Part Two: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds

Summary

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Behind the Bastards

Episode: Part Two: The Fake Bomb Detector Grift That Killed Hundreds
Date: June 18, 2026
Host: Brett (Robert) Evans
Guest: Ed Zitron
Production: Cool Zone Media / iHeartPodcasts

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Episode Overview

This episode continues the investigation into one of history's deadliest grifts: the fake bomb detectors that, masquerading as high-tech security devices, led to hundreds—if not thousands—of deaths worldwide. Brett Evans and guest Ed Zitron break down how a repackaged golf ball finder evolved into a multi-million dollar fraud, exploiting police, military, and governments across the globe. They also explore the psychological mechanisms and societal failures that enabled the scam, drawing parallels to modern tech grifts.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Ideomotor Effect and Early Grifts

(03:37–08:59)

• Recap: The story picks up from the last episode, recalling the Gopher—a "gag gift" that claimed to help golfers locate lost balls using pseudo-scientific jargon and the ideomotor effect (the unconscious motion that powers Ouija boards).
• Evolution: The conmen behind the Gopher, Wade L. Quattlebaum (ex-used car salesman) and Malcolm Stig Rowe, saw a new opportunity: instead of selling it as a golf accessory, they rebranded it as a drug detector for police and schools.
  • "You might be able to make some money off a thing like the Gopher, but you’re not gonna get rich … [So] is there any way to make more money off of this idea?" — Brett, 06:18
• Targeting Law Enforcement: Recognizing schools and police lacked affordable detection tools, they marketed the "Quadro Tracker" as a solution, capitalizing on the era’s War on Drugs and the shortage of drug-sniffing dogs.

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2. The Quadro Tracker: Pseudoscience and Early Adoption

(08:59–19:41)

• Marketing Nonsense: The Quadro Tracker was “a small black box with an antenna” and fake “insertion cards” that supposedly detected drugs, gunpowder, or explosives—boasting technology “too secret to patent.”
  • "It comes with a number of insertion cards its developers say will detect marijuana, gunpowder and cocaine ... needs no batteries. The technology has not been patented because the company does not want to reveal how the drug detection cards work." — Brett reading a 1995 Kansas City Star article, 10:57
• Parallels to AI and Startups: Ed compares this obfuscation to the pitch tactics of Silicon Valley:
  • "This is straight up just… how every AI company raises money." — Ed, 11:42
• Law Enforcement Bought In: Despite immediate skepticism from some, multiple school districts and police departments bought the devices at wildly inflated prices—sometimes as much as $8,000 each.
  • "If it does what they say ... then it's gonna be a tremendous asset." — Brett quoting a school officer, 13:09

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3. Media, Skepticism & Lazy Journalism

(16:07–19:41)

• Brett highlights the problem with media coverage: real tests debunked the tracker, but “positive” demos went unchallenged, allowing the scam to flourish.
  • "The news coverage is like, but other school tests showed it works. Those aren't real tests … They just report three other tests say it's real." — Brett, 19:11

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4. The Spread & Escalation: From Drugs to Bombs

(19:41–23:51)

• Government Corruption: Officials, like U.S. attorney Guy Lee Womack, used their office to sell the trackers and collect kickbacks.
• Product Extension: As initial markets plateau, the scam expands—the trackers are promoted as bomb detectors, exponentially raising the stakes when they inevitably fail.
  • "Once they're like, it’s a bomb detector too, you’ve escalated the human harm." — Brett, 23:02
• Human Toll Begins: While not directly responsible for mass casualties in the states, they gave false hope in tragic situations—like a child’s murder case in Texas.

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5. Internationalization: The Scam Goes Global

(35:16–45:12)

• British Expansion: Malcolm Rowe moves to the UK, partners with Sam and Joan Tree, and launches “The Mole,” sold across Europe. To establish legitimacy, they manipulate testimonials from the UK’s Royal Engineers.
• Fragmentation: Original partners splinter, each rebranding variants for new global markets. Jim McCormick and Gary Bolton become central to spreading the scam to Africa, Asia, and especially Iraq.
  • "All of them went on to sell versions of the tracker. But it was McCormick who had the greatest ambition." — Brett (quoting Vanity Fair), 38:17

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6. Scaling Up in the Era of Terror: GT200, ADE651, and Mass Casualties

(45:12–62:39)

• After 9/11: Demand for bomb detectors explodes; Bolton, McCormick, and others exploit post-9/11 fears and huge government budgets. Devices now sell for up to $40,000 each.
• Faked Demos & “Science”: Demonstrations are rigged, and potential users are told not to open the device “or they’ll damage the technology.”
  • "You might break it. Then how would we find the bomb molecule wavelength?" — Ed, 43:14
• Bizarre Instructions: Newer models include "detection cards" that users are supposed to “charge” with a sticker in a jar containing a sample of the target substance. Static electricity, humidity, and user error are offered as excuses for incorrect results.
• Massacre in Iraq (2009, 60:15): 155 Iraqis die when a truck bomb passes a checkpoint using an ADE651.
  • "The bomb truck had to pass at least one checkpoint where the ADE651 is typically deployed." — Brett, 61:29

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7. Corruption, Bribery, and Legal Fallout

(62:39–66:08)

• Bribery as Business Model: Upwards of 75% of McCormick’s profits are funneled into bribes for defense officials in Iraq, Thailand, and elsewhere.
  • "That is called the sales and marketing expense." — Ed, 64:05
• Wider Harm: Beyond failing to stop bombs, these devices are used by corrupt officials to justify false imprisonments and torture, further expanding the human cost (notably in Thailand).

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8. Aftermath: Prosecutions but Ongoing Harm

(66:08–66:57)

• Convictions: McCormick and several associates are sentenced (McCormick to 10 years), but the grift and its logic persist. Variants of the device, sometimes repackaged to “detect” HIV or even cash, continue to circulate in some countries.
• Litigation Problems: Admitting the devices were fake would undermine drug and terror convictions tied to their use in places like Mexico and Thailand.
  • "If they ever acknowledge that the device is a fraud, the convictions resulting from those searches would be vulnerable to litigation." — Brett (reading Vanity Fair), 65:40

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Pseudoscience Pitch

• "He’s an electrical engineer… He wouldn’t possibly just say a bunch of shit that he made up." — Ed, 11:49

On the Fallacy of Authority

• "You think that you’re a good cop and that, like, you couldn’t be tricked ... so you wind up defending this bullshit device because you’re defending your own ego." — Brett, 30:28
• "Almost as if, the more wrong you get, the more you double down." — Ed, 30:47

On Corruption

• "These are not being bought because they really think they’re real. McCormick and Bolton are saying, like, here’s several million dollars. And then they’ll buy a bunch." — Brett, 54:19

On Parallels to Modern Tech

• "They keep doing this today. This is the AI industry." — Ed, 19:41
• "It’s people with AI, especially. They are like, well, so many smart people couldn’t be wrong. Actually, they could." — Ed, 66:08

On Sheer Gall

• "Everyone do a little shuffle before they go and use the thing that kills them." — Ed, 46:49

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Structured Timeline & Timestamps

• 00:01–03:37: Opening, banter, and commercial breaks (skipped)
• 03:37–08:59: Origins of the Gopher and transformation into the Quadro Tracker
• 08:59–19:41: Sales tactics; media reporting; police/school adoption
• 19:41–23:51: U.S. government corruption; expansion into explosives
• 23:51–35:16: Debunking; legal cases; failures and persistence of the fraud
• 35:16–45:12: The scam grows international—UK, Mexico, Egypt, Asia
• 45:12–62:39: Proliferation post-9/11; tragic consequences in Iraq and beyond
• 62:39–66:08: Legal fallout, ongoing use, and lasting human toll
• 66:08–66:57: Reflections and closing remarks (content section ends here)

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Recurring Themes

• Human susceptibility to the ideomotor effect and pseudoscience
• Institutional laziness, corruption, and the ease with which authority can be manipulated
• The tendency for those in power to double down rather than admit error
• The persistence of dangerous technology grifts (with allusions to the AI industry)
• Lasting consequences—both for direct victims of bombings and those falsely imprisoned

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Final Thoughts and Tone

The episode is darkly humorous, incisively critical, and relentlessly skeptical—typical of the Behind the Bastards style. It pushes listeners to distrust miraculous claims, demand evidence, and question those in power—reminding us that human error, greed, and institutional rot are as deadly as any bomb.

