Ep. 655: A Wildlife Agent Goes Undercover

Published Jan 27, 2025, 10:00 AM

Steven Rinella talks with Ed Newcomer, Brody Henderson, Janis PutelisPhil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.

Topics discussed: Being a USFW Special Agent; trafficking wildlife; LA, NYC, and Miami hot spots; rescuing species, not animals; caviar trafficking; how the US lists globally endangered species; the Birmingham Rollers and roller pigeons; synchronized seizures; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; the hawk body; public shaming; the "Fish and Wild Guys"; elvers; the IUCN; the World’s Most Wanted Butterfly Smuggler; getting turned in by the criminal; the Queen Alexandra’s Bird Wing; serving Justin Bieber for his monkey; getting ambushed by duck hunters; and more.

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This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light dot com, f I R S T L I t e dot com. If you listen to last week's show, you heard me and Moe Fallon discussing my new History Channel show, which is called Hunting History, and that show premiere is January twenty eighth at ten pm. So you heard us talk about a handful of the episodes on that podcast episode. But now I can go watch the actual damn things by tuning into the History Channel. Any Ray twenty eight, ten pm Eastern, nine Central. Do your own math as you work westward. Hope you enjoy it. You'll learn a lot, you'll have some laughs, you'll be entertained. Check it out. Join Today by US Fish and Wildlife undercover agent retired. Right when you came in, I told you don't look retired.

Yes, retired, but I wouldn't. I wouldn't call myself an undercover agent.

Well that's what Krin called you.

Oh all right, okay, straight up space.

Fish and wildlife special agent. Yeah, ed newcomer retired because tell everybody why, I had no idea.

Yeah, well, I've been retired for two years, and that's only because all federal agents have to retire when they turned fifty seven, so I hit mandatory retirement.

Now there's no old federal agent.

There are some exceptions occasionally, like if somebody's working on a particular case or something, they may extend their retirement so they can finish up that case.

I see, but it's rare.

Yeah, and you got to come in before thirty seven, you said.

Right, Yeah, you have to enter the academy honor before your thirty seven.

So it's not like you can do it. It's like a second, like you have a career and then have another career doing what you did.

I guess you did.

That's what I did. But it was close. Yeah, I became a federal agent.

I went.

I arrived at the Federal Law Enforcement Academy literally about three weeks before I turned thirty seven, So I just made it.

Yeah, yeah, and I retired. Yeah, it's kind of nice.

Except so jealous. Man.

The problem is, you know, you got a pretty good gig, not.

As good as you got well, unless you're broke.

I'll tell you what.

Being a special agent, most agents I know go right to mandatory retirement because they love it. They love their job. Being a federal agent is awesome, but being a special agent for US Fish and Wildlife Service, it's ten times awesome. I was so my identity was so tied up in my badge. Oh it was hard to retire.

Is it hurt?

And I still I'm very jealous of the of the people I know who are still agents because I talk to.

Them and I'm like, oh, that sounds like fun. I want to do that.

Really? You miss it?

Oh totally, yeah, every day every day. That's why it's fun to come talk about it with people like you, because it's just fun for me to reminisce. And I like making sure people know that, you know, these agents are out there and they're they're doing a really good job, and they're working their asses off for people.

You know.

It sounds like, look, just reading from the notes, that a lot of people are interested in that job.

Yeah, we get.

You know, I was never involved in the hiring process when we would hire the national agents, but I was always told by people at headquarters we'd get you know, normally, when we have a class of new agents, it's maybe thirty to thirty five agents at a time that go through the academy, and for those thirty five seats, easily three thousand plus applicants easily more. Sometimes sometimes they just cut it off because they get too many, and it's not it becomes a burden for the you know, managers to go through all the applicants to find the gyms.

Okay, you work with wildlife, carry a gun?

Yeah, and that I scold badge with a buff bag it's got a fish and a duck on them.

Is that part of the reason that you didn't start that job until thirty seven years of age?

Yeah, so totally you know, this is totally straight up. I came out of law school interested in the job. I went to law school and I thought, okay, you know.

Finish law school.

Oh yeah, yeah, a law degree, great background to be a federal agent law enforcement in general. And I always thought, well, if I don't make it into the academy or I don't get hired by law enforcement.

I got a job, right, you'll slum it as a slum it as a lawyer.

But yeah, so I started applying pretty much as soon as I came out of law school. And what age was that, Well, see twenty six you come out. Yeah, I graduated from law school twenty six. Yeah, so I applied the first time they were opening, so total, I applied four times before I got hired.

Did you do the bar exam?

Oh? Yeah, yeah, I'm admitted at full on lawyer. Yeah.

I was admitted in two states, Washington and Colorado, and I practiced law for ten years, kind of accidentally because I was waiting to get hired by It's a wildlife service.

Are there a lot of agents who are lawyers?

Not a lot?

There are some FBI hires a lot, But in the service, I'm not sure how many of us are eight or lawyers, but there's quite a few.

It probably helps you when you're working a case because you're probably able to analyze your evidence and analyze your case from a somewhat objective perspective of how things are going to look in court and what the arguments are going to be. Yeah, making that up No, that's one hundred percent right.

When I did practice law, I was a prosecutor, and so what I kept seeing was, you know, I'm limited to what the detectives are bringing me. So whatever they do in their investigation, they give me their report, and that's what I have to go with, right, And every time i'd read an investigator's report, I'd be like, oh, man, that sounds like a lot of fun, and I'll bet I could have done that better than they did it. So when I became an agent, I kind of brought that prosecutor background with me and I kind of knew, all right, as I'm building the case against bad guys, this is what the prosecutor's going to want, this is what they're going to need, this is what a jury's going to need to hear, and this is how we're going to avoid losing an appeal. So it's very helpful to have a law degree, especially if you come from a kind of criminal justice background.

Like I did.

Did you have a wildlife background?

No, And that's why it was hard for me to get noticed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. I finally, like I reached out to this special agent in charge who was in charge of the West Coast, a guy named Dave McMullen, who is just an awesome US Fish and Wildlife agent. And I said, you know, I'm really interested in this job. I can't get an interview. I can't even get a call back, right And he was very nice and he asked, you know, send me your resume.

Let me see.

He called me right back and he said, yeah, I can tell you. The reason you're not getting interviewed is there's nothing on your resume that indicates that you have any interest in wildlife and and yeah, it's kind of an eye opening. I don't know why I didn't think of it. I just assumed law degree was one of the educational qualifiers. I thought, you know, that's going to get me in. So he gave me some great advice here. I was an assistant Attorney General in the state of Washington, but on weekends I was volunteering with the Washington Department official Wildlife game Wardens and going out and.

Doing whatever they wanted.

A resume, yeah, yeah, to do whatever they wanted me they wanted the job I did well, these guys would have me out on on the you know, Puget Sound middle of winter, pulling shrimp traps so they could check shrimp traps. And that's a hard that's hard work to pull a shrimp trap by hand.

I don't know if you were volunteering.

Yeah, I loved it. I couldn't wait. I couldn't wait to do it.

We've all volunteered to pull a few shrimps out of the depths.

Yeah.

That sounds funny, don't it, because most people pay to go pull shrimp. You've got to buy your license and everything.

Like what made you want the job in the first place. Like as a kid, were you into wildlife and hunting and fishing.

Or I've never I don't hunt. I fished before, but I never got into hunting.

You just like nature and wild life.

Yeah.

I grew up in Denver and so you know, my my dad mom took us camping up to the mountains all the time, and I love it. I mean, you know, back in the day, we would the whole family's car would pull over if we saw a hawk on a fence post by the side of the road. So it's kind of ingrained in us not shooting at it, not shooting at But that's the first thing I want to get into. Yeah, oh sure, because this is the thing Krin like thet I gotta tell you.

No, yeah, the hawk parks. But Krinn, I hope other guests aren't listening. Krin doesn't usually get excited about a guest. Krinn has a baseline excitement for all guests. Okay, Krinn holds a baseline excitement for all guests. But she had a like a speak a spike on a spike, a high spike for you coming on, inspired in part by her her discovery of roller pigeons and the trouble that roller pigeon enthusiasts find themselves in. And so I want to I want to get into this just as a way to lay the ground where what you for what exactly you spend your time on?

You know?

Sure, hence my joke about shooting hose. Yeah, no, I'm getting ahead of us. I got ahead of us.

I got it.

But to answer your question, I I was interested in law enforcement from a real young age I had, you know, I was one of these five year olds that ran around thinking they were going to save the family if there was a home invasion.

You know.

Uh, so you know, growing up in Denver, I'm thinking I'll be a Denver cop. You know, someday That's kind of what I figured. And then I saw at some point in my life, I really there was such a thing as a game warden, and I thought, well, cop cop for wildlife. That sounds pretty cool. I'll do that. That really interested me. And then it wasn't until I was in college that I just literally stumbled across a job announcement for US Fish and Wildlife special Agent. And when I saw that, you know, it's like, Oh, that's like the FBI for wildlife.

That's what I want to do, right.

You get the most jurisdiction, you have the most authority, you have the most opportunity to make a difference and do something good, you know.

So kind of where I led.

And then did you spend your whole career in La? Yeah?

I did.

And that's another funny story because it's going back to this. A special Agent in charge, David McMullen, when he was talking to me about applying and how to get interviewed, he said, look at you got to go to LA. And I said, LA, I don't want to go to LA. I'm a rocky mountain boy. I want to work in the Rockies. I'm interested in you know, Rocky Mountain wildlife issues. That's where I want to work as a special agent. He said, No, you got to go to La. He goes, there's this little there's this little, tiny firecracker of a agent down there, a woman named Marie Paladini.

She's a lawyer. You'll get along great. And that's where the action is. That's where the wildlife trafficking is. That's where all the big cases are.

You got to go to LA because it's a big port city.

Yeah, big port city and a big you know, urban center where there's just every kind of culture you can imagine there. So La New York Miami. If you want to be a special agent in the Fish and Wildlife Service and really learn about international wildlife trafficking and interstate trafficking, you got to go to one of these big ports La New York and where Miami, Miami is another big one.

Guy.

We need, like, you know, a prime time CSI type show.

I'm all in I'm all in picture that yeah, so can I. I've I've pitched it before, you know, like n c I S. But Fish and wild if it'd be way better?

Oh yeah, superhero saving animals.

Every episode they'd be making you rescue cats and dogs. Well picture cute little kittens and stuff.

Yeah, you know, that's actually that's something else we should probably talk about because a lot of people who initially apply for the service, they sometimes not a lot, but some people think that it's going to be about rescuing animals. And I got to tell you, in twenty years of doing that job, I rescued, literally rescued an animal less than half a dozen times. Because most of the time, the animals you're dealing with are they're done right, even if they're alive in the trade, they're not going back to the wild. And so it's what you're trying to do is stop the wildlife crime to protect future animals, not the ones you're dealing with right there. So you know, if you get upset about seeing dead animals or animals mistreated and you can't you can't translate that into Okay, I'm in law enforcement moment and do something about this, and you're going to be emotionally crushed by that. This is not the job for you because it's not about rescuing animals, about rescuing species, but not animals.

What's the case you worked it would help people up top here that would help people kind of best understand the work you were doing.

Yeah, and I'll give you that example. But let me just say that we have agents based all over the United States, right, and so where you're based is going to dictate pretty much what you're doing.

Right.

So, for example, our agents here in Montana, you know, before wolves were delisted, they worked a lot of wolf poaching cases. They still work grizzly bear cases to determine whether or not it's self defense or not, or whether it's a straight up poaching case. Got agents in the Southeast work on different things than agents in the Northwest, right, because there's different animals there. There's different species listed under the Endangered Species Act, or there's different animals trafficked. So the experiences between an agent based in Bozeman and an agent based in Los Angeles are huge, got it right? And I have never done some of the stuff that the agents in Bozeman have done. I've always wanted to, but you know, I've never done a grizzly bear poaching crime scene because that doesn't happen in Los Angeles. So anyway, you know, a typical excuse me, a typical case that I might have handled in LA involved trafficking of some wildlife, whether alive or dead, for commercial purposes. And so you know, early in my career I worked on a lot of caviar trafficking cases involving Russians. There's a lot of Russians in LA and they all trafficked in caviar, not all of them, but you know, the cavyr traffickers were Russians. And then you know, I had an insect trafficking case, I had endangered fish trafficking case. So it's very variable.

