The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 15

auto-scroll word highlight ▶ Rumble @ here

Transcript

0:00 Good afternoon, SR. I don't see Bridget yet. Afternoon, Colonel. Hope you're having a grand old time out there. I am. I'm sporting my new Cruising the Coast hat that my husband picked up this morning when he checked in at the registration. Oh, there's Bridget. Let me get her up here, and we will get started. Okay, so programming note up front. Let me go live over here on Rumble.

0:38 I threw you the co-host, Bridget. OK, so I'm going to do the hour book review and we will have a very short period for Q&A's because I have an event to go to tonight, just as a reminder. But I didn't want to cancel the show today. We have to get through this book. This book is like crazy.

1:10 Crazy, crazy. It's crazy town. OK, so we're going to pick up where we left off with four DEA officials testifying before a committee that they had felt pressure from North and the CIA to leak the news of Vaughn's involvement with drugs to the press.

1:40 That's interesting. They also said North wanted to take $1.5 million in drug profits from Barry Still that he had gotten from the Medellin cartel and give it to the Contras. When the DEA refused to do that, the DEA officials, not the DEA in total, just these DEA officials, the story was leaked by the White House.

2:10 to the Washington Times, which was supporting the Contras, both financially and editorial. And who owns the Washington Times? The Unification Church and Reverend Moon, just so that we're clear on that. The leak to the Washington Times accomplished two things. It publicly linked the Sandinistas to drug trafficking right before the crucial Contra vote.

2:39 For those of you who may have missed yesterday's show, what the U.S. government and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North is trying to do is set up the Sandinista Nicaraguan government as drug traffickers when they are trafficking drugs from Colombia through Costa Rica themselves and El Salvador's airbase.

3:10 into the United States. But in order to ignore their drug trafficking, they're going to blame the Sandinistas in order for Congress to appropriate money to fight the drug trafficker Sandinista government that isn't trafficking drugs, just to be clear. And they did it right before a congressional vote to refund the efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government.

3:44 And by prematurely exposing the sting, it blew up the DEA's investigation of the Medellin cartel, which DEA agents said had been their most promising chance to break up the Colombian drug trafficking. The drug lords went free. Vaughn, their crucial witness, disappeared. The SEAL sting operation.

4:15 has North fingerprints all over it, columnist Jefferson Morley wrote in the LA Times. After Steele flew in his CIA and DEA mission, he never used the C-123K cargo plane again. It was parked in a Mena, Arkansas airport for a year. Then it was sold back to the same company he had gotten it from.

4:45 In early 1986, it wound up with none other than CIA contractor Southern Air Transport, where it was used for Contra supply runs out of the El Salvador airport until its fatal flight. Unfortunately, the informant's allegations of the guns for drugs deals between the Reagan administration and the Medellin cartel were never seriously investigated.

5:16 The memo of Rudd's debriefing was sent to the Iran-Contra prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, by the DOJ a month later with a note from Associate Attorney General Stevens Trott, T-R-O-T-T, which said there was no action being taken by the DOJ pending a determination from the special counsel. Walsh's office apparently just filed the memo.

5:45 And it was later found in the National Archives when researchers discovered it. Yeah, the DOJ is not going to do anything about drug trafficking into the United States. One of the lawyers who worked for Walsh told the CIA in 1997 that investigating contra drug dealing compromised, quote, only about 1%, unquote, of the Walsh comprised, sorry.

6:17 of their investigation. For the most part, the CIA reported any drug trafficking activity would have been stumbled upon in the course of the investigation over other issues like money laundering. So they knew that by sending it to Walsh that it was just going to be buried. In an interview, Walsh said that he tried to stay away from the contra drug trafficking issue as much as possible because it was

6:47 outside his purview. And he also stated that he knew Senator John Kerry's Senate subcommittee was investigating it. But it appears that Walsh's office never passed the Rudd memo to John Kerry. Castillo's investigation, that's the good DEA guy, into the Contra drug dealing at Ilopango met with a similar fate.

7:17 thanks to the activities of the American ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin Corr, C-O-R-R, to whom Castillo was regularly reporting. Corr... Excuse me, Colonel, if I can interrupt for a second. Sure. They're having sound issues over on Rumble. Nobody's hearing anything. Okay. Oh, okay. I think I fixed it. Sorry about that. All right. So basically, we just said...

7:45 that everything's being dumped on the special prosecutor and he's not doing anything with it. That's basically what we just covered. This is the kabuki dance that I keep talking about every single day. They have a special prosecutor and they're going to dump everything into his office. He's not going to do anything with it. And it eventually goes to the archives. But the DOJ can say that.

8:13 They did what they thought was appropriate. Meanwhile, John Kerry is investigating all of this stuff in another Kabuki committee hearing. And the DOJ is sending everything to Walsh, but he's not sending it to John Kerry. So it's a big bottomless pit. Okay. And Castillo is sending all of his information to the ambassador, Edwin Core, C-O-R-R.

8:44 Again, we know all about the role of the ambassadors in this whole enterprise. If you're going to pull off an operation in a country, you put a compromised ambassador there that will facilitate whatever the CIA wants done. He's not there to be an actual honest broker because if he starts getting cold feet, they just move him and put another compromised guy in.

9:17 He's sending all of his information to Edwin Corr, the ambassador. He was sending regular reports. And Corr later said that he thought that Castillo was a very professional and good agent and had no reason to doubt anything that he was telling him. But Corr told the DOJ investigation that Castillo was making a lot of people nervous, including him.

9:47 Because his investigation had the potential to, quote, unquote, destroy relationships with the Salvadoran officials that had taken so long to build, unquote. Now, keep in mind, the Salvadoran officials he's talking about is the guy running the death squads in El Salvador. We don't want to jeopardize that relationship. Worried, Cora sent a secret.

10:15 back-channel cable to the State Department requesting an internal DEA review of Castillo's allegation. The DEA, he said, informed him that a lot of Castillo's information was inaccurate. What he's seeing with his own eyes, that's inaccurate. Castillo soon was told by his supervisors to close his investigation and move on to something else. But Corr said,

10:44 The headstrong agent continued to snoop around the airport and make allegations until the ambassador was personally forced to take matters into his own hands. Port said that he ordered Castillo to stop the quote unquote witch hunt and warned him that, quote, they were dealing with a very sensitive matter and Castillo would have to take care not to make false allegations, unquote. Again.

