted me to come down to— they wanted Boston not to take the case down and for me to move to Florida and patch under Hillbilly.

Dude, I don't care if you're meeting damn Sam Elliott from Mask, bro.

You guys love that Dude, I've always loved him as a biker better than anything else. It was a good role.

But damn, man, to keep pushing yourself out there like that.

Yeah, well, I wasn't smart.

And I mean, I lied. And I'm not judging you, man.

No, I'm just saying I lied to Safeguard. Like, I took the psychological test and I lied. I knew I was exhausted. I knew I didn't know how to relax anymore.

Even because it's almost like I'm reading the story and it's like, you know, it's like, oh man, it's just— that's harrowing. It's harrowing. And it reminds me of times that I think a lot of us And probably a lot of listeners can relate to when they just this thing, I got to keep going. And at what cost?

Doesn't matter what you— you could be a doctor, you could be whatever.

Yes, for sure. That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. You can wear yourself out. So what happens is I go home, I sleep. The first day I probably slept 20 hours. Amen. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't sick. I know what they both feel like. For the rest of the week, I slept over 16 hours a day. So come Friday, I still love this guy. I don't think he loves me anymore. It is what it is. But we were friends at that point, and he calls me, and my— again, country. He goes, how you doing, country? And that was all he said. And I said, I'm not doing too good. So for the next hour, we talk on the phone. I'm explaining to him everything's going on, and he basically let me convince myself I need to call Safeguard. So I called and I knew one of the psychologists personally and I called and I said, hey, I don't know what's going on, man. I'm 30-something years old. I'm crashing. I don't know what's happening. So they came out and did an onsite. In other words, I didn't have to fly to them. They flew to me. They did the test. I answered it honestly.

Amen. And I got put on timeout. But what they did is they said, and by timeout I mean no more undercover cover for at least 6 months. But what they did is they said, hey, for the purpose— for this case specifically, we'll let you stay on the phone. So I make a ruse. I'd already told them that I'd gotten married, so I'd make up a story that, hey, me and my wife are getting divorced, her family's in El Paso, I gotta re— I gotta get this house finished, I gotta relocate her and the kids out there because I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror again if I didn't. Got it. And you got You got fathers. Scott Town's a loving father, 4 daughters. You got— and they're like, they all— they're like, oh yeah, oh, we got it, man. I said, but as soon as I get them there, I'm coming north. I'm sick of this heat. Amen. So we just kept talking. And during that, there was one other guy that we didn't get, but he was calling me. And he was like— he just got out of prison recently, and he was an outlaw.

And he's like, hey man, I heard about— you know, we'd met before. Scott Town introduced us. But he's like, I got a Hummer, I got this $100,000 BMW I need to get rid of. And he starts talking about cocaine and he's like, hey, you know what kind of business I'm in? I said, I can maybe take a guess. And he goes, I'm into that magic powder. And I said, the white? And he said, yeah. Oh, cocaine. Yeah. And he said, yeah. And he says, how much can you get me basically a kilo for? And I said— and he said, if you can get me a kilo at $18 apiece, I got enough to buy 10 right now. He had $180 grand ready to go. And Of course, I call the case team and I go, do you guys want me to pursue this? And they said, yeah, friend though, right? Well, this guy I met, he wasn't like a close— Scott Town introduced me to him. His name was Tim Sylvia, not UFC Tim Sylvia, but yeah, but who is a friend, uh, but Tim Sylvia the outlaw. And, uh, so what happens is, is I broker the deal for my truck driver and another undercover who always just— he didn't always, but about half of the case he would sit in the passenger seat and they go— like, I'm literally in my garage in McAllen, and I'm on the phone with Tim Silvia, and I'm on the phone with him.

I'm going, he's over here, and I'm guiding them in to meet each other. Well, when they meet each other, you can hear the other undercovers talking. Even if you see the recording from the back of the semi-truck, you can even hear me on the phone. They're calling, uh, the truck driver calls me, he's like, Tex, like, hey, what's going on, man? We're calling him Tony. Hey Tony, man. He's like, yeah. He goes, I'm here. And he goes, I'm with— he goes, what's your name again? Tim. So he goes, tell him it's Big Timmy. I go, okay. And he says, they're going back and forth. He goes, hey, he wants to talk to you. So Tim gets on the phone and I say, hey, you got the same vehicles? Yeah. I'd agreed to pay him $21 grand for the vehicles that I was buying from him stolen. And he says, I said, when are you going to report the BMW stolen? Because I had a tracker on He said, Friday. I said, can you make it Saturday? I'm just trying to make it real, right? I said, can you make it Saturday? Give me one more day and it'll be in Mexico for sure.