Is the caviar when you're working a caviar case, is it caviar coming in or caviar going out? And does caviar coming in mad to you because it's someone else's.

Problem, Yes, so with and that's that's actually a good point because sometimes it's animals going out. And and we saw a change in that over the years. When I first started in the early two thousands, we were dealing with mostly wildlife coming into the United States. So things like beluga caviar out of the former Russian republics right so poached there, yeah, exactly, and listed under the US Endangered Species Act, So it makes it illegal to import export. I got, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so that's how we would get involved. And and and the United States is kind of unique because we do have the Endangered Species Act, which lists animals for protection that don't live here, and not all countries are like that. We we have taken an interest in helping to preserve the world's you know, important wildlife. Tigers, for example, we don't have tigers here in the wild, but they're listed as endangered under our law, so it's illegal just for someone to kill.

One or move.

That's that's never curred me. I had no idea.

Yeah, it's kind of neat, isn't it.

Yeah, I've never thought about that before. We list.

Exactly, well, fish in Russia exactly Yeah. And so yeah, the idea is, you know, we want the entire world's environment to be there for everyone. When when I worked in Africa as an agent, a lot of times Africans would would push back on me that Americans are too pushy about conservation. And I used to tell them, I'd say, to the whole room, I'd say, how many people have been to the US. Very few people would raise their hand, how many people want to come to the US. Everybody raised their hand and they'd say, well, if you come to the US, would you like to see bison?

Would you like to see a bald.

Eagle in the wild? Would you like to see a bear? Everybody raises their hand, right, same thing if I ask all you guys, hey, you want to go to Africa and see some lions? Yeah, we'd all be on plane tomorrow, right. So we want other countries in the world to protect their wildlife so that weak Americans can go there and spend money to see.

It, hunt it, whatever.

But you know, we want them to protect that stuff, you know, so we can go, but we're going to protect it here in the US so people from other countries can come spend money in the US and see it. And it's just I think you everybody in this room probably appreciates that wildlife has an intrinsic value, right. It's just something we enjoy seeing, stalking, trapping, hunting, whatever you do. Right, But we want it to stay there. We don't want to use it up. We want it to be there. So fish and wildlife plays a really important role in making sure that the species around the world remain wild for us, all.

Of us, excuse me, all going to call from it. Tell me about a roller pigeon, which I had never heard of before.

Yeah, so a roller pigeon is a it's not in wild animals, and domestic pigeon looks just like the pigeon you'd see at the Donald's parking lot, really, but they come from Birmingham, England originally, and all roller pigeons are descending some of the original Birmingham rollers. And what what they are really is a bird that's bred to have a seizure in flight.

And I've had a lot of conversations I've had pet pigeons. I have never I had never this is totally new to me, has synchronized synchronized seizures.

Well, I know that I've told you my story that I shared with you before we started recording before, but I know we've had the conversation now on that I feel like we had it on the podcast about name for him.

There's there's a different type of pigeon called a tumbler, but the tumblr really does its tumbling on the ground, which is kind of weird. But no, the ones that roll in flight, they're rollers.

What do you mean they have a seizure.

So that's The only way I can describe it is that while they're flying, if you're watching them, and the guys and gals who are involved in a roller pigeon hobby would would disagree with me. They would say, we train them to do that. They don't train them to do that. Okay, there's no way they're training these birds. Now, they're breeding them to have this behavior. And if you watch them, they'll fly. When a roller pigeon hobbyist or you know, competitors flying their birds, they fly in a kit, and a kit is about fifteen birds, and they'll basically they fly in an orbit above your property. You let them out, and you let them out when they're hungry, so they fly, but they're not going anywhere, so they're kin to come back and get fed. And they fly in an orbit together. And usually when they make either a right or left hand turn, the lead bird there's usually a leader out in the front, will be have a seizure. That's the only way to describe it. They they whip their heads back, their wings lock up up, and they arch their backs and they start to flip backwards. And what I notice, what I think is going on, is I think that you breed the leader to have a seizure on a right or a left hand turn. The other birds you breed to have seizures when they see the leader have a seizure. And that's how complicated it can get. And these guys are very sophisticated about how they breed and to win a competition, if all of us in this room were in a competition, for me to win, my birds need to fly together in that kit and they need to roll together as a.

So it looks like a waterfall. Yeah, it looks like a waterfall. It's really cool.

And the trick, of course is you got to make sure they'd recover before they hit the ground because.

They'll kill themselves.

And so a lot of a lot of birds die because they hit the ground or they hood a building before they recover from their little seizure.

So how long is a normal seizure or the second seconds? Okay, that's a few seconds.

Yeah, but it looks neat right, It kind of looks like a waterfall if they're doing it right.

Yeah, I mean it was. It was I don't know how to describe it beautiful really, but it's just weird. Yeah, I mean, it's you're like, wow, I didn't know that could be a thing.

That's a thing.

And then they're graded based on how well they roll, and then somebody this thing's a world competition. There's something called the World Cup, and if you win the World Cup, you can sell your pigeons to other they're good breeders, right, because you've got high quality rollers, so you can you can then start selling the birds that you breed as breeders to other people who want to compete and.

Have this status.

How much money is in that, Like, they.

Don't make any money in the competitions, they make money selling their birds. Yeah, so this is a status thing. You know. You you want to be the World Cup champion as a status deal.

In the US, what is the roller capital?

You like the city? Yeah?

Where is it?

Big? It's big and all over. It's kind of interesting. It's big and inner city l A. You know, Mike Tyson has roller pigeons.

He's I knew he was a pigeon fancy roller pigeons.

Yeah, he's into rollers.

We're gonna go down a.

Deep rabbit hole, you know, downtown New York City on the roofs of houses. You'll see your roller pigeon setups, But.

When you see it, when I see a pigeon keeper, what was that movie with Forrest Whitaker, He had pigeons Phil Phil Phil. Come on, dude, it's got the word ghost in it.

Ghost ghost dog, the what's his name?

Famous from the Crying Game, The Way of the Samurai Ghost Dog.

Yeah.

Yeah, So if you see a pigeon fancier, I always called him pigeon fancier because I didn't know about this whole their aspect to it. Yeah, Are they mostly roller people or there are other kinds of pigeon fancier.

Lots of other kind of pigeons. There's there's homing pigeons. Uh, there's you know, these decorative pigeons you see maybe at the National Western Stock Show on a Denver that kind of stuff.

So let's get into how roller pigeon enthusiasts have gotten in trouble.

I was gonna say, selling their good rollers is legal, yes, correct, Yeah, but what part of rollering pigeon fanciers their activity is not?

Yeah?

Where do you get involved?

How does a fish and wildlife agent get involved? So, as you can imagine, when a pigeon has a seizure in mid flight, especially a whole flock of them. Every raptor within a mile or two is going to make a bee line for that little like that flog Oh yeah right, yeah, it's like it's like the deer that's got the limp right, it's going to draw all the predators right to it. So, yeah, hawks and falcons, particularly juveniles like juvenile Cooper hawks, juvenile redtails that are you know, learning to hunt anyway, they go right for these totally. And yeah, they can come in and take out your best birds. And yeah, so these guys get really annoyed that the hawks come in and kill their roller pigeons, so they start killing hawks. And honestly roller uh homer homing pigeon fanatics and and there's big money in homing pigeon competitions. They kill hawks too. And in fact, that's how I got onto this whole roller pigeon dealer.

Is what about paragrine falcons because you know they're yeah in big urban yeah areas.

Now same because especially since they hunt on the fly, they go after roller pigeons real real, real good. So it just it just depends on what hawks are in the area. Cooper's hawks are also aerial hunters, so they're more common than the paragrine. But yeah, peregrines get involved in this as well, and that's how US Fish and Wildlife Service agent gets involved because of course, all raptors are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It's pretty straightforward. You kill a raptor and you're you're violating the mbt A.

So tell me exactly how this would flow to you. Yeah, So, like, what what happens that you become aware of? Right?

Yeah, So what what happened with me is I'm working in Los Angeles and I you know, I'm doing my job as an agent, so I'm pretty well connected, like with the wildlife rehab places and I've got sources around. Somebody calls me and says, hey, we got an injured cooper sock came into our rehabilitation center and it's got a gunshot wound. So that piques my interest because that's illegal. And normally this would be a fairly low priority case for the Fish and Wildlife Service in LA because we're working on wildlife trafficking cases, organized criminal activity ongoing, right.

Involving a lot of money and wildlife.

But so happens I had nothing going on that day, and I felt like taking getting out of the office, so I said, hey, I'll come up and take a look. So I drive up to the North LA that's part of the LA that's burning right now, and I find out when I get there there's another hawk showed up in the same guy's front yard dead, another bullet wound. So I actually treated it like a crime scene, and I which, what had they been shot quite?

Not quite that bad?

What had they been shot with like a shotgun or so?

These were twenty two caliber pellets pump action pellets, which interestingly can be traced through ballistics.

Yeah.

Yeah, they come out of a rifled barrel, so they leave they leave marks on those twenty two caliber pellets if it's a pump action rifled barrel, which you know the good ones are, sure so. But they do use shotguns and they'll they also will use If they use a shotgun, they like to use subsonic rounds. Some of them will put these sound dampeners, these huge long barrels on the end of it. That gun was called a metro gun. I think did you ever hear of a metro gun. It's like an extra barrel. You attached to an eight seventy and it's it's about four and a half feet long, So you end up with this insanely long eight seventy.

But yeah, it quiets it down.

They're shooting them perched.

No, they'll get them on the fly with the shotguns.

Yeah, with the with the pellet guns. They'll do it approached. Yeah, they'll wait for him. A lot of times, the predicted Cooper socks. They'll come sit right on the pigeon fanciers lofts and they'll just walk back and forth, and it's easy pickings. So I didn't do the chalk around the dead bird. But what I did do was I canvased the neighborhood. I went and started knocking on doors and just asking questions of neighbors who happened to be home, and be a question you'd ask, uh, you know, identify, You do the classic federal agent flip of your credentials, and you identify yourself. You tell them you're investigating a possible wildlife crime in their neighborhood. That gets their interests. They want to hear more. And you start telling them that you know, you're investigating some hawks being killed, and you explain the MBTA, because nobody understands, nobody knows has heard about the MBTA explained that it's illegal to kill hawks, and then you know, if you got the bad guy's house there, you're going to get a certain reaction and you're going to know. But most of the time, people are very shocked, very concerned that somebody's shooting in their neighborhood in LA and they love hawks. They don't want to see hawks killed. And inevitably, as happened in that investigation, some people started to tell me, oh, yeah, every once in a while, I hear these loud pops. I don't know where they're coming from. One lady told me she found a big bird dead in her yard with big yellow feet. I'm like, well that was probably that's probably a lot so I knew him in an area, right. And finally I get to a house and I'm like, well, tell me about your neighbors, right, and she points to all the houses around. Well, he's a realtor, he's a police officer, whatever. She finally comes to this guy's house. She points to this house and says, well, that guy, he loves birds, he wouldn't do it.

I said, what do you mean? He loves birds. Oh, he's got lots of pigeons. Okay, I had my suspects house now, right.

So it turns out I go interview that guy and his name was Marty, and he was a He was a racing pigeon. So this guy actually made big money, like ten plus thousand dollars a time on a race if he won. Sometimes those races can be like fifty grand if you win a Is that like.

Illegal gambling kind of money or where is it?

No?

