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0:57

Operation. Cobra.

1:03

Espionage. The

1:05

Team How. With

1:07

your home She akbar.

1:11

David Clarke. A

1:17

Folks welcome to Episode Two Hundred and Seventy Four

1:20

of The Team House on Jack Murphy. Daves.

1:22

Out tonight. These. Back there

1:24

producing. Our. Guest on Tonight show

1:26

is Eric Bowl as he served

1:28

as a career F B I

1:30

agent including two stints as Assistant

1:32

Directors and I'm. We're. Really excited.

1:35

Talk about his whole career. A lot of

1:37

interesting stuff, kidnapping cases, counter drugs stuff and

1:39

then and then intelligence on so we'll get

1:41

it all that. Ah, I just want to

1:44

give a quick shout out to Cause A

1:46

Caribbean Cigars for providing with cigars for the

1:48

show or you'd find them at Catholic Arab

1:51

A or.com And ah please also check out

1:53

our Patriotic. There's a link down the description

1:55

if you sign up for five dollars a

1:58

month to get access to all episode. of

2:00

the team house ad free and we really

2:02

appreciate you guys supporting the channel. So

2:06

with that said, Eric welcome to the show. Thank

2:08

you. Thank you for having me. Cheers. Thank

2:11

you for coming in. Absolutely. So

2:15

yeah thank you for having me. I

2:18

mean it's our pleasure. So I'll

2:21

ask you to start at the beginning with you

2:23

know kind of your origin story like how did

2:25

you grow up and what was like that pathway

2:27

that took you towards the FBI? Yeah sure. Actually

2:30

it's an interesting story. It's kind of like a

2:32

it's my bureau story is a

2:34

real true mailroom to boardroom type of

2:36

story. So I grew up in Puerto Rico.

2:39

My dad was army so I'm an army brat born in Fort

2:41

Gordon, Georgia but Puerto Rico

2:43

is where I call home and back

2:45

when I was coming out of high school it

2:48

was right around that time where there was

2:51

a group called the Machatero group with independence

2:53

movement terrorist organization in Puerto Rico and

2:56

my dad had gotten a job post-army working

2:58

in the FBI as an IA not an

3:00

intel analyst these these are folks investigative assistants

3:02

and so the agents work in the cases

3:04

these are folks that would do a lot

3:07

of the DMV runs some of the background

3:09

stuff to kind of help the agents along

3:11

the cases. In 85 I

3:13

believe it was 84 is what happens the organization

3:18

shoots a law rocket into the FBI

3:20

office in San Juan and

3:22

it hits right above the office is on the fifth

3:24

floor hits on the sixth floor but at the time

3:26

they said hey let's beef up the night crew so

3:29

it was one guy that did midnight to eight another

3:31

guy they before to midnight there was a swing shift

3:33

guy and so they wanted to put

3:35

somebody else on quickly so here I am I'm

3:37

18 years old I have no credit and worked

3:39

anywhere so my background took like

3:41

nothing to get in and so my

3:44

first job is is working the night

3:46

shift in Puerto Rico and

3:49

picking up confidential trash you know doing

3:52

radio doing mail deliveries

3:55

and that's how I get started in the FBI

3:58

and then from there you know I At that point,

4:00

I was studying airway science. I wanted to

4:02

be something to do with aviation, air traffic

4:04

controller, I went maybe pilot. But

4:07

then my first exposure to

4:09

FBI agents, I remember sitting

4:11

there, I was just a kid, and there had

4:13

been this raid earlier on. They'd taken down this

4:15

big gang, and some

4:17

SWAT guys had come up with this guy, this

4:20

one guy was all tatted up, and

4:22

this bad guy. And I'm sitting there in my desk,

4:24

and there's a chair, and they said, hey, we're gonna

4:26

put him right here. And they

4:28

sat the guy next to me, and they

4:30

had these two big old SWAT guys all

4:32

jacked up. And

4:35

at that moment, I went like, I wanna be

4:37

that. That's what I wanna do. And

4:39

so I change, and I start to like, everything

4:42

I'm studying in school changes, and I become an agent in 92.

4:45

So I have seven years clerical, what they

4:47

called, we always clerked back then. And then I

4:49

become an agent in 92. I

4:53

mean, that's an interesting way to,

4:55

like you said, graduate up into

4:57

the organization. That's

5:00

like atypical, usually it's like college or

5:02

law enforcement into FDI, right? Correct,

5:05

yeah, it's not, I mean, there are folks that

5:07

start off in the bureau kind of either as

5:09

analysts or others, and then they become agents later

5:11

on. It's usually, in

5:13

agent careers, an agent position is usually a

5:15

second or third career. It's not like your

5:17

first thing you're doing. So a lot of

5:19

them have a background there. The military law

5:21

enforcement, something, accounting lawyers, and then they

5:23

become agents, where in mine was, my whole thing

5:25

was, I'd started from the organization, I was a

5:27

GS3. I was making $11,000 a

5:29

year. I mean, it's like,

5:31

back then, for me, I mean, I'm 18 years old,

5:33

19 years old, and I'm making 11,000 bucks. That

5:36

was a lot of money for me. But

5:38

yeah, it's not typical. My

5:40

path is not, at

5:43

least back then it wasn't. So 1992, you go

5:45

to Quantico. What's

5:48

it like going through the training to be a special agent at

5:50

that time? Man, I tell you,

5:52

I remember somebody once told me this, and it was

5:54

the best way to describe Quantico. It was like, it's

5:57

the best time. my

6:00

life, but I never want to do it again. So

6:04

it's every day. I was there 16

6:06

weeks. I think they've upped it too. I'm

6:08

not sure exactly how long it is now, but back

6:11

then it was 16 weeks and every

6:14

day it's like you're gonna do this. You're gonna

6:16

take this test. You're gonna do this whatever. You're

6:18

gonna shoot this many times. You're gonna and you

6:20

just get by day by day and at the

6:22

end of the day you're exhausted and you just

6:24

go day to. And before you know it, you're

6:26

graduating there. You're giving you a gun and a

6:29

badge and they're sending you out. But

6:32

it's not easy. It's not meant to be easy. But

6:36

like I said, the best thing I ever

6:38

did, I never would do it again. At

6:42

the time in 1992, what's

6:45

kind of like the culture of the FBI?

6:47

Like what is it that they're training you

6:49

to do? I mean, what is the main

6:51

focus of the organization at that time? Well,

6:54

when I was coming in, it was around the time Janet

6:57

Reno, the kind of the War on

6:59

Drugs Southwest Border Initiative. And

7:01

I remember because I was in the FBI a lot

7:03

of the agents, you know, would

7:05

tell me like, hey, you know where you're going,

7:07

right? And I go, you don't know where you're

7:10

going. You get Quantico, you open up your letter at week 8 and they

7:12

tell you where you're gonna go. And they go,

7:14

you're going to the border. Like you're gonna work dope

7:16

in the border. And I go, how do you know

7:18

that? Because everybody's, anybody who speaks Spanish is gonna go.

7:20

And being Puerto Rican, I spoke Spanish. And

7:22

sure enough, there were four of us in

7:24

my class that spoke Spanish. Two got Macallan

7:26

and two got El Paso. So

7:29

yeah, we were in that. That was the way it was back then.

7:33

So you graduate from Quantico and that must

7:35

have been a big moment for you. Huge.

7:38

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Best shape of my life.

7:41

But just

7:43

exciting. Exciting to go to Texas

7:47

to Macallan, you know, to actually

7:49

work drug cases. And

7:52

it was hit the ground running. I mean, you got there. I

7:54

mean, I remember the day I got to Macallan, I

7:57

get called like, hey, tomorrow morning, four o'clock. We

8:00

got an arrest, you know, like

8:02

that. And McAllen was a very busy office

8:04

back then. Not just drugs, but fugitives, you

8:06

know, folks that are coming and hiding back

8:08

in the Valley. And so it

8:10

was a nonstop. And for an agent, it's the best

8:12

time of your life because you're just, you're arresting, you're

8:15

involved in a lot of it. And we were

8:17

teamed up with our partners at DEA and Customs

8:19

at the time, you know, and others, IRS, others

8:22

that worked there. But DEA and us and Customs,

8:24

we were all parts of task forces. And all

8:26

the guys, we all knew each other. It was

8:28

really cool. It was nice being part of that

8:31

community. And you

8:33

mentioned a little bit of it. I mean,

8:35

that Janet Reno was really escalating the

8:38

pressure on the flow of drugs coming

8:40

across the border. Can

8:43

you expand on kind of like what you were seeing,

8:45

what was going on at that time? Well, it's interesting,

8:47

because we, you know, we had Title 21 authority, which

8:50

allowed the Bureau to work drug

8:52

cases much like DEA. So the

8:54

approach that the Bureau was taking

8:56

was that we

8:58

focused on the large cartels, whether

9:00

they're Cario Fuentes, you know, what's

9:06

the other, the different, you know, Caro

9:09

Quintero, Juan Garcia Abrego, which

9:11

is Garcia Abrego ran the

9:14

golf cartel. So McAllen, that's what, so for

9:16

us, we had a squad, a squad and

9:18

typical squad is usually, you know, anywhere 10,

9:20

12, 15 agents. We

9:23

had about 18 agents on our squad. And

9:27

we, the way we

9:29

did it in McAllen was there was one case,

9:32

maybe two cases, but you had to link the

9:34

case to a cartel. If you could

9:36

not establish that link, you could not work. It

9:38

wasn't a FBI case. Yeah, I mean, you only

9:40

had so many resources. And so the

9:44

case agent basically ran the case,

9:47

and then the rest of us supported it. We

9:49

did surveillance, we did, we sat on wiretaps, we

9:51

did whatever, but that's how

9:53

it was. And that's my first, my

9:55

first activity as an

9:57

agent was sitting on wiretaps.

10:00

you know, like bouncing around,

10:02

like, you know, supporting cases. And I knew, I

10:04

said, I'm gonna end up doing this for the

10:06

rest of my life, unless I become the case

10:08

agent, you know. You told me earlier on that

10:11

it was kind of funny listening to the wires.

10:13

Yeah. Because you speak Puerto Rican Spanish. Yes. These

10:15

guys speak like Mexican prison Spanish. Yeah, yeah. Well,

10:17

I remember because they sent me up, I was

10:20

in the county, I just got my apartment, and

10:22

then they, it was around Christmas time or Thanksgiving,

10:24

it was the holiday, and they said, hey, you

10:26

need to come up to San Antonio, it was

10:29

a wire, we're working a Mexican mafia wire.

10:32

And the main subject, I believe, was

10:34

in California. But, you know, there's the

10:36

leadership of the Mexican mafia was in

10:39

San Antonio, we were up on these

10:41

wiretaps, and, you know, I show up,

10:43

and it's me, I think

10:45

I have the four to midnight, and it's me, and

10:47

I think we're on four

10:49

lines. So the other three were San Antonio PD guys, you

10:51

know, they all grew up in that area. And they

10:54

know the language, you know. And

10:56

so I remember my first call comes in, you know, the

10:58

time we had cassette

11:00

players, like, you know, now

11:02

it's all digital. But back then, you know, cassette

11:04

players, and we had like three, three machines. We

11:06

have to explain all that to our younger audience.

11:08

Yeah, so we had like three machines, and then

11:11

the machines, the original one, you take that one

11:14

out, you seal it, it's evidence, don't mess with

11:16

it. They put a fourth one for me. That

11:18

was because that first call, I remember going off,

11:20

and I put it on, put the headphones on,

11:22

and they're like, oh, it just goes on and

11:25

on, and it ends.

