Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening un podcast.
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Speaker 1: nor where you stand with on x. Okay, we're joined
Speaker 1: by Lieutenant John Norris like Chuck Norris like Chuck Norris.
Speaker 1: You got it. It's a different spelling, right, and r
Speaker 1: e s a little different author of Hidden War um
Speaker 1: reading that book, man. I was reading the book over
Speaker 1: the weekend. People are gonna figure out what the book
Speaker 1: is box when we're talking about a bunch, but it's
Speaker 1: about like the Hidden War is is the war against
Speaker 1: illegal pot growers, public lands and otherwise just around reading it,
Speaker 1: I had like a hundred questions come up, and we'll
Speaker 1: get I want to get into some background on you
Speaker 1: and stuff. But the main question I think that needs
Speaker 1: to be dispassed right away is like you're retired now
Speaker 1: game warden, lieutenant, but you're a game warden. You came
Speaker 1: out of like bust of people for not having their
Speaker 1: fishing license, having too many uh, trout the old stringer.
Speaker 1: How in the world did it become your guy's responsibility
Speaker 1: to put to like take on like cartel backed illegal growers.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, why is that not the cops? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Steve, that is a great question, and that
Speaker 1: is the question that everyone started ask when we got
Speaker 1: into this, and you know, like all of us at
Speaker 1: the table here in the studio, I grew up loving
Speaker 1: to hunt fish. The outdoors were kind of the spiritual
Speaker 1: cornerstone where I was at. So when I met a
Speaker 1: game warden, you know, for the first time in college,
Speaker 1: I'm like, wow, you know you actually get paid to
Speaker 1: do this. You know, you're in your patrol truck, You're
Speaker 1: thirteen miles in the back country checking me and my
Speaker 1: hiking partner on a lake, and this is fantastic. And
Speaker 1: all you're doing is you're protecting wildlife. But you're doing
Speaker 1: as a solo, solo cop. Remember, it was funny reading
Speaker 1: near bio information that when you grew up hunting fishing,
Speaker 1: but we're kind of like not really aware that there
Speaker 1: were game wardens. The craziest thing, Yeah, so I I
Speaker 1: it was it was so random that I never met
Speaker 1: a game ward and growing up because I passed hunter
Speaker 1: safety at nine years old. My dad brought me into
Speaker 1: Waterfall first. Then it was big game. You know, four
Speaker 1: or five generations of conservationists from both Montana, California and
Speaker 1: everywhere in between. And unlike all my colleagues in the
Speaker 1: academy when I get there, when I'm like twenty years old,
Speaker 1: they've been you know, seeing game warden since their first
Speaker 1: deer camp at twelve years old, and they've been you know,
Speaker 1: going that path. Well, I certainly would have started much
Speaker 1: earlier and got a whole different direction towards me in
Speaker 1: a conservation officer had I met one. That was the
Speaker 1: first time I met one. I was actually in an
Speaker 1: engineering program at Santos State University and the Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: and looking at the r OTC Army Special Forces program.
Speaker 1: And then I'm on a winter break in the first
Speaker 1: semester engineering school and I'm camped out thirteen miles into
Speaker 1: the back country with my brother outlaw, my Baja racing partner.
Speaker 1: We got a pack horse, we don't have all the
Speaker 1: right gear. We're kind of new to it, you know,
Speaker 1: and we're soaked. We hiked all night to get to
Speaker 1: this lake. So we had an illegal fire in the park.
Speaker 1: We knew it was illegal, but we had a dryer
Speaker 1: stuff out. We're pretty wet and keep on with this
Speaker 1: five day hike, and at that time of year, no
Speaker 1: one's in the back country. This is a Henry Co
Speaker 1: State Park, a hundred five thousand acres of pristine country,
Speaker 1: second largest state park in California and all ours. So
Speaker 1: we were like, yeah, we're in the wide open, you know,
Speaker 1: like later on where our big hunts would go. And
Speaker 1: we see this guy coming down on the four by four.
Speaker 1: Thought he was a park ranger. Turns out he was
Speaker 1: a game ward and thinking we were poaching blacktail deer
Speaker 1: deep rhet because the backtail genetics in that park were epic.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm talking Boot and Crockett things that just
Speaker 1: light us up, right. And so he comes down, finds
Speaker 1: out we're just dumb kids doing a backpack. We're not hunting.
Speaker 1: And I've been to Zeer for two and a half
Speaker 1: hours on that lake and my eyes just blew up
Speaker 1: and my head started spinning. And when he left, my
Speaker 1: partner jail. So you questioned him. I questioned him, and
Speaker 1: he's like, I really regret stopping and talking to these
Speaker 1: dumb kids this long and I was done. I went
Speaker 1: back as soon as we got out of the woods,
Speaker 1: and I changed my major criminal justice in biology and
Speaker 1: learned what a game ward actually did. I said, that's
Speaker 1: what I'm supposed to do. So I believe that was
Speaker 1: like the heavens parted, you know, I mean, non cliche,
Speaker 1: but seriously it was. It was that random. Had I
Speaker 1: not met him, I would have been on a catch.
Speaker 1: His name I did, Oh yeah, yeah, it was Henry Coletto.
Speaker 1: He was a county game ward, not a state game work.
Speaker 1: But he later was one of the guys I patrolled
Speaker 1: with when I got back home many years later. You
Speaker 1: want to you want to run it into it? We
Speaker 1: worked together. It was it was fantastic. So that's how
Speaker 1: that went. So but keep going, yeah, like like it
Speaker 1: just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. So when
Speaker 1: I got the job, that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: I wanted a bust guys, spotlight and dear taking too
Speaker 1: many fish, you know. I wanted to do hunter education
Speaker 1: and train kids. I love teaching, did that early on
Speaker 1: in my career, developed into teaching super early, did all
Speaker 1: that stuff. That's why I envisioned game wardens should do.
Speaker 1: That was the traditional role. And then fast forward to
Speaker 1: I started Riverside County way down in southern California and
Speaker 1: wanted to get back home to the Silicon Valley. I
Speaker 1: did that in about and did all the traditional stuff
Speaker 1: in my hometown area back in co where I met
Speaker 1: that game warden patrolled there. Everything was great. And then
Speaker 1: in two thousand four, um I stumbled onto with a
Speaker 1: tip from a high school buddy of mine that was
Speaker 1: now in his master's thesis at San Jose State in
Speaker 1: fisheries biology, and he was doing a three year study
Speaker 1: up a real pristine channel at two creeks where they're
Speaker 1: steelhead trout, re legged yellow legged frog, real pristine, you know,
Speaker 1: threatening dangerous species. And he hit me up one day
Speaker 1: in late spring, right after trout opening. He said, Hey, John,
Speaker 1: this is weird. One of my transset creeks is completely
Speaker 1: bone dry. I've got no kid, dead fish, dead frogs.
Speaker 1: But I'm seeing a bunch of like plastic and debris
Speaker 1: and stuff down at the bottom of the head waters
Speaker 1: and something's not right. And keep in mind, guys, these
Speaker 1: are the headwaters of Coyote Creek. What's one of the
Speaker 1: last viable steelhead migration trout streams in the Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: where they went Pacific Ocean all the way up and
Speaker 1: came to spawn. I mean, these fish were so threatened
Speaker 1: at the time. We only had a couple of thousand
Speaker 1: of them left in that part of California. They were
Speaker 1: like valued at like thirty thou dollars of fish by
Speaker 1: the FETs, so it was pretty sensitive. So I grabbed
Speaker 1: grabbed my buddy. I said, okay, jump in the truck.
Speaker 1: I'll be with you early tomorrow. Let's go up to
Speaker 1: the drop off. I want to drop into the canyon
Speaker 1: and see what it is. And that whole thing to
Speaker 1: me was, okay, there's got to be a farmer diverting
Speaker 1: for you know, agriculture, because it was you know, kind
Speaker 1: of not a real wet winner, or you know, maybe
Speaker 1: it's someone diverting a stream with development, which is what
Speaker 1: we normally see what we call stream bet alteration violations
Speaker 1: that we did a lot of in California. So that
Speaker 1: was always your groove, that was part of your mandate
Speaker 1: to look at that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: wasn't just hunting and fishing enforcement and you know, the
Speaker 1: poaching versus the legitimate conservationist hunter doing it right like
Speaker 1: all of us. It was. Environmental damage is to water pollution,
Speaker 1: development getting into creeks, big housing projects, commercial developments. You
Speaker 1: guys are involved, you guys are not involved in h
Speaker 1: just general environmental and fractions would be like considered under
Speaker 1: your enforcement right. And the bigger, the bigger things when
Speaker 1: it comes to stream alteration, when it's really heavy impacted
Speaker 1: from developments, it gets into you know, heavy misdemeanors, felonies,
Speaker 1: civil finds, very complex environmental investigations that people didn't realize
Speaker 1: Game Morgans did at the time. So we snow go
Speaker 1: down to this canyon and we go and find this
Speaker 1: water hose basically diverting what was left of that creek
Speaker 1: and that's why it was dry three miles below. So
Speaker 1: I grabbed my buddy, put him behind me. He's an
Speaker 1: unarmed biologist and civilian like diverted like how like Basically
Speaker 1: they dam up the creek and this is a small tributary.
Speaker 1: This is the headwaters of with Steel that channel, so
Speaker 1: they damn it up. They put a water hose in it,
Speaker 1: and they're piping the water somewhere and it was kind
Speaker 1: of weird because it was like a one inch black
Speaker 1: polly pipe, which we later learned is the cartel's main
Speaker 1: method what they used to arrogate, you know, this illegal,
Speaker 1: legitimate poison cannabis. And so I put them behind me
Speaker 1: my assault rifle. We have no cell coverage, We're deep
Speaker 1: in the canyon, no radio coverage. We're hiking down this canyon,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, you know, we go two
Speaker 1: hundred yards down the creek and there's the start of
Speaker 1: what was a seven thousand you know plant marijuana plant
Speaker 1: cartel grow that had been in play for probably five
Speaker 1: six years. No one had any clue what was going
Speaker 1: on there. That's why that's you know, I said, I'm
Speaker 1: like boiling over with questions. Keep in mind, you gotta
Speaker 1: walk me through, Like how is that possible? That's what
Speaker 1: I was asking myself, you know. And I still to
Speaker 1: this day, after doing five hundred plus of these missions
Speaker 1: and spend the last fifteen years of my career dedicated
Speaker 1: to the kind of a special operations side of what
Speaker 1: it took to catch these guys and deal with them safely.
Speaker 1: It's baffling to think that, and keep in mind, these
Speaker 1: guys doing it you know, I mean, this isn't you know,
Speaker 1: a legitimate enterprise. These are cartel gunmen. They're classified as
Speaker 1: to portable felons, you know, um south of the border.
Speaker 1: They're on watch list internationally because they've got his streams
Speaker 1: of narcotics, trafficking, murder, uh you know, environmental destruction, human trafficking, assault,
Speaker 1: you name it. And those are some of their best
Speaker 1: growers in their heavily arms. So these guys have already
Speaker 1: been imported here illegally, smuggled across the border and they've embedded.
Speaker 1: You've found they they've smuggled across the border to do
Speaker 1: this job. Yeah, yeah, basically exactly exactly. And we as
Speaker 1: we get further into it and hidden more really goes
Speaker 1: into what we learned later on since my first book,
Speaker 1: Warren in the Woods, of how easy it is from
Speaker 1: to get here, how you know, involved business wise, the
Speaker 1: infrastructure of the cartel organizations are and how many are
Speaker 1: really you know, spread out through not only California, the
Speaker 1: epicenter of the weed part of what they do, but
Speaker 1: the method and phetamine production nationally, human trafficking, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the synthetic heroine fent and all that's poisoning a lot
Speaker 1: of people and killing them. There's certainly environmental damages to
Speaker 1: our public lands and some of those crimes, but the
Speaker 1: poison cannabis thing is what is just devastating, and well
Speaker 1: we get more into that, but yeah, so when but
Speaker 1: back to this, So you guys come down and you
Speaker 1: say it's seven thousand plants, seven thousand plants kind of
Speaker 1: public to I want to know why it's poison cannabis.
Speaker 1: It's we're gonna talk, okay that and I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: well no, no, but but yeah, let's get through that
Speaker 1: right away, because yeah, why why are you're saying because
Speaker 1: you're not using it like a euphemism. It's not a
Speaker 1: euphemism at all. But what I want to that I
Speaker 1: need to get this though, Yeah, how many acres is
Speaker 1: seven thousand plants? They were spread out over probably four
Speaker 1: or five acres on that particular grow. Because if it's not,
Speaker 1: how are the people not every couple of days wandering
Speaker 1: through here? That's a super good question because some of
Speaker 1: what they do is they're on a lot of public
Speaker 1: land areas, but more remote tracks, like they're going right
Speaker 1: into deep canyons that most people don't go into in
Speaker 1: a park that are just hiking recreationally, but you know
Speaker 1: who's running into them, Guys like you and me, all
Speaker 1: of us here that are going for that really pristine
Speaker 1: trout stream. We're doing a deep back country you know,
Speaker 1: deer hunt, and we're gonna go to a water hole
Speaker 1: and we're gonna backtrack tracks and we're gonna look for drops,
Speaker 1: you know, offseason all that stuff. And so either no
Speaker 1: one finds them, because it's an area of land that
Speaker 1: might not be easily accessible. Only the hardcorees get there,
Speaker 1: and so it's anglers and hunters that find it, or
Speaker 1: it's a guy like my partner that was doing a
Speaker 1: bio study. He was a hunter himself and just happened
Speaker 1: to be in that canyon all the time, and they
Speaker 1: were kind of keeping out the public for this study area.
Speaker 1: So he was like he was a facilitating the secret
Speaker 1: and like unintentional, unintentional, and he was in there. This
Speaker 1: was like the third year of a five year study
Speaker 1: he was doing for this thesis, and you know, I
Speaker 1: love the critters and was freaked out. So none of
Speaker 1: us had any idea when we walked into and they
Speaker 1: feel it had been there, had been hiding there how
Speaker 1: long at least five years. And I'll get into a
Speaker 1: little more in the story as to why we knew that.
Speaker 1: And when we go down the canyon and we see
Speaker 1: the plan and don't forget your honest question. Yeah we're
Speaker 1: gonna get yeah, the poison thing, and we see I
Speaker 1: should go back to that because there's so many issues.
Speaker 1: Just get fired up. Now we're getting back, we're getting
Speaker 1: backed up. All right, we'll dig out. I love it
Speaker 1: when I talked poison cannabis. I got to make a
Speaker 1: very clear distinction between the legitimate cannabis industry that's doing
Speaker 1: you know, they're growing dispensary quality marijuana that's legally used
Speaker 1: by recreational users where it's allowed, like California's a regulated
Speaker 1: state now where I just retired from, and Montana's a
Speaker 1: regulated state where we're all from here, my our home
Speaker 1: state of Michigan, home state of Michigan. There go Steve, right,
Speaker 1: and so you know, and and actually what we're going
Speaker 1: to get into and I go into this at the
Speaker 1: very end of Hidden More, especially chapter ten, when I
Speaker 1: talk about moving forward with regulation and what are the
Speaker 1: issues on things like public land, environmental crimes. But we
Speaker 1: actually have the legitimate cannabis industry making pure product, calling
Speaker 1: us their Earth Warriors, my tactical unit called Earth Warriors.
Speaker 1: It's kind of not the term I would normally think
Speaker 1: of from a special operations background, running with retired seals
Speaker 1: on my team and swat guys and snipers and we're
Speaker 1: all hunters like myself. But they like what we're doing,
Speaker 1: you know, and and we like to support their given us.
Speaker 1: And where it was used to be handcuffs, they've turned
Speaker 1: to handshakes with the legitimate side of the industry that's
Speaker 1: really trying to do it right. And there are environmental
Speaker 1: stewards and we found a percentage of growers all over
Speaker 1: California that are as deeply environmentally protective as we are.
Speaker 1: Know they protect their water, they can serve it. So
Speaker 1: they're saying they don't put out as you'll explain in
Speaker 1: Discriminate Wildlife poisons. Yeah, and booby traps book full of
Speaker 1: pictures of like dead mountain lions and bears and littered
Speaker 1: around these growth sites from them like poisoning up poisoning
Speaker 1: wildlife because I imagine it gets into the crops. Oh,
Speaker 1: it totally does. And when I go into poison cannabis.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I'm saying, these band toxics that these
Speaker 1: cartel guys bring across the border. She can't get it
Speaker 1: in America anymore. It was banned by the e p
Speaker 1: A fifteen years ago because so toxic and the products
Speaker 1: called carbo furan um. There's all kinds of derivative trade
Speaker 1: names meta faus, q fur and furdan. But there's all
Speaker 1: these different derivatives and they have to get it in
Speaker 1: Mexico because in third world countries don't have the environmental
Speaker 1: regulations we do. It's still produced. It was designed as
Speaker 1: an insecticide rodentious side, I say, kill anything aside um
Speaker 1: to be deluded into like five thousand gallons of water
Speaker 1: with one twelve ounce container. It's kind of crystalline. And
Speaker 1: even that was considered so toxic and harmful if it
Speaker 1: was put on crops to keep animals and insects and
Speaker 1: every off by the e p A, they banned it.
