Game Warden vs The Cartel

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Hidden Third

Episode: Game Warden vs The Cartel

Host: Mariana van Zeller
Guest: John Norris, former California Fish and Wildlife Game Warden
Date: March 4, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Hidden Third offers an intense, firsthand look into the transformation of game warden work from traditional conservation to front-line battles against armed cartel operations in California. Award-winning investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller speaks with John Norris, a former California Fish and Wildlife game warden, who unveils how underground marijuana grows—initially seen as environmental crimes—have become intertwined with global organized crime, deadly violence, and environmental destruction.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. John Norris’ Path to Becoming a Game Warden

• Origin Story: Norris describes how a chance encounter with a game warden during a rain-soaked backpacking trip shifted his career from civil engineering to law enforcement.
  • “I was in college and had been hunting since I was 9...and I never came across a game warden.” [07:26]
• Game Warden Academy: Nearly didn’t make the cut due to tough competition and diversity initiatives. Upon entry, quickly recognized for leadership and tactical acumen.
  • “I was selected by the cadre...through interviews, they said, you're going to be a squad leader. And I went, what?” [12:07]
• First Assignments: Norris starts in Riverside County, a “hotbed of criminality,” learning that game wardens must be ready for real dangers—including heavily armed poachers and organized crime.
  • “When I got there, it was like, I mean, it was the wild west.” [14:35]

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2. Early Experiences: More Than Tag Checks

• Unexpected Dangers: Quickly transitioned from routine checks to confronting armed gang members, poachers, and traffickers.
  • “I see the spotlight going...they're shooting every—coyotes, rabbits, deer. And then they're parking at the end of the road…they're gill netting fish. Illegally taking way too many fish.” [16:31]
• Solo Operations: Often alone and far from backup, faced with immediate life-threatening situations.
  • “I'm by myself...backup’s hours away, potentially.” [17:32]

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3. Undercover Black Markets: Wildlife & Beyond

• Reptile Trafficking: Undercover operations revealed a vibrant black market for rare desert reptiles, involving educated, affluent hobbyists and massive profits.
  • “We just went covert for months...within the year we're doing warrants and seizing snakes out of homes and breeding operations. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit.” [31:11]
• Environmental Impact: Importance of every species in the ecosystem and the hidden consequences of exotic wildlife trafficking.
  • “All of God’s creatures...has a very specific role in the ecosystem. You take too much of one, it's a domino ripple effect.” [33:02]

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4. The Cartel Era: Cannabis Grows & Armed Resistance

• Discovery of Cartel Operations: First stumbled upon by accident while investigating a dried-up creek; found 7,000 marijuana plants guarded by armed men in military-style gear.
  • “I see the two growers...one had an AK47. No, I saw a pistol on another guy...He is scanning tactically...These guys were expecting a potential problem from somebody and they were being stealthy and tactical.” [41:38–43:20]
• Rapid Escalation: Realization that cartel marijuana grows were an organized, armed threat—marked the beginning of a new era for game wardens.
  • “I have an AR15...I see that weapon and the guy in the front that's got the weapon...these guys were expecting a potential problem...” [42:33]
• Tactical Restraint: Norris did not confront the armed growers to avoid a likely deadly shootout.
  • “If we had approached them or they had seen us, there's no doubt in my mind a gunfight would have ensued.” [43:22]

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5. The 2005 Shootout: When Conservation Police Meet Cartels

• First Gunfight: A raid on a major grow in the Silicon Valley foothills turned into a firefight; Norris’ partner was shot, and officers narrowly avoided fatalities.
  • “My partner...just goes, ‘I'm hit.’ And drops. And he's screaming, but not out of fear...for the next eight seconds all hell broke loose.” [00:00, Recounted in detail at 57:16–64:01]
• Slow Medical Response: It took nearly 3 hours to evacuate the wounded due to risk of more armed attackers.
  • “They knew an officer was shot...they said if there’s more growers out there with guns, they could shoot the chopper down.” [65:30]
• Aftermath and Policy Shifts: Event triggered a statewide reevaluation, recognizing the cartel threat and need for game wardens to reclaim environmental damages.
  • “The response was from the general public, even the governor's office, ‘What are game wardens doing on a drug case?’” [66:58]

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6. Environmental Reclamation & Policy Evolution

• Beyond Eradication: Stressed the need for true remediation—cleaning toxic chemicals, dismantling water diversions, and restoring habitats.
  • “Terms of water diversion...taking out the human excrement, the encampments, the bunk beds, the hooches...taking all that water line out.” [54:46]
• Deadly Toxins: Cartel grows use banned chemicals like Carbofuran—neurotoxic, deadly to wildlife, humans, and police canines.
  • “EPA went, ‘Whoa, nope, can’t have that on our ag products…’ The growers...would have maybe a quarter bottle of carbofuran in a six-gallon backpack sprayer of water.” [49:12–51:04]

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7. Legalization’s Unintended Consequences

• Exploding Black Market: Post-2016 legalization, the illegal cannabis market is bigger than ever—cartels/organized crime produce much more than permitted growers.
  • “The illegal market is actually three times larger than the legal market in California...$9 billion black market of illegal weed.” [88:55]
• Barriers to Legalization: High taxes (up to 45%), permitting costs, and banking restrictions disenfranchise small-scale, long-term growers—empowering large corporations and black market actors.
  • “Many...were then locked out of the system of legalization in California when it became legal. Which is so unfair.” [87:57]

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8. New Threats: The Chinese Triads & Indoor Grows

• Rise of Asian Organized Crime: Since 2018, a surge in indoor grows tied to Chinese nationals/Hmong in Northern California, Oklahoma, Maine. Extreme environmental and social damage.
  • “10 to 15,000 hoop houses set up in Siskiyou county...Chinese organized crime...with their own chemicals...EPA banned chemicals...coming from mainland China. China.” [93:31]
• Collaboration with Mexican Cartels: Triads now launder Mexican cartel money (for less than banks would) and provide fentanyl/meth precursors in exchange for weed market access.
  • “They’ve collaborated to the point where the Chinese are laundering Sinaloa...money for no fee...” [97:21]
• Human Trafficking: Many Chinese nationals forced into grow operations, passports seized, paid little or nothing, often isolated and threatened.
  • “They're in the new country, a lot of times they take away their passports...don’t have anywhere to go.” [99:43]

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9. Human Stories and Morality in the Enforcement

• Victims Among Workers: Many arrested “growers” are exploited migrants with no history of criminal violence.
  • “A lot of the guys...are not the heads of the operation. A lot of times it's just poor people...in many cases...are either promised good money to come, but in some cases they're actually forced.” [76:53]
• The Cartel’s Victimization of Their Own: Norris and van Zeller emphasize the humanitarian issues, including forced labor and trafficking among both Latinos and Asians.
  • “It becomes a humanitarian issue...You got to sort it out. Who are the actual bad guys and who are people who are just like, you know, brought in and have no idea?” [79:45–80:01]

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10. Broader Drug Crisis: Polycriminal Cartels

• Cartels are Diversified: Marijuana, methamphetamine, fentanyl, and even human trafficking—these are interconnected businesses for transnational cartels.
  • “It’s just a big corporation, and they're so organized...my foundation guy...does weed...the framing guy...does hoop houses...the tile guy, he's my fentanyl guy.” [103:03]
• Public Health Perspective: U.S. approach to drug crisis criticized as being “a band-aid on cancer.” Portugal’s model of decriminalization and rehabilitation cited as a possible direction.
  • “In Portugal...if you're caught with a certain amount, until a certain amount...you can either go to prison or you can go to drug rehab.”—Mariana [112:17]

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11. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On the Reality of Game Warden Work

• “If you're doing real bad stuff and you want to keep doing real bad stuff, go to the woods.” —John Norris [19:34]

On the 2005 Gunfight

• “He just goes, ‘I'm hit.’ And drops. And he's screaming, but not out of fear. Tough, tough young man is going, ‘I'm hit. The MF's...hit me. They're ahead and for the next eight seconds all hell broke loose.” —John Norris [00:00, Recap at 57:16]

On Legalization’s Unexpected Effect

• “What happened is that it grew exponentially after it was legalized”—Mariana [85:43]
• “You cannot make it this hard for people who want to make this their honest business...you're making it so impossible for them that they have to then resort to black market.” —Mariana [111:53]

On Human Trafficking at Grow Sites

• “Completely slavery for it. They can never leave. Right. And it’s a mixed bag...victimization from the cartels with their own people.” —John [76:25, 79:45]

On Chinese and Mexican Cartel Collaboration

• “Now they're actually working together. They've collaborated to the point where the Chinese are laundering Sinaloa...money.” —John [97:17]

On Law Enforcement Dogs

• “She took almost a thousand bad guys in those organizations out of circulation. She found lost kids, she found murder weapons. But...she saved my life biting a suspect that was about to shoot me with a pistol.” —John, about canine Phoebe [108:48]

On Policy and Hope

• “We're failing our fellow Americans.” —Mariana [115:11]
• “It has to start from the ground up...We're leaving that community support out of it.” —John [115:38]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:15 — John’s childhood, early influences, and meeting his first game warden
• 16:31 — First major solo bust: confronting armed poachers and illegal night hunting
• 24:18 — Undercover fighting reptile trafficking and the surprising scope of illegal wildlife trade
• 41:38–43:20 — Discovery of first cartel grow: the tactical and environmental wakeup call
• 57:16–64:01 — 2005 gunfight: officer shot, firefight details, aftermath
• 73:36 — Reclamation: lessons from informants about cartel tactics and how cleaning up sites deters their return
• 84:48 — Legalization in California (Prop 64) and the explosion of the black market
• 93:31 — Rise of the Chinese triad-run indoor cannabis empire
• 108:48 — K9 Phoebe’s legacy in law enforcement

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation is candid, urgent, and reverent. Both speakers blend professional insight with personal storytelling, sometimes sparring about policy and often sharing deep empathy for both wildlife and exploited humans. The episode is full of gritty, real detail and emotional moments, especially when recounting violence, environmental loss, and the bond between law enforcement and their canine partners.

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Useful Takeaways for New Listeners

• Game warden work now involves “counter-cartel” operations, often in remote regions with little backup.
• Cartel grows are organized, militarized, and responsible for massive environmental damage using banned toxic chemicals.
• Despite legalization, the black market for cannabis is thriving—driven by burdensome regulation, high taxes, and the involvement of multinational organized crime.
• Immigrant laborers (both Latin American and Chinese) are often exploited or trafficked by criminal syndicates to grow or process marijuana.
• Chinese organized crime has become a dominant force in California’s indoor marijuana grows and is actively collaborating with Mexican cartels.
• Law enforcement increasingly finds itself caught between trying to protect the environment, public safety, and vulnerable populations—while also contending with shifting political priorities and limited resources.
• Policy reform, federal standardization, and a public health approach are urgently needed to address the complexities of the drug crisis.

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Final Note

This episode stands out for merging environmental crime, drug policy, organized crime, and human rights in a single, eye-opening narrative—a must-listen for anyone interested in the hidden intersections between wildlife protection and the drug war.

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For more:

• John Norris' book: Hidden War (Second Edition)
• Mariana van Zeller’s Trafficked documentary series

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Transcript

[A]

Hey, everybody, it's Theo Vaughn here, and I got a question. When it comes to soda, are you really picking a Zero sugar cola that you actually prefer, or are you just settling for what you've always had? That's the question. And I'll say this. When it comes to taste, I find that nothing beats Pepsi Zero Sugar. But you don't just have to take my word for it. That would be ridiculous. Pepsi has been doing blind taste tests for years. No labels, no brand names, just taste. And last year, they brought back the Pepsi Challenge, and the results were clear. 66% of people agreed and said that Pepsi Zero Sugar tastes better than Coca Cola Zero Sugar. In fact, Pepsi Zero Sugar won in every market they tested. So if you're grabbing a zero sugar soda, go with the one people keep choosing. When taste is the only thing that matters, go out and try Pepsi Zero Sugar today. Let your taste decide. We. I heard one shot ahead of me, and it was a medium bore. Sounded like an AK shot. And the second that shot went off, my partner, a young warden that been on a year, trained him in the academy. This was his first raid. He just goes, I'm hit. And dropped. And he's screaming, but not out of fear. Tough, tough young man is going, I'm hit. The MF's, blah, blah, blah, hit me. They're ahead. And for the next eight seconds, all hell broke loose.

[B]

So, John Norris, you're a former California Fish and Wildlife game warden. You spent years doing what you think wardens do. Checking tags, rescuing wildlife, hiking, endless patrols. But then one day you walked right into a massive marijuana operation run by a cartel. And overnight, your life totally changed, right?

[A]

It did literally change. At that point, I wasn't fully aware how much it would change, but that was the catalyst to a whole different direction. And how you and I met.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah, I've reported on a lot of the same sort of operations. I've hiked some of those trails. Not as many as you, definitely, but a few of them. And so I've been really excited to have you on the podcast. So welcome to the Hidden Third.

[A]

Well, thanks so much for having me. Big fan of yours.

[B]

Oh, I'm a big fan of yours.

[A]

Love what you're doing. I mean, even before traffic started and how in depth you got. And I felt like a kindred spirit, really getting to the depth of the story that so many people just don't dive into because there's so much darkness out there.

[B]

It feels like we know the darkness really well.

[A]

We know the Darkness really well and, you know, looking at some of the solutions. So when I saw that you had hidden third and congrats, by the way, this studio is amazing. Kind of your war room trophies from operations.

[B]

Absolutely. All the stuff I've. Not all. Some of the stuff I've collected throughout the years, there's a lot more, but this is, yeah, my, my pride and joy.

[A]

Yeah, it is absolutely beautiful. It reminds me of some of our war rooms for weaponry and snipers, setting up dog stuff, but same type of deal, you know, you can see it's really going good. And congratulations.

[B]

Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I've been having fun.

[A]

Honored to be here today.

[B]

Oh, I'm so happy you're here. Okay, so let's start from. I wanted to know how you even wanted. How did the idea of becoming a game warden start for you? You're a big outdoors, right? You grew up being in the outdoors a lot.

