Scott Payne (91:03)
I'm dead. But I believe your threshold changes. Just like your workout comfort zone changes. Sometimes I take off jogging and I'm like, man, I feel like, good. Sometimes I take off jogging and I'm like, how long have I been running? And I look, it's been like a minute. I'm like, oh, God, Right? But at that point in time, I'd been going for three years, and I'd gotten thinner and thinner on taking care of myself. I didn't know how to decompress anymore. I literally couldn't. When I was asked, what do I do to relax, I couldn't come up with nothing. I mean, I work harder. Well, yeah, I'm like. I mean, I work out, but I'm like, that's not really. Is that relaxing? It's great for your body. You're releasing endorphins. But it's not like I'm playing Yanni and I'm all, namaste, you know, I'm like, I'm throwing. Trying to throw plates across the gym. But I crashed. I came back from an undercover op. I slept probably close to 20 hours the first day, maybe close the second day. An average of over 16 hours a day from Sunday to Friday. And I woke up Friday, and I had a buddy call me about another undercover gig. But all he asked was, how you doing, country? And I said, not too good. And after about an hour on the phone, he let me convince myself I needed to self report. And I called Safeguard and then the FBI. The Safeguard unit is under the undercover program. Joe Pistone helped create it. Him and another guy are the ones that created it. And it's specifically for the psycho, the psychological well being of the undercover. Wow. So you sit down and do some tests, and then in those tests put numbers into a graph. Then you sit down with the clinical psychologist. Then you sit down with somebody like Joe Pistone. And that's the. That's the kind of process. And I self reported, and they came down to McAllen, did an on site and said, you've been diagnosed as over assigned. Because over what? Over assigned. Okay. Because I wasn't just undercover in my career in the FBI. I was only listed full time twice, maybe three times that. And then from what I saw, that was rare in the day and age where I was undercover because I was also a case agent. And as I said earlier, I was a big hitter on the squad. So when I would come home, I would have to run cases. And just through attrition of everybody leaving the border, all of a sudden, one. One day, you're the senior person. Yeah. You're the. You're the principal relief supervisor for the squad, which means that the boss is gone. You run the squad first. I had the majority of the top 10 sources. The majority of the top 10 cases. I was on SWAT. I ran all the tactical and firearms for that for the McAllen and Brownsville offices. And I just. I ran out of wax, man. Yeah. And so they agreed to let me finish the Outlaws case on the phone. So I'm now talking to Scott Town, who's still my close friend, telling them, look, I got married. You know, I got married, but I'm getting divorced. I got to get my kids. She's from El Paso. I got to get her and my kids to El Paso. But after that, bro, I'm pulling shocks, and I'm coming up to Massachusetts, and that's what I did to stall time in that. In that time, one of the guys, Tim Sylvia, not the UFC fighter Tim Sylvia, who is a friend, but it was another guy who was an outlaw and got out of prison. He met me before I crashed and immediately wanted to start giving me stolen vehicles, wanted to buy coke and all this stuff. So I was like. I called the case team, and I'm like, look, he just called me, and he told me he basically won't. If I can get him a kilo at 18 a grand, he wants 10 of them. I said, but in the meantime, he's got a Hummer. He's got a, like, $100,000 BMW. He's got some other stuff he wants to sell. Do you guys want me to try to set it up? And they said, yeah, absolutely. So what I did is I set it up to the truck drivers that would usually play truck drivers for me, doing cameos. They went up to pick up some vehicles from Tim Sylvia. In that meeting, you can even hear me on the phone, because the truck driver, an undercover, calls me and says, hey, Tex, I'm standing here with, you know. What's your name again? You know. Okay, Big Timmy. Okay, Big Timmy. You can hear my voice talking. And he puts me on the phone with Tim, and Tim's like, hey. Because I'd agreed to pay him 21 grand for the vehicles, because for selling prices, usually about 25, 20, 25% of the real price, at least it was then. So I go. He says, hey, man, I'm going to report that BMW stolen Friday. I said, can you make it Saturday? Give me 24 hours more now. Then I'll know for sure that thing's going to be in Mexico. And then he gets Back on the phone with the undercover, the undercover asked me how much to pay him. 21 grand. When they went to load those vehicles, that's when he hit them for the same deal he asked me for. Hey, can you get them at 18 a piece? Well, I can buy 10 of them. And that was the reversal that took down the case. But the downside. One of the downsides of undercover is building those relationships that you got to betray. Yeah. So here I am, somewhere in Nevada, helping, putting on undercover training. I know that the case is being taken down. The next morning, I get back to my room. Lord knows what time it was, and my next tails chirping. I check it. Scott Town's left me a message. They already did the takedown, and they got the two truck driver. Well, supposedly the two undercovers and Timmy and another guy. So I call Scott Town back, you know, on the next hill. Yeah. And he says, real raspy. He's like, hey, I just want you to know, it looks like you're two truck drivers, man. They and big Timmy, they got locked up. I don't know what's going on. Somebody just called me and told me, and I'm like, okay. I said, well, maybe they're doing something on their own, because it's not for me up there right now. And he said, okay, okay. He goes, listen, man, I'm gonna get up and get cleaned up. We'll find out what the hell's going on. I'm gonna call you back when I find out. And I said, okay. His last words to me were, I love you, brother. You know, my last words to him were, I love you, too. And I hung up. And within about 45 minutes, the SWAT team hit his house, knowing exactly what's.