Speaker 1: What the cartel growers do, guys, is they diluted with
Speaker 1: three to five gallons at the most. So this stuff
Speaker 1: to tea spoons, no joke. A black, big three pound
Speaker 1: black bear comes into a grow site, gets to a plant,
Speaker 1: and these guys have it all over the bud, all
Speaker 1: over the flour, all over on the soil around the plants,
Speaker 1: and in the waterways directly, and they'll put it out
Speaker 1: in tunicans like little traps for animals because they don't
Speaker 1: want anything touching that potentially four thousand dollar black market
Speaker 1: profit plant. So a black bear ingested, and the picture
Speaker 1: in my book of that big black bear, Steve was
Speaker 1: exactly that went in licked up a couple of drops
Speaker 1: of this that they put in a tunican is like
Speaker 1: a little perimeter defense. And she died like a couple
Speaker 1: of minutes later, and just keeled over and she was done.
Speaker 1: And then her fifty pound cub that also was with her,
Speaker 1: she was she had a single baby and justested the
Speaker 1: same poison, didn't die as quickly. And the other picture
Speaker 1: that's superimposed in that color section of the book is
Speaker 1: the cub up in the view of the tree, got
Speaker 1: scared when above mama and I, you know, strung out
Speaker 1: about ten feet above her mother, a little fit kipoun cub.
Speaker 1: And you know, I kind of say, it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: where you sit on the conservation. Preservation, hunt, don't hunt
Speaker 1: animal rights. You know where we sit opposite of that.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to see an animal die that way. So
Speaker 1: it's just horrendous. No animals should ever be poisoned that way.
Speaker 1: It's just it's disgusting. And so, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: when I present on this and I talk about this,
Speaker 1: whether it's a law enforcement group, of kids, group of
Speaker 1: political group, a good conservation group like we all here
Speaker 1: are here, you know, are going to animal rights group,
Speaker 1: talk to humane society, the Mountain Lion Society. I've been
Speaker 1: all over those traditionally left groups societies and they see
Speaker 1: that and they go, we need to support your efforts.
Speaker 1: You know, let's forget where we sit on this spectrum.
Speaker 1: Let's unify. Let's fund this to get the clean up
Speaker 1: done that we need to do. Make sure you guys
Speaker 1: are doing this thing safe because the violence we've been
Speaker 1: involved in, the gunfights, my partner almost getting shot and
Speaker 1: killed in the Silicon Valley. We got some stuff we
Speaker 1: could share that's crazy to see how violent these guys are.
Speaker 1: And not only to tactically trained, specialized law enforcement team
Speaker 1: like we developed into, but what if you were you know,
Speaker 1: you were on a private, you know, public hunt doing
Speaker 1: a d I y style and you run across this,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, most hunters are equipped to deal
Speaker 1: with it and get out safely. But we've been up
Speaker 1: against some pretty crazy guys and so that's the poison
Speaker 1: cannabis we're dealing with. And the problem with that stuff.
Speaker 1: What's so nasty about it is this issue doesn't get out,
Speaker 1: you know, really far enough. I mean I wrote the
Speaker 1: first book on the topic back in two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: We did three years of reality TV with Wild Justice,
Speaker 1: the first game ward in reality TV on on National Geographic,
Speaker 1: which was good because it showed you what game wardens do,
Speaker 1: the diversity of what we do. We're not just checking
Speaker 1: fishing licenses, you know, and closing the gate and locking,
Speaker 1: you know, locking up a park at night. We're doing
Speaker 1: some you know, legitimate, diverse law enforcement stuff. But it
Speaker 1: exposes issue a little bit. So we've been talking about
Speaker 1: it for ten years. It's been on worldwide television, it's
Speaker 1: been in one book. Now Hidden More comes out and
Speaker 1: I'm still shocked by how many people we'll get the
Speaker 1: new book. We launched an n r A annual with
Speaker 1: all Over North being a primary endorser of it, and
Speaker 1: all these A hunter himself. I didn't know that, and
Speaker 1: after he read and endorsed it, he told me, he goes,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. You know, I spent my entire
Speaker 1: military career fighting foreign drug problems from infiltrating our domestic lands.
Speaker 1: And we got a team of game wardens and other
Speaker 1: law enforcement guys, and especially you guys had to get
Speaker 1: specialized a game wards to fight this and protect our
Speaker 1: wildlife too, and being a hunter. And he wasn't even
Speaker 1: fully aware. So when you look at that aspect of it,
Speaker 1: um the growers are still insulated, not only in California
Speaker 1: but in the rest of America, and not enough people
Speaker 1: know about this. So the poison cannabis is going all
Speaker 1: over the Midwest on the black market, the Eastern Seaboard,
Speaker 1: um all over the country and being sold on the
Speaker 1: black markets, being slowed as a pure product. It's getting
Speaker 1: into that black market that isn't regulated versus a legitimate dispensary.
Speaker 1: That was that was one of the things I wanted
Speaker 1: to ask about, and we might aso try to dispatch
Speaker 1: with that early on. We're all turkey hunt in California,
Speaker 1: not on public man but on private land front of
Speaker 1: mine's place, and I was telling her and we noticed
Speaker 1: the piping all over the damn place you were on one. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: because they have her. My friend, a woman I went
Speaker 1: to graduate school with. Her family had her dad had
Speaker 1: run cattle and he was a large animal vat and
Speaker 1: he started he got older and kind of got away
Speaker 1: from running cattle, and so some of their properties went
Speaker 1: like relatively unvisited and no one was actually work in
Speaker 1: the land, and um, so there wasn't a constant presence
Speaker 1: out there. And I brought up to her like you
Speaker 1: see this pipe in weird places, and she was always as,
Speaker 1: it's just people to sneak in to grow. And at
Speaker 1: this time, uh weed was already legal in California. So
Speaker 1: it raised the question, why if if you legalize weed
Speaker 1: in the state, why is there still an incentive Like
Speaker 1: how did it even come up? The people are still
Speaker 1: secretly growing and why why would they need to grow
Speaker 1: on public land? Why don't they like buy property and
Speaker 1: just grow eat. Yeah, and then why you need to
Speaker 1: sneak in somewhere and do it on the slot it's
Speaker 1: it gets down. That's a that's a really good question.
Speaker 1: And everybody thought that when we regulated in California, and Prop.
Speaker 1: Sixty fourth recreational did all these medical laws. Other states
Speaker 1: did it too. That Okay, that's going to stop the
Speaker 1: black market. Now it's legal. It's no big deal. And
Speaker 1: it was like a really common argument. It's the main
Speaker 1: argument here for legalizing drugs. It totally is brother. And
Speaker 1: here's the problem the backlash. What people don't realize when
Speaker 1: you dig deeper into it is once you regulate, there's inspections,
Speaker 1: there's permits you've gotta get, there's fees to that. You're
Speaker 1: now on big Brother's radar. Right, you're on the governmental radar.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna be inspected. You've gotta keep your private
Speaker 1: land grow site open to inspection. Your dispensaries are open
Speaker 1: to inspection. Use e P A band poison, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can't do that. Can't use I mean, the the purification
Speaker 1: standards on cannabis legitimately now. And I'm gonna take California
Speaker 1: as an example because I just came from that state
Speaker 1: and was part of seeing regulation and you know, kind
Speaker 1: of trying to preach the message of hey, guys, if
Speaker 1: we're gonna regulate, great, that's the choice of the voters.
Speaker 1: That's how the legislature is gonna go regardless of what
Speaker 1: my thoughts are in at that's what we're gonna do.
Speaker 1: Let's just do it right. Let's make sure we break
Speaker 1: the back of the black market and don't facilitate more
Speaker 1: black market. Well in California is an example. When they
Speaker 1: legitimized recreational marijuana and then all the new medical laws
Speaker 1: started to come in. They took public land trespass growing,
Speaker 1: which is cartels from Mexico, from a felony to a misdemeanor.
Speaker 1: And if you were now check this out guys too,
Speaker 1: on this fact, if you're a juvenile, and a lot
Speaker 1: of these guys are juveniles because they're coming up generationally
Speaker 1: to be trained. You know, they're under eighteen, but they're
Speaker 1: formidable they're growing. Now, that's a misdemeanor to an infraction
Speaker 1: for these young growers that are with You know a
Speaker 1: guy that's a grow boss, we call him and you
Speaker 1: know he's he's vetted. And these are guys that you know,
Speaker 1: they're not just random guys coming up trying to make
Speaker 1: a quick buck because of the living conditions in Mexico.
Speaker 1: These guys are vetted grow bosses that got their vettedness
Speaker 1: by doing this successfully diverting water, hiding it from the
Speaker 1: federal allies, being successful at getting you know, big harvest
Speaker 1: out and not getting busted. Then they get brought up
Speaker 1: here because they're basically vetted journeyman that know what they're
Speaker 1: doing and they're good a lot of them. You read
Speaker 1: the stories in the book and see some of the
Speaker 1: pictures of the booby traps and the camouflage that you
Speaker 1: know the same the like the pungee stick traps. Isn't
Speaker 1: that crazy? Yeah? Sold one where we just where is
Speaker 1: it going? Are people and other people in California they're
Speaker 1: going to a dispensary and they're thinking they're buying like healthy,
Speaker 1: high quality, clean whatever, regulated inspected weed, and they're buying
Speaker 1: stuff that's laced with wildlife poisons or going to other
Speaker 1: states all together. It's sometimes being just like you said, Stevens,
Speaker 1: sometimes being utilized into dispensaries, you know, and and and
Speaker 1: masked in that. Fortunately not in super large quantities that
Speaker 1: we've seen out there but in California, but a majority
Speaker 1: of it just goes back east and gets into the
Speaker 1: black market Middle America, illegal states, illegal states, Middle America
Speaker 1: where kid is have no access medical patients seaboard states
Speaker 1: like Chicago, New York. It's going everywhere, and I mean
Speaker 1: we produce you know where I came from in California
Speaker 1: is eight of the entire nation's black market marijuana resent
Speaker 1: in private land or this public land thing. But the
Speaker 1: thing that's also interesting is even though Weed is the
Speaker 1: one of only six Mediterranean climates on the globe, so
Speaker 1: it's great growing. That's why it's the Weed state. And
Speaker 1: we February and almost December outdoors if we have a
Speaker 1: mile winner um. All those other states that are still
Speaker 1: involved in it, that still have a cartel presence just
Speaker 1: for the cannabis side of what they do is still
Speaker 1: like twenty seven states where it's to a lesser extent
Speaker 1: being grown on public lands by the cartels, but definitely
Speaker 1: not the magnitude that we saw in California. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the biggest thing is is if you're gonna
Speaker 1: if your cannabis user, be careful. You know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to be one ingesting toxic poisons that eventually will
Speaker 1: kill you or the people that you're associated with. But
Speaker 1: also I don't think anybody that's a legitimate cannabis user
Speaker 1: wants to be complicit in buy into that black market,
Speaker 1: especially from you know, a foreign presence. It's you know,
Speaker 1: not regulated, not supposed to be here with the fast.
Speaker 1: I don't think people think about it too much, don't
Speaker 1: they don't. I don't think I wait to say something
Speaker 1: only people think about that because I don't think people
Speaker 1: that buy um, people that are buying like hard drugs
Speaker 1: out of Central and South America, I don't think that
Speaker 1: they're really cognizant of the blood bath that they fuel.
Speaker 1: They're not. They're not. If you told them, they're not
Speaker 1: going to care. You can take it outside of drugs too,
Speaker 1: I mean, take milk, for example. Do people really think
Speaker 1: about where that comes from? Point people like? But but
Speaker 1: I don't think the dairy farmers are going down, moaning
Speaker 1: each other down and killing hundreds of thousand, tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of innocent individuals. Not not at all. But there
Speaker 1: could be environmental damage, there could be others, you know,
Speaker 1: different man to buy definitely have to buy hard drugs
Speaker 1: out of Central and South America. You are, uh. My
Speaker 1: point is that people are very easy to sort of
Speaker 1: gloss over. No I gloss all overall. I'm I'm not
Speaker 1: passing judgment. I clossed over all kinds doing real quick.
Speaker 1: Why uh, why grow in California instead of just going
Speaker 1: south of the border and bringing it. That's a good question,
Speaker 1: that's a great question. And basically they're kind of doing both.
Speaker 1: They're still bringing it from across the border, and they're
Speaker 1: doing it smuggling, you know, across the border and getting
Speaker 1: across fairly easily, whether it's tunnels or however they're getting
Speaker 1: across and also running what they call panga boats one
Speaker 1: way boats that go around the Mazelon Point and come
Speaker 1: in and deposit six thousand three to talks about that too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we got into pangas and it was something you know,
Speaker 1: being a being a more of a you know, an
Speaker 1: inner border kind of woodsy, kind of not on the
Speaker 1: water that much, you know, domestic unit kind of running
Speaker 1: all over. We did a lot of you know, ocean stuff.
Speaker 1: We just had to because the last ten years we've
Speaker 1: been seeing more and more of these panga boats hitting
Speaker 1: the shoreline. And you know, last we heard as we
Speaker 1: were working with you know, different different federal allies and
Speaker 1: the Homeland Security and Coastguard, you're getting sometimes twin of
Speaker 1: these boats a month, and we might catch two or
Speaker 1: three of them, so and then they're making you know
Speaker 1: that all that poison weed is coming in from off
Speaker 1: shore trucks and you know runners are there to pick
Speaker 1: it up. The distribution center is very highly structured, good
Speaker 1: corporate model. They have distribution centers, stash houses, and it's
Speaker 1: it's gone in minutes to be distributed all over the country.
Speaker 1: And I mean, you know you're not only getting that,
Speaker 1: you're getting some meth imported. And then you get the
Speaker 1: human trafficking thing, because if you can get that weed
Speaker 1: in off the coast, you can bring in a threat.
Speaker 1: You know, you can bring in somebody off this coastline
Speaker 1: from anywhere. So there's been the domestic you know that
Speaker 1: the extreme terrorist groups linked to the cartels as potential
Speaker 1: threats and evidence of that, and that gets into a
Speaker 1: whole another level of public safety, not just poison weed
Speaker 1: coming in, which is still horrible. So, yeah, we got
Speaker 1: to coming in from Mexico, but if they can produce
Speaker 1: it here, it's that much less of a burden and
Speaker 1: cost than having to try to pay what it's going
Speaker 1: to take to get these guys across safely knowing they're
Speaker 1: probably getting a few of them are going to get caught, right,
Speaker 1: and then then they're gonna lose that load. Whereas that
Speaker 1: you know, if they're embedded here and they're really good growers,
Speaker 1: those guys are embedded for generations and until they get caught,
Speaker 1: they might go ten, eleven, twelve years. We've cut some
Speaker 1: guys that have been at it for over a decade
Speaker 1: and embedded in you know, Palo Alto, Fresno, big city
Speaker 1: populace centers completely here, illegally fake I d s, not citizens,
Speaker 1: but just running operations. Back up for a minute too.
Speaker 1: You were telling a good story about this guy that
Speaker 1: was doing the He's working on steelhead and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden his stream runs out of water, and you
Speaker 1: guys going to investigate and you find a grow operation. Right,
Speaker 1: walk me through to the end of that, because I
Speaker 1: got a question, but maybe maybe you'll answer it, okay,
Speaker 1: So then what happens like you're like, wow, look at this,
Speaker 1: Look at this. Here we are. This is a n
Speaker 1: eye opener. Didn't expect this. We keep cruising down, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of tactically and carefully, like we're stocking animals quietly
Speaker 1: because you know, the spider senses are tingling. Something's wrong.
Speaker 1: And then we see two arm growers, you know, one
Speaker 1: with an a K, one with a pistol and his hip,
Speaker 1: both having Michetti's and they're walking up the creek and
Speaker 1: they're tending their plants and they're getting closer to us,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, they're sort of them out working armed.
Speaker 1: They're working armed, like they're ready. They're not like when
Speaker 1: someone finds we'll be like, yeah, I'm guilty. It's it's
Speaker 1: not that situation at all. Steve the situation and when
Speaker 1: we get further into the team that developed and why
Speaker 1: we develop the canines, and every time we go into
Speaker 1: a grow site, when we run across growers, it's more
Speaker 1: it's more often and odd that they're not armed than
Speaker 1: when they are. And if they don't have the gun
Speaker 1: right on them, then the guns being dropped or it's
Speaker 1: you know, in camp next to them. But nine times
Speaker 1: out of tenants on them, because they have a lot
Speaker 1: to lose, they at least have a pistol on them.
