Speaker 1: Pushkin Previously on deep cover. In Michigan. In the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, an FBI agent named Ned Timmins followed a hunch.
Speaker 1: He believed that a drug ring was smuggling massive amounts
Speaker 1: of pot into America, and he thought the local biker
Speaker 1: gangs were involved in some way. So Ned went undercover,
Speaker 1: using a new name, Ed Thomas. He grew a fu
Speaker 1: mancher mustache, wrote to Harley Davidson, and started hanging out
Speaker 1: in roadside honky talks all the while gathering intel war
Speaker 1: ahead sources up in northern Michigan bikers, and they would
Speaker 1: talk about the bikers would get their supply of weed
Speaker 1: when these big shipments would come in, you know, which
Speaker 1: is fifty thousand pounds, one hundred thousand pounds or whatever
Speaker 1: would come into the Detroit warehouse. Ned kept hearing chatter
Speaker 1: there's this huge deal out there and involved shrimp boats
Speaker 1: and barges and airplanes, and so I told my bosses
Speaker 1: about it, you know, and they kind of said, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, right, Tim, is what he's smoking. Ned heard
Speaker 1: that this pot might be headed to a storage facility
Speaker 1: somewhere in Detroit, the El Dorado of stash houses over
Speaker 1: at the FBI. Ned's bosses had their doubts, but Ned
Speaker 1: stayed on the trail vintel, hanging out with his informants.
Speaker 1: Whenever I walked into a house or one of their
Speaker 1: houses or hotel or where they were, I always headed
Speaker 1: in my head, Okay, what if this happens? What if
Speaker 1: this happened? And I would go through a checklist of
Speaker 1: what I would do. You know, I had a gun, obviously,
Speaker 1: and here I was looking half the time. I turned around,
Speaker 1: and those guys had guns and they're not supposed to.
Speaker 1: Ned's main informant was still Toby Anderson, the violent, erratic
Speaker 1: biker slash country western singer. Toby was a hand garnade
Speaker 1: with a pin onw He just just a matter of
Speaker 1: time till he's self destructed or just died in a
Speaker 1: hail of bullets or something. You just you just couldn't
Speaker 1: control him. He's just crazy. He was difficult to manage, yes,
Speaker 1: but he was also giving that just enough, you know, crumbs.
Speaker 1: He connect him with other bikers. He'd helped him set
Speaker 1: up drug busts enough so that Ned could tell his bosses, look,
Speaker 1: I'm making progress. Like At one point, Toby introduces him
Speaker 1: to another criminal, and together the three of them set
Speaker 1: up a sting out in California. Their plan was to
Speaker 1: get meth from some dealers way out in the sticks.
Speaker 1: There's a big field and there's mountains up each side,
Speaker 1: and there's some hail billy there at the gate. And
Speaker 1: he meets us and gets us through this gate and
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's just a two track sage brush
Speaker 1: cactus and just high mountain desert. And we get near
Speaker 1: the barn and outcomes this freaking five hundred pound pig,
Speaker 1: I mean a big pig. And I said, what the
Speaker 1: fuck is it you? Oh, that's the guard hog's woman.
Speaker 1: He said, well, he smells people if they're you know,
Speaker 1: and the mountains are trying to survey us or whatever hills.
Speaker 1: And that's true. A pig. He has one of the
Speaker 1: best noses in the world. What really surprised NED is
Speaker 1: what these hillbuildings are feeding their prized guard pig. They'd
Speaker 1: soak a bug onion sweet onion in math and throw
Speaker 1: it to the pig. The pig loved it. I mean,
Speaker 1: he's like, you know, he wanted he wanted a fucking onion.
Speaker 1: And you know, I didn't really trust him because he's
Speaker 1: really fucking big, and he's got tossling shit and this
Speaker 1: was Ned's life now and passed a drugged up pig.