11:27

And I take that thing off, my headphones off,

11:29

and I look around the room, and

11:31

I said, I have, I didn't understand

11:33

a word these people just said. And I

11:36

said, I don't know what I'm

11:38

going to do. So they put another machine, then I could take

11:40

it out, and in between calls, I could read, listen, and

11:43

I would pick things up. Like, for example, like, in

11:45

Spanish, muevele, like,

11:47

means furniture, muevele,

11:50

them is a car, and

11:52

feria is, for us, some fare, and for

11:54

them it's money. So they say, muevele,

11:56

you can see the feria, and I'm like, something's going on. about

12:00

furniture and they're going to some fair and

12:02

these guys stand into a PBI just laugh and

12:04

they laugh. The only thing that made me

12:06

feel good is that the opposite

12:08

of thing like when the the Mexican-American agents

12:11

the agents that were from Texas or whatever

12:13

that kind of grew up with that language

12:15

Spanish kind of when they

12:17

got sent to Puerto Rico and they sat on

12:19

Puerto Rican wires and they had to listen to

12:22

like like where I

12:24

came from talk they say that

12:26

is impossible so I at least at

12:28

least at least I picked up the language but it

12:30

wasn't easy at all it was very

12:33

challenging at first. So how

12:35

did you make that jump then from you know you

12:37

said you didn't want to spend your whole career sitting

12:39

on wires. Yeah. How did you

12:41

make that jump to you know working cases? Yeah well I

12:43

mean like I figured out real quick I said okay so

12:46

I got it I've got to open

12:48

up I got to start a case and

12:50

I have to tie it to to a

12:52

large cartel one of the one of the top organizations

12:56

and and at the time I was

12:58

stationed in McCallum but we had we

13:00

had Hidalgo County and then there was

13:02

Stark County which is just west

13:05

of and a lot of

13:07

dope was coming up through Stark County through Rio Grande

13:09

City Roma Texas and I

13:11

said you know I was single so I figured like you

13:14

know it's not like a 45-minute drive or

13:16

something and there's enough work in McCallum

13:18

you can stay in McCallum but but I was gonna

13:20

go out to the to the Wild West and I

13:22

was gonna I was gonna go find the big case

13:24

and I remember I

13:26

teamed up with a Border Patrol agent Juan

13:29

Garcia's name Juanita we called him and

13:32

he took me under his wing and

13:34

you know I said hey listen I want to make a

13:36

case like I you know I'm tired of sitting on these

13:38

wires I want my own case

13:40

and he says okay and I said well who's the biggest

13:43

baddest guy here who's who's the one everybody wants at that

13:45

time there was a guy named La Bruja the witch

13:47

and and he

13:50

says La Bruja is the guy that runs here and

13:52

he's tied to Garcia Ira go and this and that

13:54

whatever and he

13:56

he taught me how to become a

13:58

good agent like and I stayed

14:01

with him and sure enough, in

14:03

fact, I'll talk a little bit when I talk about

14:05

my intel career, but he taught

14:08

me the value of intelligence, like

14:11

how intelligence drives investigations. Like for

14:13

example, Juanito,

14:16

like being border patrol, they could come in

14:18

I believe it's 25 miles within from the

14:20

border, they can get into the ranches, you

14:22

know, do what they have to do

14:24

for obvious reasons. And whenever there was

14:27

a big load that had crossed, the

14:29

organizations would celebrate it by having a pachanga,

14:31

a barbecue, you

14:35

know, the fajitas, beer, and they're celebrating. So

14:37

Juanito had this really smart idea that, you

14:39

know, when he saw pachangas happening in ranches,

14:41

you know, he'd just write down the license

14:44

plate numbers of the

14:46

cars, the trucks that were at the pachangas. And so

14:48

he had a whole list. And so when you're working

14:50

your cases and you knew DA had taken down this

14:52

load or there was a load that was crossed and

14:54

you're sharing back and forth, then

14:56

he could piece together like this guy

14:58

has been at a pachanga every time

15:00

this organization, and that's how he tied

15:02

it all up. So that's the true

15:04

meaning of collection, like intelligence collection,

15:07

understanding like what your gaps are, and how

15:09

he was smart and did that. And he

15:11

taught me all those kinds of things. And

15:13

later on, I use those examples, when we

15:15

started talking about how the bureau transformed into

15:18

this, this kind of dual agency, you know,

15:20

with the intel mission as well. But

15:22

yeah, that was that's how I got in.

15:24

And sure enough, we got up on one

15:27

wiretap, we ended up spinning off on three

15:29

more or more, we ended

15:31

up taking down that entire organization disrupting that

15:33

entire organization. Was that a river witch? River

15:35

witch, yeah. We were rich was a codename

15:37

we gave it just because labra, which means

15:40

the witch and and the Rio Grande Valley

15:42

and the river. So River Witch was Operation

15:44

River, which was the one that that

15:47

that was that was my first big

15:49

case. So how did how did that

15:51

investigation progress as you get warrants for

15:53

these wiretaps? Yeah, start developing the case?

15:55

Yeah, you basically, you know, you you try to get

15:58

up on a phone, you know, through the court

16:00

order of one of these leaders

16:03

of this organization. And

16:06

hopefully, because it's hard to penetrate

16:08

those organizations through regular human sources.

16:10

They're very close-knit. They're very tight-holed.

16:14

Everybody knows everybody. The cars you drive, the

16:16

minute you're driving in there, they know you're

16:18

not from here. So getting somebody in is

16:20

hard. So

16:24

you have to be smart enough to understand

16:27

how they're communicating and what phones

16:29

they're using. And then

16:31

developing the probable cause to

16:33

actually be able to intercept

16:35

that phone with a court. Go to a judge

16:38

with an affidavit and get that doing. But once

16:40

you're on the right phone, you're picking up a

16:42

lot. And they all talked in code. Each

16:45

of them had numbers and areas. I

16:47

remember one time, we were on this

16:49

list. And I would go, and

16:52

every day, I would look at the

16:54

pen registers and see what numbers. I knew

16:56

all the numbers. I had memorized every single

16:59

number. And I saw one number.

17:01

I was like, wait a minute. This one, I don't know.

17:03

And sure enough, that led me to a house.

17:06

And then little by little, we

17:08

started developing probable cause. But one

17:11

of the interesting things about that case was there

17:14

was always this rumor that there was somebody

17:17

that was at the

17:20

customs time that an

17:23

immigration, I'm sorry, that was allowing the load to

17:25

come in. They

17:27

knew who she was, but she

17:29

was very smart about it. And I

17:32

remember one time, I go in and

17:34

it's like, I say, hey, I

17:37

asked the translators, anything relevant? And I

17:40

look at the stack of notes, summaries.

17:43

And I saw one. It said, hey, vapassan.

17:47

Vapassan. And it was like, it's going to happen. And he

17:49

goes, si, a la una, don

17:52

de comemos pescado, where we eat fish.

17:55

And I knew that there was

17:57

a point. of

18:00

entry near Falcon Lake and

18:02

there was a place where you could eat fish. It was like a little

18:04

restaurant there and I went, wow, I wonder

18:06

if something's going to happen at

18:09

one o'clock at that port of

18:11

entry. And so

18:13

I had been working with the immigration folks

18:15

and I said, hey, listen, you

18:17

know, is she, what is her schedule?

18:20

She goes, well, she's, she, she was supposed to

18:22

be in Rio Grande City, but she asked to

18:24

work Roma at one o'clock. She takes a one

18:26

o'clock shift. And I went, I

18:28

told my boss, it's happening. He's like, what do you mean?

18:30

I go, it's happening. Like they're going to cross and she's

18:32

going to be there. Are you sure? And I said, I

18:35

know it. I just know it. I mean, I've been working

18:38

this case long enough. Something's going to happen. So we had

18:40

everybody out there. We had, we had a really cool setup

18:42

with DPS and, and sure enough,

18:44

man, I remember, um, uh,

18:47

she, she requests

18:50

to kind of start at two o'clock or she

18:52

changes her time. And I went, oh

18:54

man, now I got everybody out there. I'm going

18:56

to be like, what's Eric up to? And

18:59

then sure enough, a call comes in and he goes like, Hey,

19:02

a la dos. Like they, they

19:04

changed the time too. And I knew then

19:06

sure. Now I remember, I remember we were

19:08

all, we had, we had people kind of,

19:10

um, inside the, the customs or the immigration

19:12

office that could have, has an eye view

19:14

of what's going on there as the lanes

19:17

would come in and, uh, like

19:19

clockwork, man, the first car comes in, the

19:21

first car, she, she enters the tag and,

19:23

you know, we, we could see that she

19:25

was in, she enters the tag and

19:27

it's the right tag. And

19:30

we say, don't follow that one. Let that one

19:32

go. Then here comes a crown Vic, those crown

19:34

victorious, they can hold like 500 pounds of weed

19:36

in the trunk and the crown

19:39

Vic comes and she makes this

19:41

a gesture like she's entering something.

19:43

But we, um, the guy in

19:45

our task force, our customs guy,

19:47

he said, she didn't enter anything.

19:49

And we knew that one, that one comes in and

19:52

then two more crown Vicks come right, boom, boom, right

19:54

back there. And we were like, okay,

19:56

so everybody hold tight,

19:58

you know, hold tight, tight but then

20:02

DPS you know they're fantastic they you know they

20:04

did the traffic stop but think these guys ran

20:06

and all three of them took off and jumped

20:08

in once a couple of them jumped in River

20:10

went back south but we ended up taking down

20:12

1500 pounds a week that day and then the

20:15

wire went crazy that's when

20:21

it gets really good what happened yeah

20:23

they're all like half fingers they're all pointing

20:25

fingers who the fuck you know what happened

20:27

so and then the case just

20:29

goes on it that that was that

20:31

was the most fun area you busted a

20:33

corrupt immigration yes yep

20:35

yep yep cuz she she ended up

20:38

getting prison time obviously for

20:40

that but that's how you you had to

20:42

you had to put the work in like

20:44

you had to really understand what

20:47

what normal looked like and then

20:49

what is out of place and

20:52

that one call was out of place that

20:54

one call was like who is this person

20:56

turns out the call that he made was

20:58

a fugitive that was that was up north

21:01

it had come in it was living in

21:03

Macallan and that person had made the call

21:05

and so that's all it took was

21:07

that one break and then we were able to take

21:09

down this but it's a lot of fun I mean

21:12

it shows it shows really kind of how agencies

21:14

working together because we had IRS

21:17

DEA customs FBI we are we're in an

21:19

OSU def task force it was been

21:22

time I mean that was obviously a

21:24

huge event but you mentioned that the

21:26

wire goes crazy yeah was

21:28

there like a kind of culmination of this

21:31

case yeah yeah it culminates we take down

21:33

the whole organization everybody

21:35

it's you know you want to

21:37

take the time to identify who all these players are you

21:39

don't want to take it down too soon but sometimes

21:44

on these wires you

21:46

know it gets risky because you're you

21:48

don't want to heat it up so like you're taking down

21:50

a load you don't want to let the dope walk so

21:53

you got to have creative ways of you

21:55

know like we would random yeah like

21:57

furious Texas was the checkpoint so we

21:59

let them know like hey listen this is coming up

22:01

and then they do a search and then the wire go

22:03

what's going on is like you know how it

22:06

starts to get the point where you can't do

22:08

that to write because they know it's gonna start

22:11

heating up and so we we calculated the time

22:13

I had been transferred to Puerto Rico right before

22:15

the takedown and another case agent had taken it

22:17

up after I left but but

22:19

yeah that was that was remember

22:22

how many people they ended up I

22:24

don't remember dozens I know yeah which

22:26

organization was this it was it was

22:28

a the guy that was running

22:31

the show was named Hector Martinez but

22:33

he was tied to the Juan Garcia

22:35

Abrego organization the Gulf cartel some

22:39

people might know that if you watch that show

22:41

narco yeah yeah the one they do not in Colombia

22:44

but the Mexican version he shows you

22:46

know he's on that and so on but that was that

22:48

I tell people like my kids and stuff like if

22:51

you watch that that's what my life was like that

22:54

that was literally 1992 is around

22:57

there when I when I got to

22:59

Macallan so yeah that was a lot

23:01

of fun and then from there you

23:03

get sent down to Puerto Rico yeah

23:05

I'm working you know gang cases

23:07

and public corruption yeah I'm at this stage I

23:09

mean especially because you're from Puerto Rico if you

23:11

set the stage a little bit for sort of

23:13

the the political but also

23:16

the criminality that you had to deal with

23:18

yeah so what

23:21

we could just open up some we call them

23:23

resident agencies are like sub offices one

23:25

and each side of the island Ponce, Fajardo, then

23:27

Iguodilla where I was in the west the west

23:29

part of the island a lot

23:31

of gang activity we

23:34

were there was a something called

23:36

the safe street task force again everything's

23:38

multi-agency with P.O.P.R. police of Puerto Rico

23:40

and we had task force officers that

23:42

were on our team police officers that

23:44

we had brought on our squad there

23:46

was a lot of that a lot

23:48

of public corruption work bribes

23:51

you know federal money going into

23:53

Puerto Rico and people taking

23:55

cuts of it and things like that so like

23:57

they say the target rich environment you know there was never

24:00

lack of work. The Puerto Rican nationalist movement

24:02

still kicking at this point? It wasn't

24:05

like it was when I was when you

24:07

started. Yeah, not like when it was when

24:09

I was in the

24:12

80s. There

24:14

was a fugitive that everybody

24:16

was trying to catch that was tied to

24:18

the Machateros they thought was around our, he

24:20

was our AOR but

24:22

that was it, that was extensive. I mean

24:25

there was work but

24:27

I was focused on gangs

24:29

and any memorable cases

24:31

that you worked on during that

24:34

time down there? Well,

24:39

there was a case, the

24:41

biggest case that I worked when when I was down

24:43

there was a case that involved

24:45

a corrupt mayor that

24:47

was taking money, federal

24:50

money that was coming in. He had

24:52

an architect I'm

24:57

sorry an engineer that drew up plans

24:59

and this engineer

25:01

basically would would do

25:05

the work but he'd have to pay the

25:07

mayor 30% of the work. And

25:10

I remember when we first, that case came in,

25:14

my partner may

25:17

rest in peace, he passed away but he and

25:19

I were sitting in the office and we got

25:21

a call about like hey listen this is guy

25:23

he has some information you know

25:25

about corruption going on it was late

25:27

you know like yeah you

25:29

know really does he really kind of thing. So

25:33

sure we'll talk to him, tell him to come over to our

25:35

office and we waited for him and

25:37

he showed up and he was he was an engineer

25:39

you know and and I remember

25:43

he telling he's telling me about the mayor and I

25:46

said you know what there's there's one way we can make

25:48

sure this is true. He says

25:50

how? He says well we'll go go talk to him

25:52

but we're gonna we're gonna wire you up you

25:54

know so we got we got you know authority to do

25:57

all of that and consent and

25:59

I remember because at the time, so

26:02

now you watch movies and all

26:05

this sophisticated technology. But it

26:07

was a cassette recorder. Dude, it was

26:10

as big as that notepad it seemed like. And

26:13

it was about this big. And so

26:15

we ended up going to a hotel room. And then I

26:17

said, OK, drop your pants because we're going to put it

26:19

here on your ankle. We're going to run the wire up

26:22

here. We're going to tape it up here. And

26:24

the man is sweating. He is sweating. You

26:26

need to relax because you can't go in

26:28

looking like this. He said,

26:31

do I have anything smaller? In the movies, everything's smaller.