11:14 He's saying things he's seeing with his own eyes. They're telling him he's not seeing what he's seeing with his own eyes. Just what was false about the allegation Castillo was investigating was not clear. Indeed, his information had been corroborated by the CIA and the traffickers themselves. Castillo now suspects the Costa Rican DEA cable alerting him to contra drug trafficking at the two hangars.

11:46 was less a request for him to investigate it than it was a cover for the DEA office in Costa Rica in case there was ever an investigation. So they can say they said it, they just didn't want him to actually investigate it. Since Castillo had been sending the Contra drug reports to Washington for months, it is likely they were being shared with NIEVES, N-I-E-V-E.

12:14 BEF, the top DEA official in the country where the drug flights were originating. If, as Menendez's aide Miranda claims, the Ilopango operation was part of Menendez's drug pipeline into the United States, Castillo's probe might have raised some very sticky questions about how well the DEA was monitoring their informant.

12:44 Denied access to the military side of Ilopango, Castillo settled on another tactic. He would hit an off-base location linked to the operation. He and his informants zeroed in on a likely suspect, a New York weapons dealer and U.S. military contractor named Walter Grasheim, G-R-A-S-H-E-I-M.

13:13 He went by the name Wally. The tall bearded arms broker was a Salvadoran sales rep for Litton, L-I-T-T-O-N Corporation and other American weapon manufacturers and had a booming business selling things like night vision goggles, Steyr sniper rifles and other assorted gear to the Salvadoran military.

13:44 Again, the death squad. He was also advising and training Salvadoran army units in long-range reconnaissance operations on behalf of the U.S. government. One of Castillo's informants, sorry about that, at Ilopengo told him Grasham was intimately involved in the Contra drug operation.

14:16 And Castillo claims that DEA computers turned up several references to him as a suspected drug trafficker, as well as weapons trafficking. On September 1st, 1986, Salvadoran police working with Castillo's raided Grasham's elegant hillside home in San Salvador. A pound of marijuana was found, but that that was nothing compared to what else was in the place.

14:46 Some of the rooms in the home had munition explosives piled up to the ceiling, including automatic weapons, M-16s, hand grenades, and C-4 explosives, which are the exact same components in most Gladio stashes. Castillo later told the FBI the raid on his house uncovered embassy license plates, radios, and IDs in his name.

15:15 Castillo showed Grasham's U.S. Embassy ID to interviewers. Grasham, who says the weapons were legally his, strenuously denied he had anything to do with the Contras or drugs, and believes Castillo was duped by his informants, whom he says were secretly working for the CIA. The agency put Castillo onto me as a way of getting him away from whatever they were doing.

15:46 The person who claimed I was a drug trafficker was on the payroll of the CIA, as most drug traffickers are that we found. I've never been involved with drugs, even though it was in its file. The marijuana found at his house, he said, probably belonged to the U.S. Army colonel who was a frequent visitor. According to the Justice Department IG report, Grasham was not entirely wrong. Castillo's informant.

16:16 was helpful and had been informant for the CIA. And soon after he put Castillo on Grasham's trail, fingering him as the head of smuggling operations, the CIA basically took over the entire thing. Castillo's boss, Robert Stia, S-T-I-A, said,

16:48 He was asked by the CIA station chief in El Salvador to relinquish use of several different informants. The station chief had explained that the CIA had established an informant network before the new Castillo DEA had showed up and wanted the DEA to stop talking.

17:16 Though Castillo's 1986 investigation was killed, he picked up word three years later that hangar number five at Ilopango was once again being used for drug trafficking, this time by members of the Salvadoran Air Force. He opened up another investigation, much to the irritation of the U.S. embassy personnel who regarded Castillo at this point as a hostile person.

17:44 He had a reputation, this is a quote, reputation as a man who is always digging things up, unquote. That was actually a quote in the DOJ's IG report. What do you have DEA agents for in a foreign country if they're not supposed to be digging up stuff? This time, the CIA intervened directly and refused to allow Castillo to go anywhere near Ilopango.

18:14 when Castillo asked how he was supposed to investigate drug trafficking allegations if he couldn't go anywhere near it. A CIA officer told Castillo that it was not necessary because the CIA had taken over the case. The CIA station chief assured Castillo that there was no drug activity happening. In an ironic turn of events, Castillo soon found himself under investigation,

18:45 by the DEA. He spent the next five years fending off accusations that he had gotten too close to Central American informants and accepted improper gifts, inappropriately handled firearms, and a number of other administrative failures. Castillo's boss complained to his superiors that the charges against Castillo was unfair, and ultimately the DEA gave Castillo a disability retirement.

19:14 In his 1994 memoirs, he blamed the fallout because of his investigation at Ilo Pango. The DEA declined to respond to any of the accusations he made, and in its response to Afoya, it claimed it had no reports from Castillo about drug trafficking at the airbase, despite the hundreds of reports that he sent them. So, like so much of the DEA,

19:44 And what was said about Castillo and the air base over the years, it was a lie. The Justice Department IG had no trouble locating the agent's reports and quoting from them liberally. The squashing of Castillo's investigation ended any official U.S. government's interest in drug trafficking, weapons trafficking at Ilopango. But the issue refused to stay buried.

20:14 At the same time the contra drug pipeline in El Salvador was being hastily covered back up, police officers thousands of miles away in L.A. was starting to pry the cover off of it again. As one of them sadly remarked 10 years later, they had no idea what a Pandora's box they were opening. Victor Gill had no job and no business license.

20:44 But for some reason, he found it necessary to buy eight money counting machines in the space of a month in 1986. Money counting machines for someone who has no job. To U.S. Customs agent Fred Hero and IRS agent Carl Knudsen, that made it very suspicious, like it was screaming arrest me.

21:18 The two agents were on the prowl for money launderers, and a good way to find them was to track the sales of money counting machines. T.O. and Knudsen dropped by Bell Police Department to see if anyone knew anything about this guy buying all these money machines. As luck would have it, the city of Bell's only narcotic detective, Jerry Gazzetta,

21:46 G-U-Z-Z-E-T-T-A, was on duty, and he knew Gil well. He'd arrested him on cocaine charges a few years earlier and was more than happy to help the federal agents bust him again. You can't investigate money laundering without getting into dope. There's no way, the cops told him. Gazetta went after dopers with a vengeance.

22:16 And he was a one man investigation stop that had impressive results. In November of 1985, he'd been the subject of a glowing piece in the L.A. Times for his work in taking down a large Colombian trafficking ring. Some of his fellow officers regarded him as a loose cannon and publicly hounded him and basically accused him just of trying to make a name for himself.