Speaker 1: Slide open the burned door and it's all Hey, pull
Speaker 1: out a bail in the middle, and you can crawl
Speaker 1: through the You crawl through the tunnel, through the hay bales,
Speaker 1: and you come into a big room. There's thirty stations
Speaker 1: set up for when Nick cook, Ned said it was
Speaker 1: the biggest meth lab he'd ever seen. He handed off
Speaker 1: the intel and a few weeks later the authorities busted
Speaker 1: the place, and it also clarified something for Ned. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a full time undercover FBI agent trying to
Speaker 1: figure out if the rumors he'd been hearing were true.
Speaker 1: But he also had another, maybe equally important job title
Speaker 1: now babysitter. We're driving someplace and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Toby's in the back seat and pulls out a gun. Well,
Speaker 1: he could have just easily popped one in the back
Speaker 1: of my head, but I was so pissed at him
Speaker 1: the way you pulled over, took the gun away from
Speaker 1: and threw it off the cliff. I mean, he knew
Speaker 1: he had he had his between his legs. You know
Speaker 1: he knew he got spanked. I'm Jake Halbern and this
Speaker 1: is deep Cover Episode two. What will the neighbors think?
Speaker 1: Ned kept pushing Toby for intel, and sometimes, apparently Toby
Speaker 1: would just lose it on Ned, saying that he was
Speaker 1: scared their cover would be blown, that word might get
Speaker 1: out among Detroit's biker gangs that Toby was an informant
Speaker 1: and that they were working together. In ned noir novel,
Speaker 1: he depicts one of Toby's panicked rants. Toby tells him
Speaker 1: they'll kill us, Bros. We fuck up and they'll kill us.
Speaker 1: You understand, no one will even find the bodies, Just
Speaker 1: shoot us and stuck us in a Vada ascid or
Speaker 1: some shit. You have any idea how fucking dangerous this
Speaker 1: shit is? Ned nodded, but Toby grabbed him by the arm,
Speaker 1: leaned in close, close enough he could smell the ether,
Speaker 1: the cigarettes, and the bo do you bros, you fucking
Speaker 1: butter because it's me and you out there dangling right
Speaker 1: over the goddamn edge. The dialogue may sound a bit stilted,
Speaker 1: but Ned insists the essence is accurate, and that in
Speaker 1: a way, the distrust was mutual. Ned was keenly aware
Speaker 1: of how dangerous, how precarious their relationship was becoming. You
Speaker 1: don't just go out in an hour and do something
Speaker 1: and get a fugitive or whatever. We work for days.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we're staying at hotels, we're traveling, we're flying together,
Speaker 1: we're dry together. You know, if you don't trust that guy,
Speaker 1: you get a problem. Because my neck is at risk
Speaker 1: and his neck is at risk, and both of us
Speaker 1: are at risk. So I better trust him and he'd
Speaker 1: better trust me. For the stuff we were doing. Despite
Speaker 1: the risks, Ned was increasingly comfortable in his new habitat
Speaker 1: not just that he kind of liked it, liked being ed.
Speaker 1: Thomas liked riding as Harley, staying out late in the bars,
Speaker 1: gathering intel. I must though, because I was doing it.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of adrenal into it. You're out there
Speaker 1: on the edge, you know, hanging on to the edge
Speaker 1: of the cliff with your fingernails all the time. No
Speaker 1: one at the office was exactly telling Ned to go
Speaker 1: to these lengths, but he felt that he needed to
Speaker 1: be on duty all the time to do his job right.
Speaker 1: You know, we did a zillion other drug deals, so
Speaker 1: we always had something going on? What does this due
Speaker 1: to your home life? Just trays it. You live it.
Speaker 1: You live at twenty four to seven, your eyes waiting
Speaker 1: for the next call, whether they wreck a car, steal
Speaker 1: a car, break into a house, shoot somebody, stab somebody.
Speaker 1: It's it's analysts. It's like taking care of juvenile delinquents
Speaker 1: that are adult killers. Back home, Ned's wife Kathy was
Speaker 1: discovering that her husband's alter ego was taking over ed
Speaker 1: Thomas now needed his own room. We had three bedrooms.