26:33

This is it. But I said,

26:36

he'll never suspect a thing. And sure enough, he goes

26:38

in and he has a conversation with him. And

26:42

he's like, either give me

26:44

the 30% or you're never going to work in

26:46

this town again. Perfect. That led to just

26:50

a long investigation where ultimately on

26:53

video we're paying. He's paying the

26:55

money. And it was another huge

26:57

take down. Another good

27:00

case. And that was important.

27:03

Because I love Puerto Rico. It's the island I

27:05

grew up on and the corruption. That impacts a

27:07

lot of people. When you're

27:09

having to take money that's meant to go

27:11

to fixed streets and schools and stuff like

27:13

that, and then people are stealing it. So

27:15

that gave me a lot of

27:17

pleasure working that. Put those kind of guys

27:20

away. I don't know. That's awesome. And

27:22

then you get sent to DEA SOD.

27:26

Yeah. Yeah. I

27:28

become a supervisor. It's

27:31

funny because people ask me because I spend a

27:34

lot of time in leadership roles in the bureau.

27:36

And I would give leadership speeches and stuff like

27:38

that. And sometimes

27:40

people say, were you

27:42

inspired by some particular

27:44

leader? What drove you

27:47

to be a leader in the FBI? And

27:49

I tell them, well, actually

27:52

what drove me was I had, I

27:57

love being a street agent. I just loved it. I mean,

27:59

you work your cases. was a lot of fun. And

28:01

my time in management, I don't think I was

28:03

ready for it. I wanted to spend more

28:05

time in the field. But I had just

28:07

built a house. And it was

28:09

on the beautiful home. It was on the cliff right

28:12

up on the water. And I

28:14

was building the house. And I'd gotten a loan

28:16

at the bank, just like everything else. And Hurricane,

28:18

I think it was Hugo, comes

28:21

by. And it blows.

28:24

The whole house is destroyed. So

28:26

the whole top of the thing is gone. And so when

28:28

I go to find the builder, I

28:31

can't find the builder. The builder is gone. And

28:33

it turns out the builder was involved in this

28:35

kind of sort of a Ponzi scheme, where he

28:38

was using money from certain

28:40

loans to fix other

28:42

homes that were yelling at him. And so

28:44

it turns out, now, I don't

28:46

have any money. The

28:48

builder is gone. And I have to build the

28:50

house myself. And I just literally would

28:52

get up early in the morning, go to the concrete place. I'd

28:55

hire people. It was a disaster. And

28:57

I said, I'm going to go broke, because

28:59

I'm paying this. I can't afford

29:01

this. So

29:05

I did know that if I got

29:08

a promotion, I

29:12

could sell my house through the

29:15

transfer program, the relocation program. And

29:17

so I said, OK, I'm going to see if

29:20

there's any jobs at headquarters. And then I'll get

29:22

a promotion at headquarters. And then

29:24

I did. And that's

29:26

when I got my job. And then,

29:28

sure enough, the real

29:31

company buys my house. And I'm able to

29:33

get out from under. So it wasn't like

29:35

inspired through a book by Colin Powell or

29:37

anything like that, or George Washington. It

29:39

was like, I was broke. And if I

29:42

did not sell this house, but

29:44

when I become in a leadership role, when

29:46

I was at SOD, I didn't really manage people.

29:48

I was more part of the Special Operations Division

29:50

kind of helping manage investigations that were nationwide. But

29:53

I really liked, when I

29:56

became a supervisor, I

29:58

liked working with people. teams. I

30:00

like being part of that and that's

30:03

when I stayed on the trajectory into

30:05

leadership roles in the FBI. But it

30:07

really was more than trying to get

30:09

from under from a low. Yeah,

30:13

not a very glamorous story like you

30:15

said. Not inspired by a JFK speech,

30:17

but it's still a

30:19

reason. Yeah, exactly. No,

30:22

it's a hell of a motivator when something like

30:24

that happens. Could you tell a little bit more

30:27

about what SOD was? Because I've heard of them

30:29

before, but yeah, I don't really know too much

30:31

myself. You know, I don't a lot of people

30:33

don't talk about it. In fact, I don't I

30:35

don't know how much I can say about it.

30:38

I will just say it's

30:40

a multi-agency organization. DEA

30:42

runs it. They bring in

30:44

partner agencies and they're focused on

30:47

helping to coordinate large

30:52

scale investigations that are across the country.

30:54

You know, I mean, the types of

30:56

investigations are coordinating, you know, have subjects

30:58

that are in all like maybe 10

31:00

different states. And so the what we

31:02

call we call ourselves staff coordinators. And

31:04

we basically, you know, helped

31:07

help provide resources, financial resources

31:09

to these major operations like

31:11

huge drug trafficking. They're all

31:13

drug trafficking cases,

31:15

drug trafficking cases. And

31:18

yeah, and so what what I would do

31:20

is I would support certain offices. My

31:22

region was the Texas area. And

31:24

so whether it was San Antonio,

31:26

Dallas, Houston, El Paso, and

31:29

I would work with the case agents of those

31:31

big cases and help them any way I could,

31:33

you know, with resources and things like that. So

31:36

but yeah, that was it was a lot of fun. Again, I

31:39

worked with DEA my whole career. So it

31:42

was kind of neat being able to work with them there. Let's

31:47

talk a little bit about, you know, kind of like

31:50

around this time frame, 9 11 half. Yeah.

31:53

Tell us a little bit about where you were

31:55

and what your job was, you know, and leading

31:57

into the next thing you got pulled into.

32:00

Well, so yeah, so 9-11, the actual date of 9-11, I

32:02

was in Puerto Rico. I

32:06

was there doing a training. I

32:08

was part of the EASOD, but

32:11

I was supporting, I was in a

32:13

training team going to San Juan. I

32:16

remember the secretary kind of

32:18

telling me like, hey, there's a plane

32:20

flew into the World Trade

32:22

Center. I went over to the TV and

32:24

I saw kind of what's

32:26

now, everybody knows, the first tower and

32:31

then the second tower hits. We

32:36

thought somebody just accidentally took

32:38

a small plane. We don't know what's going on. The

32:42

special agent in charge of the San Juan

32:44

office basically designates us, this team of people

32:47

from headquarters. We're part of the San Juan

32:49

field office at this point. All

32:52

hands on deck. We

32:55

wanted to get back home because

32:58

my wife and kids, I was

33:01

worried because I didn't know exactly what was going on,

33:03

but I did know that our

33:06

house, we lived over near Oakton. The

33:09

planes would fly over our house all

33:11

the time. I'm thinking, if they shoot

33:13

that plane, all the stuff's going down.

33:18

There was no flights leaving. One of the

33:20

most eerie things I remember was when the

33:22

first United Airlines flight that left San Juan

33:24

to go back to Dulles, they

33:27

let us get on that plane. We

33:30

blue lighted it all the way to the

33:32

airport and the agents that were on our

33:34

training team got on that first United Airlines

33:36

flight back to San Juan. It

33:38

was, I'm sorry, back to Dulles.

33:41

The flight attendants on that plane

33:43

were friends of many

33:45

of the flight attendants that passed away because one

33:47

of the flights originated from Dulles. They

33:50

were going back home and they would come up

33:52

to us crying, just thanking

33:54

us for being there. They

33:57

were very scared, as you would imagine.

34:00

And then when we get to Dulles and we land, I

34:02

don't know if you've been to Dulles Airport, I'm sure you have. There

34:04

was nobody, it was completely

34:06

empty. It was the most eerie feeling.

34:10

And the next day we all were

34:13

to report to headquarters to the

34:15

Sci-Oc, which was, think of it

34:17

like a big command post there

34:20

in the building. And there

34:23

was a line of people at the entrance of Sci-Oc.

34:27

Sci-Oc's designed to be a

34:29

command post where you have large scale

34:31

investigations need to be coordinated. And

34:33

one hijacking would have had that place going

34:35

crazy. I mean, just filled to the top,

34:37

right? There were

34:40

four hijackings here. And so I

34:42

remember lining up, we were all lined up and

34:44

then I got to the front of the room

34:46

and I said, Eric Villaz, SOD, Criminal Division. And

34:51

he says, okay, it was pretty chaotic. He goes,

34:53

go to room E2, I forget what the name

34:56

of the room was. And he's like, I said,

34:58

okay. So I walk right through the center of

35:00

Sci-Oc and it is like controlled

35:03

chaos is probably the way to describe it. Just

35:06

like every, there's a lot

35:08

of movement. Everybody's just talking and

35:10

I find room E2 and there's

35:13

another guy sitting at the table. And I

35:15

go, Eric Villaz, like they told

35:17

me to come here. And he goes, okay, you see that

35:19

box, all those boxes along the wall.

35:21

There was a lot of boxes up along the wall. And

35:24

I go, yeah, he goes, well, those are all

35:26

letters that people have written to Director Muller. You

35:29

need to open them, read them and see

35:31

if there's anything of value, tip value in

35:33

them. Somebody could have written, said, hey,

35:35

my neighbor or whatever. So I start

35:38

to open letter by letter. And

35:40

the one of the most interesting things like the

35:42

most patriotic letters you'd ever read, like there were

35:44

people, I remember one was like, dear

35:47

Mr. Director, they all started like that. It's like, I'm

35:49

a former Marine, I still wear size 32, put

35:52

me in, you don't have to pay me.

35:54

Everybody was coming together. Everybody wanted to be part

35:56

of this. And I always wondered

35:59

like. whatever happened to

36:01

all those letters because I thought like it'd be

36:03

great to kind of put a book together called

36:05

Dear Mr. Director and kind of show because I

36:07

think like the further we get away from that

36:10

I mean there's people that are now police

36:12

officers and government law enforcement and

36:15

serving the country that weren't even alive when

36:17

that happened. But the

36:20

further we get away it's easy to forget like

36:22

how we came together as a country and how

36:24

we united you know I remember

36:26

how hard it was to buy an American

36:28

flag because they were all out of stock

36:30

they were all over the bridges and American

36:33

flags everywhere. It was crazy

36:35

because like I'd come into the

36:37

sock and I worked a night shift and

36:39

there would be like boxes of Skittles or

36:42

boxes of Frito-Lay potato chips or something that

36:44

people were you know donating so that we

36:46

because we were working around the clock non-stop

36:48

how it's crazy how we all came together

36:51

and but yeah that was

36:54

that changes because now I go from I

36:57

get an assignment right around then I get

36:59

assigned to the LA where I'm working the

37:01

drug squad a supervisor in Santa Ana Orange

37:03

County but that doesn't last very long

37:05

I become a JTTF a Joint Terrorism

37:08

Task Force supervisor like my my career

37:10

transitions from criminal work to national security

37:12

work. Before we get into that in

37:14

not long after 9-11 I guess in

37:18

2002 there's a kidnapping case.

37:21

Yes. Tell us a little

37:23

bit about how your involvement in that yeah

37:25

about yeah that's one of the

37:27

hardest cases I ever was involved in I mean

37:31

when you work in these RAs these resident

37:33

agencies these smaller offices you you tend to work

37:35

a lot of different types of cases even

37:37

though you may be assigned to one squad

37:39

that like my squad that worked drugs or

37:43

then became a terrorism task force if

37:46

the violent crime squad that had kidnappings if there

37:48

was ever a child kidnapping it was all hands

37:50

on deck for that we all worked it and

37:53

this was a case that

37:55

involved a little girl I think she was six

37:57

years old named Samantha Runyon a lot of your

37:59

listeners and viewers may

38:02

remember that, especially people from that area, a

38:04

little girl that got kidnapped right from her

38:06

front porch. And

38:10

my job was, okay, Eric, you head

38:12

over to the command post, which

38:14

was over by Orange County Sheriff's that set up

38:17

something near where the little girl lived. And

38:21

I never wanted to

38:23

work crimes against children cases. Like I

38:25

have, at the time, my daughter was six

38:27

years old, looked a lot like her,

38:30

you know, and, um, and I

38:32

mean, God bless all

38:34

those agents and officers and law enforcement

38:36

that work those cases. But it, it,

38:39

it's hard to kind of see that kind of stuff. And

38:41

so, um, my job was,

38:43

I was, we had, we

38:46

were going to interview every single person that lived

38:48

anywhere near that place. Like

38:50

we said, hundreds of agents that had

38:52

been deployed from Los Angeles

38:54

down to Orange County. And I was keeping

38:56

track of, okay, you hit this apartment complex,

38:58

you this apartment complex, and we're tracking all

39:01

the leads. So I, I, I didn't have

39:04

to kind of look at any of the images

39:07

or anything like this, but I remember I was

39:09

sitting there and there was a guy from behavioral

39:11

analysis unit from Quantico had come in and

39:14

he, he, um, he,

39:16

he asked me, he says, like, uh,

39:18

he says, do you think this was

39:20

post-mortem? And he shows me

39:23

the picture of her, messed

39:26

me up. That messed me up.