Speaker 1: Some of them have a slung assault rifle as they're
Speaker 1: working in the garden because you know, they know law
Speaker 1: enforcement could be around the corner. They know what our
Speaker 1: dogs are doing. But when we're going down that canyon.
Speaker 1: I see these guys armed. I have one assault rifle
Speaker 1: and an unarmed civilian in no way to radio out.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking, if this gets western, I get into
Speaker 1: a gunfight right now, it's gonna be the worst day
Speaker 1: in my career. This is not what I was preparing
Speaker 1: m into my career. Yeah, because game wardens aren't notoriously
Speaker 1: going in on stuff like this. Now, granted we went
Speaker 1: in not knowing we were going into but we hit
Speaker 1: we hit the cut bank. We just laid low. They
Speaker 1: drifted by, they didn't see us. And then when I
Speaker 1: saw how the water was diverted as servous as hell. Oh,
Speaker 1: I was freaked out. Yeah, I mean my adrenaline dump
Speaker 1: like that first buck. You know that I missed. You
Speaker 1: got some biologist because he got some Yeah, I got
Speaker 1: a biologist for he was savvy, you know, he was
Speaker 1: a hunter. Even he was like, you know, we looked
Speaker 1: at protocol, not at all. Man. When when when we
Speaker 1: finally cleared that and we knew they were out of
Speaker 1: the way, we just looked at each other. Those eyes
Speaker 1: were huge, and he looked at me and I looked
Speaker 1: at him, and we kind of nodded, you know, I said,
Speaker 1: watch your six. We're gonna get out of here carefully.
Speaker 1: We marked it. And then that was the time I
Speaker 1: turned on and started to know narcotics Task Force teams,
Speaker 1: met the Sheriff's department, met guys from their marijuana eradication
Speaker 1: team that I later became very close to, and Warren
Speaker 1: the Woods first book goes all into that where that
Speaker 1: bond was built because game Wards are seeing this environmental crime,
Speaker 1: but now we're getting this backlash with an agency of like,
Speaker 1: you know, traditionalists that want to do what we've always
Speaker 1: done for years. But that that's that's that's what I
Speaker 1: was driving out my second there's like a question boiling
Speaker 1: up is uh, it's like such a trope of detective movies.
Speaker 1: Where's a crime, and then the local cops, right, but
Speaker 1: then the FBI they come and they assumed like they
Speaker 1: come and assume jurisdiction. So you you see this, okay,
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh my gosh, there's these guys and
Speaker 1: they they got an illegal grow and they're illegally diverting
Speaker 1: water and they're armed. Um, how does how does the
Speaker 1: local sheriff's department, the state police not say back off Sonny, Yah,
Speaker 1: we're going in hot. We're going in hot? Like, how
Speaker 1: did how did you guys make it? That's the game board?
Speaker 1: How did It's not logical that would be like, oh,
Speaker 1: the game boardings will go do it? Well, it was,
Speaker 1: it was. It was a long process and it was
Speaker 1: it was. It was met Our efforts of getting involved
Speaker 1: in that was honestly met with with mixed feelings. You know,
Speaker 1: like one hand is the group I brought in and
Speaker 1: I go into this in detail in the book, but
Speaker 1: I'll share it and just go a little further. Now, Um,
Speaker 1: all the guys I brought into that mission, there was
Speaker 1: a narcotics task force that we were working with that
Speaker 1: lead it because they were had jurisdiction for that area.
Speaker 1: Now we could have let it. We had jurisdiction. We
Speaker 1: have a game boardings have more jurisdiction on more properties
Speaker 1: than any other you know, federal, local, or state law
Speaker 1: enforcement agency because of open fields and animals belong to everybody,
Speaker 1: so we can go all over that wherever there's a
Speaker 1: wildlife impact or wildlife or president that could be posted
Speaker 1: or poison. But you know, it wasn't our forte and
Speaker 1: we don't step on toes. We don't go in trying
Speaker 1: to be something we're not. But I found it. And
Speaker 1: we're pretty good in the woods. You know. We all
Speaker 1: hunt and fish like you guys, and we know how
Speaker 1: to get in quietly and we're good at tracking and
Speaker 1: you know, being careful with our sound and our scent
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. So, um, we got a big
Speaker 1: group in Arcotics Task Force guys. We probably had thirty
Speaker 1: people in this mission. And where there was um C
Speaker 1: HP California Highway Patrol, there was state parks, there were
Speaker 1: narcotic police departments, and there were a couple tactically trained
Speaker 1: SWAT deputies from Sound of Claire County Sheriff's Office. And
Speaker 1: the reason I'm gonna highlight that is because what happened
Speaker 1: on that mission and my first mission, and what I
Speaker 1: saw that went right and all the things that went wrong,
Speaker 1: and I saw how the emphasis was on not really
Speaker 1: catching bad guys. It was we're gonna go in and
Speaker 1: you know, we're gonna bring this force down the canyon.
Speaker 1: We're gonna sort of try to sneak up on him
Speaker 1: and maybe catch them. But um, if we don't catch them,
Speaker 1: we're gonna let them run away. Don't chase them. You
Speaker 1: could get injured chasing these guys down. And then we're
Speaker 1: gonna cut the plants and we're gonna destroy the plants.
Speaker 1: We're gonnair lift him out with the big Payfalk helicopter.
Speaker 1: UM federal funding for grants to you know, fund that
Speaker 1: part of the mission was all based on plant count
Speaker 1: at the time. And I'm going back to two thousand four.
Speaker 1: This is you know, there's a historical bill that that
Speaker 1: matters for hunters everywhere. And I saw that, and we
Speaker 1: have the opportunity and myself in another game ward and
Speaker 1: we're kind of the bird dog leads of getting these
Speaker 1: guys in quietly leading in and then we pull it,
Speaker 1: went to the side, let their tactical unit kind of
Speaker 1: come in like a little swat element or seal team
Speaker 1: the other thing. And um, I knew that if I
Speaker 1: had been running the mission different, I wasn't gonna Monday
Speaker 1: morning quarterback because it wasn't my mission. Now I was
Speaker 1: just the guide since I found it, we could have
Speaker 1: caught these guys easily and safely. And then when we
Speaker 1: catch them that time, we didn't. We didn't. They were
Speaker 1: they were yelled at to put their hands up fifty
Speaker 1: yards away and they're hidden in their camp, and you know,
Speaker 1: and they booked, they booked, and nobody wanted to chase
Speaker 1: them but me and one other game warden and one
Speaker 1: other sheriff's deputy. It was a sniper and a woodsy
Speaker 1: guy from Pennsylvania. Yeah, one of my closest friends of
Speaker 1: this day. And he's he's he's highlighted in the first
Speaker 1: book especially. Um. We decided to give chase, and it
Speaker 1: was futile because I had a big head start on us.
Speaker 1: You know, this was way before canines. We had dialed
Speaker 1: in on tactics. So we're chasing these guys a good
Speaker 1: half mile down the canyon. They do get away, and
Speaker 1: I went, well, you know, I know, if we had
Speaker 1: got a little closer and stalked up to him safely
Speaker 1: with rifle cover, we could have just run him into
Speaker 1: two teams. It really wasn't that hard of a wasn't
Speaker 1: rocket science. And then we eradicated all the plants, and
Speaker 1: I looked at all the other guys on the mission
Speaker 1: and I went, we got four while diversions. I didn't
Speaker 1: know the magnitude of this pink poison. L Diablo, the
Speaker 1: carbo fury, and you know that we call it pink
Speaker 1: death because it kind of looks pink pasty. It was
Speaker 1: all over, So I had no idea that we were
Speaker 1: all around some super hazardous material. We didn't have nitral
Speaker 1: gloves yet any of the protection gear that we now
Speaker 1: have that we know about, and all that stuff was
Speaker 1: left out there, and I'm like, are we going to
Speaker 1: clean this stuff up? We got a big old military
Speaker 1: helicopter can carry like four thousand pounds, and I mean,
Speaker 1: can we take not only the plants, maybe able to
Speaker 1: camp trash, all the poisons of the pesticides and they
Speaker 1: keep a real clean camp. I'm guessing, Oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: their Christine. I mean they're all earth first, back to
Speaker 1: green you know, it's I'm pack it out really organic.
Speaker 1: You know they make the organic growers in California. Just go,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, this is what we gotta step up
Speaker 1: to this level. So, um, it didn't get done. And
Speaker 1: what was funny was that in the cleanup didn't happen, Well,
Speaker 1: the cleanup didn't happen, the apprehension didn't happen, and uh,
Speaker 1: we kind of and we were kind of like considered
Speaker 1: at the time by that task force of all right,
Speaker 1: game wardens are good in the wood, stumble around to
Speaker 1: your thing, you know, and guys get us down there,
Speaker 1: just get out of the way. Let us do our thing.
Speaker 1: And I thought, well, federally in state, I'm sworn by
Speaker 1: the state right work for the governor directly, and we're
Speaker 1: sworn federally. And I'm like, my mandate is first to
Speaker 1: protect public safety. Second thing is to protect the wildlife,
Speaker 1: waterways and wild lands of not only our state, but
Speaker 1: any state on min at any given time. I said,
Speaker 1: I've done a lot of game woard work now for
Speaker 1: ten fifteen years, and I've seen a lot of poaching,
Speaker 1: a lot of environmental destruction stream that stuff. But one
Speaker 1: guy poaching the trophy buck or taking you know, five
Speaker 1: too many trout, and what I saw, this one grows
Speaker 1: site doing to the waterways and everything. It's trivial. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, and plus, this isn't like the guy that
Speaker 1: just caught an extra trout, you know, by mistake, or
Speaker 1: got a little greedy, you know, with his kids fishing
Speaker 1: one day. This is a foreign entity here illegally with
Speaker 1: no respect for our wildlife, wild lands, humanity in any
Speaker 1: way from what I've seen, and that's no exaggeration, and
Speaker 1: they're embedded and just making millions and millions of dollars
Speaker 1: a black market profit, destroying our land in the process
Speaker 1: and threatening anyone that is in to do that. And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, I don't see any more important job
Speaker 1: for a game warden to do based on how we're sworn. Now. Granted,
Speaker 1: I was already more in the tactical element, working with
Speaker 1: local teams in military and getting into swat training and
Speaker 1: sniper rifle and you know, all that kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: And so I had an affinity for going that direction,
Speaker 1: but not just to be a game ward and trying
Speaker 1: to do that, but to applied if it could ever
Speaker 1: be applied. And now I saw this type of environmental
Speaker 1: criminal that was very dangerous and you can't just check
Speaker 1: them on your standard patrol route. Walking a creek in
Speaker 1: a standard you know, it just doesn't fit. It's not safe. Um.
Speaker 1: So we had we were met with mixed a mixed
Speaker 1: bag of emotions, you know, and kind of kind of responses. Um.
Speaker 1: But because of Santa Clair County Sheriff's Office, and I
Speaker 1: gotta give a shout out to them. And by the way,
Speaker 1: they're all fans of the show. They wanted me to
Speaker 1: say hi to you guys. They all listen. A bunch
Speaker 1: of them saw you when you did that live broadcast
Speaker 1: and Sacramento recently. Um and you'll read them. They're all codenamed,
Speaker 1: but they're all they're all fans of love Which and
Speaker 1: they all hunt fish, you know, so the right way.
Speaker 1: But those guys saw what we were doing, and they said,
Speaker 1: you know what, this is crap man, this whole thing
Speaker 1: that because you're a game war and you're not a
Speaker 1: real cop or you can't be a special operations guy.
Speaker 1: You can't be a legitimate swat guy. Let's get together.
Speaker 1: I saw how you work, You saw how I worked.
Speaker 1: We could have caught these guys. These other guys running
Speaker 1: didn't think it was a good deal. So they started
Speaker 1: bringing us under their wing. And so in two thousand
Speaker 1: five we started doing missions, and we started doing ourselves
Speaker 1: and not as you know, the burden bunny cops coming
Speaker 1: in behind the sheriffs. We were equals. Now. I was
Speaker 1: getting called in on planning, giving my outdoor you know,
Speaker 1: knowledge and stuff and hunting and tracking and mapping out
Speaker 1: things I can imagine, like how to get in and
Speaker 1: out of right, Yeah, just like planning a hunt, like
Speaker 1: how to get in and out of areas? How are
Speaker 1: you going to get in out of the area? Is
Speaker 1: what rid you're gonna drop down on for your camp
Speaker 1: and how to recognize a place you're never gonna get
Speaker 1: through it. It's just like hunting, you know, we just
Speaker 1: I mean, you change four legged to two leg and
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty similar. Obviously, there's all the navigational plausibility.
Speaker 1: How long does it take to walk somewhere, what you
Speaker 1: can do in the dark and can do in the dark,
Speaker 1: just on and on right, that's what would be a
Speaker 1: good glassing point to set up and find them. Seriously,
Speaker 1: good observation points. When we when we got our Stiper unit,
Speaker 1: Delta unit wrapped up in this new met team that
Speaker 1: the second book goes into, it was you know, it
Speaker 1: wasn't about getting on people all the time, although we
Speaker 1: did a lot of that. It was about getting overwatch
Speaker 1: like we would on a hunt, to watch a canyon below,
Speaker 1: knowing where they were working and getting our team in
Speaker 1: safe but seeing trends and changes. You tell that story
Speaker 1: about that you guys had identified an individual that you
Speaker 1: knew to be heavily involved, but he never came around.
Speaker 1: And you talked about just sit and watch and watch
Speaker 1: and watching for a long time, and you didn't want
Speaker 1: to raid the sight until you could get until you
Speaker 1: could validate or prove that he was in the know,
Speaker 1: right from talking about just sitting and observing at intersection
Speaker 1: out in the woods. Yeah, the big kingpin that knew
Speaker 1: once he was once he was seen there, it was
Speaker 1: conspiracy and he was responsible and he waited. That was
Speaker 1: a two three month deal, you know. And that was
Speaker 1: with the sheriff's that I mentioned. That was with some
Speaker 1: good partners. Did you guys have it once you got
Speaker 1: rolling on this? Did you have a never ending list,
Speaker 1: like like a never ending list of science that you
Speaker 1: could never even get to because it takes because because
Speaker 1: because of the danger element, you can't just go do
Speaker 1: five or six in a day, right, You've got to
Speaker 1: make a plan so no one gets hurt. So it's
Speaker 1: inherently slow. It's by design, right, is inherently slow. You
Speaker 1: can't just find one one day and grab a team
Speaker 1: and run in and hit it the next day. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's so much plan someone as you as you know
Speaker 1: very well, someone gets shot yeah, yeah, exactly. And the
Speaker 1: problem we would have is in the early days when
Speaker 1: we weren't a formalized team and didn't have the capability
Speaker 1: to plan on ourselves. It was me and a handful
Speaker 1: of game wardens that were tactically savvy and trained really
Speaker 1: good at the traditional stuff. But they were starting to
Speaker 1: see this in other areas of the state and gravitating
Speaker 1: towards it. So I would bring them down to Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley or I would be pulled up to say northern California,
Speaker 1: um if our if our boundary district chiefs would allow
Speaker 1: the move, and a lot didn't, you know, They're like, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's on marijuana case. That's you're going to be a
Speaker 1: garbage collector if you want to clean this stuff up,
Speaker 1: and that's not a game ward and that's for that,
Speaker 1: that's for the cops, that's for d A. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had a lot of you know, internal chiefs and
Speaker 1: caw optin is. It just didn't like it. And nothing
Speaker 1: against that because it's a traditional job of what we
Speaker 1: gotta do. The traditional stuff still important. I mean, we
Speaker 1: can't stop doing the traditional game war and hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing checks and being a steward out there. Um, but
Speaker 1: this was now becoming the biggest environmental damage and crime
Speaker 1: we were seeing throughout California because everything starts in the
Speaker 1: headwaters and it's everything that happens downstreams. So it took
Speaker 1: a long time to get to the level where we
Speaker 1: were accepted. Um, we were equals. We were co planning missions.
Speaker 1: And what we were doing is we were lending the
Speaker 1: help to arrest and apprehend and do all the dirty,
Speaker 1: arduous work of eradicating these plants and a hundred degree weather,
Speaker 1: you know, after an all night raid. But then we
Speaker 1: were starting to bring these agencies into Hey, guys, if
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this, help us. You've got a helicopter
Speaker 1: here today. Okay, it's a thousand dollars an hour to
Speaker 1: run this blade. It's gonna disappear. We're never gonna have
Speaker 1: a helicopter back in this canyon. Can we take three
Speaker 1: four more hours bringing more people or just do it ourselves?