22:47 He hated dope dealers, one of them said. He hated them with a vehement passion because dope dealers had killed his brother. And that's one of the things that spurred him so aggressively. In a sense, a drug dealer killed my entire family, he confessed. After the guy shot my brother in the head, my father died of a heart attack. And then my mother died a couple of years later.

23:16 And he got off with two years for involuntary manslaughter. So he had every right to hate them. They invited him to join their surveillance of Gil. The trio soon discovered that Gil was buying the money machines for Colombian traffickers who didn't want their names turning up in purchase orders. And eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges. It was the start.

23:46 of a mutually beneficial relationship. They were busting money launderers, and it was an answered prayer because it was leading them to drug traffickers. After California passed Proposition 103, which slashed local property taxes, many local police departments became hooked on drug money, using asset forfeitures to claim the lost tax revenue.

24:20 Cash seized from traffickers and money launderers began being used to pay officers' salaries for overtime. So, in other words, we don't want to bust people too far up the chain. We just want to get the medium down so we can pay our bills. That's a perverse way of doing business. The cash-strapped Bell Police Department was delighted to loan Gazzetta out.

24:50 to federal agents. They could find the suspect. Guzetta could help them surveil it, issue the search warrant, and take part of the money. The trio did some very good work together at first, Gio said. We took a lot of dope off the street and seized a lot of cash. And Guzetta became a local hero. Later in the summer, IRS agent Knudsen received notification.

25:23 from two LA banks about a pair of customers who were making large cash deposits on a regular basis. Officials, this was known as suspicious transactions. Banks routinely report them to the IRS whenever they want to. They don't report them all, as we know. They did a bank account check and found that they had no visible means of support to be depositing.

25:53 as much as a million dollars in the bank, Guzetta said. The federal agents approached Guzetta and asked him if he wouldn't mind helping because one of the banks was in the city of Vell. Guzetta began talking to the depositors, which was easy because they stood out in a crowd. They just happened to be the Torres brothers, the big, tall Nicaraguans.

26:25 They were also Daniello Blanton's associates. The Torres brothers were running all over L.A., picking up packages, dropping off packages, and making strange nighttime trips to South Central Los Angeles. Guzetta discovered one of them was on probation for cocaine possession. That, combined with the bank account, the surveillance, and the lack of employment, provided all the ammunition he needed.

26:56 to get a search warrant for the addresses of the Torres brothers. On August 11, 1986, Guzeta and his federal friends raided them. They hit the jackpot. They found $400,000 in a closet of one of the houses. That was fair change. But Torreses were too smart to mix the money with their cocaine. Like their friend, Blanton, they kept them far apart.

27:26 hidden in nondescript rental houses around the city. The raid didn't produce any cocaine. Guzetta said that the brothers disclaimed ownership of the $400,000, handing it over to the feds, which satisfied the two, Gio and Knudsen. They seized the money, cleared up some paper, and made their bosses happy. They weren't interested in prosecuting them federally.

27:56 because all they really had on them was a currency violation. Even if they were convicted, they'd pull three years at the most and be out in a year and a half. But Guzzetto wasn't willing just to let the brothers loose. If he couldn't put them away, he wanted them to work for the police. As imposing as they were, the Torreses had an Achilles heel to be guiltfully exploited, which was their live-in girlfriend.

28:28 who were close relatives of the Medellin cartel boss, Pablo Escobar. In his 1996 interview, Norwin Menendez confirmed the relationship between the women and Escobar. Guzeta said Torreses were informed that no charges would be filed against them, but their girlfriends would be prosecuted on conspiracy and tax evasion charges. In prison,

28:55 and then deported as undesirable aliens and never allowed back into the United States. To the rest of the world, it would seem like the brothers had sacrificed their women to save themselves. That would have been their Latin culture. Even worse, it would appear as if they had ratted them out, and because they're related to Pablo Escobar, would probably have put them on a hit list. To keep the brothers on a short leash,

29:26 It was arranged that Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office for the Torreses to plead guilty to drug charges under false names. They were given suspended sentences, put on probation and turned over to Gazzetta, who was assigned as their sole law enforcement contact to minimize chances of exposure. They were scared to death, Gazzetta said. They believed very strongly.

29:54 that if anyone found out that they were informants, including their girlfriends, they would be killed. During a debriefing in August of 1986, the Torreses told Rosetta that they were convinced their girlfriends had already hired assassins. They told the detectives they would check in with him every 24 hours to let them know they were still alive.

30:20 The informants advised if they were found dead in some other location, that it was their girlfriends that had contracted their killing. That's crazy. That the method which would probably be used was lethal injection of drugs to show up as a drug overdose. Guzetta and federal agents began debriefing the brothers and slowly, like an ocean liner emerging from the fog, the size of the operation began to take shape.

30:53 It was mind boggling. They revealed a drug ring that was dumping hundreds of kilos of cocaine every week into black neighborhoods in L.A., generating truckloads of cash. The confidential informant had admitted laundering up to a hundred million dollars since January of 1986. Customs agent wrote a few days after the debriefing began.

31:20 They currently have approximately a thousand kilos of cocaine currently stored in L.A. around different houses that they also have about a quarter to a half million dollars secreted in several locations that they were unable to get out of the United States.

31:52 extravagant claims but this took the cake he said no one he had questioned claimed to have 500 million dollars laying around these guys were right off the streets they had absolutely no credibility as far as i was concerned guzetta said to prove what they were saying the torres brothers invited guzetta and his friends to follow them

32:20 While they made the rounds, dropping off dope, picking up cash from the customers in South L.A., the reliability of the confidential informants were substantiated. Gio reported to his bosses a few days later. Under the control of Detective Guzetta, Bell Police Department, the confidential informants had picked up and delivered 40 kilos of cocaine and collected almost a million dollars. Within two weeks, Guzetta wrote,

32:50 He had observed the movement of 750,000, 230,000, 130,000, and 150,000, respectively. Guzetta began compiling his debriefing notes into a series of reports. He titled it Project Sahara because he figured the Torreses could help dry up the cocaine supply in South Central.

33:20 police investigators 10 years later in 1996. Basically, there was one major market which informant, and he puts the numbers for the Torres brothers, are dealing with, which was for the sale of the black market in South Central Los Angeles. And that it was basically controlled by two blacks named Rick and Ollie.

33:51 Guzetta listened with his mouth open as the brothers rattled off names, dates, delivery sites, and routes of transportation. The two black dealers in South Central, they reported, are generating a conservative figure of $10 million a month. The Torreses told him that the two blacks were getting their cocaine from three Colombians and a fourth peripheral.