39:28

Like, I remember how hard that was, um,

39:32

you know, because of my daughter and, and

39:34

I remember that that affecting me ways I'd

39:36

never thought it would affect me. Even

39:39

as much, and I, I talked about mental health a lot

39:41

because a lot of folks are like, especially guys like, Oh,

39:43

you know, I'm not, I can, I'm taking tough it up,

39:46

but that, that messed me up. And

39:48

I definitely had to need to get some help and to

39:50

talk through that because, um, it

39:52

was tough. It was tough to see that.

39:54

That's what messes up, you know, what, what, and I

39:57

mean, it's perfectly natural bothers a lot of guys, a

39:59

lot of the soldiers. have on here people

40:01

who have PTSD a lot

40:03

of it is from kids on the battlefield it's

40:06

from exactly that. It's hard because

40:08

I mean sometimes you

40:10

know you think you know like I don't want

40:13

to seek any help or talk to anybody about

40:15

it and you internalize it eventually it's gonna come

40:17

out yeah you're gonna deal with it

40:19

some way you know whether it's through addictions or through

40:21

some sort of thing you're gonna

40:23

have it's gonna be hard for you and it

40:25

caught up to me later in life it's

40:28

you know because I held all that stuff in

40:31

so I do a lot

40:33

around that area like helping people in that area you

40:35

know just to talk about PTSD and things

40:37

like that and share my story

40:39

with them. Did

40:42

you guys run that killer down? Oh yeah.

40:45

Yeah he got the death sentence. Yeah.

40:51

Tragic. Tragic. Jesus Christ.

40:53

Tragic. Well but

40:55

I mean like you said I mean thank God

40:57

that you know well you were one of them

40:59

but all of these guys who work cases like

41:01

that oh my god as you point out it

41:03

takes a real poll on it does on the cops

41:06

I mean I remember years ago I went

41:08

to a conference for police

41:11

officers and prosecutors who work counter

41:13

human trafficking cases yeah I remember

41:15

talking to one of the police

41:17

officers and he said something that

41:19

was like so banal

41:21

but so striking when you picture

41:24

his life yeah he

41:26

was there at this conference down in Tampa and

41:28

he's like you know I just standing out on

41:30

the beach today looking out over the ocean I

41:32

thought damn it feels good to

41:34

not have to look at kiddie porn today

41:37

it's like imagine what that guy's life is

41:39

like and what he's going through and I

41:41

mean pour one out for

41:43

for these dudes and women who do

41:45

that job yeah they're they're really

41:48

important people yeah especially the women a lot

41:50

of lot of the agents for female agents that work

41:52

those cases and you know they have kids of their

41:55

own and yet you know they were stronger

42:00

than me, you know, like,

42:02

but yeah, so that was

42:04

the only time I really had to work

42:07

anything like that, you know, terrorism kept

42:09

me busy. And so you

42:12

were a drug supervisor out in the

42:14

LA office and then that transferred over

42:16

into the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the

42:18

JTTF. Folks out there who

42:20

don't understand that, can you explain what the

42:22

JTTF is, why that was created? Yeah. So

42:24

it was created, you know, post 9-11 in

42:26

order to form task forces in

42:28

which you could bring in your state local

42:30

partners, other federal agencies,

42:34

they all have their specialties and they all

42:36

have different things they bring to the fight.

42:38

And so the JTTF is basically

42:41

that and each office had a

42:43

JTTF and some have multiple JTTFs

42:45

task forces. In LA being as

42:47

big as it was, they

42:49

had started one in Orange County, you know, obviously

42:51

the population of Orange County and there was a

42:53

lot going on and it was

42:55

done in conjunction with the Orange County Sheriff's

42:58

Department and and

43:01

I remember, you know, I remember my boss calling me

43:03

in and telling me one day like,

43:05

hey listen, starting Monday you're no

43:07

longer... Your squad is no longer

43:09

gonna be a drug squad. Your

43:11

squad is gonna be a terrorism

43:13

squad. And I was like,

43:16

terrorism? You know, I was like, I don't know

43:18

how to work terrorism. And he says, but

43:22

you know how to work task forces. And

43:24

that was the difference, like, because what

43:28

happens after 9-11, everybody, like, not

43:31

everybody, but a lot of people transition

43:33

from criminal work into counterterrorism work. And

43:35

one of the things that happened because

43:37

of that is the way we worked

43:39

criminal cases, we worked always with partners.

43:42

So, you know, I was first thing I was saying, but

43:44

who's our CIA person? Who's our, like, who are our partners?

43:47

Bring them in, like, let's let's

43:49

leverage everybody's expertise because that's how we

43:51

did it on the criminal side. And

43:54

so that whole JTTF concept was all around that

43:56

and it was a lot of the criminal guys

43:58

that came in that brought that love that type

44:01

of work experience to the table. So to me

44:03

it was more about learning kind of the

44:06

different roles of national security and and the

44:08

guidelines that that that govern how you do

44:10

national security investigations versus how you do criminal

44:13

investigations. I want to talk

44:15

a little bit about like also since we're going down

44:17

this road in this topic the differences

44:20

between the two because in a

44:22

counterterrorism investigation I imagine you guys

44:24

are doing a lot of

44:26

surveillance, a lot of watching, when a lot

44:28

of FBI guys want to make arrests. They

44:31

want to work those cases and put someone

44:33

in handcuffs, right? Yeah it's funny

44:35

because you

44:38

know don't get me wrong like an FBI

44:40

agent is going to do whatever they need

44:42

you to do. Like if you're you're signed

44:44

to work counter-intel, counterterrorism, cyber, whatever, you're doing

44:47

it. Most

44:49

most of us I guess I'll say

44:52

that at least when I

44:54

was coming wanted to like catch bad

44:56

guys. Right. Catch bank robbers. Bank robbers

44:58

like the FBI agents put the cuffs

45:00

on the bad guys put them in

45:02

jail. There's this kind of instant gratification

45:04

you get from your work you know

45:06

you're like and so you're working fugitives

45:10

and you're doing a lot of that

45:12

kind of stuff but and

45:14

even going to case it's trial and learning what it's

45:16

like to go to court and then

45:18

you work some of these counter-terrorism these national security

45:21

cases and they they

45:23

don't always provide that kind of

45:25

instant gratification. You're working long term,

45:28

a lot of stuff that you're doing is

45:30

in support of other agencies

45:32

and things like that and so it became a

45:34

bit of a challenge to try to kind of

45:37

recruit people from the criminal squads to kind of

45:39

come and fill the JTTF or the terrorism

45:41

squads but you know like I said

45:44

you got to do what you got to do but

45:46

but yeah there's there's there's a difference working

45:49

those kind of cases. You spent some time out there in LA

45:52

working both drugs and terrorism. Could

45:54

you describe like what's the from

45:57

an FBI agents perspective what's the criminality

45:59

scene like? along around Los Angeles. I

46:01

mean, I imagine it's like, it's literally

46:03

an underworld unto itself, right? Oh, yeah.

46:06

Yeah. Those offices in New

46:08

York, LA, Washington field

46:10

offices, big off Chicago, Miami.

46:13

There's a lot, a lot of

46:15

work. I think when I

46:17

started in in LA,

46:20

we must have had I think we had about at

46:22

least 12, maybe 14 drug

46:25

squads, like squads

46:28

of agents that work in drug cases throughout

46:31

our territory. And

46:33

so you could focus either like on your AOR,

46:36

or, you know, sometimes

46:38

you focus on a particular organization. But,

46:41

but yeah, when it came

46:43

to crime, I mean, and

46:46

I like that, you know, I kind of like working

46:48

in offices where you you're busy. Yeah,

46:50

you're busy. I remember when I got

46:52

Macallan, Texas. It's when you're

46:55

in Quantico, there's this whole process. And week number

46:57

eight, after you pass your second legal exam, they

46:59

at that point, they figure, okay, guys

47:02

gonna make it, you know, you think

47:04

you're taking your second PT exam and

47:06

your second legal exam. And so

47:09

they're, I guess, you know, is they're comfortable enough

47:11

now to give you your orders, you know, so

47:13

there's this whole kind of ceremonial thing where, at

47:16

the end of the day, it's

47:18

usually a Friday, you there's a big

47:20

board of the US down at the bottom, and you're all

47:22

sitting like in this kind of like

47:25

stadium style seating in the classrooms. And

47:29

the class counselor, whatever would pull an envelope

47:31

out of a fishbowl kind of thing. And

47:33

then you'd read the name on the front.

47:35

And then when they call your name, you

47:38

come down, and you'd open your letter

47:40

and you tell your class where you're going, you

47:42

know, and, you know, the

47:44

less I'm usually last, but in this

47:46

case, the fishbowl thing, you know,

47:48

I think I was like a third or fourth person,

47:50

you know, and I remember what somebody got like, I

47:54

don't know, Colorado Springs or something like that.

47:56

I go, wow, that's nice, you know, and

47:58

I had, you You know, now I

48:00

think you're allowed to list them all. You can, all 56

48:02

offices, you can put like number one to 56, back when

48:05

I went through, you can pick three offices that you want

48:07

to go to. I wanted to go back

48:09

to Puerto Rico, but they wouldn't let agents go back

48:11

to Puerto Rico at that time. First office agents, you

48:13

know. I

48:16

don't know, just figured, you know, I'm an

48:18

agent, why can't I go back? But anyway, so I

48:21

picked Miami, Atlanta, and

48:24

Charlotte. Like I figured if I could get

48:26

there, I can get like a quick flight to, and so

48:28

when I opened my letter, you've

48:31

been assigned to the San Antonio division,

48:34

Macallan resident agency, and

48:37

people are like, oh,

48:41

you know, you're gonna hate it, blah, blah, blah.

48:43

Well, you had to pin you, you had to go up and

48:45

put a pin on the map, and I

48:47

remember like. Wow, this is really elaborate. Yeah, yeah, you go

48:50

and you put a little pin on the map, and I

48:52

remember looking at the map, and I go, okay, here's Texas,

48:54

like I had never lived anywhere like, near

48:56

Texas, but I was like, okay, here's Texas, and

48:58

here's San Antonio, somewhere in the middle in this

49:01

area, so I'm looking at that, okay.

49:03

So Macallan, I don't see

49:05

anywhere, and they're like, lower, lower, and

49:07

I'm like, lower, and I'm like, lower.

49:09

Like, I got all the way to the bottom, and

49:11

it was like, I was in Mexico, I

49:13

think I went to Mexico, and I kind of went back up, and

49:15

it was like, boom, and I pinned it

49:17

there, and I was like, wow.

49:20

Like, because, you know, some people were laughing, you

49:23

know, I don't know. Then

49:25

I, and it was funny, because there's another Puerto Rican guy.

49:29

He's like a brother to me, his name Eric as

49:31

well, and he was in my class, and he says,

49:33

oh man, you're screwed. I

49:36

go, hey, it can't be

49:38

that bad, you know, it's like, and

49:40

so he goes and gets his letter, and he opens

49:42

up San Antonio Division Macallan. And

49:45

so we both got Macallan. The best

49:48

thing that ever happened. I frickin'

49:50

love Macallan, Texas, and it's like, the cases that

49:52

we worked, and all the other people that got

49:54

these little offices in these Colorado Springs, nothing against

49:56

them, but like, you know, hey, they were like,

49:59

hey, can you help? us on this case

50:01

there's five pounds coming up on a

50:03

controlled delivery five pounds like no like

50:06

ten thousand pounds maybe you know

50:08

that's the kind of stuff we were working. Yeah. So being

50:11

assigned to offices like LA you know

50:13

Macallan, Texas those were

50:16

blessings for me. I got to work great cases

50:18

you know. And one of

50:20

those cases you mentioned to me was the

50:22

JIS case. Yeah the JS case was a

50:24

terrorism case. That was after I got right

50:27

after I get the the the JTTF job

50:30

in LA. Shortly

50:34

you know this is

50:36

2002 I think. So think

50:39

about it. So it's it's not far removed

50:41

from 9-11. We're handling

50:44

thousands and thousands of leads. You know

50:46

everything is run down everything no matter

50:49

how crazy it sounds. Somebody in a

50:51

crystal ball saw something in LA. Who

50:53

is it? Let's go figure out who it is. And

50:56

it was non-stop. And so most of

50:58

them as you would imagine all wash out. Look

51:00

out suspicious but nothing. And

51:03

I remember one time in this case JS

51:05

case is probably one of

51:07

the most significant terrorism cases in the country that's ever been worked

51:09

in the US and yet not a lot of people know about

51:12

it. I had never heard of it until you told me about

51:14

it. And it's because it's it's anchored by

51:16

two huge events that occur

51:18

in this two-week period of time where we're

51:20

working this case two major events which I'll

51:23

tell you happened. I remember getting the call

51:25

my boss at the time really

51:28

good guy Randy Parsons he calls me and

51:30

I'm having dinner at the time with my wife

51:32

and some friends who flew

51:34

in from San Antonio and he says

51:36

here can you step out and he goes

51:39

hey this this is a

51:41

for real like I go what I could tell

51:43

by the tone of his voice that something was

51:45

different about this particular case and

51:47

this case involved the Torrance

51:50

Police Department some people

51:52

may may recognize it now when I

51:54

get into it the Torrance Police Department

51:56

had been tracking down some some some

51:59

crips that were Some

52:01

guys that were robbing some gas stations.

52:03

And during one of the gas station

52:05

robberies, the guy

52:08

drops a cell phone. The cell phone

52:10

leads them to an apartment complex. And

52:12

the apartment, they find all sorts of

52:14

stuff. Al-Qaeda literature, a manual called the

52:17

JIS manual that talks about how they,

52:19

you know, and

52:21

it was a radicalized

52:24

person up in Folsom Prison

52:26

that had radicalized this,

52:28

these guys days. So

52:31

this particular guy, while he was in prison.