Speaker 1: If we're not wrecked, and let's back up the trash,
Speaker 1: let's restore the creek, because if we just leave and
Speaker 1: winter hits all that crap swashing right into the creek,
Speaker 1: it's just a continual environmental train wrecks. You guys, you
Speaker 1: would do it all in one fell swoop. We're doing
Speaker 1: it all in point fell swoop. You'd come in m
Speaker 1: apprehend suspects like that lingo apprehend suspects, Um, do whatever
Speaker 1: that involves, right, collect evidence and then start picking up
Speaker 1: garbage and bottling up. Cut a bunch of nasty plants
Speaker 1: and stack those up and then going to like hazmat mode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: going to hasmatt mode and do a cleanup mode. And
Speaker 1: you know a lot of agencies that want to do that.
Speaker 1: And when he laughed, it was like that thing was
Speaker 1: never there to some extent, to some extent, and and
Speaker 1: you had to tear out irrigation tons of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the black pipe, even though that's not the biggest poisoning
Speaker 1: element out there with all the other stuff. Some of
Speaker 1: that pipe was running three miles to another county to
Speaker 1: get water for one grow, no exaggeration. We track win
Speaker 1: three miles one day. Is that all brought in on
Speaker 1: just people's backs. Yeah, this is a crazy thing, bro.
Speaker 1: They these guys, I will give them an a for effort.
Speaker 1: They are hard workers. They're the toughest guys. They're bringing
Speaker 1: in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of yards of this
Speaker 1: pipe on their backs, the running loads, hundred pound loads
Speaker 1: continuously to get all their growth, the big five gallon
Speaker 1: propane tanks, all the clones of marijuana, the seeds, the
Speaker 1: camping gear. And they can't just go park at the
Speaker 1: local trailhead. Oh no, No, they're gonna take crazy routes.
Speaker 1: They gotta take crazy routes, and a lot of them.
Speaker 1: Some of them are, you know, as close as three
Speaker 1: four yards from a five billion dollar home on the
Speaker 1: edge of the kid I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding,
Speaker 1: especially where we started, because a lot of that stuff,
Speaker 1: like haven't spent some time they are, a lot of
Speaker 1: that stuff is just like impenetrable. Yeah, like brush rush, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, coyote brush, and they go around here. Wouldn't fly,
Speaker 1: people would see it from so far away. But there
Speaker 1: it's like dnse it's dance. It's dance and deeply cut
Speaker 1: very much, very much. But they can get away with
Speaker 1: a too. You know, they could be to three hundred
Speaker 1: yards away from an affluent community in the Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: a kids science camp, we've had that, and then they
Speaker 1: can be eight miles into crazy hike into the back country,
Speaker 1: you know, almost above alpine level, didn't you guys. I
Speaker 1: think I feel like I saw this in your book
Speaker 1: that you guys found some growth sites on designated wilderness areas.
Speaker 1: We did. We did. We had a we had an
Speaker 1: issue with one of the coolest missions I've read. It
Speaker 1: was like a top five in my career and it
Speaker 1: was definitely one of the top couple. While I ran,
Speaker 1: I think that's prohibited on a federal wilderness area, right,
Speaker 1: I think, so you can't. You can't ride a bike.
Speaker 1: You definitely can't can't ride a bike. I don't think
Speaker 1: you grow cannabis and cans and you know, kill kill
Speaker 1: golden trout and stuff like that. But yeah, we did.
Speaker 1: We got in some wilderness areas and you know, we
Speaker 1: were finding this stuff on grows um. We did one
Speaker 1: thing over on the eastern Sierra California, and there's a
Speaker 1: species of a subspecies of rocky Mountain big horn sheep
Speaker 1: called the Sierra Nevada horn sheep. They're all up there
Speaker 1: in that lone Pine area, you know, below Mount Whitney,
Speaker 1: and there's not a lot of them. They're about six
Speaker 1: hundred at their at their peak population. And something. Our
Speaker 1: agency had put millions and millions of dollars into, you know,
Speaker 1: doing hands and then in Seen we had just an
Speaker 1: excessively heavy winner. So those glacier snow packs were you know,
Speaker 1: they they stayed up a lot longer, and the sheep
Speaker 1: were pushed really low while they were getting pushed into
Speaker 1: grow country. And these guys, these cartel guys were coming
Speaker 1: up from l A and coming up on the Eastern Sierra,
Speaker 1: getting in that real pristine golden trout wilderness, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of above above timber level, and they were putting
Speaker 1: grows at like nine thousand feet. And we're up there,
Speaker 1: you know, doing scouts and recons and we find grow
Speaker 1: sites and it's you know, I mean, what is on
Speaker 1: what's the value of a big horn sheep. That's only
Speaker 1: six hundred of them in the world, you know. And
Speaker 1: then there's black bears, and so we're finding black bears poisoned.
Speaker 1: We actually found a massive, beautiful seventeen year old ram,
Speaker 1: you know, just the sentinel of that species. Lion killed.
Speaker 1: But the only the reason he was lion killed was
Speaker 1: he had ingested some of those poisons. He was only
Speaker 1: a hundred yards from a grow he found and he
Speaker 1: adjested some of those poisons and just walked off and
Speaker 1: was in the process of dying. So he was an
Speaker 1: easy target for a cat. So the cat got him,
Speaker 1: which you know where you see at the you know,
Speaker 1: end of a sheep's life, of course, but that cat's
Speaker 1: probably poison it did to do. We never found that cat,
Speaker 1: but when we started to see that, um, we said, hey,
Speaker 1: there's no just raidingness and you know, chasing guys around
Speaker 1: and cutting plants. This crap needs to get out of here. Now.
Speaker 1: Their sheep all over in this area, and you know,
Speaker 1: they're even more sensitive than like, you know, threat endangered
Speaker 1: steelheaded trout. There's far less of them, so we're we're
Speaker 1: talking a great species, you know, and just in that
Speaker 1: part and people wouldn't think that would be in California,
Speaker 1: but that was a California species in one area. So
Speaker 1: I learned a lot more about a different species of sheep.
Speaker 1: It was super cool being a big game hunter. I
Speaker 1: was just blown away. And we we spent you know,
Speaker 1: se a part part of a good month and a
Speaker 1: half up there doing missions like that. It was cool.
Speaker 1: How do how do most of the sites get reported?
Speaker 1: Our people? Do people out recreating. Find them? Do you
Speaker 1: guys find them yourself? Do you find them from the air.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's a mixed bag. We we find a
Speaker 1: bunch from the air. Um, we can do a lot
Speaker 1: with Google Earth. You know. Now Google it's gotten good enough.
Speaker 1: Just like when I'm learning a hunting route on a
Speaker 1: on a on a big game hunt. We're looking around
Speaker 1: and we're looking at six months ago, six months now
Speaker 1: in a traditional area. And really if you find a
Speaker 1: south facing slope sometimes other facing slopes where there's a
Speaker 1: water source, you know, through the summer, one out of
Speaker 1: two times if we go do a scout and we
Speaker 1: don't know anything's out there, we don't see anything from
Speaker 1: the air, there hasn't been a tip. It's maybe not
Speaker 1: even a historical grow site that's had grows there in
Speaker 1: the past. We just go, Okay, this area has a good,
Speaker 1: you know, annual stream and it might be really really trickling,
Speaker 1: but it's enough to you know, fortify marijuana, and it's
Speaker 1: in the right area and it's remote and it's never
Speaker 1: really been hit. Let's go scout it. It's hunting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there it is exactly it was like to find it
Speaker 1: like this would be likely habitat not Yeah, one out
Speaker 1: of two times we will find a grow doing that.
Speaker 1: The guys that are in the game and it is
Speaker 1: I mean it's kind of fun. You're hunting it. You know,
Speaker 1: if you find it, you get you know, you get
Speaker 1: the Easter egg that day. You're like, oh, yeah, now
Speaker 1: we got a mission. But hunters, anglers hardcore you know,
Speaker 1: back country guys, hikers that get off the standard trail.
Speaker 1: You know, see man track signs off of a main
Speaker 1: hiking trail and wanted skill explore where does that go?
Speaker 1: Or they see that water you know that that semi
Speaker 1: annual blue line on the topo mapp or on their
Speaker 1: GPS screen and they go, you know, I just want
Speaker 1: to go check that out. I mean, I'd be hunting today.
Speaker 1: I'm scouting or putting a camera out on public land
Speaker 1: or whatever, um or whatever, and they're checking it out
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh, oh there's plants. Oh I hear.
Speaker 1: Oh that's a guy with an a K forty seven
Speaker 1: um tippy tolling out you know, weapon up and then
Speaker 1: calling us right away hopefully. So you mentioned, uh, there's
Speaker 1: some pictures in your book there are interesting just talking
Speaker 1: about man tracks. Do you guys found I know what
Speaker 1: you're gonna go to now. Yeah, you have like trail
Speaker 1: cam images of guys with carpet right strafed the booth,
Speaker 1: but also fake cattle tracks like a slip on cow print. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you strafed your boot. Yeah, so you can make like
Speaker 1: a cow print when you're going places you're not supposed
Speaker 1: to be. Yeah. And the funny part about that was
Speaker 1: we were getting duped for about a half a season.
Speaker 1: We were, you know, on a lot of public land
Speaker 1: like forest service lands, national forests. They're still catalyses, right,
Speaker 1: So these growers were realizing, hey, these you know, some
Speaker 1: of these teams are getting really good at finding our
Speaker 1: man tracks, even if we try to brush them. They
Speaker 1: know where you know, the water is, so they're kind
Speaker 1: of bisecting our tracks. So these guys would put those
Speaker 1: fake cow hoobs, you know, on the bottom of their feet,
Speaker 1: tie them off, go clumping around with the cattle, get
Speaker 1: up where the cattle are, then take them off, well,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple hundred yards into the dense stuff
Speaker 1: like you just mentioned, Steve, And then you know, we're
Speaker 1: looking around for man tracks, knowing there's a gross somewhere
Speaker 1: up there, and overseen his cattle tracks. And then we
Speaker 1: caught a guy and he had that in his backpack.
Speaker 1: When we are clever bastard, I'm like, I'll give him
Speaker 1: another a for effort. But yeah, and then the felt
Speaker 1: bottoms on the you know, on the feet, they're they're
Speaker 1: they're definitely dedicated and diligent at counter tracking and staying camouflage.
Speaker 1: These are hard to find. Um, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: not maver, They're not half they're not half assen it
Speaker 1: by no means in terms of people finding sites. Are
Speaker 1: there areas where there's such a presence that a place
Speaker 1: gets a reputation among local hunters and anglers or other
Speaker 1: users where it winds up being that the idea is
Speaker 1: that it's not a good place to hang out. That's happened,
Speaker 1: especially in California. What we call it, we call that
Speaker 1: a d t O traditional grow area and DTO is
Speaker 1: just short for drug trafficking organization. It's basically an official
Speaker 1: term that you see in the book that's you know,
Speaker 1: a law enforcement term for basically cartail groups a majority
Speaker 1: of any drug traffing organization referring to a cartel group
Speaker 1: mostly out of Mexico, UM and we do have those
Speaker 1: traditional areas, and these guys will go in, they'll set
Speaker 1: up a grow and they'll not be successful at it
Speaker 1: two or three years, and then it gets caught, you know,
Speaker 1: we busted or some agency does. And then they go
Speaker 1: another half mile up the canyon on the same water
Speaker 1: source and they put another grow in because they're smart
Speaker 1: enough to know that the resources we put into finding
Speaker 1: these and the fact that we don't find near all
Speaker 1: of them, and there's only so much money, there's only
Speaker 1: so many guys dedicated to doing this type of work
Speaker 1: with all the other law enforcement stuff we gotta do,
Speaker 1: and we set it before. On the game ward in
Speaker 1: front is one example. You know, there's lessen four game warders,
Speaker 1: an example that I just came from my old home
Speaker 1: state of California and less and there's twelve of us
Speaker 1: on my specialized tactical unit with two canines. And granted
Speaker 1: those teams are getting bigger, but I think of all
Speaker 1: the other impacts to poaching we got to do with
Speaker 1: the attraitional stuff, commercial wildlife sales, black market ivory, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you name it. The traditional poachers doing their thing. So
Speaker 1: these guys know by just doing the odds and playing
Speaker 1: the numbers. If their particular sector has ten or eleven
Speaker 1: grows out in the forest and they lose even eight
Speaker 1: of them, two or three them are gonna make them
Speaker 1: about thirty million dollars profit. And that gets to the
Speaker 1: attrition of, hey, if we put enough out there, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna get some of some of them are going
Speaker 1: to make it. Does I want to ask how valuable
Speaker 1: these are? Very? Yeah, they're They're valuable to the point
Speaker 1: where let's take an average growth site and this is
Speaker 1: this is the lower end of the average size save
Speaker 1: five thousand plants. You know, that's medium to medium small
Speaker 1: from what we were used to see. And I had
Speaker 1: some of the Silicon Valley foothills in northern California when
Speaker 1: we were statewide that you know, reached fifty thou plants
Speaker 1: and covered like two football fields and they were spread
Speaker 1: out over a mile. I mean crazy, But five thousand plants.
Speaker 1: It approximately two thousand dollars on the black market per
Speaker 1: pant plant. That's kind of conservative. And if you do
Speaker 1: all those zeros and multiply, you know, a five thousand
Speaker 1: plant grow is still up in the several millions of
Speaker 1: black market profits. If we don't interdict it. So not
Speaker 1: only is there a bunch of money involved, but our
Speaker 1: whole thing was, man, let's get this stuff, not let
Speaker 1: it get too big, because we don't want any of
Speaker 1: it harvested. And they dry it, they process it, they
Speaker 1: weigh it on scales. Actually in the grow site. They
Speaker 1: put in one pound bags and they take it into
Speaker 1: sea bag and it's ready for sale. They just gotta
Speaker 1: get it out of the woods, get it to their
Speaker 1: pickup car, get it to a distribution center, and then
Speaker 1: it's nationwide and we know it's all poison, carbo furience.
Speaker 1: It comes out ready to roll in their camps, very
Speaker 1: organized digital scales, you know, vacuum bags of one pound
Speaker 1: wrapping material. Um. It's ready to go and they hang it,
Speaker 1: they dry it, they trim it, um. They they're very efficient.
Speaker 1: It's like working away. It's like working away. It's like
Speaker 1: going into an indoor growth site and a dispensary, except
Speaker 1: it's you know, the bizarro version of that. It's nuts.
Speaker 1: I remember one time I was scouting for muskrats in
Speaker 1: Michigan one time and I was out cattail marsh and
Speaker 1: found a growth site that was it was all five
Speaker 1: gallon buckets. It was five gallon buckets laid out in
Speaker 1: a cattail marsh. I mean, you never like no one
Speaker 1: in a million years and find it if it wasn't
Speaker 1: for someone looking for muskrat hut. Yeah, you were going deep,
Speaker 1: man what I'm saying. But there's no one like camped
Speaker 1: out there but and looking at and and going through
Speaker 1: your book. I mean, it's like you guys can't take
Speaker 1: for granted people are living in tents and stuff, guarding, guarding,
Speaker 1: working Like a lot of these places have residents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's most of them. Do the big ones that get
Speaker 1: above ten thousand plants you can't like, and especially if
Speaker 1: they're way in to the back country. A grower crew
Speaker 1: can't like hike in all day and all night and
Speaker 1: tend it and water it and tend those plants before
Speaker 1: they start drying out or before they get impacted by
Speaker 1: animals or they gotta move for sunlight or whatever and
Speaker 1: then leave and then come back. They live in the
Speaker 1: site and these some of these complexes we've seen are
Speaker 1: so elaborate. I mean, you know, adobes cut into the
Speaker 1: side of hills and camouflage like little ho chi min tunnels,
Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot of make a lot of
Speaker 1: references to you know, had you know, some of my
Speaker 1: family veterans in the family and relatives, you know, Vietnam veterans.
Speaker 1: I'd show him pictures or videos and s somewhere or
Speaker 1: TV on this and see the pictures in the book,
Speaker 1: and go I thought I was back man on the
Speaker 1: you know, in order being on board this is crazy,
Speaker 1: And I go, yeah, and we we would literally walk
Speaker 1: five ft from this thing before we see something wrong
Speaker 1: in the brush on the wall and then it's dug
Speaker 1: out like a tunnel and it's you know, like a
Speaker 1: hooch that houses four guys. There's guns in it, there's
Speaker 1: a kitchen that's all hidden um processing areas. Like wild
Speaker 1: it's crazy, But explain the alluded this alluded to this earlier.