34:21 source. Two of the Colombians they knew only by nicknames. One they knew quite well, Daniel Blanton. The informants related that Daniel Blanton is extremely dangerous because of his access to information who's at a road and further as extremely dangerous because his potential to override the informants market, thus cutting off the informants from their supply source and cutting off their usefulness.

34:53 as informant. Gazzetta said the brothers told him that Blanton had a lot of inside information in law enforcement activities as people that were working with him. And they warned him to be extremely careful about releasing any information to other law enforcement agencies because they were afraid that Blanton had somebody inside the police department that were feeding him information.

35:21 Ricky Ross confirmed that Blanton had an uncanny ability to accurately predict upcoming police raids, but said he was never able to explain his clairvoyance. The Torres brother told Gazzetta that Blanton was working with the Laguna Beach police officer named Ronnie Lister. He lived in an expensive house in Mission Viego and drives a new Mercedes.

35:50 Ronnie transports 100 kilos of cocaine to the black market and has transported millions of dollars to Miami for Blanton. Once Blanton's cash arrived in Florida, the brothers reported a relative of Blanton, Orlando Morello, would launder it in his bank. He had been a bank chairman under the Somoza government. Roberto Orlando Morello, the uncle of Blanton's wife,

36:23 was an influential Nicaraguan economist who had been appointed by President Somoza to be the central bank of Nicaragua, which basically functions as the Federal Reserve. The banker was also the official representative to two Swiss banks located in Panama and Managua and had managed a number of Somoza family businesses before the revolution.

36:53 It was when Torres started telling about Morello and the Contra in the airfield in New Orleans and Brownsville, Texas, where the Contra cocaine was allegedly being flown in under armed guard, that Giuseppe knew that he was out of his league. Even if only half of what the Torres was saying was true, the detective realized he was up against an organization that would roll over him. It took, I took it to the chief of police.

37:21 I told the chief it's bigger than I can handle. These guys are talking about millions of dollars in cocaine. They're talking about a Nicaraguan leader named Calero. They're involved in this. Colombian families. They strike the fear into the hearts of these men. His chief, Frank Bording, asked him if he would mind teaming up with the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, called the Majors.

37:48 Guzetta didn't mind at all. In fact, he was thrilled at the prospect. The majors are hot shit, he said. They had all the resources. They had all the funding and had all the manpower. They had their surveillance equipment, night vision goggles, helicopters, overtime, everything. They were basically the premier law enforcement. They had over 8,000 man sheriff's department and everything that it had to offer.

38:22 The L.A. defense attorney, Jay Lichtman, put it, quote, this was really the cream of the crop, the elite, the top officers of the sheriff's department, unquote. They were considered the best drug detectives in the nation. They also won notoriety for their boozing off duty carousing. A drunken crew member had once pulled out a pistol at a restaurant to hurry along lazy waiters. On one occasion, Deputy.

38:52 Danielle Garner, regarded the best drug detective in the department, relieved himself on the pants leg of a narcotics officer that he didn't like. The squad called Majors 1, Majors 2, and Majors 3 worked out of trailers at the Whittier Lenox Station. Each team had seven or eight detectives commanded by a sergeant. Giuseppe was put together with the Major 2 group.

39:22 headed by Sergeant Edward Hoffman, whose brother was a friend of Guzetta. Guzetta gathered up his Project Sierra reports and delivered them to the majors, where they landed on the desk of Detective Thomas Gordon. In 1986, Tom Gordon had become a hard man to impress. Since 1982, he and his cohorts on the majors were tangling with the biggest criminals.

39:53 la had to offer the mexican mafia gangsters meddling cartels international money launderers but um the project sierra had a bit of everything and it had an element the majors had never before faced a cia linked gorilla army that was allegedly dealing dope they had no telling where this investigation could take them

40:23 One of its main attractions was that it would provide law enforcement community a wealth of information on the inner workings of the crack market. Though the crack epidemic had been raging in South Central for three years by then, drug agents still had little understanding of its dynamic. They knew the street gangs had dominated the trade, rarely left their own neighborhoods. That meant that somehow someone was bringing massive amounts of cocaine and delivering it to them.

40:52 But no one from the DEA on down had been able to figure out where it was coming from. Well, they had figured it out. They just weren't telling anybody because they were in on it. Many narcotic detectives assume that the normal rules of the drug trade were true. But none of that applied to crack. Quote, we haven't encountered any major network. We're conducting these little skimishes. It's very frustrating.

41:25 Unquote, said one of the detectives in a Los Angeles Times report that was echoed by the local DEA office who wrote the marketing of crack was thought to be a cottage industry, a low level blip in the drug trade. They know that's not true, but that was only because the cops had never gotten much beyond the street level. In June of 86, DEA intelligence revealed that.

41:58 What looked to be an independent street cottage industry was actually the bottom rung of a carefully managed organization. That came as a revelation. Analyzing the information provided by the Torres brothers, the majors reached some frightening conclusions. The L.A. crack market, they realized, was far more disciplined and well organized than they ever dreamed. So these two mysterious dealers.

42:28 named Rick and Ollie, it appeared that the gangs had established a direct pipeline to the Colombian cartels, which meant they had access to as much cocaine as they could sell. Since the circle was small, it was little wonder that its bosses had escaped detection. It had been one long cop-free party, but that was coming to an end.

42:54 The majors now had the names and addresses of everyone at the top of the distribution chain, from the Colombian importers to the Nicaraguan middlemen to the black wholesalers who controlled South Central Market and everything that went with it. If everything went right, Gordon and his men could take down the biggest crack operation ever uncovered. One of those tentacles reached all the way to South America, and they could cut off the supply.

43:25 This was going to be my last hurrah, Gordon said. He was scheduled to rotate out of the majors in a few months. Like anyone, I have an ego and I wanted to go out to the bank. So it's probably good to stop right there because we're at Chapter 15. Since I have to leave early anyway, and it would be a good place to pick up. And we're going to talk about how.

43:58 the majors um handle this and it's quite high opening um to say the least so what happened to bridget oh they're messing with her again okay so the bottom line is we're on the cusp of what we think is going to be taking down that market now obviously they don't take it down because it continued for decades and still till today

44:33 And we're going to find out why. But it wasn't from lack of trying on the streets. SR, go ahead. Thank you, Colonel. Just want to thank everybody for attending the day in spaces on Rumble. I did want to note that Castillo also wrote a book called Powder Burns. I don't know if you're interested in that or not, but it also details a lot of this investigative stuff that was going on. Thank you, Colonel. Yeah.