52:33

And then when he got out of prison,

52:35

he went on to build this organization and

52:38

to conduct this terrorist attack. And so

52:40

these guys were originally just a street

52:42

gang. Yeah. And then

52:44

in prison, one of them was

52:46

radicalized with Islamic extremism. Yeah. So

52:49

right, there was somebody up in Folsom Prison

52:51

that was radicalizing people that

52:53

didn't have life sentences that were going to come

52:55

back out. And so this particular guy, he was

52:58

coming back out and so he had a mission

53:00

and it was all described what he was going

53:02

to do, how he was going to recruit people,

53:04

how he was going to conduct the terrorist, how he was going

53:06

to find his target, how he was going to conduct the attacks.

53:09

And it was all written down. And it was like, wait a

53:11

minute. So they pick up the guys,

53:13

obviously they pick them up. And

53:15

both of these guys are now, they

53:17

are, they are in custody

53:20

at Torrance Police Department. So I go from

53:22

Orange County up to Torrance. And

53:25

I remember getting to the command post, I don't know what time

53:27

it is, it's in the middle of the night and

53:29

there's a bunch of stuff and we're kind of like, we're

53:31

really starting to dig into this thing. And we're interviewing the

53:34

two people in custody. They're

53:36

being interviewed at the time. And I

53:39

remember sitting there and I look up at the screen

53:41

and there's this on the TV screen it's like, you

53:43

know, breaking news. And there's this red bus

53:46

in London that's got the top blown off of it.

53:49

So that's the day of the London

53:51

attacks is the day that we are at

53:54

the command post. So as

53:56

you can imagine, the whole focus is on that.

53:58

The Bureau is focused on that. Like

54:00

everybody's doing everything they can to ensure that

54:02

there's nothing else that's going to, you know,

54:04

what else can we do to

54:07

help that case? So we're just plugging away.

54:09

One of these guys says that there's 12

54:11

other members out there. There's

54:14

12 members that

54:16

we said what? Okay,

54:18

so we had two and there's 12 unknowns and

54:20

they would give us a first name. They would

54:22

give us like, um, one guy

54:24

wasn't talking at all who

54:27

was radicalized by the first guy. Another

54:29

guy was doing, he was talking, he was talking about

54:31

this, these 12 people. And coincidentally,

54:33

the next morning we had a JTTF executive board

54:36

meeting. This is where we brought the leadership of

54:38

all the different organizations. And so I got in

54:40

front of them all and I said, Hey, here's

54:43

what's happening. And so every single person

54:45

in that room, we divvied out kind

54:47

of, you know, so LA sheriff had

54:50

surveillance, you know, LAPD did this particular

54:52

leads. DEA was helping, NCIS was helping,

54:54

everybody was helping. And we divvied

54:56

out all the work and we were tracking down these 12

54:58

people. We tracked all 12 of

55:00

them down within a couple

55:02

of days. Wow. All

55:05

of them. I mean, because like

55:07

DEA and LAPD had

55:09

a task force where they

55:12

knew, they knew that city very, very

55:14

well. And so they were able

55:16

to like, yeah, their sources and go. And

55:18

so, but ultimately we ended up taking

55:20

down that organization with this too. So

55:22

the first event is the London bombings.

55:25

The day that chief Bratton is

55:27

up on the podium and he's

55:29

announcing the indictments and the arrest

55:31

of this organization who were targeting

55:33

Jewish, uh, LL, um, um, uh,

55:35

LAX, the LL counter and, uh,

55:38

uh, synagogue and some other targets,

55:41

they, they, he announces this

55:43

and on the screen you see Bratton and then

55:45

on the bottom of the screen you see this

55:47

big, huge hurricane and that's the day Katrina hits.

55:50

So Katrina's hitting as we're taking down

55:52

the group. So now the whole focus

55:54

is on Katrina as you can imagine.

55:57

So a lot of people don't even know that one

55:59

of. the biggest

56:01

kind of cases of potential terrorist attack

56:03

that was thwarted and that was worked

56:05

in this, how we

56:08

all came together is kind

56:10

of forgotten. But it was, I mean,

56:12

I slept on the couch up in

56:14

LA, like we,

56:17

whatever sleep you can get, like you

56:19

need a lot, everybody was working around

56:21

the clock for two weeks. It was

56:23

fascinating to see how we all came

56:25

together. Yeah, I mean, it's also interesting

56:27

that, given the timeframe that these guys,

56:29

they want to go after the Israeli national

56:31

airlines, it

56:33

seems like there are so many, I mean, if they're

56:35

Al-Qaeda and Ben Lotten's big

56:38

thing was, you know, attack America, it's

56:40

weird that they, instead of attacking America

56:42

somewhere, they went straight towards- The

56:45

Jewish community. Yeah, it had something

56:47

to do with kind of their radicalized

56:50

philosophy, the guy that was up in

56:52

Folsom. His

56:54

views, he was very

56:56

anti-Israel and that's

56:58

why they selected those targets. And

57:03

it was pretty scary, like who

57:05

were these folks? When

57:07

we found these 12 people, they

57:10

had been approached by this guy. Like they said,

57:12

oh yeah, he came up to me and wanted

57:14

me part of this group, he gave me a

57:16

manual, they have a JIS manual and I read

57:18

it and I thought, I'm not doing this kind

57:20

of stuff. What the hell was JIS, by the

57:22

way? You're

57:25

gonna catch me here, it's

57:27

like, Jamal is something- Jama

57:29

Islamiya? But not Jama Islamiya,

57:31

it was an acronym of

57:33

the leader in Folsom had called

57:35

this organization. It was something he

57:38

created. He came up with

57:40

a name and it was three words, J-I-N, we

57:42

just used that as the initials of it, but

57:44

it was not Jamal Islamiya, it was a separate

57:47

organization. And so when you rolled up these 12

57:49

guys, I mean, how

57:51

did you find them? I mean, were they

57:53

like, yeah, I live in with this mom guy,

57:55

I mean, what are the- Yeah, we had

57:57

little small leads. He

58:00

frequents this place like this

58:03

and he's best friends with a guy in a wheelchair. Stuff

58:06

like that. And we're like, okay. And

58:08

his name is, you know, whatever.

58:10

Like Tom or something like that. And

58:14

so, yeah, just good old fashioned

58:17

police work. They go, you

58:19

know, guy, some guy in the wheelchair, blah,

58:21

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know,

58:23

one by one, everybody would. And

58:26

how did the prosecution go? They

58:28

went extremely well. Yeah,

58:31

I think we never went to

58:33

trial. I mean, they all played out, you know. Okay.

58:37

They all got their sentences. But that's

58:39

the other thing. They weren't screwing around

58:41

at that. No, no, no. These

58:43

were like material support cases. These are

58:45

like major counter-terrorism charges. They

58:48

all played out and

58:50

they all got their sentences. That's another reason a lot of people

58:52

don't know about it because they never went to trial so they

58:54

didn't get the publicity. It's a fascinating

58:57

case, like how that thing

58:59

developed. And it shows, you know, just

59:01

how when we come together as partners. There

59:04

was never at any time, I mean, I

59:07

understand that this guy had like al-Qaeda literature

59:09

and admired that, had aspirations, but there was

59:11

no overseas nexus for this particular group? No.

59:15

That's really interesting. There

59:18

wasn't an overseas connection for

59:20

the group other

59:23

than the fact that the guy

59:25

was inspired by some

59:28

of the folks. But never was there

59:30

any direct contact with

59:32

somebody. So

59:34

as you go through this

59:37

period of time, I mean, we get to about 2008.

59:40

You're in, oh, well, first let's talk

59:42

about a terrorist screening

59:44

center. Yeah. Yeah. So

59:47

that's my first job in the senior

59:49

executive service ranks, the SES ranks. And

59:52

I was a deputy director there. They've

59:54

briefly stood up. And that's the center,

59:56

you know, the multi-agency center again that

59:58

handles kind of watch listing and the

1:00:01

whole. Terrace watch list. I

1:00:03

imagine that was a huge headache. That was

1:00:05

really busy. Again, we were just

1:00:08

standing it up, so we

1:00:10

were building all

1:00:12

the different protocols. But

1:00:15

again, it's another multi-agency

1:00:17

environment. I'm very comfortable in that

1:00:20

space. Great people. And

1:00:24

I did that for only a year.

1:00:26

I mean, I was there for about a year when I

1:00:28

got I

1:00:30

got word about this position in

1:00:33

Los Angeles as the head of intelligence for

1:00:35

the Special Agent in Charge of the Intelligence

1:00:37

Branch in Los Angeles. And

1:00:39

I was asked about me something

1:00:41

I was interested in. I

1:00:45

love LA, so I was like, I'll go back to LA. But

1:00:48

I was like, I don't really think about this

1:00:50

intelligence stuff. This is kind of after

1:00:55

the 9-11 Commission and the

1:00:57

Terrorism Reform Act that establishes the

1:01:01

National Security Branch of the FBI and all this other

1:01:03

stuff. And so I was the

1:01:05

first Special Agent in Charge of Intelligence in the field.

1:01:08

Was that folded under the Patriot Act or

1:01:11

was it a separate bill? Yeah,

1:01:13

it was the Terrorism

1:01:16

Prevention Act 2004 after.

1:01:23

But it establishes the role

1:01:26

of the executive assistant director of

1:01:29

the FBI's intelligence branch. And

1:01:31

it sets up the mandate

1:01:33

of the FBI's mission

1:01:36

to embrace

1:01:38

the criminal work that we do,

1:01:40

but also accept our role as part

1:01:43

of the intelligence community and

1:01:45

how we operate in

1:01:47

the domestic environment and the different regulations

1:01:49

and guidelines that guide all of that.

1:01:51

But how we work with our partner

1:01:53

agencies domestically. And so when I got

1:01:55

that job, I knew

1:01:57

nothing about. intelligence

1:02:00

as you would think of it from the

1:02:03

IC, the intelligence community aspect. So I mean

1:02:05

are we talking about running

1:02:07

human intelligence networks? Human

1:02:09

intelligence, I mean the Bureau is a

1:02:12

human, is kind of bread and butter,

1:02:14

you know. It's you know

1:02:16

obviously through court orders and with authorizations

1:02:18

we can do, we can collect

1:02:20

different ways but human

1:02:22

is a huge part of it, you know. That's what

1:02:25

we do as agents. I remember somebody once said like,

1:02:27

and it's really interesting like our role as

1:02:30

agents is you know how we communicate and

1:02:32

we're able to get information from you know

1:02:35

through building relationships and different things that we do. So

1:02:38

it's interesting

1:02:41

because when we move out kind

1:02:43

of into this world of this

1:02:45

kind of transformation that occurs, even

1:02:48

the idea of transforming the FBI

1:02:51

left some people with a little bit of a bitter feeling

1:02:54

of because you know I mean

1:02:56

I worked the FBI 33 years total. I was

1:02:58

just a kid when I started. I loved that

1:03:01

organization and the men and women of

1:03:03

the FBI I mean I wish everybody

1:03:06

could see the dedication of these folks. I

1:03:08

mean they're regular human, they're regular Americans and

1:03:10

they wake up every day you know I

1:03:12

just love that organization. And

1:03:14

so when you talk about the Special Agent rank,

1:03:17

the 1811 rank, and now you're telling them that

1:03:19

you know we're transforming, you know they're like wait

1:03:21

a minute. And so I think when my role,

1:03:23

one of the things because I kind of got

1:03:25

tagged as kind of like the Intel guy you

1:03:28

know. I didn't start off, I told you about

1:03:30

my career, I was like I started off working

1:03:32

drugs, violent crimes, stuff like that. But

1:03:34

when I got to the intelligence

1:03:36

branch and that side of the house,

1:03:38

I think the first thing that I

1:03:40

was hit by was the fact that

1:03:43

there was a translation problem. There was

1:03:45

like any time you're gonna transform

1:03:47

an organization, a big organization such in

1:03:49

like the FBI or any organization, it's

1:03:52

commitment versus compliance. That's a huge thing for

1:03:54

me. If you try to transform

1:03:57

an organization through compliance, it's going to fail.

1:04:00

to do things as long as you're watching them

1:04:02

and you're like, on

1:04:04

the other hand, if you spend

1:04:07

the time talking to

1:04:09

them, letting them understand so

1:04:11

that they're committed to it as much as you are, they

1:04:13

believe in it as much, then they'll do it when you're

1:04:15

not looking because they feel it's important, that's what they want

1:04:18

to do. And I just felt like

1:04:20

at that time, we were very

1:04:22

compliance driven. Everybody knew they had to

1:04:24

do X, Y, and Z, and they had to produce this

1:04:26

and that, but nobody,

1:04:29

even though we tried, it just

1:04:32

had not been enough. And so I

1:04:34

said, I'm going to go out to every field office and I'm going

1:04:36

to talk to every agent ever and I'm

1:04:38

going to explain what it

1:04:41

is that we're doing and showing them that what we're

1:04:43

talking about is stuff that we have done our entire

1:04:45

life. When I told you the story about Juanito and

1:04:49

I would use that story to explain to

1:04:51

them, I had requirements,

1:04:53

intel requirements, where

1:04:56

do they cross their dope? Who

1:05:00

are they sending money to? Those

1:05:02

are my requirements. So I would develop

1:05:04

sources and I would specifically go to

1:05:06

collect that information. All we were

1:05:09

telling them now is that you have

1:05:11

to understand when you're working your cases and

1:05:13

you have certain authorities that you can operate

1:05:15

under, that allows you to kind of ask

1:05:18

other questions that maybe

1:05:21

our partners might be interested in. That's

1:05:24

all we're asking. We're not asking you to stop

1:05:26

doing this great work. By

1:05:28

explaining to them and them realizing, it's almost like,

1:05:31

well, why did you just say that in the

1:05:33

first place? So

1:05:35

if I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying that the

1:05:38

FBI Directorate of Intelligence was like a

1:05:40

clearinghouse of information that everything would come

1:05:42

into you guys and you disseminate it

1:05:44

where it needs to go? Not necessarily.