Not necessarily. Yeah, it's like a plot sort of a thing. Yeah, there's a pot. So uh.

He vibed real real bad and asked me if I was armed, gave me all the you know, red flag creepy things. But in the end I actually got him to confess that he did kill hawks, so easy conviction on that he confessed, he pled guilty. But the more I thought about it, the more it nagged at me that, Okay, there's a lot of there's a lot of pigeon fanciers around the country, and if this guy is motivated to kill hawks, probably.

Some other ones are.

So I just started digging and I realized it'd be really difficult to infiltrate the best way to get these guys is to do some type of undercover work. And you you characterized me as an undercover agent when you never introduced me. We don't talk like that really, But I did a lot undercover work during my career, middle part of my career in particular a lot, and this was one of the big cases I ended up doing. And I found that there was these group of roller pigeon guys operating in la Is, a fairly large group associated with the National Birmingham Roller Club the nbr C, and then fact the president of the nbr C lived in la So I really just started to ingratiate myself with these guys online and ask a lot of questions that I wanted to get into it. I got invited, Yeah, got invited in to learn about the hobby and get involved.

How long did it take for you were How long did it take for you were introduced to the rafter control?

Shockingly, it is very quick.

Yeah.

I mean I got invited to go to some pigeon shows that they have where they show off their birds, they buy and sell the good breeders, they show equipment, and you know, funny enough, I had an undercover persona all set up. I'd already been doing undercover work by that time, but obviously did not use the name ed Newcomer. But I ended up on one of their web pages with a photo with me with a bunch of these guys who ended up I ended up arresting a year and a half later, And on the little caption down below, it says, you know, the Inner City Roller Club welcomes a newcomer to the group, and.

We put that up on the bulletin board in the office there. It's kind of.

Nice, but at first you're like, shit, they found out exactly yeah, yeah, whenever you see yeah, you see your name, and parents like, wait, oh, the context is correct, it's not capitalized exactly.

So but at that very first, you know, Meaty that I went to I saw this funny looking cage sitting there, and I knew immediately it was a Gosshawk trap because I'd already I knew what these things looked like. And there's this guy selling a gosshawk trap for one hundred bucks. So of course I go up and I'm like, what's this cage for? You know, to get into this hobby? I don't know, what do you use this for, and yeah, he didn't miss a beat. He says, Oh, that's for catching hawks, but don't tell anybody because it's illegal.

M hm.

And I'm like, you know, could you say that into my lapel mic, you know, it would be nice.

So and that went on. Once that kind of opened up it.

Then once one of the guys on the inside has made a statement to me about a hawk trap being present on the property and what it's for, it gave me an excuse to talk to everybody about, Hey, I saw that weird cage.

What's this deal with hawks?

Do?

Is this something I need to be worried about? Where I live?

Floodgates just opened immediately, and yeah, everybody was talking about it.

I went back.

My boss actually wasn't too excited about me. That that little firecracker of a lawyer that I ended up working for down in LA that Dave McMullen told me I needed to work with. She wasn't excited about this case. She's like, these migratory birds, it's a low priority. We need to work on trafficking cases. And I said, no, just let me go do one of these meat on the weekend. Let's see what happens. I came back and showed her that undercover video where everybody was talking about killing hawks, and I pointed out to her that, look, there's two hundred and fifty people in LA who are members of the nbr C, the president's here, there are people all over the country that are members of the NBRC. And I didn't meet a single person at this meet who didn't admit they were killing hawks. And she's like, well, shit, we got to work this case then, you know, and then we were off and running. It was a year and a half. I spent every weekend at a pigeon.

At that point, like, what's the goala like for me?

Of them for you?

Because it seems to me like it'd be eas like you got the one guy that confess, but that's not really helping the bigger picture exactly, And so how do you work that into being like, if we do this, it's going to make a difference.

Yeah, Like, did you need a dead raptor to tie to an individual like over and over and over again.

Or yes, yes, that's ideal. You know, the quintessential body. It's a murder case, right, it's a hawk murder case. So you want that body. But you don't necessarily need it, because attempt to do these things is also a violation. But what you got to get past is their ability to create reasonable doubt by saying that that trap is used for something else, right, it's used to trap raccoons or whatever. So you got if you're going to go for the attempt, you got to prove that they know that they're trying to catch a hawk. And so you got to do that undercover work, get those admissions on tape. And so the goal here is with that first case I did with the guy, the racer, Marty, you know, it's a misdemeanor violation. He didn't get arrested. He basically paid a ticket, right, and it was a big fine, but it didn't get in the paper. I think he paid it's about five grand. I think it was pretty good fine.

And the word never spread.

The word to his friends maybe, but it doesn't get out in bigger community that you know. What happens then, is every all his buddies say, well, you idiot, you shouldn't have admitted you did it. And too bad Marty got caught. I'm not going to get caught, right, So what you want is deterrence and you got to deter people, and the best way to do that is to catch a lot of people. And then catching a lot of people catches the attention of the media, and that tends to.

Get the word out. Public shaming, public shaming.

Yeah, we didn't use those terms, but yeah, that's what it is, really and that's effective.

It's really effective.

So you know, you know, Abraham Lincoln said something that I love, and that is that the law without enforcement is simply good advice. And if people don't know you're out there enforcing the law and you're catching people, they just advice.

Then what prevents the what prevents the cage guy from saying in the end, he said, well, what I didn't tell you is I just relocate them, so maybe you can get me. Maybe it's like a legal possession. But I didn't kill it, right, You don't know that I killed it, right. I forgot to say, I'll just move them away and let them go. So, yeah, I possessed it for a minute, but that was it.

Yeah, and some of them did try that. But the way the MBTA, the Migratory Bird Charity Act is written, is it's illegal to catch them.

It's not. It doesn't matter.

If you want to catch one and relocate it, you have to have a permit from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. So that didn't necessarily get them out of it, but it would have been good jury sympathy, right, But there were some some of these guys actually told me. I'd ask them, I'd say, well, what do you do with it after you catch it in this trap?

Oh?

And a lot of them told me don't release them because hawks will learn to not go in a gosshawk trap. And so if you release a hawk, it's just going to set your fellow roller pigeon guys up to have a nightmare because they're going to have a hawk preying on their pigeons that you can't catch. In the business, you know what we call that trap shot? Yeah, yeah, well that's true, all right. Animals aren't dumb.

Yeah. So let's see where were we on this?

So I get into these clubs and basically presented myself as somebody who was interested in getting involved. They did, They did kind of check me out a little bit. They wanted to know where I lived, and we had to have the cover was pretty good on that case because these guys were dangerous. Some of these guys lived in south central LA, you know right there. I mean I was the only white guy at some of these meetings, and a lot of them we'd run there anytime I could, you know, figure out who they were, we'd run them. A lot of them had felony convictions for assaults, gun crimes, drug crimes. One guy in the middle of the investigation comes up with a warrant for gang rape out of LA County.

And that's what I was going to ask you earlier. Like we've had game wardens on that have told us, like poaching cases will often lead to like larger other you know, criminal activity.

Did you absolutely into that a lot?

Yeah, absolutely, especially when you've got more organized, you know, criminal activity going on. If you're talking about somebody who has two or three extra trout or you know whatever, kills a buck when they shouldn't have whatever, that's that's kind of a one off. But if you've got somebody in systemically and systematically involved in committing crimes, you know, there's there's a couple of things that people will kill you for or hurt you for.

Three things.

I always say, one is to protect their liberty and the other is to protect their money right, and to prepare their house. And when you are when they are involved in an ongoing criminal activity, you're gonna as a law enforcement officer, you're endangering all three of those things for them. You're going to take their money, potentially their revenue source. You're probably going to do a search warrant on their house, and they definitely think they're liberty is at stake, and those are the things that make people really dangerous. Yeah, so yeah, so we didn't take any chance is with these guys. In fact, every time, every time I'd come in on a Monday morning after meeting with them, my boss would kind of shake her head and say, this is too dangerous. We need we need to take this down. I'm like, no, no, we got to go farther. We got to catch more of these guys.

We need more.

And then a really crazy thing happened. I happened to be up in Oregon for a firearms qualification and defensive tactics training because at the time, Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho were all part of the same region. So we'd get together as agents for training and stuff. And I'm up there and I'm literally wrestling around on the ground with an agent named Dirk Hoy who was based up in Portland, and we're, you know, we're resting in between doing some ground fighting and I'm like, what are you working on, Dirk? And he goes, oh, I got the weirdest case.

I'm working on.

This case involving these pigeons that flip backwards.

I couldn't believe it.

I mean literally, here I am in the prone position with Dirk between my legs and he's telling me this, and I'm like, I'm doing the same thing. And from that moment forward and I started to collaborate, and we realized he was investigating members of the National Birmingham Roller Club up in Oregon and Washington and Idaho and Montana. And here I was with the investigating the guys in southern California, the same thing, same exact thing. They were doing, exactly the same network. And because it was getting around among the club, here's the best way to kill hawks, these guys were sending each other schematics on how to build traps. They were talking about the best way to shoot, how to poison, how to drown. I mean, oh yeah, they were given each other. Once we really got into it, the culpability here was just.

Through the roof. You know, if you would have embedded yourself with cottontail rabbit hunters in the.

Sixties would have made some good cases.

No, sixties would have.

Been too early, right, Well MBTA was around then.

Yeah, you'd had a very similar experience, I think.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's true with uh so people who who raise pheasants, you know for hunting clubs, they'll do it too because hawkshall, hawxhall hit the pheasants.

So yeah, it's a temptation.

Sure, there's some chicken chicken people to have hobby farms with chickens totally. I mean they're a threat to our chickens, totally. My wife's not into that, but she's you know, she doesn't like when a hawks flying above.

Of course, you know who are some of the worst offenders are guys who are involved in cock fighting because they're killing predators.

Oh yeah, can't hold his own.

Again, Nope, because they don't have their little you know that little.

Lad.

So you know, then you got a double whammy because that's a state violation to be involved in cockfighting, and then you've got them killing hawks.

But that's a hard case to make.

So when you tell me how this like like how does this wrap up? Like how do you how do you bring it to a clothes.

Well, the cool thing was Dirk and I agreed immediately what the strategy was. You know, we got to get as many people as possible. He was having peregrines get killed up in Portland, so it's a little little higher priority. So what we decided was, yeah, there's too many people to get all of them. So what we did is we focused on club leaders, people who were who were you know, setting the example, anybody who was a president of a local club. We targeted the president of the National Birmingham Roller Club, who is one of the worst killers of them all. And we decided, all right, once we have good evidence on all this, this t our target group.

Each of us have a target group.

We'll do our takedowns at exactly the same time, will coordinate everything, we'll do our search warrants, we're going to arrest everybody, and we'll do it all on the same day, and then the word doesn't get out, evidence doesn't disappear, and then we can try to get the media's attention to in order to deter people. Neither Dirk or I were interested in having our names in the paper. We wanted we wanted the roller pigeon community to know that they had been infiltrated and that everything they had said and done had been recorded, and that they were going to look real bad, so they needed to clean up their act.

So that's how I played out.

About fourteen months after I started, we did our takedown. We even Dirk even there was a Montana game Morden that got implicated in the whole damn thing, which was very depressing for both Dirk and I. But also we really wanted to get that person because you know, that's a bad image to have sure wildlife law enforcement officer involved. He didn't end up getting charged because Dirk couldn't prove that he actually killed a hawk, but we had an agent here. I think it was Bozeman, might have been Missouli, I can't remember, but we had one of our agents here go interview him. The minute the agent came in and rolled the gold and said, Hey, I'm here to talk to you about hawks, the guy said, he literally said I want my union rep. And the very next day he retired. Oh yeah, so that's pretty damning right there, right But He didn't end up getting charged because Dirk just couldn't couldn't prove that he'd actually killed a hawk, but it was just obvious he was involved. In fact, one of the guys I arrested in LA we had him in handcuffs in the back the car and the first thing he said was do you know? And he named the Montana State game Morton, Yeah, hoping that, hoping that would get him out of it. And let me just say the Montana It's Montana game and fish right, isn't it?