And he says, absolutely. So then I get back on the phone with the undercover, and the undercover says, how much am I supposed to pay him? I said, 21 grand. So when they go to load the vehicles, the stolen vehicles onto the truck, Tim hits them and says, can you guys get 10 kilos at $18 apiece? And they said yes. And that's how we ended the case. I was drawing up diagrams of all the clubhouses and houses I'd been in for all the SWAT teams that were going to be hitting it and stuff, which was nerve-wracking to me because I'm a tactical guy and I'm like, well, what if I get this wrong and somebody gets hurt? And then also my Scott and myself with another guy had— we're creating our own motorcycle club called the Righteous Few. It had already been approved by the president, the national president of the Outlaws, to be the number one support club for the Outlaws. I was in the Northeast. Um, all I had to do was go back up one more time and I'd have got my cut. But you know, it is what it is. Um, yeah, you were also—

you were not done.

Yeah, I was done.

You weren't even being real.

It would have been cool. Yeah, you know, ego-wise. Oh yeah, for sure.

But yeah, damn, bro, so this whole thing's insane. So we're taking down the case.

I'm actually at an undercover school teaching. Um, I wasn't there. I'm pretty sure Safeguard said I couldn't go.

And this when you're just doing stuff on the phone still? Okay. Yeah. And how do we get to the end? This is it.

Okay. Because they said they were going to deliver the 10 kilos. That's going to be a reversal, and that's going to be the first arrest. Right. So when they show up, when Tim Sylvia shows up to deliver the Hummer and to get whatever, SWAT team is going to take him down. Right. He's got the money and all this stuff. SWAT team is going to take him down, and that starts all the arrests happening. So I can't tell you what time it was. It was in Nevada where I was at versus what time it was. I don't know if that's 3 hours behind or whatever, um, from Massachusetts. But I go back to my room, and these are long nights at the UC school like I told you. I go back to my room and my phone's chirping, and I listen, and it's a message from Scott Towne. And I chirp him up and I go, hey, what's up? And he says, he's all raspy voice, he goes, hey, I just want you to know somebody just called me. Your truck drivers, Tony and that other and Big Scotty, Big T, uh, Big Timmy, they got locked up.

And I'm like, okay. And he goes, I just wanted to let you know. And I said, well, you know, they're not up there for something for me. I said, but sometimes they do things on the side for themselves. He said, listen, I'm gonna go to something defective like this. He said, listen, I'm gonna go to— I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna get showered up, and I'm gonna find out what's going on. I'm gonna call you back. And I said, okay. And our last words to each other, he said, I love you, brother. And I said, I love you too. And about 40 minutes later, a SWAT team hit his house and he went to prison. They all pled guilty. You ever talk to him again? It's very possible. I can either confirm or deny, but since the New York Times bestseller and being on a podcast or two. Yeah, uh, the bond was real.

The bond was real. Was real. Like, how happy is the ending? Like, I'm just wondering.

Like, it's pretty good so far. Is it? Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, really good.

So you guys can still communicate often? Yeah. Like, in what type of manner? You feel like call me?

Whatever. I will tell you that Chocolate Scott started trolling me, and he'll probably get a kick out of this. He did? Yeah, he started. All of a sudden, you know how if somebody finds you on Instagram and they start liking all your stuff and it's like from 6 months prior, but you start getting all these dings, ding, ding, ding, like they liked your reel, like they're— well, it was like, this guy sucks, screw you. Oh, Chocolate Scott.

Yeah, Chocolate Scott's like that.

So he said— so he put—

this guy's be Chocolate Scott. So I almost wish I knew him, actually.

So here's the thing, he's like, he's like hitting me with like, yeah, you suck, you eff this, you know, this and the other. And I saw it and it was like, I could kind of see the picture, but I saw that it was Doom666 and I'm like, who the hell is it? I don't respond to negative stuff, but I'm like, because most of the time you're arguing with an algorithm anyway, it's some AI you're arguing against, it's not even a real person. Yeah, some pervert. But I click on it and I open it up and it's Chocolate Sky. And for his Instagram, it says, "Fuck you, Scott Payne, you big bitch." Damn.