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Further Content

• Ed Zitron recommends: his newsletter at whereised.app and Better Offline Podcast.
• Brett’s final advice: Practice skepticism and self-love—unless you’re “a bad person”—and recognize that intelligence is no guarantee against being conned.

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For listeners:

This episode is an eye-opening case study on how institutional faith, laziness, and self-interest can create catastrophes—that the line between a "gag gift" and mass manslaughter can be just a pivot away. It's also a warning for our hi-tech, hype-driven era.

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Transcript

[Brett Weinstein]

Call Zone Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And this week, we are telling the story of a fake bomb detector that wound up getting a shitload of people killed thanks to the ideomotor effect and how that's weirdly relevant to our current moment in American culture. AI all this good stuff to talk with me about that, Ed Zitron. Ed, welcome back to the show.

[Ed Zitron]

Thanks for having me.

[Brett Weinstein]

Now, Ed, you're the host of the Better Offline podcast, and how are you feeling about the ideomotor effect and people being able to know what's real?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm amazed by Clever Hans. I think Clever Hans is a hero who was unfairly eaten by German soldiers

[Brett Weinstein]

after he was murdered in the world.

[Ed Zitron]

They were very unfair to Clever Hans.

[Brett Weinstein]

It was just desperation and not a punishment. But it does in the articles read a little bit. Like, because they found out he wasn't really smart, they sent him off to die.

[Ed Zitron]

You're a fraud, Hans.

[Brett Weinstein]

Oh, man.

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[Brett Weinstein]

So we ended last episode by introducing the Gopher, a gag gift that claimed to help you locate lost golf balls using the magic, the ideomotor effect into tricking people into thinking it was not an empty plastic box with an antenna. If you read the fine print at the end of those magazine ads that Sophie displayed last episode, you'll see that the manufacturer bragged that the Gopher was totally shockproof with solid state construction and no moving parts because again, it's empty. There's nothing in the box.

[Ed Zitron]

Was shockproof. Something that was going to be a. Is that a common problem with.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

You can still get one of those

[Brett Weinstein]

on ebay, by the way. Yeah, I think it's that, like, if you drop it, it won't get disrupted because again, there's nothing to disrupt. It's not a prod, it's not real. For 34.99, folks, that's a bargain at any price, Sophie.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

You can get one on either ebay or Poshmark. Not sponsored. Thank you so much.

[Brett Weinstein]

You could have all the balls you need, you know, listeners. If you've been feeling listeners like you don't have enough balls, you know, the good ball finder people can help you have all the balls. Anyway, I'm gonna stop saying balls now, please. One of the chief executives of the Quadro Corporation who gave us the gopher and the evident designer of the gopher itself, although this is a little unclear to me, but I think the designer was a man named Wade L. Quattlebaum, which I just that's a good name. That's a good name.

[Ed Zitron]

We banger episode for names.

[Brett Weinstein]

Great names in here.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Wade Quattlebaum was a former used car salesman from South Carolina. Yes. Who founded the Quadro Corporation alongside an American businessman named Malcolm Stig Row.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

The mess. Malcolm Stig Row. Wade Quattlebaum. Great names left and right coming at you. It's awesome. So I have not found much about either man's early life. Which is tragic because, you know, with two titans like this, they both had been doing cons their whole lives. I just. I don't know what Wade Quattlebaum was doing when he was 15. And that will haunt me the rest of my life.

[Ed Zitron]

Getting the shit beaten out of him for his second name.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ed Zitron]

Absolute crap. Just hit Powers. And every punch made him like, I'm gonna con the fuck out of all these people.

[Brett Weinstein]

Every business meeting with Malcolm Stig Row. Malcolm just found himself punching Quattlebomb by the end of it. Oh, shit. I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. It's okay. It happens to everybody. I found, again, not much about either man. But when Quadro first started making and selling the Gopher, they initially put it out in a couple of small Southern states. And it performs okay. It's like a reasonably successful gag gift for, like, Father's Day, you know, if you don't like your dad too much and he golfs, maybe you get him a Gopher. Cause they cost like 12 bucks, you know, at the time. They're not that expensive, probably.

[Ed Zitron]

Cause the cogs are like, two cents.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes, exactly. It costs, like a dollar to make this fucking thing. So this was not exactly the kind of business that was ever going to take the world by storm. Right. You might be able to make some money off a thing like the Gopher, but you're not gonna get rich off of it. So Malcolm started looking at the world in this new post Cold War era. Cause it's the early 90s, and one of the things he notices is he's thinking, where else could I apply what we've got in the gopher? Is there any way to make more money off of this idea? He notices something, which is that when he turns on the tv, when he watches the news, you know, he sees a bunch of special reports on the crack epidemic and the war on drugs and all the dangerous things drug dealers are doing. How drugs are getting smuggled into the country. And when he's just watching, like, bullshit TV Every cartoon show, every like, popular sitcom has like a very special anti drug episode. And so he puts all this together, Malcolm does, and he's like, I bet there's money if you could convince police departments and schools that you can help them find drugs. Right? Because like the canine units are expensive. You know, dogs can work. I don't think he doesn't realize what a con the dogs often are too, but they're expensive and there's not that many. I got out of a dog search once, which was bogus. I had nothing on me. I just don't ever let the police search my cars. But they tried to bring a dog out. This is like three in the morning in Brady, Texas, and they couldn't wake the dogs up. That was the excuse I got for why I was free to go. I was like, we can't wake them up. We were gonna have them search your car, but they're too sleepy. So again.

[Ed Zitron]

Wait, what?

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got that. What? So Malcolm, and that's to Malcolm. That's evidence. Stuff like that is evidence of the market, right? There's not enough of these dogs. They're way too expensive. If you could convince, you didn't have to make a real product. If you can use the ideomotor effect and convince cops and principals that the same thing that helps you find golf balls can help you find drugs, then you can sell these things and you can sell them for a shitload more than you can sell like a gag Father's Day gift. But you don't have to spend any more to make them. Right. Part of what's going into his calculations here is that in the early 90s, more and more schools are hiring school resource officers and they're bringing DARE programs into their institutions. And where there's cops in schools, you know you're going to have searches in schools. And actually searching for drugs by hand is a pain in the ass, right? Especially if the school's big and canine units aren't cheap and they're often in heavy demand. So maybe you can't bring them to a school if there's no reason to suspect drugs are there. But if you could put something in people's hands and they can just walk them around and search whatever kids, they were gonna search anyway for drugs, then you've got a product, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Now the problem is there's no actual scientific gizmo that can sniff out drugs. That doesn't exist today. Really. People keep trying to make them, but we haven't figured it out quite right. They certainly don't exist in the early 90s. And furthermore, neither Malcolm nor Wade have any idea how to make such a device. What they do know how to do is trick middle aged men into thinking they've developed a golf ball finder. And since most cops and school principals are middle aged men who play golf, well, you can kinda see where they're thinking of fertile ground. So they changed the name of the gopher to the Quadro Tracker and they make some cosmetic modifications to the outside so it looks a little more high tech and expensive. They're bigger, basically. He also has paper and plastic computer chips designed and installed inside the hollow plastic case. These are unpowered. They're like paper. They're just like paper and plastic computer chips and they're unpowered. The only purpose is to like convince idiots into thinking it's real if they open it for some reason. Right. So Malcolm Stigrow and Quattlebaum and their partners at Quadro market this new drug detector to schools and police departments. At first in the south and southwest districts in Texas, Kansas and Florida. So south Southeast too, say yes, please. And they sign up to buy some of these things. Right. So as soon as he's like, I've got a drug detector that you can carry, you don't need to train it, you don't need to have a dog. And it'll tell you, you know, basically it'll give you an excuse to search for exactly what you want to hear, right? Yeah, it'll tell you what you want to hear. Right. So police departments and schools start buying. And I found an article in the Kansas City star from 1995. This is before these were, you know, proven to be complete bullshit. That gives you an idea of how the media covered the Quadro Tracker when it first starts being sold to schools and police departments. See if you can identify anything that seems incredibly fake for from the text of this news article.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay. Okay, I'm ready.