Speaker 1: One was more like a guest room, and I think
Speaker 1: we had a desk in there and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: I recall that he said, Hey, yeah, they're going to
Speaker 1: put in an undercover phone here at the house. You know,
Speaker 1: so if it rings, you know, you're I'm gonna you know,
Speaker 1: here's your name, and just you know, answer it and
Speaker 1: be cool, you know, act like you're my girlfriend. I go,
Speaker 1: why do I have to act like me your girlfriend?
Speaker 1: Why can't I just be your wife? Kathy was an
Speaker 1: FBI agent in Detroit too, and she'd also gone undercover
Speaker 1: just once. I did one undercover thing one time, and
Speaker 1: I was not at all comfortable with it. I felt
Speaker 1: like everybody can look at me and see that I'm
Speaker 1: a cop. Kathy had spent the night at a gambling
Speaker 1: joint run by the mob, getting to know the criminals.
Speaker 1: Then the cops busted in. Everyone hands up against the wall.
Speaker 1: Then they told Kathy you're good, you can put your
Speaker 1: hands down now. But I was I just was like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't. I'm so embarrassed now in front of these
Speaker 1: people who have been so nice to me all night,
Speaker 1: and I just found it out of there. I was
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, don't ever make me do something like
Speaker 1: that again. That's not me. I'm not comfortable in that situation.
Speaker 1: I feel like a big fat liar is written like
Speaker 1: all across my forehead. Her husband, Ned, he didn't seem
Speaker 1: to have that problem. He seemed comfortable with the pressure
Speaker 1: and the deception. Or maybe he was more than that.
Speaker 1: I think Ned always was what one of his supervisors
Speaker 1: gcribed Neda as an edge worker. Ned was always right
Speaker 1: at the edge of going off to the criminal side.
Speaker 1: And then one day he did the unthinkable. He brought
Speaker 1: the criminals home with him to his leafy, upscale suburban house.
Speaker 1: Just shows up with Toby and one of his sidekicks.
Speaker 1: They all just sauntered up the driveway together. Well, they
Speaker 1: looked just like motorcycle guys. The hair, the the you know,
Speaker 1: instead of having a belt having belts that are like
Speaker 1: chains or whatever. Their jeans are not like fashionable. Their
Speaker 1: jeans are just you know, beat up jeans, and and
Speaker 1: you know they've got flu Manchu mustaches and long hair.
Speaker 1: They're not trying to give an appearance of like good looking.
Speaker 1: I thought, oh my god, what will my name think.
Speaker 1: I hope they didn't see them come in because they
Speaker 1: look like really rough characters. And my neighbors belonged to
Speaker 1: Oakland Hills Country Club. No one and I truly mean
Speaker 1: no one here would ever mistake Toby or any of
Speaker 1: his buddies for golfers. This was like the ultimate intrusion
Speaker 1: into my life, into our life. It just is unheard of,
Speaker 1: you know, it just was. It was not appropriate, and
Speaker 1: it was it was I felt it was dangerous. People
Speaker 1: could could have you know, followed them or seen them,
Speaker 1: or you know, now they know where we live. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's Kathy the homemaker worrying. But here's Kathy the
Speaker 1: FBI agent, and she's also worried. I had a lot
Speaker 1: of my own informants, and they would never have come
Speaker 1: to my home or I never even would have like
Speaker 1: lunch with them or something. I mean, I'm an FBI agent,
Speaker 1: I'm a law enforcement person. Why would they even want
Speaker 1: to sit down any place and be seen with me.
Speaker 1: You've just compromised that confidential relationship. I spoke to a
Speaker 1: number of Ned's former colleagues, and they pretty much all
Speaker 1: agreed with Kathy. No one brought an informant home with them.