So he really— but he's got a right to be pissed.

I know, I know, man. But I giggled because I could totally see him high, laughing, typing that stuff. Oh yeah. But the last thing he put out there that— before I blocked him— is he put— he actually validated me because a lot of people are like, "Oh, you're making this up." I'm like, "Dude, pull the court records, pull the reports. It's in there." The recordings that happened. I don't know what you want me to tell you. I'm not making it up. It's there. But he put— he put— he would go— he found another one and he goes, I've seen this guy naked in the basement. Not much there. All right. So I so wanted to respond because the first thing I was going to say is, you're still picturing me naked in the basement from 2006? Yeah. Must have been tough in prison. Second thing I would have said is, I don't find you or clothesline attractive. The third thing I would have said is it was very, very cold in that basement.

Yeah. And it's, it's in Massachusetts. Yeah.

And the fourth thing I would have said is I thought I was getting ready to die. And that's a whole new level of shrinkage. The last thing I was concerned about is what I look like naked.

So I can't even stay erect around them broken glass, you know. Here I hear a window shatter. Dude, I won't get hard for a month. That's just who I am. My dad was the same way. Yeah. Did Townes go to jail? Yeah, yeah.

We pretty much dismantled the whole Taunton chapter. I don't know if it's back up, but yeah, we pretty much got everybody.

Have you seen him since he went in? Nope. No. How long will he be in for? He's out. Oh, he's out now? Yeah, he's out. So you haven't seen him since he got out either? Okay, got it. No. How long has he been out for? I don't know.

I don't know if he did 6 or 8. And let's just say, I think we arrested— I think we took that case down in 2008. Got it.

But, uh, let's see if it says the Outlaws MC Taunton chapter is no longer active, having been effectively dismantled following a major federal sweep. Woohoo! There you go. Um, do you have to miss a lot of things? Uh, yeah, like a lot of family stuff. Yeah, you missed a lot of like birthdays.

I did pretty good with that, but I missed like some recitals and stuff like that. Yeah, or Father's Day. Way, you know, because it might be putting on the Undercover School, or it might be being on the, on the case. Because like I said, you kind of go where the case takes you. Um, if you get an opening to go to Sturgis with the— I mean, yeah, that's—

yeah, no, I mean, it's all— it's just so— it's so fascinating, you know, because life itself, you're kind of—

we're all trying to be ourselves, and, and then to go into life and then go into another life, kind of, you know, like an other You know, like, yeah, my big, uh, my big, uh, I guess my, my Clark Kent walking into a phone booth and coming out as Superman is I, I have a cross on my necklace. And before I would go undercover, I'd take the cross off and it'd either be— it would either be a Norse, you know, like Thor's hammer. But for most of it, it was just a skull. But that was kind of my thing. Like, I'd go back in, I'd take the skull off, put the cross back on. It was kind of like me saying trying, trying to leave it there. And now I'm Scott again. But truthfully, the, the job creeped in all the time. I mean, how's it not going to when I'm on an undercover call and my daughter's chasing me through the house and I'm trying not to let her hear me cuss because I'm on the phone with a bad guy, you know?

Sure. Um, are you ever— before you go, Scott— are you ever, uh, worried about somebody coming back from the past, something coming back to haunt you?

It could happen, yeah. Um, Retaliation. Yeah, you know, I'm not trying to be a tough guy or nothing like that, but I do have a belief system. And for me, I mean, I wouldn't want any family members or anything like that to be in fear. Usually for me, your best defense is a good offense. That's me. Like, just being a uniformed cop, how many people in your town do you think you arrest in a year? And do you— I mean, they're not all like felony charge, they back out.

That's a good point.

So you How many times as a uniformed cop do you go to the mall or to a movie theater or to the grocery store and you run into people that you've locked up? It might have been somebody you had to fight. Amen. I never thought about that. I just walk right up to them. That's me. I see them and I'd go, if they're eyeballing, I'm not even going to let them plot. I'm just going to go right up and go, good game. Hey, no, I'm going to be like, brother, how are you doing? When did you get out? How's the family, man? Hey, are you clean right now? Are you good? How you doing? Listen, as long as you're on that up and straight and narrow, You on the right path, I'll help you. And I have. I've actually people that I put in jail, that I infiltrated, put in jail, but they've taken a turn for the better. I, at their sentencing, I wrote an acknowledgement letter or a letter for their character. Amen. And they got probation instead of going to jail. So that's not a— I mean, no, if you get— for me, for the most part, what I've found, because I do really make friendships, I mean, you're creating relationships, but you're betraying them a little bit.

