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The Team House
The FBI Bomb Tech Who Chased Terrorists Worldwide | Steve Lazarus | Ep. 400
02:27:36
Retired FBI agent Steve Lazarus joins us to discuss his career investigating domestic terrorism, infiltrating militias in the 1990s, and hunting figures like Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph. He also breaks down major cases from the inside, including...
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- [00:00]
Steve Lazarus
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- [01:23]
Jack Murphy
Hey everyone, I want to tell you about my new novel the Most Dangerous man out in June. It is a novel about a regimental reconnaissance company soldier who gets kidnapped while he's on a mission to West Africa. And when he wakes up he finds that he is now being hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories that I heard over the years about safari guides taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa. I took that and I took a century old short story the Most Dangerous Game and modernized it. And the product is this book which I think will feel contemporary and resonate with audiences today. Thank you and please check it out. Special operations,
- [02:28]
Steve Lazarus
covert ops, espionage. The team house with your hosts jack murphy and david park.
- [02:44]
Jack Murphy
Hey everyone, welcome to the Teamhouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest Steve Steve Lazarus. Steve is a retired FBI agent. He served on Counter Gang Squad, narco domestic terrorism cases, became a bomb technician, spent some time in Afghanistan, Iraq, many other things that we'll talk about here. He's also an author. Now he's the author of detective fiction. The books are Call Me Sonny, Finding Sonny and the upcoming Killing Sonny. I read Call Me Sonny, the first one on the plane back from Tokyo the other day last week and I loved it. It's a great down on his Luck Private Eye. It starts off with that kind of classic premise and then goes into a really in depth plot that this poor guy gets wrapped up in. I thought it was a great book. And Steve, thank you for joining us.
- [03:38]
Steve Lazarus
Thank you very much. And I appreciate the kind words.
- [03:41]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, man. No, you did a good job with it. You have the knack for it.
- [03:47]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, like, like I was telling you earlier, it's, it's one of the things that I've been kind of Joe Average in a lot of things in my life. I've always been able to write. It's always served me well, whether it was in the military or the bureau. So I thought let's, let's see if I can go ahead and write something that's, that's commercially so far, so good.
- [04:06]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get into the book in a bit here, but let's start at the beginning, man. Tell us a little bit about kind of how you grew up and what your path was towards federal law enforcement.
- [04:20]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, I was an air force brat. Dad was a B52 pilot. We lived all over the place. I ended up graduating from high school in Northern Virginia, went off on a football scholarship to East Tennessee State University that lasted all of about a half a year before I realized I was not college football, at least not, not Division 1 AA they called it at the time, material. So ended up joining the air Force in 1983 and, and spent some enlisted time. And there was actually a point at which I'll, I'll never forget this. I was a young, I think a two or three striper or something like that. And a plane comes in, it's a T37, it's on a cross country flight, it's a trainer, and it lands at the air force base I'm working at. And out pops the student pilot, this lieutenant. And he was a guy I played football with in high school. He's two years ahead of me. And it occurred to me, we caught up for a few minutes and everything and gassed his plane and he went on his way. And it occurred to me that we came from the same high school, we played football together, we knew each other. And he's flying the plane and I'm gassing it and that sort of stuck in my crawl a little bit. So I real fast went back to school, got my degree, went off to ocs, got my commission, also went to pilot training, did not do as well as he did. I ended up busting out of the program and ended up in the military police business, or as we called it, security police, Air force is a great place to fly airplanes. Terrible, terrible place to be a policeman or military policeman. And so around about 1996, I said I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to apply to the FBI and put my, put my paperwork in and actually applied to the FBI and the DEA at the same time. FBI got back to me first, so they got first dibs. And, and In January of 97 I was off to the FBI Academy.
- [06:27]
Jack Murphy
So being a, I think they're called security forces now. Air Force security forces. I mean is that job primarily like gate guards, guarding the airfield, that kind of stuff?
- [06:38]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So when you're an officer, they make you, at least back in those days, something called a shift commander. So in my case it was kind of a leadership laboratory. You know, as a brand new second lieutenant, I had about 130 people working for me and they were guys who had everything from guarding the gate to the patrols on base, to the investigations on base to the, the bulk of them was the, the guys who were securing in this case at Carswell Air force base, the B52s and then the nuclear stockpile that went along with them. So it was a great place to, you know, learn a little bit of that, that first, first level of leadership, leading a whole bunch of people who, who had kind of a mishmash of responsibilities. But it, it's, I'm not gonna lie, it's kind of a miserable existence. It's shift work. It's pretty much underappreciated. You're constantly being told, you know, how much they appreciate you being the guy who supports the mission in this sort of condescending, you know, left handed compliment you get, you get from the operators. And I think finally what made me want to do what I wanted to do was if I was going to be in an organization, I wanted to be the operator in that organization. I wanted to be in the operations side of it, not, not, you know, one of the appreciated support people. So made the decision and took, took a, a jump back in that time. You know, I had three kids and a wife. And at that time the FBI would not give you a class date until you had your 214 in your hand. Oh, wow. By then I was a captain. I, you know, I made some decent money and had three kids to support. My wife did not work and I, I took that leap of faith and went off to Quantico in January of 97.
- [08:33]
Jack Murphy
So what was the FBI Academy like?
- [08:36]
Steve Lazarus
You know, I think if it was the kind of thing, if you could get rid of the fact that every time you took a test, you were testing for your job, because if you failed two tests, you were gone. I never had an issue. I was always a good shot. Shooting was not a problem. I was in superb shape. So the PT and the defensive tactics and all that were not a problem. I was just deadly scared of flunking a test, you know, a legal exam or, you know, a communications exam or who knows what. Because if you flunked one of. One of those, you were on probation, you flunked two, you were gone. But I think if, for most people, if you've ever been through any sort of, even a basic training type scenario, just somewhere where you've lived in a barracks and you eat, you eat when they tell you, you study when they tell you, you go to bed when they tell you, or if you've ever been to a police academy. I don't think it was that big of a deal. Nobody really freaked out.
- [09:36]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah, but I mean, you're there with, like, all types of different people. Like, you came directly from the military, but there's also, like, a lot of dudes who are accountants, but then also kind of like the grizzled street cops to, you know, work their way up to federal eventually sometimes.
- [09:52]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. That was one of the first humbling moments in my career was that very first, you get. You show up on a Sunday, you start class on a Monday, but you show up on a Sunday and you show up in your suit and you meet up in what is going to be your classroom, and you. Everybody stands up. This is big sort of a tiered classroom, and everybody stands up, starting with the A's, all the way back to the Z's, and you tell them who you are and what you did before you got there. And yeah, we had. You know, One of my best buddies there was running a nursing home in. In Birmingham, Alabama, before we got there. But we had dudes. We had one Guy was a PhD fellow studying advanced AIDS research at Stanford, you know, before he got there, we had somebody. We had a lady who was a clinical psychologist for the Department of Corrections. We had two now, one former Navy SEAL in my class and two SF guys like yourself. And, you know, here I was, I was like, yeah, my name's Steve, and I was a. I was a security policeman in the Air Force for the last 11 years. Maybe I just won't say too much more about myself, but that was. That was kind of humbling. And yeah, we had street cops, we had state troopers it was a. It was everybody.
- [11:11]
Jack Murphy
And this is 1997. So if I'm thinking back, this was after Oklahoma City. This is maybe. Had Columbine happened yet? Maybe not.
- [11:22]
Steve Lazarus
Columbine happened in 99. I actually was on a TDY for the FBI when Columbine happened. I was in. On a TDY training trip up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee when that happened. But it was like we were talking earlier, it was the sort of the height of the militia movement. So what you'd had. You had had Waco and Ruby Ridge, you would have the end of the Branch Davidians standoff. And all these things were that. I don't remember a time from then until now when anti government sentiment and had been as high as it was at that time.
- [12:04]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, well, let's jump into kind of. And I guess this is relevant. Where did you get assigned. What was your first job with the Bureau after you graduated the academy?
- [12:17]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, so they had this big deal where you go up in front of the class and you open your envelope, you say, hey, my name's Steve and I came from here and here's where I think I'm going. And then, envelope, please. You open it, you announce it in front of the class where it is you're going. And. And I got Atlanta, which was actually pretty darn good. I. I had sort of covered up my. My dream sheet. What they do is they give you the 56 field offices. You have to rank them in order from 1 to 56 in terms of 1 being the 1 you'd like to go to the most and 56 being dead last. I think I had Atlanta somewhere around 7. I sort of covered up the Southeast because I was from the Southeast. So I ended up in Atlanta and got there and got assigned to. This is how small the Bureau was comparatively at the time. We had one squad that was domestic terrorism, all international terrorism, and all foreign counterintelligence on one squad, which is how many guys? Seven or eight squads. Now, in the Atlanta office, how many
- [13:18]
Jack Murphy
guys is a squad about?
- [13:21]
Steve Lazarus
I think on our squad, we probably had about 15 people. Yeah.
- [13:25]
Ghostbed Advertiser
Wow.
- [13:25]
Jack Murphy
That. That's crazy.
- [13:27]
Steve Lazarus
Yes.
- [13:27]
Jack Murphy
Yes.
- [13:30]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So I was assigned domestic terrorism. And in particular, I. My, My job was to see if I couldn't infiltrate a couple of the militias around town, around the state that were forming. And the best place to do that, the best. The best way to do that is to get yourself a source who's inside one of them. And the best place to do that is the gun shows. So I made a career out of going to gun shows. My wife was pissed off at me all the time because I spent all my weekends, which is when the gun shows normally are. I spent my weekends at gun shows just chatting people up, talking to them, seeing how they felt, engaging them in conversation. I ended up opening a few good sources, and one of them, I'll say his first name now, a guy named Luke was a guy that, that I. I opened up probably in early 1998. I'll say his name because he's since. Since passed one of the greatest guys I ever met. And he was recruited by what was called at the time the Georgia Civilian Militia to be. Right after I opened him as source to be their security officer. And I asked him, I said, well, what are the. Tell me about the job description there, Luke? What are you going to be doing? He said, well, my job is to make sure that we keep snitches out of the militia. And I just thought that was, that was poetically beautiful, you know. And it ended up that probably about 20% of the people who were in that militia were on somebody's snitch list. They were a source for somebody what, whether it was me, whether it was atflant department. And Luke ended up helping me make some really good cases and, and, and take down some guys who, who, you know, they, they. They had some plots. Like, one of them I was, was telling you earlier, one of them had a plot to blow up the Buford Dam in, in. In. At Lake la. We had a good time. I did that for a couple of years.
- [15:42]
Jack Murphy
I mean, I always think exactly what you said. When I think about militias or even like the Klan, I think these groups are completely infiltrated by the feds at this point. And have you ever read the book? There's an older novel called, I think it's called the man who Is Thursday, written by this guy Chesterfield. And it takes place in, I guess the early 1900s, maybe late 1800s. And it's about the police. They recruit this guy to infiltrate an anarchist group. And the hilarious thing about the novel is as he infiltrates this group of anarchists, it turns out all of them are snitches. They're all working for the cops. And everyone's pointing fingers and stuff, but they're all on the take. This group is sort of like fictitious at the end of the day.
- [16:28]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, they were the worst, the guys. And I'll tell you, you've seen all the memes about Meal Team Six and the gravy seals and what have you. It really did fit with These guys fit perfectly into that sort of that, that memology, if you will.
- [16:43]
Jack Murphy
You're down there in Georgia, some good old boys.
- [16:46]
Steve Lazarus
Oh, my goodness. And, you know, I. I also worked sources against outlaw bank biker groups, also lured sources against some pretty violent street gangs. And pound for pound, the most snitches were to be found in this. This sort of militia movement again back in the. The late 90s, the early 2000s, if you went to a meeting, if you look to your left and look to your right, at least one of those guys was a snitch.
- [17:16]
Jack Murphy
Can you explain to. I mean, this is for me a little bit, but also just for some of our younger viewers, what was going on at that time with the militia movement? Why did these groups exist? What was their intentions? Why was it felt that the FBI needed to have a heads up on what they were up to?
- [17:34]
Steve Lazarus
Well, if you go back to. If you go back to things like Waco and Ruby Ridge, you know, these were things. And we could. But I don't think we should, you know, go into what. What really happened there and just exactly whose mess the FBI was cleaning up in both of those cases. But, you know, the government as a whole, whether it was the FBI or ATF or anybody else, took a big black eye with the public, and we were seen, right or wrong, as being sort of an enemy of the people. So it gave rise to some of these guys and some of these names maybe your older listeners might know, like John Trachman of the Montana Militia or Mark Kornke, Mark from Michigan. These guys became like. They were like the first podcasters we're talking 30 years ago on ham radio.
- [18:20]
Jack Murphy
Was that on ham radio?
- [18:22]
Steve Lazarus
Absolutely. And they had these sort of calls to action where it's time to rise up and to overtake the government. And nobody really had an idea of exactly what the X's and O's looked like in that case. Yeah, absolutely. Let's take over the government. That's kind of big undertaking, you know, because if you think that you're gonna, you know, to quote a fairly famous comedian, if you think you're gonna, you know, grab yourself an AR platform and train in the woods for six weeks and take over the government, you don't understand how tanks work. Yeah. And. But that was a big thing at these gun shows. People were selling. They were selling gas masks to protect yourself during government gas attacks. There were stories going around about concentration camps. Remember the whole thing about the FEMA concentration camps from the late 90s and the early 2000s, everything was a conspiracy. And it was kind of getting steam and it's all fun and games until a guy like Tim McVeigh gets it in his head that he can exercise a little bit of leaderless resistance and kill 169 people at the Murrah Federal Building as. As his sort of statement against, you know, fu. Uncle Sam. And so he started to be seen as sort of a hero of the extreme fringe. Right. And you know, we, we stopped a hell of a lot more of those plots than. Than obviously than got through. But as they say, they don't report the safe landings at JFK, just the crashes. So you hear about the Tim McVeighs, you don't really hear about the other ones.
- [20:03]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, I mean, from what I recall from. I mean, I grew up really in the 90s. I was a teenager. But and I should also preface this. I mean, I don't have any problem with gun shows or gun ownership or anything like that at all. But if you tell us a little bit about the sort of like, darker side of the culture that was permeating in the 1990s, the survivalist stuff, the Turner Diaries, some of this, like, neo Nazi literature that was getting passed around.