[Brett Weinstein]

Three Missouri schools will soon be using a new drug detection device that some critics are calling a modern day divining rod. The Quadro Tracker is a small 3 1/2 ounce black box with an antenna. It comes with a number of insertion cards that its developers say will detect marijuana, gunpowder and cocaine. Quadro Corporation vice president Malcolm Rowe, who is an electrical engineer, said the Quadro Tracker works by sensing the unique wavelengths produced by the molecules in controlled substances or gunpowder. Because it supposedly works through magnetism, it needs no batteries. The unit's technology has not been patented because the company does not want to reveal how the drug detection cards work.

[Ed Zitron]

Just a quick question. Said the wavelengths. Yeah, yeah, that came off the molecules.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, the wavelengths off the molecules. Yeah, just in controlled substances.

[Ed Zitron]

Ed, this is straight up just. This is how every AI company raises money.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Just like. Well, we have. He's. He's an electrical engineer. He's Demis Hassabis, who's the head of DeepMind and was like, here's a Nobel in chemistry.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

He wouldn't possibly just say a bunch of shit that he made up history. It's like, what? True detective. We'll repeat the circus time is a flat circle.

[Brett Weinstein]

It is. And thinking about hearing that, I couldn't help but think like hearing this guy be like, yeah, we haven't patented it. But like it works through, you know, that explanation. I couldn't help but think of the OpenAI or not OpenAI. The. The anthropic co founder who spoke at that Vatican event and was like, well, we don't even understand the mysteries of how AI thinks. You know, it confuses and surprises even its designers because it really is as miraculous as the human mind. You know, like it's the same sort of bs.

[Ed Zitron]

Woo.

[Brett Weinstein]

Obviously there is a real product with AI, but.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, except they specifically made it do the things. The mystery.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. This is much more bullshit. Right? Because there's not even like a product of any kind here really. Yeah, but you do see how some of the marketing bullshit is the same. And yeah, I do find it very funny. Like the idea that you're basing probable cause for searches on a device where the designers are like, we can't tell you how it works because then someone might know how it works.

[Ed Zitron]

Then they'll start changing the molecules.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, they'll change the molecules on us. Switch it up.

[Ed Zitron]

The molecules will be different. The drug dealers making the drugs will change the molecules to give off a different wavelength.

[Brett Weinstein]

I hate it when drug dealers do that. Always moving the molecules around.

[Ed Zitron]

What are we gonna do then? They'll do molecule science on us.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep, yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Then we're fucked.

[Brett Weinstein]

We can't stop, can't ever have drugs. Once they figure out the molecules, we're screwed. So three schools in Johnson County, Missouri are said to have bought trackers for $955 each. So they're selling these things originally for like 8 to 12 bucks. Now you're getting 955 for the ones you're selling to fucking Missouri. Other sources show that trackers were sometimes sold for as much as $8,000, especially to law enforcement agencies. BJ Hodges, director of safety and security at Shawnee Mission School District, was quoted as saying, if it does what they say they do, then it's gonna be a tremendous asset, not only to school districts, but to law enforcement. And, yeah, if it did what it said it did, it would have been. But it doesn't. It's the Theranos thing, right? This is very much a Theranos thing, where they're like, well, if you could really do all this. Yeah. Off of a drop of blood, you know?

[Ed Zitron]

But did they bother to do any fake detections or did they just.

[Brett Weinstein]

Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They've got fake detections out the ass.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Oh, yeah. They know where the drugs are or whatever. You know, it's very easy to trick people with this shit. As we've talked about, we just went through all the different ways people were tricked in the past by this. It's the same ones in the future, you know, or the 90s. Quadro's marketing pitch included claims that their tracker could find narcotics behind brick walls and at distances of up to half a block away. It could even. What the. This is my fav. What? Yeah, yeah, it could even. This is my favorite part. If you want to think back to just what we were talking about a little earlier, they even were like, it can identify places where pot was smoked in the past. Right. Which gives you. It's the same thing with the dogs, where they're like, if it alerts and then there's no drugs, they're like, oh, he had pot.

[Ed Zitron]

But that doesn't make any sense, because if it's where the drugs were and it was the fumes coming off the drugs, that means the drug molecules are not giving off the wavelengths.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right? Right, Right. It doesn't make sense based on your bullshit science.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I mean, I was with you until the drug molecule wavelength, that was fine.

[Brett Weinstein]

But now I prove this is nonsense. Well, it's also just like you're saying that this will alert anywhere people have smoked weed. Isn't that everywhere? Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Detecting several thousand streets in every city.

[Brett Weinstein]

If your device that you're using to search kids cars in the school parking lot can go off just because people smoked pot in the area in the past, then you can never use it in a school parking lot. Cause you know what's happened in every school parking lot in the entire country? Kids have smoked weed. You know, like,

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

it's common sense, I fear.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. So I'm glad I found that old article, because they do prove. These old articles do prove that at the time People didn't universally believe this crap. Both they give you the explanations of people saying why they are paying all this money for nonsense. Cause they're idiots. But you get their explanations, which is interesting. But you also see evidence of the skeptics. Right? And that's not. When I first started reading articles about these and I was like, how are people buying these? The skeptics were never brought up. So it just seems like, oh, maybe everyone thought this was real and that's not the truth. When the Quattro tracker starts being sold in like 1995, famed skeptic and magician James Randi finds out about it. And he issues a challenge to Quadro offering $507,000 to anyone who can pass a double blind test of the device. And first off, we love you, James. And second, after that comes a paragraph I did not expect to read. And this is about James Randi. He conducted a test with Missouri Seminole County School District Director of Security Wolfgang Halbig, who was considering buying one of the units with a known sample of marijuana. Randi asked Halbig to find the card for marijuana from a number of unidentified cards. In a series of tests, Halbig did not get one correct. Now that just sounds like a deblonking, right? Nothing sketchy about that. And there isn't about the debunking. Do you know who Wolfgang Halbig is today, Ed? No, this has nothing to do with James Randi. It's just crazy that he shows up in this. Wolfgang Halbig was indeed the district director of security for Seminole county back then. In more modern days, because of his experience as a school director of security, he became a Sandy Hook shooting denier and a regular guest on Infowars. Back when Alex Jones still ran it, he was a major part of the Sandy hooked. Now that's Wolfgang Helbig. That has nothing to do with his story. He's actually on a good side here because he is like with James Randi, he is busting the fact that this thing is nonsense. It's just funny that it's Wolfgang Halbig.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Yeah, very funny.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's also funny that he would have fallen for the tracker. He definitely would have thought this was real if James Randi hadn't saved his ass. I do love that too.

[Ed Zitron]

It's so cool seeing how history is just full of dullards waiting to be conned.