Speaker 1: Explain the like then, like the hell is the pungee
Speaker 1: pit four? I mean, who, like, how's that? That's not
Speaker 1: really gonna save your growth site? No? No? See, like
Speaker 1: so a game ward and falls in and gets like
Speaker 1: impaled on sharp sticks. I mean do they think that
Speaker 1: then everybody's just gonna leave and not come back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like it doesn't make any sense. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense other than you look at the
Speaker 1: mindset of the of the criminal you're dealing with it. Hey,
Speaker 1: someone's coming into my growth site and I don't want
Speaker 1: an animal, I don't want a person. I don't care
Speaker 1: what harm I do to them, but I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: anything i can harm them to such a level that
Speaker 1: I'm going to impede as much progress as they make
Speaker 1: in their element of what their mission is. So when
Speaker 1: we started to see pungee pits like and that picture
Speaker 1: was from a national park, that was that was you
Speaker 1: know Park National Park, Shasta County, And that was that
Speaker 1: was Brian Boyd, one of our premier canaine handler, and
Speaker 1: canine Phoebe, and a bunch of guys from Shaftsa County
Speaker 1: Sheriff's Office. Um, and that was when we had our
Speaker 1: full time team. So we were up there. We were
Speaker 1: all over the place and one of our point guys,
Speaker 1: a really good guy from Schafta County Sheriff's Office that
Speaker 1: we work with, almost stepped in that. And our canine Phoebe,
Speaker 1: because she's been trained to detect so many other sense
Speaker 1: our apprehension guru dog, she sniffed up on the band
Speaker 1: poisons and and alerted because that you know, that tarp
Speaker 1: was so camouflage, he was gonna walk right into it.
Speaker 1: And what they're doing on those pungee pits, like in
Speaker 1: Vietnam they used to, you know, the Vietcong would dig
Speaker 1: the pungee pit for our soul, human human exprement exactly.
Speaker 1: And then what these guys do is they take the
Speaker 1: band poise and they take the pink down. But but
Speaker 1: but they play that same game. Yeah, but track what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, where is the wind? There's no win. Where
Speaker 1: is the wind? And maiming or killing a person like that,
Speaker 1: it's just viciousness. There's no game because it's not like
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, we got him, now we'll continue to
Speaker 1: grow weed for ten years. Yeah, it's like, you know what,
Speaker 1: we hurt this guy, we slowed down his operation, We
Speaker 1: got a piece of him, and we're going to just
Speaker 1: move out. The other reason they put kind of bizarre
Speaker 1: because like, yeah, and the only other advantage they have
Speaker 1: is if you think of they put those pungee pits
Speaker 1: just like that the little bear trap with the tuna
Speaker 1: can or snares. They put him on the edge of
Speaker 1: the grow or on the edge of a camp. So
Speaker 1: if a team falls into that, they're not those guys
Speaker 1: are gonna lose the grow, but they're probably gonna get
Speaker 1: away because now we've got it, just went in and
Speaker 1: we formed a perimeter. We're looking for guns. We're not
Speaker 1: going to continue to assault that grow, and if we do,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be you know, several minutes, if not hours later.
Speaker 1: And what's gonna happen now is those guys have escaped
Speaker 1: trails and they they're good at what they do, and
Speaker 1: they get not gonna save the site, but you might
Speaker 1: they might buy you the time to go and and
Speaker 1: we like to catch him because as we know, they're
Speaker 1: so vetted, they're gonna get out of one grow and
Speaker 1: they're gonna be thrown in another one within a day.
Speaker 1: It's that, you know, it's like a journeyman moving around
Speaker 1: on a contracting job. Okay, you're not that needed here,
Speaker 1: but you know we need you twenty miles to the
Speaker 1: north on another one that we're doing. It's that same
Speaker 1: mindset model. Tell everyone about bringing dogs into this. I
Speaker 1: love it when you talk dogs. Man coming in the
Speaker 1: office and all your dogs. I get a little yellow
Speaker 1: lab that's retired as a companion canine. You know, she's nine.
Speaker 1: She was a companion canine with me at work for
Speaker 1: for six years and she wasn't gonna buy any cartel growers'
Speaker 1: gonna lick him to death, but she could sniff it out. Um.
Speaker 1: But I'm gonna talk about the dog development, which really
Speaker 1: started completely from scratch. So you know, you have you
Speaker 1: have law enforcement dogs that are working in cities, and
Speaker 1: they're working out of cars, and they're you know, they're
Speaker 1: very close to back up and doing traditional law enforcement
Speaker 1: canine stuff and those dogs are amazing save our lives
Speaker 1: all the time. And then you got war dogs. You
Speaker 1: know that My Seal Team buddies have worked around, you know,
Speaker 1: and they evolved that whole canine program. I mean relatively recently,
Speaker 1: even our military special forces guys. Um, it's been about
Speaker 1: a twenty year process. Especially the last ten years, it's
Speaker 1: really changed. We were the same way on met but
Speaker 1: we were having to take kind of a tell you
Speaker 1: what Matt means, Matt, I didn't even do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're the marijuana Enforcement team, and the Marijuan Enforcement Team
Speaker 1: was the official term of the tactical unit that we
Speaker 1: built a pilot program out and I hand picked all
Speaker 1: the right guys from across the state to do just that.
Speaker 1: We weren't doing traditional work anymore, of the hunting, the fishing,
Speaker 1: you know, the traditional coaching stuff we're um chief might
Speaker 1: carry on. Was so you know, uh concerned with this issue,
Speaker 1: and he believed in us enough to say, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take some heat on this politically, and it's not
Speaker 1: you know, might be met a little weird in inter
Speaker 1: outer agency, but I want to test it. So you
Speaker 1: guys build it and we'll do three months in summer.
Speaker 1: I'll get to the dogs. But this this is relevant
Speaker 1: if you bear with me. And in six weeks into
Speaker 1: this thing, since we weren't just at Hawk, all over
Speaker 1: the state hodgepodge in it with different agencies, suddenly that
Speaker 1: we the training was better. You know, I got better
Speaker 1: equipment for the guys. We were all becoming a cohesive
Speaker 1: unit like any small unit in special ops does. UM.
Speaker 1: We got the support and the funding to go out
Speaker 1: and be boundary lists so we didn't have to worry about,
Speaker 1: oh now I'm into Northern California boundary. It's not my district.
Speaker 1: I can't go into this. You know, this Captain's territory.
Speaker 1: Now we were just working four headquarters for the chief
Speaker 1: and going anywhere we needed to, just like a small
Speaker 1: unit should be, you know. And in six weeks we
Speaker 1: were documenting everything. We're far safer, We're catching a bunch
Speaker 1: more guys. Our dogs were tearing it up. We had
Speaker 1: two great dogs, and we thought were just running out
Speaker 1: of money, and myself and uh, the captain that co
Speaker 1: founded the team with me, we're meeting with all the
Speaker 1: chiefs to like beg for money and can we keep going.
Speaker 1: We want to prove ourselves by the end of summer,
Speaker 1: and they said, hey, we've been talking before you guys
Speaker 1: got here. We're done with that. We need this full
Speaker 1: time by January one, So build it. Get the testing protocol.
Speaker 1: It's open to everybody, but obviously we have some vetted
Speaker 1: guys that are really good at it. Test them objectively,
Speaker 1: and we had to basically build the first special operations
Speaker 1: force in fish and wildlife in our hunter to your history.
Speaker 1: Test the guys and know, hey, you're leaving patrol. You
Speaker 1: know it's one way and if if it succeeds, you're great.
Speaker 1: If this thing fails, well you're gonna go back to patrol.
Speaker 1: But it's going to be different. You know, I don't
Speaker 1: know how welcome you're gonna be. And um, we just
Speaker 1: hit the ground running from until I retired. Now it's
Speaker 1: running great, And it was just it was amazing how
Speaker 1: much stuff we were not documenting, how much poisons we
Speaker 1: were taking out that wasn't getting logged to know the amount,
Speaker 1: how much hundreds of miles of black polly pipe. Steve guys,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm when I retired. I mean, you weren't
Speaker 1: you weren't you weren't cataloging You're not enough? Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I mean everybody, everybody was doing a little different because
Speaker 1: like like Brian Boyd with Canine Phoebe, he'd be working
Speaker 1: with Shasta all the time, apprehending a bunch of guys
Speaker 1: with you know, with that team, tearing a bunch of plants,
Speaker 1: taking a bunch of poisons out, but nobody was doing
Speaker 1: the documentation that was getting back to us. And then
Speaker 1: I was doing my thing with Santa Clair County Sheriff's
Speaker 1: Office and I was, you know, honing tactics with them,
Speaker 1: and we were developing things without dogs at that time,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't documented anything. I was along for their
Speaker 1: ride because we weren't running missions. So when we started
Speaker 1: as a full time team, we were running missions, we
Speaker 1: were equals if we were using other agencies or being
Speaker 1: with them and are Our different approach was we're three
Speaker 1: pronged team. Okay, Met's gonna arrest and apprehend, you know,
Speaker 1: as aggressively as we can safely with dogs without dogs.
Speaker 1: We're gonna hunt these guys. We're not going to just
Speaker 1: go in and fly the helicopter in and drop in
Speaker 1: scarum away and cut plants. Secondly, we're gonna cut plants
Speaker 1: safely if we can. Now we're aware of the poisons.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we couldn't cut them because they're too toxically tainted.
Speaker 1: They need like fourteen days just to like dissipate a
Speaker 1: little before we can go in with the nitro gloves,
Speaker 1: the face masks, the proper protection equipment to even touch
Speaker 1: this stuff, so we don't contaminate everything. So we take
Speaker 1: the plants out. That's phase two. But phase three that
Speaker 1: we would push on any agency we would help on
Speaker 1: a mission, if Met was going to be involved, if
Speaker 1: I was going to send my guys there is you
Speaker 1: guys gotta help us reclammate. You gotta help us clean
Speaker 1: up the damages, restore the waterways. I want the wildlife
Speaker 1: content to be pristine when we leave. And if we
Speaker 1: can't do it that day, get it on the books
Speaker 1: to do it in the in the near future. Or
Speaker 1: if we don't have a helicopter that day to pull
Speaker 1: it all out, Steve, then what we're gonna do. We're
Speaker 1: gonna bag it in really really heavy contractor bags. Get
Speaker 1: it in an area where it can of road into
Speaker 1: the stream, you know, through a year, through a winter
Speaker 1: with all that fishery and all those wildlife drinking off
Speaker 1: those water sources, and we'll come back with a chopper.
Speaker 1: You guys even came back with mules. We came back
Speaker 1: with mules. Yeah, we had some wilderness areas or we
Speaker 1: didn't have a blade, you know. We Funding was always
Speaker 1: an issue because the most expensive part about these missions
Speaker 1: is a cleanup. So it gets to Horsemen's expensive, very
Speaker 1: expensive because of man manpower, equipment, manpower and equipment, you know,
Speaker 1: and you need a helicopter to pull this stuff out,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times you need a lot of
Speaker 1: blade time because if it's a big grow, you're gonna
Speaker 1: have you know, ten eleven, twelve, sometimes twenty loads of
Speaker 1: six pound loads of a net and you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to fly it to you know, a disposal area, you're
Speaker 1: gonna have to come back. So it's a big cost
Speaker 1: and a big cost that we're constantly reaching out to,
Speaker 1: you know, conservation friends to help us out um foundations,
Speaker 1: UM that we we have, Uh, well you go get
Speaker 1: outside of money to do cleanups, we have to, huh.
Speaker 1: One of the one of the groups that we've been
Speaker 1: working with, there's a really good group called the California
Speaker 1: um Wildlife Offers Foundation, And it's like you know, ex
Speaker 1: chiefs and you know, affluent donors that are conservation patriotically
Speaker 1: oriented and they formed a foundation about ten years ago
Speaker 1: and just bring money in for the oh crap moments
Speaker 1: like you know, we lose a canine to death and
Speaker 1: you know, a canine and all the training that goes
Speaker 1: into a canine, I mean, that's that's at endeavor. And
Speaker 1: then the tactical gear our team needed, night vision, you know,
Speaker 1: battle helmets. I mean I built a sniper team that
Speaker 1: had never been built before. So you know, you start
Speaker 1: getting into weapons like that besides normal patrol weapons, and
Speaker 1: there's no budget for it, and it's already unconventional anyway.
Speaker 1: We had to get outside sources to fund that, and
Speaker 1: we had a lot of good help on the canine front,
Speaker 1: especially with our new dogs and keeping our dogs safe
Speaker 1: and that equipment we needed um from our Wildlife Officers
Speaker 1: Foundation to good effect in some other places too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So get into the dog like how you use the dogs.
Speaker 1: It's pretty interesting the dogs. It is risky for the
Speaker 1: dog on a couple levels. And and as you probably
Speaker 1: notice from the book, we've we've honed tactics a little
Speaker 1: bit because our dogs are starting to get hurt because
Speaker 1: these guys, these cartel growers, are aware of what our
Speaker 1: dogs can do. Um. The dogs are trained to be
Speaker 1: as quiet as they can go in with us. Um.
Speaker 1: If we see that they have a weapon and they're
Speaker 1: pulling that weapon, we're going to deploy a dog. We're
Speaker 1: not going to try to take that guy head on
Speaker 1: and get into a gun fight if we can avoid it. Um.
Speaker 1: We had had I think we had about four gun
Speaker 1: fights up until we really got the dogs honed, and
Speaker 1: they were happening more and more frequently because a lot
Speaker 1: of times, not every time, fortunately, but a lot of
Speaker 1: times these guys don't want to give up, even if
Speaker 1: they have a whole tactical unit of highly trained officers
Speaker 1: on them with big weaponry. So they're keeping their shotgun up,
Speaker 1: they're pulling that pistol, and then we have to we
Speaker 1: have to do what we gotta do to stay safe
Speaker 1: and you know, solve the problem. Um. But it was
Speaker 1: always close calls, close calls, close calls. In two thousand
Speaker 1: five in the Silicon Valley foothills and August fifth, the
Speaker 1: two thousand five a date you know, burned in Forever.
Speaker 1: That was the first officer involve shooting we had in
Speaker 1: a cartel grow site, and it was the first officer
Speaker 1: in the nation that had ever been hurt or hit
Speaker 1: by one of these growers. It happened to be my
Speaker 1: young game ward and partner that I had not only
Speaker 1: trained in the academy, but he had come on to
Speaker 1: be a partner in my squad in Santa Clara County
Speaker 1: and one of the best game wardens we've ever had.
Speaker 1: Great guy, and he wanted to go on a raid
Speaker 1: and I'm like, absolutely, I'm working with the Sheriff's office.
Speaker 1: This was the pre met days, right, this is going
Speaker 1: way back, and we're hiking up in there, and it
Speaker 1: was harvest time and it was an area they've been
Speaker 1: going eight to ten years a growers from working in
Speaker 1: a remote area of public land right above the Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: the tech capital there, and um, the guys were the
Speaker 1: growers were there and they had armed gunmen just defending
Speaker 1: the grow during harvest time. I mean hardened cartel guys
Speaker 1: from down south in full camo s kss a k
Speaker 1: S pistols where all the patron st monikers on their
Speaker 1: hats and belt buckles and and and tactically they were
Speaker 1: set up right in the site. You know, they used
Speaker 1: the early morning light to their advantage. They had a
Speaker 1: little dugout parapet that they could kind of hide behind
Speaker 1: a brush wall. And you know, we're looking, we're scanning,
Speaker 1: we're doing everything we can. We're going through this grow site.
Speaker 1: And we hear one shot ring out and they only
Speaker 1: got one shot off, fortunately because we all reacted the
Speaker 1: way we needed to before the gunfight got any further.
Speaker 1: But sadly, that one shot hit my partner through both
Speaker 1: of his legs. So he was hit with an AK
Speaker 1: forty seven round through his right leg and then it
Speaker 1: exited his left leg. So he was bleeding out of
Speaker 1: four holes for the better part of three hours. And
Speaker 1: because no agency had ever been attacked like that from
Speaker 1: these guys, air support wasn't really coordinated with their administration.
Speaker 1: No one knew who would come and help us because
Speaker 1: he couldn't hike out, so we needed helicopter lift. Some
Speaker 1: helicopter teams wouldn't come in because they said, hey, that's
Speaker 1: a hot zone. Man, We're not a military bird, you know,
Speaker 1: We're like, we're we're we're a fire you know, we're
Speaker 1: a califire reputed and we're a hue and you know,
Speaker 1: if that's not a secure site and you just guys
Speaker 1: saw it, he's gonna shoot us out of the air.
Speaker 1: We're gonna more casualties, which made sense. But my partner brother,
Speaker 1: you know, is bleeding out to death and he's fighting
Speaker 1: three hours and he's fighting shock, and he was all
Speaker 1: all all fight, you know, he wasn't gonna quit um.
Speaker 1: And and it was his it was his will to
Speaker 1: survive and his will to stay in the game that
Speaker 1: really kept him alive. But we realized that day when
Speaker 1: he got here, rescued and finally made it out as
Speaker 1: he was going into shock um and survived and recovered
Speaker 1: and actually is a lieutenant now in California doing great work,
Speaker 1: Thank heaven. Um. You know, just just we we really
Speaker 1: looked out on that one, or we probably wouldn't be
Speaker 1: having this conversation. I don't know that we would have
Speaker 1: continued to do this work. Like you said, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? Um that right, and then told me there's
Speaker 1: got to be a better way to detect these guys,
Speaker 1: you know, and um, certainly we can go face to face.