Okay?

They've changed their name since I okay, it's like I can never remember.

It's been an f w P for long.

I can a few years. Colorado changes. It always confuses me.

So I can never remember. But to their credit, they were awesome. They were not interested in having an officer in their ranks who had, you know, violated the law. So they were very cooperative and they were very.

Glad to see him go. So you know, that's that's good news.

How many rest did you guys make?

I ended up arresting seven people in l A. I can't remember how many dirt got up here in Oregon in Washington, but it was a it was a good case and made a lot of made a lot of attention. And the the thing I really really was proud of is that it empowered the people in the roller pigeon community who were opposed to hawk killing, who often had been kind of shouted down and bullied.

It gave them a voice to come out and say, you know, we told you guys, you know we got to stop this, and it was good.

And the best part is even today, if you go on the roller pigeon chat rooms and email groups or whatever, you'll see somebody's like, well, I'm pretty sure there was an undercover agent at.

That last fly. Yeah, and there very well could have been.

But that's the ideal situation, right You always want them looking over their shoulder, like, oh crap, those I used. I arrested this guy early in my career who was Japanese national, and he used to refer to us as the fish and wild guys, and I always because he couldn't for some reason, he couldn't pronounce fish and wildlife.

So they say, oh, those fish and wild guys, they're always out there.

And I just want people to know that that, you know, if you if you end up committing a federal wildlife law and a fish and wildlife agent gets on you, you're cooked. I mean, every agent I know is so tenacious and so committed to their job.

It is.

It is true.

It's what they say about federal agents. Once they're on you and they have evidence that you did something, they're not giving up.

They'll get you. It's just a matter of time.

How do you create the distinction between when does someone violating a state's law become federal.

Yeah, that's a great question.

If it because it does, if it becomes a lazy act, does that involve you, then yes, a lazy act.

Violation, Yes it can.

So the best way to explain that is the if you think about the FBI's relationship to say, to the Montana Bozeman Police, Right, if a car gets stolen here in town, that's a state issue, Right, local police are going to handle that. If that car crosses the state line into Wyoming, now that's a federal offense. The FBI can get involved. And the reason for that is the jurisdiction of the Montana law enforcement ends at the border, so it becomes difficult for them to conduct investigations outside the state. For the Feds that's not an issue. I never cared about a state line. That never never crossed my mind. Right, So if I you know, if something crosses state lines, it often triggers a federal law that makes that a federal offense, allowing the FBI, Orficial Wildlife or Secret Service or whomever to get involved. And a lot of times it's done at the request of the state. So we in LA often got calls from Montana, Colorado, Wyoming from game wardens that said, hey, you know this LA guy came in and killed a big elk out here illegally, and can you help.

Yeah, heck, yeah we can.

If he killed an elk illegally in Montana and he drove the meat, any part of it, antler meat, hide, whatever, back to LA, that's a Lacy Act violation, which makes it a federal effection.

And you can assist in the investigations.

Yeah, so we bring the resources of the federal government to help the state. That's really what the Laciac's all about, even though it you know, it's not like we're stealing the case from the state. A lot of times, what I would do as an age, that's how it happens.

In the movies.

And taking one over Perkins.

And that makes my skin crawl. That makes my skin crawl, because it's really not the way it works out in the field. Honestly, what I would normally do if I had that situation is I would get with the Montana warden and I'd say, all right, we got him on the Lacey. What do you need, here's my report, here's all the evidence. What do you need to make your state case? And then we together we would say who's going to get the best punch out of this? Right, who's going to get the best penalty? And sometimes it's the state, sometimes the state. In many cases the states are have much harsher penalties for wildlife crimes than the Feds do.

Well, it's interesting to hear you say that, because we often cover this sort of stuff and like it never fails nine out of ten times. At the end of the discussion, we go some beachulin got three hundred dollars and losses license for like a year. R Like that's barely a slap on the wrist.

Yeah, are you guys automatically taking over if it's federally managed like waterfowl for instance.

Or yeah, it we can, right if it's a federally managed animal, we can take take it over, as you say, but especially with waterfowl, we generally, even though we have primary jurisdiction over waterfowl, all migratory birds dove doves too, we don't, you know, bust in on that, because the US Fish and Wilife Service we're all special agents. We're playing clothes investigators. We don't have a patrol function, right, you know, I drive a unmarked car. I don't have a dispatcher telling me where to go. So uniformed game wardens are ideally suited to enforce waterfowl hunting, dove hunting.

Yeah, I was you're talking about just like someone going over the limit or but if it's like a large.

Scale thing, Yeah, again we would.

If a state's got an investigation going, we would join them versus taking it over on them.

Yeah. Yeah, we don't do that, did you not cool?

Did you ever work any cases that involved people in the restaurant trade serving poached wildlife or serving illegally captured wildlife that was making its way into the restaurant trade.

Yeah, I didn't in particular, but there are some cases that that that's come up, even in LA a lot of the Asian restaurants will serve wildlife that's taken turtles in particular, reptiles, sometimes fish. So we, yeah, we got involved in some of that. But you know that reminds me I told you earlier that you know, early in my career what we dealt with was a lot of wildlife coming into the United States right about halfway through, maybe around two thousand. Between two thousand and five and twenty ten, we started to see more and more native wildlife leaving the United States, and that as China and Vietnam became richer emerging economies. You had all these people there who had money to spend, and so they started to spend it on exotic stuff and wanting it a live, alive and dead both yeah, for the food trade and for the pet trade. So we started to see a lot of native animals leaving the United States, in particular reptiles. The turtle population in the southeastern United States has been absolutely decimated by the demand for turtle meat and pets in China and Vietnam, and it's become a big part of what the US Fishing and Wilife Service does is combating the trafficking of animals that are native to the US, or at least North America.

Are black bear gallbladders, still think, because that's something like as a hunter, we always like you always always heard about it.

Yeah, did you know you used to not be able to in some states, maybe all states, you could possess You couldn't possess even a bear's goalbler, right, Yeah, like you were. They changed it to be that you're allowed to have like one or something, but it would be that you like, you couldn't remove it from the field.

Of even to your own I did know that, okay, Yeah, and even now it's not legal to sell it, right, you could, you could.

Keep it, but I think I think some I don't. I don't know if it's even state or federal, but I remember reading somewhere that was like if if if you legally harvest a bear and you legally tag your bear, you are allowed to for whatever there there's no prohibition on you having it, right, you can't sell it. But at a time it was you couldn't have it, you know, ossession. So ostensibly, if you had a whole, ungutted bear in your possession in a truck, you were like technically in possession of a gallblad exactly.

Okay, Yeah, it's kind of like having a loaded firearm. Right, It's like you're dead if you find out the game war's going to get you for it.

Yeah. Yeah, it was like a per se violation.

So how does stuff something like that, or take like spotted cats, I don't know whatever jaguar hides gallbladder whatever the hell you know about? How does it flow from? You know, people that are in the you know, in some rural area. You got some kid who's collecting turtles, right, Like, how does it flow and eventually wind up on a container ship? You know what I mean? Like like who's the sort of who winds up being the kingpin or the the sort of export agent on domestic wildlife? Like what does it bottleneck through?

Yeah, so it varies, of course, depending on the wildlife and who's interested in buying it. Right, So let me give you a classic example of this absolutely phenomenal case that our agents did on the East Coast. It was called Operation Broken Glass Oh Elvers, Yes, yeah, good for you, Yeah, glass Eels. Right, that was an example where you know, for years, decades, generations even maybe there's been a glass eel fishery on the East Coast, and it's isn't it.

There's only a couple states where it's legal to harvest them, like Maine and somewhere else, I think.

Yeah, and I'm not familiar with.

So there's a limited legal harvest just for listener's sake.

What like.

If you go to a sushi restaurant and you get unagi, okay of like smoked eel, that eel they're raising and finishing those eels in Asia.

They're sending the juveniles zone, but.

They can't propagate them. Yeah, so basically they're buying us bay like baby eels or glass eels or elvers. They're buying the babies in order to raise them and make a processed food item exactly. But it's so complicated to propagate them because they propagate out in the middle of the like yeah, like off the off of Bahamas, off yeah, off of Bermuda and sargas Le.

See.

So and there's some legal trade, but it's augmented greatly with illegal harvest, correct hugely.

Yeah, they're like salmon, right, they go from freshwater saltwater, and but yeah, and glass eel just for your listeners, you know the reason it's called glass eel because it's they're almost see through that I think when they're young, they're just these little slippery things. So anyway, there it's been a there's been a legal harvest of those allowed. But what happened was this increased demand, as you described in Asia for the eels that are used in sushi restaurants. What happened was it's the local guys who are skilled at catching, you know, elvers, And what happens is these Chinese guys were showing up in those communities and they were going out to the different fish shops asking to buy eels and offering absurdly high prices for local fish shops.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're we're in the process of writing a book right now and I did some we're doing a thing about that cool and it was something like two thousand dollars a pound.

Yeah for elvers. Yeah, it's crazy.

Cucumbers I think, Yeah, well, you.

Know, c cucumbers is another good example we could talk about. But basically basically the you know didn't answer to your question. What happens is uh the word Yeah, somebody from the from the end consumer seller shows up in that community and offers that high price and then corrupts the local guys who know how to do it. And that's true around the world. That's how it works with rhino horn in Africa, That's how it works with c cucumbers in Mexico. It's always the end consumer seller. And I don't want to just say Chinese because I don't want to, you know, disparage Chinese. But right now, China is a huge consumer of wildlife, so we'll use China as the example. Somebody from China shows up, the speaks English and starts offering a lot of money for whatever they're after, and it just snowballs and gets out of control and the local people are corrupted.

Uh this this guy.

There's kind of various levels of kingpins. You might have the local East Coast guy who's the kingpin organizing five fishermen who are then giving him all the elvers. He sells them to the Chinese guy who's kind of a kingpin, but he's moving it on to the next guy, and eventually it gets on that container and it ends up over in China.

But it's on a container with air raiders and sophisticated I It's like, it's not like you're you know, it's not like you're sending batteries. Are you guys to keep them alive?

Yeah? Yeah, that's hard.

Are you guys involved with a lot of like inspections in port cities, like going on to ships and or do you have to have a reason to go look for stuff?

No, Fish and Wildlife agents and inspectors. We have a uniformed division called the Inspection Division, and those those are basically customs officers. Their authority is at the ports of entry. They look and act just like customs officers. They just wear a brown uniform. But we have full customs authority. And sometimes even the US Customs doesn't remember that Fish and Wildlife Service has full customs authority. So when I was an agent, I could show up at the airport and I could crack open any package I wanted. I could search any passenger I wanted. I could go through their luggage because the Lasiact gives US customs authority.

Yeah, it's kind of nice.

Yeah, let's go back to the elvers thing for a minute. Yeah, if you are working a case like that, do you have sympathy on the locals who you use the word like corrupted? Is there ever an element of entrapment's not the right word. But like if you're going to someone you know who's hard on their you know, hard up, and you make this offer to them, you know, two thousand what is two thousand bucks a pound? Right? Is that guy of interest to you? Are you mostly interested in the person who is recruiting or would you naturally try to work that case to who is exporting?

I think every fish and while er special agent who knew what they were doing would focus more on the drivers. Right, So they're going to try to get up as high in this chain of bad guys as you can. But it doesn't mean you ignore the other bad guys, right. I always you know there's this obsession sometimes with only getting the kingpin. Well, i'll tell you what. It can take years to get a kingpin, and while you're working on it, a lot of crimes occurring, right, And so there's absolutely no excuse for not getting the lower level people too, in part because they can often become great informants.

Right.