[A]

Very much. Very much. And this one, this is a weird story because by all stretches of the imagination, it shouldn't happen because I was going a completely different direction. I grew up in the suburbs of Silicon Val, and I know tech capital of the world. People think of the tech capital of the world, but you just go 20 miles south of San Jose, California, where I grew up and went to college and everything else, and you have some of the biggest cattle ranches still in the country. You have open spaces and county parks and state parks. So I was raised as a hunter, as a fisherman. Mom and dad were both conservationists. My dad was the state champion in trap and skeet shooting. He was a backup for the Olympic team. My mom competed with him and she was quite a champion herself on the trap and skeet range with shotgun. So right away we were, you know, shooting responsibly and target shooting at 8, 9, 10 years old, fishing and hunting and learning that when you are a consumptive user of wildlife, you're also a steward for wildlife. And I didn't know this at nine years old, but I was becoming a conservationist, had no idea I'd be doing it professionally. But I was seeing what we could do to protect our wildlife in the long term by managing them properly. So everybody that whether you hunt or fish, whether you consume or don't, everybody will always have clean waterways. They'll have steelhead trapped to see migrating. They'll have black tailed deer, they'll have turkeys. Everything California has to offer. When I was growing up, I had an uncle, the youngest uncle in my mom's family that was A civil engineer and neat guy. And we grew up without a lot of resources for a lot of years. So I was the first to go to college. I'm the oldest of four children, kind of moms. She called me her alpha, her wolf pack, because we were scrappy. We're all a year apart. And I kind of looked after my siblings when she was working two jobs and she was a single mother at the time, doing her thing, and it was challenging. I knew that if I could make it to college, then I could probably secure a lucrative job, something that would sustain me, my family, whatever we needed to do. And through my uncle who was a civil engineer. And I like to design, I like to draft, I like the idea of doing hydrology with waterways because I love water so much. I got into the civil engineering program at San Jose State and I was the first semester in that program and I had done. I was finished my finals on the semester system. This is like December, the first year, Mariana, that I'm in college and it was a December Friday and I was in the truck from San Jose State and raced down to south county where I grew up in the San Martin Gioro area by all these ranches. And my brother, Outlaw, I call him, one of our best friends in the family since second grade. Jeff Moore had a pack horse ready to go. And we were going to get dropped off at Henry Coast State park for like a six night, seven day hiking trip with a pack horse. And it's going to storm all six, seven days. And there's nobody in this park at this time. And the head ranger that I had been introduced to years ago goes, what are you boys doing? You know, it's going to pour. And half of these places you're going to the deep backcountry you've never been to before. And you're leaving at like 2, 3 in the afternoon. We got this. Barry, we were just so excited. And I really credit Jeff with being a catalyst to get me into not only the hunting and fishing, but the backpacking and living out of a backpack. And I know you know that from your operations. I've seen where you went with traffic, man, and you were more thrift than us. I don't think so. But, but, but the crazy part about it was we, we took off that night and we got 13 miles and found this lake in a downpour that we were lucky to find. And we stowed the horse and we were soaking wet and we made a fire that I later found out was illegal at the time because we had to dry everything out. And the next morning, here comes this screen four wheel drive truck creeping down the mountain, coming down to where we're camped. And I'm thinking, oh no, it's got to be a park ranger. We're the only foolish kids here during the winter. Who is this person? And he's checking us and we probably, maybe the fire is an issue. And he checked us out. And I said, you're not a park ranger. He goes, no, I'm a game warden. I went, what's that? And you get the thing that's weird about this story, the more I reflect on it is I'm in college and I've been hunting since I was 9 years old by either my dad, when he was still around, or mentors that brought me up. And in all those hunting experiences, I never came across a game warden, which is unheard of if you're deer hunting and you're waterfowl hunting or you're fishing on a lake. It was just this random coincidence that I didn't even know what the game warden position was. So I kept him there for two hours.

[B]

He's talking.

[A]

Oh yeah, my eyes were. Well, what do you do? That's your truck. Oh yeah, that's my office. That's kind of my steel horse. Right. I live out of the house. I got to be responding to my community. I have a, I have a computer. I don't go to a substation. I work alone most of the time. Sometimes I have my dog, sometimes I don't. And I went, wow, that's western dream job. That's like a dream job. I knew that when I got out of that six day hike, I was going back to the criminal justice advisor and meeting a new program at San Jose State and changed my major to criminal justice that winter five weeks later. And I learned, I go, well, wait a minute, man. I mean, this is an impacted program I got into with civil engineering. I don't want to upset a lot of people, but is this going to get me to be a game warden? He goes, we're one of the best criminal justice schools, John, in the country, just like engineering. So I was very lucky. And they had placed FBI, police, you name it, and game wardens in the past. So I changed my major and I was off to the races.

[B]

Isn't it so interesting how those things are? If it wasn't, if you had decided because it was downpouring, you weren't going to go camping, if you weren't there that night, if the game warden wouldn't have shown up, you would have had a completely different life. Right?

[A]

Yeah, I'd probably be a very passionless, disgruntled, wealthy engineer, quite frankly.

[B]

There would have been some gun benefits.

[A]

Yeah, it would have been great. And don't get me wrong, this stuff and it's been a fantastic business for my uncle and that, but you know, you just know. And you know, I mean your, your passion comes out in your work.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

And it's why you're so good at it. And I know you just probably like me. You pinch yourself every day and go.

[B]

Every day. Yeah.

[A]

How did I get here?

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

How am I doing this? And I am a man of faith and I believe that that day, that was God's plan. Because the possibility in 100,000 acre state park of me running into my first game warden. And like you said, what if it was five hours later? Yeah. And I'm gone.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so, yeah, I mean, the chills just reflecting it. That's pretty. Telling you the story is pretty.

[B]

You know, I tell my son, I have a 15 year old son, and I tell him all the time when we talk about his future and what he wants to do. He's still too young to decide, obviously. But I say if you have, if you're privileged enough to be able to wake up in the morning to go and do a job that you love, where it doesn't feel like work, that's what you have to try and do. This should be the goal, whatever that job is. I don't care what that job is, as long as it's something where you wake up, right, and you're happy to go to work. It doesn't feel like a job, which is essentially, I think, what you opted for and what your life has been.

[A]

Yeah. And like you, I think I feel incredibly blessed, incredibly lucky.

[B]

Hey, everyone. So real quick before we keep going, if you're enjoying this conversation, which I really hope you are, take a second to subscribe like or leave a review on YouTube.com Marianne Van Zeller or wherever you're listening to this podcast, the Hidden Third and share it with your friends. This show doesn't have a marketing budget behind it. It grows because of people like you. And this means everything to me. So thank you so much. Obrigada.

[A]

And then what I wanted to do is I just wanted to get through the academy.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, Now I'm a 21 year old kid, fresh out of college, wet behind the ears. I've done 11 months in juvenile probation in the juvenile hall, waiting to get on this hiring list because was impacted white males that didn't have military experience. There were very game warden positions. And I didn't realize they'd have five to 10,000 applicants for four positions.

[B]

No way. And then there was four openings.

[A]

Four openings statewide. Yeah. And then there was an affirmative action movement right then, which was fine from the standpoint of getting diversity because we wanted that. But I knew as a white male, I'm like, I may not get hired even though I ranked really high. But the chiefs knew, they saw something in me. They wanted me in. But they said, we're going to put you on, Mr. Norris. We're going to put you on a hiring list, extend it for two years and we'll retest if we have to. So I thought, well, I'm going to go to grad school. I got a window to get a criminal justice graduate degree that could come in handy later. And I'm going to work locally and I'm at juvenile probation. 11 months of that and doing grad school. And then all of a sudden there was four open spots off the civilian list. And I got the call 11 months later and they said, can you be at Napa Valley College at our fishing game police academy in February? We're going to do your background. And it was like seven weeks later, boom. You know, the, the bomb went off and now I'm. I'm a 21 year old cadet and I'm.

[B]

You were 21 years old. What was it like when you got that call?

[A]

It was my heart stopped, you know, the adrenaline dumped and my mind started spinning and I'm like, okay, this is the, this is it.

[B]

This is it.

[A]

This is, this is the big career, man. And I also knew after getting to know more about game wardens, after going that direction, legendary guys and gals, legendary game wardens that really like some of the journalism missions you've done, let's say on a really dangerous traffic case that just they turn over the extra stone. They go over the edge a little bit, maybe sometimes too far, but they stop a poacher that would have never got caught and that ripples in the community. And now thousands of poachers are. They're looking behind their back on their own ranches or up in the forest behind bushes, cases that weren't getting made. So I knew I had big shoes to fill. And I was. Was selected by the cadre, basically the captain lieutenant of the academy. Through interviews, they said, you're going to be a squad leader. And I went, what? What? They go, yeah, you're going to be a squad leader of your squad. So you're going to have to be squared away yourself. Every day is formal inspection. It's a meeting of a high stress academy in our uniforms. And then it's pt and then it's academics and it's gun range and all this. And we're getting grilled, you know, drill instructor style. And then I have to look after all the guys in my squad. And most of the guys in my squad were, were lateral transfers from lifeguards and state park rangers from right here in Southern California that were great officers twice my age. And now I'm their squad leader. It just seemed like I'm a kid, but obviously someone in leadership had faith in me and I took it very seriously. And out of that deal and made. And you make lifelong friends just like the people you've worked with, you know, and many that have retired because they were much older than me. And then some that came up with me. And the academy was a great experience. Wasn't easy. Learned a lot and dropped right from there, thinking I was going to maybe stay in the Bay Area and be in the home. And they'll go, you're going to Lake Elsinore during assignments. And I thought I heard Lake Almanor.

[B]

So wait, Lake Elsinore is here?

[A]

It's right over the hill.

[B]

So it's Southern California.

[A]

Go over LA to Riverside county, there's Lake Elsinore. Yeah, I mean, it's a short drive from where we're sitting right now. I thought I was going to a pristine lake called Lake Almanor. And then I got all excited and then the captain goes, no, Mr. Norris, I think you're thinking like Almanor. You're going to like Elsinore.

[B]

Elsinore. What is the different. What's Lake Elsinore known for?

[A]

Lake Elsinore is in Riverside county and it is just a hotbed of criminality.

[B]

Yeah, it is. You know it is. I know it well. I mean, I know Riverside county and I've been there. I've interviewed biker gangs there. I've interviewed marijuana growers. I've done. I've done it all in Riverside County.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And this was Mariana. This was 92 to 95. I was down here. And this position, the warden that had been here before had transferred up to the Eastern Sierras because he had been a career warden down here for so long. So it had been vacant for five years of any fishing game warden presence. We call places like that cherry patches because when you land as a new warden, There everyone knows wardens are 200 miles away if they're going to come to a call from another area. So when I got there, it was like, I mean, it was the wild west. It was spot guys, gang members from LA driving over the hill with AK47s and other illegal guns and spotlighting the San Jacinto river and some of my mountains right between Temecula and Lake Elsinore.

[B]

And what's spotlighting?

[A]

It's illegal to take an artificial light, like a big powerful light that you would plug in whatever big flashlight and at night drive and find animals and shoot them under the light.

[B]

Why is it illegal?

[A]

It's unsporting, it's unsafe. Deer freeze in the headlights and just shooting at night like that, not knowing your backdrop, especially during hunting season, you could have campers and hunters camp right behind where that shot's going to go. So it's a big no, no. But what these guys would do is they weren't just going over there to kill animals. They had a lot of criminal history of violent gang crimes and a lot of automatic weapons and semi automatic weapons and crazy stuff. So I'm working them like a game ward knowing, all right, I'm going to make my first big case. I'm going to make my TAC officers proud. Because at the time when you made good spotlighting cases and you could outsmart, creep up and catch people doing that, as dangerous as it is, you were considered a vetted game warden. You were respected by even the superheroes, our mentors, right. And so I'm back there driving around by myself with my patrol truck at an old 87 Chevy Blazer and I'm one little spotlight and there I am cruising, I see my first spotlight. And this is like a month or two out of the field training officer program. I've only been living in Riverside county. Like you're 21, 22 years old, about 22 now. Yeah, 22 and a half maybe. And I see the spotlight going and I'm watching them work up the canyon and I see muzzle flashing here, gunfire. And they're shooting every. They're shooting coyotes, they're shooting rabbits. If they're out there, they're shooting deer. And then they're parking at the end of the road, which goes to a back end spillway of a, of a lake called Canyon Lake. And they put out a net that I can see in their headlights and their flashlights. And what are they? They're gill netting fish. Illegally taking way too many fish leaving the gill net and just Shooting all night.

[B]

And this was because they wanted. Why were they hunting? Was it for entertainment out there?

[A]

Just to kill stuff? Yeah. And just for fun. Just for fun, yeah. And that's.

[B]

And at this point you didn't know who they were or who these people.

[A]

I didn't know anything about who they were. Yeah. I didn't know what was going on at that point. Didn't know if they were from the area. But I'm staying back hidden and trying to stay tactically safe and getting ready to, you know, catch them at an inopportune moment where maybe their guards down because they're shooting a ton. And this goes on for hours. And finally I get in behind and blacked out.

[B]

And you're by yourself?

[A]

I'm by myself.

[B]

That is crazy. Did you think for a second that that probably wasn't a great idea?

[A]

I thought, this is all I have. But I got backup coming. But backup's hours away, potentially because it's so remote and most of the agencies around me didn't have four wheel drives. They had squad cars like Paris Police Department, Riverside County Sheriff's. They had a helicopter that helped me out that night. Fortunately, one of those agencies, I don't know if it was Riverside or chp, I don't remember that they came at

[B]

some point to help me out.

[A]

They did because they heard me go on the radio and I was the new call sign for that position. And they heard this young man's voice and they're like, there's a 5313 warden out there again. And they knew Al, who's the warden. That was one of my mentors who was up north and about to retire. And they go, he's behind Canyon Lake and San Jacinto. He's got live gunfire, he's got guys at gunpoint. And they were, they were freaking out. I hadn't met some of these guys.

[B]

This guy is insane.

[A]

Yeah. Chopper comes in, squad cars are coming in and they're almost breaking their suspension to like get down to where I'm at. And I've got. At that night, it was eight suspects that were in a van all out laid out that I'm not going to go and arrest and handcuff and search anything by myself. And I finally had help. But it was one of those cases that pretty much defined how crazy some of these poaching cases are. Right.

[B]

And not something that you were expecting once you first signed up. Game ward, I'm assuming.

[A]

No, I was trained for it because we had a really good His Call sign is Rock in both books. He was a Vietnam veteran, saw a lot of combat, lost a Green Beret, Special Forces brother, still mia, unaccounted for. So he pretty much dial this in for you guys are going to get into some very Western stuff. You're going to be by yourself. You're going to have everything from sexual assault perpetrators. You're going to have murder bodies dumped. You're going to have guys out there that are hiding from the law, that have felony warrants that might have a murder rap, they might have armed robbery, a lot of gang violence. And I knew where the area I was going. And sometimes ignorance is bliss because I was warned about it, but. But not to the point where I didn't go do my work and do my research and get my geographics down. And I had an affinity right from the drop to be. To get into tactics and get very proficient as possible because this was. We weren't quite at 9, 11 yet, but we were seeing a lot more. School shootings were starting. You were seeing just a lot more violent crime, especially in the outdoors that I'm getting privy to as a game warden that if you're doing real bad stuff and you want to keep doing real bad stuff, go to the woods.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it's the best place, of course.