Speaker 1: We can do that. And that was right before literally
Speaker 1: like a couple of months before we started doing an
Speaker 1: apprehension Canaine program. And that was before Brian Boyd Warren,
Speaker 1: buddy of mine and a longtime teammate who I brought
Speaker 1: into met when we started. That's when him and Knaine
Speaker 1: Phoebe were made it up when she was just about
Speaker 1: a year and a half old and they had to
Speaker 1: kind of trial and error these apprehension tactics are going
Speaker 1: in and keeping her quiet and you know, it's hot,
Speaker 1: we're going on long hikes, and then how do you
Speaker 1: identify a bad guy not on an open field and
Speaker 1: a concrete parking letter, in an alley or in a
Speaker 1: building right or near a car, but through all that
Speaker 1: brush and you said it before, Steve, how choked up
Speaker 1: that terrain gets. That's of our missions. So you guys,
Speaker 1: what we're dealing with is we're going in and she's
Speaker 1: got to see what that target is. We'll usually see
Speaker 1: the gun we're hiding, we're landing in wait, just typical
Speaker 1: hunting situation. And then um, when we go to make
Speaker 1: that announcement, we gotta get close enough that we don't
Speaker 1: lose our suspect. And we got to deploy her knowing
Speaker 1: that we got to get on that dog quickly because
Speaker 1: if he pulls a gun or a knife or anything
Speaker 1: on the dog, the dog is gonna get hurt, or
Speaker 1: we're gonna get shot at. Or you're creeping. You like
Speaker 1: creep up on the people. We creep up on the people.
Speaker 1: We spent something We have literally spent five hours moving
Speaker 1: twenty yards and watching them and just like hear him
Speaker 1: talking working, you're here talking working or their process and
Speaker 1: or they aren't quite up out of camp and you
Speaker 1: know you don't want to, you know, break cover for safety,
Speaker 1: just just things that you naturally got to do. And
Speaker 1: there's been a lot. How tight do you like to
Speaker 1: get for you spring the trap, you know, you know, buddy.
Speaker 1: It all depends guys on on on venue. It all depends.
Speaker 1: One time you guys, you guys were looking through their
Speaker 1: tent window. Yeah, yeah, one time. I mean literally, it's
Speaker 1: been good morning, not coffee I'm delivering, you know, and
Speaker 1: you're just right there. And sometimes it's been open field.
Speaker 1: You're in some sort of meadow, there's a processing area,
Speaker 1: and you know that they're getting Nancy, the dogs getting Nancy.
Speaker 1: And sometimes it's you know, fifty yards. Well it needs
Speaker 1: to be close, It really needs to be close because
Speaker 1: they have the advantage. I mean, they know their terrain.
Speaker 1: They have escaped trails, they walk it morning, noon and night.
Speaker 1: They know every sound. They know where the animal bird
Speaker 1: sounds are. They know when something makes us sound like
Speaker 1: you know from a good hunt, that that you know,
Speaker 1: that blue jay, that that stellar j that just burns
Speaker 1: us down, you know, or it's a raven here in Montana,
Speaker 1: a pine square or something like, oh man on that
Speaker 1: white tail and it goes a little sucker, same thing.
Speaker 1: They know every sound. And so nine times out of ten,
Speaker 1: if a team isn't really honed at taking their time
Speaker 1: and taking a long, slow, tactical stock in they're burned
Speaker 1: before they even get to the grow a gig to grow,
Speaker 1: and you know there's a pot of food cooking, there's tracks.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't see guns usually take them with them,
Speaker 1: but that's all they take. And so it took a
Speaker 1: lot of years to go, okay, how are we This
Speaker 1: is a real this is a very formal labissary to catch.
Speaker 1: And then the challenge came up like a hunt of
Speaker 1: a you know, real nice animal. You're spending your lifetime
Speaker 1: going after um and and that experience, and so we
Speaker 1: would get a little more honed. Okay, well that was
Speaker 1: a little too far to deploy the dog, or a
Speaker 1: little too far to make an announcement and announce and
Speaker 1: you know from cover and now we're gonna that was
Speaker 1: a little too close because you know, we got him
Speaker 1: before he got us, but it was you know, kind
Speaker 1: of oh crap distance. So it just veries a little
Speaker 1: bits close. And so the dog mostly just goes in
Speaker 1: to take down the guy that like, that's his main job.
Speaker 1: That's one of the two primaries. And that's I'm glad
Speaker 1: you brought that up because I would not I would
Speaker 1: have forgot to cover that. But the other thing is
Speaker 1: our apprehension do ugs you know are honestly some of
Speaker 1: the some of the finest. And we have our other
Speaker 1: agencies now local agency sheriff's departments and um, federal agencies
Speaker 1: that have incredible dogs that we work with. The whole
Speaker 1: dog thing is really kind of morphed, especially the last decade.
Speaker 1: But um, they're not just going in there to apprehend,
Speaker 1: They're going in to smell. Because like Phoebe is an example,
Speaker 1: is a great detection dog as much as she was
Speaker 1: an apprehension dog. Detection of what, detection of marijuana, detection
Speaker 1: of how they smell being in the woods that long,
Speaker 1: and the food they eat, they have a distinct smell
Speaker 1: because they don't growers. The growers exactly, Um, the band poisons.
Speaker 1: We can train our dogs to pick up that scent
Speaker 1: of that poison that we can't touch. I mean you're
Speaker 1: talking forty four thousand times on that nose of that
Speaker 1: pub and so um, you know. Traditionally, our our apprehension
Speaker 1: dogs are detection dogs are trained to sniff abalone, black
Speaker 1: bear gun cartridges, powder, Yeah, for poached animals or a
Speaker 1: guy that you know, you guys have abalone dogs. We
Speaker 1: got abalone dogs because we're around the California coastline and
Speaker 1: commercial abalone deal. You know. So Phoebe was every bit
Speaker 1: of good. And Phoebe got really amazing at detecting the
Speaker 1: girls we get in and detecting men from tracks on
Speaker 1: the ground or their smell. And then she starts, you know,
Speaker 1: she starts squirling up sheets. She gets Birdie. That's it.
Speaker 1: She's Birdie big time, and she you know, it took
Speaker 1: her a couple of years to calm down. There were
Speaker 1: a lot of missed apprehensions because she's running through brush.
Speaker 1: One bad guy runs a partner next to hers, and
Speaker 1: camouflage were face painted. We all look the same, and
Speaker 1: she's like, overload, who's the bad guy? You know? And
Speaker 1: then miss missed the apprehension. But let me say apprehension
Speaker 1: me the dog. The dog is catching the person. The
Speaker 1: dogs catching the person. And not to sugarcoat it. When
Speaker 1: they go to guns, I mean it's deadly forced. Now
Speaker 1: that dog is biting them with all the force that
Speaker 1: dog can bite them on, not leafalley, but putting enough
Speaker 1: pain compliance on them, whether they bite him in the thigh,
Speaker 1: the calf, the shoulder, the forearm. Canines. Different canines are
Speaker 1: wire different to buy different parts. I understand the legality
Speaker 1: on that, absolutely, No. Yeah, so the dog knows. The
Speaker 1: dog doesn't attack until unless it sees a gun. The
Speaker 1: dog is does attack until we give the command and
Speaker 1: release the dog to do so, gun or not. So
Speaker 1: the dog is just running like if it encounters a backpacker,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna maul the back now, No, not at all.
Speaker 1: And that's all. That's what I was trying to figure out, Like,
Speaker 1: how do you avoid just it whatever, loose on something stranger.
Speaker 1: It doesn't do it until you're like they're that individual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I'm glad you brought that up because I always
Speaker 1: look at it from our you know, you said use
Speaker 1: of force and policy types things, you know, and from
Speaker 1: the layman, one of this dog just sees a gun
Speaker 1: and goes man, how does that work? You know? And
Speaker 1: but from this standpoint, about two three years in, Phoebe
Speaker 1: started to become the dog and we knew we had
Speaker 1: a you know, that special dog. And we all have
Speaker 1: great dogs, but we've all had that or heard about
Speaker 1: that one in a million dog, right, that hunting dog,
Speaker 1: whether it's a waterfowl dog and mpland dog. Phoebe was
Speaker 1: that dog. And I'm gonna get into my other our
Speaker 1: other dogs here in a minute, but I'm gonna talk
Speaker 1: about Phoebe because she's not only legendary from saving lives
Speaker 1: and putting up great numbers. She was as socialist my
Speaker 1: yellow labs. She never been an officer. Um. She was
Speaker 1: the kind of canine, no exaggeration. Guys, we're doing a
Speaker 1: briefing three in the morning. We're under headlamps. We're with
Speaker 1: our group of met guys. We might have other agencies, Feds,
Speaker 1: county guys. We might have thirty guys there, and everybody
Speaker 1: looks kind of the same. And plus it's dark and
Speaker 1: we're all in the battle gear and plate carries and
Speaker 1: rifles and face paint. She would go around Brian. We
Speaker 1: do a briefing, you know, we brief everybody, our guys
Speaker 1: on the canines. We know him. We're trained to handle
Speaker 1: the canines with our handlers in case he gets tied
Speaker 1: up or hurt. But we have to tell everybody a
Speaker 1: brief that we're working with. Hey, this is my dog,
Speaker 1: this is her name. This is the command you give
Speaker 1: if you know she's on the bike and I'm disabled
Speaker 1: or you know in you know sidebard or whatever and
Speaker 1: I gotta get the dog off or needs to protect
Speaker 1: me or whatever. The com I can't say. I can't
Speaker 1: give that. I can't give that away. Is it a word? Word,
Speaker 1: it's a word, but I'll say it off the air. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So anyway, she um, and you can yell a word,
Speaker 1: scream it, yell it, whisper it. She got that good.
Speaker 1: Not all dogs are that. They get kind of wired up.
Speaker 1: But what she would do is, guys, she would go
Speaker 1: around and hip check every officer. Look you're right in
Speaker 1: the eye. Wait till you petitor, look you I I
Speaker 1: and kind of like I got you today, I know
Speaker 1: you now. And she would do it in a big
Speaker 1: circle every time she did it to me, and I
Speaker 1: knew her. She was like a family dog. She'd come
Speaker 1: and hang out with my dog before missions. And so
Speaker 1: in all the chaos, all the cacophony and all the
Speaker 1: drama when it goes down and it just it gets
Speaker 1: crazy out there. If it's multiple multiple cartel guys and
Speaker 1: multiple guns were splitting the team up and we're in
Speaker 1: different camps. Um, she never been about you know, I've
Speaker 1: never been a good guy. And one of those things
Speaker 1: that if she got a little confused, we just point
Speaker 1: the weapon in the direction where she got to go
Speaker 1: and she's like, all right, I got it, and she
Speaker 1: just keeps going. And by the time um, she semi
Speaker 1: retired in ten, she had a hundred sixteen bite apprehensions
Speaker 1: on armed gunmen and she had nine hundred more arrests
Speaker 1: where she bade him and didn't have to bite because arrests. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so almost a thousand if you look at one tenth
Speaker 1: of those being actual bites. And so see how many
Speaker 1: hundred sixteen bites and sixteen bite apprehensions and nine hundred
Speaker 1: apprehensions where she just got up to them but they
Speaker 1: gave up so they didn't get a bite because they
Speaker 1: didn't want any part of that. But when also they
Speaker 1: get volved, the dog doesn't attack, right, it would no
Speaker 1: longer threat. You know he's in custody if he puts
Speaker 1: the gun down and says, hey, I don't want you
Speaker 1: know a lot of them, Okay, So it's not a
Speaker 1: given that you're gonna get absolutely not. No, no, see,
Speaker 1: we were only gonna let that dog that's like keep
Speaker 1: being curious about like you're like toll on it, but
Speaker 1: like keepe, curious about how like how this is received
Speaker 1: by administrators the public. What I was like, Okay, you
Speaker 1: got some dogs and it seems pretty sophisticated dogs. They're
Speaker 1: very sophisticated dogs. They're highly trained. I mean you look
Speaker 1: at the way we train our dogs, the way say
Speaker 1: it's Seal Team buddies of ours train their dogs, and
Speaker 1: how they're you know, designed, and how their the mission
Speaker 1: is a little different, but the level of training, the
Speaker 1: level of control, the level of restraint or the level
Speaker 1: of aggression that needs to be executed when it does,
Speaker 1: it's the same. We use the same type of dogs
Speaker 1: that are special forces do for a reason because what
Speaker 1: you just said, Steve, is policy on how much force
Speaker 1: can you use. And when you come from a state
Speaker 1: like California, not only California, but I mean canine at
Speaker 1: hensons are scrutinized stay in the world, right, you know,
Speaker 1: chill it really like what dogs are biting people? Why
Speaker 1: would you ever have to bite somebody with a dog?
Speaker 1: So um, But to get to that point, yeah, we
Speaker 1: we we stay right within the you know, only use
Speaker 1: the force we need. And it's not only us with
Speaker 1: our weapons. It's dogs too. But what I can say,
Speaker 1: and all those bites she made, and I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know if any other dog that has ever come
Speaker 1: close to those those numbers. And that's not a dig,
Speaker 1: but she prevented so many gun fights when we had
Speaker 1: her on the team permanently once we started in um
Speaker 1: with all the crazy missions we had when the team
Speaker 1: was developed, over the five years I was there with
Speaker 1: it running it, she prevented at least forty gun fights
Speaker 1: no exaggeration, twenty of which two of them. That's well.
Speaker 1: The third chapter of Hidden War, as you notice, went
Speaker 1: into that where we weren't a team yet. It was
Speaker 1: a year before we had our full time team. But
Speaker 1: I was able to bring Brian and Phoebe down to
Speaker 1: Santa Clara County with my Sheriff's partners, and we had
Speaker 1: two armed guys coming right at us once pulling a
Speaker 1: tarist judge. Brian's like, John, I got this guy take
Speaker 1: my dog. And so Phoebe's biting another guy that's pulling
Speaker 1: another gun, and I'm like, I guess I'm dealing with
Speaker 1: the dog now because I was his covered in his
Speaker 1: canine support that day. So I'm dealing with the dog.
Speaker 1: But that guy that had that gun, it was a
Speaker 1: Russian torqu croft pistol, and Phoebe had him bit and
Speaker 1: was putting bite pressure on his back calf, and he
Speaker 1: was laying on his belly, and she was putting enough
Speaker 1: pressure on him that he couldn't just pull the gun
Speaker 1: out real quick and start shooting me and my rifle cover.
Speaker 1: He was struggling and under pain, and he got it
Speaker 1: to write about here when I dove on his back,
Speaker 1: and had she not been there, I would have had
Speaker 1: to engage that guy. He would have engaged me or
Speaker 1: three guys behind me, and several of us would have
Speaker 1: been hurt. And then that's when the light bulb went off.
Speaker 1: I went, I've worked with you a lot of times
Speaker 1: with Phoebe all through some Wild Justice filming when we
Speaker 1: did the Nagio thing, and we would work together and
Speaker 1: not catch anybody, and then we'd go apart with the
Speaker 1: film crews and catch other people. But I had never
Speaker 1: seen Phoebe actually doing apprehension, even though I knew how
Speaker 1: cool she was and how awesome Brian was as a handler.
Speaker 1: In that symbiotic canine handler relationship they had developed, and
Speaker 1: when that when it was my life and my guys,
Speaker 1: and it got so crazy and I was this close
Speaker 1: to getting in another one and having to shoot myself
Speaker 1: since the first gun fight No. Five, when when Kyle
Speaker 1: was shot, I was like, we need this all the time.
Speaker 1: When we're doing this job with these cartel growers, we
Speaker 1: need this all the time. We can't be We're gonna
Speaker 1: do it, but we have one dog that's doing this statewide,
Speaker 1: and we're doing it in four different parts of the state,
Speaker 1: and Phoebe's tied up in Shasta and now we're gonna
Speaker 1: go just rogue it on foot. And we had some
Speaker 1: other gunfights we could not get out of because we
Speaker 1: didn't have a dog on several missions. And so when
Speaker 1: we got the full time team and how we built it,
Speaker 1: it was a godsend, guys, no exaggeration, because I had
Speaker 1: moose dogs get shot. We've had we haven't had one
Speaker 1: shot that I know of, but we've had them stabbed fatally.
Speaker 1: What started to happen and I go into this a
Speaker 1: little bit, as you remember in the book, and I
Speaker 1: have a couple of pictures where you got one dog
Speaker 1: got stabbed but then recovered right. But recovered, and that
Speaker 1: was one that did recover that got stabbed, But there
Speaker 1: are several that didn't recover, and they weren't with our agency.