You catch those people at the lower level, they don't want to go to jail, and they want to minimize their penalty. They'll often cooperate in exchange for a lower sentence. So you focus on the whole picture, right, But of course, if you were to only catch the local guys who are fishing for the elvers, you're not doing your job because the bad guys are that are buying them are just going to find other people to do it. So, yeah, you want to focus as high as you can because you want to kill it. You want to kill the trade or you want to kill the illegal trade. That's the goal, and you're not going to do that by focusing on just the kingpin or just the catchers.

You got to get them all. Yeah, yeah, as many as you can.

Anyway, did your work a case? I think Krim was saying, did you work a butterfly case?

Yeah?

Yeah, it's like the first kind of case I did that was kind of bigger on my own, and it's just coincidence that I got assigned to it. But there was this Japanese national named Yoshi ko Jima who was kind of notorious for trafficking in endangered butterflies for what purpose?

Decoration decorations?

Why everybody left the whole the drama of you know, you're just writing the script in your head.

Yeah, I'm just picturing every episode of this like New Undercover.

You know, it's just it's.

Butterfly Collectors, actually the head of the triad.

It's not, it's not it's not about drugs. It's about all this other stuff and the weird, you know, interesting kind of interests of decoration or food or whatever.

I haven't really watched any serial shows since Dukes of Hazards. But the way it works in Dukes of Hazard is every episode, a new bad guy comes to town. Yeah, I mean like right, so every episode is like a new critter. There was always tension, always tension between Roscoe Peak, Old Train and uh, who is the Kleatus? Right? And then you know Bowl and Luke and who drove the toe truck cooter where boss Hog fall in. He's always there's always there and boss Hog every episode and new new bad guys use your pair of bad guys comes into town and they like aligned with Boss Hog, often double crossing him. They're vanquished in the end by bowling Luke something. You will get blown up by dynamite on an arrow and then like a week later, like a new bad guy emerges. And for this show, like every episode is I hate to the butterfly episode.

I hate to tell you this, but Cooter was probably a bad elver poacher. I'm pretty sure he was either that or hawks. He was killing hawks one and the other.

I'm sure he was.

Well, you know, Bowl and Luke were convicted moonshiners. There you go, so they were they were troublemakers. Anyways, one crime leads to another. Yeah, probably poachers too.

So uh, off that subject and off subject. How good of a TV show? This is going to wind up in butterfly decorations. Yeah, they're they're displayed what in the glass case?

Sometimes?

Yeah, a lot of You'll see them a lot in frames on people's walls. Start paying attention. Even in TV shows, you'll see them in the background in frames on walls with their wings.

Spread like needle.

You ever watching the show and be like, oh, yeah, you're not supposed to have that one.

Well, no, I haven't seen that. I haven't seen that. There's there's tons that are.

Legal, right, mistake, Well the monarch might get listed.

Yeah, right, exactly. And a lot of times butterflies that are not a problem here or not. When I say problem, I mean they're not valuable, they're not traded, are super valuable in other countries.

Does it because there's like species that are classified as endangered here and then there's like the International Union or something or other. Yeah, you see end So like the eels are listed by I think that, I see you.

I'm glad you brought this up.

And then they're not here.

Because International Union of the i U c N.

Yeah, I forget what the C stands for it, but it's concert anyway. So but I so in terms of the law and law enforcement and crimes, the i U c N means nothing.

Okay, Yeah, the International Union, we think the exactly And.

It's not to say that their science isn't legit and that it should be. But from a special agent's perspective, we care about two things. One is is it listed as endangered or threatened under the US Endangered Species Act, because that's the only that's the law that has criminal penalties. The second thing we care about is whether or not it is listed under either Appendix one or two of the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species.

That's SITIS.

And the reason we care about that is because SITIS is it is incorporated into the e s A. So the Endangered Species Act allows us to enforce the site's provisions, so it becomes a violation of the Endangered Species Act to import or export an animal in violation ast siiteise. So sites and the EESA are what special agents are looking at. And a lot of butterflies. There are a number of butterflies listed as endangered under the US Endangered Species Act, so obviously we.

Care about that.

But then there's a whole ton of butterflies that are listed is either Appendix one or two under SITESE, and so we also care about that.

So you can be yeah, you can, you can be on site these but not be endangered.

Yes.

For instance, bobcats, IUCN has them as a species of Least Concern there in some states they are a non game animal and some states they're listed as a fur bear. But they still are site these right right because they resemble Yes, I guess the logic of it, which probably doesn't matter to you guys, but the logic of it is it's a spotted cat, right And so in trying to track all these endangered spotted cats around the world, you need to pay attention to bobcats so that you don't don't have spotted cats that aren't bobcats moving as Bobcats, right, or so I could be screwing that up, but something like.

That, right. Yeah.

And with siteismember, it's an international agreement.

Right.

So say, if Canada wants to put Bobcats on as sitey's Appendix two, and they get enough support among the site's membership and it's voted, that's Bobcats become a sights too. The US is obligated to enforce.

That law, I think.

Yeah, So even though we wouldn't have put them on site's, if Canada wants to or Mexico wants to put them on and they get the votes, then we're obligated to enforce that, and.

That becomes your responsibility in the field exactly.

Yeah, So we're always looking anytime anytime we realize an animal involved in something as a site's animal or listed as threatened or endangered at peaks our interest because there's probably some illegal activity afoot.

Yeah, I want to I want you to tell the full butterfly story, but I want to tell you for sure. Yeah, Well, how much have you like to share? A funny anecdote is one years ago we were in doing some work in Guyana and had these two ri river turtles and they have their native words for him. But I remember they would there's one turtle that even the tribe we were with, and explaining the turtle, they would be like, there's the meat turtle and there's the Sitis turtle. And I couldn't figure out to be days to figure out what they were saying. I'm like, oh my god, he's talking about the Sitis tree. Because they used to traffic in those turtles, you know, they would sell those turtles, and they knew him, like, you know, the damn Sitis turtle. Yeah, the one you touch, the one you don't touch. Yeah. Yeah.

In most countries don't have anything like the Endangered Species Act, so they they rely only on what's listed in SITIS. Great Britain, for example, you know, they have their own Wildlife Act, but when it comes to the International Species there, they're only enforcing Sitis you know. So yeah, but if butterflies.

Yeah.

So this I was a pretty new agent, and we got a tip that this guy, Yoshiko Jimo is coming to the International Bug Fair at the LA Museum of Natural History, which go ahead and laugh, but there is such a thing as the Bug Pare. It's actually the largest event that the Museum of Natural History hosts every year in LA. They get about ten thousand visitors a day, and it's everything. It's kids running around who are interested in scorpions, and then there are these serious collectors that go and they sell high end butterflies to each other basically, but some of these things, you know, the most endangered bird wing butterfly could go for ten thousand dollars for a male female pair. Easy alive, no dead, Yeah, they're not really valuable alive. People want them displayed, pinned in a frame or in a display box. So again, it's a status thing. A friend of mine describes it as kind of like the obsessive baseball card collector, like somebody who would spend ten thousand dollars for obscure baseball player art or.

Something, yeah, or art. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have another friend who talks about it like it's you know, if you if you steal a van, go, what do you do with it? You know, let's you know, where do you display your stole?

Saying your buddies see that?

Yeah exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, he always buddies. Yeah.

He described it as you have a secret room in your house with a secret door and when certain people come over, you open the door and you're like, my van go right, I mean, what's the point. But that's that's kind of the driver for these things. And they're beautiful, they're they're cool. But anyway, Yoshi Kojima was had already been on our radar screen. This agent named John Mendoza in California had tracked him for years and believed he was going into Death Valley National Park and the Grand Canyon National Park and poaching butterflies and then selling them overseas himself himself. Yeah, so John had been doing a lot of surveillance trying to catch Kojima in the act. But as you can imagine, doing surveillance in Death Valley or just not easy because you're gonna get seen, right, And eventually, to John's chagrin, you know, justified chagrin, he was ordered by his commands chain of command to close the investigation. And I loved it when I picked up the Kojimaccase, first thing I did is I looked up John's old reports, and his closing line on that last report was awesome. You know, It's just like, you know, he just dimed out his supervisor. He's like my supervisor ordered me to close this case. Closed, just pretty sharp for what reason.

You know.

I didn't think it was a good enough priority. Didn't think it was going to succeed whatever. Okay, you know, twenty years ago and farther there, there were still some agents around who didn't really understand why it was important to work on international trafficking cases. Didn't think it was important. Disagreed that it was important. So, you know, I don't know if that was the case there. Sure, it just happened. So the story was Kojima is coming into LA. We had an informant who we were working with, and we and my boss said, this is a great opportunity for you to work with an informant. You're going to go to the fair. The informant's going to make the contact. We're going to see if Kojima will admit to anything kind of see right, So I thought, my job is just to get the guy wired up and supervise make sure nothing bad happens. So I meet with the informant the night before, we show him out of work the equipment. He goes to the fair the next day and for whatever reason, Yoshi Kojima, can.

You can you real quick, who hells the informant?

Informant is somebody else involved in the insect trade.

Yeah, I'm not gonna name him.

But who's already been caught or they're like uh uh no.

He was kind of irritated that Kojima was undercutting all his prices.

Yeah, and that happens a lot.

So you keep you keep certain informants involved.

In yeah, in your orbit. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean to be a good age and you really have to. You have to make contact with people in the trade, right, and you have to develop trust with them and try to get them to help you. Because animals can't tell you what's going on.

They can't call you.

No wolf or grizzly bear California condor is going to call you and say, guys are shooting me. So yeah, you get to know a lot of different people, and the motivations are varied. Sometimes you'll arrest somebody and then they're like, well, I'm not going to go down for this by myself. I'm going to be an informant for you and get a better sentence. Other Times it's people who are trying to do things legit and they're getting undercut by people like Kojima. They're pissed off, so they're going to turn Sometimes the best people to go to are ex wives, ex girlfriends, ex.

Boyfriends, ex husbress.

I'm telling you, you're investigating somebody and you find out.

They're divorced, the first person you talk to is their ex.

Definitely, Definitely, they will give you fantastic information about what's going on. Oh yeah, I've had so many wives invite me, give me permission to search their husband's garage or whatever because they're just tired of the reptile smell out in the garage.

Yeah, it's happened more than once.

So think own wife. I mean, she's like, please go look at the garage that's out there.

That literally happened.

We showed up at a house in San Diego and knocked on the door and the wife answered, and we identified ourselves and she said, what's he done? Now, we explained it and she goes, oh, he is garage. Our garage is full of reptiles. And my partner said, can we take a look. She's like, yeah, walk out, and there's there's endangered monitors out there, and.

Uh, yeah he was. He was in trouble in more ways than one.

But anyway, so I go to the fair thinking I'm just going to be kind of overseeing our informant, right, But Kojima is very cagey. He's the member, he's the guy that invented the phrase fish and Wild guys, and he he was very paranoid. He John Mendoza had actually gone out and interviewed him at one point, kind of frustrated because he knew his case was getting shut down, so he just thought, what the heck, I'll go interview Kojima and Kojima. Later, when I was working Kojima undercover, Kojima bragged to me about how he had outsmarted the Fish and Wild Guys and this agent, which is a dumb thing to say to an undercover. And the Kojima case really kickstarted a long few years of me doing pretty complicated undercover work. I actually ended up starting undercover businesses and working the roller Pigeon guys, and I made some great undercover cases. And it was all because I learned how to do undercover work getting Kojima. It took me three years to get that guy, and my boss was absolutely fantastic mentor. She's one of the greatest undercover fish and wildlife agents. Ever, as far as I'm concerned, Marie Palladini and she really tutored me on how to do this work, because what happened at the fair was Kojima would not talk to our informant. He talked to him, but he just wouldn't. He wouldn't get tripped up and say anything even remotely incriminating. So by the end of the day, I was kind of frustrated that our informant wasn't getting anywhere, and it wasn't his fault. So I just you know, it's a public insect fair, So I just walked Kojima at a booth. He was selling stuff. So I just walked up and I was like, what's this?