45:07 And his his information we're going to find out later on is he had been dealing with Gary Webb. So Gary Webb, one of the very first things he did in his investigation was to contact Castile after his name came up in some reports. And he found out that he basically had uncovered the entire contra piece of this.

45:37 Down in El Salvador and had been persecuted for the next five years and finally driven out of the DEA because he exposed it to the inside of the DEA, which obviously dovetailed into the CIA. And it was a concerted effort to persecute him for the next five years and finally drive him out of the DEA. So thanks for bringing that up.

46:07 I don't know what happened to Bridget. I tried giving her the mic. Anyway, does anybody else have anything? Ron, I know Ron wants to say something. Oh, I see Staff Sergeant Payne. Welcome. I haven't seen you in forever. I threw you the mic, Ron. I'm just listening. I love this. Not that I love this story, but this is, I just, I really.

46:59 I'm fascinated by this whole story. Actually, I have to say that I think what I like more is listening to you read it. Because you're like the color commentator on the football game. You're adding in all the extra flavor. So my hat's off to you, Colonel.

47:25 If you're just reading this book and you don't know anything about Operation Gladio, would it surprise or you would just gloss right over the fact that the government is leaking to The Washington Times? Well, The Washington Times is owned by none other than Reverend Moon, whose entire Mooney cadre is part of Operation Gladio in South Korea.

47:50 Millions were deployed all over the world conducting Gladio operations. He owns munition manufacturing companies in South Korea. And again, this isn't something I've read so many of these books. And now when you go back over and you read them, you see all of these little pieces. And like you say, once you understand Gladio, you're able to tie all of those pieces together.

48:17 Us kind of going through this and discovering this all together, it just makes life up. It's the same thing with the ambassadors. Yes. Yeah, because we now know that they're part and parcel of the – and as a matter of fact, some of the ambassadors used to work in the CIA, and they just happened to show up in all of the same places where we're doing these covert operations. That's not a coincidence.

48:44 I mean, would it not be a fair assumption to say that the CIA and the State Department are basically like, they're brothers, if not cousins. I mean, they say that they're fused together. Yeah. So if you want to try the CIA officer who you think may have been in a hot operation, then you just move him. Oh, he retired.

49:14 quote unquote retired. He's a former CIA officer and he's going to hang out at the State Department and he's going to go in and be a attache, a cultural attache in some company, in some country that we're going to overthrow when he's actually just an advanced CIA officer there to prep the battlefield. So yes, I think they're fused together.

49:40 Well, that's a much better word. You know, one last thing. There was a story that I saw yesterday or the day before about some sheriff down in your neck of the woods who got busted for doing gambling and all kinds of stuff. Do you know what I'm talking about? I saw the article. I didn't go into any depth about it.

50:05 I don't even remember which sheriff it was. I'm just – and I'm not saying that that's anything new or revelatory. I'm just saying it's just – it's basically systemic, showing it still goes on to this day is the point I guess I was going to make there. So anyway, I'll let somebody else talk. Renee, go ahead. Hey, Colonel. Hey, everybody. Regarding –

50:33 This whole racket and the patterns we've learned about within Operation Gladio and all these people who are complicit in the hustle. I keep thinking of RICO charges and I'm not very well versed on that. But I'm just curious of your thoughts with all of the sealed indictments. And is this going to perhaps be the card?

51:03 of um this whole you know people who are complicit in part of you know the racketeering the um laundering the everything that will bring them down i'm just curious on your thoughts please well i mean i would like to think so um because as you guys um know i've been very vocal about the fact that um especially in the last two days

51:30 Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, who I'm big fans of, say that, oh, so-and-so was fired, so we're all about accountability. I'm sorry, that's not accountability, guys. Firing somebody who is saying they want people dead and is obstructing justice by holding on or sitting on chargeable offenses needs to be charged with a crime.

51:58 holding people accountable. Firing them is not holding anybody accountable. Sorry. Allowing people to retire is not holding anyone accountable. So accountability is slamming them figuratively against the wall, charging them with every single thing that you can and making them spend as much time in prison as you can.

52:27 In order to make other people that come along who may be inclined to do the exact same thing, not do them. That's accountability. And what frustrates me to no end is having been in a position of authority as a commander. The worst thing that you can do in...

52:56 Dealing with a disciplinary case is to allow that person just to ride out, excuse me, right out of the Air Force at the end of their enlistment. Because you know where the son of a bitch is show up in the Guard and Reserve doing the same shit. That's not accountability. It's laziness as a commander to not hold these people accountable.

53:27 preferred charges you give them a less than honorable discharge so they can't freaking get back in ever and they can't go to the guard they can't go to the reserve they are out that's accountability and it also increases exponentially the morale of your unit when you do that and it scares the hell out of everybody else who's even thinking about doing it so you're

53:57 Organizational effectiveness and efficiency goes leaps and bounds. You reward people for doing the right thing and you hold people accountable for doing the wrong thing. You don't let them just slide. And I'm telling you, when my first assignment as a second lieutenant, that was one of the very first things that I had a heated argument with my boss because he also was prior service.

54:26 And he just wanted to be loved by all of the enlisted people. And I was like, I'm not just allowing somebody to ETS out of the service because they go and especially in aircraft maintenance. Now, granted, I was in personnel. They were going to be sitting at a desk who give a shit. I did in aircraft maintenance. If you had somebody that didn't know what they were doing and they joined the Guard or Reserve Unit, they were going to deploy forward.

54:56 And they didn't know how to do their freaking job. That puts people's lives in danger. And it was just one of the things that I did. Did it make my job a whole lot harder? Yes. But it also made the other peers of the enlisted people that were busting their ass doing the right things appreciate working for somebody that was going to hold their peers accountable.

55:25 And that, at the end of the day, made everything worth it to me. It's definitely a tougher road to take, but it's the right road to take. SR, go ahead. Thank you, Colonel. I'll add a little bit to what you're saying as far as making sure people are held accountable. It's also, if you take a look at it from a serviceman's point of view, when you have authority that is equal and just.

55:55 across the board the respect is tremendous it is unbelievable what people will do for leadership like that the other thing i wanted to mention is looking at what's going on here between the dea and and the cia this seems to be one of the rare cases where we have the entire dea set against the cia and that

56:24 is unique in my book. Well, no, no, no. Don't get me wrong. The DEA was not against the CIA. Absolutely not. There was one DEA officer against not only the DEA hierarchy, but against the CIA too. The DEA was in bed with the CIA. They were not against them. His reports that were going to his superior...