- [20:30]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, well, the Turner Diaries was. Was of course, their bible that, you know, was. It was a story about a guy who did exactly what it was they wanted to do, who rose up in violent opposition to the United States government. And it was very, very pervasive. Everybody had a better idea about what you could do to attack the government or to create chaos. We were starting to see bigger and bigger bombing plots. We saw people like Eric Rudolph, who created this fictitious organization called the army of God that, you know, never really existed. But people were starting to find ways to violently express their hatred against the United States government. There were biological plots, there were chemical plots, there were explosive plots. And I think all of that. I think if there was something that probably changed that, it was probably 9 11, really, it's not that brought us together as a country, but it was almost sort of a slap in the face to everybody that, you know, maybe. Maybe extreme violence against the United States government and her citizens is not. Not the way we want to go. Maybe it's not the way we want to behave as Americans. I'm not saying anybody had any, you know, great moments of enlightenment, but I think for the most part after 9 11, that sort of hatred of all things associated with the government, it started to sort of fall out of vogue, if that makes sense.
- [22:06]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, no, that's an interesting perspective. I never thought of it like that.
- [22:11]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah.
- [22:13]
Jack Murphy
So
- [22:16]
Steve Lazarus
again, I've never seen and I worked these kinds of things for quite a few years. I know obviously right now we are in as polarizing of times politically and socially as we've probably ever been in in this country. But I will tell you right now, the level of just pure anti government vitriol and let's solve it in a violent manner. Not even close to what there was back in the 90s.
- [22:43]
Jack Murphy
It's wild.
- [22:45]
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- [23:01]
Steve Lazarus
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- [26:26]
Jack Murphy
Tell us more about the Buford damn plot because I don't know anything about
- [26:31]
Steve Lazarus
that so it was the Georgia Civilian Militia. The head of the Georgia Civilian Militia was this guy named James Troy Diver. And James was a he stuck out like a sore thumb in in Georgia. A couple of reasons. First of all, he was about 6 foot 6, high as a big guy, loud as hell and the thickest New Jersey accent you have ever heard. He sounded like he walked off the set of what's the what's that show down the Shore or whatever it was Jersey Shore sound like. You walked up that set and he was just this loud obnoxious guy and he took an immediate liking to Luke. He just loved him some Luke. And Jim was also a convicted felon who didn't get the memo that as a convicted felon, he wasn't allowed to have guns anymore. And he was laundering money and guns through our guy Luke, because Luke, in addition to all the other great things he could do, he was an ffl. So that was, that was especially useful to us. And so Jim came up with an idea at a, At a meeting one night at. I don't know if it was at a Waffle House. And yes, I, I hate to, I, I hate to sort of gender the stereotypes, but yes, a lot of these meetings occurred at Waffle Houses. And Jim brought up the idea. He first floated it as a what if. You know, see all that water over there in Lake Lanier? Yeah. What if all that water was just what if that dam wasn't there, holding it back? Now, here's the funny thing, full disclosure. The Beaufort Dam is an earthen dam. I don't know how much everybody knows about engineering. I got a chance to learn a little bit about it, but there are very few munitions, military munitions, that if you drop them on an earthen dam the size of the beaver dam would actually cause it to give way. And these guys were talking about getting a few cases of dynamite and trying to find a few strategic plots to blow the Beaufort Dam. And the thing about the plan, the thing about the statutes that talk about terrorist plots and that talk about conspiracies is it just says there has to be a plot. It doesn't say there has to be a good plot.
- [28:54]
Jack Murphy
Right.
- [28:54]
Steve Lazarus
It doesn't. Has to be a well thought out plot. It doesn't say, it has to be plausible. It doesn't have to say. It doesn't say that it has to work, just that there's a plot. So Jim was talking back and forth and we caught him up with some other people. I think the guy's name was Don Beauregard out of Florida in the southeast states. Alliance Militia out of Florida. And we, we ended up working a joint case with the, believe it was Tampa field office and ended up locking up Jim for about six or seven years. And I think Don Beauregard went to jail for about six or seven years as well. And I think that pretty much beat it out of them. That might have been another thing that I think, in addition to 9, 11. I think another thing that sort of just, just beat these guys down was they started realizing how many snitches there were in the organizations. They started realizing that even if you don't do anything. If you're just planning or if you're. If you're just conspiring, we'll still throw your ass in jail for, you know, minimum of five years. I think after a while, they just realized that, you know, the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze anymore. And again, it just. It just kind of died out. And I think. I really think by the early the mid 2000s, I think it had just sort of died out as a movement.
- [30:18]
Jack Murphy
I'd like to hear a little bit more about your C.I. luke. Like, how did he come into their orbit and end up in the militia? And then why did he decide to talk to you?
- [30:28]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, I struck up a conversation with Luke because he had a booth at a gun show. Like I said, he was an ffl. And I just started discussing things with him. And it was the kind of thing where I'd see him at this gun show this weekend. I'd see him at another gun show another weekend. And Luke was one of these guys, and I don't mean this in a bad, bad way, but he was always a wannabe cop. And the thing about wannabe cops is they're great sources because they love spending time with actual cops or actual FBI agents or ATF agents or whoever. They just enjoy it. So Luke was one of these guys. I should tell you, he never took a dime from me other than expenses. You know, if he traveled, for instance, to go to a militia meeting in Alabama, for instance, you know, we pay his money and. But otherwise, I tried to give him. I tried to give him some money every now and then, you know, around Christmas time, it's just a thank you. And he said, no, I'm not. It's not why I'm in it. So he was one of these sources who was in it to do the right thing. And he also enjoyed the relationship. And I. He was approached. I don't know how it was he was approached by Jim, but after I had just given him some loose source sort of assignments sort of things like, you know, if you know somebody who you know is a convicted felon who's trying to obtain firearms, or if somebody's story just really sounds fishy with you or somebody just kind of rubs you the wrong way or you get an icky feeling, give me a call, let me look into the guy. And it probably wasn't a few weeks after that, he said, hey, I got this guy approach me, and he wants me to be part of his militia. There's about two dozen of them. He wants me to go To a meeting. And I said, well, that's fantastic. And we kind of started working it from there. I'll never forget the first meeting I sent him into. I don't know if any of your FBI guests have ever talked about this. I suppose I could talk about it now, because, by God, I hope this is an outdated piece of equipment. But I had to hang something on loop called a nagra. And a nagra was a circa, you know, early to late 90s recording device that the FBI used. And it's probably looking around me for something I could compare. It's probably about the size of a small paperback book, and it's battery powered. And it literally had a reel to reel tape inside of it. And you would jam this down the guy's pants and you would run the leads. This was like a wire, like the kind that people would find.
- [33:07]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:07]
Steve Lazarus
You know, mob movies in a Scorsese movie.
- [33:10]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:10]
Steve Lazarus
And get whacked for. And I remember the look of horror on Luke's face as I'm, you know, jamming this thing down his pants and taping these. These leaves to his chest. And the people at the FBI would tell you, yeah, but it's studio quality recording. I was like, that's. That's great. We'll hear all of his screams as he's. As he's being executed. But Luke started gathering for us, and probably about six months in, I think we were ready to take Jim Diver down. And then we found out the. The. We found out the ties to the southeast states alliance. So we kind of kept working the case. We kept it alive. And eventually we arrested Jim for a variety of weapons charges and the conspiracy and the terrorist plots. And I think they let him plead it down to just the weapons charges because all he got was five years. Five, six years. But the thing about Luke, and it was probably one of the more humbling things in my FBI career was, you know, I stayed on with Luke for a while, and after I moved to the drug squad, it's common to turn a source over to somebody else. I turned him over to another agent. He kept producing for years and years. Five, six years ago, somebody finds me. I guess it must have been less than that, because I haven't been on Facebook that long. Somebody finds me on Facebook. And so Steve Lazarus, that used to be in the FBI, well, real careful about that, because I got people who promised to kill me and all that kind of stuff. And I said, yeah, maybe. Who's this? This is Luke's daughter. I wanted to let you know, he passed away this weekend. And I said, I'm really, really sorry to hear that. I said, I'm just curious, you know, Luke and I haven't had contact in probably 20 years. What made you reach out? Although I'm honored that you did. She said, steve, he talked about you and working with you in the bureau for the rest of his life, even after he said, I know he's working with some other people, he said, but he talked about the good times, just the way that you treated him and how good he felt and how much it. It meant to him to be able to contribute something. And I. I kind of got a little bit emotional, to be honest with you. I. It was one of, if not the most humbling things that anybody has ever said to me before, because I didn't see it from that perspective. I saw, you know, I saw Luke as, you know, a tool, maybe a little bit of a quasi friend. But to realize that he saw it in that light was so humbling.
- [35:51]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, it meant something to him. Tell us how you intersected with Eric Rudolph.
- [36:01]
Steve Lazarus
Well, if you were in the Atlanta office, you were looking for Eric Rudolph, and that meant you would spend weekends up in Murphy, North Carolina, either beating feet through the woods with the SWAT teams and the dogs or everybody else.
- [36:17]
Jack Murphy
What was he on the lam for?
- [36:19]
Steve Lazarus
Oh, yeah. So after the Birmingham bombing, so he had three bombings that we can associate with him. That was the Olympic park bombing. Excuse me, four bombings. The Olympic park bombing, then the other side nightclub, which was the gay nightclub, then the Sandy Springs abortion clinic, and then the last one was the abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama, where he actually killed, pardon me, a police officer with his bomb. And that was the one where somebody found his. Or saw him driving away and got the license plate number. And that's where he went from being what we called an unsub, an unknown subject, to being Eric Robert Rudolph. We knew who he was at that point. So after a couple of years of bombings, now we knew who he was, and he fled. And he had always told everybody if he ever went on the run from law enforcement, he would get lost in the Nantahala National Forest, which is up there in, you know, Murphy, North Carolina, area. And he did. He did a damn good job of it for, I think, at least a couple years. He had some people helping him. He had this George Nordman guy who was helping him. But it became a rotating TDY to go up and spend a week at a time up in Murphy, North Carolina, either beating your feet through the. Through the the woods or interviewing people or manning the command post. And I did that several times. And then, gosh, I don't know the exact day he was caught. I want to say it was sometime around 2000, 2001 actually, at a buddy's house, hanging, helping him hang, siding on his house. And his wife comes out and says, they caught Eric Rudolph. And I said, no, kid, you got to be kidding me, right? She said, no, they caught him. It was up in, up in Murphy. And at that time, at that point my phone went off and I was told, get up. To get up to Murphy, North Carolina. Actually, it must have been 1999, because I was still on the terrorism squad. And I was told, get up there. We want federal agents. We want you and another agent up there in case he decides to talk. He probably will not, but we still want you to be there in case he decides to talk. So I spent the next probably 36 hours literally sitting in a room on the other side of one way mirror watching Eric Rudolph, pardon me, but take a dump, scratch his nuts, pick his nose, eat his meal, do whatever, and all the time refuse all of our requests to interview him. He lawyered up pretty fast. The next day I was told to see, I was told that there was no sense for us being there anymore. But they wanted me to go ahead and seize his clothes and swab his hands before we left on the off chance that there was any sort of a explosive residue left on him, which would have been really odd considering he hadn't lit a bomb off in a couple of years at that point. So I seized his clothes myself and my partner John, we seized his clothes, he swabbed his hands, and we're walking out the back of the Murphy, North Carolina police station. Might have been the sheriff's office. And there's all these reporters that are being held at bay across the street, I don't know, 100 meters away, something like that, all these, you know, shutters going off and everything. And the next day it's a picture of me and my buddy walking out of the Murphy police station out the back of the jail with a paper bag in our hand and marked evidence. And everybody sort of postulating in the news about what that might have been. It was his underwear
- [40:21]
Jack Murphy
surprise.
- [40:25]
Steve Lazarus
But he was, he was, he was an arrogant guy. I will say that he was a very arrogant guy. He was one of those guys who I would say remain true and faithful to his cause. I don't know how he's doing now. He's at supermax out There in Colorado. He's been there for 20 plus years. So. But. But he. He never, never showed any remorse. Never. Never really accepted responsibility for anything. The only reason he took a plea was to beat the death penalty. So in the end, you know, he didn't want to die.
- [40:59]
Jack Murphy
They gave him life, even life.
- [41:02]
Steve Lazarus
Note with. And people say life with no parole. But in the federal system, because of the. Because of the laws that came about in 1994, life means no parole. Parole. There is no parole in the federal system.
- [41:14]
Jack Murphy
So he's in that underground prison where they keep, like, mob bosses and stuff, terrorists and so on.
- [41:20]
Steve Lazarus
He's there with Ramsey Yousef. He's there with Terry Nichols. He's there where the Unabomber was. El Chapo, I believe, is out there now. Oh, yeah, it's. It's. It's a. It's a genuine who's who soon.
- [41:36]
Jack Murphy
Soon to be occupied by Maduro.
- [41:39]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, exactly. Maduro will probably be out there. So it's, it's, it's. It's a who's who for sure.
- [41:48]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. I remember reading somewhere that Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh were kind of boys in prison, which I guess is not totally surprising.
- [41:58]
Steve Lazarus
They were like. Like buddies or.
- [42:00]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, they were like pals or something.
- [42:02]
Steve Lazarus
I guess they might have been. I don't know the extent to which. Because, you know, the thing about supermax, everybody. Everybody knows this is it's 23 in a cell, an hour out in the yard. But I guess there is also some open population in supermax that you can earn your way into over time. I know if you're a guy like a Ted Kaczynski, even if they think that you might be harmless. But if you're super uber famous, the problem is you could be a trophy for somebody else.
- [42:33]
Jack Murphy
Right.
- [42:34]
Steve Lazarus
Somebody else might want to get a shot at you and kill you just as a trophy kill, especially if they're on death row already. And that's another one who's out there is Dzhokar Tsarnaev, the surviving member of the Tsarnaev Brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon.
- [42:51]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll get into that. So just to close up this part of your career in domestic terrorism, we've interviewed FBI agents on the show before who have said prosecuting a domestic terrorism case is about the most difficult job at the FBI, at least in some people's opinion. And it sounds like you got some convictions when you reflect back on that. I mean, what are the difficulties in actually getting a conviction on a domestic
- [43:20]
Steve Lazarus
Terror charge, probably the biggest problem. And again, I only worked this for a couple of years, but my sense is that what they're talking about is that you're pursuing a terrorism charge, but you're pursuing it with all of the encumbrances that come with investigating an American citizen. So when you get into the, into the international terrorism charges, now you've got fis. You've got tools available to you where you don't have to afford the subject, especially if they're an agent of a foreign power. You don't have to afford them all of the same protections that you have to afford someone who's just, you know, some dude meeting down at the, at the Waffle House with his buddies and discussing about blowing up a prominent landmark or a dam or a courthouse. So I think that's probably what they're talking about.
- [44:13]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. And of course, you guys are trying to be preventative to get them before the act. You know, after the act, you have something you can pin on Kaczynski or McVeigh, but you're trying to get ahead of it, right?