[Brett Weinstein]

It really is. I love it. So police departments in Illinois and Georgia made purchases of the tracker despite this Public debunking between 1993 and 1996, Quadros sold roughly 1,000 units around the United States. This paragraph from the article I've been quoting from should provide some explanation as to why it comes right after they describe Randy and Halbig testing. The tracker tests and demonstrations in three other school systems, however, convinced administrators to buy the units. They are still drawing up guidelines about how to deal with searches of students lockers, cars and belongings that the tracker hits. And we know now because of the lawsuits, these weren't real tests and demos in these other school systems. They were cons. But you see how the problem like this is a really perfect encapsulation of the issue. That goes right back to what was happening with those scientists who got tricked by the table readings and whatever, right? Which is you've got this actual test that proves the device is bullshit. But then the news coverage is like, but other school tests showed it works. Those aren't real tests. They don't detail the tests. They don't say what happened. They don't analyze those tests. They don't ask, are those tests real? Were they conducted by anyone but the Quadro Corporation? Were they double blind? They just report three other tests say it's real. Right? And that's how shit like this winds up spreading everywhere and keeps spreading.

[Ed Zitron]

They keep doing this today. This is the AI industry.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep, yep. It's Jesus fuck lazy journalism even when you had all the ingredients to do decent journalism. Now, Rowe and Quattlebaum had other allies in their quest to push the tracker into every school and cop shop they could find. Guy Lee Womack, an assistant U.S. attorney, used his office illegally to market the Quadro tracker after he paid Quadro nearly $14,000 for the distribution rights in Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico and Wyoming. So initially, it seems like this thing might be taken off, right? You've got corrupt members of the government who are like, literally selling this thing and using their position to convince law enforcement agencies to buy it. Maybe this could work. You know, it's never been a real product, but you might be able to keep it going for a while. As Jeffrey Stern wrote in a 2015 piece for Vanity Fair summarizing what came next. As Quadro Corporation grew, Roe attended security conferences. At one of them, he met Sam and Joan Tree, a British couple with a modest and legitimate business selling evidence bags, fingerprint powder and other supplies to police departments in England. Meanwhile, Rowe's device had attracted the attention of the FBI, which tested one, determined it was worthless and sent out a teletype warning to law enforcement agencies. Roe a camp to England and moved in with the trees. It didn't take long before a new version of Roe's device, with a new name, was being pitched to law enforcement agencies in England. So that all happens in 96. The FBI debunks the tracker and proves it's bullshit. He flees the country with the trees to start up a new grift. And that same year, a US District Court in Texas hears the lawsuit, USA versus the Quadro Corporation, which listed Raymond Fisk, Wade Quattlebaum and Malcolm Rowe as representatives, per an article in the 1996 issue of News Briefs. According to the indictment, the company marketed the Quadro Positive Molecular Locator as a detection device that used a chip to sense molecular emissions of anything from illicit drugs to explosives. Scientific analysis revealed that the device is simply a hollow box with a radio antenna attached, and the chip is a piece of paper between two pieces of plastic. Quadro has sold about a thousand of the devices at prices for between $395 to $8,000 to school districts, law enforcement and airports.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Great.

[Ed Zitron]

I know how this works. So you were completely correct that this is the gopher. It is the same thing.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's the same thing. It's the same thing.

[Ed Zitron]

They were smart and they gave it a gun handle.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes, you gotta have a gun handle.

[Ed Zitron]

You gotta have a gun handle.

[Brett Weinstein]

So that's real.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, hall monitors can go around being like, yep, yep. Call me poor, blah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Gotta have a holster for it. Shit. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

This was pre Blart, though.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. I wonder if any cops shot someone while reaching for the Quadro Tracker. I mean, probably gotta be one, or at least a locker. So by this point, Quadro has expanded the number of cards they've offered, and they added explosives to the mix, which really gives an idea like this piece of snake oil, the potential to kill a lot of people once they're like, it's a bomb detector, too, you know, You've escalated the human harm because if a drug detector fails in a high school. I'm not going to say, obviously, kids in high school with drugs, sometimes it ends tragically. But nine times out of 10, if some kid is holding at school, nine times out of 10, it's like a joint or something, right? And if they don't get charged for possession, nothing catastrophic is going to happen. But nine times out of 10, if a bomb detector fucks up, you've got a much worse like scenario here.

[Ed Zitron]

Statistically speaking, is it worse if it's a false positive or a false negative?

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. Well, I mean, that. I guess that is true. That Like I guess.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh no, both are very.

[Brett Weinstein]

Both are bad actually both are really bad because false positive with drugs means you're going to get fucked up and in trouble and possibly have your life ruined over not having drugs or having drugs, either equally bad to me honestly or with the bomb. False positive means people are going to think you have a bomb and maybe something really bad happens to you or

[Ed Zitron]

it doesn't notice a bomb and then you get blown up.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. The biggest worry, a false negative on drugs, not a big deal. A false negative on a bomb, big deal. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Huge deal. Not great.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Potentially like world changing deal depending on where the bomb is. So the Cuadro did play a bit role in at least one tragedy. Thankfully not like what we were talking about. In 1996, the Texas Department of Public Safety called a search for the body of a seven year old murder victim, Carlin Smith. They used a Quadro Tracker presumably with a little boy corpse card to locate him. I don't know what card they put in there. It didn't find anything. Cause it couldn't. And that's evil because they're giving, you know, the family hope. It's just gross to get involved with your snake oil in a search for a murdered 7 year old. I think, I think that's evil and

[Ed Zitron]

like taking it really seriously and being like yeah, we'll find your kid. Let me use this box with nothing in it and a bit of metal coming out of it.

[Brett Weinstein]

Fucked up.

[Ed Zitron]

It's got a gun handle though. It's very serious.

[Brett Weinstein]

Got a gun handle?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, like Ghostbusters. But your son isn't a ghost, we promise.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. Or maybe he is. You know, the Quadro will figure it out. Yes, but you know who didn't lose their sons tragically, I hope. Maybe. No way to know really. Here's ads.

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

Hi, it's Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamar. Want the full story? Take a listen. Hedi she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch the Aviator so I know every Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But incredible innovator, right? She says. He's a, quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well.

[Brett Weinstein]

Give us examples.

[Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

I know they do get along intellectually and in fact she helps him design a faster plane. She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Goodbye.

[Brett Weinstein]

And we're back. So the good news is the tracker was exposed and forbidden from being sold in the United States under court order before anyone got provably killed due to this piece of shit. And even though the FBI and the subsequent court case both proved beyond any doubt that the tracker was worthless, some users still believed this is a quote from that News Brief article. I haven't given up on the device, said John Beltzer, the campus officer at Blue Valley Northwest High school in Beaumont, Texas, which paid about $950 for the device. I don't believe the skeptic, the scientists or the FBI. It may not work on the exact principles that the company says it does, but it still has some merits, added Betzer. Mike Thomas, safety coordinator at Blue Valley, uses the device as a deterrent for students and remains convinced it effectively uncovers drugs and gunpowder. I did it myself, said Thomas. I found hidden shotgun shells.

[Ed Zitron]

Wow.

[Brett Weinstein]

Great guys.

[Ed Zitron]

Hidden by Whom.

[Brett Weinstein]

Hidden by whom? Well, and also, like, this is just. You think that you're a good cop and that, like, you couldn't be tricked. And so you wind up defending this bullshit device because you're defending your own ego. That's the brilliance of anytime you can sell shit like this to serious people. You know, my job is to find.

[Ed Zitron]

Almost as if the more wrong you get, the more you double down.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Interesting. Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's this thing of. Most people who are, quote, unquote, searching for drugs or bombs, to be honest, aren't really don't have a real job that actually helps anyone. Right. Not that, you know, especially finding bombs. That job is important. But most people who can say, that's my job are just a cop who took like a class to get certified to get a little extra pay. They're not like an actual expert on drugs or on bombs or any of that. There's a lot of that fraudulent stuff in, like, police training. That's a big part of why so not. Again, not that there aren't actual police explosives experts, but look at how the lapd, for example, handled high explosives not too long ago. There's some fun stories of that in the recent past. And I think that's what's happening here, is some cops who like, well, I did the training on drugs, I did the training on bombs. I have to know what a real thing is if I think this device is real. It can't just me being dumb and getting tricked by this idio motor effect. It has to work because I'm a professional, you know, and it goes the

[Ed Zitron]

whole way round to being like, I know better than everyone else. I know better than the feds, than these troublesome scientists with their fact finding.