[A]

So that was the deal. But when I started making cases like that, I got kind of addicted to stopping those type of poachers, knowing they probably had a bunch of other crime in the LA Valley, which many of them did.

[B]

And so these eight guys that you first on that first operation, what were they? Were they actually gang members or what was there? They were all gang members.

[A]

Yeah, Latin descent, right. From LA Basin.

[B]

And they came in with what kind

[A]

of weapons they had.

[B]

So they had their shooting rifles.

[A]

They had rifles. They had an AK47 derivative. They had a completely prohibited like assault shotgun called a spas 12. That's Italian made. And what was crazy is I was collecting a lot of what we call exotic weapons for our academy class. There's a class where our cadets, we spend two or three days just handling about a thousand different weapons because game wardens run across more guns than any police officer ever. Because you might see an old German Mauser, you know, granddad's hunting rifle, and you might see a fully automatic machine gun that's been converted to be used in gang violence. And I was in the district over the hill from us where we sit to see it all. So what I would do is I'd seize these weapons upon arrest they're not going to get them back. And when they were forfeited, they could go to our academy for training to educate other. Other wardens and those. That same TAC officer Rock and the staff that believed in me to be a squad leader. I'm sending guns like up every month and I go, where'd you get. What's this one? Whoa. You see that one? You see this one? Great. And they all end up in the academy. I was paying it back, you know.

[B]

Do you know an interesting story that you just reminded me because of what we're talking about is we want. I once did a story about ghost guns here in la, and it was about these unserialized guns that people are making in their backyards or wherever.

[A]

And the AR lowers.

[B]

I mean, all of it. Yeah. And when we were spending time, we actually went to a backyard of someone's house here and we saw this whole operation. They were selling. Making these guns with. With gun parts that they bought from online, others that they made themselves. And they were. And they. They were selling them mainly to gang members or cartel members, actually. And a few days later, we ended up going with the same group to. It was Riverside county. And it was. I believe it was sort of. Is it like Mojave Desert there? And that. That's where they would go every time they built new guns. They would go and test them out,

[A]

just fire them out and work them.

[B]

And that's what they were doing. So I was just thinking it might. Must suck for these guys who, you know, live off crime essentially in. Mainly in the inner cities, and then they go out there just for hunting, in your case, and they get caught for hunting, which is, I'm sure not what they expected at all.

[A]

Exactly. But that's where they go, where they can shoot, where they might get off the path and not be contacted by law enforcement. So I realized then that the game warden job wasn't going to just be checking fishing licenses. It wasn't going to just be conservation cases. Like that cool game warden that met a couple of college kids that were out doing good stuff just without the right equipment, getting hypothermia from being so good.

[B]

The warden that made you want to become a warden.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

Your life was actually going to be very different.

[A]

Exactly. And I mean, I mean the positive on this, though. And I always. I mean as much evil as you and I have seen in our work, and we've seen a bunch, but I believe there's so much good still. And I see so much good in especially the Hunting and the fishing community as conservationists because 99% of everybody I contact is a game warden with a gun. Are legal, ethical. Super excited to see me. It's not that typical law enforcement. Hey, dad's at the game warden and if they're older, they're like first pitcher. I'm helping them bring their deer out. These are really, really responsible, really inspiring young men and women getting into those type of activities. And there are force multipliers, we call them our eyes and ears. It's very, it's the very vast minority that are that vicious. But, but of course when you do run into them, you're usually alone, you're usually far away from backup. So it's a very dangerous job that has a whole lot of light, but when it goes dark it can get really, really problematic.

[B]

So before you actually got into the whole cartel marijuana operations, which we'll get there. But before that, what was the craziest operation you went on? Before marijuana?

[A]

There were a bunch.

[B]

I mean I'm sure that that first one was pretty.

[A]

That was a big one and something I got into the first year I was in Riverside county and I don't remember the name of the operation, but it was running down herpetologists, illegal herpetologists that were taking desert snakes and lizards that are super high dollar on the black market kind of from a traffic type story. And they come from all over the country and spend a week or two or more driving the roads really slow at night under their headlights to get desert. Rosy boas. Chuck Wallace Gila monsters, San Diego mountains.

[B]

So for people that don't know, herpetologist is somebody who studies, a scientist who studies essentially frogs, usually reptiles. Reptiles, right. Yeah, exactly. I spent some time with some herpetologist in the Amazon jungle many years ago, looking after. I mean they were trying to see if there was new. I mean they would go out for like three, four months at a time and they would find all these new species every time they would go. Which is crazy how much there is out there. Yeah. But it was really fun. I had a great. It actually I thought I was going to be super afraid because I mean, who wants to go out and hang out with like poisonous frogs, right?

[A]

Big snakes, especially down in that jungle.

[B]

And we were camping too. I mean we were on hammocks. It wasn't even a tent. It was out in the wildlife in hammocks. And I'm going to tell a quick story because it's a fun one.

[A]

Yes, please.

[B]

I actually thought, I think I told this to. On Joe Rogan. One of the. My visits to the Joe Rogan podcast once, where I'm there and we came back, we went, it was at night, we had these headlamps and it was me and my husband who I was working with at the time, and these two herpetologists. And they would do this every two or three months. They would go out there and spend weeks on end just looking for new species and sort of doing conservation work as well. And we go out at night because it's the best time to go out and look for poisons. And we'd have our snake boots on, our snake guards and all of it headlamp. And it was incredible. I mean, these guys would see the most craziest dangerous looking animals in the world, snakes. And they would jump and grab them and show them to us. I can't even remember the names of them, but it was really beautiful. And I came back to camp and I'm thinking, wow, this is so special. I'm really, I. I thought I was going to be afraid and. But I'm really brave and I'm the queen of the jungle. This is what I thought of myself. I am so brave. I can't believe I just did this. And then we all go to sleep in our little hammocks and before we go to sleep, one of the guys, the scientist was telling us how there have been all these jaguar attacks in the region. So of course not the best story to tell before you go to bed.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And I wake up up an hour later and first of all, I am freezing because nobody told you that it gets really cold in the rainforest at night. So I'm shaking from so cold and then I start hearing it. It's right next to me and it's breathing and I can feel its breath next to me. And I go into full panic mode where I can't even ask for help. I thought that if I'd make any noise, that's when it would attack me. And there it was. And you know, humility set set in where I realized, turns out I'm not so brave. I'm not the queen of the jungle. And at some point my husband, who's sleeping in a hammock next to me, wakes up because my teeth are. You can hear the noise of my teeth.

[A]

Just the grit, grit.

[B]

Yeah. Like, oh my goodness. And I'm so scared. He wakes up and is like, hey, are you okay? And I managed to explain, hey, I think there's a jaguar right next to me. And. And he goes with his flashlight and we don't see anything. Any. I wasn't able to sleep at all. Whole night thinking that it was going to be attacked.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But there's nothing we could do. Yeah, but he promised me that there was nothing around there. I was probably just imagining. I wake up in the morning, I'm telling this story. This is a long story. I'm sorry, but I'm telling this story to the scientist.

[A]

Yeah. Don't hold back.

[B]

And they, and they turn to me and they say, they start laughing. Aha, sure, whatever. And I look at my backpack and it's full of hair. And I, because my backpack was right next to me and I showed it to them, I said, see? See, it was, it was an animal. And they start laughing even more and they point to the dog, spent the night there. It was the most embarrassing moment ever where I went from thinking I was so brave to being petrified and thinking I will never come to the Amazon again. And then realizing, oh my God, it's even worse than I thought. I was scared of some of a dog all night.

[A]

Yeah. But the thing is, jaguars, leopards, mountain lions, I mean they're not always attacking, eating people. But there was a rare instance where they do.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And jaguars are some of the stealthiest big cats on the planet.

[B]

Yeah, they are.

[A]

I would have thought the same thing. Who wouldn't?

[B]

It was so. It was so.

[A]

And even after you did determine that it was just a dog and haha. I still wouldn't sleep well, I'd want a perimeter fence, give me some ir.

[B]

We sleep for a couple more nights and it was actually pretty fun. But. But yeah, but all this to say, I can't remember what. Oh, how you were with these herpetologists and. Yeah, and so they were. So there were people out there that were basically just trafficking the. These reptiles.

[A]

Yeah. And there's a differentiation because I mean the scientists and herpetologists that we learn from during this operation were completely legal and great. But you have these. They may not be professional herpetologists, but they know all the stuff, they know the biology and they just are just enthralled and fascinated by all these different reptiles. And they want to breed them, they want to have the babies, they do it all on the black market because a lot of these are very protected. And I mean, I'm a new warden trying to do the spotlighting and the fishing and the gill netting and the streaming alteration. I collected snakes as a kid. We had king snakes up in the ranches all over Silicon Valley and the gopher snakes and the horned lizards I didn't know about a desert rosy boa was. Or how sensitive they were and almost endangered and how pretty they are. Or a gila monster or chuckwalla rubber boa. All these different snakes and how much they bring on the black market. Now I'm like, okay, now the light's going off. I was told in the academy we'd have all kinds of different things. And so the funny part about this story is we started to see the activity, make a couple of contacts. And so we had a really cool lieutenant that was okay with some of us game wardens. And I was new in the squad. I had a couple of veterans that had been on at least a couple years older than me. And they had a little bit of snake experience. So we did an undercover operation. We just went covert for months. And we go out and collect. Like some of those guys leaving their big corporate jobs and getting a hotel out in Banning, California, let's say along the 10 freeway. And they're going to just go poach snakes for 10 nights. And so we would go out and be poachers pretending you were poachers, pretending to be poachers with them.

[B]

So you got to gather information.

[A]

And you always meet at crossings at night, you know what each other look like because they're driving really slow. They're not really spotlighting for mammals, but they're using their headlights so they don't draw the attention of a spotlight because they know it's illegal. But if they drive slow with their headlights and the desert gets a little cold and reptiles need that ideal 83 degrees to temperate their body, all those snakes come out to the edge of that road. Cause it's still warm well after dark, 2, 3, 4 in the morning. So we could see we had our probable cause, but oh, that's definitely a collector. So now I'm going to go collect this side and maybe we're going to meet up, we're going to have a conversation. And that led to now I'm in a deep cover operation fresh out of the academy. And we're like 20, 30 suspects and spending a year within the year we're doing warrants and seizing snakes out of homes and breeding operations. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit.

[B]

Yeah, it's multimillion dol. Trafficking reptiles. Knew. But there's a vast black market for reptiles around the world.

[A]

Yeah, who would have thought, right? I mean, major money. And the crazy part about that story, and it's public, so I can talk a little bit about it now, but we're doing our little thing, and then we run into another van out there doing the same thing. And when we go to kind of meet these people, we find out, oh, man. Our real undercover team, like that operation, we have a special unit in special operations similar to met, but strictly covert. They were out there working the same stuff, like on a grand scale, and they're like, what are you guys doing here?

[B]

More undercover than there were, actually.

[A]

Yeah. I won't say the name, but a good friend of mine, I'm like, what you, what you? You're just at the academy, what's going on? It was crazy. And so we collaborated and I learned more. I call it drinking through a fire hose of a learning curve. I would not. It would take me 10 years to learn that stuff in the Silicon Valley. Because the diversity down here in the Southern California desert, plus the high mountains, you have so much down here that people just don't realize. So the three years here were exponentially valuable for getting me more vetted to do whatever else was going to happen next.

[B]

Now, I think people would ask, why spend so many resources trying to protect reptiles? Explain why it's important to protect whatever creature there is out there.

[A]

Well, yeah, it's a great question. And when you really look at it, you may not think a snake is pretty or it's a type of pet that you'd want in a terrarium in your house. And some people do. But at the end of the day, all of God's creatures, whether they're not so attractive, reptile, or the cutest little bear cub or whatever, and everything in between has a very specific role in the ecosystem. To keep everything in balance, the predators need to be of a certain amount so they take enough of the prey like big game environments and rodents to keep things like disease, to keep things like viable populations of big game species. These fisheries are the same way. And if you're taking too many of these, and we got to remember that we've impacted the biggest harm to wildlife is numbers of humans, Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And of course, we've expanded the country. We don't have much frontier states left. Even the last quote, unquote, great frontier state. My new home state of Montana, it's growing exponentially, and it's just happening. And so we're impacting more wild spaces. And I know, I mean, you more. I mean, I know you resonate with everything you saw in the jungle. South America, the Amazon and everything, the rainforest, deforestation.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

You take habitat, you take animals. And I didn't realize how on the fringe of being completely extinct, some of these reptile species were, and what role they play in taking out too many rodents and what their food source is. And so it's all that ecosystem balance. You take too much of one, it's a domino ripple effect and you destroy ecosystems for generations. And so we put a lot of resources into it, but nobody had ever had cases like that that rippled for a decade or more.

[B]

So what was this network like? Were they just selling here in California or would it go to other states?

[A]

It was going to other states. Yeah. It might have been going out of country, I don't remember. But a lot of them were collecting breeder pairs to have rosy boa, like snake babies. And they would sell them for very high dollar. Internet stuff was kind of starting, that was pretty early. But they'd go through, through Internet sales, they'd go through kind of black market. I know this person. If you need to move this snake, they'd have a conversation and then they would do trades. Yeah. And a lot, a lot of money was exchanged. And these people were, they weren't your typical anything criminal. You know, they were very well to do, Very smart, very educated families, great jobs, fairly affluent.

[B]

So they weren't doing this for the money. They were mainly doing this for the thrill or because they were doing it

[A]

for the thrill and they wanted to expand kind of their breeder pairs and not pay attention to our laws to keep them in balance. Balance. So that's where they were. And they were definitely making a good chunk of money too. Supplemental or otherwise. It was, it was a lot of money.

[B]

Okay, so then, so this is more or less what you'd expect a game warden to be doing.

[A]

Right?

[B]

But then what happened that one time where everything changed.

[A]

Yeah, let's go in the wayback machine to.04. And I've been home now since around 95. When I call home, I'm in the Silicon Valley foothills working all the ranches I grew up on. I'm meeting poachers I didn't know even existed. Did Henry Cove park, where I learned a backpack and met that warden. Now I got the key, you know, the golden key, and now I can patrol it. So that was super nostalgic and awesome.