- [44:25]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. And like I said before, you know, they don't, they don't report the, the safe landings at jfk, only the crashes. Yeah. So that's all the public has to hear about. But I, I can tell you that for everyone you hear about, there's, there's dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, that have been stopped or, or nipped in the bud. And that's, that's, that's the FBI. I remember, we, we were pretty proud of that.
- [44:51]
Jack Murphy
And after your time on domestic terrorism, you got pushed over to Narcotics.
- [44:57]
Steve Lazarus
I did. I actually asked to go to narcotics. There was a pretty active drug scene in Atlanta at the time. Between street gangs and biker gangs and then just plain normal, everyday traditional drug dealers. There was a lot. Atlanta was a big transshipment point. Point. So we'd come into Miami or we'd come into Texas, it would get shipped up to Atlanta, it would get broken out and it would get, you know, Atlanta was kind of a, a hub in the, in the wheel and we go out from there. We didn't, we didn't have anything like Miami weight. You know, Miami would have laughed at some of the weight we did. You know, 40 kilos, 50 kilos of coke was a, was a good size hit for us in Miami. You know, until it got to 100 kilos, they wouldn't even touch it. But we did some good work there. Multimillion dollar seizures, 40, 50, 60 kilo seizures and Got to learn a whole lot of new techniques. Got to learn a whole lot more about surveillance, a whole lot more about wiring people up. A whole lot, just a whole lot more about working sources. It was sort of a broader problem set than the domestic terrorism.
- [46:14]
Jack Murphy
Can you tell us the story about the man with 30 IDs?
- [46:19]
Steve Lazarus
Oh, yeah, quick tip we get. And this, this guy's coming in with about 100,000 ecstasy tablets into the Atlanta train station. So we, we find him and we, we chat him up. We do a field interview with him. We get into his, into his backpack, and there's all the pills. So that the source was good. And we, we arrest him, we take it back to the office, we're talking with him. We said, well, where were you going from there? And at this point, he just gives up the whole thing. He says, I look, man, I'm just a mule. I don't want to go to jail for 30 years for this. So, yeah, I was meeting my. I was meeting my, my, my dealer. I was meeting the guy who sent me on this mission. This guy's. His name is Hunziker, Jim Hunzaker. We spent the next, I don't know, month looking for Jim Hunziker. We could never figure out who he was. And we were knocking on doors. We knew names of girlfriends, we knew names of associates, and they all knew him as Jim Hunziker. And we finally decided Jim Hunziker can't possibly be his name. But we also know that this mule doesn't know his real name. Neither does anybody else who has been around this guy. So it was just an absolute stroke of luck. We found a girlfriend who had introduced him to a psychic. Because when we were searching her place, she gave us consent to search her place. And when we searched her place, we found a card. And on it it had New London, Connecticut, and a date written. And I said, well, what is this? He said, she said, well, he asked for a reading from this psychic. And the psychic, he didn't want to give his name, but the, the psychic said, well, just tell me where and when he was born. I'll give him a reading. She said, and I wrote this down. So we thought for a second and thought, well, if this guy really believes in psychics, this is probably his actual place of birth and date of birth. So we queried the New London resident agency, the FBI, with this date of birth and said, tell us about all live male dates of birth or all live males who were born on this date, rather in London, Connecticut, and There was one. His guy's name was Mark Allen Abraham. And oh, by the way, when we ran him with his true date of birth, he was wanted in Fairfax county for, I think, assaulting another a narcotics detective during an arrest. He was wanted there. And we got his arrest photo and we showed it to everybody, said, that's him. So now we knew the guy's real name, but we still didn't know any of his aliases. We didn't find that out until later. So what we did was we set up a. We asked a little bit.
- [49:16]
Jack Murphy
We.
- [49:16]
Steve Lazarus
We sort of determined what his pattern of life was as a drug dealer. And he fronted a lot of drugs to a lot of people. He was very trusting, and some people owed him some money. And one guy in particular who was a little tweaker, whose name was Charlie, I can't remember his last name, but he owed him like $30,000. We figured Mark was. Or. Or, yeah, Mark, his actual name, was on the run and probably use his money. So we arranged to leak a story and we did that. Charlie was trying to pay off his debt to him, his $30,000, so that he'd be free and clear because, you know, he didn't want Mark to come after him or something like that. And it worked. And Mark got in touch with Charlie over the phone. And eventually, after about a month of wrangling back and forth, we set up a meeting at the Savoy Hotel in South beach. And we arrested him when he showed up for that meeting. And it was then that we found out exactly what he had done because he was tired of running. He let us. He let us know how he had done it, what he had done. He had just taken identities from graveyards. But he was a little bit more sophisticated than that. What he would do was he would find boys who were born in one state but died in another state so that the birth and the death records couldn't be cross matched and died as young men. And then he would. Let's say that your name was John Smith, and you were born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and you died in Dallas, Fort Worth, Texas, and you died at the age of 8 years old, and you were roughly his age. Well, this is back before we had a lot of Internet capability, so there wasn't a whole lot cross matched. So what he would do is he would write off to Albuquerque and say, hey, I need my birth certificate. I was born there on such and such a day, and I just need that birth certificate. I lost my original and state's departments of vital statistics Send these out all the time. Well, once you have that birth certificate and he got about 30 of them. Wow. You have, you have the genesis document at that point.
- [51:28]
Jack Murphy
Right, right. You can go get your driver's license
- [51:31]
Steve Lazarus
and passport and now I get everything else. And he had at least 30 identities when we arrested him. And it was, it was, it was actually something that was so impressive that I think I wrote it. I think I wrote it into the second book or the third book. It was one of those things that I said, yeah, I've got to include this in the book somehow.
- [51:56]
Jack Murphy
Do you think that would even be possible today? With biometrics and computer databases?
- [52:01]
Steve Lazarus
It's a lot tougher.
- [52:03]
Jack Murphy
Yeah.
- [52:04]
Steve Lazarus
If you've ever, if your face has ever been scanned, if your prints have ever been scanned, you know, now we're to the point in DNA where, you know, if your third cousin bought one of those stupid 2323 AndMe kits and enrolled themselves, you know, you're, you're some degree of familial connection that's, that's in the database somewhere too. So. Yeah, it's, it's really tough. It's not only that, but I mean, think about, think about being an intelligence operative. Think about trying to sneak into countries on fake passports and all that. That stuff is pretty much over.
- [52:37]
Jack Murphy
Yes, no, it, it absolutely is. And that's, it's interesting you mentioned that because it's something I've been doing some research on, but. Yeah, the, the whole idea of non official cover that the military and the CIA use, like, it's not going to go away, but it's definitely not going to be what it used to be. It's going to be minimized, I guess you could say.
- [52:59]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, it can't. You just, you can't pretend to be three different people anymore. When I, you know, when I go to Abu Dhabi, the first time I went there as a civilian, he looked at me and you know, the, the guy in the candor at the immigration booth, he says, this is your first time in the UAE, Mr. Lazarus. I said, no, it's not. And of course he knew it wasn't because as soon as my face registered in the facial recognition, the fact that I had been there three times as an FBI agent, I'm sure popped up on his side of the desk on the screen that I couldn't see. So, yeah, you're right. It's a whole new world and it's presenting a whole new problem set for, for people who are in that space.
- [53:36]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah, no, I know. Dudes who did that kind of work. And there's like a whole slew of countries. There's like a list that they can't go through because they went through there on Alias in the past. And so you go through some. On some countries, they might just deport you, and others, you could be in a substantial amount of trouble.
- [53:54]
Steve Lazarus
Yes.
- [53:58]
Jack Murphy
So from that point, we're getting into the late 90s, early 2000s. Tell us where you were when 911 happened.
- [54:07]
Steve Lazarus
I was at Quantico. I was a firearms instructor by then, and I was going to an advanced firearms instructional techniques class. And it was Tuesday morning, of course, and it was whatever time it was. And I'll never forget there was a guy up there speaking at the podium. And one thing you never saw at Quantico, the classroom is sort of a sacrosanct area. You don't interrupt people when they're in the classroom. You don't barge in and you just don't interrupt ever. And this guy Gary was up there talking. He was giving us a class about who knows what. And somebody walked in and pulled him aside and pulled him out and just left us kind of sitting there. And we thought, oh, guy's mom must have just died or something like that, right? I wonder. Wonder what's going on. He came back about 10 minutes later and, you know, a little bit of the color had drained from space, and he told us what was going on, and we all just sort of stopped. He said, well, I don't really think anyone's going to have their mind on work right now, so let's go. And we basically went and sat in the unit, she chief's office for the firearms training unit and watched tv. And we were actually sitting there watching it when the first tower fell. So we saw that live. And, you know, I think everybody kind of knows what happens from there, but. But, yeah, we were. We were at Quantico when that happened.
- [55:34]
Jack Murphy
And what was sort of like the. The change in tone? Because I think you. You mentioned to me earlier, like, whatever your FBI career was, now it's going to be something different. You know, the moment you saw that happen on television, you must have known.
- [55:48]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So we're sitting there that night. There's a place called the boardroom at the FBI Academy. It's kind of the watering hole. It's the place where, you know, you can go have a couple beers after work. And, you know, mostly. Mostly the. The students go there, but the cadre goes there as well. Some. And sitting there just watching the day's events, watching it all on either CNN or Fox News or whatever it was. And the guy next to me turns to me and says, yeah, well, so what did you used to do before you came here? In other words, what, what crimes were you working? I said, well, I was on the drug squad. And, yeah, he called it exactly right. I had spent my last day on the drug squad at that point. When I got back to Atlanta, I was assigned to the airport. At that point, we had the world's busiest airport and we had no permanent presence there. And it was kind of a glaring omission on our part. I mean, jfk, o', Hare, lax, all the big airports had permanent FBI presences out there, and we didn't.
- [56:45]
Jack Murphy
And that kind of just again, set the stage for maybe some of the younger folks out there. After 9 11, of course, huge emphasis on airport security screening, all kinds of debates about the biometric stuff that was coming online about racial profiling. And it sounds like you were right in the middle, right in the thick of all that.
- [57:08]
Steve Lazarus
Oh, absolutely. And I'm not going to lie, man, the first, the first six months I was there was almost exclusively investigating flying while Arab or, you know, flying while. And it was sad, but yeah, flying while having dark skin. And the thing was, people were freaking out and, and we would get people who would say, these two dudes were talking in Arabic and I think they were plotting something. I would ask them, do you. Do you know Arabic? And they said, no, no, I don't know Arabic. Well, how would you know if they're plotting anything? Oh, I just got a bad feeling. It was, it was part of this national frenzy that was going on at the time. And then so they'd have these two dudes sequestered off to the side and I'd go talk to them and ask
- [57:46]
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Steve Lazarus
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Jack Murphy
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Steve Lazarus
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- [59:37]
Steve Lazarus
your passports and say okay, Mr. Garcia, Mr. Ramirez, you're free to go. Thank you very much. Sorry you were, sorry you were held up this evening. And we finally started tamping that down a little bit. Part of it was we, we started letting the, the airlines know that we weren't going to put up with. There were, there were some absolutely hysterical passengers and hysterical air crew members who were just freaking out and having panic attacks. Yeah. And we were speaking any language but English or if you had a skin tone any darker than yours or mine, you got caught up in that stuff. It was a bad time for a while.
- [60:20]
Jack Murphy
How do you think, be it the airlines or law enforcement or the bureau specifically began to kind of drill down away from the panic towards pragmatic policies that were actually effective?
- [60:36]
Steve Lazarus
Well, of course, I never operated at the policy level of it, but I think that, you know, we, we learned from, obviously the, the very start of it was we learned from 911 itself. We learned that it doesn't take a gun to bring down an airliner. Later on with Richard Reed, we learned that it can take something as simple as a shoe. We learned that we needed to up our explosives game. We also learned that we needed to do a better job of. Sorry to use the word, but yeah, absolutely. Profiling people who present a much clearer danger to civil aviation than others. You know, for a while there, if you recall, right after 9 11, we were taking away nail clippers. We were, you know, roughing up grandmas and you know, 8 year olds with casts on their arms. We were making them go for additional screening and you know, looking through baby diapers and all kind of just, just absolute nonsense. And I think one of the things we got better at over the years is not only the intelligence and, and finding about, out about the plots before they happen. One of those examples would be the, the, the, the printer plot that was disrupted back in, I forget what year it was. 2011, 2012, where they were going to bring down some, some airlines, some airliners using explosive laden printers, Computer printers.
- [62:06]
Jack Murphy
Was it the printer cartridges like the old school ones, the big Xerox machines?
- [62:12]
Steve Lazarus
That's the one. That's the one. That is a lot of what gave rise to part of the FBI's TDAC, the Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center. And that's why in Huntsville, Alabama right now there is a portion of that TDAC that all they do is work all day to try to build devices and to try to build explosives that will defeat the technology that we have to identify it. And then once you do that, you build the technology, you build a better technology. And once you do that, you start again, you try to defeat it. That there's a entire operation down there that does nothing except try to defeat this. The, the defenses that we have in place right now so we can make better defenses.
- [63:02]
Jack Murphy
That's interesting. I didn't know we had like a red team for tsa, like trying to innovate, try before the bad guys do. Makes sense though. It makes a lot of sense.
- [63:12]
Steve Lazarus
There's a, there's a building down there that literally has every sniffer, every X ray, every method, magnetometer, and all they do all day long is try to defeat that stuff. And then when they defeat it, they say, all right, we, if we defeated it, how do we, how do we make it better so we can't defeat it next time? And then the whole process starts again.
- [63:33]
Jack Murphy
When you were working down there as the airport agent, were there any near misses that you recall?
- [63:41]
Steve Lazarus
None. No, no, no big plots that I recall. We pretty rapidly went from sort of a lot of the counterterrorism stuff to a lot of the traditional airport crimes. We had people who were trafficking folks, we had thefts, we had a lot of drugs. But we as the airport agents, we didn't work the long involved detailed cases against major terrorist organizations because we simply weren't staffed for that. It was myself, one other guy. So we kind of ran all day putting out fires. If there was something in a major case that needed addressing, leads that needed to be run. To be run, we did that. I can tell you not not going to name the guy because he was wrongfully accused. But there was a guy who, who we thought was the guy for Amerithrax, the anthrax case. And I can't tell you how many times I followed him through the Atlanta airport and put him on planes just to make sure he was, you know, going to where he was going to Washington D.C. and not hopping a flight to Beijing. That was one of the things that we were. We were kind of concerned about, but like I said, not going to say his name because it turns out, at least in the official record record, that he was not the guy.