What's that?

I don't know anything about this, And for whatever reason, we hit it off. He just loved telling me about all these butterflies, and nothing he had for sale on the table was illegal. It was all legal stuff. He wasn't that stupid, right, But one thing he did that was really weird. He I think he was trying to impress me. He pulled out from underneath the table, which is usually where the illegal stuff is, this live beetle and a little tupperware container. And this beetle is called a dynasty's beetle, and you'd know him if you saw him, because you probab probably only see him in a museum. They're huge, six inches long maybe, and they have a giant horn. Yeah, sometimes it called rhinoceros speedles, but they're just.

Yeah, wasn't it, wasn't it? Doug Emlin, Yes, we interviewed a guy that works on those horn beetles.

Oh yeah, cool.

The horn actually looks like a job that worked in your way.

Yeah, and I understand worked he works in a university way. Yeah.

Yeah, And they looked like they'd be really ferocious, right, But anyway, it's alive. And I was like, oh, where'd that come from? And he goes, oh, I brought it up from South America. And the reason he shushed me is because generally it's a violation of USDA regulations to bring a live insect into the US, so that's not the crime of the century. But here he was admitting he'd done something illegal. So I thought that's good. But I didn't know where to take it next because I didn't really done undercover work.

So the weird weird you're undercover. I'm just kind of impromptu.

I'm just talking to him, making sure I identify him as Yoshi Kojima, just trying to do whatever I can, right. But the weirdest thing was at the end of the day, I'm just loitering in a group and I feel that somebody tapped my shoulder and I turned around and Seyoshi's standing there, and I actually kind of, you know, I kind of panicked a little bit because I'm like, we know, why are you here? And he had this box in his hand, and he said, here for your collection, to start your collection. And he gave me this cardboard box. I open it up, and it's full of just crappy, you know, butterflies, dinged up wings, moths, nothing, and uh. On the top he wrote his email address. And I went back and told my boss this, and she goes, this is the perfect situation right now.

I don't want to spoil what I already know because I listened to the interview.

She recorded that she didn't tell me she was recording that interview.

With Lee Ane for NPR story Well, yeah, years ago. Yeah, because like now, looking back at that, you know, the reason that maybe you got a little preferential treatment.

Maybe maybe now.

Yeah, I don't know if it existed then or not. I didn't get weird vibes from him then. But what you're getting to is later Kojima definitely had a crush on me.

Later. I don't know if he did then. Maybe. You know what I was.

I have a friend whose sister worked undercover narcotics, and she's was at the time in her late twenties, and I was asking her a million questions about her. She's she's out of it now. She did it for a long time, and she said, they always think there's going to be a relationship always interesting. Interesting if it's in the role she played. Yeah, the role she played, Yeah, it's and it's a young woman.

It's hard.

I mean, you know, I was telling you about my boss Marie. She did a lot of undercover work when she was younger. And it's it's a problem because the bad guys will hit on you. You know, you know you got to be obviously, you can't get in a relationship with an informant or a bad guy.

That's just not cool.

But I want to tell you something funny that she told me about it. I said her, she was like out of state drug buyer, right okay, So she would periodically show up in a town to buy right well, she lived in the town, her cover was that she lived elsewhere. It would travel to buy okay. And I said, well, how do you avoid Like, if some drug dealer wants you to go in this creepy ass house and you're undercover, how do you not go? She said, I would say, I'm not going into your creepy ass house.

Exactly exactly, and I'm sure she would.

She would tell you that there's a temptation to go in, right, Because as a law enforcement officer, how often do you get invited into the bad guy's house?

Right?

Normally you got to have a warrant, right, But if you're undercover and they invite you in, you don't need a warrant.

You come out.

Yeah, you get this free opportunity to look around. But it's super dangerous to do that, super dangerous. And then you know, it happened to me with Kojima invited me into his place and I had to make a call, And at the time it was a different story, but you know, I had a cover team behind me and they lost me in LA traffic and we pulled into Kojima's underground apartment, and in there I was like, well, my cover team's definitely not going to reacquire me now, right, And so I thought, well, I'll make a fake phone call to my cover team. I'll say, hey, Yoshi, yeah, we can go check out your place. But I got to make a call because I got to change disappointment and Murphy's law. I stepped out of the car and my undercover cell phone actually fell landed right on the antenna and broke into like three pieces. So now I have no way to contact anybody, and I got to make a call. Am I going to go into this apartment when nobody knows I'm there? Or am I gonna, you know, get out of this?

Did you feel like this guy was could be physically damed?

I was, you know, physically. I was never afraid of Kojima, Like he wasn't going to beat me up. But you know, I can't defeat a gun. If Kojima's got a gun, and I don't know who else is in his apartment and he's so paranoid about the fish and wild guys, you know, if he's got a friend or two friends in that apartment, They're going to beat the crap out of me till I tell him who I am.

I can't.

Once I'm in there, it's hard to extricate, right, So you'd never want to assume that this little guy is not going to hurt you, because anybody can hurt you with the right weapon, right. So anyway, I did it because I'm like, I got to see in this apartment. But I knew I had limited time because what my cover team is going to do, they're going to follow certain protocols to reacquire me, right and if they can't find me pretty soon, they're going to notify the LAPD that we have a missing undercover agent and that's going to cause helicopters and black and whites to be in the neighborhood. So I knew I had a limited amount of time to get in and out of that apartment, and it was fine. It worked out fine. I made sure I stayed closer to his front door than he did. But getting into that apartment was amazing because his whole apartment was filled with butterflies and these illegal beadles that he'd been bringing up from South America that he was selling claiming selling in Japan for ten thousand dollars apiece. I don't know whether that's true or not, but anyway it was. I got in and out of there in about ten minutes. And by the time this is I had no cell phone, so I raced to the local like seven to eleven, find one of the last remaining pay phones in the city of Los Angeles. Call the office and yeah, the covered team was getting ready to call the LAPD.

We just just got checked back and just checked back in.

Yeah, that was fun other than like seeing some evidence of what's going on there, Like I mean, did you have expectations of what his apartment is like? Like it was it like a super nice apartment. You're like, oh my god, this guy's crushing it in his field because look at this apartment or was it dingy and dirty and.

Dingy and dirty? I mean this nice, nice place, right, nice building, but dark kept his curtains closed, just gross, like you know, they got a big wrap around couch, but there was only one place to sit and everything else was just stacked with butterflies or butterfly containers. The grossest thing was two gross things. Actually, one is I look down the hallway of the apartment from the living room and there was like a tea I assume it went to a bedroom on the right and a bedroom on the left, and then there was a bathroom and the door was open and I could actually see into the bathtub and there was this disgusting black ring all around the tub.

It was like a silence of the lambs. Maybe or he didn't, I don't know.

But the second gross thing was he very proudly goes to the kitchen and opens the cupboards to the above the sink. There's no food in the cupboards. It's all tupperware bins filled with these beetles.

So it's more of a warehouse.

Yeah.

Yeah, he lived in Kyoto, but he had this apartment in la and it was just kind of his bass. He did ultimately admit to me that he did poach butterflies out of Grand Canyon and Death Valley, but what he was doing now, he didn't do as much poaching himself. He hired people to go and he eventually tried to recruit me to go out to Death Valley and collect collect butterflies for him.

Yeah.

Yeah, was he You take a guy like this, is he like, does he imagine himself as mostly legitimate but now and then I'll fudge the line or is he a career criminal?

He was committed.

He described himself to me as the world's most wanted butterfly smuggler. He took pride in the fact that fish and wildlife was after him, and he took pride in bragging that he outsmarted us, which as soon as I heard him say, you know, he outsmarted John Mendoza, I was like, no, you didn't. Number one, no you didn't. And number two, I'm gonna catch you. I'm putting you in jail.

Dude.

As that went through my mind when he said that, I was like, nope, I'm never quitting until I put Yoshiko gi men jail.

How did you How does it go about the event? I mean, at some point you got to make an arrest.

Right, Yeah.

There were a few ups and downs with him. He was real touchy, and you know, it would take a long time to explain how that whole case transpired over three years, but suffice it to say there were two times during my relationship with him in an undercover capacity where he cut me off. He got mad at me, so he would stop talking to me. At one point what he wanted to do was he wanted to go into business with me and have me sell butterflies for him online that he would send me from Japan. And very clearly, obviously it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what he wanted was a fall guy, right, So when the fish and wild guys came coming, he would feed them Ted Nelson, which was my undercover name. He feed him Ted, and he'd slink away and he'd hope fish and while iff would be happy because they caught Ted.

Right. So I knew that was his plan going in.

But at one point he wasn't sending me enough butterflies, like he wasn't sending me the endangered stuff. So I created this undercover eBay account where I looked like I was selling some stuff on this side, and what I hoped he would ask me. My plan was he would come back and say, hey, Ted, where are you getting these? And I'd say some baloney line like oh, I got a dealer, a supplier out of Germany and he's terrible. He sends me horrible material. And I hope that Kojima would then say, well, I can give you that, right, But instead he turned me into the local tip line for the California Department A fish you No, I got it. His game warden called me. His game warden called me one day and he goes, hey, Ed, I know you're doing a butterfly case. We got this weird tip on our tip line and some Japanese guy turning in some guy And I'm like, well to me, and I listened to it and it's like, yeah, turning in Ted Nelson for selling sidese material that he doesn't have permits for.

You are kidding?

Yeah, So at that point the case is done, right because because Kojima, I'm thinking I can't get him now because if I stay in the business, Kojima thinks he turned me in. If I if I stay in the business, he's gonna think I'm an informant. Yeah, I was gonna think I turned So I let it go and my boss Marie was like, oh, case it's done. You're never going to get this dude. So I really literally put it aside and I started working on high Roller. Yeah that's what a high roller came up. Like I said, I had nothing to do that day, right, So I went out and did that Hawk case.

But about a.

Year later, right in the middle of high roller. So I'm all right, Now I'm doing a different undercover case with a different persona where I play a much rougher guy than I was portraying with Kojima. I get a tip that Kojima is coming back to the fair. I'm like, oh, I'm gonna take one more shot.

So by this time I have just a striped suit, so you're just out of jail.

No, but I did have a.

Giant handlebar mustache because I grew a big mustache to kind of fit in with the pigeon people better. And I go to the fair and my plan is I'm gonna find him, and I'm gonna accidentally in quotes air quotes, run into him, and I'm gonna see what happens.

So I go to the fair.

I find him. He's in this big hall doing his usual thing. He's got his fanny pack in the front where he usually carried about ten thousand dollars cash in his fanny pack. I don't know how this guy never got robbed walking around La, but whatever. So I wait till he's moving from one hall to the other where you got to go through like this narrow walkway and I come the other direction, and he looked like he looked scared out of his wits.

When he saw me.

But I immediately went out and said, hey, Yo, she's so good to see you. And in the conversation, I very quickly let out that I owe him a huge debt, and that caught his interest. And I said, because of the advice you gave me about how you handled the fish and wild guys, I didn't get arrested. I said, I said, some asshole turned me in to fish and game and they came to my house. They did a search warrant, but because of the advice you gave me, I had everything hidden somewhere else. They never found a thing. They couldn't prove anything. And thanks to you, Yoshi, I'm not in jail.

Is this what they call a double cross in parentsiaw.

He bought the whole thing, man, he bought it hook.

Line and center, excellent material.

So he takes me to lunch and at that.

And at that moment, he liked that handlebar mustard that he did.

It turned out to people. I think he did like the handlebar mustache.

Yeah, but he.

He takes me to lunch, at this awful Korean restaurant in you know, Koreatown in LA I'm not sure we had beef. I'm not sure what the meat was in that year.

You're like, man, I might need to investigate this place.