[B]

And what are, what are the poachers? What are they poaching? Mainly at that time, you know, it's

[A]

everything from trophy blacktail deer. Out of season. It could be steelhead fish. We still have a steelhead fishery. You know, a steelhead is a ocean trout that migrates inland to spawn. And goes back to the Ocean. And the US Fish and Wildlife Service values them at somewhere between 25 and $40,000 a fish right now because they are so impacted in numbers. And steelhead fishing is pretty much eliminated in a lot of coastal states like parts of Oregon, Washington, especially California. Or it's catch and release only. And there's like a very limited little window you can, you can catch these fish because they're just so depleted. And so, so when you start having development, you start having people fishing for these things out of season, you start to deplete a fish that's really necessary. I was doing a lot of that. And that's all over in the San Jose Bay area in the Silicon Valley, there's four or five steelhead channels that still have migrating fish. And there were impacts there from pollution. And then what we're going to later learn, cartel grows on an exponential level.

[B]

So how did you learn that?

[A]

Okay, so 04 and ironically it was March, April, and that's when the trout fishing is going on and it's open and the steelhead have spawned and usually they're starting to work their way back. So you have little fry hatching the babies. And I have a very, another very good friend that was a friend of the wolf pack growing up that became a fisheries biologist, did his masters on it right out of San Jose State. Call sign gi I won't say his real name in my first book. And GI calls me up one like, like a Saturday morning morning and just goes, dude, I've been doing this. He had a transect study of two nice creeks on a ranch that was now public land right below Henry Co Park. And he'd been watching it for a couple of years. And it's April, so all the runoff is flowing great. And he's got red legged, yellow legged frog, which are endangered species, steel, a trout, all this stuff. One of the creeks is bone dry in April and everything's dead. When he drives into the ranch, the headwaters, everything's dead. He's, you know, it's, it's dried out. He's seen like visqueen plastic, little debris, little pieces of black pipe which we later know the black poly pipe is the number one irrigation way these cartels water these grows. And he goes, it's bone dry, man. I go, it's April, gi How can this be? He goes, someone's diverting the water up top. I said, okay. And I've been working spotlighters and fishing. So the next morning after a little sleep, I grabbed him and put him in the truck, we go up to the mountain, to the top of the ranch, that I've had a little experience, but he knows it. We dive off into the canyon. I have no cell coverage, I have no radio coverage. I have my AR15, I have a backpack, a light kit.

[B]

And you're not particularly concerned either. You were thinking, oh, this is just. We're going to.

[A]

I'm prepared. But I did not expect what I would find 100% because it just had not been seen before. Nobody had, you know, tipped me off to this could be a possibility that maybe we had this embedded presence, you know, in this part of California and we'd later learn rest of California and now spreading to other states. And he's an unarmed civilian, albeit very savvy in the woods and good stalking tactics and hunts and fishes. So I had the right guy with me, thankfully. And when we got down that canyon and I'm just looking at pristine canyons and just beautiful. And we get down to the start of what should have been a beautiful flowing little mini Grand Canyon tributary. And it's bone dry. And right below us is plastic visqueen, a hand built dam and a pond that's dammed up the entire creek. And everything down is bone dry. And I mean, the headwaters are almost two and a half, three miles below us where we drove in. So I go, this is bad. You know, this is steelhead migrating channel. I know this creek, this is a tributary to Coyote Creek. This is bad. And then we see the pipe, the water line going down the dry creek to water something downstream. And very quiet and stealth, like I put them behind me. And we start working our way down this Creek. And about 100, 200 yards down, we start seeing 18 inch marijuana plants on both sides of the channel. I start seeing a little bit of camouflage painted, you know, tarps, a little bit of a structure. But right then we just stopped. I said, okay, this is not some landowner, some illegal farmer for agricultural crops, diverting water for their cattle or for their ground crops or their trees. This is weird. And we hovered and the creek Mariana goes down kind of, but maybe 10ft wide. And there's an erosion cut bank bank where you can kind of hide in it with a bunch of debris and roots of trees. And then we spot the two growers. Oh, they were there, they were there. It was a live and grow. And I later learned this is how Sinaloa did it at the time. Live and grow, 7,000 plants. We're looking at probably 500 of those plants. And I see the two growers start to work out of the brush ahead of us up downstream, but on a channel that's kind of even with us, just above their plants pants. And what I saw from a tactical standpoint went, whoa, this is not a typical poacher. These guys are in od, olive drab green battle dress uniform, Vietnam era, probably from a surplus store. One had an AK47. No, I saw a pistol on another guy. One guy had a machete. And they are creeping through like we would in our sniper or our entry team that I would later build with the MET unit, which was already, you know, kind of behind the scenes. We're getting trained for that when this 04 incident happens because we're after 911 heaven and the twin towers have fallen. And a handful of us in the agency, either with military experience or tactical experience, we're starting to gear up for what we might need later as a game warrant agency. We're going along and I see that weapon and the guy in the front that's got the weapon, I mean, he is scanning tactically. He's not saying a word. There should be no one there. Why would he not be whispering to his partner? And he's looking around and the, the other grower has a machete and he's digging in the holes a little bit. He's adjusting water lines. But the gunman is now standing behind the guy tending the water lines, basically covering him, looking behind him, which we would do in our tactical unit. You always look at your six o', clock, your tail gunner position, we call it. You make sure no one's coming up behind you. So these guys were expecting a potential problem from somebody and they were being stealthy and tactical to guard and defend and be ready to, to defend their grow site.

[B]

Yeah, that's interesting to me. I didn't realize that they were armed already from the start. So this was the beginning. It then became a massive thing. You'd see cartel operations and marijuana grows all over California, national forests, national parks. But I didn't know, and I know that then they eventually became more and more armed. Right. They had more and more weapons. But I didn't know it started from the beginning. I think that at that time they would think that they would never be caught. So they were just any person that they would have there, they would just be working on the, on the actual plantation planting, but not, not the protection. But it seems like one guy was just there to protect.

[A]

Yeah. And they were, they were both armed because I definitely saw a pistol on the, the One grower that was tending plants and the other guy had the bigger gun to defend, which we would do with a long gun anyway. But did you.

[B]

But did you approach them? We hope not.

[A]

We lied. We did not approach them. There was no way I was ready to make that approach. And what I saw, that if we had approached them or they had seen us, us, there's no doubt in my mind a gunfight would have ensued. And I have an AR with my red dot and AR15 and I've got that lead guy in my sights and I'm hiding. He can't see us, but they're working toward us. And that was that oh, crap moment. Because if I have to explain and I have no communications to get out, and I got a biologist civilian with me and I stumbled into this and I have to execute deadly force. That's not going to be. That's not the way we ever. We don't ever want to get into a gunfight, but we would have many more, which we'll get into later because of this cartel threat. But by the good graces he got, they got 15 yards from us and we just held and they couldn't quite see us. And they looked kind of through us as I covered them with my rifle and they turned around and they crept out.

[B]

Because if they had come, if you had stood up to leave, they would have seen you. Right. So it isn't as if you could suddenly leave. And if they had come too close to you, they would have definitely seen you guys. In which case you would have had to defend yourselves.

[A]

Yeah, I would have had to make an announcement. Police, police, let me see your hands. That type of thing. Until I knew it was safe.

[B]

And what was going through your mind at this moment?

[A]

Oh, you know, the adrenaline dump, the pucker factor, the hearts racing. But I was there realizing it was a very, very dangerous foe. They didn't look like they belonged there. They look like Sandinista rebels. I remember from my history books and the Iran Contra affair and everything going on in South America, they look like drug runners from South America, as I had been privy to it was like no poacher I'd ever seen before before. So now I realized, wow, okay. I mean, I didn't know Sinaloa cartel yet, but I kind of knew it was coming from some cartel. Organized drug narco trafficking, given who was there. It wasn't a landowner growing weed. It wasn't, you know, your hippies up in Northern California that, yeah, they're illegal, but they're growing a few Plants, they're not stealing water. We didn't know that The Carbo furan. The EPA banned neurotoxins that they would import from Tijuana. That's EPA banned in this country to use. They're felonies.

[B]

Yeah, so tell me about that. Okay, so you're at this point you realize, holy shit, this is not what I expected at all.

[A]

Hello.

[B]

Hello.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

And also, how do I get the heck out of here? And then you manage to get out, they sort of move to the other side, you leave, and then what happens?

[A]

Well, my mind's spinning a million miles. And so is GI's. And he hadn't seen it yet either, because when he saw it dry, he reported it to me. He didn't want to go get into that alone. Thankfully.

[B]

No. Poor gift. I thought he was just gonna go for a walk in the woods.

[A]

Yeah, he was gonna go check his transects, check his frogs, you know, study it, you know, go do water samples. Whatever he was doing, he was pissed, you know, Very passionate growing up there like me. But now I knew I was. I had to get a hold of people that dealt with this. The unit, the beanie task force that

[B]

I know you, which, which you and

[A]

your husband, you know, had worked with before, and it might have been around that same time. And I just learned this today, so small freaking world. Here we are. Which is great. But now I'm gonna have to start reaching out to people. Now I know the sheriffs, I know a lot of SWAT type cops and patrol cops from San Jose PD and all the Bay Area. But I don't know, does the sheriff handle this? This is weird. I mean, I know it's an environmental thing now, but we're not equipped to deal with this at this stage. So I got connected with the B and E. They were called unet, United Narcotic Something Task Force.

[B]

And the B and E, just so people understand, it was sort of like. It was a task force like you said. Said. It's a Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement.

[A]

Multiple agencies.

[B]

Multiple agencies. And they go out there and basically tackle the drug problem and tackle rose, like marijuana. But they also did meth, right?

[A]

Meth and cocaine. Yeah, they were really cool. And a lot of those task force have been disbanded, unfortunately. But they were really cool because they brought people. Every agency would dedicate an officer for a year or two. They do everything from undercover marijuana grows. In this case, they would kind of lead the charge and bring a bunch of. Of other officers to rate it. I was obviously me and Gi and another game warden were the bird dogs to get them into position. Then step out the back, you know, step to the back of the line as they're going to go make the, the assault, the announcement, whatever. Wait.

[B]

And you know, you know, one of my good friends from B and E from back in those days is Bob Panel, who you know as well. Right? Yeah. Shout out to Bob Panel.

[A]

Shout out to Bob. Yeah.

[B]

Many incredible stories in the past. I talk to him often. I love the guy.

[A]

Yeah. They being. He was great, you know and it's. Those are like the glory days when we had a lot of effort and attention on this enforcement wise. That's unfortunately changed. I know we'll dive into that later, but we did that raid. There were probably 30 or 40 officers from all kinds of agencies. We didn't catch anybody. We certainly could have caught people if we had changed the plan. We eradicated all the plants and we didn't know they were toxically tainted, but they were, but nobody.

[B]

When did you find out?

[A]

We didn't find out until about a year later on the next grow because we didn't see any carbohyrum bottles when we first rated that grow. But we would find it when we reclimated and cleaned it up like a year later.

[B]

So I've been to some of these grows as well.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

I've done stories on illegal marijuana and have spent time in some of these. Yeah. Massive. And they're massive. People don't understand. Understand. It's. It's huge.

[A]

It's like major agriculture.

[B]

Thousands of plants. Yeah, major agriculture. And they divert, like you said, they divert the water, there's pipes. I mean it looks exactly like some of the, you know, agriculture that you see elsewhere. It looks legal because it's so well done.

[A]

It does, yeah. Yeah. It's terrace nicely. The water is diverted. I mean they gravity feed water feeds. Like the best engineers I've ever known. They're good, very good.

[B]

Thousands and thousands of plants that are making them millions and millions of dollars. Dollars. And then you start at one. I remember when we went. We saw all. Yeah, these basically jerry can. Not jerry cans. They're like plastic. What were they where the carbo furan comes in?

[A]

Yeah, they have these irrigation sprayers. Right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. But then these little bottles and they would pour some of it in. They dilute it with some water and.

[B]

And this is really toxic stuff that's not even allowed here in the United States. You can't even sell it. You can't find it.

[A]

Right, right. And it's it's dangerous to the growers too. But the thing about carbo furan that we would later learn is, is the epa, when they got their technology up to snuff, it's almost going on 30, 40 years now. These insecticides were made by American companies to just keep everything off of the plants, the fruit, the lettuce, whatever we're going to do ag, tree, fruit, whatever. But the stuff's so toxic because it's a nerve agent anticoagulant. Some of the actual nerve agents that were developed by the Nazi regime in World War II are some of the active ingredients in carbophurin metaphos Q4N. There's a bunch of derivative names. So EPA went, Whoa, nope, can't have that on our ag products, no matter how diluted they are. And one can, like a crystalline bottle of metaphose or carbofuran Mariana is made to be diluted with about 6,000 gallons of water originally on commercial crops. And they found out that was so toxic they banned it from use on our crops, made it a felony to possess in the country. And the growers we were later finding from that grow on forward would have maybe a quarter bottle of a carbo furan of those crystals in a six gallon backpack sprayer of water.

[B]

Oh my God.

[A]

So you can imagine how hot and concentrated that stuff was. And then like, like when we go into, in the book and the color pictures I have in even the new edition of what carbon free looks like, what to be on the alert for. And all the dead animals, like a golden eagle that tries to, to feed on a gray fox that died from carbofuran and both are dead within minutes of each other just from picking at the skin.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, this is dangerous for the animals. It's dangerous for the growers too, for themselves. Right. They're doing this, they're touching, they're coming in contact with this.

[A]

Yeah. And look at the end user of the cannabis consumer.

[B]

Right. And then it's bad for the consumers, right?

[A]

Yeah, it's, it's the worst. I mean, people aren't. It dissipates when it's sprayed onto a plant anywhere in a grow. It has kind of a look, looks like bird poop or liquid paper or like a misty white paint. But in 24 to 48 hours it dries and it's invisible. So it's still on there. It's still polluting any cannabis consumer. Whether it's an edible flower or it's smoked. It's not killing people. Right. Away. But there have been intestinal GI people bleeds in intensive care when our officers have been exposed to this. And I really learned this when I retired in 2018 when this latest book was about to drop. Hidden War, that there were so many officers they couldn't talk about it. And after the Joe Rogan first appearance with Joe, and I'm getting emails and direct messages like, John, I'm in Tennessee, I'm a forest ranger. I'm this, this, that and the other, whatever. And I was exposed to it like on one grow, my nerve system. I've been on administrative basically medical leave. My nervous system is not working. I lose sight sometimes. I was blind for 10 days after this grow and I still have vision problems, period. My central nervous system isn't right. So there's been a ton of people exposed to this on the enforcement side and on the consumer side. But linking it to carbofuran, this is the big issue is it dissipates and it can't even be found in tissue or in the blood system. 48, 72 hours after our dogs are canines. Mariana, tier one Belgium males, 18 months old and suddenly they have leukemia and they're dead. And having to be put down in three to four weeks from diagnosis. Pores in their paws. It's on the soil, it's in the water. So this stuff is in. And not just these cartel grows, the new China cartel grows that are indoor, primarily private land.