- [65:07]
Jack Murphy
He's not the guy. They suspect that dude who was some sort of scientist. Right. Who worked with a. Yeah, he had the access to it. I'm trying to remember. I watched a documentary about this, but the, the guy passed away from cancer and he was never prosecuted.
- [65:23]
Steve Lazarus
Correct. Yeah, he's. He's dead. I don't remember if he passed away or I don't remember if he killed himself. I'm not really sure.
- [65:29]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, something like that.
- [65:31]
Steve Lazarus
But. But yeah, they. It basically got hung on the dead guy. And I don't mean that tongue in cheek. I mean, I think it probably actually was him, but there was definitely somebody that we liked for it and his name did get out in the press and no sense, no sense putting it out there again. But yeah, I followed that dude at least two dozen times through the Atlanta airport, making sure he didn't hop a flight to Beijing or Moscow or something like that.
- [65:57]
Jack Murphy
And then after the airport, you got put on the gang squad.
- [66:01]
Steve Lazarus
I did, I did. Worked about two or three years on the gang squad. Did a. First started out at first working something called the Black Mafia Family, which I think a lot of people have probably heard of. Demetrius Flannery and company, AKA Meech. Big, big, big into the hip hop industry, which, you know, puts them squarely in that sort of Atlanta space. Big, big, big into, you know, huge heavy weights of narcotics and everything. But that we quickly got supplanted in that by. I think it was dea. It was, it was just one of those things where DEA had the. Had the ticket on these guys from the get go. And it was kind of seen as us almost sort of poaching and trying to explore the Atlanta angle of it. They ended up working it out of Detroit, if I'm not mistaken. So then I ended up working outlaw biker gangs for a while. And you know, there's gonna be a couple 1 percenters out there who are saying, hey, it's not gangs, it's clubs. No, it's gangs. If you're, if you're involved in a criminal enterprise, it's a gang. And we didn't investigate anybody for being in a club or for doing charity rides or for, you know, or for doing Make a Wish for kids. We investigated people for, for their criminal gang activity. So I worked that for a number of years and Atlanta and Georgia was Outlaws territory. So the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, you know, the black and whites, didn't really have any Pagans or any Hell's Angels or too much else there. But that was, that was Outlaws country.
- [67:46]
Jack Murphy
And those are mostly drug cases too, right?
- [67:50]
Steve Lazarus
Drugs, some prostitution for what goes on in the clubs, stolen property, a lot of, a lot of big time thefts and stuff that ends up getting sold at swap meets and bike swap meets and what have you. And that, that did not turn. We made a few cases. We've made a few cases against some guys who, for insurance fraud, for, you know, stealing bikes or having their bikes stolen and reporting them to the, the insurance companies and what have you. And it. So a little bit of, a little bit of fraud by wire, a little bit of fraud by mail. But the, the big cases against the Outlaws came after I had left. And that was in 2007, right when I got back from Iraq. That's when I, I left the gang squad and went into the bomb program.
- [68:45]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. So tell us about that. How did you become a bomb technician?
- [68:50]
Steve Lazarus
So a buddy of mine, who we were brand new agents together, we became pretty good friends, was a bomb technician from early on and he had risen up to become the, the bombing coordinator and sort of the senior bomb technician for the Atlanta division. And he asked me if I had ever thought about doing that. And I actually had to have him explain to me what that meant. You know, well, what is it we do? And he sort of explained what FBI bomb techs do and how we work with military EOD and how we work with other state and local bomb technicians and how we are sort of responsible for certifying bomb squads across the country. And it sounded interesting. And there were also some, some opportunities at that point in the GWAT to maybe go overseas and use those, those skill sets overseas. And that, that sort of appealed to me. So went through a number of tests, you know, putting on the bomb suit and crawling through culverts and putting together a few, a few electronic circuits and, you know, showing that I knew my way around a circuit board and got picked up for it and ended up in bomb school and Six months after I ended up in bomb, after I got out of bomb school, I found myself as part of a two man team exploiting bombing scenes in Afghanistan in Kabul.
- [70:12]
Jack Murphy
Could you tell us a little bit about your original question? I mean, what does a bomb tech at the FBI do? You mentioned certifying bomb squads around the country and things like that. But you, you're. I mean, what do they do from an investigative standpoint for the FBI?
- [70:28]
Steve Lazarus
Well, you're the lead, you're kind of the lead subject matter expert for anything having to do with explosives. You know, if somebody, something blows up, you're the person who's there trying to put these things. And we can talk about that later when we talk about the Boston Marathon bombing. You're sort of the person who's on the scene trying to put this thing back together to determine how did it work, how did it go together, what can we recover from this thing and how can we attribute that to somebody so that either the military can go shoot them in the face or law enforcement can go roll them up or something like that? And so not as much. Yeah, you get in the suit every now and then. You're not going to end up in the suit as much as the local guy who has to walk down the street to go look at the lunchbox that somebody left behind in the park. Park. And somebody thinks it might be a bomb every now and then that'll be the FBI guy. But usually the FBI guy is concerned with explosives investigations, exploiting explosive scenes, things like that. That's really what I ended up doing in Afghanistan was you deploy out to smoking holes in the ground, you'd start putting the whole thing back together and start drawing a picture so that people could figure out how this happened, why it happened, and then who we can attribute it to.
- [71:52]
Jack Murphy
So when you got to Afghanistan, what year was that, by the way?
- [71:56]
Steve Lazarus
2008.
- [72:00]
Jack Murphy
And so you, were you part of like a counter IED task force or something like this? Was that your purview?
- [72:07]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, I'm going to teach everybody a new term now. It's called a backronym. So a backronym is when you want an acronym but you want a cool sounding name first. So come up with the name first and then build the acronym around it. So the acronym here was sexy, because everybody wants to be sexy. And that's what it said on our T shirts. Well, sexy was the Combined Explosives Exploitation Cell. And the idea was simple. There were like six of us spread throughout Afghanistan. I was in Kabul, so we were probably, probably about the busiest next to Kandahar. And it's one FBI bomb technician and one military EOD technician, in this case a Navy EOD guy. And we called ourselves two men in a truck. And we had a little white Toyota Land Cruiser, lightly armored. And we rolled out to bombing scenes and I mean two, three, four a week. And we would gather everything from fingerprints off of corpses and severed hands, to DNA to explosives residue to shrapnel, to photographs to, you name it. And our job was to prepare these reports and gather evidence such that again, we could kind of put this thing back together for somebody to see if we could attribute it to someone. And as you're well familiar, from the very beginning of the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, you know, you, you guys were out there rolling up military age males and you were enrolling them, right? You probably did some of this in some of these, these quick Capture platforms, these QCPs where at first you were just kind of capturing fingerprints, right? Or you were swabbing for DNA. Well, all that stuff was just populating this thing that became this immense database.
- [73:58]
Jack Murphy
Was that, was that bats?
- [74:00]
Steve Lazarus
What's that?
- [74:00]
Jack Murphy
Bats?
- [74:02]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, bats. Well, that, the bats is the, is the, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms something or other system. That's, that's the, that's the, the home side one. The one we used over there was just something that was going into, you know, the military database. So on the one side we got operators like you out there, pardon me, who are rolling up military age males and enrolling all their biometrics in these, in these, these, these platforms. On the other side, you got that, that's the, that's the big input. The small input is you had bomb technicians like me and these EOD techs who'd go out and you know, you'd find the severed hand of a bomber underneath the car. Well, you'd go ahead and pull the prints off of that and swab for DNA and you'd submit that. And every now and then you'd get something that came back or which was nice, but that guy was dead. What was really nice was when you found bits and pieces of the bomb, you know, usually the underside of the tape where you could take a latent fingerprint off. And they say, oh well that's, you know, Abu Marco. And we, he got rolled up in, in Ramadi back in 03 by 5th Special Forces Group and he got, he spent some time with, in Abu Grave and he got released and his last known location is such and such and every now and then you get one of those. And that was really super gratifying because then, you know, you either drop a hellfire on him or you guys would go shoot him in the face or, you know, he, he'd get rolled up trying to enter the US
- [75:38]
Jack Murphy
and as far as like, conceptually that you're working in this two man team and what I, I imagine, and you tell me if I'm wrong, that the idea was that, you know, military EOD techs are incredibly skilled. We've interviewed some of them on the show. They know all about how to diffuse and render safe military munitions and improvised munitions and everything else was kind of the reason for you being there because you have more of the investigative experience and the ability to collect forensic evidence and process it.
- [76:13]
Steve Lazarus
So yeah, I mean, first off, yeah, there's, there's no comparing the, the skill set. It's actually different skill sets. And I, I'm gonna brag on the Navy here for a minute. I've worked with Air Force, Army, Marines and, and Navy eod. They're all fantastic. The Navy is a cut above. It's just because institutionally the Navy, the, the EOD is part of the Navy special warfare community.
- [76:41]
Jack Murphy
They have to do it underwater.
- [76:43]
Steve Lazarus
It's just something that they take very, very seriously. So we're there for the investigative arm, but also because we've got a knowledge of a lot of the improvised explosives that these guys, these guys are most mostly focused on military ordinance. We have spent a lot of time learning about the different sorts of, of improvised explosives that terrorists are using. We spend a lot of time discovering how it is that they build these into, into different sorts of bombs. Something like a dtmf, a dual tone multi frequency switch, which is, which is something that a, a terrorist would use to put inside of a bomb where you can call the device. And rather than just the phone ringing, setting it off, now you have to enter a number of prompts which then throw a number of switches inside that DTMF and set the device off. We spent a lot of time studying those sorts of things, staying up on the newest technology. So between, we each brought something to the table and one of the things that we brought was sort of our currency in the ttps that the enemy was using on the improvised side. When you get to military munitions, no question about it, we completely defer to the military when it comes to any kind of, to include foreign military munitions because these guys are the, they're just the experts. No two ways about it.
- [78:16]
Jack Murphy
Can you tell us about any memorable Scenes that you guys got called out to where you had to kind of process the aftermath of an IED bombing.
- [78:25]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, I think probably the worst one, it was September or October of 2009 and six Italian guys got, got whacked on Route White, which I don't know if you were ever in Kabul was between the airport and Massoud Circle. They got, they were traveling in a three ship and they were acquired by a suicide bomber who was driving a little Toyota Corolla. White Toyota Corolla which is sort of the ubiquitous I, you know, rolling IED vehicle over there. And he rolled right up on one of them and blew it off. He killed, I think he killed six people that day. And it turns out that two of them were people that my partner and I had had dinner with. Oh man, couple, a couple of nights maybe, maybe a week before out at FOB warehouse which was the, the French FOB that a lot of us would go to in order to try to get a good meal at a German, a French place out there. We could get some decent food. But we knew, we knew two of those guys. It was the single worst loss of life for the Italians in the entire war. Mean, it was, it was the kind of thing where you know, for us, us being Americans, it would have been ah, shitty day. You know, even for the Brits it would have been a shitty day. But for them it struck their national consciousness. I mean they went into like grieving, the whole country went into grieving. They had not experienced that, that kind of a loss before. And it, it just, it was, it was again, it was one of those things where you, you just sort of realize like, yeah, everybody over here is playing for keeps, man. You probably need to up your game and, and, and watch yourself and you know, watch your six. One of the, one of the things that was actually good about it, people used to, to kid us about like dude, you're just out there in some, some shitty little Toyota Land Cruiser. Lightly armored. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody ever came near us. We didn't look like military. We didn't travel in multi ship formations. We weren't flying a flag of anybody. We weren't, it wasn't a military vehicle. We never even got approached and we, we drove within, we drove hundreds of kilometers sometimes to go investigate bombing scenes. And with. Without much of a problem at all.
- [80:59]
Jack Murphy
What did you guys conclude from the bombing on the Italians? Were you able to figure out where that originated from?
- [81:07]
Steve Lazarus
It was, I don't remember if it was HQ or Taliban, you know, Haqqani or Taliban, but it was, it was just more the same thing. These guys, what they would do is they would put guys out there. They, they get these bombers. And I, I don't know what it is people think that these bombers really are, but these bombers were not the highly educated, highly motivated, you know, true to the cause people, they, they get kids who were absolute freaking dirt poor and they give their family some money to be able to take them off to a camp and train them up. And then before, and they, they taught them what they had to do. And then, but then before their mission, a lot of times they would even drug them up, especially if they didn't have to be driving. If it was just like walking into somewhere and, you know, lighting off a suicide vest, they drug these guys up. And they were. The, the, the, the people who were committing these bombings, the actual suicide bombers were, were nobodies. The, the people who, the people we were after, the ones who were the highest value targets for us, were the ones who were the skilled bomb makers because obviously if we could get rid of them, then the, the, the, the dirt poor kids had nothing to work with. But it was, I, I, again, I don't recall. It was a huge blast. It was, I do remember that, which was, which was notable because a lot of times they were using improvised explosives, you know, but this was, this was actually military grade tnt. And we knew that when we saw the, the huge black plume of smoke rising into the sky. And so it was probably 4 to 500 pounds, which is just. 4 to 500 pounds of TNT is just amazing. It's, it's, it's, it's awesome. And if you're within 100ft of it, you're probably not walking away.
- [82:54]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. And I think you mentioned to me there were other cases where you guys had policed up like enemy cachets and were blowing them up and doing some pretty big detonations.
- [83:09]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So that was actually my second tour in Afghanistan. I went back in 2011 and they assigned me to the ISAF camera ID section, which I thought was going to kind of suck. And it did a little bit because I was at this point kind of like working for a staff officer. I was working for an Air Force 06. It was a, it was an international cadre. We had Brits, we had, we had a French guy, a German guy, a Portuguese guy. And it was nice. But what was really cool was when we would do these things we called buybacks. And the buyback was really simple. It was ISAF sources who were out There finding who was in possession usually of captured enemy munitions. And there was so much of that. And rather than allow it to go into the hands of Taliban or Haqqani network bomb makers, we would offer huge bounties on these things and they would make, they would make these deals. We never had part of that. We were never part of the deal making. We were part of the recovery. So a deal would get set up and we would launch it. You know, 1, 2 o' clock in the morning, we go out to a predetermined location. There was usually a QRF backing us up. When we were there, we would inspect what it was that they were giving us. We would inspect and assess that the net explosive weight of what they were giving us was what, what was agreed upon. Then the changeover of money would take place. And then we would have to drive all these munitions to a pre designated grid coordinated somewhere out in the middle of the desert and make it all go away before sunrise. So we would build these shots and I think the biggest shot we probably did was about 7 or 8,000 pounds of net explosive. Way that we would set off just out in the, in the middle of desert and go home and secure the knowledge that that was seven or eight thousand pounds that didn't make their way into a roadside ied. Yeah.