Speaker 1: There were with other agencies. But um, we all kind
Speaker 1: of took a big breath and went, Okay, is there
Speaker 1: any way we could have prevented that? Is there anything
Speaker 1: we could have done to change or cane I and tactics,
Speaker 1: and you know, they become I mean, we're all dog
Speaker 1: people here in the room, man. There there there are
Speaker 1: family and they go home with us. They're not just
Speaker 1: work dogs. We have them as pets from the start
Speaker 1: in canines. We retire with them. And so you know
Speaker 1: when some of our are our allied agency brothers on
Speaker 1: the federal level, we're losing dogs because these cartel guys
Speaker 1: were starting to realize, Hey, if that dog's really far
Speaker 1: away from the officers and I'm not pulling guns, and
Speaker 1: I suck in that dog and I take the bite,
Speaker 1: but I got a fixed blade of eight to ten
Speaker 1: inches on my hip, and I can stab for that
Speaker 1: jugular up in front of those ribs. I can take
Speaker 1: this dog out because I know this dog has shut down.
Speaker 1: About thirty of my partners grows and that team would
Speaker 1: not have been as good maybe or in their mind
Speaker 1: of catching so many guys and really apprehending our main
Speaker 1: guy or a couple of guys in that grow and
Speaker 1: not only shutting it down, but putting these guys in
Speaker 1: jail and putting the hurt on them and when they
Speaker 1: would be in that violent and so if we take
Speaker 1: their dogs, we're gonna slow these guys down and make
Speaker 1: them less effective. They they're not done that way. UM,
Speaker 1: so we we hone some things and none of our dogs.
Speaker 1: Um we're stabbed fatally, but I mean being she She
Speaker 1: passed away sadly last year at thirteen years old, and
Speaker 1: um it was a leukemia. Um. She had been semi
Speaker 1: retired even though she was checked out as a seven
Speaker 1: year old dog healthwise by the ved at like twelve,
Speaker 1: she was still actually technically deployable. You know, our administrators rightfully,
Speaker 1: so are our canine program leads, and and even myself
Speaker 1: and Brian and all of our other guys on the
Speaker 1: team were like, you know, she has had a historical career. Man,
Speaker 1: let's if we can get another dog up in her place.
Speaker 1: That she's getting up there. She's like battling the odds
Speaker 1: of age. You know, it's not common for a twelve
Speaker 1: year old Belgium mall to be out apprehending guy's hardcore
Speaker 1: still they're usually done, but she was doing it. So
Speaker 1: we pulled her and we developed the new dog, which
Speaker 1: is Brian's current dog, a male, a little bigger than Phoebe.
Speaker 1: He's doing great work. What's one of those dogs way?
Speaker 1: You know somewhere the real lightweight little little missiles we
Speaker 1: call them a little female missiles and males maybe fifty
Speaker 1: five pounds sixty pounds max. And then the big ones.
Speaker 1: You know, so a fifty pound dog can take a
Speaker 1: person down. Puts crazy. We got we got a little
Speaker 1: lightweight one work and a that um, just a straight
Speaker 1: firm missile. Man, I'm no joke. You guys are think
Speaker 1: about training up some mountain lions if we could do
Speaker 1: what we would, man, that's a good idea. Hey, our
Speaker 1: people are people in your community? Um, are they miffed
Speaker 1: that that you do? You feel that you that you
Speaker 1: revealed too much about how your guys, how you guys
Speaker 1: like to operate by writing a book about it, you know,
Speaker 1: not so much. It's been one of those things where
Speaker 1: we balance it, you know, and our agency, and I
Speaker 1: was one of not the only, but one of a few.
Speaker 1: You know that we're kind of targeted by. I'll go
Speaker 1: back to Wild Justice and the TV thing because that
Speaker 1: was a big exposure. Ever, even outside of the book, Um,
Speaker 1: the thing for me was, you know, it wasn't about
Speaker 1: you know, showboating anything game wardens do, or what I
Speaker 1: was doing or what my guys was doing. It was
Speaker 1: I've been dyed in the Little Leven Wildlife wild lands
Speaker 1: and waterway since I was a kid. And when I
Speaker 1: saw the destruction, man, it broke my heart. And when
Speaker 1: I saw this car, healthing happened. And I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, we can take the easy path, in the
Speaker 1: safer path, maybe go do the fishing license compliance stuff,
Speaker 1: or we can dive into this. But here's a problem.
Speaker 1: No one knows this that's going on. We're not going
Speaker 1: to fight it alone. I don't care for the most
Speaker 1: whiz bang tactical, high speed low drag seal Team six
Speaker 1: slack team doing our thing. We're gonna w one tiny
Speaker 1: little dance in this issue in one part of California.
Speaker 1: This is going on nationally and I'm like, and I
Speaker 1: keep hearing the same thing over and over again, over
Speaker 1: and over again. Hey, nobody knows. Nobody knows other law
Speaker 1: enforcement teams that are coming up in other states and
Speaker 1: even in our own state having the same challenge, and
Speaker 1: they're like, can you train us? Can You'm given presentations
Speaker 1: on the shootouts we were in one where my partner
Speaker 1: was shot. We have a whole debrief presentation. I do
Speaker 1: PowerPoint radio tapes for l groups all over the country.
Speaker 1: So all the mistakes we made and almost got shot
Speaker 1: and killed. I don't want to see that happen in
Speaker 1: any of my brothers are like, we're talking about that
Speaker 1: story you have where you had a guy that was
Speaker 1: down for three hours, right, yeah, you know, or all
Speaker 1: of us in the room being out and you guys
Speaker 1: get hurt. I get hurt hunting, you know, off duty
Speaker 1: doing my thing because I'm out there, you know, with
Speaker 1: just my family. Um so we we we waghed do
Speaker 1: we talk about or do we not talk about it?
Speaker 1: And one thing I do in the book and we
Speaker 1: did on TV two we give away stuff that isn't
Speaker 1: really super secret. I mean, if you really dig deep,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find it. It's pretty common stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't talk about the the inner team tactics you
Speaker 1: know right now, um on these broadcasts. I certainly didn't
Speaker 1: reveal them on TV, but we got to give up
Speaker 1: a little to get the message out. The other thing
Speaker 1: we needed to do besides getting this issue out was
Speaker 1: I just felt like we needed to legitimize game wards everywhere.
Speaker 1: The thin green line of conservation officers was checking out
Speaker 1: your shirt where it's like, it's like what you call
Speaker 1: the the blue the thin blue line. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is the thing green he's got. He's got one of
Speaker 1: the shirts with the with the black and white flag
Speaker 1: on it, with the game warden green. Yeah. Well you
Speaker 1: notice that I've never seen on those floor. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's just that's that's that's the same thing. It's just
Speaker 1: you're looking at rangers, conservation officers, border patrol, You're looking
Speaker 1: at those of us that are in our wild lands
Speaker 1: without a lot of support, and you know, not to
Speaker 1: take anything away from the thin blue line because we're
Speaker 1: all law enforcement. You know, this isn't anything different. It's
Speaker 1: just showing that as thin as the blue line is,
Speaker 1: there are so few game wards per capita compared to
Speaker 1: our populations throughout the entire country. And obviously we still
Speaker 1: have all that traditional wildlife poaching going on that we
Speaker 1: talked about that we you know, some of us don't
Speaker 1: do a lot of anymore. And you and you're not.
Speaker 1: And then you've got this too, Yeah, you're not. You're
Speaker 1: not acting like that's not important. No, no, And there's
Speaker 1: some Pennessee sections and hid more that you probably noticed
Speaker 1: where we did a study between the first book and
Speaker 1: the second book. It's been exactly a decade and we
Speaker 1: look at the population of every state in the nation
Speaker 1: numbers and the game ward numbers, and you've got this
Speaker 1: explanation multimillion growth in impacts to our wild lands and
Speaker 1: we've added like eight hundred game wards nationally and it like,
Speaker 1: you know, ten years ago there's forty six game wards.
Speaker 1: Now you've got a forty seven. So it boys, it
Speaker 1: really comes down to um sharing what we need to share.
Speaker 1: Not only you know, talk about what the thing green
Speaker 1: line of conservation warriors do nationally, even outside of the
Speaker 1: special ops stuff, the traditional stuff, but letting all you
Speaker 1: guys know that our eyes and ears, I mean, we're
Speaker 1: all team. You guys are avian hunters for all the
Speaker 1: right reasons. You're in the woods for all the right reasons.
Speaker 1: We call you, you know, fellow hunters, force multipliers. You're
Speaker 1: gonna find it, You're savvy around it, you're gonna get
Speaker 1: out safely because you've got great skills and you're piste off.
Speaker 1: And I rate to see this happen on your public
Speaker 1: lands or even private honey ranches. California is a fifty
Speaker 1: fifty split right now. When I retired and Steve, this
Speaker 1: is guys, this is an interesting stat we I did
Speaker 1: those stats as I keep them all annually and I
Speaker 1: tabulate my my spreadsheets. It was literally a fifty fifty
Speaker 1: ratio of private land, personal ranches that the cartels are
Speaker 1: infiltrated and public lands. So I could be on one
Speaker 1: of my buddies blacktail hunting clubs that I grew on,
Speaker 1: grew up on, doing a blacktail deer hunt, or I'm
Speaker 1: doing a you know, spring hog hunt, thinking, oh man,
Speaker 1: you know he won't be this deep in. My buddy
Speaker 1: and his ranchers and his cattlemen are running fence all
Speaker 1: the time, and I find a grow site, like you
Speaker 1: got to be freaking kidding me. I don't want to
Speaker 1: name the place, but I was on his place was
Speaker 1: a big ranch and they do a lot of like
Speaker 1: there's a lot of there's a big recreation program on
Speaker 1: his ranch. They run cab but they also have like
Speaker 1: an actual recreation program, an advertised recreation program. And when
Speaker 1: I was talking to those guys, it's a constant thing
Speaker 1: of theirs. Yeah, it's become literally the biggest people backpacking
Speaker 1: in and a state. And this is on a on
Speaker 1: a very active ranch property and they're constantly encountering illegal
Speaker 1: grow sites to pop up. Yeah, and not happy about it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's you hit it on the head to the
Speaker 1: point where how much do you want to keep hunting?
Speaker 1: I mean, how much is that starting to outweigh? Are
Speaker 1: you know? We have dwindling consumptive users and conservation actually
Speaker 1: hunt in California, And I mean I go back to
Speaker 1: my old home state and I say, look, there's so
Speaker 1: much good resource there. That is a beautiful state, and
Speaker 1: we're losing you know, hunting numbers like exponentially. And that's
Speaker 1: necessarily not helping because I go back and one out
Speaker 1: of two times, even on private land, I'm gonna run
Speaker 1: into a grow site and I'm like, dude, I really
Speaker 1: want to deal with the grow site today when I'm
Speaker 1: on one of my few hunts because I still go back.
Speaker 1: I have little kids, and yeah, problems, but the Turkey
Speaker 1: and you know, it's a great state. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: some really cool hunts out there, so we want to
Speaker 1: we want to counter that as much as possible. Hey, uh,
Speaker 1: I don't expect you to do this out of memory,
Speaker 1: but in your book you have in the end, you
Speaker 1: have a little bit of a snaps as the house
Speaker 1: of you put some metrics okay around miles of pipe
Speaker 1: the stat sheet. Yeah, rat open that up and rattle
Speaker 1: a couple of those off. It's kind of funny to
Speaker 1: look at the It's kind of funny to look at
Speaker 1: the list. I can't remember where I encountered it in there,
Speaker 1: so so looking at breaking it down, like you said,
Speaker 1: the metrics, breaking down the stats um in six years
Speaker 1: between and the end of our team destroyed three million
Speaker 1: of the of the contaminated marijuana plants, all carbo fuen contaminated.
Speaker 1: It's three million plants, three million plants that would have
Speaker 1: hit that black market. And then we uh, then we
Speaker 1: destroyed almost fifty nine thousand, or twenty nine tons of
Speaker 1: process marijuana. And that's the stuff in the one pound
Speaker 1: bags with all the poisons on it about to go
Speaker 1: back east or you know, be sold in the black market.
Speaker 1: I've forgotten it was that high. Actually, twenty nine tons
Speaker 1: daying um, seventy felony arrests and armed gunmen UM seized
Speaker 1: six one firearms during those missions, and I'm sure we
Speaker 1: didn't get them all. That's a pretty significant almost a
Speaker 1: thousand felony arrests, almost as south yet almost just under
Speaker 1: a thousand felony arrests. And you know, our our dogs
Speaker 1: were a big part of that making that happen that
Speaker 1: Are there a lot of the same individuals that are
Speaker 1: rolled up in there. Are you guys pretty successful at
Speaker 1: prosecuting people, Well, we're successful at prosecuting him. Now when
Speaker 1: we get the environmental crime Enhancement's keep in mind when
Speaker 1: it went felonyto misdemeanor once legality started in California and
Speaker 1: miss ametar to infraction, very few d a's offices would
Speaker 1: even prosecute these on the local level because they wouldn't
Speaker 1: get a jury on a marijuana case and take those
Speaker 1: risks and and you know, convictim. They didn't want to
Speaker 1: do that, but we would say, wait a minute, you
Speaker 1: know they were within a hundred fifty feet of a stream,
Speaker 1: or they were using a band poison and I'm glad
Speaker 1: you Brobably they overstayed their fourteen day federal camping limit exactly,
Speaker 1: so let's make it a felony again. But Steve, the
Speaker 1: thing that you just you just triggered, which is great,
Speaker 1: that I forgot to mention, is that band toxic poi
Speaker 1: and as a felony in the California Peano coade is
Speaker 1: one example. So even to possess it now it becomes
Speaker 1: a felony. If they divert a waterway, if they you know,
Speaker 1: block up a creek, if they alter a stream bed,
Speaker 1: all that becomes a felony enhancement. So that's how we're
Speaker 1: starting to get prosecutions even after regulation is working. But
Speaker 1: we had a yeah, we had six hundred one firearms
Speaker 1: UM four and fifty tons of just general gross site trash.
Speaker 1: And that's that's one team at twelve not getting everything,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of other teams that have done other work,
Speaker 1: other good work that hasn't even been food packaging, propane cans,
Speaker 1: toilet excrement in the creeks, trash, dumps. And if we
Speaker 1: haven't got it in one year, imagine five years of
Speaker 1: that with guys living out their freight month straight. It's
Speaker 1: it's a train wreck. They must have to start to
Speaker 1: hide the trash. After a while they try to. They
Speaker 1: actually dig big like compos you know, like like landfill holes,
Speaker 1: and we'll go out and see him, and we'll do
Speaker 1: a reclamation and clean up one, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden there's another layer and another layer. And the
Speaker 1: worst part about it, you brought up a good point
Speaker 1: is they'll they'll have these holes that are like almost
Speaker 1: twenty ft deep for the next grow site the next year,
Speaker 1: for their trash or for a water catchment, and they
Speaker 1: don't cover it up, so animals are coming in and
Speaker 1: deer slipping into it and going to their death. We're
Speaker 1: walking in. We could walk into one on a scout.
Speaker 1: So you have that besides the pungee pits and you
Speaker 1: know the little little trail things. And something listeners especially
Speaker 1: should know about is good. But um, yeah, four and
Speaker 1: fifty tons of just general grow site waste, and you
Speaker 1: talk about polly pipe, guys, before two point three five
Speaker 1: million feet or four d forty five miles of black polypipe.
Speaker 1: I mean that's more about polly pipe. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: one inch line. That's how much of that crap we
Speaker 1: took out. Four five So that's one tip of Montana
Speaker 1: to the other far corner of Montana. That's the whole
Speaker 1: stretch of californa half of California. It's crazy. Um. And
Speaker 1: then and then forty six tons of fertilizers, seven fifty
Speaker 1: gallons of the illegal toxic chemicals the yea seven yeah,
Speaker 1: and then seven three. This is the one that UM,
Speaker 1: this had I think is one that's underlooked, and it's
Speaker 1: important because every time we take out a water diversion,
Speaker 1: just think what that water diversion was due. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't only blocking water for everything downstream that you survived,
Speaker 1: mostly our wildlife or our drinking water, but it was
Speaker 1: also poison in the water to the grow site. And
Speaker 1: what was you know ingesting that all that wildlife. So
Speaker 1: and that's basically seven water dams we dismantled in that time,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot more out there. So UM and
Speaker 1: then those dams, when you look at the number amount
Speaker 1: of water they would steal, and we didn't know how
Speaker 1: much water was really being impacted. California was in their
Speaker 1: most severe drought in a century between about twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: and about remember that, and the whole country was taken notice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was. It was just really dry. And so
Speaker 1: all the cartel grow sites, like in the traditional mountains
Speaker 1: of northern California Silicon Valley, it just wasn't happening. They
Speaker 1: couldn't even get underground water. So they were like in
Speaker 1: the Delta, they were doing stuff in weird places. But
Speaker 1: the science finally came out and we just and we
Speaker 1: were able to learn that an hot aird outdoor grow
Speaker 1: each plant takes between ten and twelve gallons of water
Speaker 1: per day stolen for up to ninety days before it's harvested.