[Brett Weinstein]

That's right. That's right.

[Ed Zitron]

These woke scientists.

[Brett Weinstein]

Fucking wokey scientists. And one of my favorite fun little side facts here is that one of the school districts who kept using this device even after it was banned was the McKinney Independent School District in Texas, where my mom used to teach. They kept using this thing again after the FBI said, don't use it. They keep using this because it's a deterrent. Right. This is from one school official. We're not looking to nail a particular kid. We're looking to send a message. Likewise, a Louisiana principal said, I heard that there had been some trouble with it, but I tell you what, I'm impressed with it. And this is not necessarily going to be used to catch kids with drugs. If my having this thing keeps kids from bringing drugs on campus, it's worth its weight in gold. Right. It'll just scare them off, you know, doesn't need to be real. That's a really bad attitude to have towards your job, presumably, finding deadly substances on kids, if that's how you're in.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

If it's something you actually take seriously, if you have this thing in your head about how the dangers of drugs and all, would you not worry about not finding drugs?

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, my brain concern that they can't find the things it's supposed to find, that they just discourage kids is really frustrating. So Guy Lee Womack was ultimately forced to confess that he'd used his office to sell snake oil. And he winds up having to quit the state attorney and I think he pays like a five grand fine. The men behind Quadro, including Roe, were acquitted by a jury, though, and found not guilty on three counts of mail fraud and one count of. Of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. And I think the main reason why is that their lawyers convinced the jury that they didn't think that they were committing a fraud. Right. As long as they think it's real. And because all these cops are going up on the stand and being like, well, I think it works. How could you know that the executives are lying? Well, these cops are saying they think it's real, even if it's not real. These people probably believed it was. And so it's not fraud. Right. So if you wanna know who is to blame for what happened next, because the fact that these guys don't get convicted gets a lot of people killed, mostly in ira. And the response is on the cops because the cops stop these people from getting arrested because they. They gave them a way out of this court case of the fraud finding. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus Christ.

[Brett Weinstein]

Now I should note, though, I did find exactly one cop at the time who identified correctly what was going on with this thing. The commander of a Jefferson County, Texas drug task force told the Providence Journal, we played with it in the office and got mixed results. Sometimes we'd find something, sometimes not. Our rate of success was about half. I think it was either blind luck or a Ouija board effect. It's not nearly as consistent as drug sniffing dogs, but there are no vet bills. So again, he's like, well, this is a Ouija board thing. But hey, it's cheap. Great. Cheap, good police work.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's not as good as dogs, which are also kind of a Ouija board thing.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. It's all just Ouija boards all the way down.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's just. Yeah, we're Just Ouija boarding through our lives. Please tell me it's not the same fucking people who do the bomb stuff, is it?

[Brett Weinstein]

You'd hope, but it is, actually. It definitely is. So while all this is going on, Roe and the Trees, that's that husband and wife couple who are selling stuff to cops in England. They're back in the UK repackaging the Quadro, which had been the Gopher, into a new form. Now, there's a little more opacity here as to, like, who made which new version of this device, when. But from what I can tell, Roe and the Trees produced a new version of the tracker that they called the Mole. M O L E, all in caps. I think it stood for something. And contracted a salesman named Gary Bolton to sell the mole, right, which they're billing as a bomb detector. It'll find bodies, it'll find guns, it'll find drugs. Whatever you need, right? Bolton was a longtime friend of the Trees, and together they all formed a new corporation called Global Technical to sell the molecule. At first, they're all friends, but because the mole was meant for sale in the UK and Europe, Bolton decides, like, well, if I want to really get this thing moving, I need to get a legitimate group of people who are attached to the defense industry to say it's real. And the best people is like, the Royal Engineers have this, like, team of guys who, like, test stuff to see if it works. Right? So if you can get the Royal Engineers to say this thing works, then you can sell it pretty much anywhere, because the Royal Engineers are very much professionals, Right? Right. So in 1999, he submits one of the moles to the Royal Engineer Support Team, and he asked them to repair a report on it, per the BBC. They found it was accurate only about 30% of the time and could not be relied on. Now, that should have been the end of it, right? Well, the Royal Engineers found it doesn't work. But despite that, that same article notes that several years later, like four or five years later, when his house gets raided, Bolton's home gets raided because of the crimes he's about to commit. Police find two letters of support from the Royal Engineers in Mr. Bolton's offices. And he'd use these letters to pitch governments and law enforcement agencies around the world on the mole by saying, look, the Royal Engineers said it works even though they didn't. And he definitely had the papers from them saying that it worked, even though they're supposed to have said that it didn't. One article I found on Corruption Tracker Claims that Bolton doctored the letters, but that's not necessarily true because Bolton remains involved with the Royal Engineers directly for some period of time after they test the mole and find its bullshit. And in fact, after that test, they will help him actively sell the mole. So I don't know that he did doctor those certificates. The first big law for the mole. Yeah, it's interesting. We'll cover that more in a little bit. The first big hurrah for the mole and for Global Technical was a home demo that Bolton carried out. This impressed a businessman named Jim McCormick enough that McCormick offers to help them sell the thing in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Now, at this point, Bolton has started to get greedy and so has everyone else, because especially I think this guy McCormick comes in and says, we could sell tens of millions of dollars of these. So all of the guys who'd been working together start planning on how to go to business on their own, right? They don't want to share the profits with the others. As Jeffrey Stern wrote for Vanity Fair, quote, the group would soon fall out amid rancorous charges and countercharges. All of them went on to sell versions of the tracker. But it was McCormick who had the greatest ambition. By 2004, he was going around England with a functioning prototype, trying to find a company to manufacture a heavier model with a more premium feel. A series of awkward encounters ensued in which he tried to persuade factories to build something they knew wasn't going to work. But by 2006, he had found a manufacturer willing to sign on. McCormick was no longer a distributor. Now he was a producer, too. So that's what happens with all of these guys. There's gonna be so many different versions with different names of bomb detectors that are all the gopher. There's four or five.

[Ed Zitron]

They're literally the same tech.

[Brett Weinstein]

They're all the same. Sold to 20 something countries around the world, Thousands of them. All the same thing under different names. Right? It's wild. Now, we'll talk a bit about some of these other grift mole devices. But I want to say now, regardless of all the different things these names are sold under, again, this is just the gopher. McCormick's variant. Like most used cards, you're supposed to load a card with the scent or essence of whatever thing you want to find. But that's not the only way grifters tried to pretend these things worked. Here's a quote from a different BBC article. Samuel Tree claimed the detectors could track down missing people if a photograph of them was placed inside A technique he said he used to search for Madeleine McCann, who went missing as a toddler in 2007 and two other children.

[Ed Zitron]

No, not Maggie McCann.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's vile. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, just. If you're an American listener, Maddie McCann was a girl who went missing in Portugal, I believe.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

No one really knows what happens. There's tons of conjecture.

[Brett Weinstein]

Horrible.

[Ed Zitron]

Some dickhead with, like, a fucking goat. Like, just a metal stick in a box where. Yeah, I'll find Matty McCann.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep. Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

This is alarmingly close to the power in Jojo's Bizarre adventure. I don't like any of this at all. Use a photo to find a missing person. This is Hermit Purple. It's unbelievable.

[Brett Weinstein]

It really is. So again, Madeline is still missing, tragically so his. None of this worked. Right. But the fact that Sam Tree made the news trying to find her is really bleak. Right? And he's doing it because it was the biggest story in the UK for a while.

[Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

This.

[Brett Weinstein]

This girl going missing.