- [85:13]
Jack Murphy
Interesting stories to tell the FBI guys back home. Not too many of them were blowing up 8,000 pounds of demo in a shot.
- [85:22]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, they were, it was, it was a lot of fun. I kind of got in a little bit of trouble. And I don't know if I sent you one of the pictures of it. I don't know if or whether they'll get. It'll get shown. Somebody caught me a little bit by surprise after we were, as we were loading some of those into that back of that little, same white Toyota Land Cruiser, by the way, somehow I ended up going from best sexy position to a staff position. I ended up with the same stinking truck, exact same one. And we probably had 5, 6, 700 pounds of munitions literally just sitting in my back seat. He said, hey, Steve. And I turn around, I got this kind of surprise look on my face and the flash goes off. And I said, yeah, just make sure nobody gets that. Well, somebody got it. And I got a little bit of a talking to from my superiors back home about using my vehicle to transport those sorts of munitions over know, bumpy roads and stuff like that. But that was the job. People were certainly doing way, way, way more dangerous stuff than that.
- [86:29]
Jack Murphy
Have you. Have you Ever seen that movie Sorcerer?
- [86:32]
Steve Lazarus
I have not.
- [86:33]
Jack Murphy
Oh, it's a classic. It's the guy they have to transport dynamite that's sweating nitroglycerin across this country in South America on the back of like a deuce and a half truck. It's a, it's an awesome movie. But
- [86:49]
Steve Lazarus
isn't that how one of the Kennedy sons died, one of one of Jack Kennedy's brothers? Wasn't he flying dynamite or something over the Atlantic or over the Pacific somewhere? He was flying dynamite in some plane and the thing just freaking blew up and blew the smithereens in the middle of the sky.
- [87:06]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, we had FBI agents with us in Afghanistan, and then I remember we had HRT guys with us in Iraq. And here's a little funny story about the FBI in Afghanistan. We were young rangers. I mean, we were young guys and the FBI was the agents were teaching us a quick class about searching a detainee. And this is how you search them. And you grab the sleeves in case they have a blade that lays flat against there. You feel that in there, all this sort of interesting stuff. And then some of the rangers were given their side of the class. Like, this is how we search an enemy prisoner. And one of them is you come up to the body and the barrel of your rifle is hot because you've been in a fire.
- [87:55]
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- [89:30]
Jack Murphy
Right. So what you do is you put your weapon on fire, stick the barrel into the guy's eye, and if he flinches, pull the trigger. And the FBI dudes are just like, oh, my God.
- [89:42]
Steve Lazarus
I, I remember a military guy teaching me one time that, you know, you had the guy spread eagle. And the first thing that started with. It started with a kick to the nuts.
- [89:49]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When you come up to them, come
- [89:52]
Steve Lazarus
up to a dead body, that'd be pretty effective. I don't think I'd be able to fake my way through that.
- [89:57]
Jack Murphy
The sternum rub the eye tap. Admittedly, the barrel thing in the eye is maybe the most extreme, but. And speaking of which, you went over to Baghdad 0506.
- [90:11]
Steve Lazarus
I did. That was just prior to getting into the bomb program was my first opportunity to sort of go serve overseas. And I was, I was itching to do that. And we had something called the. I can't remember the name of it now, but basically we were helping the Iraqis put on the war crimes trials for the Saddam regime and got over there and spent about six months there helping their investigators build their case. So we had FBI agents who were teamed with investigators, and we had AUSA's assistant United States attorneys who were teamed with their prosecutors, so kind of our counterparts. And we were helping them understand, you know, what it was that they were going to have to do to prove something in a court of law, even though, you know, their court of law didn't look like any. Any court of law that I, I'd ever been in before myself. But it was kind of funny. Every one of us. You, you remember the deck of cards, right? Yeah, yeah. So Saddam was the ace of spades. You know, if you were big, like, you know, Tariq Aziz, I think he was an ace. Ali Hassan Al Majid, Chemical Ali, he was an ace. And, you know, if you were an ace, king, queen, jack, something like that, you know, you're. You're a pretty big dude. Well, each one of us got assigned somebody on the hot list, so to speak. And if you were on the hot list, you know, we were kind of going through all the. The bad things that you did that. And then making sure that we had enough evidence to stand up against you in court? Well, my guy was a guy, he was the head of the bath party down in, I want to say Nazaria. And he was a good friend of Chemical Ali. The guy's name was Abdul Ghani. Abdul Gafor was my guy's name. And I thought, hey, this is pretty cool. I got a guy, it's like in the deck of cards, he's like the three of clubs. So it's. I didn't really have the panache of, you know, what some of the other guys had, but ended up talking to this guy for a while and he played the game just like everybody else. Blame it on the dead guy. And that was sort of their defense mechanism was I was just following orders. And we gave them history lessons on the Nuremberg trials and talked to him about that and explained how that worked out for Herman Goering and everybody else. And they all got sentenced to death. So. But yeah, so day one of the, the very first trial, which ended up, as we talking earlier, being the only trial for Saddam. It was kind of one of those moments. I found myself sitting in the courtroom 10ft away from Saddam Hussein, which was pretty cool, you know, wish I could have taken a photo, but that would have got me in a lot of trouble.
- [92:57]
Jack Murphy
What was Saddam's disposition at that moment?
- [93:01]
Steve Lazarus
Arrogant and defiant. And we had to tell what I was doing there. The Marshals were controlling. U.S. marshals had a contingent over there and they were controlling all of the movements, all they were in charge of making sure that the court, there was order in the court, so to speak, that everybody was moved properly, that nobody got feisty with the judges, nobody jumped a rail and tried, tried to attack anybody. And they did a fantastic job. And one of the things that they had to continually tell these, these sort of lower grade soldiers who were watching over Saddam, you know, they, they'd go to walk over to him and take his arm to, you know, sit him down or something, and he turned to them and say, don't you dare touch me. I'm your President. They sort of had to re educate these guys like, no, he's, he's not the president anymore. Anymore. Yeah, he's leader. He's not somebody you have to be afraid of. But he was absolutely defiant. He was defiant on the gallows. If you've ever seen the, the very last moments of his life, right before the. They snap his neck, he was defiant on the gallows till the very end.
- [94:12]
Jack Murphy
Well, there's something comforting about a leopard that doesn't change his spots. It's that Consistency, Absolutely.
- [94:19]
Steve Lazarus
You know what? I can. I could probably respect that a little bit more than somebody who became a sniveling coward. And, you know, he. He went to his death like a man. He was a piece of. A piece of shit of a human being, and his sons were even worse. But, yeah, he. He stayed honest till the end, I guess. I guess there's some level of respect in there for that.
- [94:38]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, well, fuck him.
- [94:41]
Steve Lazarus
And that, too.
- [94:47]
Jack Murphy
Other than that, what was sort of your impression of how the Iraqis were navigating? Like, we're trying to, like, give you this gift of democracy, and we're trying to teach you how to go through this legal process. And it sounds like we did send really good guys. FBI, AUSAs, US Marshals, like, some. Some really, like, quality people. But, you know, Iraq, in fairness to them, the country's in turmoil, if not civil war, and they're trying to stand up some sort of new system of governance. I mean, how is all of this coming together? What was your impression of it?
- [95:25]
Steve Lazarus
Well, you know, if we're going to be honest with ourselves, here we come, big dumb America again. Like a bull in a China shop saying, congratulations, Iraq. In this case, we. We bring you democracy. Right. What the hell's that again? We're trying to impose our. Our system, our way of life on people who, I. I'm sorry. Just not ready for. They were more ready than the Afghans, but. But not much more ready. Yeah, yeah, we sat there and in the. So I got there probably three months before the trial started, and we. They were actually building the courtroom. Literally constructing the courtroom. Everything from the. The. The podium at which people would speak to the. The dais along which the. The. The judges would. Would all sit. I think there were like four or five judges. And they also built the platforms for the defense and for the prosecution. And there became this ongoing argument about the height of the two platforms for the defense and the prosecution. And no less than six times they had to go in and they had to make sure that. And they had to change. Literally carpenters going in, ripping up carpet, taking out seats and what have you to rebuild the platform. Because the defense platform could not be the same height or higher than the government's platform. The government platform just had to be. It could be a quarter inch, but it had to be that much taller. And the. That was just, I think, one of sort of the penny Annie little bitches and moans and gripes and complaints that not only between the defense and the government, but between the government and the government and Nothing was ever right. And it was just, it was just a bunch of unorganized gravassery like, like
- [97:24]
Jack Murphy
they're like they're very caught up in the pageantry of it.
- [97:29]
Steve Lazarus
Did you ever read this Will Piss some People Off? Did you ever read. It was a lieutenant colonel, I think it was his war college papers. Army Army 05. This is war College paper. It's called why Arabs Lose Wars.
- [97:41]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. Yeah.
- [97:43]
Steve Lazarus
Okay. So he talks about the culture, the Arab culture and the class difference between the. Not the class difference, but the class chasm between officers and NCOs and lower ranking listed soldiers. The inability to delegate, the inability to, you know, allow anybody to, to make a decision. And that culture. That is again why that, that colonel that wrote that, that article about why Arabs lose wars, it seeps its way into every part of their life and it set, it seeped its way into this as well. It was kind of the same thing. Nobody could make a decision. Everybody was blaming everybody else. They got caught up, up in minutia and they just couldn't see the forest for the trees.
- [98:35]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, I mean, one of the big differences, I mean, what makes the American military as good as it is is that you have this core of NCOs who are professionals and their whole job is to train soldiers. And so we send them off to Ranger school or whatever the course is. And the whole idea is they come back and they're going to spread these skills within their unit.
- [98:56]
Ryan Seacrest
They're.
- [98:57]
Jack Murphy
They're going to teach the young guys all of these things. Whereas in a lot of Arab militaries, it's more like the officer wants to hold on to these skills and keep them to himself because the more they get spread around, the less need there is for that officer. He wants to keep everyone dependent on him. And that's a major flaw that that system has.
- [99:19]
Steve Lazarus
Oh yeah. First thing I learned as a second lieutenant and thank God I actually did go into, into what I went into because like I said, 100, 140 people or so on my, my flight, which is an Air Force platoon, and I was the only officer there. One of the things I learned from the very get go was see all those senior NCOs around, man, if you let them, they'll make you look really good. If you just let them do their job, let them do their thing, they'll make you look like a superstar, man. Just don't get in their way. So that is part of the culture that's really never made its way into the Arab world. And I see it also, I saw it also in the United Arab Emirates when I was back there as a civilian contractor. Again, there is, it's not a class difference. It's a class chasm between the privileged class and what they see. I'll never forget I was teaching a class over there and we had these three different leadership courses we could teach. One of them was for, was for captains who were trying to ascend to major. Another one for, was for lieutenants who were trying to become captains. And the third one was for warrant officers who wanted to become lieutenants. And I'll never forget the client, one of the clients told me this, this will piss some people off. Probably give me PNG from the country too. But whatever. He said, yeah, these, these warrant officers, Steve, they're nothing, but they're trying to become something. And that told me more about what they thought about. We're talking about warrant officers. We're not talking about, we're not talking about buck privates here. We're talking about guys and in some cases women who had a solid 10, 12, 15 years in, who were running significant programs and what have you. And that's the way that their leadership looks. And I remember one time I used to put a leadership saying on the board every day. And I put the leadership saying on there one day. It was just supposed to stir discussion. And it was during the captains to majors course. And I just, all I put up there was three simple words. You know what it means? Officers eat last, right? And I know what it means. You know what it means. Oh, my God. We had a discussion about that for an hour and a half about what exactly does that mean? And I said, people, it's simple. You take care of your people before you take care of yourself. This is not hard. It was hard. Trust me.
- [101:47]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah. In a lot of militaries, foreign militaries, you know, the, the officer class is basically, unfortunately, like a welfare program for the aristocracy. And then for the enlisted, it's like, it's not like in America where you get an MOS and you go through your advanced training and learn your job. It's like you join this military and they hand you a shuffle and they're like, yeah, dig a ditch for three years and that's it.
- [102:15]
Steve Lazarus
Yep, yep. And like I say, I, I, I consider myself pretty privileged to have come up in the, in the, the military that I came up in. And again, being in the career field that I was in, learning, you know, which is an extremely enlisted, heavy career field officers are, you're less than 1% of the career field in the security police, security forces, whatever they're calling it nowadays. But it definitely teaches you some life lessons and it teaches you that if you can identify your best NCOs and especially your best senior NCOs from the GET go, that's really. You've done most of the heavy lifting at that point. Yeah.
- [102:56]
Jack Murphy
And then tell us about back home. You got called in in the aftermath or during the Boston Marathon bombing.
- [103:05]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, that was one of those things where, forget where I was. I was at work doing something and phone went off and I was in Burlington, Vermont at the time. I was working for the resident agency up in there and all they said was get to Boston when you get there, get a hold of this guy because he's scrambling up on the jet right now. He's going to run the bombing response. It was one of the supervisors that I knew pretty well. And so I got there fairly early that evening probably I think the, the bombs went off what, late morning. I was probably there by about 4 o' clock in the afternoon and they put me. We. We ended up with about probably 30 bomb technicians from across the FBI and also some Massachusetts states and, and city of Boston and Massachusetts State police bomb techs, all really super, super guys. We ended up exploiting that scene for the next week, week and a half. And that's how we, we. They put me in charge of scene one, which was where the very first bomb went off, which was the finish line itself. And that was where the brother who we initially called Black Hat, we later found out he was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, the one who died in the shootout and Watertown about a week later. And we basically just started putting that thing back together. We were talking earlier about what do FBI bomb techs do. Well, we found the, the parts and pieces of the pressure cooker. We identified the pressure cooker. We found the parts and pieces of the backpack, of the toy cars that the electronic guts were ripped out the of to make the switching system for this thing. We found what the explosives were. We found what sort of nails and shrapnel and BBs and pellets they put inside these things to inflict mass damage on the crowd. And as we're getting all this stuff, we're feeding it to investigative teams. So you've got an invest an entire investigative team whose job it was to find out. I think they were called Prestige was the was the name of the pressure cooker, but did nothing but find out everywhere And I mean, everywhere online and in person, that you could buy a prestige presser cooker and start flooding the Zone with agents to find out what credit cards were used there, who came here and bought a pressure cooker. And the same thing was done with the explosives, the same thing was done with the backpacks. And then all that sort of came together with all of the. The video surveillance camera up, cameras up and down Boylston street that they were able to use to track these guys movement. And eventually they actually knew the guy's identity for a while and were looking for them. And then finally the decision was made at a pay grade much, much greater than mine, that it was to our benefit, to the law enforcement community's benefit to go ahead and release. Release their names. Yeah, there. And their identities, rather than trying to sneak up on them, just go ahead and put it out there so that we get the public's help in. In finding them. And that's eventually what happened.