Speaker 1: It was too risky. Oddly enough, the one person I
Speaker 1: spoke with from Ned's FBI days who had also done
Speaker 1: this was his direct supervisor. He told me that he
Speaker 1: and Ned were quote unquote rebels. For his part, Ned
Speaker 1: defends himself, saying it was a judgment call, the decision
Speaker 1: to bring Toby home. It was calculated. Well, it depends
Speaker 1: on how much trust you having your sources, and that
Speaker 1: also builds trusts with the sources, the sources that can
Speaker 1: get you killed any second. Well, I'm curious, did you
Speaker 1: do it just out of kind of professional relationship building
Speaker 1: or did you do it because these were your friends
Speaker 1: and this was your wife. I think to build a
Speaker 1: bond with the sources you depend on those guys not
Speaker 1: to stand up and say, hey, he's a fucking FBI
Speaker 1: agent and you have to build this bond. So whatever
Speaker 1: I was doing seemed to work. I wouldn't recommend it
Speaker 1: to anybody. I can't teach it. I can't say that's
Speaker 1: what to do. But that's what I did. Kathy she
Speaker 1: didn't like it, but she didn't confront Ned or overrule him.
Speaker 1: And Ned never really asked for permission either. Oh no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you know no. See, Ned never checked in with me
Speaker 1: first on anything. Our marriage was more like, hey, look,
Speaker 1: we're going to move to a new house. Come here,
Speaker 1: I'll take you and you will look at it. My
Speaker 1: marriage was more traditional in that regard that, you know,
Speaker 1: he said what we were going to do back then.
Speaker 1: I'm going to blame this on the times a lot,
Speaker 1: but probably also the way I was raised. It just
Speaker 1: did not occur to me to object to my husband.
Speaker 1: He has this, he's got this, It'll be fine. But
Speaker 1: this wasn't a one off occasion. Ned brought Toby home
Speaker 1: with him multiple times. Kathy remembers them all hanging out
Speaker 1: on the backdeck Cookenburger's Super Casual. It was kind of
Speaker 1: the opposite of the whole undercover stick, you know, like
Speaker 1: in Donnie Brasco, where the FBI agent has two completely
Speaker 1: separate lives, one as a gangster and one is a
Speaker 1: suburban dad with a teflon firewall separating them. It was
Speaker 1: almost as if Ned Timmins and Ed Thomas were morphing
Speaker 1: into a single being. Perhaps this was inevitable given Ned's
Speaker 1: strategy of building trust, but this isn't how Kathy sees it.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't have to choose that path. You
Speaker 1: don't have to choose to work a case in that way,
Speaker 1: you don't have to choose to go deep cover. You know,
Speaker 1: it all evolves. And but I know for him, he
Speaker 1: felt like it was just spinning into the next, into
Speaker 1: the next, into the next, And he told me that
Speaker 1: he felt like he didn't know how he was ever
Speaker 1: going to get out of it. In the midst of
Speaker 1: all of this, Ned's game plan paid off big time
Speaker 1: when he gets the break you've been waiting for, and
Speaker 1: it involved, of all people, Toby's little brother, a guy
Speaker 1: who went by the nickname Shine. One day Ned got
Speaker 1: would seem like a big lead from Toby, though on
Speaker 1: its face it seemed a bit far fetched Toby says, Hey,
Speaker 1: I gotta tell my brother is into something really big,
Speaker 1: but he won't let us near it because he's afraid. Now, Robert,
Speaker 1: so what is it? He says. It has to do
Speaker 1: with airplanes and boats and chapter trailer loads of dope
Speaker 1: coming to Detroit. And Toby knew he was into something big.
Speaker 1: Ned didn't know exactly what to make of this. Planes, boats,
Speaker 1: tractor trailers all filled with weed. Was it possible that
Speaker 1: Toby the Walking hand Grenade really had a brother who
Speaker 1: was a big time criminal orchestrating all of this? If
Speaker 1: this was true, how had Ned not picked up on
Speaker 1: this sooner. Toby's brother went by the name Shine. His
Speaker 1: real name was Clinton Anderson. He died in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: so I had to kind of piece together a picture
Speaker 1: of who he was. I don't have the background as
Speaker 1: to why they called him Shine. About my uncle Clint.