56:51 officers in the DEA was going into a black hole. And when Gary Webb did a FOIA asking for them, the DEA said they didn't exist. He didn't find them until the Department of Justice issued an IG report that had them in it. So yeah, yeah, the DEA was dirty up to the top. You have a rare person who then they persecuted for five years.

57:22 and finally made him retire. Ron, go ahead. Well, I think that's pretty much systemic. I mean, you look at any of the federal law enforcement agencies, and to me, whatever they say they do, it's almost like, you know, a legislation that comes out that's the Patriot Act. Well, it's the opposite of what it says it is.

57:45 The Affordable Care Act, okay, well, if it's the FBI or the DEA or the ATF, they are literally organized crime doing things that they're punishing regular citizens for doing. So it's completely inverted, but I just wanted to comment on what you said about in the military.

58:07 It's very hard to get people out of the – I mean, it is and it isn't. But it's – at least when I was in, it was hard to get people out because you had to, like, prove it. It was – well, you know. I'm not going to tell you. But for people who aren't in the military, it's almost like – the way I thought, and you can confirm this or not, it's almost worse than a union. So in terms of documentation and things you had to do.

58:35 No, no, I wouldn't say that. I've hired civilians. So there is a vast difference. And I was told as a lieutenant, I had a civilian working for me. I'll just tell you this real quick story because it's hilarious. Again, I'm not a typical officer because I just spent eight years in aircraft maintenance.

59:03 They made the mistake of making me a personnel officer. So I had a civilian in my section out at Los Angeles Air Force Base retire. Now there's a process in civilian world in the Department of Defense that the easy way to get rid of somebody is on the civilian side is to delete their position. Now you can go back later on after you got rid of the person.

59:32 recreate the position but they would just delete the position so now that person has to hang out there as an overage and as an overage they can be assigned anywhere but as soon as the first position comes open that they're leveled into that opening so you don't really even get to hire um anybody you're just told this is going to be your new worker so when my civilian retired

59:58 One of those people was hanging around and got leveled into my area. Well, this guy came to work in the middle of summer when it's 85 degrees in a flannel shirt, long sleeve. And he tried to wear at his desk sunglasses. And I knew because I grew up in Florida. I knew the guy was a drug addict. I could tell by the way he acted.

1:00:26 And just to say, I'm not into drugs. I've never done drugs. But a lot of the people in my high school did drugs. And I knew immediately from his mannerisms, he was a drug addict. And so the whole idea of him wearing sunglasses inside was he thought he could sleep at his desk. So my senior master sergeant and I kind of cocked up a plan.

1:00:54 What I would do is about an hour after he got to work, you could watch him, which I did. And I would now keep in mind, I taught at a tech school when I was enlisted. And if a student, you had to be in school at six o'clock in the morning. So a lot of people would stay out late. It's their first time away from home. They're 18 years old. They'd come in and try to sleep in class. Well, I'd hit him in the head with erasers because that's the kind of thing you got to do back then.

1:01:23 Now, of course, you can't do that now, but that's what we would do to wake him up. And you didn't go to sleep in my class. So I started taking the old metal garbage cans. I had a big one in my office for shredding. We put the shredder bag in it. I would take that metal garbage can on his desk and drop it. And we had the old big metal desk back then. And it would scare the hell out of him. He would jump up out of his chair like he was going to die. And I had the thing right in front of him.

1:01:52 If he was sleeping, which he was, he wasn't going to see me coming. So we kept doing this. And eventually we got the guy to quit. He left. And I was documenting the fact I had like a shit ton of paperwork on him. So he was going to get fired anyway. And when he was presented with the paperwork, he just quit.

1:02:21 And so that was my first civilian firing. I had several others. And they tell you that, and my boss told me this, there's no way you can fire him. You can't fire civilians in the military. And of course, I took that as a challenge and did exactly that. So about a month later, I had a visit from this woman, very nicely dressed, in a suit.

1:02:52 Very well spoken. And they escorted her in to see me. And she asked me if I had seen him. And I said, well, he quit a month ago or a couple months ago. And she said, well, I'm very worried about him. He stopped coming home. I don't know where he's at. He's a drug addict. And I'm afraid something bad is going to happen because he gets violent whenever he gets on drugs.

1:03:19 So we went to security police, had him barred from the base. And I kind of checked my six for the next six months everywhere I went. And there was a lot of discussion about things that possibly he could do because Los Angeles Air Force Base is in the middle of the city. It's not like a normal Air Force base. And we had civilian cops on the gate. So it wasn't well guarded either. So anyway.

1:03:49 That's the difference between firing a civilian. And in the military, it's much more cut and dry as far as I'm concerned. And I fired a few of them. I've done a lot of, I wouldn't say a lot, discharges for non-performance. And it's just a matter of documenting each one of them. Because in the military, you have standards. Everything is done by a regulation.

1:04:17 If you don't follow the like in maintenance, if you didn't follow the checklist and it happened, then that's like, boom, document it. Boom, document it. Second one, letter of reprimand. Third one, Article 15. You're out. I found it much easier to get rid of substandard performing military people than I ever did with the civilians that I had to fire.

1:04:40 Well, OK, well, you would know a little bit better than I, but we had a couple of guys in my unit, you know, that they were just they were worthless and there was nothing that we could do. So we had any time I was on duty with them or I had to do I had to pull their weight and, you know, you could complain all you wanted. If they reported to you, there's something you can do with it. That's your boss's fault. I was the three. That's your boss's fault.

1:05:09 That had never, ever happened in my unit. Because again, the very first thing I did when I got to Los Angeles, I sat down with every one of my NCOs. I didn't know a damn thing about personnel. I had no idea how to operate the computers. I didn't know what they did. I had worked turning wrenches. I had no idea. So I sat down with every one of them for about 60 days, like literally pulled my chair up next to their desk. I read every single regulation that they were responsible for.

1:05:39 I wrote continuity books so that anybody else, if they were out, because everybody was basically one deep in all of their different sections, that there was a continuity book that I actually wrote myself. So I learned their job. And all you had to do is flip through that. You want to update a data separation? Here's how you do it. If somebody's just reenlisted, here's everything you had to do. I put screenshots from the computer system. So I eventually knew everything that everybody did in my area.

1:06:09 And if you didn't do it, we had basically transaction registers that was once a week. And the discrepancies, if there was discrepancies of people who had expired data separations or whatever, I wrote you up. You can't have that because that's somebody's paycheck. And so that's the type of officer that I wanted to be number one, because that's the kind of officer I wanted to have.