1:05:48

The Directorate of Intelligence was basically, it's

1:05:51

a director that basically governed the way

1:05:54

that we developed our analytic workforce so

1:05:56

it had oversight of workforce

1:05:59

planning. development, formalizing a

1:06:01

lot of things. Yeah, but we were yeah we

1:06:04

formalized a lot of that you know training, budgets,

1:06:07

it's a headquarters entity, but our

1:06:09

field offices are set up so

1:06:12

that their each

1:06:14

office has its intelligence division

1:06:16

within the field offices you know the column, squads,

1:06:19

branches, and

1:06:21

so we have that

1:06:24

throughout the and all the DI just

1:06:26

established policies and governance over that and

1:06:28

that's kind of that's the difference. So

1:06:30

I did it in the field from a field perspective

1:06:32

but also went back to headquarters and

1:06:34

ran the program from the national level as

1:06:36

well. So

1:06:40

I mean during that time I mean can't you

1:06:43

say what kind of stuff you were working

1:06:45

on were these like counter-terrorism investigations, drug... When

1:06:48

I was in the DI or like

1:06:50

when I was like... When you

1:06:52

were working in FBI intelligence. Yeah

1:06:54

so no from

1:06:57

the DI's perspective we weren't involved in investigations.

1:06:59

I mean the burials divided up and you

1:07:01

were like... We had our own you

1:07:04

know and yeah so we didn't work cases

1:07:07

like that. I mean we worked

1:07:09

with our partner agencies. We would like I said a

1:07:11

lot of what you do in

1:07:13

headquarters is setting up national policies

1:07:15

and guidance and budgets and things

1:07:18

like that. Yeah, my other partner

1:07:20

AD's and executive assistant directors that

1:07:22

had those responsibilities you know worked

1:07:25

the criminal counter-terrorism cases. And this

1:07:28

is about is this about the time that they ask

1:07:31

you to be an assistant director? Yeah

1:07:33

so I get asked to

1:07:35

come back to headquarters. This was I was in LA

1:07:37

as a special agent in charge. I'm

1:07:39

asked to come back to headquarters to be the acting

1:07:42

deputy assistant director of the DI so

1:07:44

that there's an assistant director that runs

1:07:46

the director of intelligence and then

1:07:48

there's there at the time there were three deputy assistant

1:07:51

directors and I'm asked can you come back for

1:07:53

a couple of weeks. I remember my boss in LA saying like

1:07:55

you know you're never coming back. I go no

1:07:57

they just need me for two weeks. Turned

1:07:59

out to be seven. years. Like I was right, I

1:08:01

never came back. And I ended up in

1:08:03

headquarters because I ended up they moved me

1:08:05

into that role as deputy assistant director and

1:08:07

then I got promoted to be the assistant

1:08:09

director when

1:08:12

director Mueller was there and then and

1:08:14

then I became the executive assistant

1:08:16

director when director Comey was there. Do

1:08:19

you want to tell the story about director

1:08:21

Mueller when you almost got yourself fired? Yeah,

1:08:25

yeah. Right,

1:08:27

so you

1:08:30

know I worked for all three directors and you know

1:08:32

they all have their different styles and

1:08:36

I enjoyed working for all three of them. Director

1:08:40

Mueller, he

1:08:43

was you know I

1:08:46

loved his style because like you knew,

1:08:48

you knew if you

1:08:50

messed up, you knew you messed up.

1:08:53

Like he would you just knew it

1:08:55

and and I liked his former Marines

1:08:57

style and you know he but he

1:08:59

was intimidating I will say that like and

1:09:01

I every morning we would brief him every

1:09:03

morning and before

1:09:06

we brief him we have like four pre briefs so

1:09:08

they started like 5.50 in the morning

1:09:10

they're briefing me then we go to the next

1:09:12

person we kind of go up the chain until

1:09:14

we end up in director Mueller's conference room for

1:09:17

the morning briefs and you have

1:09:20

to be prepared. Like the

1:09:22

one thing you don't want to do don't try to bullshit

1:09:24

him. If you're not

1:09:26

prepared he's gonna know it so you just you

1:09:29

prepare yourself and that's important right so

1:09:32

every morning I got prepared and we get there super.

1:09:34

So one thing you also knew

1:09:36

is like don't be late so you can

1:09:38

imagine right before his brief we're lined

1:09:40

up ready to go all the

1:09:42

people that are gonna be in the brief there's all

1:09:45

the different assistant directors we're lined up in the hallway

1:09:47

and they're waiting for his secretary to say you can

1:09:49

come in now then we'll pile into the conference room

1:09:51

and then his his office is in the back and

1:09:53

then he comes in at the time he sits at

1:09:55

the main chair and you know the

1:09:58

brief goes on the brief starts on it. you

1:10:01

got to know because he asks very detailed

1:10:04

questions. So every time you

1:10:06

survive one of those things, you're like, okay. So

1:10:09

I had another live another day and

1:10:11

made it through that brief. But I

1:10:13

remember one time I was supposed to brief him

1:10:17

on something that was not a morning brief. And

1:10:19

it's, you know, it was a brief that

1:10:21

I was I was working a special project.

1:10:23

It was called the director's one of his

1:10:25

priority initiatives. And I

1:10:27

was the briefer. Okay. And so,

1:10:29

you know, director Mueller would sit in the

1:10:32

main chairs of the conference room over

1:10:34

here to the side here to his right as the deputy

1:10:36

director. And then right here to the

1:10:38

left is that first chair. That's where the briefer sits.

1:10:41

Okay, that was my chair. And then

1:10:43

around the table, there are all the other executives. And

1:10:45

so the meeting was supposed to be at 10 o'clock in the

1:10:48

morning. I make up some

1:10:50

of these times just because I don't remember exactly the times, but it was 10 o'clock

1:10:52

in the morning, I say. And

1:10:54

I remember getting there at

1:10:56

9 45. Now, I had

1:10:59

prepared this. I probably didn't slept. I mean, I was

1:11:01

just focused because I'm in a brief director Mueller. And

1:11:04

so I get to to

1:11:06

the secretary and I just want to let her know

1:11:08

that I'm 15 minutes early, but I'll be out here

1:11:10

in case she needs me. And before I can even

1:11:13

open my mouth to say like I'm early, she's like,

1:11:15

where have you been? And I

1:11:17

go, I was in my office. I'm

1:11:19

just I'm here early. This

1:11:21

meeting started at 9 30.

1:11:24

So it's 15 minutes already into it. And

1:11:27

and she had sent an email to my

1:11:29

secretary to tell me about the time change,

1:11:31

which obviously I didn't even know. And

1:11:35

so I see the door and I have

1:11:37

I go like, oh, my God, because

1:11:39

I have to open the door and I could just I

1:11:41

know there's gonna be a conference room table. There's

1:11:44

gonna be a bunch of executives and there's gonna

1:11:46

be director Mueller looking right at me. And I almost didn't

1:11:48

want to go in. But

1:11:50

I figured this one. I'm fired. You know, OK, it's

1:11:52

my career is over. So I just

1:11:55

opened the door and it was like, you know, in

1:11:57

those movies where like the jukebox stops and everybody's just

1:11:59

like. looks and here I come walking

1:12:01

what seems to be like a mile to

1:12:04

get to my little chair right in the front there

1:12:07

and it's interesting because

1:12:09

around the room there's almost like this

1:12:11

sense of oh this

1:12:13

is gonna be good Eric's in trouble

1:12:18

he's gonna get laid right

1:12:20

here and so I get

1:12:22

up to the front chair there's you know

1:12:25

in this case here I am director Mueller's

1:12:27

right here and as I'm kind

1:12:29

of starting to pass

1:12:31

out papers the guy the

1:12:34

guy that was sitting on my side

1:12:37

he knew about the part he already started kicked

1:12:39

it off so they already started he was winging

1:12:41

it so as I'm doing this he

1:12:43

says director Motto says something to me but I can't

1:12:45

I can't hear him I don't hear him I'm like

1:12:47

I'm at this point I'm thinking like what's gonna happen

1:12:49

to me and

1:12:52

so at the

1:12:54

time the general counsel she says I don't

1:12:57

think he heard you and

1:12:59

then he said did you hear what I said

1:13:02

and I said no sir I didn't hear you

1:13:05

and he says I said you're gonna

1:13:07

like Anchorage this time of the year and and

1:13:11

I said I said you do know I'm

1:13:13

Puerto Rican right and it was in I

1:13:16

would have never said something like that to him but at

1:13:18

this point I was

1:13:21

a main disrespectful it was just what came

1:13:23

out and he started laughing like a belly

1:13:25

laugh like he was really he thought that

1:13:27

was just so funny and

1:13:29

it kind of calmed me down you know I was able to

1:13:32

get through my brief actually the

1:13:34

best brief I ever done because you know I didn't think

1:13:36

I had a job after that I figured you know whatever

1:13:38

I'm going back to work cases you know and nailed

1:13:41

the brief and then as I was getting up he says

1:13:43

hey just want to let you know it's okay stuff like

1:13:45

that happens you know and he just made me feel real

1:13:47

good about it and I just

1:13:50

like I admired that about him that

1:13:52

you know he he was

1:13:55

tough you know he had to be

1:13:57

tough but he also

1:13:59

you know he But that was

1:14:01

the scariest thing that ever happened to me. I

1:14:08

don't know if he remembers that, but I remember it. Before

1:14:13

we're moving on, any other interesting things about

1:14:15

your time as assistant director, the first time

1:14:17

that you want to mention? No,

1:14:22

I'm not really. Like I said, it was a time

1:14:24

of change and I

1:14:26

take a lot of pride in being able to be

1:14:28

part of that, try to make sure that we

1:14:31

do everything to keep our country safe. But no, I mean, I enjoyed

1:14:35

the people I had around me, great people, it

1:14:37

was a good time. And

1:14:40

after that, you left the bureau

1:14:43

and took a job doing

1:14:45

security for Disney. Yes, the Walt Disney Company.

1:14:48

That was 2016. When

1:14:51

you're an

1:14:54

agent, any 1811 kind of designation, like you

1:14:56

could retire at 50, then we would be

1:14:59

mandatory, retire at 57. And

1:15:01

so anywhere between that time, people are usually leaving.

1:15:05

And so I was just about to turn 50 and

1:15:08

this is 2016 and I'd

1:15:10

gotten the job at Disney as

1:15:12

head of security for their

1:15:15

parks and resorts segment. So

1:15:17

I left the bureau on a Friday and

1:15:20

I started in Burbank on a Monday. So I went

1:15:22

right into that. I

1:15:26

had a huge span of control. So basically

1:15:28

anything that was a theme park, a

1:15:31

ship, a store

1:15:34

or a hotel resort around the

1:15:37

world fell under my role

1:15:40

as the vice president for that

1:15:42

segment. And it

1:15:44

was, I tell you, I

1:15:46

tell you, man, that's

1:15:48

a hard job because

1:15:51

Disney is, I mean, one,

1:15:54

they have an incredible security program because

1:15:56

security is foremost. all

1:16:00

the guests and cast members safe.

1:16:03

But there's a saying, the sun never sets

1:16:05

on a Disney park because I

1:16:07

would fall asleep, if

1:16:09

you call it that, and then I'd wake up in

1:16:11

the morning and I'd just dread looking at my phone

1:16:13

because while I was sleeping, Paris was up and running.

1:16:17

Orlando and Disneyland and then I'm there

1:16:20

asleep, but Paris is up. And

1:16:23

I look at my phone and it was almost every day. It's

1:16:27

one of these things because the Disney brand

1:16:29

attracts a lot of attention from the media.

1:16:31

So I was almost like, I'm the vice

1:16:33

president of de-escalation. Try

1:16:36

to keep seeing crisis management.