I'm telling you it was not good. But he was so convinced at that point that I was also a bad guy. And now I gave him the line I initially planned to. He said, are you where are you getting your material? And I said, I got a German supplier, but he gives me crap and boom. He immediately said, oh, I can give you the material perfect condition, And right then I knew I had him, because he said, look, I'm going to go back to Japan. Get on Skype. We'll start talking my Skype in early two thousands, right, and I'll show you. Yeah, what happened to Skype. I was just thinking about that as I was coming here to Zoom Zoom Zoom killed Skype. So he says, we'll talk by Skype. I'll show you what I've got. You tell me what you want, pay me, I'll send it to you. And I was like, this is perfect, right, I'm going to I'm going to record him on camera making incriminals statements. And that's exactly how it played out. The only thing that was weird is after we were at lunch, he wanted me to drive him to a like a I don't know what you call it, asauna in Koreatown.

Sure, and the whole Yeah, Chris is gonna do this this scene sight crin for a TV show.

This is that I can't remember.

He did take me later, like later that weekend, he took me to dinner at Lowry Steakhouse, which is pretty nice because he bought the whole thing.

Because she's already picturing the network standers not enough sex. Krin's like, but wait, but wait, we got a scene.

There's spice it up a little bit.

So the whole way to this bathhouse, I'm driving him there and he, you know, he's asking me. He starts asking me, who, what actors do you like? And I didn't know, so I just said, I just started saying, I do.

A big time man. I'm not hitting it either.

Wait till I get my mustache.

I'll grow my mustache back. I'll be irresistible to you.

Uh So, Anyway, on the way there, he starts he asked what actors do you like, and I just named somebody, right whatever, Brad Pitt, and he goes, oh, he's gay. I'm like, oh, Brad Pitt's gay, okay, And I'd say who else He'd say who else? Oh, Tom Cruise, Oh so gay? Everybody I named was gay? It was And I was like, I didn't really understand what was going on, and You're like, jeez, I must be gay. Well, I think he was trying to hint this is now He's like trying to hint that he's either by or gay. And it kind of played out after that when we when we started to talk on Skype, we started to do a lot of deals with butterflies. He starts sending endangered stuff, like he would send stuff to me that I would then let take to the University of California or Riverside to make sure.

I had it ideed right.

Oh yeah, so they have a big entomology department, so I'd get it and I'd immediately drive out there and have them look at it, and they'd.

Be like, where did you get this?

We can long story, Yeah, I mean this is a you know, internationally known entomology university, and they're like, we cannot get this for research. We can't even these don't exist, and you're you're getting them in the mail. So Kojima had a very very sophisticated network round shit, he had the good shob Where.

Are you getting the.

The money?

Yeah? Like how do they how do they as you're getting the money? How are they sort of confident enough that they're gonna wind up getting the money back?

Sometimes you you don't know really, Sometimes you do spend money in an undercover situation and you do get ripped off, and that just happened.

But you have to live under a sort of price cap, right, Like you couldn't go and say I need ten million dollars to buy a butterfly, right.

They're gonna be like no, no, no, you know. Yeah, So you usually ask for more than what you need. So I can't remember how much I had to start with. Is like maybe thirty grand or something like a little con Man budget, yeah exactly. So what you're doing is you're to avoid and trap I think people you don't want it. You can't trap people, right, so you got to offer reasonable rates for these things. You can't, and so you take the risks that they might walk away from you, or they might steal your money. That's just part of the part of the risk, got it. Yeah, but he didn't. He wanted the money and he provided the stuff. But as we were talking, it became clear that he had a thing for me, and yeah, that's fine whatever. It just became really awkward when you're on a skype call with somebody and they want you to take your shirt off and stuff like that.

It was very uncomfortable.

I'd have had butterfly tattoos over.

Yeah, that's the real entrapment there.

You know.

What was the worst part is at the time I was married, and you know, we would have a lot of these calls at when it was convenient for him, because one of the things that really made him mad is if you were not available when he wanted to talk. So he's in Japan, you know whatever, twelve hours ahead, thirteen hours. Yeah, he's winding down for the night. Yeah, and I'm winding down for the night. He wants to talk, Like what time zone is wrong? Yeah, twelve one o'clock in the morning. I'm on skype and my wife has to be extremely quiet. She cannot come into that room, she cannot make any noise because he'd be very alert to I thought you lived alone. I thought you were singing right now. Yeah, So that was that was stressful because he wanted to talk almost every night for a couple of months. It was pretty rough, but I ended up. You know, back then, we didn't you couldn't. I didn't have a fast enough computer to record screen on the screen, so I just had a video camera set up to the side that he couldn't see, and I'd just record him and me on the call. And man, I got some incredible, incriminating statements just about how much material he had, how much, how he would get his species, which species he could get. I remember once I expressed some interest in an endangered butterfly out of the Caribbean, and he said, well, it'll take me a couple of weeks, but I can get you.

One name one of these butterflies for me.

Well, the big one that the final one that I got, was the Queen Alexandria butterfly. It's the largest butterfly in the world. And you're pull one up and let's see what it looks. They're about the females about the size of a small dinner plate, maybe ten ten eleven inches across, and the male. The males are generally colorful, but they're smaller.

You can click around there someone's head next to it for comparison.

It's like that.

Yeah, they're big.

Yeah with these with.

These cases like the butterfly one, I'm sure a lot of other ones. Were you in a position where you were having to work with another country's law enforcement?

Uh?

Yeah, I worked a little.

Did Japan get involved with the butterfly thing at all?

Or?

Interesting? Interesting question because.

Later we tried to get some help out of Japan and I went through the Homeland Security law enforcement attes based in Tokyo, and we did not get We got minimal cooperation for him.

That's what like, does cha like when you're dealing with something like that's ending up in China coming out of China? Like is there any kind of cooperation.

Or it depends?

Sometimes it's great, Yeah, sometimes China is actually really good. Just kind of depends on the species who's involved. The interesting thing with the Japanese government is, and the Homeland Security at told me this, they consider undercover work to be dishonorable. So when they heard that it was an undercover agent who had, you know, basically built a case against a Japanese citizen. They weren't that interested. No kidding, no, which is it didn't matter. We had everything we needed on Kojima. But yeah, eventually he I owed him some money and he made some flirtatious statements to him, and I basically kind of hinted that things might heat up if he came back to LA because he was I had an arrest warrant for him.

We just needed to get him. And then he came and he hooked him up at the airport.

Yeah, it's fun were you present?

I was there, but we wanted to kind of see what he said after he was arrested, so I wasn't part of that. I didn't see him till the next day.

But you interacted with him.

Yeah, because when you arrest somebody in the federal system, you move him. You take him into the jail for the evening, and then the next day you're responsible for moving him to the court. So I had to go pick him up at the jail and move him.

Over to the district court.

How's that conversation go?

It was?

It was funny.

He looked he's excited to see me when I first walked in. Then he saw my belt, badge, and he saw I was wearing a holster and I had handcuffs.

He's excited to see, like he thought you were in trouble too.

No, I think he thought I was there to bail him out. Pretty sure he thought I was there to.

Get him out.

Was he an American citizen?

No Japanese citizen?

But he.

He claimed he was very good at weaving lives, So he made up a whole American life where he claimed to have a wife and a half Japanese half you know, Anglo kid. And so he claimed he had a passport, an American passport, but he would never tell me what name the American passport was in. So I didn't think he was telling the truth. But we didn't know for sure if he had an American passport, and he was pretty tricky. He would he would tell people. He would tell if he knew all of us. He might tell you, hey, I'm in Grand Canyon, but he really was in Japan, right, He might tell you I'm in Utah next week.

And so what you would hear. The buzz you would.

Hear among the insect trading community was very confusing and conflicting about where he was.

He's tricky. How's I always tell sons of bitches right where I'm at? How's that doing that? Man?

How does that work in cases where you're dealing with like your target is not an American citizen as far as like sentencing and getting them in jail, and like what ends up happening.

Yeah.

I actually did a lot of cases against foreign nationals and I was involved in extra diditing a number of those people. And it's a long, very complicated process, but it is possible to you know, extradite people back here to the United States, whether they're Americans or foreign nationals, and I did that in a number of cases. The way it should work out is a foreign national should not get bail, right. Unfortunately, sometimes they do, and I've seen foreign nationals flee. Yeah, and that's really frustrating when you're the case agent because now, thanks to a judge who stupidly gave this guy bail, and now you've got to spend possibly years trying to hunt this guy down and then get him back.

Right.

But generally, a foreign national who commits a crime in the US or where there's US jurisdiction can be sentenced here, no problem. You get him back here they go through their trial if they want one, or they plead guilty and they're sentenced. The thing that's most interesting about foreign national though, is if you're convicted of a felony in the US and you don't have US legal residents, you're immediately deported after you finish your sentence and you cannot return.

To the US.

So that's actually a big deal. A lot of people want to come to the US. They want to, you know, take advantage of our banking, our business. They want to go on vacation here, they want their kids to go college here. And once you're convicted of a felony and you get out of jail, you know. Kojima got out of jail and was immediately turned over to Immigration and Customs enforcement. They drove him to lax They watched him get on a plane and boop. He went back to Japan and is not allowed to return to the US.

Ever. Was he then arrested in Japan?

I don't know. I doubt it.

I doubt it. But would you send a file case like that to them to say, hey, heads.

Up, yeah, I've done that before, I've shared information with South Africa.

They just might not give a shit I might not have time.

Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Yeah, it's their business, you know, if they do or don't. I've worked real closely with Germany on some cases. Actually a case involving remember when Justin Bieber got drusted for the monkey. Yeah, Germany needed to serve Justin Bieber with some papers because Justin left the country before they were able to give him his fine, so in German law they had to serve him personally.

So they were like, how are we going to do this?

They called me, I having to know some German cops who are working the case, and they said, hey, we got to serve Justin Bieber.

Can you do it? And I was like, hell, yeah, I can serve Justin Bieber. That was one of the best days of my life.

I've tracked down Justin Bieber, gave him German paporwork pay a fine. So how much time did what's his name, Kojima? He got just under two years, so I think it's about twenty one.

He had a lot of restitution and fines and stuff he did.

He never paid him, but nothing you can do about that. We confiscated whatever property we could and did a US Marshall sale on it. I think it the property had in LA. We only got about sixteen thousand out of him, but you know two years.

Yeah, imagine that conversation. Yeah, exactly when you're like what are you in here for? You know, like Norm McDonald, the comedian Norm mc donald used to have a joke where he's talking about the hierarchy, you know, in prison, like the worst you did, you know, the higher he is. He's talking about oj going to prison and when he finally went to prison for stealing memorabilia, that he would sit so low on the hierarchy. But he would say like, no, man, I killed my wife and a waiter with a knife, and all the guy's like, no, you didn't. We saw that trial. So it's like when you're in there a butterfly theft, it's gotta be a weird position.

You occupy international smugglers.

What you tell every good You're right, Yeah, I'd leave the butterflies. They'd be like, well, what were you smuggling? Nothing?

You find out this contraband.

Yeah, exactly.

Did you have any or or possibly many instances where you really felt scared for your life, Like in situations where maybe you got into that apartment and al a sudden you thought, oh.

Yeah, you know, I was lucky in the service has been lucky in general. We haven't had an agent shot in the line of duty since nineteen sixty eight.

Was shocking.

Yeah, and of all things, that agent was ambushed by duck hunters, fully ambushed, fully ambushed.

Yeah.

They set him up.

They set him up. Yeah, they set him up. They knew he was coming down a dike. He's working with the state game warden.

They knew he was. I think it was Illinois. I think it was.

Yeah, coming down a dike. They set him up, they hid, They popped up right in front of him, shot him point blank.

What Yeah, he lived, he was.

He had a shold, he had a shoulder holster on at the time, and they they were loaded with bird shot because they were duck poachers.

But that was their first miss.

That was their first mistake.

So he but it was close, you know, his close range is like ten yards is close. And he he was drawing his pistol, he had his shoulder holster, he was drawing this revolver and most of the shot hit the revolver and he I had to fire back.