[Ed Zitron]

The most British thing I've ever heard. Some con artist.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. And he uses the. The PR from this to sell. The version that the Trees make is called the Alpha six. And they sell it to the Egyptian government, to the Thai government, and to Mexico for about $3,213 per gadget. Although it varies depending on who they're selling it to. Their highest value sale was $24,000. And over a few years, they're only doing this for like four or five years. They make $2 million at least, selling these things. And per the BBC, they do it all while working from home. The Bedfordshire couple bought cheap plastic parts from China and assembled the devices in a shed in their back garden. These things cost like $2 to put together. They're just snapping them together and then selling them to, like, the Thai government for $4,000 or whatever. It's nuts. You love it. Good stuff. This hurts my brain.

[Ed Zitron]

It explains how every con happens. It's just if enough people believe something, everyone just goes, fuck it.

[Brett Weinstein]

And if enough people who have the right job titles say this is real, you'll actually kind of find offensive that someone should test it.

[Ed Zitron]

Exactly.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. So Bolton's device after the mole, the one that he starts coming up with when everyone breaks off on their own, is the GT200. And this is going to be the most famous of these gopher descended bullshit detectors. Bolton lucks out by the fact that after everyone else split up to make their own, you know, drug detectors, 9, 11. Happens. Right? That's like, right after they all go into business for themselves. And Bolton has connections to the US government and he has connections all over the world. He's a very well connected guy. So he realizes as soon as this happens, everyone's going to be way more scared about terrorism now because of what just happened. And no one's going to be thinking because people are not thinking. In the wake of 9 11, I can sell these fucking things like hotcakes. I can sell these everywhere and people won't even double check to see if they work because they paranoia back then. Right? Yep. Yep. It's the E. It's taking money from a fucking baby. The BBC describes his sales methods. Sales demonstrations would be rigged to succeed. Anyone skeptical of the devices would be publicly humiliated. And users were instructed not to open the equipment to avoid damaging the sensitive technology inside. We can't look inside. It's sensitive.

[Ed Zitron]

You might break it.

[Brett Weinstein]

You might break it.

[Ed Zitron]

Then how would we find the bomb molecule? Wavelength?

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. The bomb molecules will escape. It won't know what to look for.

[Ed Zitron]

Every bomb gives off a distinct wavelength from the molecules it's made of.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's so.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's how we find them.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep. So some of the devices came with detector cards, as I've said, which were programmed. The fraudsters claimed to detect everything from explosives to human beings and even dollar bills through concrete, water and from great distances. Fraudster Gary Bolton even charged the Royal Engineers thousands of pounds for useless cards that went missing from a trade fair in which uniformed members of the Royal Engineer Corps were paid to help sell the GT200. Right. If you want Again. So the claim is that he falsified those things. But after they give this thing a like say this is bullshit. The Royal Engineers take money to sell it for him. They're like at trade shows, shilling this and handing it legitimacy even though they know it doesn't work. I wonder why. I wonder who got money right? I've never seen that looked into enough. But it's very fucking sketchy that the Royal Engineers are involved with this product as long as they are Now. I don't know precisely what happened here. I don't know if they just didn't know that the GT200 was different from the mole, which is the device they tested. Home Office scientist Tim Sheldon addressed this sorta in a 2014 BBC interview after the scandal around this all came out and said the involvement of UK government agencies in promoting this is very embarrassing and awkward. Yes, it is. And the Royal Engineers weren't the only ones. The British embassies in Mexico City and Manila were convinced to back the GT200 and basically helped sell them to those governments by saying, yep, it's real. Sophie's gonna show you. This is what this thing looks like, the GT200, this fake bomb detector. It's got a pistol grip, it's got this antenna thing that swivels around on the top, and it's got a holster.

[Ed Zitron]

What are the stickers for?

[Brett Weinstein]

The stickers are so you can make your own detection cards. So you just put. We'll talk about how that works in a second. Actually, Ed.

[Ed Zitron]

What.

[Brett Weinstein]

Great question, though. What are the stickers? Cause they're sheets of stickers and, like, a jar that you're supposed to sticker to put the stickers in and, like, a substance in order to charge them so that it can search for that substance, basically.

[Ed Zitron]

And the brass card reader, of course, I assume brass is the best for molecules.

[Brett Weinstein]

Of course. Molecules love brass. Everybody knows that.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, Right, right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. So not long after this point, the United States invaded Iraq. Bolton starts working with another international salesman, James McCormick, because McCormick has better connections to industrial manufacturers. Now, in 2003 or four, by that year, versions of these devices are in use in something like 20 countries worldwide by enough people that the makers had been forced to devise new methods for tricking their customers. In order to make sure they didn't catch on, users were instructed. This is my favorite part. They start telling people when they start selling these for thousands or tens of thousands to militaries, they're like, we can't just tell them to just walk around with it. We have to explain how they can charge it, because they're not going to. They're going to. They're going to think it's sketchy if there's no power. So they tell them all you need is static electricity. So if you just before you start your shift, each new guard, you grab it and you just sort of shuffle around with it to build up enough static charge to power it, and that makes it work. So you've got in all. In, like, Iraq and in Thailand, all these, like, soldiers who are just, like, shuffling around in their socks with this thing to charge it up before they go out on ship.

[Ed Zitron]

Everyone do a little shuffle before they go and use the thing that kills them.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. So you shuffle around and then you go walk past, like, a line of cars. And if the antenna dips, that means that that car has explosives or whatever in it. Right. It's a positive alert, you know? Now, obviously, these give a lot of false positives, and when they Give a false positive, as they often did, the company representatives would either say, oh, there must have been a bomb there earlier, or they blame user error or the weather.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

You know, you've got a lot of excuses. Oh, the weather was bad. Oh, it was that humid. Well that can't work in that exact humidity, you know. You guys didn't know that, right? In 2006, McCormick inks a deal with a major manufacturing company to produce a much larger, more military feeling premium version of his device, the ADE651. This was directly manufactured for the new market that had opened up and liberated Iraq, which now faced daily roadside bombings and suicide bombings and had a real need for an accurate bomb detector. Very few places have ever needed one more than Iraq does in 2006.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Question, is there a reason it's called ADE651? Does that, does ADE stand for anything?

[Brett Weinstein]

Why are they, what are they doing? Automatic detection equipment or something? I'm gonna guess. But it's like, it sounds more military.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm just wondering what an upgraded version looks like.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

What's upgraded about it? Does it have a second thing that lies to you?

[Brett Weinstein]

I think it's heavier. It's heavier.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Second thing that lies to you?

[Brett Weinstein]

No, just the one.

[Ed Zitron]

How did they not sell like 50 SKUs of this thing? Just like, like they got this in pink for your female soldiers.

[Brett Weinstein]

I think that's how when they sell one for like 30 grand, they probably just make a bigger one and say like, oh, this will detect plutonium. Like hell yeah. But it's a little unclear. I did find how they like the instruction manual claimed it worked. So this is the BBC kind of summarizing the instructions you got with this thing. If you're some fucking soldier in the Iraqi army, number one. A small amount of the substance the user wished to detect, such as explosives, was put in a clip top jar along with a sticker that was intended to absorb the vapors of the substance. The sticker was then placed on a credit card sized card which was read by a card reader and inserted into the device. The user would then hold the device which had no working electronics. And the swiveling antenna was meant to indicate the position of the sought substance. So again, these things cost about £2 sterling to make, but they could be sold for £5,000 or so on up to like 20 something. Thousand and one even sells. One of these sells for half a million dollars. That has to, he has to put that in like a big ass box, right?

[Ed Zitron]

And so you put the Sticker.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

By a bit of bomb residue.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And the jar. In the jar, of course. Because how else would the vapors be kept?

[Brett Weinstein]

And the sticker soaks it up.

[Ed Zitron]

How would the vapors be stopped from escaping before you put them in the jar?