- [106:22]
Jack Murphy
There's that. That documentary on Netflix. Have you ever seen it?
- [106:27]
Steve Lazarus
I have.
- [106:28]
Jack Murphy
That was pretty good.
- [106:29]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, they did. They did a really good job with that, I can tell you. When I first got there, I went to both scenes and the young boy's body, he was all but cut in two by the second bomb, the one that Jokhar Sarnaya planted outside the restaurant. Little cafe there up the street and that probably. I don't think I ever would have any sympathy for Jokar Tsarnaev, you know, rotting away in a. In a prison. I certainly wouldn't have any sympathy for him being executed. But I got to tell you, there's a part of me, I've always been very pro death penalty and I still am. Think it serves a purpose. But, you know, his death penalty got overturned and I think they had to go back to the penalty phase again. His conviction wasn't overturned, but the death penalty was overturned. So I'm not even sure where that is right now. I don't know if they've adjudicated it again yet or not, but. And people thought I was crazy when I said this, but I actually, there's a part of me, because he's a young guy that wouldn't mind seeing him rot in Supermax for 60 or 70 years until he just dies of natural causes and has to spend. That's hell. Being in that prison is absolute hell. And I almost think like a. A nice quick needle in the arm just might be too good for the guy. I know it. I know it serves sort of the, you know, the public outrage, the Eye for an eye kind of thing. But I think there's some value to somebody like that just. Just rotting and slowly going insane and just turning into an animal.
- [108:17]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, they're never going to let that dude out, right?
- [108:19]
Steve Lazarus
Oh, no, he's. He's through.
- [108:22]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. Anything? I mean, it sounds like you weren't really involved in, like, the actual manhunt, but, I mean, how did it sort of. That whole event sort of wrap up for you?
- [108:32]
Steve Lazarus
Oh, actually, we were. Oh, you were?
- [108:34]
Jack Murphy
Okay.
- [108:35]
Steve Lazarus
We got a call that they had notified the guy. Excuse me. They identified the guy in Watertown. It was when the gap. The call came in from the. The guy who owned the boat that he had holed up in that backyard.
- [108:48]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah.
- [108:50]
Steve Lazarus
You know, he said, I noticed my cover and my boat is. Is upset. And so we got this call to go up there to Watertown. Now, we were not part of an assaulting team, but every bomb tech was up there to help clear any of the locations that we got to, because these guys, when they. When they were involved in the Watertown shootout, they were tossing more IEDs out of the car. Yeah, they were still shooting. We. We had a car to clear. We had houses to clear. We were literally going house to house and sending. We also, we had the robots. So they were taking advantage of the fact that we had these robots that we could send into areas instead of risking a. A man, you know, a SWAT operator to send them in to clear these. Some of these rooms, because these guys had already. They killed an MIT police officer. They had shot at other police officers. They were throwing. They were serious bad dudes. So they were using us for the robots. They were using us to help clear explosive hazards. And I think we were probably about. We were clearing a house probably about three or four blocks away when they actually identified him, and then set up the FBI hostage negotiator, the crisis negotiator, in the nearby bedroom window to sort of talk him out.
- [110:15]
Jack Murphy
It sounds like the FBI definitely earned their pay through that whole incident. Boston.
- [110:22]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, yeah, it was. It was a cool thing to be a part of. Obviously you wish it didn't happen, but it was. It was definitely a moment in history. I will tell you one thing that was really weird was they. When they had the. The shootout in Watertown and then he went missing, they issued a shelter in place order for everybody. And I got, you know, you think of Americans, you know, ah, hell no, I'm not doing that. You don't tell me what to do. No, the streets were empty. Absolutely. It was eerie. We got a call at one point, myself and my partner to go clear Joker Sanais call car. And I, I think there's a picture of this that you might be able to show. There's a. It's a screenshot from a tv and I'm actually putting him, I'm putting his helmet on him in the bomb suit for him to go down range and, and breach the back end of this car so he can get this package out of there. And because his mother said he had, he had more bombs. And so we ended up going to. It was like 8 o' clock in the morning, going to. Across town, probably about six miles across town to where his apartment was and clearing his car. And I just remember driving there. There was nobody in the street.
- [111:43]
Jack Murphy
Wow.
- [111:43]
Steve Lazarus
Nobody. Not a single person. I'll tell you a funny story. We get there and HRT is set up on the house, but they don't want to move on the house until we clear the car. So I made contact with the HRT team leader and we cleared the car. And he says, all right, so we're going to try to call him out. He said, do you have a PA on your truck? I said, yeah, absolutely I do. He says, all right, do me a favor, call him out. I said, all right. And I actually keyed the mic. And it was at this point that I realized I had no idea what this guy's name was. None. I didn't know who he was. I said, I could have said you in the house or what have you. And so I turned to my partner who was the guy who had gone down and, and x rayed the package. We had cleared the package. I said, what's this hump's name? He said, I don't know. So he got his phone out and he Googled, you know, what was going on. And he, and he hands it to me and he kind of expands it and he hands it to me and I literally hand to God, I'm like this. In the car, I'm like. And you know, calling him out like that. I had no idea what this, this hump's name was, but he wasn't in there anyway, so it didn't matter. But, but there, what was in there was a lot of the explosive that he had used. There was still a lot of that left behind in the apartment. So it was a, it was a good hit.
- [113:11]
Jack Murphy
I mean, the, the other weird thing is the mother was an interesting character as well as I recall. And didn't she like start saying like the two Brothers were caught up in an FBI conspiracy and there's all kinds of crazy stuff she started going on about. I mean, she seemed more radical than they were.
- [113:32]
Steve Lazarus
She was. And she, she refused to believe that they had been radicalized. When they went back overseas, she thought they were. They were just good boys. I don't know if everybody realizes or not. Maybe they watched the, the, the. Maybe they watched the, the documentary. Maybe it, it. I forget if it went into it or not, but, you know, Joker ran over his brother.
- [113:52]
Jack Murphy
Oh, is that how that happened?
- [113:54]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So they get in this running gun battle with the, the police up there in Watertown, and at some point, Tamerlin, who's the older brother who we. We call Black Hat for a while, he gets se. He fires at police.
- [114:10]
Dan Morgan
He.
- [114:11]
Steve Lazarus
He gets shot. Jokar is trying to run away in the car that they have hijacked from this dude, the one who went and told the police about. About being carjacked by, by the Tsarnaev brothers. And in the, in the ensuing confusion, he actually runs his brother over. I mean, kills him straight dead. He probably would have died from the gunshot wounds anyway, but Jokar absolutely ran his brother over and then, you know, got out of the car and ran and, and, and wasn't seen again until he was seen in the boat.
- [114:50]
Jack Murphy
And so then that sort of the next step for you in your career, you went to the render safe unit,
- [114:57]
Steve Lazarus
did that was one of the things that happened from that was I think I represented myself pretty well, did a good job, established myself as somebody who could be counted on, who could understand complex things within the bomb world. And about a year later, they came looking for a team leader to go to the render safe unit. And I was asked to put in for the job, and I did and ended up getting it.
- [115:27]
Jack Murphy
What is that job?
- [115:29]
Steve Lazarus
So the FBI has something called. I'll start with the big picture. The FBI has something called cerg, which is the Critical Incident Response Group. They're based up in the Quantico area. And this is the FBI's sort of rapid deployment force. It's everything from HR team, which is the hostage rescue team, to the hazardous materials response to crisis negotiators, hostage negotiators, and there's also an invest a bombing component of it, the counter IED section. And part of that is called the render safe unit. The best way I can think of to just to describe the render safe unit is the FBI's nuclear bomb squad. The idea being that one of the mantras, whether you're in military or civilian bomb disposal or eod. The idea is if you can, anytime you're attacking a problem, you want to start remote and stay remote. If we can attack it with a robot, if we can attack it with, you know, some sort of a kinetic countercharge, something where we don't have an EOD operator actually putting their hands on this thing and risking their life, then that's the way we prefer to do it. There are circumstances where you cannot do that. One of them is when the area cannot withstand a detonation, that the resulting detonation would be worse than the loss of life of a bomb technician. Well, one of those things is a nuke or a significant Chembio type device. So the idea is you have to have both military and there are military components to this as well, and civilian bomb technicians who are specially trained to go put their hands on an extremely complicated device like an improvised nuclear weapon and make it go away and disarm it, make it safe, render it safe. So it's a whole nother level, both for the military and for the civilian bomb side. It's a whole nurgle level of training. I found myself studying frickin nuclear physics for two years among you know, you're talking about a guy who, you know, took college algebra in his undergrad and that was kind of the extent hey,
- [117:48]
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- [119:35]
Steve Lazarus
in college and all of a sudden I'm taking electrical engineering courses in nuclear, nuclear engineering courses. And it's, it's, it's just a whole different world. But I spent about three and a half years doing that.
- [119:49]
Jack Murphy
And I mean, this has got to be like worst case scenario, right, if they need you in this job?
- [119:56]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So it's, there's, there's the way it works is you got four teams and at the time I'm, it's, it's vastly different. Now I know that they've changed. I don't know exactly how it is, but when I was there, there were four teams. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta. Two teams were on, two teams were off. You were on for three months. Off for three months. And if you were on, you were either on a CONUS response, a complete CONUS response, or you were on the NCR response, the national capital region response. So the NCR had its own team. If you were on the CONUS response, you had like two hours to be able to get down to an off site airport where we had a pair of 757s that would fly you and your equipment anywhere in the Continental and actually Alaska and Hawaii as well. So anywhere in the United States to address a problem. And if you were in the national capital region, you had X number of time to get to a place where we had Blackhawks that would fly you anywhere in the national capital region to, to address a problem. But you were, you know, you were on call, like I said, for three months. And when you were not on call, you were in your training cycle. That was also the cycle when you could, you know, take leave or you know, go do, go do things with your family. Yeah.
- [121:10]
Jack Murphy
I published a book last year and one of the chapters is about the military's green light program, the backpack nuke program that we had during the Cold War. I mean, I'm just Kind of curious, like what kind of scenarios did you guys envision? You mentioned maybe an improvised device or maybe a nation state could, you know, they have these devices as well. You know, I have to think the device is at least going to be the size of like a 55 gallon drum. I would, I would think. And there's probably going to be a security element around it
- [121:45]
Steve Lazarus
sometimes. It depends. One of the things we got really good at. Well, we'll go back to the device itself obviously can't go into, you know, too much there. But the two broad categories of devices would be something state sponsored that had, you know, just gotten. Either either the state itself was trying to introduce it into the United States or some rogue element had spirited it away from that state. You know, I think probably Pakistan, you know, is, is the most likely Pakistan, India is most likely genesis of something like that. And the other one would be just a completely improvised device. A completely improvised device is a little bit difficult, a little bit more of a far fetched situation because first of all you have to get the visible material and then also you have to put together a physics package to make this thing go off. And that, that requires engineering that is really beyond most terrorists ability to do. Tom Clancy's book notwithstanding the Sum of All fears. So the most likely scenario was probably a nation state device somehow being spirited into the, into the country like in a shipping container on board a ship would be the most likely scenario. You probably recall that there was a time at which we realized that we weren't inspecting much more than like 1% of the containers that came into this country. So we spent a lot of time doing. I, I, I spend a lot of time at a Conex storage yard and refurbishment yard outside of Houston, Texas, climbing five stacks and seven stacks and what have you and learning how to free climb these things and, and cut my way into a, into a Conex without cutting the rope that was holding me seven feet off the ground. And you know, that, that, that was kind of the, our, our existence for a while.
- [123:54]
Jack Murphy
Is there anything from that time in your life, in your career that you know, you're like, that's something I have to sleep with at night that something like that could happen.
- [124:04]
Steve Lazarus
It's a low probability. I wouldn't want anybody to go to bed at night thinking there's much of a likelihood of a blinding flash going off somewhere in the heartland. The thing is the consequences, the likelihood is low, but the consequences are so high that you have to have a way to deal with that. You cannot just all of a sudden discover, you know, a nuke in, you know, the state House in Des Moines, Iowa, for instance. And then somebody says, well, I don't know, what the hell do we do with this?
- [124:42]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, drive it out into the middle of the desert.
- [124:44]
Steve Lazarus
Exactly, exactly. Hopefully. Hopefully not even have to move it. But the other question I get is, you know, do we ever have any. Any real worlds that we actually rolled out on? Now, there were. There were, you know, scares. There'd be things like, you know, you'd wrap up sitting alert for a State of the Union address, and then all of a sudden, you know, one of the. One of the sniffer vehicles would go by and, you know, catch a dose of radiation off of something that didn't seem quite right. But usually it ended up being something that was. It was explainable.
- [125:17]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. Yeah.
- [125:18]
Steve Lazarus
So to the best of. The best of my knowledge, at least on my watch, there were no close encounters of the nuclear threat threatened the NCR or the heartland.
- [125:29]
Jack Murphy
If I recall right, you have to scan. You're looking for gamma radiation, right? Because neutrino radiation's like, everywhere.
- [125:37]
Steve Lazarus
Again, can't go too much. Too much into that. But you're looking there. There's all sorts of different kinds of radiation that could indicate whether you know what part of the bomb you're dealing with or what type of a bomb you're dealing with. Are you dealing with something that's meant to be an actual nuclear. Produce a nuclear yield, or is it. You just try radiological, sort of a dirty bomb or. You know what? So there's You. You're actually the whole spectrum. No, no pun intended, of, of radiation is. Is well within the. The. The search capabilities of both those military teams and the. The civilian FBI teams that do that job.
- [126:15]
Jack Murphy
That makes sense. And then you retired in 2018.
- [126:21]
Steve Lazarus
I did, I did. Got that offer. I couldn't refuse. Well.
- [126:24]
Jack Murphy
Oh, for Abu Dhabi.
- [126:28]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. Sitting at my. Sitting at my desk, and the very same guy who got me into the bomb program called me up and said, what you doing? He had retired earlier in the year. And I said, you know, not a whole lot. It was probably about 15 months from being mandatory. And he said, well, let me tell you what we got going on in Abu Dhabi. The contract they had doing this. This training basically for. For Abu Dhabi intelligence officers and training them. And he told me what it paid, and he told me when he had jobs available. I said, yeah, that. That sounds like a good idea. I was. I was about ready to be a single guy again anyway, so I figured Wouldn't it matter if I wasn't home all that. All that much. So off, off I went, and I ended up spending on and off the next seven years there and meeting my. My next wife as well.