1:06:39 When I was enlisted and I didn't have that either. We had people that didn't do their job and was never held accountable because they went out drinking with the boss every Friday night. I saw that and that was never going to happen under my command. So I understand what you're saying. The process is very easy if you use it. And every enlisted person has job responsibilities. And it is very obvious to commanding officers.

1:07:07 Who's not pulling their weight? What they do about it is a completely different animal. SR, go ahead. Thank you, Colonel. I'm sitting here thinking about this, and I recall while I was in school being trained in MVS fundamentals and operating systems. The answer was, even though we had civilians in that class, if you didn't, every day there was a test.

1:07:35 And this was for three weeks solid. If you didn't make an 80% or better on that test, you were gone. That was it. No questions asked. As far as people sleeping in the classroom, I'm with you, Colonel. Smack them like Gibbs does to the dozo. Whack, upside the head. Pay attention or get out of here. Yeah, the bad thing for them is I played softball. I was the second base when I was in school. So I had a deadly aim.

1:08:05 Yeah. So I rarely, rarely miss. And it got to be a joke. You know, we didn't have safe spaces and timeouts back then either. Colonel, I just want to, you know, I was a weather guy. And just to kind of echo what you're talking about in terms of putting the instilling the fear of God and people, you know, being a weather guy, we had to be responsible for.

1:08:36 putting up the barometric pressure on the weather report so that the pilots could then adjust their altimeters because it was all based on the pressure. And if you gave a wrong reading, it could mess up the altimeters. And if you find out that the plane or the helicopter crashed as a result of a faulty report that you gave,

1:09:00 you could be held liable for their death. And I'll never forget that because they said they instilled that in me from day one at weather school. And as I look back on it, I think they were probably exaggerating it a little bit, but they were doing it on purpose to enforce, look, this is important. Don't fuck this up. So to your point about standards, yes, 100%. Yeah. And I mean, the systems,

1:09:30 When I was in aircraft maintenance, the systems that I worked on was referred to as environmental and electrical systems, which meant when you changed out equipment, a lot of times the quick disconnects, they're electrical plug-ins, and they'll have any number of amount of wires, 12, 8, whatever.

1:09:59 And they are all connected with soldered connections. And there are certain ways that you connect those electrical wires and you have to check them at periodic times because obviously an aircraft, the vibrations can work soldered connections loose. And so every single thing that you are supposed to check is in what's called a technical order. And if you're...

1:10:25 Liquid oxygen was one of my systems as well. If you're in an environment where you're on oxygen, you can't run out of oxygen. Every single thing, canopy steel, the actual pressurization seals around the doors when they shut, every single one of those are life critical. If you blow a canopy steel in flight, that's rapid decompression. And so again.

1:10:54 Every single thing matters. And you don't leave one step out because it literally can equate to life or death. Renee, go ahead. Yeah, just wanted to emphasize, I totally agree with what you all are sharing. And people with bad crap because it's tolerated. Growing up in the South.

1:11:20 At the time I went to school, there was paddling. And so if anybody in the class ever got out of line, that damn paddle came out on top of the teacher's desk. And I got to tell you, we didn't have bullying. We didn't have any problems that young people have today at school because that paddle would come out from the teacher's desk and put the fear of God in everybody. So that's all. Yeah.

1:11:48 Our teacher, we had paddling, obviously, when I was in elementary school, but we had a paddler. We had one teacher that was designated to deliver. It was a guy. And nobody, nobody wanted to get paddling from that man. But, yeah, those days, obviously, kids didn't act up in class back then either. We need those days back. Yeah.

1:12:18 Well, we need kind of like you're kind of like your example of humiliation in front of everybody. Similar principle. Yeah. Yeah. Because you felt a lot of shame when you were the one that had to wait outside for the paddler man to come down the hallway. The anticipation of that and listening to it in the classroom. I mean, every piece of that was very meaningful to teach children discipline.

1:12:46 Anyway, I'm going to jump off here. Thank you guys all for being here again. And I'm like I said, I'm going to try as hard as I can every day to keep going through this book because we've got you guys. This book is just crazy. And everything that we've talked about is crazy, but it's going to get crazier. So anyway, I will be back tomorrow, hopefully at the same time, four o'clock.

1:13:14 And I will keep you guys posted. Thank you again all for being here. And tomorrow I'll tell you about all the fun we have at the birthday party tonight. So thanks, everybody, for being here. On a final note, that is a lovely hat. Oh, I know. Right. And I have the perfect necklace that's purple and teal that I'm going to wear with it. So I know I told my husband he kind of bought it for himself, but I told him I was stealing it. I absolutely love it.

1:13:45 So anyway, take care, everybody. See you tomorrow.

Entities here

Rudy Castillo24 Contras19 Jerry Gazzetta17 Torres brothers15 DEA15 CIA14 El Salvador13 Los Angeles12 U.S. Department of Justice10 Victor Gill10 Walter Grasheim8 Medellin Cartel8 United States8 Dulles International Airport8 Colombia7 Majors7 Oliver North6 Edwin Corr6 U.S. Embassy in San Salvador6 Giuseppe Gazzetta5 Lawrence Walsh5 Salvadoran Armed Forces4 Crack Epidemic4 Daniel Blanton4 Laguna Beach Police Department4 Nicaragua4 Justice Department Inspector General4 Carl Knudsen4 Operation Gladio3 Tom Gordon3 Costa Rica3 Orlando Morello3 Sandinistas3 Riverside County Sheriff's Department3 Ray Blanton3 Pablo Escobar2 Barry Seal2 U.S. State Department2 Sun Myung Moon2 Norwin Menendez2

Claims made here

Oliver North financed_via Contras host_asserted ▶ 1:40

“That's interesting. They also said North wanted to take $1.5 million in drug profits from Barry Still that he had gotten from the Medellin cartel and give it to the Contras. When the DEA refused to do…”

Washington Times funded Contras host_asserted ▶ 2:10

“to the Washington Times, which was supporting the Contras, both financially and editorial. And who owns the Washington Times? The Unification Church and Reverend Moon, just so that we're clear on that…”

Unification Church secretly_owned Washington Times host_asserted ▶ 2:10

Oliver North ordered_assassination_of Sandinistas host_asserted ▶ 2:39

“For those of you who may have missed yesterday's show, what the U.S. government and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North is trying to do is set up the Sandinista Nicaraguan government as drug traffickers w…”