[B]

I want to get there too. I've spent some time in those as well.

[A]

It's changed.

[B]

Okay, so you spent a year just basically going into these grows once you found them and you. This is before you even knew there was carbon fiorent in there. And you adjust, you guys would just basically whack the plants, assemble everything and leave. But you didn't do any arrest because.

[A]

Well, that day, because it was a unit problem. It was a B and E unit task force operation. They didn't put a lot of effort into arresting those growers and they definitely weren't going to clean up the waste of what was left behind. Because two reasons. They're not from a conservation agency. That's not what their mandate is. And the other thing is all of the DCET money, the funding from DEA under the drug czar was based on plant count. So when all the counties in California and all the counties of every state in the country are trying to pull from that DCEP grant, because there were 27 other states then that had cartel grows to a lesser extent besides California. California was the math The Mecca were the weed state of the world. Right. But it was 27 other states too. So other narcotic groups, maybe some game wardens, were finding this stuff and not getting the attention on it, not knowing what's going on. So they said, we're not going to chase bad guys. It's not worth it. It. If we can arrest them, conveniently, we will. And we're. What do you mean? Reclamate? So that day, during that mission in 2004, was again drinking through a fire hose. Of learning what my real criminal is out there in the Silicon Valley from an environmental standpoint and what we weren't doing. Right. To basically remediate the damages.

[B]

Because you were just whacking the plants. Whacking the plants and leaving with them, but not actually doing anything for the environment.

[A]

Terms of water diversion. Yes, water diversion. Taking out the human excrement, taking out the encampments, the bunk beds, the hooches, everything they built. Stabilizing the banks and taking all that water line out so it doesn't just silt up the creek.

[B]

So you weren't doing any of this?

[A]

We're doing any of that. And I asked the task force commander that day, I said, dude, we got to run up and pull that water line, man. This is a real, real pristine waterway. We needed to go three miles down. He goes, yeah, if you guys want to do that, go for it. That's not something we do. I just called the Blackhawk helicopter from Offett Field. We're going to get a hoist right out of here. We don't even have to hike. Which was cool. First time in a Blackhawk. I'm like, okay, so this is oxymoronic. Like, this is good. But I'm really pissed off that we're not doing anything environmental. And I know I could have run those guys down with a tactical plan. So the best thing about that mission was I met two really good sheriff's deputies, and one was a sniper, and one was running their marijuana eradication team. And we automatically went to try to get the guys that ran away way ahead of us. They had a big head start. We actually almost got him.

[B]

Really.

[A]

And they were the only guys to run in behind me and a game warden partner to actually go after him. And I realized, these are my guys. Who are you? And his call sign, Snake. I'll leave it at that. And he was Pennsylvania and a hunter and everything. Just a really smart guy. And I said, okay, now I have some friends in the sheriff's office that do this. And Then we just hit it off and they took us under their wing because then they were doing grows all over Santa Clara county, their own. And I would get called in and then in 05 when my partner got shot, shot near fatally through both legs.

[B]

Wait, wait, we're gonna get there.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, wait, so a year later, okay, so all this is done. You realize that this, there's a problem here because you're getting rid of the plants, but you're actually not doing anything for the environment or going after anyone or trying to stop, prevent this from happening in the future. And what happened a year later when you found out that there was also all this toxic material involved?

[A]

Yeah, when we started learning about the toxic material, we said, okay, we're going to do everything we can to contain this stuff safely or get hazmat experts have it, define what we're going to do. And if it's too toxic to touch, we'll leave it. But we got a market to go back for it.

[B]

Was that a point where you realized that even though this was horrible because now we've got chemicals that are killing people and wildlife or at least harming you realize. But actually this, you know, in terms of. It's a good argument to come back with and tell them, look, this is more than just water diversion. We're talking about really toxic chemicals.

[A]

Yeah, Formally, the environmental reclamation thing happened right after the 05 gunfight because.

[B]

Okay, tell me about that.

[A]

Okay, we'll go into that. Because this triggers. That was the catalyst of what would take up to 2013 to finally get the Specialized team and make reclamation a critical, essential part of a three prong approach.

[B]

Right, which makes sense. Okay, so tell me about the shootout.05

[A]

was with our Santa Clara county partners. Obviously we met on the grow site where GI discovered it and we left with a lot of plants eradicated. And this is August 5th, 2005. We just had the 20th anniversary, anniversary of that incident. That's a date I'll never forget because that was a date a lot of us probably shouldn't have come home again. I think there's a little divine intervention of who was there, how we were positioned. Three game wardens, three sheriff's deputies, an unarmed mid peninsula ranger that found the grow and was a bird dog to get us in there. August morning hot. And we went into that mission thinking, knowing we had 7 to 10,000 plants in one big grow site. Now, up to this point, Mariana, the thing we never saw national. No officer had been shot, shot at or hit by any clandestine cartel grower anywhere in the country, including California. And very rarely, because nobody was really trying to catch these guys to see what they were about. We weren't finding many guns, if any. So, hey, we got enough guys. And administration would say, all right, you're two met officers with the sheriff's department. I'll give you one more sniper from your team. Borrow from Fish and Game because I can't give any more people. So, Lieutenant. Now, I promoted a lieutenant 20 days before this mission. I get a couple of my guys that have been dying to go on a raid after hearing the stories. So there we go. That's all the help we could get. And they were in the middle of harvest time. There were gunmen all over that mountain. At least two or three in the grow we walked into. And we would later learn there were probably more like 20 or more cartel operatives on five different grow sites spanning a couple of miles of that range ridge and harvesting it in different satellite camps. And they had been in there for years. It had never been discovered. And I mean from these mountains, I'm not kidding you, you would look down at Facebook headquarters, Cisco, Amazon, ebay, and you'd have great cell coverage and your radios wouldn't work. So the technical capital of the world and cartel are running all over the forest. And right below that mountain that we were on of the affluent city of Los Gatos is a $20 million Cisco Systems CEO's home. And using some of their long patio decks with their view of the Bay Area for landing zones later because it's 300 yards behind their homes, no one had a clue. It was completely contradictory to where you think these cartels would roll, right? So that's going on. And we go into the grow and we're moving through big plants quietly. They're about almost five, six feet tall. And I'll never forget that day. We're all in what they call a skirmish line. So you don't have field cross will run fields of fire. You stay safe. And it's myself and Mojo, call sign and Bulldog and Rails from the sheriff's office and two other snipers, Snake and Apache. And we. I heard one shot ahead of me and it was a medium bore. Sounded like an AK shot. And the second that shot went off, My partner, a young warden that been on a year, trained him in the academy. This was his first raid. He just goes, I'm hit. And drops dropped. And he's screaming, but not out of fear. Tough, tough young man is going, I'm hit. The MF's, blah, blah, blah. Hit me. They're ahead and for the next eight seconds all hell broke loose. So we heard the shot, didn't see that gunman. My partner drops and instantly I'm scanning ahead of me because my partner drops to the ground, he's been hit somewhere and I'm looking for a threat ahead of me where he might have been coming from or where that you can't see much but I know it's a head somewhere to the right or left. And then I start just scanning with my rifle, staying in concealment, not wanting to cross fire into anybody else. My wardens, the young guys did a great job. The sheriff's deputies were spot on. We had never tactically trained with these guys yet but everybody had had similar training. And the mission motto we've always had and I use it in life now is filling and flow. You know, adversity in life. Hey, it's going to get better. Hold control what you can. Three foot rule, don't worry about what you can't control but fill and flow. Go around the obstacle, get to your mission, save a life, complete it, get out of here alive. And I'll never forget the fill and flow just worked with these two agencies and we didn't have the same radios, we didn't have the same weapons but everybody moved and behaved, behaved perfectly and executed tactics I really think the way they had advantage I was surprised three of us weren't hit. But when I look back on how it went down right after that shot hit my partner and he dropped and I'm scanning I start hearing gunfire just to my right and it's from two AR15s and I know it's my sheriff's deputies. Unbeknownst to me they've identified a suspect that's right in front of me and my other partner warden that hasn't dropped seven yards in front of us us and we later learned it was a sawed off shotgun. Kneeling behind some a berm, a parapet if you will. It was kind of an area they could sit and watch the grow defended in the morning and we happened to walk right in without with the way the sunlight was the best we could do. And they basically engaged and neutralized that gunman probably within a second of me taking a face full of buckshot and or my partner, call sign Bulldog taking a face full of bucks shot or I wouldn't be here having this conversation. Wow. And when that happened I'm directly in my attention there and then I catch movement out of my left eye and I don't know this at the time, but it's realistically the gunman that shot my partner. And now he's coming around the corner, and I'm like, that's him. Fifteen yards, moving through roughly in the brush again, hard to see because there's all this marijuana and manzanita very choked up, up slightly uphill. And I just start to say polisia in Spanish. I get about half of that syllable out. His gun comes up mine. I engage, he disappears. Don't know if he's hit or not.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[A]

Threat, no. No other threats there anymore. I start retreating tactically and end up landing foot to foot, boot to boot with my partner, who's now on the ground. And talk about the will to survive. He can't hold up his big M1A rifle anymore, so he's dropped his rifle, he's pulled his Glock pistol, pistol, and he's got his right hand, or his left hand on his inner right leg because the bullet was a military steel core AK round. And they're made to go in and tumble. So it went in his left leg straight, and it started tumbling through his left leg, exited his right, went into his inner right thigh, exited out his right. So he's got four holes in him. Whoa. Yeah. And I mean, this is before trauma medicine is really advanced. It's O5. They're barely getting the anticoagulant blood, the dirty tourniquets, the Israeli dressings, all the trauma medicine that we now use, like it's, you know, old hat. It's on all of our kids even for patrol.

[B]

None of that was travel with some of that.

[A]

Yeah, you guys, you must have. With all the crazy war zone and cartel zones you went to, that's crazy. But all this. All this happens in the span of 8 to 10 seconds. And the domino effect of Snake and Apache taking out a suspect that was about to hit me and my other partner, me engaging this other suspect that was coming around to see what he shot. Finish the job, shoot more of us we don't know. So only one B1 shot got off by one bad guy. And now one bad guy is out of the picture. And now I'm going. All right, what did I. What did we train to do? Contain the scene, get a perimeter, hover the masses. We have a wounded warden down hard, and it would be 2 hours and 45 minutes before we get him airlifted off that movie mountain as he's slowly bleeding out, slowly going into shock with what minimal bandages we had largely from the sheriff's office. That had a little bit of extra stuff because they had a dedicated SWAT team and some of them had combat experience on the military side. So that being said, wow, it was a terrifying day. It was an educational day. It was an infuriating day because now we saw that if this can happen in the Silicon Valley, valley right above everything that is one of the safest big cities in America, San Jose. I mean, the Bay Area, that part of the Bay Area is pretty darn safe because of the resources you have there, you know, and the tech.

[B]

So you can only imagine what's happening, what can happen elsewhere. So I have so many questions for you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So why did it take two hours, over two hours to get him out?

[A]

Because the air support we were looking for and calling for help wouldn't fly into a hot zone. They already knew an officer was shot. They knew there was a gunfight. And they said in until if there's more growers out there with guns, they could shoot the chopper down. And they were right. There could be more growers with guns. And we had a whole mountainside that wasn't clear. We had our little fiefdom and now we're in a 360 and we've all trained to do this and some of us are keeping guns up. I'm looking after my partner, the sheriff's deputy Rails, who's part of the met team for the Santa Clara county sheriffs. It was their operation we were assisting them on. So the dispatch, radio traffic is going through the sheriff's office. But this had never happened in the Bay Area. So we had dea, unit B and E, every SWAT team in the Bay Area, from other teams coming from out of the county. It was a three day event of just containing that mountain because it never happened. It was a national news thing. People were seeing game wardens were coming out of, you know, hilos and short hauling in and out to get. And about this partner getting shot. This young warden has been identified as blah, blah, blah. And. And I didn't know what the career was going to lead to after that. I didn't know if we were all going to get in trouble because it happened. I didn't know if we were never going to touch another cartel grow. I didn't know if this was going to get our chief in trouble with the governor, with the director, because the response was from the general public, even the governor's office. What are game wardens doing on a drug case?

[B]

They don't realize. They don't, they don't realize.

[A]

But we had Nancy Foley, our first female chief of patrol ever in the history of the agency, happens to be the chief she was also happened to have a lot of special operations unit undercover stuff. We had worked some of that undercover stuff. I told you before, good friend, you know, growing up, a mentor. Had been in ahead of me by three academies. She held her ground. And she told the governor and she told news teams. He said, hey, my game. Warrens trained as tactically and as well funded and as well equipped as any law enforcement agency in the Bay Area. I'm incredibly proud of what they've done to help today. It's a tragedy that one of our officers got, you know, got hurt. He's been flown out to the hospital. We're standing by to get updates. And basically we had full support from our command staff and the sheriff's office with their chief as well, had full support. But we had a lot of after action, a lot of a couple weeks of administrative leave after a shootout that were involved in, and especially if you're there witnessing it. But if you're one of the officers to pull the trigger, which I did, and which the sheriff's deputies did, you know, that's your first experience of getting grilled and interviewed and grand jury review and all of that to make sure it was, you know, authorized deadly force, which of course, in this case, no question, of course it was.

[B]

But there was a lot flown out and then he was. He was fine. I mean, I'm sure it took a

[A]

year, but, yeah, he made a full recovery. That bullet missed his femoral artery by a couple of millimeters. Where it hit, if it hit his femoral, there's no way we could have stopped the bleeding with the best trauma gear.

[B]

Right. Is he back to doing this work? He is.

[A]

He made a full recovery. Recovery. He came back a year later, limping, getting back in it. We did one news story together. We agreed that we, NBC Bay Area wanted to do, you know, back in action, what really happened. And we were both in that story. And then after that, it was like, we don't really want to do any more press on this. Let's just get back to work.

[B]

Right. That's amazing. And do you know what happened to the two guys who were shot?

[A]

One was deceased. One was.

[B]

So that's the one that was shot by a snake and.

[A]

And the other one we never found. And there were rumors that he was shot up in the shoulder as he was disappearing in the brush by my round, injured and got away. We don't know.

[B]

And do we know why? They shot. I mean, it wasn't very smart of them. Why did they shoot at you guys? I guess because they, they were protecting their.