- [127:22]
Jack Murphy
Before I get into your post FBI life, there is one question I wanted to ask you about the Bureau. And I don't want to push you to go into politics if you don't want to, but I did want to ask you about sort of the turmoil or what it seems to me on the outside looking in chaos at the FBI. What do you think about when you look at what's going on in the Bureau today?
- [127:47]
Steve Lazarus
I think it's a testament why you need serious, experienced people in. In these jobs. I don't think the guy that's right there is the guy right now. And I don't think that the number two guy, Dan Bongino, was the guy either. And I think the difference between them is that Dan Bongino realized that he was in over his head and he got out. And I'll tell your, Your. Your viewers, your listeners, a little something. Maybe they. They don't know about the FBI. As the director, you can fake it till you make it, till some degree. Some degree. Okay. I think this guy's had some serious missteps. I think he's in over his head. As the Deputy director, you can't do that. And the reason is the Deputy Director of the FBI is the chief operating officer for the organization. He is, in your terms, he's the S3 or the J3. All right? You have to have a knowledge of the deep, deep workings of sensitive cases, how they're investigated, how we get fizes, how we interact with other agencies. And I'm sorry, but having been a street agent at the Secret Service for a number of years and then a podcaster does not cut that. So my sense is that Dan Bongino probably realized he was in over his head very quickly, said, screw this, I make more as a podcaster, and got out. I still talk with a lot of guys who are in the Bureau. We have, to a degree, gutted our counterterrorism and our counterintelligence capabilities in favor of moving guys into traditional criminal programs and cash. Patel is on record, before he became the director, as saying, hey, these guys are cops. When I get there, we're going to clean out the Hoover Building. We're going to make them cops again. I'm sorry, they're not cops. They're investigators. And they investigate things that if people knew they were investigating, that they would not sleep at night. So now you have. We've stuck our hand in a hornet's nest over in Iran. And by the way, in principle I'm in favor of what we're doing over there. I think it's long overdue. But we've angered the world's largest exporter of state sponsored terrorism. And I mean by far no one else is even close. And the IRGC is the arm through which they export that terrorism. And I think that we're going to see a beginning of, be it sleeper cells, be it whatever. I think we're going to see non military pushback from agents that the IRGC has been planting in this country and around the world for years and years. And my fear is that the FBI as the investigative arm that ought to be posed and poised to prevent that, we've depleted our capability to do that over the last year.
- [130:57]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, I mean it seems pretty chaotic to say the least. So let's talk about Abu Dhabi. You're over there on and off for seven years. What was the position that you were working?
- [131:12]
Steve Lazarus
So we were just independent contractors. We were working for a company over there that had a contract with the Emirati intelligence services to provide just a whole range of, of training for them. Everything from a basic intelligence course to internal and external investigations courses to actually one of the sweeter positions. My girlfriend at the time and now my wife and I found ourselves in, was, was teaching leadership to these guys for the last couple, three years. And that very, very rewarding doing that. But it's, it's the kind of thing where they don't have, they're good people, but they don't have the depth and the breadth of experience to be teaching these sorts of things as a country. They're only 50 years old as a country. So they contracted that out. They early on decided they wanted FBI and CIA and before us, NYPD guys to go in and sort of put together a training program to build their capacity. And that's what we were doing.
- [132:23]
Jack Murphy
And how did you, I mean, we talked a little bit about some of the leadership problems. How did you feel that they, they took to that training?
- [132:32]
Steve Lazarus
So you have, you have different kinds of people within that organization. The Emirates has a national service requirement and you can fulfill that national service requirement a lot of different ways. But you've got to put your, I think a couple of years in or something like that. And so some of the ones who, you know, you had draftees in some of these courses and obviously they were a little bit different than the ones, the ones who were, you know, completely invested in it. So we saw everything from literally dirt poor and as much as you could be dirt poor and beat an Emirati, but, you know, the poorer farm kids, you know, from up in the. The northern parts of the country, like Ras Al Khaimah, to, you know, children of ambassadors who spoke absolutely perfect fluent English and were Western educated. You know, we had Sandhurst grads in, in the classes. We had UCLA grads, USC grads, NYU grads in the classes. So it was, it was, it was kind of fascinating to see. Some of them were really, really, really highly on their game, and some of them just, you know, didn't. Didn't care quite as much, I would say.
- [133:47]
Jack Murphy
I. And then, you know, you mentioned that you always had, you know, some writing ability, and then at a certain point you decided. Or when was it? And why did you decide to actually go all the way? You decided to write a novel.
- [134:01]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So July 21st, we were over there. My wife was my. My girlfriend at the time. She had a contract. I did not have a contract. I. Mine had just run out. So I was kind of just. Just hanging out, keeping her company dependent. I, you know, you can only go to the gym and the pool so many times during the day at the hotels. So I said, you know what? I had had an idea from a book in mind for quite some time. It tracked back to a case that I had worked way back in my career, back in 1998, where he arrested this guy for plotting a chem bio attack on the Atlanta subways over the July 4th holiday in 1998. And we got him to court, my partner and I, and that partner was now one of my bosses in the company I was working for. We got him to court, and we're sitting behind him waiting for the judge to come in for his arraignment. And he turns around and he makes this solemn vow that he's going to kill my partner and I and our families when he gets out of jail. So I really never thought much about it. My wife at the time worried about it pretty consistently. I said, don't worry about it. He's locked up. At some point, he made his way all the way out to AdMax in Colorado. And she said, well, what if he could hire a hitman from jail or from prison to attack us? I kind of filed that away. I didn't really thought about it. Well, eventually I thought, well, what's my book going to be about? It's going to be about a guy who Uncovers a murder for hiring and he finds out that his name is actually on the list. So it's the, the book opens with this, this shadowy figure getting a visit out there in supermax, as you know, because you read the book and thank you, by the way. And a lawyer ends up walking away with a list of people that are to go on a hit list. And eventually this, this kind of down on his luck. Alcoholic FBI agent who retired from the Atlanta division and got to divorced and moved to the Florida Keys and became a private investigator, lands on top of it and figures out what's going on. And in so doing he finds out that his is the last name on the list. So I just started writing and I wrote the first chapter and I handed it to my girlfriend, now my wife at the time, and I said, take a look at this, tell me what you think. She said, I like where you're going, but it kind of sucks. And she broke it down for me, the parts of it that weren't all that good. And I changed it and immediately changed kind of the way that I wrote from that, that standpoint on. She told me about where things were too wordy, where I was, you know, leaving the story. I was. She was kind of my first editor, if you will. But she got me started. Started on, on a more effective way of writing and I finished it. It took me about a year and a half to finish the book. Actually. It took me about a year to finish the book and it took me about 15 months to find a publisher after that.
- [137:19]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, I, well, first off, I love the genre of, you know, the down and out former cop turned private detective. I love the noir films and all that stuff. Stuff. And your, your book is sort of like a modern take on that. But I also thought where you, you were very strong and very interesting in the book was in describing sort of the criminal underworld. And the way you describe it feels real and plausible and it is the sort of thing that'll keep you awake at night. Like, is this real?
- [137:52]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So what I relied on was the cultures that I was exposed to when I was working these things. Now everybody I worked with was. Or I, I ran cases against. Yeah, they were a bag, they were doing bad things. And, and that's the reason that I was running cases against them. But each one of them had some sort of a culture. Whether it was not ratting, whether it was brotherhood, whether it was whatever it was that I was able to draw from and sort of use it to illustrate the characters in this book. I Think the people in the book, I think I drew more from, like, sort of a mafia culture than any, you know, sort of an omerta. And a little bit of the few things that I learned about the dark web and about how people navigate their way through the dark web, I was able to put that into play as well. The other thing I tried to do, and the sort of balancing line, and my wife caught me doing this a couple times too, and she. She reeled me in when she would see this was. She said, okay, I understand you're trying to make the reader understand how we do things in the FBI, but don't turn this into a tutorial. And so I. I kind of reeled that back a few times. And in my editor once, I found. Once I found a publisher, my editor reeled that in a little bit as well. I love Tom Clancy, but, my God, the man can go on, on and on and on sometimes. And it becomes like a. It becomes a tutorial because a field manual. Nobody wants to read a field manual.
- [139:25]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. In the modern era, too, I think. You know, when Tom Clancy was writing those books and some of the nuances of the military, I mean, the only way you would know those things is if you were in the military or you did a bunch of research. And books nowadays, a lot of that stuff is right on Wikipedia. It's not so mysterious anymore.
- [139:44]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, you have to wonder about some of his sources and how much. How much risk they put themselves into telling them some of him. Some of the things that he used in his books.
- [139:54]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, no, he definitely had. Had some great sources that he drew upon. You know, I think you're. You did a great job fleshing out, you know, the. The villains in. In Call Me Sonny, and the whole part where the guy. You're talking about how the guy gets professionalized in prison, you know, how prison is sort of like a finishing school for criminals, and then he gets out and he starts becoming much better at crime. And the whole narrative about how he begins laundering money through the guy that owns the used cars, the used car lot. It's like, this is awesome stuff. Like, I love to learn how that kind of thing works.
- [140:36]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, I. I try to. I. I try to provide, you know, sort of a backstory with theirs. I. I find that if you. Again, if you can keep from doing it in such a man, in such a way that you're writing a field manual or a tutorial or something like that, if you can find that sort of sweet spot where there's just enough backstory to make people kind of understand or. Or have a little bit of a deeper connection, a deeper association with the people. And actually the. The thing that you talked about, you. You were talking about, like, the very beginning of. Of part two of the book. And I won't give any too many spoilers, but the. The helicopter escape scene from the. From the prison, that actually was not in the first cut of the book. The editor came back to me and the. The. For. For your listeners, the bad guy here is. Is Travis Conway Way. The editor came back to me and said, hey, I need a chapter where you sell me on the fact or sell me on the reason that Travis Conway is this belt and suspenders kind of guy. So I thought about Reedsville prison, where I had done some cases in South Georgia, and I thought about a couple of cases where people have actually been snatched by helicopters out of. Out of prisons. And I went ahead and wrote that. That scene and it just got gorier and better and more and more fun to write as I went along.
- [142:12]
Jack Murphy
And
- [142:14]
Steve Lazarus
it was great, man. I really enjoyed that. Like, at the end, I said, you know what? I really should have the rotor cover, cut this guy in half. And yeah, it's a.
- [142:23]
Jack Murphy
It's a cluster.
- [142:25]
Steve Lazarus
One chapter I wrote in the entire book.
- [142:27]
Jack Murphy
A clusterfuck of an escape attempt. Yeah, no, it's memorable. Yes, it was.
- [142:32]
Steve Lazarus
Yes, it was.
- [142:33]
Jack Murphy
And there's a. There's a lot of players in this book. The protagonist has, like, multiple teams of hitmen after him. At various points, some really colorful characters come in and out. There's some former special ops guy turned assassin looking for him. And then there's a huge. I won't give it away. There's a huge twist at the end of the book where you're like, holy shit. Do you want to give like a thumbnail sketch or the. You know what the back cover synopsis is for the second book that I haven't read yet?
- [143:06]
Ryan Seacrest
Yeah.
- [143:06]
Steve Lazarus
And I think you're gonna like it because you're right. He is a special Ops guy, his 5th Special Forces Group, as a matter of fact. And we get to. We get to find out about the mission that he went on where he became Robert Charles Petty. I actually sat down with one of your former colleagues for about three hours and had him walk me through a, Like. Like an A team type type operation so that I could. I could write this thing and write it properly and give it. Give it its proper. Its proper due in the book. So in the second book, at the end, at the end of the first book, all these guys who've been operating sort of with impunity. It gets rough for them for a while, but then they, they managed to work it out by, by killing somebody who could have given up the network. But at the end of it, they're back in business and you're kind of left feeling like, well, the bad guys got away with it. So I pick right up there in the next book, and it's, it's called Finding Sonny. So we, we're going to find out a lot more about Sonny. We're going to find who is. Who is sort of the ultimate bad guy in the, in this book, we're going to find out a lot more about Vincent Kamara, AKA Robert Charles Petty, as the state of Florida knows him now as he, as he sits in his jail cell. And we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna introduce a few more characters. We're also going to explain that big old, that big matzo ball I left hanging out there at the end of the, the first.
- [144:45]
Jack Murphy
Right.
- [144:47]
Steve Lazarus
I'm going to explain that one as well. And I could have gone two ways with that one, but I, I, after long talks with my editor, I, I decided. Decided we would go in a definite, A definite one particular way.
- [145:01]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, no, it's awesome. I'm definitely going to read Finding Sonny later this year. This podcast keeps me pretty busy with reading books. I had to read one book for our last one with the human trafficking detective. Read that on the way to Japan, and then read your book on the way back. So that, yeah, this job keeps me pretty busy reading, but I will get to it. And you said you're, you're working on the draft for book three.
- [145:27]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. So midway through the first book, I said, I wonder if I want to close this one out at the end of it or if I want a sequel. And then midway through the sequel, midway through writing that, I said, I wonder if this is trilogy material. And again, I got on the phone with the, with the, the editor, and he, we hashed out some ideas for it and we said, yeah, this is definitely trilogy material, but I, I think with the name of the, with the name of the third book, I think, yeah, we know Sonny dies in the end of this one, but, but I think I've managed to put enough twists and turns in there again to where it's still, even though, you know, he's, he's. He's a goner at the end of it, it's, it's still going to be pretty interesting.
- [146:13]
Jack Murphy
Do you have any plans for the future as far as like, do you think you're going to keep writing the same product protagonist or do you think you're going to start a different series or what do you think?
- [146:22]
Steve Lazarus
Well, I've got an end figured out to this book that I'm writing right now that is going to take us deeper into Bryce Chan. So the, the Bryce Chandler series, the Bryce Chandler mystery or thriller series is going to continue on. He's going to be my, you know, eonymous Bosch, you know, if you will. He's going to be my, my protagonist because I think he's, I think he's interesting. I think he's got a of lot, lot to give to the series. But I'm going to go in a completely different direction with him at the end of this, at the end of this next book and it's going to be, there's going to be something really, really out of character that sort of blows up at the end of the third book.
- [147:01]
Jack Murphy
All right.
- [147:02]
Steve Lazarus
It's going to take you back, it's going to take you back 20 years to some really, really bad that happened when he was a, an FBI agent in Atlanta.
- [147:11]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, I mean you, you unpack some of it in place. The first, first book where, you know, like the, the previous episode we just did with the detective that investigated human trafficking cases about the personal toll that this job takes on you and you know, you unpack quite a bit of that in the first book about why this FBI guy is a former FBI guy, why he struggled with alcoholism, why he's divorced, why he's dealing with all this stuff.