Jefferson Morley exposed Oliver North book_quoted ▶ 4:15

“has North fingerprints all over it, columnist Jefferson Morley wrote in the LA Times. After Steele flew in his CIA and DEA mission, he never used the C-123K cargo plane again. It was parked in a Mena,…”

Lawrence Walsh covered_up Contras host_asserted ▶ 6:17

“of their investigation. For the most part, the CIA reported any drug trafficking activity would have been stumbled upon in the course of the investigation over other issues like money laundering. So t…”

Lawrence Walsh covered_up Rudy Castillo host_asserted ▶ 6:47

“outside his purview. And he also stated that he knew Senator John Kerry's Senate subcommittee was investigating it. But it appears that Walsh's office never passed the Rudd memo to John Kerry. Castill…”

Edwin Corr covered_up Contras host_asserted ▶ 9:17

“He's sending all of his information to Edwin Corr, the ambassador. He was sending regular reports. And Corr later said that he thought that Castillo was a very professional and good agent and had no r…”

Edwin Corr covered_up Rudy Castillo host_asserted ▶ 9:17

DEA removed_from_power Rudy Castillo host_asserted ▶ 10:15

“back-channel cable to the State Department requesting an internal DEA review of Castillo's allegation. The DEA, he said, informed him that a lot of Castillo's information was inaccurate. What he's see…”

Walter Grasheim trafficked Medellin Cartel host_asserted ▶ 13:44

“Again, the death squad. He was also advising and training Salvadoran army units in long-range reconnaissance operations on behalf of the U.S. government. One of Castillo's informants, sorry about that…”

Walter Grasheim supplied_arms_to Salvadoran Armed Forces host_asserted ▶ 13:44

CIA covered_up Contras host_asserted ▶ 16:16

“was helpful and had been informant for the CIA. And soon after he put Castillo on Grasham's trail, fingering him as the head of smuggling operations, the CIA basically took over the entire thing. Cast…”

CIA covered_up Walter Grasheim host_asserted ▶ 16:16

CIA covered_up Rudy Castillo host_asserted ▶ 16:16

DEA covered_up Rudy Castillo host_asserted ▶ 18:45

“by the DEA. He spent the next five years fending off accusations that he had gotten too close to Central American informants and accepted improper gifts, inappropriately handled firearms, and a number…”

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Victor Gill host_asserted ▶ 23:16

“And he got off with two years for involuntary manslaughter. So he had every right to hate them. They invited him to join their surveillance of Gil. The trio soon discovered that Gil was buying the mon…”

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 26:56

“to get a search warrant for the addresses of the Torres brothers. On August 11, 1986, Guzeta and his federal friends raided them. They hit the jackpot. They found $400,000 in a closet of one of the ho…”

Pablo Escobar member_of Medellin Cartel host_asserted ▶ 28:28

“who were close relatives of the Medellin cartel boss, Pablo Escobar. In his 1996 interview, Norwin Menendez confirmed the relationship between the women and Escobar. Guzeta said Torreses were informed…”

Norwin Menendez member_of Medellin Cartel host_asserted ▶ 28:28

Jerry Gazzetta recruited Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 29:26

“It was arranged that Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office for the Torreses to plead guilty to drug charges under false names. They were given suspended sentences, put on probation and turned …”

Torres brothers laundered_money_for Medellin Cartel host_asserted ▶ 30:53

“It was mind boggling. They revealed a drug ring that was dumping hundreds of kilos of cocaine every week into black neighborhoods in L.A., generating truckloads of cash. The confidential informant had…”

Torres brothers trafficked Medellin Cartel host_asserted ▶ 30:53

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 32:20

“While they made the rounds, dropping off dope, picking up cash from the customers in South L.A., the reliability of the confidential informants were substantiated. Gio reported to his bosses a few day…”

Jerry Gazzetta founded Project Sahara host_asserted ▶ 32:50

“He had observed the movement of 750,000, 230,000, 130,000, and 150,000, respectively. Guzetta began compiling his debriefing notes into a series of reports. He titled it Project Sahara because he figu…”

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Project Sahara host_asserted ▶ 32:50

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 32:50

Daniel Blanton trafficked Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 33:51

“Guzetta listened with his mouth open as the brothers rattled off names, dates, delivery sites, and routes of transportation. The two black dealers in South Central, they reported, are generating a con…”

Daniel Blanton supplied_arms_to Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 33:51

Rick and Ollie trafficked Torres brothers host_asserted ▶ 33:51

Rick and Ollie trafficked Daniel Blanton host_asserted ▶ 33:51

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Rick and Ollie host_asserted ▶ 33:51

Jerry Gazzetta exposed Daniel Blanton host_asserted ▶ 34:21

“source. Two of the Colombians they knew only by nicknames. One they knew quite well, Daniel Blanton. The informants related that Daniel Blanton is extremely dangerous because of his access to informat…”

Ray Blanton recruited Ron Lister book_quoted ▶ 35:21

“Ricky Ross confirmed that Blanton had an uncanny ability to accurately predict upcoming police raids, but said he was never able to explain his clairvoyance. The Torres brother told Gazzetta that Blan…”

Ron Lister trafficked Ray Blanton book_quoted ▶ 35:50

“Ronnie transports 100 kilos of cocaine to the black market and has transported millions of dollars to Miami for Blanton. Once Blanton's cash arrived in Florida, the brothers reported a relative of Bla…”

Orlando Morello laundered_money_for Ray Blanton book_quoted ▶ 35:50

Anastasio Somoza appointed Orlando Morello book_quoted ▶ 36:23

“was an influential Nicaraguan economist who had been appointed by President Somoza to be the central bank of Nicaragua, which basically functions as the Federal Reserve. The banker was also the offici…”

Frank Bording recruited Giuseppe Gazzetta book_quoted ▶ 37:21

“I told the chief it's bigger than I can handle. These guys are talking about millions of dollars in cocaine. They're talking about a Nicaraguan leader named Calero. They're involved in this. Colombian…”

Edward Hoffman headed Majors book_quoted ▶ 38:52

“Danielle Garner, regarded the best drug detective in the department, relieved himself on the pants leg of a narcotics officer that he didn't like. The squad called Majors 1, Majors 2, and Majors 3 wor…”

Rick Ross trafficked Medellin Cartel book_quoted ▶ 42:28

“named Rick and Ollie, it appeared that the gangs had established a direct pipeline to the Colombian cartels, which meant they had access to as much cocaine as they could sell. Since the circle was sma…”

Sun Myung Moon member_of Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 47:25

“If you're just reading this book and you don't know anything about Operation Gladio, would it surprise or you would just gloss right over the fact that the government is leaking to The Washington Time…”