[Brett Weinstein]

I don't know how the vapors are supposed to work, and I'm not really sure how the vapors are supposed to be functioning here.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

I don't think they know.

[Brett Weinstein]

I don't think they know.

[Ed Zitron]

Makes me think that anyone could scam most governments.

[Brett Weinstein]

I think I could. I think I could.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, 100%.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. I need to go. We need to go back to just. I think I could just sell the U.S. army water and claim that, like I prayed to it, and it'll stop bullets. You don't need vests anymore. Just drink the special water. You know, I only got to sell a few of them at the prices the army is going to pay.

[Ed Zitron]

Superior hydration mechanisms.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. For what?

[Ed Zitron]

For advanced warfighters. And it's just water.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. War water.

[Ed Zitron]

War Water. Water.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

This is Dr. Joy from therapy for black Girls. If you could enjoy a spotless space without so much scrubbing, wouldn't you? Of course you would. Well, I've got you. Dawn Power Wash Dish Spray cuts through the mess and gets everything clean in half the time. We're talking about both the toughest messes in everyday dishes. Plus its work goes beyond the sink, like to clean counters, stoves, grills, and to remove stains on laundry. And it's really good at getting those hard to clean dishes. So basically, Dawn Powerwash cleans everything from dishes to grills, removing all the grease and grime, and does it twice as fast. Not bad. You can find Dawn Power Wash Dish Spray at your favorite retailer. Dawn is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy, and unwavering commitment to equality. And we'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of this year's deserving honorees. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.

[Brett Weinstein]

This ad is brought to you by Veeve Healthcare, the makers of Dovato Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Dovato. Dovato is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Dovato is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Dovato is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Dovato.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

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[Brett Weinstein]

Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit Dovato.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

[Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

Hi, it's Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder. We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamar. Want the full story? Take a listen. Hedy she starts dating Howard Hughes, the aviation tycoon. Do you know a lot about him? I mean, I watch the Aviator so I know everything Leonardo DiCaprio has allowed me to know about him. But incredible innovator, right? She says he's a quote, very strange man. But they do get along really well.

[Brett Weinstein]

Give us examples.

[Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

I know they do get along intellectually and in fact she helps him design a faster plane. She takes a look at what he's designed. It's got these square wings and she's like, that doesn't make sense. And so she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of like what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Goodbye.

[Ed Zitron]

This is Matt Altmix from How to Money and we are all about comparing prices to save money on so many things in life. I'm talking flights, phone plans, groceries, restaurants. So why wouldn't you compare prices for

[Brett Weinstein]

your next ride share?

[Ed Zitron]

Taking a few seconds to check Lyft can save you real money on your next ride. I did this the last time I caught a ride home from the airport after some travel. Guess who came out on Top Lyft. Comparing rideshare prices will help you to save money every time you ride. Save money.

[Brett Weinstein]

Check Lyft. So the fact that these things now look as expensive as military grade gear made them sell like it. That's why they're getting more money. And the new Iraqi government goes gaga for these devices. One of the gross things initially in, like, early reporting is like, the news will write about this as if, oh, they just are too dumb. They didn't know that it was fake because, like, they got tricked. They're not tricked. The Iraqi government doesn't buy these because the Iraqi government is tricked. The Iraqi government buys a bunch of these because they're bribed. All of the people buying anything for the Iraqi military are corrupt because every single Iraqi government official in this period is hideously and horribly corrupt. And that's basically still true today. These are not being bought because they really think they're real. McCormick and Bolton are saying, like, hey, it's your job to buy these for the Iraqi army. Here's several million dollars. And then they'll buy a bunch. Right? That's what's happening. They're not idiots, they're corrupt. Right, Right. Iraq becomes the number one buyer worldwide for fake bomb detectors in the space of a few years, spending more than 53 million pounds on no less than 5,000 of these devices, making the worldwide sales value of the ADE651 and similar models at least tens of millions of dollars over just three to four years. Potentially as much as $100 million. We know that McCormick falls in love with selling to Iraq. Who would buy versions of the ADE651 for as much as $40,000 per Vanity Fair? McCormick was also giving volume discounts and paying kickbacks, according to investigators, who have also suggested that he was diverting money into offshore accounts. But whatever the precise number, McCormick was flying high. Even by the lofty standards of defense contracting. When combined with sales and a dozen others, McCormick's income over five years approached $80 million. So he does very well off of this. And like any.

[Ed Zitron]

We haven't even got to all the people that died, I assume.

[Brett Weinstein]

No, no, no, we're getting there.

[Ed Zitron]

Very good.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, we're getting there. And like any guy who buys, you know, gets suddenly rich, he's gonna splurge on some rich guy purchases. He buys a $5 million house in Bath with an indoor fancy sound system

[Ed Zitron]

literally anywhere else but. Well.

[Brett Weinstein]

But he bought this one from Nicholas Cage. This was Nicholas Cage's former house. You could only buy one of those, well, I guess you probably could buy more. But he does buy Nicolas Cage's old house in Bath. He gets a vacation home in Cyprus. He buys a yacht, but he rarely uses either. Instead, his main hobby is pitching and selling this thing to new marks. Now, when you're using a bomb detector to find bombs and the bomb detector doesn't work, it's not going to take long before people start dying. We don't know exactly how many people get killed by this because among other things, in the early days, whenever an ADE651 is clearly responsible for like a failure and a bomb getting through again, the government is full of corrupt people getting kickbacks. So they just pretend that didn't happen. Right?

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's very easy. This is also. This is the Iraqi army. It's super easy for the company to be like, well, they're just not very good at using it. It's user error. They fucked up because they are. The Iraqi army was not very well trained. Still, during one massive wave of bombings that his detectors failed to detect in 2008, he scheduled McCormick, scheduled a press conference from Baghdad in which he stood with the head of Iraq's bomb squad and pitched his detector seemingly without shame. What makes this all infuriating is that the GP200 and the other precursor devices had by this point been repeatedly tested and demonstrated as fraudulent in the UK and the United States where they were manufactured, per Corruption Tracker quote. Despite the fact that the devices were tested again in 2001, this time by UK Home Office scientists and again found to be fake, the companies continue to operate and sell them and received promotional support from various branches of the UK government, including the Embassy in Mexico, UK Trade and industry who provided support for displaying the equipment at trade fairs, and members of the military who exhibited the devices. Predecessor devices had been tested and found useless by the United States Sandia national laboratories and in 2002, and by the US Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technology Division in 2005. So US and British soldiers in Iraq are not using these things. And part of what eventually causes a problem for these guys is that the smart US and British soldiers in Iraq realize their bullshit and realize, like, wait a second, our lives are on the line by guys using these to look for bombs. Whoa, somebody's gotta do something about this. They start pushing in 2009 to remove these things from fucking checkpoints. The BBC's News Night focused a special report on the matter, and regulators and law enforcement in England started gathering evidence and carrying out the early stages of an investigation.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's still being used at this time. Everyone's still using them.

[Brett Weinstein]

Maybe actually, Ed, that year they raided James McCormack's home and took a bunch of evidence. So you'd think, well, they're probably not still selling them at that point. Right, Right, yeah, because you'd think. So that's selling them on a detective constable in London. Joanne Law does attempt to stop these things from being sold anymore because they're fake. And she runs into England's Export Control Law, which only gives the government the ability to ban military hardware and security equipment that's electronic. And since there's no electronics in these things, they can't initially be banned. The fact that they're fake protects them. Like that's the original. They can't immediately be banned because they're not electronics.