[A]

They were protecting the grow. They were protecting the girl. One of the guys saw an officer saw a move, movement and said to another grower, said, primo, which is cousin. Yeah, right. And that's what they use for anybody in the grow. And if they don't hear that sound off, we would later learn.

[B]

So he was trying to see if it was his grower that was there and when he realized it wasn't, he shot. Do you think they shot you be thinking that maybe you were like rival cartel trying to steal your grow? Yeah, they possibly because it's not known that they would shoot at law enforcement. Right. That's not something that they usually.

[A]

Well, they, it all depends. And this is what's really, really strange. As I started diving deeper and in the newest book, Hidden War, which I got a copy for you here in chapter four, I go into a debrief. I got to attend. And from your background, the journalism, you do an amazing traffic series. This one will really, really kind of mind blowing. Like our white dope team, meth, cocaine, that's right next to the met team in the sheriff's office, picked up a plaza level boss from Sinaloa in Northern California, from Santa Clara county county, and basically had him in custody for doing a 22 pound meth cook. You know, it's simply 22 pounds at a time for the big cooks in California in our county. But we later learned while he was in custody that he was also a plaza boss for about either 50 to 100 gross in Northern California. So we're like, okay, but he wasn't that sicario gunman mentality. He was gentle, he was honest, he wasn't vicious. And he wanted to, to talk, provided he was protected. And I got to sit in on that debrief with dea, with the sheriffs, with multiple interpreters, and they said, lieutenant Norris, you're going to get to ask all the questions you want because you've been curious about the reclamation aspect. Because we've been reclamating grows now. And this debrief happened in 2012 when we caught this guy. So now we're doing reclamations all the time. And when we're reclamating to grow, we're finding that very seldomly does Sinaloa go back in and use that same site and set it up. And again, because they know we raided it, but if we take the water system out, they got to put like 30, $40,000 of infrastructure run the water line maybe three minutes or three miles. So I grilled this guy and got so much information on the inside that was just really amazing. One that, yeah, we noticed some of our grills were getting all cleaned up and we're like, what the f is this? All over Northern California. And we realized it was these game wardens doing this. And, you know, they knew what was up, up. And I said, are you going to go back in there? He goes, no, why would I? You guys have sanitized it. I know you're watching it. But I said, so I've suspected this. And this is kind of the protocol I'm getting from field experience of what I see you doing and not doing through, you know, basically trail indicators in the land. But if we don't reclimate those sites that you're used to doing for 20, 30 years, he goes, oh, no, man, we'll put a satellite grow in there, no problem. It's just wanted to keep you guys busy. And if you don't happen to find it, we're going to make 5, 10, 15 million. And if you do find it, it's a throwdown because I have 50 others. So they had our game.

[B]

I mean, that was great for you to take to your bosses and say, this is why the work we do is important.

[A]

The best part, Mariana, about that is the DCEP coordinator, a super cool agent that basically is the man holding the piggy bank strings for the dea, for the drug czar under the president of how much money each county's to going going to get. I said, you know what plants you need to reward for. But catching guys like this should have a better factor, a better ratio of money we get for actually apprehending them, because at least we're detouring them. We're learning. It's not just, oh, yeah, they're going to fly around, scare them off. I'm just going to be in another grow. That journeyman Sinaloa guy is going to leave Santa Clara county and he's going to be in San Benito county or he's going to be in Riverside the next day. So we had to do try to arrest him. That was something the Met team had to do when we formed our unit. Santa Clara was aggressive before when other teams weren't. So the sheriff's office were wired right, and the reclamation, I said, if you guys actually reward for how many gallons of carbo fear in how many miles of water line, how many bottles of propane, how many tons of general Waste and trash. And now that's how they're funded.

[B]

Right. It's reclamation and prevention too. Right. Because they were not going to come back because too much of an investment to come back. Yeah, deterrence.

[A]

And it restored the environmental component and at least got the water quality back. So we took that as a huge win win. And that literally, I mean, not a good way to get there. But that first gunfight that brought this into the attention of this isn't just some disenfranchised Latin growers running around the forest of Santa Clara County, Silicon Valley, making a little money on pot. This is an organized straight line infrastructure straight from the cartel. They're well funded, they're armed and in some cases if they're told by their bosses they're going to find fight cops and they're going to shoot.

[B]

And yeah, yeah, I want to get into the whole industry because I don't think people realize how big this is. Even after legalization, this is still a huge industry. But I wanted to mention when we did, I did one of these operations where we went in, in a helicopter as Well, I think 2009 or 8 or something.

[A]

That was a hit.

[B]

Yeah, no, actually, sorry. My husband was doing a bunch of these up in NorCal in 2010. And then I did my own also actually with my husband when I was working at a channel called Fusion back in, in the day. And it was about 2011 or 12, something like that, 13, 14, I don't know. It was San Bernardino County, I think it was 2014 actually San Bernardino County. We went in, in a helicopter and it was also we were going to, you know, we, they've had found this massive grow and we're talking football fields, I mean dozens of football fields worth of Mariana plants. And we got there and there was, there were actually arrests that day.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And I remember perfectly well one of the guys, what they. There were, I think there were two or three arrests, I can't remember. But one of the guys or most of them only spoke Spanish and I was, because I speak Spanish and a bunch of the law enforcement of the people in the team did not. I was actually, I started talking to them in Spanish and I got him and he remember him telling me, look, he gave me the number of his wife and said please, please call her because he was about to be arrested and thought maybe he wouldn't have a way to communicate with her.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I called his wife and we actually filmed film this and it was a really sad call because I had to tell her, look, Your husband was just arrested. Yeah. And she was crying and her story was very sad. And which was he had been called or recruited to come here to work in Ventura county in the fields, you know, picking strawberries or some other. In agriculture legally. But then once he crossed, I mean, dropped, he. They told, yes, I know he was dropped in a place that he had no idea, he had never planned. He had never worked in a legal business at all. But they kind of threatened him and said, look, this is what you're doing. You're going to make a lot more money here than you make picking strawberries. But. But you also, it's dangerous. You have to stay here, you know, overnight. And at the point his wife told me, look, he, he didn't have another option. It was. It was a little bit like he was forced to do this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And a lot of the guys that spend time in those grows, as I'm sure you know, are not right. They're not the guys making millions. They're not the heads of the operation. A lot of times it's just poor people from, you know, the interior of Latin America, Central America and Mexico that in many cases are either promised good money to come, but in some cases they're actually forced to. To come and do this for very little pay. So that's the part that I think sometimes we don't speak enough about.

[A]

We have to. I'm glad you brought that up. I remember that story, or maybe I got a message from you on something, but that's similar to what I was helping Daily Caller and Jorge Ventura, who's a young motivated journalist from LA and was listening to you and me and our stuff while he was finishing his journalism degree at Fresno, driving Uber and going environment cartoon. Oh my gosh. And ended up working in San Bernardino county and Riverside. So he's with Daily Caller News Nation now. And I was up there helping him produce and get interviewed for. For some of these Chinese cartel grows indoors Siskiyou county and some Sinaloa cartel grows indoor private land hoop houses, not remote forest. To your point, more and more of that, where the human trafficking aspect with the heads of the Chinese cartels, the Triads and Sinaloa Jalisco, new generation, their own people, they're trafficking for that gross stuff. And we're seeing. And they are there. They're there in their promised payment and they don't quite get paid paid. And they said, well, you can leave in a week after you finish these 200 more, you know, acres or whatever. Yet they can never leave. Right. And it's completely slavery for it. And now what we got into. But then you have, you have a mixed bag of the best growers that are in there setting the grow up. And it's usually two in every grow site. So the day we had that gunfight, those were probably the two lead grow Sinaloa connected, not brought in as workers, not trafficked, but there to defend it and there to see it through. And what we learned from that informant, right that plaza boss, he basically said, yeah. I said, well, we see some really interesting water diversions and we see some very aggressive groups of you guys that we've had deadly violence with. And we see no guns sometimes and we see people running away. And every Munson different, different gangs are more violent than other gangs. We know that from just gang warfare in general. Cartels are the same way. We had different areas of California named for levels of violence. Like that whole ridge of the Santa Cruz mountains above the tech capitol. We call that just Asshole alley.

[B]

What alley?

[A]

Asshole alley. Asshole Asshole alley. We're gonna go up there and it's going to be a knife fight, a gunfight, a canine and stab it. It's going to be weird because they're just, they're just very, very, very aggressive up there and to the public. And not only cops, and they will gun for cops.

[B]

What would you call the San Bernardino area around here or this Southern California?

[A]

It's pretty bad. I mean, I think the whole state of California with the way the law is, you know, it's, it's kind of, it's full of a lot of that. But, but, but to your point, there is, there is so much victimization from the cartels with their own people. People that are the last people that we have any issue with other than just stop doing the crime.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You know, and it's, it becomes a humanitarian issue.

[B]

It must be really hard for you guys too to figure out what's what, right?

[A]

You got to sort it out.

[B]

Who are the actual bad guys and who are people who are just like, you know, brought in and have no idea. Because I, I legitimately don't think that this guy that they arrested that day would have ever shot at you guys. He was just, he was a farmer, you know, he's a farmer back in his home country. He was brought in, all he knew, knew how to do was sort of planting. And they, these guys spend months on end there, right?

[A]

They do.

[B]

And it's an. I remember learning this, that there's another guy who comes in who's more of A boss who comes in to give them, who brings the provisions, brings the food, and brings the carbohurin and whatever they need. But he's sort of more of the higher up on the. On the hierarchy, on the scale.

[A]

And to. To your point, that's exactly what we saw in a bunch of Sinaloa cartel grows, and it's what we see in Northern California now. And we had some that escaped and ended up in, like, the backcountry of Mount Hamilton in the Santa Clara county foothills not far from Co Park. Dropped off or got himself out of a car that was being delivered to a grow in the area. And he worked a grow in like. Like Shasta county. And he didn't want to be there, and he was just trying to find somebody, you know, dehydrated, starving, walking down the road, coming out of the brush at night. We're doing a spotlighting patrol. And who are you? Yeah, and his story added up, right?

[B]

It was similar to these guys.

[A]

But what was very interesting that we learned, and I go more in depth than it in the book, is those plaza bosses have their tier one growers, and they're all vetted in Mexico, and they're really good at camouflaging water lines, doing the gravity feeds. The great grows. You saw the ones that are in plain sight like a football field, and then the ones that are the size of a football field, but you can't see them because they're spread out and snaked, and all the canopies, really hard to see from the air. And you got to be right on the trail and pull out out the little brush walls to see the camp. There's usually two to every grow. We learn from our informants, and those guys are making a good amount of money on every hundred pounds of process that gets out, because the only way they ever make it here is to get vetted in Sinaloa, Highlands, way down to Michikon, whatever. They get it effectively, they don't get caught, and then they get brought up here to start growing it and when regulation starts, started. And I know that's a good subject of just the whole thing, of what we've done right and wrong. We knew in 2016, we saw what the writing on the walls. And so in 2013, I should back up. So five or six gunfights in one officer almost killed. Canine stabbings, the whole nine yards. Now we got a new chief. That was my mentor. He was the chief of patrol for a couple of years. Mike, carry on.

[B]

So there were more shootouts, more Gunfights happened.

[A]

Yeah, the first one one was, was when Mojo got shot. And then we had. Our team had four more. Some of us were on the with the sheriffs for one. The last one we had was in the Santa Cruz mountains over the hill from where my partner was shot in 2017. And that's one of the last mission chapters in Hidden War in this new edition, because we know that was the same aggressive cell, the way they were equipped, the way their weaponry was. Unfortunately, unfortunately, it was a met mission from our new team. I was on my way out. We knew the threats regulation had started the year before. And most agencies when they said, oh, it's a misdemeanor now for outdoor cartel growing and six plants or 6,000, it's a misdemeanor above six plants. We're not going to risk our lives going after cartel growers. We're going to check the mom and pop shops. The woods are up to you fishing game. So no one wanted to help us. And the cartels went. When Prop 64 passed in this state, 30% of my job as the team leader when I formed this team was to do what we're doing now. Have a conversation, not necessarily a podcast, do a presentation. I had a PowerPoint. I'd go to grower groups, I'd go to the lobbyists, the legislatures for the governor, conservation groups, animal rights groups, and say, guys, we know regulations coming. It's on the ballot, it's probably going to pass. But I would tell the legislatures, please do not make illegal trespass, growing routes, public or private land, and don't water down the law to get this thing to pass. For the money that cannabis is going to generate, I said, you got to keep it a felony. You got to take good money, a good amount of money. You're going to make millions and millions of dollars on taxation, licensing fees and all the stuff, put it back into the agencies because these cartels have no incentive. They know they're not going to get arrested. We know we're in sanctuary state. They're not going to get deported. We're being told at the state level when we're federally deputized as well. I have a federal U.S. fish and Wildlife. I ID that. I can't talk to ICE and do any border patrol allied work on what we know are. And we're not even dealing. We're not talking an immigration issue. We want to separate that issue. People confuse immigration with deportable felons. And I'm like, wait a minute, this person isn't going to be in here anyway, if they're not a citizen and they have a watch list of many crimes they've done. South America, Mexico, and we're being told we can't talk to these things guys, and this person's going to stay in the state, is not going to get arrested and they're going to be released. And now it's going to be a misdemeanor. And the cartels just went, let's go

[B]

to work is like the best thing that can happen. So let's talk about that. So in 2016, legalization happened in California. So it's no longer a. So it's legal. Basically, marijuana is legal. But what most people don't. Didn't know, and we did a story about this for Trafficked, which was about black market marijuana. Essentially. What most people didn't know is that they thought a lot of the proponents of legalization, I mean, I'd say, myself included, would always say this is great because what it does is that it's the end of black market weed. Right? We're going to legalize this, we're going to be able to buy it more safely, it's going to be better product, it's going to be better for everyone, and we're going to do away with the illegal business of weed. But in fact, what happened is that it grew exponentially after it was legalized and for a few reasons, as I'm sure you know. In our investigation where we found out, we started speaking to a lot of people and this was it. And the illegal side of the business grew not only in the selling of. In the shops meant much of a lot of the product that was being sold in the shops, which are now all over la, Right. And California in general.

[A]

Right, Northern Bay Area, yeah.

[B]

But a lot of the products that are being sold there are come from the illegal industry. They're growing illegal. They're. The distribution is also a lot. So every part is sort of the grow from the grow to the cell to the distribution. A lot the majority of it is illegal. I don't think most people knew this. And the reason why this is what we found out was because even for people, imagine you're a grower, not one of the bad cartel growers, but you're a grower. And we spoke to one, a guy called Buddy Powers, I believe was his name, his nickname was. He's in the Santa Cruz Mountains as well. And he. All his life he grew illegally grew pot, right. Illegally had all these. He had his backyard. He lived in sort of Forest areas. He had in home grow or in grow. Oh, my God, what do you call it?