Speaker 1: So when you do all the on ten thousand plant
Speaker 1: grow for ninety days ten to twelve gallons, you know
Speaker 1: a plant. How many millions and hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: gallons of our water was being stolen in our worst
Speaker 1: drout would take us to ab at it. We did.
Speaker 1: We actually calculated it, and the dams that we dismantled
Speaker 1: were responsible for twelve billion gallons of water conservative estimate,
Speaker 1: that was pulled out of its natural course of its
Speaker 1: natural course whether it was drinking, wildlife, habitat, whatever, and
Speaker 1: that was very conserved because that doesn't take into account
Speaker 1: any of the private land grows that were quasi legal
Speaker 1: or maybe not legal at the time, and people were
Speaker 1: doing it wrong, maybe diverting their own water, but not
Speaker 1: a cartel public land trespassing. So that really got the
Speaker 1: governor's attention, and that's when we started to get teams
Speaker 1: for watershed enforcement and stuff like that. So yeah, in
Speaker 1: the West, right fight over water exactly. I'm quote like that.
Speaker 1: That's it. I call water is life. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's gold. You know, it's more precious than gold in
Speaker 1: states and so pristine states like we have here in
Speaker 1: in true you know, public land Mecca of Montana. I
Speaker 1: always keep an eye out for this stuff and that
Speaker 1: it's been in this state before, not as much fortunately
Speaker 1: because of the terrain, but um, the Mountain states will
Speaker 1: get it and they have and it's it's just something
Speaker 1: we got good enough environment to grow here. It is,
Speaker 1: but it's a very short summer the grow the grow
Speaker 1: window is really tight, really tight, so it doesn't happen often.
Speaker 1: But up here we get a little bit of that,
Speaker 1: but we get a lot of the methamphetam in the
Speaker 1: fat in al and we certainly always have the gun
Speaker 1: running and trafficking because that's in every state these same groups.
Speaker 1: We gotta remember, guys, is you know, the poison, cannabis
Speaker 1: production and all the drama my team focused on is
Speaker 1: a kind of a focused mission. That's only one element
Speaker 1: of what these groups do. They're doing all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 1: They're on the same organization, and you know, when they're
Speaker 1: not growing weed in the summer, they're cook a meth
Speaker 1: in the winter, they're doing fat in al, they're running guns.
Speaker 1: And something people don't understand, and I didn't know this
Speaker 1: until towards the end of my career and we are
Speaker 1: really in bed in intel circles, was that of all
Speaker 1: the hundreds of millions of dollars of profit these cannabis growers,
Speaker 1: these cartel guys make a third or more of those
Speaker 1: profits go just two guns and ammunition stolen in America
Speaker 1: to fight the cartel wars south of the border because
Speaker 1: they don't have the EMMA and they don't have the
Speaker 1: infrastructure for weapons, and down there they're at full on
Speaker 1: war because it's it's you know, it's wild West hands
Speaker 1: off up here. Fortunately, they want to play nice. They
Speaker 1: want to draw attention and you have you know, law
Speaker 1: enforcement or public outrest. And the other thing is they
Speaker 1: want to keep it as quite as possible because it's
Speaker 1: gonna hurt business. Hence one of the reasons we name
Speaker 1: the book hid More. You know, it's just one of
Speaker 1: these things. Let's try to keep it under the weight
Speaker 1: our domestic eco terrorism thing, if you will. And I'm
Speaker 1: glad we're not having that here. Our job to be
Speaker 1: a lot different. But um, a lot of that is
Speaker 1: going into guns and going down south of the border.
Speaker 1: So um, kind of a little uh eye opening fact there. Okay,
Speaker 1: so uh tell people real quick. We've talked about hidding
Speaker 1: war a couple of times. But but but talking about
Speaker 1: plug both of your books in the best way for
Speaker 1: people to find you if I don't know how much
Speaker 1: you want to be found, But well, at least you
Speaker 1: can plug yourself, plug yourself, all right, basically whatever degree
Speaker 1: you're comfortable, no, no problem. You can get copies of
Speaker 1: hitting More, that's the newest book, and you can go
Speaker 1: back and get the old one, the first one, or
Speaker 1: in the Woods on Amazon. Um, there's an audio book
Speaker 1: out I'm gonna be doing an audio read. Well. The
Speaker 1: audio book will be read in August. It's on Kendall UM.
Speaker 1: You can get it through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any
Speaker 1: major bookstore. You can also get it through me if
Speaker 1: you want you through. If you want a personalized copy,
Speaker 1: I work that out, you know, through my email, and
Speaker 1: you just get me on John Norris dot com, on
Speaker 1: my website and on Instagram Facebook and O R E
Speaker 1: S j O h N N O R E s
Speaker 1: on Instagram, Facebook and the website, So real easy. And
Speaker 1: I encourage feedback questions, you know. I try to answer
Speaker 1: all the questions I can and UM educate because we
Speaker 1: we were getting a lot of public awareness. Now now
Speaker 1: that I'm retired and out of California, it's kind of
Speaker 1: cool to be going more on a national level and
Speaker 1: presenting on the book, doing signings, doing presentations to this
Speaker 1: stuff with some pictures and video, and just sharing some
Speaker 1: stories that everybody seems to resonate with rather conservations or not.
Speaker 1: You know, kind of a unified front. So I just
Speaker 1: appreciate you guys. One. I love the work you guys do,
Speaker 1: love what you stand for. UM fan, myself, my team members,
Speaker 1: are all fans, so they're really excited to hear this,
Speaker 1: and thanks for spreading the word. It goes a long way,
Speaker 1: and we are one big team here, you know, trying
Speaker 1: to protect our wildlife, waterways and wild lands, and you
Speaker 1: guys are stewards of it at the top level. I
Speaker 1: appreciate it. I didn't ask you if you got you
Speaker 1: got your final conclude you're saying thank you, great questions. Guys.
Speaker 1: He's gotta go check on as illegal grow on Joe's joke. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I got anything more anything open book. I'll
Speaker 1: share what I can. Yeah, thanks for coming on. And
Speaker 1: it's like, uh yeah, I'm glad you guys. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm glad you guys are out there and it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I think one of the biggest, like my concluder is um,
Speaker 1: I don't think people realize the complexity of game Warden life.
Speaker 1: That's it like growing up man, Yeah, hand I was
Speaker 1: like everyways, just like you know, you didn't talk fondly
Speaker 1: of the game Warden. Yeah, it's like he's we gotta
Speaker 1: watch our back, I gotta watch over back. He's you know,
Speaker 1: he's on her, but he's always suspecting us. I know,
Speaker 1: I didn't have that fear because I never met one,
Speaker 1: but everybody else it was the same thing. And then
Speaker 1: once you get to your point in life or you're
Speaker 1: not where you haven't recently broken a law, you start.
Speaker 1: Now I see a game ward and I'm like, hey, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm your buddy, because yeah, we all went through those moments.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say, yeah, I didn't know what I
Speaker 1: was doing. The game warden get that first Crossman seven sixty,
Speaker 1: and you know, you're on every Blackbird Hunt and whatever
Speaker 1: else you can. You're like, oh, there there's really a limit.
Speaker 1: There's an on game. Oh okay, yeah, you know bad stuff,
Speaker 1: but um but no it is. And that's I really
Speaker 1: appreciate you seeing that, Steve, because that's the thing. The
Speaker 1: whole thing now for me is like we said before,
Speaker 1: is don't you know, don't simplify what game wardens do.
Speaker 1: You know, they're legitimate law enforcement officers no matter what
Speaker 1: state they're from. They're highly trained, and they're out there
Speaker 1: by themselves, you know, And it was it was hard
Speaker 1: enough to deal with a poacher with a felony warrant
Speaker 1: or or you know, a guy that could get really
Speaker 1: violent on you. You know, we a lot of fugitive recovery,
Speaker 1: your guys hiding out in wild lands. That's where you know,
Speaker 1: these guys that need to stay off the grid, not
Speaker 1: to go back to prisons, and not to mention that
Speaker 1: most of the people you go and talk to are
Speaker 1: probably already toting a gun, already going a gun. The
Speaker 1: flip side of it, you gotta run a lot of
Speaker 1: math in your head, right, you got to. When I
Speaker 1: was doing all the traditional stuff for the majority of
Speaker 1: my career, the cool thing was is that I knew
Speaker 1: the guys I was contacting. They were cool. You know,
Speaker 1: they might help. Can we check? I want to check, Hey,
Speaker 1: what do you want? That's why I feel like it's
Speaker 1: helpful to have game wardens, and I know a lot
Speaker 1: of them do. It's helpful to have game wardens that
Speaker 1: come out of a hunting and fishing background. Thank you,
Speaker 1: because thank you for saying. But you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: just to sort of have a sense of having to
Speaker 1: read on people because people that are gonna be It's
Speaker 1: like people that have this thing where there's suspicious as
Speaker 1: someone like, well, why does he need a gun? Right
Speaker 1: for something like that's not the right attitude to have.
Speaker 1: You gotta kind of know who you're dealing with. And
Speaker 1: I think I feel that would be a major advantage.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying that's the only way, the only path,
Speaker 1: but I feel a major advantage would be having people
Speaker 1: who understand culturally the groups of individuals they're likely to
Speaker 1: be policing in order to make those those really those
Speaker 1: judgment decisions that you can't explain, and teach someone about
Speaker 1: how to read a situation, reading a person's intents right
Speaker 1: where someone could walk into it and get a really
Speaker 1: wrong impression of what's going on, or adversely miss things
Speaker 1: that they that someone else would have picked up on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that you hit it on the head. Haven't known the culture.
Speaker 1: And that's what we've seen, right, most of us, at
Speaker 1: least from my academy. I'm a dinosaur, you know. When
Speaker 1: I you know, going back to like the early nineties
Speaker 1: when I started, we all grew up handloading, you know,
Speaker 1: we learned how to use a rifle early. We were
Speaker 1: taught at the respect of it, very comfortable around firearms
Speaker 1: like you, like all of us, you know, and um,
Speaker 1: then as we started to get to the latter generations
Speaker 1: of game, Warden's coming in the last ten years, and
Speaker 1: I was you know, I taught at the Academy a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of subjects and been an instructor
Speaker 1: in my whole career, and you know, we would get
Speaker 1: people coming into the job, these young you know, college
Speaker 1: kids that have how many of you guys hunt? Two
Speaker 1: hands go up at a forty cadets. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 1: how many of you have done a lot of shooting
Speaker 1: with a rifle, and like six hands go up, like wow.
Speaker 1: So we're going to teach people to shoot weapons in this.
Speaker 1: We're gonna get them qualified, and then we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to get them comfortable. Like like you just said, Steve, Hey,
Speaker 1: if I didn't have that background that we all have,
Speaker 1: going up to a guy with a gun, even that's
Speaker 1: a cool sportsman, Hey, how you doing and that rifle
Speaker 1: comes out? I mean, that's an O crap moment. And
Speaker 1: training past that to get the comfort level. It really
Speaker 1: is an upward It's a learning curve that is so
Speaker 1: steep compared to the traditional guys you know that have
Speaker 1: been on it and gals that have done it for
Speaker 1: a long time. So it definitely helps and it keeps
Speaker 1: you know that one Warden, no matter how much experience
Speaker 1: they have in the field because of their background from
Speaker 1: overreacting or in some cases underreacting. Because you're right, it's
Speaker 1: a good judge of character. I mean, you know from
Speaker 1: your experience how easy it is to see someone that's
Speaker 1: really what we call hanky with a weapon or really relaxed,
Speaker 1: and it's like, hey, it's another buddy hunter. We're on
Speaker 1: the range site and this guy is not a threat.
Speaker 1: But it's that fine line. So yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a tough game. Well, thanks again for I'm not Man.
Speaker 1: Thanks to help people go find your book. It's pretty
Speaker 1: interesting read, and especially that you know people from other
Speaker 1: states are just beginning to deal with this. I'm guessing
Speaker 1: the problem is not going to go away. Um. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it's not going to go away. And I mean there's
Speaker 1: all kinds of debates on you know, do we legalize nationally,
Speaker 1: do we do this? Do we do that? In In
Speaker 1: chapter ten, I go into not so much solutions because
Speaker 1: there are no easy solutions, but things to consider coming
Speaker 1: from a state that is a heavy cannabis state on
Speaker 1: the legitimate and also the dark side, um, and looking
Speaker 1: at what has worked and hasn't worked. And looking at
Speaker 1: our you know, our home state now in Montana, what's
Speaker 1: working and not work Colorado some others, you know, like
Speaker 1: maybe some you're probably experiences like what you got back
Speaker 1: in Michigan. Um. I think legislatively, we need to really
Speaker 1: think that if we're going to regulate, we gotta let
Speaker 1: regulate right. And one thing I can say that I
Speaker 1: get into in this book a little bit without giving
Speaker 1: it all the way is don't go easier on these
Speaker 1: public land trespass cartel foreign growers. Let's go harder, you know,
Speaker 1: because there's gonna be tax money. There's gonna be funding
Speaker 1: coming in millions and millions of dollars now from legitimate
Speaker 1: anibus that are now paying into the government pot that
Speaker 1: really needs to go back to this stuff. In California,
Speaker 1: we're supposed to start seeing those proceeds actually this year
Speaker 1: from legality that started two years ago. So where we
Speaker 1: were millions of dollars short and only able to reclamatecent
Speaker 1: of all the growth sites we went and start to finish. Now,
Speaker 1: maybe we can get to that d percent mark. Maybe
Speaker 1: we can put double the amount of officers on doing
Speaker 1: reclamation education and UH and just spread the word. So
Speaker 1: I think we need to learn from our mistakes and
Speaker 1: and not be you know, so cocky in our position
Speaker 1: that we're not making mistakes. Hey, we made a lot
Speaker 1: of mistakes before we formed this team. We made mistakes
Speaker 1: as we formed this team, and we were you know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of things we could have done differently,
Speaker 1: and that's one of the things. When we formed MET
Speaker 1: as well as when we do legality. They're almost kind
Speaker 1: of two parallel courses. Let's just try to fail forward,
Speaker 1: you know. And one thing I'm doing now and my
Speaker 1: teammates back in California are we become very effective specialized,
Speaker 1: UM diversified. But the cool thing about you know, being
Speaker 1: more successful would be more effective environmentally, which is great.
Speaker 1: But of what I was mandated to do as a
Speaker 1: lieutenant and team leader of the unit was outreach. So
Speaker 1: it was to do interviews, it was to do podcasts,
Speaker 1: it was to you know, if we had to do
Speaker 1: TV documentaries, investigative news, things like wild Justice. You know,
Speaker 1: certainly there were parameters that I could work within UM.
Speaker 1: And I think being retired, I'm glad I met you
Speaker 1: guys now and not then, because we can talk a
Speaker 1: little more freely, not to discredit anything, but get down
Speaker 1: to the raw real answers. You know of what's working
Speaker 1: and I think and what we discussed today, and you
Speaker 1: guys amazing questions. Thank you for those questions. I think
Speaker 1: we've kind of broke a lot of that down and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of fired up. You know, outdoorsmen
Speaker 1: and women are gonna gonna think a lot about it,
Speaker 1: and I know appreciate any input you guys, how are
Speaker 1: your listeners do? Yeah? Thanks man, Thanks again for coming
Speaker 1: on until we can talk all day. But we asked
Speaker 1: a really interesting idea of widening that discrepancy between the
Speaker 1: right way to produce the product and the wrong way.
Speaker 1: But again, we could talk all day. Concluded, you guys
Speaker 1: might want to hook up with on at and do
Speaker 1: like a historical growth site layer because those would be
Speaker 1: some good hunting spots here soon. That would be good
Speaker 1: right across the parking lot. You can go ahead over
Speaker 1: their next Okay, no hundreds had found him for six years.
Speaker 1: Get that referral from the meat Eator team and I
Speaker 1: might get in the door. They have to work up
Speaker 1: a new icon. I know what it will be. I
Speaker 1: know what it will be. There's one in your book.
Speaker 1: All right, thanks John Norris. Uh is that a John
Speaker 1: Norris Jr. I'm a junior. Yeah, there you go. All right,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. Thanks guys, Okay everyone, thanks for listening. Again.
Speaker 1: And if I said it once, I said a thousand times.
Speaker 1: Please go check out our feature length doc mentory about
Speaker 1: hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky. You
Speaker 1: can find it at Stars in the Sky film dot com.
Speaker 1: It is available for streaming and download. Again, do us
Speaker 1: yourself a good turn, do us a good turn Stars
Speaker 1: in the Sky. Find it at Stars in the Sky
Speaker 1: film dot com. You can stream it, you can download it,
Speaker 1: and you can watch it again and again. Thank you.