- [147:37]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah, the whole thing in the trailer in Barnesville that, that comes up again in book two and, and is, is, is finally dealt with and, and, and reconciled in book three. So I, I, that was not just a and again that was something that happened, you know, in, in real life won't ruin it for the, for the listeners. But just think as, think the most horrific you can possibly think of and this, this, this was it. But that comes up again in book two and book three. Yeah.
- [148:13]
Jack Murphy
So Call Me Sunny and Finding Sunny are both out. Where can people go to find them?
- [148:18]
Steve Lazarus
Easiest place is where everybody buys their books. Amazon. They're also on barnesandnoble.com most of the places, most of the retail booksellers out there.
- [148:27]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Cold weather can wreak havoc on your skin. You don't want to miss out on this month's great savings on all Your favorite skincare Essentials now through March 31st. Earn four times points when you purchase participating skincare items like Dove Soap, Dove Body Wash, Dove Beauty Bar Soft Soap Body Wash and Irish Spring Body Wash. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [149:00]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.
- [149:03]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [149:04]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [149:07]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [149:14]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion won. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [149:22]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and are army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [149:35]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [149:35]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [149:40]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247 365.
- [149:50]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
Wow.
- [149:50]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [149:55]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [149:58]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
Safeway and Albertsons have made saving easier than ever with great savings on family favorites this week. 16 ounce sweet strawberries are two for $5 member price. And don't miss the incredible deal on Signature Select. Boneless skinless chicken breast value packs for $2.97 per pound limit. One plus medium avocados or mangoes are five for $5 member price. Fresh and delicious savings for every meal. Hurry, hurry. And these deals won't last. Visit Safeway or albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save There can get
- [150:29]
Steve Lazarus
them but the easiest place is just, you know, Amazon. I, I figure if Stephen King sells 80% of his books on Amazon that that's good enough for me as well. Yeah, so.
- [150:41]
Jack Murphy
And where can people go to find you? Do you have like a website or anything else people can social media.
- [150:47]
Steve Lazarus
I do as, as part of trying to market out my books. I, I pimped myself out on social media pretty hard, which is pretty funny. My kids laugh at it. To this day because I always was one of those old guys that said I'd never get into, into social media. And now 815, 000 followers later on on Instagram as Steve Lazarus books. I'm on TikTok is Steve Lazarus Books Facebook, Steve Lazarus Books or Steve Lazarus Author or something like that. But I don't do X. I'm probably going to start sub stacking here before too long. And also I've got my website, Steve lazarusbooks.com cool.
- [151:29]
Jack Murphy
Steve, thanks so much for doing this interview and sharing your life experience with us, telling us about your books. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we get going tonight?
- [151:40]
Steve Lazarus
No, I really thank you for having me on. It's, it's fun to share the story. I do hope that I, I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that I think the FBI is a doomed organization. I think we need a tweak, not a redo. I think that if we get the right serious people into the Bureau sooner rather than later and we stop all this political buffoonery and this, this and this, this revenge tour sort of stuff, firing people because they covered a lead six years ago, I think if we can get back to being what the Bureau deserves with the, excuse me, what the American people deserve the Bureau to be and that being a guardian of our, our freedom and our safety and our way of life, I think that's in everybody's best interest. So we need serious people to do that. So that, that's going to require a shift. But I don't think it's by no means out of the realm of possibility we can do this.
- [152:45]
Jack Murphy
Talking to former agents in the past, I remember how furious some of them were about Comey going down on the Hill to testify. And they felt that it politicized the Bureau. And they'd say, as investigators, as FBI agents, we try so hard to be nonpartisan and apolitical and we just follow the evidence and we follow the facts. We're cops. That's what we do. And they hated to see the Bureau get dragged into, you know, a political circus, frankly. And I mean, look at where we are today. It's like not going to be fucked up.
- [153:23]
Steve Lazarus
There's no question about it. I don't know if he's ever owned it to this day or not, but every FBI agent I know, my wife and myself included, were saying, what do you mean? We're not charging Hillary Clinton. We don't charge anybody with anything. We investigate crimes. We send our findings to the U.S. attorney's office, they charge people to this day. I think that maybe he was just told he was going to, you know, he was going to eat the pill for that one. He was going to stand up and be the one to say it.
- [153:54]
Jack Murphy
It should have been doj, not.
- [153:57]
Steve Lazarus
What's that?
- [153:57]
Jack Murphy
It should have been DOJ down there doing that.
- [154:00]
Steve Lazarus
Should have been. It should have been. I think all that came in the, in the, the kerfuffle after the. Or the, the. The show after the meeting between. Who was it? Bill Clinton and the, The Attorney General and the, the. The tarmac there.
- [154:16]
Jack Murphy
Yeah, yeah.
- [154:17]
Steve Lazarus
Deciding not to charge his wife. And it's not even our decision to make, but, yeah. Every FBI agent I know and come's a nice guy. I mean, I, I don't think he's a, He's a bad human being. But to me, the, the sort of mold of an FBI director that, that I'm looking for is more the Louis Free, quiet professional. When he does talk, it means something and people lean in to listen because, you know, he's, he's established himself and he's also the only former agent who became director. So there's that as well. But that, that to me is more the mold that we need to get back into. Not grandstanding politicians, not, you know, people who won't get off of a freaking G5 because you're waiting for someone to bring you an FBI raid vest and you want to cosplay this afternoon at a, at a presser. But serious man or woman who will make the FBI what it needs to be again.
- [155:22]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. I mean, as you're saying this, I remember we had Danny Colson on the show a couple times. Serious G man, you know.
- [155:31]
Steve Lazarus
Yeah. G Man's G man. Yeah.
- [155:33]
Jack Murphy
Yeah. Well, Steve, thank you again for, for doing this interview. We will have links down in the description for people watching this on YouTube or listening to the podcast links to Steve's books and his website. You guys can go and check all of that out again. I, I really recommend Call Me Sunny, the first book in the series. It was really good and for everyone out there. We will see you next time. Thanks for joining us.
- [155:57]
Steve Lazarus
Thanks for having me on.
- [156:00]
Jack Murphy
Hey, guys. I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Eyes on podcast, and the High side news outlet, which. Which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be. Once a week, it's going to come into your inbox, and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Eyeson and the team house and whatever's topical or current on the high side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have you know the greatest hits of that week. It's really good, man.
- [156:42]
Podcast Host
Checking it out.
- [156:44]
Jack Murphy
The website for it is teamhousepodcast kit.com join teamhousepodcast kit.com join go there and you enter into your email list or you enter your email into the little thing on the website and you're good to go. And that'll be Viet. So we really appreciate your support and hope you'll consider signing up.
- [157:07]
Dan Morgan
Where's the link?
- [157:08]
Jack Murphy
The link will also be down in the description if you're looking for it there. And that's Teamhouse Podcast Kit K I t kilo India tango.com backslash join hey,
- [157:22]
Ryan Seacrest
it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you looking for a refresh this spring? Make sure you take some time for some self care with savings on all your favorite hair care Essentials. Now through March 31st. Shop in store or online for participating hair care items from Pantene, Head and Shoulders, Aussie and Old Spice and earn four times points. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [157:53]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the podcast. Say hi Dan.
- [157:56]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [157:57]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [158:00]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [158:06]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion won. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [158:15]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually I think somewhere north, probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and are army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [158:27]
Jack Murphy
Awesome.
- [158:28]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [158:33]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247365 wow.
- [158:43]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [158:47]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit for the people people.com for an office near you.
- [158:51]
Safeway/Albertsons Advertiser
Safeway and Albertsons have made saving easier than ever with great savings on family favorites this week. 16 ounce sweet strawberries are two for $5 member price. And don't miss the incredible deal on Signature select boneless skinless chicken breast value packs for 2.97 per pound limit. One plus medium avocados or mangoes are five for $5 member price. Fresh and delicious savings for every every meal. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit Safeway or albertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.
- [159:26]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Cold weather can wreak havoc on your skin. You don't want to miss out on this month's great savings on all your favorite skincare essentials. Now through March 31, earn four times points when you purchase participating skincare items like Dove Soap Dub Body Wash, Dub Beauty Bar, Soft Soap Body Wash and Irish Spring Body Wash. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [159:59]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi Dan.
- [160:02]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [160:03]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [160:07]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [160:13]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion one. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [160:22]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north, probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time time goes on.
- [160:34]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [160:34]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [160:39]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247 365.
- [160:49]
Steve Lazarus
Wow.
- [160:49]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [160:54]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [160:57]
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- [162:03]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you looking for a refresh this spring? Make sure you take some time for self care with savings on all your favorite hair care Essentials now through March 31, shop in store or online for participating hair care items from Pantene, Head and Shoulders, Aussie and Old Spice and earn four times points. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [162:35]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi Dan.
- [162:38]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [162:39]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [162:42]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan with which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [162:48]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion one 20 billion is an insane number.
- [162:57]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north, probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [163:09]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [163:10]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [163:15]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call 247 365.
- [163:25]
Jack Murphy
Wow.
- [163:25]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [163:29]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [163:34]
Ryan Seacrest
My shopping style is more stay at home than try in store, so my amex Blue Cash Everyday card is my go to accessory.
- [163:40]
Jack Murphy
When I shop, it's easy to earn
- [163:42]
Ryan Seacrest
by getting 3% cash back on US online retail purchases. Each order brings me closer to more
- [163:48]
Jack Murphy
cash back so go ahead, add to cart and shop the latest styles.
- [163:52]
Ryan Seacrest
Reinvent your look and reward yourself with amex and try on the Blue Cash every Day card. Learn more@americanexpress.com Explore BCE terms and cash back cap apply. Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Cold weather can wreak havoc on your skin. You don't want to miss out on this month's great savings on all your favorite skincare essentials. Now through March 31, earn four times points when you purchase participating skincare items like Dove Soap, Dove Body Wash, Dove Beauty Bar, Soft Soap Body Wash and Irish Spring Body Wash. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [164:42]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi Dan.
- [164:45]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [164:46]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [164:49]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [164:55]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion won. 20 million is an insane number.
- [165:04]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north, probably closer to 2223 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [165:16]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [165:17]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [165:22]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting for take your call. 247365.
- [165:32]
Jack Murphy
Wow.
- [165:32]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [165:36]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [165:47]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Cold weather can wreak havoc on your skin. You don't want to miss out on this month's great savings on all your favorite skincare essentials. Now through March 31, earn four times points when you purchase participating skincare items like Dove Soap, Dove Body Wash, Dove Beauty Bar, Soft Soap Body Wash, and Irish Spring Body Wash. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [166:20]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.
- [166:23]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [166:24]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [166:27]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [166:33]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion. 120 billion is an insane number.
- [166:42]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [166:54]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [166:55]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [167:00]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 24. 7 365.
- [167:10]
Jack Murphy
Wow.
- [167:10]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [167:14]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [167:25]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Cold weather can wreak havoc on your skin. You don't want to miss out on this month's great savings on all your favorite skincare essentials. Now through March 31, earn four times points when you purchase participating skincare items like Dove Soap, Dove Body Wash, Dove Beauty Bar, Soft Soap, Body Wash, and Irish Spring Body Wash. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [167:58]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.
- [168:01]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [168:02]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [168:05]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury loss law firm.
- [168:11]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently. It said 20 billion one. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [168:20]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [168:32]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [168:33]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [168:38]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247 365.
- [168:48]
Steve Lazarus
Wow.
- [168:48]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [168:52]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [169:02]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you looking for a refresh this spring? Make sure you take some time for self care on all your favorite hair care Essentials. Now through March 31st. Shop in store or online for participating hair care items from Pantene, Head and Shoulders, Aussie and Old Spice and earn four times points. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [169:34]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.
- [169:37]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [169:38]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [169:41]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [169:47]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion won. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [169:56]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north, probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [170:08]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [170:09]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [170:14]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open or a call center is always waiting to take your call. 247 365.
- [170:24]
Jack Murphy
Wow.
- [170:24]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [170:28]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an offer near you.
- [170:38]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you looking for a refresh this spring? Make sure you take some time for self care with savings on all your favorite hair care Essentials. Now through March 31st. Shop in store or online for participating hair care items from Pantene, Head and Shoulders, Aussie and Old Spice and earn four times points. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [171:09]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.
- [171:12]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [171:14]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [171:17]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest and dramatic law firm.
- [171:23]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently. It said 20 billion one. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [171:32]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north. Probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [171:44]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [171:45]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What would I do if I got into an accident?
- [171:50]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247 365.
- [171:59]
Jack Murphy
Wow.
- [172:00]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [172:04]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [172:13]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Are you looking for a refresh this spring? Make sure you take some time for self care with savings. All your favorite hair care Essentials. Now through March 31st. Shop in store or online for participating hair care items from Pantene, Head and Shoulders, Aussie and Old Spice and earn four times points. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [172:45]
Podcast Host
I've got Dan Morgan here on the pod. Say hi, Dan.
- [172:48]
Dan Morgan
Hey, how's it going today?
- [172:49]
Podcast Host
It's going good, man. Tell us who you are and what you do.
- [172:52]
Dan Morgan
I'm Dan Morgan. I'm an attorney and a managing partner at Morgan and Morgan, which is America's largest injury law firm.
- [172:59]
Podcast Host
That's pretty awesome. I think I saw a billboard of yours recently that said 20 billion won. 20 billion is an insane number.
- [173:07]
Dan Morgan
Yeah, 20 billion recovered. It's actually, I think somewhere north, probably closer to 22, 23 after this year. And each year we get bigger and badder and our army grows. So the number will hopefully keep getting bigger and bigger as time goes on.
- [173:20]
Steve Lazarus
Awesome.
- [173:20]
Podcast Host
So how does someone get in contact with Morgan and Morgan? What what would I do if I got into an accident?
- [173:25]
Dan Morgan
Probably the easiest way is dialing pound law. That's £529 from your cell phone. We are always open. Our call center is always waiting to take your call. 247365 wow.
- [173:35]
Podcast Host
Dan Morgan from Morgan Morgan, America's large injury law firm. Thanks for coming by the show.
- [173:39]
Dan Morgan
Thanks for having me. Visit forthepeople.com for an office near you.
- [173:43]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. Cold weather can wreak havoc on your skin. You don't want to miss out on this month's great savings on all your favorite skincare essentials. Now through March 31, earn four times points when you purchase participating skincare items like Dove Soap, Dove Body Wash, Dove Beauty Bar, Soft Soap Body Wash and Irish Spring Body Wash. Points can be redeemed later for discounts on groceries or gas. Offer ends March 31. Restrictions apply. Promotions may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details.
- [174:14]
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