I mean, you're going to be betraying them if you're undercover. Yeah, but it's almost like the old Bugs Bunny cartoon. You got the sheepdog and you got the coyote, and it's Ralph and Sam, and they clock in in the morning, and all day the coyote's trying to steal sheep, and all day the sheepdog's beating the crap out of him, trying to get— and at the end of the day, they clock out. See you in the morning, Sam. See you in the morning, Ralph. It's just, you know, I've been told, I've been told this. If you were a biker and you were part of the club and you snitched, they'd never forgive me. But I was just doing my job. So you see that a lot. Professional snitch. No, I'm not a snitch. I'm not. I'm a bonded law enforcement officer. And we have reports of you doing criminal stuff, and I infiltrated you, or somebody did, and we found evidence of that criminal stuff. If you're not doing anything wrong, don't worry about it.

Yeah. Um, do, do they ever— oh, just this kind of like a question, almost like the movies— do they ever bring retired agents in for like, you know, they ever try and get you back out there for one more show?

Yeah, yeah. But you would be—

if you're a retired agent, because you're retired now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you could come back in as a source. That's a, that's a whole different ball game though.

But they're never like, Scott, we gotta wheel you out one more time here, you know?

Not now. I'm overt now, man. Yeah, you know what I mean? Oh yeah, people know now.

Yeah, I know.

Anybody ever told you you look like Matt Damon? You know what, as a matter of fact, the other day somebody did, and as soon as they pulled up the picture, I went, dang, you know? Yeah, who would have thunk it? Uh, no, I mean, no, I mean, it could happen, but once I was done, I mean, obviously, I mean, you do Rolling Stone magazine and then this, and yeah.

Would you do it again?

Absolutely, absolutely, man. But you know, okay, They always say, man, you'll know when it's time to retire. I thought I was going to work to 57. I thought I'd be the undercover coordinator for the state of Tennessee, and maybe I could extend, you know, because that's a skill set that a lot of people don't have in the Bureau, as opposed to being a tactical instructor. I mean, there's a lot of tactical instructors, but I thought I was going to stay to 57. But after the Bass case, I was like, man, I had to get the back lumbar. I got a lumbar fusion. A week and a half after the lumbar fusion, I got Tammy talking about PVC pipes and everything else in my truck. And you just start thinking—

she loves to torture people.

Yeah, I know. I like torture.

You like torture?

I like torture. I love shit. You need somebody to torture you, you call me. I swear, I know that torture. But, uh, the thing is, is I, I was 48 going on to 50. How many more Oh, how many more? Like, I can't go— I mean, if— okay, now I'm gonna look like a pedophile. Oh, there's an old dude buying beer for young boys and he's teaching them white spray. No, I'm not. But how can I infiltrate 17-year-olds, right? You know, and you just start realizing— just one day it hit me, and it was right after the base case. It was in February. We took it down January of 2020. February of 2020, I'm in Phoenix, Arizona. We're putting on training. We're training online cover employees for domestic terrorism. And I don't know what we were discussing about. I don't know what it was. I know it was my birthday, but I just— this overwhelming feeling hit me in the face like a brick. I can't remember what we were talking about, but I remember like everything just kind of going, calming down, and me saying this in my head: I'm satisfied with my career.

Yeah. Never said it before. Not saying I've done everything, but if I do something now, I'm just starting right back over. I'm like, I think— holy cow, I'm okay. I think I'm okay. Amen. Yeah. Well, Scott Payne, man. Boom! Big country. Shmedium country.

Thank you so much for coming in, man. Scott Payne, bitch. Code Name Pale Horse, that's his book. How I Went Undercover to Expose America's Nazis.

And I was gonna say, and the paperback's out now.

Sorry. Oh, nice. And the paperback is out now. Yeah. True. Yes, true. Thank you so much for, uh, for being here today with us, man. Thanks for sharing your stories. Uh, yeah, dude, what a fascinating, um, existence you've had so far, man. We appreciate your time, brother. Thank you so much. Give our best to your family, man. And, uh, yeah, Scott Payne, thank you, bro.

Thank you, man. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found. I can feel it in my bones, but it's gonna take a little