[Ed Zitron]

They don't fall under.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

That's unbelievable.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah. This rocks. It's so good.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's so funny. This part's not funny. All this comes to a hideous climax in the fall of 2009 when a 20, and this is in like October, a 26 seat bus filled with a full ton of explosives rams into the Iraqi Ministry of Justice in Baghdad. Now, what happens here is a few things coming together. You've got in 2009, the surge has just happened, the awakening has happened. This is actually a relatively peaceful period of time in Iraq, right. And so there's a drop in the number of bombings and that convinces Prime Minister and future subject of this podcast, we'll get him, Nouri al Maliki, to take down security measures in Baghdad, including blast walls, because things have gotten safer and that would look good for his administration. So there's not walls up, which is part of why this is so bad. But the bombs get directly to this fucking justice building and go off. And 155 people are killed at least. I mean, it is a massive, hideous bombing, hundreds more injured. It is hard to exaggerate how like one of the worst single bombings in Iraq's history like that gets carried out here. And a subsequent investigation finds that, per the New York Times, the bomb truck quote, had to pass at least one Checkpoint where the ADE 651 is typically deployed.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus Christ.

[Brett Weinstein]

So we know it goes through at least one checkpoint that should have had one of these things, which meant it didn't get caught. That article quotes a US general saying, obviously these things don't work. We would use them if they worked. However, quote, the Iraqis believe passionately in them, whether it's magic or scientific. What I care about is it detects bombs, said Major General Jihad Al Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior's General Directorate for Combating Explosives. I don't care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them. General Jabiri said. I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world. Amazing, amazing comment. If you have met as many Iraqi army generals as I have, you know a couple of things. For one, they're all corrupt liars, right? And General Al Jabiri was no exception to that rule. Shortly after that interview, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior arrested Major General Al Jabiri on corruption charges, arguing that he'd taken bribes from McCormick. Now, really the charges were dropped because it's Iraq, but you shouldn't take that too seriously. The Iraqi government was then and is now ludicrously corrupt. Harith Al Qarawi wrote about this in 2013 for an article in Al Monitor, quote, in Al Monitor, quote, Security related ministries have seen the worst examples of corruption because of their huge budget allocations, poorly monitored US financial support, and the urgent need to build them from scratch. There are reports by the Integrity Committee, the US General Inspector in Iraq, and the Parliamentary Security and Defense Committee on the hundreds of millions wasted because of corruption in these ministries. Yet, except for a few mid or low level officials who found no political sponsor, all partisan senior officials managed to escape punishment or accountability. Wild how?

[Ed Zitron]

I just don't see. I guess the justice system works over there.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's a great justice system.

[Ed Zitron]

The Iraqi one's fine.

[Brett Weinstein]

Really good.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Brett Weinstein]

You should ask the founder of ISIS what he thinks about the Iraqi. Although that was really the US justice system in Iraq. Anyway. McCormick, the trees, and everyone else the British government could get their hands on were arrested in 2010. The court cases that followed found that corruption in the military was often a reason why these things were sold. A report by the U.S. special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction in 2011 estimated that 75% of McCormick's revenue was recycled to bribe military officials in multiple countries. Right. Which is how he's selling all of these.

[Ed Zitron]

That is called the sales and marketing expense.

[Brett Weinstein]

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We had to bribe them to get them to buy our product. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

How else are you gonna do it?

[Brett Weinstein]

Exactly. And the corruption tracker adds, in Thailand, the devices not only allowed through real explosives, but in the south of the country, where there is an ongoing conflict with a separatist rebel group, security forces have used the devices to justify the false imprisonment of Hundreds of people, according to rights groups. So it's not just people that they kill through letting bombs through. They also let governments murder, torture, and imprison people by pretending they had explosives.

[Ed Zitron]

These people dead.

[Brett Weinstein]

A lot of them. A lot of people. You don't know how many. Probably thousand again. In Thailand, people are getting through bombs, detecting checkpoints with bombs. I have no idea how many people in total die. Iraq continues using these things at checkpoints for years afterwards. I'm not convinced there aren't any in use still right now. The good news is that a lot of the bad guys in this story were sentenced for their crimes. McCormick received the maximum sentence for fraud, 10 years, and he was actually sentenced to two more after his release. Because he kept breaking the law, his assets were clawed back as much as possible by the state. But as Vanity Fair noted, this did not spell an end to the grift quote. A year after McCormick's conviction, the Egyptian military began testing an apparent adaptation of McCormick's device called the CFAST, claiming it can detect both AIDS and encephalitis. Last June, 38 people were killed at Jinnah International Airport in Karachi when attackers with suicide bombs and rocket launchers got past the airport security force, which has admitted to relying on the ADE651. Another version of the device was reportedly being used in Thailand. Mexican police looking for drugs have incorporated the device into their stop and search procedures. If they ever acknowledge that the device is a fraud, the convictions resulting from those searches would be vulnerable to litigation. In some countries, sheer corruption keeps the device in the hands of soldiers and policemen, maybe even up to the present day. And that's a beautiful story of a scam device. Ed, how you feeling?

[Ed Zitron]

I hate every person involved in this. I fucking. I hate them so much. It's also. You're right. It has inspired me. It has totally inspired me because it's like the same. It's people with AI especially. They are like. Well, so many smart people couldn't be wrong. Actually, they could. They could be wrong.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

It happens quite often. Thank you. Mm.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep. It's. It's the just. Yeah. Loopholeism. Right. Whenever you think, well, this guy is really smart, he couldn't get tricked. Smart people get tricked all the time.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Yep.

[Brett Weinstein]

You know?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Anyway, Ed, you want to plug anything before we roll out?

[Ed Zitron]

Where's your ed.app for my newsletter? Better offline podcast. You can find it on YouTube. And where you find your podcast. I'm Ed Zirtron. Please interact with my content I need you to Excellent.

[Brett Weinstein]

Interact with Ed's content, interact with my content and interact with yourself by getting to know yourself and loving yourself the way I probably don't love you because I've never met most of you, because that would be really hard for me to do. But you know, in theory I support you loving yourself unless you're a bad person. But I don't know that. Bye.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit

[Brett Weinstein]

our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com BehindTheBastards we love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

[Brett Weinstein]

Let's talk about Peyronie's disease, or pd. It's not widely talked about and some men may feel reluctant to bring it up, but it's more common than you'd think. PD can happen when scar tissue builds up under the skin of the penis, causing a curve with a bump during an erection that for some men may lead to pain during intimacy and impact mental health. A trusted urology specialist can help diagnose PD and walk you through your options, including non surgical treatment. Visit talkaboutpd.com hi, it's Karen in Georgia

[Karen and Georgia from My Favorite Murder]

from My favorite Murder. We cruised around LA in the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and dove into the fascinating life of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr. Want the full story? Take a listen. She starts dating Howard Hughes and in fact, she helps him design a faster plane. So she finds the fastest bird and the fastest fish and sketches out a drawing of what the two would look like as a plane. And that becomes the plane that we know today. And he calls her a genius. Check out our new episode spotlighting groundbreaking innovators like Hedy and Lamarr and Billie Jean King. Presented by the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Goodbye.

[Brett Weinstein]

This is George Tsavaris and Sam Taggart from Stradiolab. Let's be real. Home comes with a lot of odors. Cooking, pets, everyday life. That's where Febreze comes in.

[Ed Zitron]

Febreze helps fight household odors and leaves behind freshness that lasts. And with over 30 cents to choose from, you'll always find one that feels like you.

[Brett Weinstein]

Febreze. Freshness that fits your life, your space, your style.

[Ed Zitron]

Febreze is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality.

[Brett Weinstein]

You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard. This is Jacob Goldstein from what's yous Problem? Business software is expensive, and when you buy software from lots of different companies, it's not only expensive, it gets confusing, slow to use, hard to integrate. Odoo solves that because all Odoo software is connected on a single, affordable platform. Save money without missing out on the features you need. Odoo has no hidden costs and no limit on features or data. Odoo has over 60 apps available for any needs your business might have, all at no additional charge. Everything from websites to sales to inventory to accounting. All linked and talking to each other. Check out odoo@o d o o dot com. That's o d o o dot com.

[Podcast Advertiser/Promo Voice]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.