[A]

Indoor grow.

[B]

Indoor grow.

[A]

Sorry, Indoor house or. Yeah, right, yeah.

[B]

And. And so we visited him and he said, look, I was excited about legalization because I thought, okay, I've been making all this money from illegal grows, but now it's my chance of actually legalizing and making this legal. And what he found, and so many of the people that we spoke to found was that the. The money you needed to even set up a legal operation was insane. The permits were bananas. They couldn't get a loan because it's not federally, it's not legal. It's only California, so you can't get a loan. You. So it was basically only the rich people, all the corporations and tobacco companies, all these big corporations that could come in and buy. It's 100% buy it all. And all these people. Which in a sense is so unfair. Fair. You know, many of the minorities, black and Latinos that ended up going to prison for selling marijuana, who then figured out, okay, it's going to be legalized. We're going to our mom and pop shop of selling marijuana is actually going to. We're going to change it and make it legal. And they found out that they actually couldn't afford it. So the same people essentially that were being locked up were then locked out of the system of legalization in California when it became legal. Which is so unfair. Right?

[A]

Well, you hit it on the head. It's beyond unfair. I mean, it's disgusting, because we truly are the weed state here in California, not only of the nation, but of the world. We're only one of true. One of only six true Mediterranean climates. So we've had grows start in February on a dry year and harvest at Christmas. And just like good Napa Valley wine, we're known for good cannabis. Right, Right.

[B]

When we were doing our investigation, what we found. I know California is big and there's a lot coming from here, but this is what I remember finding. So the illegal market is actually three times larger than the legal market in California. At least this was a couple of years ago. So three times larger, even though it's legal in California, that the illegal market is still three times larger and that 80% of dispensaries selling weed were illegal at the time, and they were fueling a $9 billion black market of illegal weed.

[A]

Yeah, from. From a legal quote, unquote dispensary.

[B]

Right, From a legal dispensary. But the products that they were selling.

[A]

So the Horrible thing about this whole thing is, and I said this before regulation started and I really pushed it from experience from the field and what you guys saw from a journalism standpoint just pushes that point home. If you had regulated and really put deterrence on illegal growing and you allowed these legal growers and you know what, you talk about the Santa Cruz Mountains, buddy. There are, there's a lot of environmentally conscious tier one growers. They're dem certified. It's kind of like the Michelin rating of how organic it all is. They're all over Northern California. I went to three or four grower meetings to do a panel discussion with the California Growers association and everybody freaked out. Camo polo, walking in with the dog. Well he's working us. No, I'm going to talk to you guys. You guys are going to get legal now. Now we're going to be teammates. But let me show you what's really going on out there. And they were so infuriated with the cartel stuff. I had tier one groves in the Emerald Triangle. A guy that had 10 dump trucks, big legal, multimillion dollar. He followed me out to the car as I'm putting my dog and my AV out. And he was lieutenant, anything you need, you guys need for reclamation. I'll send my guys anywhere in California. You tell my trucks where to be, your met team, anybody. And he was sincere. And I realized for regulated cannabis to be pure on the market, regardless where you sit on the cannabis spectrum, those are the guys we need to support. And now they're getting impacted by the cartel either directly on their properties or getting run out by them. And you know What? We had 10, around 10,000 growers statewide that were all ready to register and when they saw the permit fees they couldn't afford and it went down to 10% of those, no way that even tried to register, register. And then in interviews I've done with growers of follow up with multi million dollar farms they're like we're shutting down

[B]

next year because they can't, because they can't afford it. The taxation is insane. It's like 45% taxes which is much higher than alcohol.

[A]

Why?

[B]

I mean they, this is the problem with, with our government is that we try to make something good and then we fuck it all up.

[A]

Yeah. And we over complicate it. We go out, you know when you see the dollars and Maine's done it now, Oklahoma's done it. Michigan, I've worked with those states. Tucker Carlson just did a whole thing on the weed tria Backyard his forest main state. And they're following California's model and being from California and loving this state and how many resources and you loving California being here. It's a beautiful state that's just run so poorly. If we would just be a good example for the world on cannabis regulation, we can make a big dent. But we're going nowhere near that and it's, it's, it's a problem. It has to change.

[B]

So. Okay, so let's talk about the Chinese triads because that's another thing that I learned when we were doing our own story.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We ended up going to, we went on an opera in an opera with. I think it was a San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

If I didn't get that wrong. And we went into, we went into one of these indoor grows and there was a bunch of Chinese people, Chinese nationals there and making millions of dollars from these indoor grows. So tell me about it.

[A]

Right around 2018, my guys on the Met team assigned up north. If we weren't doing missions together because we do a lot of missions together and we always. And then as a team leader, I'd be always over with a couple missions here, there as well, other other functions, stuff like this. And I remember getting the reports from the guys and going up and seeing some of these grows myself that you have the Hmong and the Chinese coming from like Oklahoma and Michigan in Siskiyou county and Shasta county and it's like, what are they doing? I mean Sinaloa and now Jalisco, New generation. You know, some of these, these cartels have kind of had, they've kind of had an impact imprint. They've kind of dominated the weed trade. This is going to get really weird. It's going to get really violent. Why are they here and why are they not having more negative interaction with the Mexican guys for territory? And then what we, it was just the infancy of it. But Fast forward to 2023 and it was a whole different world. Being three years out, even though I'm getting the reports from my old teammates. Oh yeah, this is what's going on. I go, oh yeah, sounds bad. And then I saw it firsthand. Random went, this is crazy. Crazy. So 10 to 15,000 hoop houses set up in Siskiyou county, two to 4,000 plants a piece in them and not one of them that we ran across was a Mexican cartelgro. It was Chinese organized crime and. Or the Hmongs doing their thing, possibly Triad related. It had their own chemicals. There were these EPA banned chemicals that were starting to pop up with the Chinese labeling coming from mainland China. China. And there's seven of them.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

And so they were doing the same type of toxic poisoning and just basically producing in Northern California if they got raided. Because Siskiyou county has no legalization at all. Jeremiah Larue, the sheriff up there said, no way. It's going to be absolutely out of control. Governor's office isn't helping him. He's asked multiple calls to the governor of California. Never got a call back. He said, it's the wild west up here. We are under siege. We have a Chinese cartel element destroying the most rural county in California. And this is rural, you know, on the Oregon border, Mount Shasta's in the background. A lot of pristine water.

[B]

But this wasn't be. If this was indoor grills, all of this was indoor?

[A]

Well, yeah, they were the.

[B]

Was it in houses or not in houses? It's in the greenhouses.

[A]

The hoop houses? Yeah, like the greenhouses. Hoop houses are like the. They're white and they kind of curve on the top. We call them hoop houses, but they're basically greenhouses houses that are usually white colored and they're very big. And what the Chinese groups are doing is they're buying up property in Siskiyou county and then they're just leveling it. They're putting up hoop houses. They don't necessarily have a legal well operation or drilling. So they're either having stolen water from water trucks, bringing in water or bringing their own illegal drilling equipment and drilling wells unregulated. And we got all this in the documentaries. We're going on raids. I've seen the well drilling truck and seeing this and seeing like Doris, you know, Siskiyou County, Doris, California, watching their water tank for the city getting hit by illegal water trucks all night long and putting security elements so out of control. Chinese gunmen in flak vests going up to ranchers gates with AKs. And now we're on water restrictions for. From the drought. The ranchers are so depleted with underground water for the illegal cannabis that these Chinese groups are doing all around them. They're not having water for their crops, they can't raise their livestock. And they're getting told by these grower groups coming up to them at their gate like in an evening and going, you might see your water disappear, don't make a problem of it. And you and your granddaughter, there's a pitcher might be okay.

[B]

So threatening people.

[A]

The Daily Caller group got that. Jorge and the guys got that in San Bernardino and LA County. And then we saw the same thing in Shasta and Siskiyou county when I was doing narcofornia with them. So that changed the game. And I went, how can that be happening? And how can we not have help? To Sheriff LaRue up there and Department of Cannabis Control, the Marijuana Enforcement team. There's now approximately 100 game wardens of the 500 in California dedicated to the cannabis enforcement program. That's how much the environmental impacts are. We have private land grow teams and then we have the tactical unit unit, which is, you know, the tactical unit for outdoor indoor support, the private land teams on really aggressive ones. But what you saw here earlier and what we saw, you know, just three years ago, and it's the templates, the same thing that's happening in Maine, it's the same groups in Oklahoma because they've

[B]

realized they can do it anywhere, they

[A]

can do it anyway on the crime. But I still. But you know what bothered me, and this is what just from a curious journalistic standpoint, blew my mind, was how are they working? So why did the Mexican cartels just give up on it? I know it's not as lucrative as fentanyl because it's bigger, it's less money and human trafficking, but they still made a ton of money.

[B]

They did.

[A]

And they've been going crazy in California since Prop 64 in 2016. And then I learned that Sinaloa and Jalisco aren't only working parallel with the Chinese triads. And all these Chinese grows in multiple states. States now they're actually working together. They've collaborated to the point where the Chinese are laundering Sinaloa and Harlisko's money.

[B]

I knew that for no fee. I heard that.

[A]

I didn't know any of this.

[B]

I didn't know about the no fee. But I know that they are now the money launderers.

[A]

They're the money launderers for it. And I've been to Congress twice in the last year and a half to testify in hearings based on this on environmental impacts, border security. But the Chinese connection, tribal land impacts, the tribal lands getting hit on the fentanyl trade. Don't want to digress too far because we're on cannabis, but I didn't realize at the time that it's about a 6% cost for every black market dollar. Right. That Sinaloa makes.

[B]

You've got your facts right?

[A]

I got my facts right. Yeah. My DEA buddies, we researched it all and some of the stuff you've done, and then the Chinese said We'll try this out and we'll do it for 5%. And you let us take over the weed trade because we need black market dollar untraceable that we can convert to our standard down the road for world standard dominance if we ever get to that route. So it goes into the whole geopolitical value of the dollar of controlling the money trade and having the standard throughout the world. Going to the Chinese, that's a little bigger than just cannabis black market dollars.

[B]

One thing scarier than a massive criminal group is two massive criminal groups.

[A]

Two massive criminal groups or three working together for different nationality and they're getting along amazing amazingly. And the other thing was Chinese said, hey, we'll provide precursors for P2P Super Meth and for fentanyl, but give us the weed trade. And that's just been a harmonious thing that's been exponentially growing the last four or five years, if not longer.

[B]

Yeah, it's interesting that it changed a little bit from what I saw here. So what we saw here in LA and surrounding areas was mainly in suburban America. They'd rent these houses, trash them, right? Yeah. And then trash. They would knock down walls and basically make these big grows, indoor grows with all these marijuana. Every single room was transformed into a indoor marijuana grow. And they would black out the windows so that nobody. So the neighbors wouldn't be able. Wouldn't see. But then they would sort of have somebody that would have people living inside. A lot of them were Chinese national that didn't speak English at all, that were brought in, flown in just for this. And they were paid, if they were paid at all. They were paid very little. So they didn't even know. I mean, it wasn't. You know, I felt bad when we actually went into this house.

[A]

Yeah, you had some of those disenfranchised, manipulated. Same thing with the Chinese group.

[B]

And in this case even, even worse. And you know, because they're in the new country, a lot of times they take away their passports and they don't have anywhere to go. They don't have any money with them or they don't know anyone.

[A]

They keep dangling the carrot, but they never get it. Yeah, it's horrible.

[B]

It's really bad. And, and, and. But they would still sort of have somebody water the plants outside just to pretend that it was actual family or real people. L. When in fact you'd walk in and it's this massive multi million dollar illegal cannabis operation that the neighbor next door many times doesn't even know is happening. Right. There in suburban America. And in many cases, what I heard back then, too, is that they're also using some of these toxic, like you were saying, chemicals. So you've moved from, you know, the. Using these toxic materials from the forest now to suburban America, which is in itself also really dangerous.

[A]

And, you know, the worst part of

[B]

the crime and all that it comes from comes with it.

[A]

Yeah. And you just hit on the head how dangerous these neurotoxins from China or even Mexico, Carbofuran. When we got to the hoop houses and they didn't have to hide in the woods anymore because they were just going to lose a couple grows, no one's getting arrested or deported or charged. What I finally realized, and we had 55 gallon drums of this stuff and blue 55 gallon drums of the Chinese poisons. And we go into these hoop houses in Siskiyou and the first thing you do, rather than run in there is you. You cut it open, take the whole roof off because the carbon monoxide and CO2 levels are toxic. You got to ventilate it. And so they're taking those poisons. And I kid you not, they've got their own Tyvex hazmat suits in a little side room. Growers with hazmat suits.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

They put it on and they're pumping out of these 55 gallon drums and they're putting out all 4,000 plants in there. They're putting it in the water. And this is a concentrated area that's so much closer to a city than way back in, say, the national forest. Right, right.

[B]

Much easier for their operation. Yeah.

[A]

Siskiyou County, Shasta residents, headaches. They're having vision problems. All those toxic films are. Yeah, this was just last summer. We started to get wind of it. Siskiyou county put out a state of Emergency request to Governor Newsom. Jeremiah LaRue, hit it up. And right before I went to second congressional testimony, I got that sent to me and I went, okay, this is a textbook example of what these poisons are doing and what bad cannabis regulation is doing for the other states that are committing the problem. We are. And incentivizing the Chinese and Mexican cartels to work together some more. So fortunately, it's getting out there, though.

[B]

Out of control.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But one thing that's interesting. Yeah. It's. Most people also don't know this, but you know this very well with 2016 and that's what you were fighting against. What 2016 liberalization California did is that it went from being. It became a misdemeanor Right.

[A]

So now, infraction for a juvenile grower, right?

[B]

So now you've got these people out there that before might be arrested, and now they're. Now they. Nothing happens to them practically. So what's the downside? Right? Let's just grow everything.

[A]

Well, it was like. It was like that grow boss that we debrief, right? He said, yeah, you know What? I got 50 grows. You guys are going to get maybe 11 of them when the law changes. So I lose 11, I won't even lose my best growers. They're not going to. They're not going anywhere.