1:16:39

Because like for example, in Paris, there's

1:16:42

a train station in Chessee

1:16:45

that actually, it's a public

1:16:47

train station, that when you come out of the train

1:16:49

station, I mean, I don't know,

1:16:51

it's like maybe half a football field from

1:16:54

the train station to the gates of the Disney

1:16:56

where you come in. And so people will be

1:16:58

coming, they have suitcases with them because they're traveling

1:17:00

maybe through up to Germany or something on this

1:17:02

train. And then they can't

1:17:04

bring their suitcases in. So they'll, maybe

1:17:06

they'll hide it, behind a tree or something like

1:17:09

that. And so now you have a suspicious package

1:17:11

there. You gotta run the dogs, you gotta, and

1:17:13

then if the media picked up on it, it'll

1:17:16

be the big story. Disneyland Paris

1:17:18

shut down for possible this. And it was

1:17:20

these little things like this that

1:17:23

could turn into like, and

1:17:26

so now you're on calls and you've got executives

1:17:29

in different parks and you're trying to, and I did that for almost

1:17:31

four years. And

1:17:33

it takes a toll. I

1:17:35

mean, if you think about it, we

1:17:39

were dealing with Super Bowls level

1:17:44

of attendance crowds every

1:17:46

day in six of

1:17:48

these parks around the world. Every

1:17:51

day. Screening, I think there was like 150 million people we'd

1:17:54

screen a year coming in through

1:17:56

Backcheck and everything. And so you

1:17:59

can just imagine what's. like just

1:18:02

and so so I can only do that for so

1:18:04

long I did it for almost four years and I

1:18:06

felt like it was time for me were there any

1:18:08

like big active threats that had to be mitigated during

1:18:10

that time frame I

1:18:13

mean nothing like you would you

1:18:16

would think of that sense but like

1:18:18

Disney it's iconic and it attracted a

1:18:20

lot of attention so it wasn't uncommon

1:18:22

that you would see somebody you

1:18:26

know that would say something or write something

1:18:28

and mention Disney you know and then then

1:18:30

we would take that extremely seriously like what

1:18:32

is it all about so we work with

1:18:34

our partners to understand what that

1:18:36

threat was but but most

1:18:39

of the times it was just it was

1:18:41

just the brand that attracted a lot of

1:18:43

attention right and I imagine you know security

1:18:45

encompasses a lot of things not just terrorism

1:18:47

but like husband beats

1:18:49

up his wife hotel or something you

1:18:52

know something oh yeah everything everything from

1:18:54

you know just the crowd

1:18:56

control like you know you

1:18:59

know when we opened the park in Shanghai

1:19:01

for example you know you

1:19:05

you would sometimes you we had you know guests

1:19:10

who didn't understand like you know for example like you

1:19:12

get off a ride you know Pirates of the Caribbean

1:19:14

for example you know rides over what do you do

1:19:16

everyone else you get up you walk over here on

1:19:18

this side and you exit next row comes in you

1:19:20

know but like sometimes they wouldn't get up because they

1:19:23

want to do it again you know it's like well

1:19:25

you can't do it again you know little things like

1:19:27

this and they would cause scuffles cultural differences cultural things

1:19:29

between them and the cast members and then little

1:19:32

things like that you know but you know

1:19:34

there could be just think of

1:19:36

they're like many cities that are going on and

1:19:38

like I was like the chief of police of

1:19:41

it's so funny you mentioned that because like I'm

1:19:43

having flashbacks to

1:19:46

when I went to it was

1:19:49

a theme park I

1:19:51

probably shouldn't even tell this story but

1:19:54

it was I just bring it up

1:19:56

my my at a theme park with

1:19:58

my daughter and my ex-mother-in-law who

1:20:00

is not American and she did exactly that

1:20:02

on the ride. Oh really? We're gonna ride

1:20:05

it again. It caught the

1:20:07

big scene. Oh yeah. Yeah I

1:20:09

mean the US you're trained you know you just get

1:20:11

up you know but in your

1:20:13

opening these parks in different parts of the world

1:20:16

and they're new to it. You know but in

1:20:18

time it all you know it all starts to

1:20:20

click. Right right. But you know there's

1:20:22

different things you know. Counterfeiting of products

1:20:24

things like that. It just runs

1:20:27

the gamut of what you can imagine. Were

1:20:29

there any notable differences from you going from

1:20:31

being federal law enforcement to now private sector?

1:20:33

I mean yeah you're not a cop anymore

1:20:35

you don't have arrest authorities. No. But I

1:20:38

imagine you have a huge budget. Yeah

1:20:40

well you know interesting because it's

1:20:43

like I did when I left Disney I started a podcast

1:20:45

of my own called the Humble Survey and I don't do

1:20:47

it anymore but it was it was really it was meant

1:20:49

to help. Can people find it out there if

1:20:52

they look for it? Yeah

1:20:54

I'm pretty sure. I mean I think I did

1:20:56

like 10 episodes maybe and then and

1:20:58

then it was like I think my wife had said you need to

1:21:00

do something make some money like because

1:21:03

I started a podcasting racket. I

1:21:06

didn't have as many followers as you had but I

1:21:08

wasn't making any money. I was just kind of like

1:21:10

it was cool because I got to you

1:21:13

know I'd started my own company at the same

1:21:15

time but I my company started in

1:21:18

March of 2020 right in the middle of

1:21:20

COVID so like nothing was happening so I

1:21:22

started this podcast and it was designed to

1:21:24

help public servants military

1:21:27

firefighters law enforcement whatever

1:21:29

transition from government into

1:21:31

private sector roles and like some

1:21:33

of some of the complexities with that like even

1:21:35

how they write their resumes and things

1:21:38

they talk about how they talk about and stuff

1:21:40

like that and and

1:21:43

it's you know when you're in public service

1:21:45

if you're let's say you're a police officer

1:21:47

I mean you have a lot of skills

1:21:49

that you're learning that are so transferable so

1:21:52

valuable to the private sector I mean think

1:21:54

about your ability to connect with others to

1:21:56

de-escalate things to solve problems quickly think think

1:21:59

on your toes Manage budget.

1:22:01

JTTF. I mean all that you can

1:22:03

transfer it but sometimes the way we

1:22:05

describe what we do doesn't resonate sometimes

1:22:07

with like somebody on HR so I

1:22:10

was helping them kind of do a

1:22:13

little you know help them with that.

1:22:15

Probably the biggest thing that you realize

1:22:17

is that when I was

1:22:19

in the FBI you know we were kind of

1:22:21

like the whole organization was about national

1:22:24

security and we

1:22:26

were the focus of what we were doing.

1:22:28

When you go into the private sector you

1:22:32

know these companies are you know it's

1:22:34

shareholder value it's it's they're

1:22:36

generating revenue their company you know and

1:22:38

security isn't the primary

1:22:41

mission of the Walt Disney Company. It's an

1:22:43

important aspect right but it isn't what drives

1:22:46

it you know it's like so you have

1:22:48

to be able to integrate with the operational

1:22:50

side and the and the revenue side to

1:22:52

make sure that you're incorporating the security to

1:22:55

an extent where you could still be a viable business

1:22:57

and you can't do that. But when you I

1:23:00

went from being the guy

1:23:02

in the room who knew the most about

1:23:04

something because I was in an environment where

1:23:07

I was very comfortable with the Intel and

1:23:09

whatever I was doing to being

1:23:11

the guy in the room who knew the

1:23:13

least about what they're talking about like I

1:23:15

the whole Disney culture and the way that

1:23:17

they spoke and everything like that I had

1:23:19

to learn all of that and that transition

1:23:21

is is hard but

1:23:24

but I will say this because

1:23:26

there is this thing where a lot

1:23:28

of corporations that that are hiring corporate

1:23:30

chief security officers they don't want somebody

1:23:32

right out of government they want you

1:23:34

to to actually have time in the

1:23:37

private sector and then they'll hire you so it's kind

1:23:39

of in a tough situation cuz how am I gonna

1:23:41

get that experience you're not hiring me right and

1:23:45

so I remember somebody

1:23:49

once you know I went through my gauntlet of

1:23:51

interviews because when you go through these jobs you're

1:23:53

like you're interviewed by everybody like the OGC

1:23:55

to the head of finance and

1:23:58

one of them asked me like Do you

1:24:01

worry about your

1:24:03

ability to transition from government into the

1:24:05

private sector? You asked me that question.

1:24:08

And I go, you know, actually, and he

1:24:10

said to Disney. And I said, actually, I

1:24:13

would probably be more worried the other way around. I'm

1:24:17

more of the kind of Disney kind of person.

1:24:19

I am OK with working

1:24:22

in environments where you have a lot of

1:24:24

different team members and the culture

1:24:26

may be different the way they speak. I

1:24:29

have no issues transitioning here. I

1:24:32

think I'm wired to fit really well in this

1:24:34

company. And the other way, if you asked me

1:24:36

that, that might be where the challenge would come

1:24:39

from. But it is a

1:24:41

challenge. I mean, you just, everything's

1:24:44

different. The way

1:24:46

I brief is different. When you briefed Mueller,

1:24:48

you get to the point. Here

1:24:51

it is. It's very regimented. Blah, blah,

1:24:53

blah, blah, you're hitting everything. Somebody once called a

1:24:55

military brief. I remember

1:24:57

doing, I'll tell you a Disney story, because it's actually in

1:24:59

one of my podcasts and it kind of got a lot

1:25:02

of attention. At

1:25:04

the time, I was working for

1:25:06

Bob Chapek, who

1:25:08

was my boss. And then Ron

1:25:10

Iden, who also was the chief security officer. And

1:25:13

I was going to brief Bob Iger on something.

1:25:16

And it was an

1:25:20

operation security plan for something at Walt Disney World that

1:25:22

we put together. And we were going to brief Bob

1:25:25

Iger. And it's kind of

1:25:27

cool. You get to brief Bob Iger. He's

1:25:31

not a hard person to brief. He's a very, very

1:25:33

nice guy. But I studied for

1:25:35

my brief, just like I would with Mueller.

1:25:38

Or any of them, Comey or Director Ray. You just

1:25:40

want to be prepared. And

1:25:43

so when I finished my, I remember sitting

1:25:45

in front of Bob Iger's in front of me. Bob Chapek

1:25:47

is right to his left. And Chapek's

1:25:49

looking at me a lot. And

1:25:52

I'm looking at Iger. And Chapek's like, he's

1:25:54

just got his eyes locked on me. And

1:25:58

after the brief, Silver, I think. I think I nailed it. Like,

1:26:01

I walked around going like, I think my wife asked me like,

1:26:03

how'd it go? I

1:26:05

said, I nailed it. It's the best brief I ever gave. Only

1:26:08

to find out that Bob

1:26:11

Chapick, he wanted to talk to me to give me

1:26:13

some feedback on it. I said,

1:26:15

that's going to be fantastic. You know how great I did. Oh,

1:26:18

it's so great that you learned how to brief. No.

1:26:21

He said, for content, you get an A.

1:26:24

For delivery, you get a C. And

1:26:27

he goes, you get a C because he

1:26:29

was like, he

1:26:31

had a, he, I appreciate that he took

1:26:33

the time. He said, like 45 minutes to

1:26:35

kind of give me this, this feedback. He

1:26:37

says, you know, we're an entertainment company. We're

1:26:40

all about, we're storytellers, you know, your

1:26:44

brief was very rigid, you know, like,

1:26:46

it was very, you know, you

1:26:49

need to kind of form it in a way. Tell the

1:26:51

story. And he's like, and

1:26:54

to me, it was almost like, what? You

1:26:57

want me to get in there and start like

1:26:59

telling a story like, you know, like Cinderella, like,

1:27:02

you know, like, like, you know, he's like, relax.

1:27:04

He said, the way you dress needs

1:27:07

to kind of tone down. Like I was,

1:27:09

I was dressed like a government person, you

1:27:11

know, like, um, I came in very formal,

1:27:13

you know, because I had been trained. That's

1:27:15

how you look. But no,

1:27:17

you know, it's like, um, so I ended

1:27:19

up buying like new clothes. I kind of got a

1:27:22

little bit more Disney-esque the way I looked and I

1:27:24

appeared in the wake because he was giving me that

1:27:26

like pink pinstripes. What's the disc look like? It's just

1:27:28

like more like, it's like that more modern executive, you

1:27:30

know, no tie, you know, you kind of have a

1:27:32

nice sleek look. I know what it

1:27:34

is, but it's, it's definitely not the way you dress

1:27:37

when you walk it into, you know,

1:27:39

the director's conference room. Um, it was

1:27:41

great feedback. Um, but there's things

1:27:43

like that, you know, where you, I'm glad he told me,

1:27:45

you know, and I was able to transition and change. And

1:27:47

the next time I had a briefing, you know, I didn't

1:27:49

get up there, start tap dancing, but at least I

1:27:52

was much more relaxed, you know, and it makes

1:27:54

sense. You got to tailor it to the audience.

1:27:56

This audience is exactly, exactly. So that's, that's, that's

1:27:58

an example of kind of. some of the transitions

1:28:01

difficulties. That's a great story.

1:28:05

But you said that this job did

1:28:07

take a toll on you and

1:28:09

it was the high stress. Oh

1:28:11

yeah, very high stress, very high

1:28:14

stress. High stress, I

1:28:16

didn't have no problem in stress. Like

1:28:18

I love two-minute drill work. I love

1:28:20

that. Stressful environments kind of get me

1:28:22

energized. But when you know your stuff,

1:28:25

you know what you're doing because you have

1:28:27

years and years of experience versus like you're

1:28:29

brand new and everything coming out of your

1:28:32

mouth is wrong. You know like

1:28:34

I would say something and people like what? Okay

1:28:37

I'm not supposed to say that or I would do

1:28:39

something. They're like what? I'm not supposed

1:28:41

to do that and now you're leading

1:28:43

a huge stressful environment. Everybody's focused on

1:28:45

you and you just

1:28:48

don't. It takes years to learn this kind of

1:28:50

stuff you know but so but but

1:28:52

yeah I actually like being

1:28:54

busy. I like that kind of stuff. And so

1:28:56

it was a kind of a relief when they

1:28:58

asked you to come back to the Bureau? Yeah

1:29:00

so I don't

1:29:02

know if released the word because remember by

1:29:04

this time I've already I've left Disney. I've

1:29:07

started my company which

1:29:10

nothing's happening. It's COVID and I got

1:29:12

my podcast going. I

1:29:14

really missed the the

1:29:17

mission part. Like I'm

1:29:19

a mission person. I come from generations

1:29:21

of law enforcement. My father was a

1:29:24

cop. His father was a cop and then

1:29:26

we have like four generations

1:29:29

of police of Puerto Rico

1:29:31

throughout my entire like family

1:29:33

and serving my

1:29:35

country and being part of the FBI and

1:29:37

the greater community of public service like that

1:29:40

was everything for me. No matter how cool

1:29:42

Disney was but the cool thing with Disney

1:29:44

was I felt like I was a public

1:29:46

servant too because I was keeping families safe.