But for whatever it.

Somehow disabled his pistol and he was hit.

He got hit in the eye and the head, and yeah, he lived though he stayed an agent till he retires.

Yeah.

But anyway to answer your question, you know, I always considered LA to be like a higher risk place to work.

But I was lucky.

I you know, I think in my whole career, I had to chase one guy on foot, I wrestled one guy to the ground. I pulled my gun often, but I only ever came close to shooting one person, and you know it didn't have to. But I never felt like I was ever in immediate I never felt super scared. There were moments when people said creepy things to me where I realized I need to get out of this situation. But it never got to the point where, you know, anybody ever physically assaulted me or drew a gun on me. There there have been agents that have had guns pulled on him, which is pretty scary.

When you pull your gun, you mean just like to be like, yeah, get down, you're underrest.

Yeah, to stay up, to be ahead of them on the UDA loop, right, Yeah, always going to be ahead of the bad guys.

Yeah.

So you know, an agent who retired a long time ago, who's deceased now, a guy named Samjola. When he retired, he said something very profound at his retirement party. He said, you cannot be in law enforcement for twenty plus years and not have had a few close calls, including the ones you don't know about. And that last part that really hit me. I had been on maybe ten years when he retired, and that I had never thought of that before. And you know, if somebody's going to assault you, it's not your choice, it's their choice, right, So you don't know, you don't know if somebody's thinking about killing you, looking at you to see if they could get the upper hand on you, and you know.

We're hiding in the bushes like that. Yeah, one story we heard of.

Yeah, we had a game warden. We did this couple volumes of a series called Close Calls Near death Experiences with people. Yeah, and we interviewed a game warden who he had a close call that he didn't know about, but then later happened to interview, later happened to interview a serial poacher. And in the interview the serial poacher who he's been arrested on other charges, he's been arrested on drug charges or domestic violence commever a handful of charges, and he's interviewing him because of potential connection to a poaching case. But he's in trouble now, so now he just wants to talk. He tells the story about a night in Colorado, and the warden interviewing him realizes he's telling him a story about himself. Oh, man, about his plan to kill the guy. Wow, but the guy didn't follow him down the right road. Wow.

Yeah.

And he's sitting there being like he's talking about me. I remember that night. Yeah, he's like, he turned down my road. I was going to give it to him right through his window.

Yeah, how many times?

You know, you never know if it ever happened in his life, no idea, And so I always kept that in mind what Sam had said at his retirement party, that you know, you just can't predict what people are gonna do.

Yeah.

All the undercover thing's gotta be scary, man, it.

Is, but it's also so fun.

It's so it's so rewarding to know that you're in there and they're they're believing, they're believing what you're saying, and they're saying these incredibly incriminating statements in front of you. Sometimes it is just so fun to leave the undercover contact and just be like, I got them, I got these guys.

But how often do you wind up liking the guys? You know?

It's weird.

I there were times when I got to like the people I was working undercover, especially like in High Roller.

I respected some of those guys.

They reminded me I went to an inner city high school, and they reminded me people I knew in high school, and I liked them. But you know, they're just blatant killers, and they're blatant lawbreakers, and I just have no respect for that.

So it always, yeah, what I affects the affection? Yeah, it does, It really does.

I mean, I guess it's I like you, but you need to have consequences, and I'm going to see what you do when those consequences are delivered. Right, So what I'm more interested in is what happens after these guys are caught. Do they accept responsibility? Do they change their ways? If that's the case, I can like those people, right, But if they snub their nose and they call me a jack booted thug and I made up everything, and I fabricated everything and they don't take responsibility.

I don't have any respect for that person. So you can't really like a person like that.

So if you do, if you do undercover, take the Japanese individual, you do undercover. But then because of the way your agency works, you don't vanish, right, right, you gotta He's not like whatever happened to that guy? Right, It's like there you are, right, You're like, oh, no, I'm me, I'm special agent blank. Anyone can find out what my family history is, where I live. Does that not wind up stressing you out that all of a sudden you're a known thing. And if they ever had some kind of vengeful impulse, it's like they know exactly who betrayed them.

Right, Yeah, And this is where I think sometimes our agents get too paranoid. They act like they're secret agents, not special agents. And the bottom line is we're not secret agents. We are special agents. And at the end of your undercover you are going to have to sign affidavits and you may have to go to court and testify, and you're not going to do all of that with your undercover name.

You're gonna be known. And the way.

You know, I had so many situations where after I had worked somebody undercover for a year or more, I would run into them in court and now I'm in a suit and tie, I'm clean shaven. They now I'm referred to as special agent, newcomer. They know me as Ted Nelson or whatever. It's like this weird disconnect in their brain. I had people way smile at me in court. Yoshi Kojima waved and smiled at me while he was in belly chains with his hands chained in front of him. I had high roller guys smiling and waving at me in court, and I could never figure it out. And I think it's just there's like this disconnect. They don't associate me with Ted Nelson. I'm I'm now the agent who's treated them decently since the case has gone down, you know. But more to your point, I did have a case once where I arrested a guy. He became a fugitive because he jumped bail, and I spent years trying to get him back. Eventually caught him in Mexico. We extradited him. His two sons absolutely hated me, I mean hated. And these guys had guns. They were former Israeli army. They knew how to use guns. And I was worried about those guys because they knew who I was. Because now I'd signed all these affidavits, I'd testified in court against their dad and their adults. You know, So when I drove home, I did counter surveillance. Whenever I drove home, I took different routes home every day. I never drove directly from the office to my driveway. You know, I keep gun in my bedroom. And you just have to be careful. You have to be aware that there are people may be planning things you don't know. But it doesn't mean you don't do your job. I mean these guys. Sometimes you hear game wardens or federal agents saying, well, I'm not going to get killed over a deer. Well, it's not if you're doing your job. It's not your choice. If some deer poacher decides to ambush you, take a shot at you just for doing your job. Yeah, you darn wright might get killed for, you know, over a deer.

Well you said, though, you're possibly going to take away their money, yeah, or liberty, right exactly, So it's not just a deer.

Yeah.

And sometimes you know you were talking about the low penalties, right. Bad guys don't know what the that they might get off with just probation. They think they think they sell an illegal butterfly, they're going to go to jail for ten years. So their ignorance of the law may cause them to react in a way that's not right. But bottom line is my belief on this is, you become a federal agent in any whatever agency but Fish and Wildlife, Secret Service, FBI, whatever, you're making a commitment that you're going to carry a gun, You're going to physically arrest people. You're going to threaten their liberty, their money, their house right, and with that comes certain risks. And if you are not willing to accept those risks, then you better not be a federal agent. You better not do undercover work. It's not mandatory you do undercover work. It's they ask you, do you want to do this undercover case? And if you say no, you don't have to do it.

Did you have a conversation with your wife or spouse before you started doing undercover work?

No?

Is that why they're not your wife anymore?

Well, I don't know why my wife's not my wife anymore.

But you know, there were times when it was very stressful on the relationship because she did not like sometimes when I carried my gun off duty. I always carried my gun off duty. And there were times in La. Ten million people live in La. Right, I was working on a case involving Russian caviar traffickers, and these are probably mobbed up people, and I'm talking about I'm taking a million dollars worth of caviar from them at a time. Right when I sees it at the airport, million dollars. Definitely get killed over a million dollars. One time, my wife and I are at a restaurant in Santa Monica. You know, I'm off, We're just having dinner. We happened to be seated at the window, and these two Russian dudes walk by who were connected to the guy I just seized a million dollars with a caviar from and they do the double take. They recognize me because we had just done a big chearch warrant at this caviar processing place.

They saw me.

I interviewed them and I just looked at my wife. I was like, we gotta go, we gotta leave.

You know, that's not.

She was planning on a nice dinner out and that all changed.

So can't say my heart rates going up and listen to that.

Yeah, that was Cavard order.

That was kind of a no crap moment, you know, another time to.

Take that Cavyard to go exactly.

Yeah.

Uh.

You know one one time I went I just went into a McDonald's during high Roller. I still have my big mustache, but I had to go down to the US Attorney's office and now I got my mustache. But I'm in my federal agent suit, you know, my uniform, my black suit, white shirt, plane tie. And I thought, oh, just go to McDonald's, get a coke. I walk in and two people in front of me. I'm like, how do I know this guy?

Right? I hear his voice. I'm like, I know this dude.

And I realized he's one of the guys in Operation high Roller. He's one of the bad guys. And I just put my sunglasses on and I turned around and I walked out and he never saw me, or if he did see me, he never made the connection guy in a suit versus who he was seeing on the weekends. But you know, I'm in a city of ten million people. What are the odds I'm going to run into this guy I just was working undercovered six days ago.

You know, that's freaky.

And what if they see you also have developed probably very heightened spatial awareness, and you're probably more likely to well recognize and you know who's going on.

One thing we talked about is I worked five years of my career. I worked in Africa as an agent based at the embassy overseas, and I did not realize how how stressful it was to constantly.

Be on like that deep yellow alert.

I was more on yellow hot you know, deep yellow or light red alert in Africa than I ever was in LA. And when I came back, I just had this huge release of tension that I didn't realize I had. And I've talked to other federal agents who are based overseas when I was HSI and FBI, and they said they said they had exact same reaction. They came back from Southern Africa and they just like like they just had their their muscles relaxed.

And that's because it's just a more hostile place.

Yeah, and there's there's so much gun crime right, it just related just being a person there you are constantly you know, you don't even stop. When when I lived in Africa, if you're driving at night, you don't stop at red lights. You're insane. If you stop at a red light, yeah, you slow down, you look, but if nobody's coming, you go. Because that's where car hijackings happen, is a stop lights at night in Pretoria.

So you just don't do it. And you know, I.

I won't get the gun stuff in Africa, but yeah, people get killed all the time over stupid stuff in Africa. And so not only now, are you a federal agent working overseas on rhino horn traffick.

Aga people year all the time?

Yeah, and yeah life is cheap in Africa, right, they'll kill you for anything. And if you're talking about one hundred thousand dollars rhino horn, they'll definitely kill you. So you've got the law enforcement aspect, but then you also have just going to the grocery store. It's super dangerous, you know, and I don't want to scare people. I never got in trouble in Africa. I never had anybody try to do anything to me. But at the same time, I never went from a store and directly got into my car, I'd walk to another car. I'd look behind me before I got in the car. I'd sometimes walk around the car, just do something unusual so that i'd see somebody change their behavior around me.

So, yeah, you do get in this mode of being on yellow alert all the time.

And back to your question, if somebody's going to do undercover work, they don't automatically become a secret agent. They just have to be careful. Right, They're still a special agent. They have to do their job and they're gonna have to just suck it up.

Are you going to go now and launch a whole second career?

So since I retired, I've been doing some adjunct teaching at cal State, which I really enjoy. Law enforcement, Yeah, criminal justice. I teach criminal justice, administrative law. I do some consulting here and there. But if you don't mind me plug in please, I'm in conjunction with cal State. I'm starting a podcast called Nature's Secret Service, where we're going to focus on wildlife crime, interviewing people involved in it, and try to talk about what drives it, some of the things that happen, some of the interesting stories should be fun to should the first episode should launch in like early March. Oh great, so Nature's secret service. Anybody wants to look for it, they can find it.

And that's in conjunction with who Cal State University graduation.

Yeah. Thanks, should be fun. I don't know if I'll be a good host, but we'll see how it goes, right.

I think you'll probably do all right.

I get some tips from you if I need them.

I don't know.

That's where I go for him. I think you got it figured out well. I think it'll be fun. Mostly it's going to be talking to, you know, law enforcement professionals. And when you get to law enforcement people talking, the good stories come out pretty quick.

So I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure we'll get to some good stuff.

That's great man.

Congratulations.

Thanks, yeah, thanks for coming on the show.

It's been a pleasure. I appreciate it. But you're very welcome.

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Thanks, thanks said yeah, nice to meet you guys.

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