[B]

Yeah. And apart from the environmental consequences of all this and the toxics, you know, everything that we've talked about today, today, there's also the problem that a lot of these times, it's not. It's not. They're not just dealing in marijuana, Right? No, we know that it goes hand in hand with meth trafficking and fentanyl and all these other drugs. It's all combined.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. To your point, because I'm so much into environmental protection on the game warden side, that was kind of our bellywick, right. We were dedicated to cannabis cartel fights, trespass, grows. That's what the marijuana enforcement team was built specifically to do just that. But you just hit it on the head. And DEA goes into this very stringently. Now you got to think poly criminality with cartels, and you got to think of it like a big contracting company that build homes. So my foundation guy that's pouring the concrete, he does weed on the outdoor public land. But then the guy that's doing the framing is going to hoop houses in counties like Siskiyou or states like Oklahoma or Maine. And then this other guy that's a fine tile guy, he's my fentanyl guy, you know, and this new P2Pmeth. Same precursors. Yeah. And then he's the roofing guy. And so it's just. It's just a big corporation, and they're so organized on how they do it, you know, And I think a lot of times Americans don't see it firsthand because maybe they're not cannabis users, maybe they're not. They don't have anybody that's been in a grow site or they haven't. I don't know how many people in America don't know somebody or know of somebody that knows somebody that's died of fence and all, because I have several people I know that have died. What are we at? 100,000 deaths approximately a year right now?

[B]

Yeah, it's been. It's been a million deaths since the early 2000s, I believe. It's insane. It's crazy. It. It really is. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. And I think with what you're doing with your work, what we're both doing with our work, and this is the thing, is just let every American know that you're affected indirectly or directly, whether you know it or not.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Because human trafficking, which has child sex abductions, some of the people, some of the young women that are disappearing up in Northern California and ending up who knows where, all those unaccompanied minors still unaccounted for when the border was flooded. It's terrifying and heartbreaking to think where those children are now at 4, 5, 6 years old. So I'm glad we're. It's a dark subject, but there's a lot of light out there like we talked about. And I think more Americans are starting to tune into it because it's everywhere.

[B]

Right? Yeah. And I remember when we were doing our marijuana story is, who cares? It's just weed.

[A]

Exactly. It's just weed.

[B]

People don't realize what this actually means and how the black market is really thriving right now and seemingly growing since I last reported on this.

[A]

It is.

[B]

Which is so crazy.

[A]

I know we didn't talk about canine Phoebe.

[B]

Tell me, tell me.

[A]

I gotta talk about Koebe, because I know you're a dog lover, you're animal lover. So I go into her story in this book in Hidden War, this the second edition that's been updated. Our latest, his printing, Canine Phoebe was like one of those, you know, one in a million dogs. And then her handler Rumble, we call him. He's still a lieutenant. He'll be retiring pretty soon. And he was one of those one in a million handlers. And they were. Had that symbiotic relationship that you just see every now and again, military or law enforcement. And he's up in Shasta county working with his Shasta county deputies, doing what I was doing with the Santa Clara guys. And we didn't really work together, but I trained him in the academy, new and long. Loved him. Beautiful man, beautiful family. Hard worker and be known to me. He's going through like two, two and a half years of trial and error of getting Phoebe trained to sneak up on these guys in the groves. The long 8 mile hikes in the sheriff's office. Now Belgium Melano. Okay, so the. It's between mals and shepherds. We have three type of canines. We have a companion dog that's going to ride with you, going to sniff stuff, going to lick your, lick all the kids that are getting fish. You know, I had one of those dogs. Dogs twice. Then we have Labradors or shepherds that are detection dogs that'll sniff out evidence including marijuana, bullets, bear parts, reptiles, whatever. And then we have the dual purpose dogs. And these are, you know, the very expensive dogs. Same one SEAL teams use when some of bin Laden on that mission on Neptune's spear. Caro, that dog.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is the same breed of dog we have that we run. So Phoebe was like the perfect California dog. It took her about two years to get really pretty precise. But to be in heat that hot, deep in those woods that time of year and be quiet that long and then if a gunman, a sinalo gunman's going for a gun or anything and to deploy and apprehend bite, apprehend that, that suspect.

[B]

So that's what Phoebe was trained to do.

[A]

That's what she was trying to do. And she ended up, I kid you not, she ended up with. I talk about it in the book because in 2018 she passed right before I retired of leukemia. But it wasn't, it wasn't a wound from the field. She had had a full career. She was just of old age. And she had 116 apprehension bites and then she had close to 900 apprehensions where they gave up. So she took almost a thousand bad guys in those organizations out of circulation. She found lost kids, she found murder weapons. But what really did it for California is under the political climate of the time and saying it's a sanctuary state, we're not going to talk about cartels. You know, weed is regulated now. And what's Phoebe doing going into grows and stopping gunfights when these guys are trying to hurt us, when they're pulling knives out trying to stab her. And the flip of the same coin, that 70 year old Belgium male melan like my little yellow lab was a sweetheart. Belly scratches, you know, petting all the officers, getting to know him. So she was like the Goldilocks. She bit just hard enough, you know, not too hard, not too soft. Nobody got killed. Yeah, but she saved my life. And I talk about it in the book on a mission where she literally saved my life biting a suspect that was about to shoot me with a pistol. Wow. Second chapter. Yeah, sorry, I. Oh, you get emotional talking about Phoebe. Oh, well, I know you because you've worked with some dogs, law enforcement teams internationally. And those dogs, they're not even four legged partners. They're like a human partner and they'll sacrifice selflessly and take a bullet for you, take a knife for you, whatever.

[B]

100% sorry. Of course.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It just, it brings a wave of motions and I feel really grateful to discuss this with you because I think of her being a doctor dog guy and how many times she saved my bacon and all my brother's bacons, you know, and sisters, so. But yeah, she had a heck of a career.

[B]

But so was she. Was there? I mean, there's some silly to ask, but was there? Is she. Was she recognized?

[A]

This is crazy and I forgot to even mention this to you, but in 2017, our agency, our Met team, got a resolution award in the Assembly. Assembly and the Senate. And first time resolution awards have been given to anyone in our agency. And it was to the Met team, but the assembly gave Phoebe her own award, Canine Phoebe. And I have that up in my office in Montana. And then the other one was to the team. And keep in mind, this was a year after we regulated right? And so we're up at the Capitol and there's some pictures in the book with some blurred out of her in the Capitol with us getting our award and whatnot and touring both them of houses and they're announcing it and all of the assemblymen and all the senators, they're reading the data of what goes into the book. You know, this team, in this many years, 3 million marijuana toxically tainted plants, 1,000 arrests, you know, 762 guns, 465 pounds of carbohydrate chemical, this much. 455 miles of poly pipe.

[B]

Those are just off head national hero.

[A]

Yeah, so. And they're talking about the team and they're talking about the dog. And the whole time like, oh my God, get those cartels. This is great. And then you hear these legislators go, hey, we regulated Prop 64. Wasn't this supposed to stop? And there we are in open chambers. So I thought that was the best part of receiving that award as an agency and as the dog of going, guys, awareness, it ain't working. The dam isn't just. It's got too many holes in it. You can't plug the hole. We got to build a new damn.

[B]

Which is the sad part about all of this, right? Because I do think legalization is the way forward, but it just has to be done well. And it hasn't been well.

[A]

Let me. I'm glad you said that. I'm really, I'm curious to hear your take on that because I get asked this A lot on podcasts. Joe and I went into this a little bit.

[B]

I did too.

[A]

And I think I'm glad you and I are going into it, but. And I don't want to. I never want to like disparage or say anything bad about the legitimate tier one wilderness growers that are trying to do it by the numbers, but the big thing that other states are seeing is, I mean, do you think this regulated federally, obviously take the incentive out of cartel crimes for at least cannabis, we can't talk fentanyl and human trafficking, at least the cannabis side. But tobacco, like wine.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. Standards, definitely. When it comes to cannabis, it doesn't work when it's a patchwork of laws. Right. When you have something happening in California that's different, what's the happening in Nevada and Colorado?

[A]

I agree wholeheartedly.

[B]

Across the country.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And. And you cannot make it this hard for people who want to make this their honest business. You know, want to start an honest business. And you're making it so impossible for them that they have to then resort to black market. And you can't make it a product so expensive and tax so high that then you can't afford it. And of course you're gonna want to do get the black market because it's much cheaper, can also be much more dangerous. But there you have it.

[A]

I agree.

[B]

So I do think what I in, in terms of the larger drug. Drug problem in America. You know, I come from Portugal and I've spoken with Joe Rogan actually about this extensively. But in Portugal, what we did many years ago is we decriminalized drugs. So if you're caught with a certain amount, until a certain amount, you are allowed. You're actually given the option, you can either go to prison or you can go to drug rehab. And the state, the government, the country, actually you spend less money in rehab than you do in sending somebody to prison, in incarceration, and obviously addresses the problem much more head on than just arresting somebody. And so in Portugal, it was a huge success. I know the United States is not Portugal. It's a much bigger country. But I think what we have on our hands, particularly with the fentanyl crisis, is we have a public health crisis that we are trying to solve through guns and through war. A drug war.

[A]

I agree.

[B]

That started, as we know, with Nixon and that has not. We spent billions and billions of dollars and have done nothing. The drugs are coming into this country more than ever. The problem is getting bigger. More people are dying. And we have. And we're still trying to. What's the expression? I'm terrible with English expressions, but what's the expression when you try to solve a thing with a round peg, A square hole.

[A]

Round. You're trying to pound a square peg in a round hole.

[B]

Right. And that's what we're trying to do.

[A]

I call it putting a band aid on a cancer. Yeah.

[B]

We're not okay with people growing marijuana and creating all this environmental damage, which I'm not. And we should absolutely put money into preventing that from happening. But you should also be paying attention to the, you know, mill. You know, almost a million Americans have died. If you go to some cities, you go to Philadelphia and Kensington, outside of Philadelphia, where you're seeing, it's, you know, those heartbreaking people, zombie, like on the streets with massive wounds that are because of this new. The tranq dope, the new fentanyl, when it's mixed with Xylazine.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And we're allowing this to happen. And these are our citizens. I mean, these are American citizens who are dying on the streets. And we're just letting them. We're seeing, you know, we're driving by every day and seeing this, and there's not enough attention being put into the public health crisis that is happening in America.

[A]

I wholeheartedly agree.

[B]

And so we hear that we have to address, we have to change how we're addressing this problem and really focus on the needs and why is there demand and how can we concentrate on that and put resources into that? They tried to do this in Oregon when they legalized as you know, but what they didn't do well, and I also discussed this with Joe, was that they didn't put enough resources into the community rehabilitation of these people into the recovery and rehabilitation. So a lot of them fell through the cracks and the problem didn't get any better. And if not, it got worse. So, yeah, that's my two cents.

[A]

No, I'm spot on with you. It's the best way to go. I wholeheartedly agree.

[B]

We're thinking failing them. This is what the problem is, that we're failing our fellow Americans.

[A]

We are.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And there's. I, I don't think we're going to ever get to the point where we can decrease demand. I mean, 43 to 44 million, you know, regular cannabis users aren't going to stop using cannabis. So let's get good cannabis into the people that want it.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

If they're not doing damage with or regulate it. Yeah, but, but, but fentanyl and the human trafficking Thing now that it's all interlinked.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's just. It doesn't have to start from the ground up. I mean, we have a role in the law enforcement, military side, whatever, but it's a small part of the whole triangle. Right. Like reclamation, arrest and eradication. We're leaving that community element. We're leaving that community support out of it.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So.

[B]

Yeah, well. But you are a small but very important part in all of this puzzle. And the work you've done has been incredible. And even in raising awareness of this, I don't think most people know that this is how happening and everything you try to then try to combat it and has been really phenomenal. So I've been very happy that you came on the podcast and that we were able to talk.

[A]

Well, I appreciate you saying that. I'm honored to be here and kudos to all you've done. You know, you're inspiring a lot of people. And you know, the thing is we always say we can do the best work in a law enforcement, in a hidden grow and make this dent. But if we're not telling the bigger story through Trafficked or through the Game Warden reality series, like our wild justice we had for a while or Northwood stuff law whatever, or podcasts like this, or podcasts like this, that's why so

[B]

much of this information comes out these

[A]

days, and it's huge. And everyone's listening to podcasts, so I appreciate the time for one and getting to collaborate and I appreciate all you do.

[B]

And tell me about the book real quick.

[A]

Yeah. This is the fourth printing of the second edition signed for you.

[B]

Thank you. The Hidden War second edition. That's so great. Wait, and there's a little signature inside for me.

[A]

Oh, of course. Absolutely. To the incredible Mariana Zeller out there spreading the word, because outreach is everything.

[B]

Can I read it?

[A]

Absolutely. Laid out.

[B]

Honored to know and work with you. And thanks for all you do to educate informant exposed. Stay safe and keep crushing my friend. That's so great. Thank you.

[A]

Thank you for all you do.

[B]

This is amazing.

[A]

Thank you. I got one other thing for you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So second thing I got here is my signature blade.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Made by my friend, collaborated, Mike Villa, camp of V Knives out of Washington. He started the Spyderco Warehouse way back in the early 90s and said, how would you like if we built a blade, your signature blade, that would be something you never had and have all the tools on it when you were a warden or a Met guy? And I went, really? So this is the thin Green line trailblazer.

[B]

Oh, that is great.

[A]

And I know you have a new backpack because I saw you. You get this new backpack and all the field work you do. Everyone needs a good knife, so watertight case here. We're going into our fourth run of these.

[B]

Oh, my God, this is so cool.

[A]

This is the thin red line version. We have thin blue for law enforcement, thin green for the wardens and military, but thin red line because firefighters, my sister's retired San Jose firefighter, search and rescue, the Palisades fire. Firefighters, we're trying to honor. So this is. This is your blade. Now, it's fast, but it's not a switchblade, so it's legal. And you've got got a drop point for skinning, gutting, general cutting, and serrations if you're cutting through wire or anything on your field ops. And when it closes, you know, I'm

[B]

going to need your help for all of this.

[A]

I'm going show y'.

[B]

All.

[A]

Glass breaker.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If you have to break out of that window in the car. Harness cutter. If you're stuck in the seat belt, lanyard loop and tools and everything, you need to repair it. Or I can always get it repaired.

[B]

This is the best, John. Thank you so much.

[A]

And that's your thin red line. Okay.

[B]

Can I try it?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

This is amazing. This is really legit.

[A]

Yeah. And beat it up, man. It's a battle blade, Mead. We all. We all use them and they clean up nice. And I'm honored.

[B]

This is so sweet. You're the first guest that brings me a gift. I mean, I've gotten books, but.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Thank you, John.

[A]

You are very welcome.

[B]

If I didn't like you already, I like you a lot now.

[A]

My pleasure.

[B]

Well, it was wonderful having you on the hidden third and I hope you come back sometimes.

[A]

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[B]

3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month Required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See full [e-mail].