1:29:48

Right. You know I'm saying I'm keeping people

1:29:50

safe but I

1:29:53

longed for like the fellowship that

1:29:56

comes with being part of something

1:29:58

like the FBI. And

1:30:00

when I got that call, man, like

1:30:04

in three seconds, yep, I'll go back, and

1:30:06

a heartbeat. And I got to experience

1:30:08

what most people probably don't get to

1:30:10

experience, like to go back into an

1:30:13

organization and to

1:30:15

be able to continue that mission, that work was

1:30:18

like, I can't even

1:30:20

tell you how happy I was. In

1:30:22

fact, I probably would still be there if it wasn't for the

1:30:24

fact that I left to start my

1:30:27

new company, which is a tech

1:30:29

startup company, to help solve a

1:30:31

challenge in technology with public partnerships.

1:30:33

Tell us about your second

1:30:35

stint at FBI, then. Yeah. What

1:30:38

was this job that they asked you to do? So

1:30:40

it was to become the assistant director of what's called

1:30:43

the Office of Private Sector. It's

1:30:45

a smaller strategic arm of

1:30:47

the bureau that

1:30:49

really, its focus is to build relationships

1:30:51

and partnerships with our private sector partners

1:30:54

that are all kind of facing the

1:30:56

same challenges we are. And that will

1:30:59

allow with the way threats have

1:31:01

changed, cyber being a huge focus. Is

1:31:03

that a lot of involve also like

1:31:05

corporate counterintelligence, like things that involve

1:31:08

national security? Not

1:31:11

necessarily, I mean, not necessarily. For

1:31:13

example, there's

1:31:15

something, there's these two huge national

1:31:17

programs in the bureau, the Domestic

1:31:19

Security Alliance Council, DSAC, and

1:31:22

these are chief security officers from different

1:31:24

companies. And these folks, they have to

1:31:26

make security decisions every day to keep

1:31:29

their company safe. And they

1:31:31

rely on any information, threat information that we can

1:31:33

provide to them. And so we

1:31:36

are providing information to them so that allows

1:31:38

them to be able to execute their mission to

1:31:40

keep their company safe. But now, I mean, there's

1:31:42

a number out there that's been thrown around that

1:31:45

85% of our critical infrastructure

1:31:47

is owned by the private sector. So the

1:31:49

front lines have kind of shifted. There

1:31:55

is a huge need for

1:31:57

us to incorporate Again,

1:32:01

through legal means, we're

1:32:03

building relationships and we're sharing information and we

1:32:06

can share with them, but we have to

1:32:08

go from, I always call it, right now

1:32:10

we're partners. We've got to be

1:32:12

teammates because the

1:32:15

folks that are on the front lines now

1:32:17

that are in these companies without the information

1:32:19

of like, hey, this is a potential risk

1:32:21

and a picture of that, our entire critical

1:32:23

infrastructure is at risk. I

1:32:25

look at what happened at 9-11, with

1:32:28

9-11 after the commission report studies came

1:32:30

out and people started to look at

1:32:32

the failures that occurred. Information

1:32:35

sharing between the federal government and the

1:32:37

state and local partners

1:32:39

was obvious. How

1:32:42

are the police officers supposed to do their job

1:32:44

if at the national

1:32:46

level we have information that they need? You

1:32:49

saw this entire movement to bring the

1:32:51

police departments and state and local partners

1:32:53

better integrated with the federal side so

1:32:55

that we have better information sharing. There's

1:32:57

work to be done, but it's a

1:32:59

big improvement than it was back in

1:33:01

9-11. I

1:33:03

am convinced that we're

1:33:06

heading down a path that

1:33:09

some major cyber attack could occur in which

1:33:12

when you start to analyze what happened,

1:33:15

if there's information that that

1:33:18

person, that CISO or that chief security officer could have

1:33:20

had that could have done something to kind of help

1:33:22

protect it, we

1:33:25

didn't get it to them. We're going to be figuring

1:33:27

out why. It's going to be things like

1:33:29

technology. There was an old policy in place that couldn't do it

1:33:31

stuff. We could either wait till

1:33:33

that happens or we

1:33:35

could do something about it now. That's kind of what

1:33:37

my mission is now, is to do something

1:33:40

about it. Technology is a

1:33:42

huge challenge, like how we share this

1:33:44

information. That's kind of what

1:33:47

I'm building my company to help. It's

1:33:49

really interesting from a public

1:33:51

safety standpoint, but also a

1:33:53

lot of the conversations

1:33:55

we've been having the last couple of years in

1:33:57

regards to China, where it's like, how do

1:34:00

a public-private partnership to protect our

1:34:02

information, as you point out, protect

1:34:04

our infrastructure. That's going to be

1:34:06

a critical issue in the

1:34:08

coming years, isn't it? It is. And

1:34:10

there are great public-private partnership

1:34:13

programs in place. You can put

1:34:15

them in your own. The OSAC,

1:34:18

which is the overseas version of DSAC that

1:34:20

the State Department runs, DHS

1:34:22

has an analytic exchange program that they do.

1:34:25

There's FBI's doing a lot in

1:34:27

the space. Police departments, NYPD,

1:34:29

their shield program, they're doing a

1:34:31

lot in that thing. Again, the

1:34:33

whole concept of moving from partners

1:34:35

to teammates. If you're a teammate,

1:34:37

then you need to know you've got to be on

1:34:40

the same playbook. You've got to understand. And

1:34:43

that's where I think where

1:34:46

we have room to improve is in that

1:34:48

area. I'm kind of interested in, like, when

1:34:52

we, one of the holdups,

1:34:54

you know, potentially here, I mean, if

1:34:56

it's a pending imminent terror attack, obviously

1:34:58

there's responsibility to inform people about that.

1:35:01

But then, what do you do when

1:35:03

there's other cases where it's classified information

1:35:05

or government proprietary information? How do

1:35:07

you share that responsibly with the

1:35:09

private sector? Yeah, well, you know,

1:35:11

the duty to warn, that's always

1:35:13

going to be, if

1:35:16

you have information that can help

1:35:18

save lives or can help protect, you're going to

1:35:20

get that information to them. There

1:35:22

are means to declassify information and to get it

1:35:24

to a point in which you can protect and,

1:35:27

you know, sources and methods and things like that

1:35:29

that have caused it to be classified by that

1:35:31

and get to something that you couldn't actually get

1:35:33

that information. When I was in, there

1:35:36

was never a time in which there

1:35:39

was a potential risk or threat to somebody that

1:35:41

we would sit on that. Like, nope, we're going

1:35:43

to get it to them. We're going to follow

1:35:45

whatever rules that we have to follow, but

1:35:47

you're going to get that information to them. And

1:35:49

so there are ways of doing that, you know.

1:35:52

So that's never going to

1:35:54

be something that's going to stop us from

1:35:57

making sure people are safe. And

1:36:00

how long did you do this job before you

1:36:02

retired a second time? My second retirement? So two

1:36:04

years. Okay. So,

1:36:07

and like I said, I would have stayed another year, two,

1:36:09

three, I'd still be there. I mean, I loved it that

1:36:11

much. I had the most amazing team of

1:36:13

folks. And you know,

1:36:16

like the Bureau, like any of these

1:36:18

organizations is very generational. Like in my

1:36:20

generation, you know, I mean, I'll

1:36:22

be 58 next month. So, so when

1:36:24

I retired in 16, everybody

1:36:27

that I worked with has, has retired,

1:36:29

you know, and then new leadership has

1:36:31

kind of come in into place. But

1:36:33

there are people who, who worked for

1:36:35

me, maybe a couple different levels, maybe

1:36:38

in my organization who are now leading the organization.

1:36:40

So I was able to come back and I

1:36:42

was able to read, to meet

1:36:44

all the new people. Like,

1:36:46

and like, I used to know every special

1:36:48

agent in charge by first name across all

1:36:51

56 field offices, like, boom,

1:36:53

Bob, Michelle, whoever it was, pick

1:36:55

up the phone, talk. And

1:36:57

then as I left every year, I would know like

1:36:59

90% of them. Then I would know 80% of

1:37:02

them by time I was out six years

1:37:04

before I, between the time I left the

1:37:06

first time to say six years had passed

1:37:08

by. And I probably knew like a handful

1:37:10

of them and everybody

1:37:12

else was new. So when I came back as assistant

1:37:15

director, now I got, I get to meet all of

1:37:17

them. And you know,

1:37:19

I will say this, I mean, the bureau,

1:37:22

you know, there's, takes a lot of heat. You

1:37:25

see, you see it in the

1:37:27

media. And you know, there's, there's times in which

1:37:29

it's deserved. I mean, sometimes, you know,

1:37:32

our strongest asset

1:37:35

is that, you know, we're humans. Because

1:37:38

we're humans and we're regular people, we can

1:37:40

do our job or effectively, but sometimes the

1:37:43

weakest link is that we're humans. We

1:37:46

make mistakes and things happen. But

1:37:49

I can tell you like the

1:37:52

people that I work with, the

1:37:55

folks in the FBI, I

1:37:57

mean, especially everyone.

1:38:00

9-11. Super Bowls,

1:38:02

weddings, anniversaries, kids, none

1:38:06

of that. You missed

1:38:08

all those things because everybody was focused on

1:38:10

keeping people safe. Anytime you

1:38:12

saw an event, everybody's laughing and joking, everybody's having

1:38:14

a good time, there are hundreds and thousands of

1:38:17

people that are working non-stop to make sure that

1:38:19

you can do that. And that's

1:38:21

the people that I saw. So when I was

1:38:23

like, you get to come back, of course I'm

1:38:25

coming back, you know? It's like, why

1:38:28

wouldn't I? But they're just

1:38:30

the most amazing people and then to be part of

1:38:32

a community of public service, like that's the best thing

1:38:34

ever, you know? Yeah, it sounds like

1:38:36

you really enjoyed the camaraderie and the culture. Love

1:38:39

it. Love it. Love that. And I missed it.

1:38:41

I really did miss it. Hey, they asked me

1:38:43

to come back and do it three times. Tell

1:38:47

us about what you're doing now. You're

1:38:50

fully into the private sector now, have a

1:38:52

couple different business endeavors and companies that you're

1:38:54

running. Tell us about those. Yeah, I really

1:38:56

have one company. The first one I started

1:38:58

back in 2020 that I think made

1:39:00

about five bucks. I don't know how much money I made. That

1:39:02

one's no longer. Now I have

1:39:05

a tech startup company called

1:39:07

Intel sec. The

1:39:10

biggest challenge that we have, like I mentioned,

1:39:12

was kind of our ability to kind of

1:39:14

share information with our partners in a trusted

1:39:16

environment. Like we know who you are

1:39:18

and so we

1:39:21

built a collaboration platform

1:39:23

we call sector net. We

1:39:25

actually launched it next week. So

1:39:29

it's super, you know, exciting, you know,

1:39:31

scary because I don't have a job.

1:39:33

So I'll be couch surfing

1:39:35

if this thing doesn't work. But I'm

1:39:38

convinced that it really is going to

1:39:40

help solve a problem that we have in government right now in

1:39:42

this area of public-private

1:39:45

partnerships. And so that's kind of the

1:39:47

big, like I said, I feel

1:39:49

like I was uniquely positioned because I spent

1:39:52

time on the corporate security side and I

1:39:54

saw what its life was like there and

1:39:56

I've spent time on the government side that

1:39:58

I've lived both of those. worlds and

1:40:00

I've led teams to understand like what

1:40:03

it is that's keeping us from getting to that level of

1:40:05

maturity that we have to get to and that's kind of

1:40:07

my mission. Can you talk at all about what

1:40:10

that challenge is that you're

1:40:12

trying to solve? Yeah so for example there's

1:40:15

information like that that the government provides

1:40:18

to its private sector partners and

1:40:20

you know like little advisories that

1:40:22

they'll say I hear some malware

1:40:24

that you need to be familiar

1:40:26

with so CISA and organizations are

1:40:28

providing this to folks. The

1:40:31

Bureau is providing information to

1:40:33

corporate security programs about threats you know the

1:40:36

threats of different things that are emerging and

1:40:38

so on and this work is actually happening.

1:40:40

The challenge is that the

1:40:42

way that the information is being provided to them

1:40:45

because we're not we're on separate

1:40:47

technology platforms you know the government has its

1:40:49

platforms the pressure has platforms and the two of them

1:40:52

aren't connected you know. A lot

1:40:55

of times they'll get sloppy in how we do it

1:40:57

so we may take something and just put a huge

1:40:59

distro list on it and send it out. Well

1:41:01

you don't even know if the person who had