Speaker 1: In my memories of him, he was a ted. This
Speaker 1: is Jesse Anderson, Toby's son. Shine was his uncle, and
Speaker 1: Jesse loved his uncle, adored him. I talked to a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who knew Shine well, and they all
Speaker 1: described him pretty much as this big, lovable guy. One
Speaker 1: person said he would have made a perfect Santa Clause.
Speaker 1: Another said he looked like Wilfred Grimley, you know, the
Speaker 1: grandfather of the actor who started all the Quaker Oats commercials.
Speaker 1: When things got rough at home for Jesse, he actually
Speaker 1: went to live with his uncle Clint for a while.
Speaker 1: He loved being there. Geez, just like anywhere else, right,
Speaker 1: kids running around playing football in the front yard, you know,
Speaker 1: watching football, watching baseball, you know, life in the seventies
Speaker 1: and early eighties, gambling, playing dart, shooting pool, you know,
Speaker 1: normal way of life. Little Jesse had never seen a
Speaker 1: dad who could be depended on before. I guess I
Speaker 1: wanted that for my dad. And that's that's what I
Speaker 1: always appreciated about my uncle Clint was you know, he
Speaker 1: was I recall him always being there, and I recall
Speaker 1: him always um, you know, never having to worry m
Speaker 1: like I did with my dad and my immediate you know,
Speaker 1: a line of sight and what I recall. And maybe
Speaker 1: I was blinded by that because I was just so
Speaker 1: happy to be with my you know, have a family,
Speaker 1: have a bad wake up, go to school, not necessarily
Speaker 1: have to worry about anything, right. It was. It was great.
Speaker 1: Jesse says the men and his family tended to be
Speaker 1: hard and have a short fuse. But I don't remember
Speaker 1: my uncle Clinton like that at all. I mean, again,
Speaker 1: for me, you know the way that I look at
Speaker 1: my uncle Clint was it was much like it was
Speaker 1: much like a savior. Shine had a son named Adam.
Speaker 1: He was Jesse's older cousin. It took me a long
Speaker 1: time to track him down. One night he finally agreed
Speaker 1: to speak by phone. All right, Jake, give me a
Speaker 1: second here. He says that Shine was a jack of
Speaker 1: all trades, a salesman and sold cars and boats too.
Speaker 1: Though Shin didn't talk about his work a ton, you know,
Speaker 1: his work and his family's subarate. He was a good guy,
Speaker 1: but he had an edge. Shine was a striver. He
Speaker 1: was always looking for something beyond the working class suburb
Speaker 1: where they started out, a place called Melvindale, a town
Speaker 1: dominated by the nearby Ford, GM and Chrysler plants. Melvindale
Speaker 1: was I fall it a factory town. Pretty much everybody
Speaker 1: there worked and worked for the Big three and was
Speaker 1: working class, good people. But he was kind of like
Speaker 1: taking me out of that environment, showing me that there
Speaker 1: was more like you know, you can't achieve more. No, no,
Speaker 1: you don't have to just be a line worker all
Speaker 1: your life. Adam had a lot of memories from that time,
Speaker 1: like when his dad came home with a new gadget,
Speaker 1: a mysterious briefcase filled with meters and electrical wires. The
Speaker 1: device was known as a p SE, which stood for
Speaker 1: Psychological Stress evaluator. It was an alternative to the traditional
Speaker 1: lie detector, and it could be used discreetly, so it
Speaker 1: didn't require hooking the subject up to any wires or anything. Supposedly,
Speaker 1: a skilled operator could use it to pick up on
Speaker 1: micro tremors in your voice. I spoke to a lot
Speaker 1: of people who knew Shine and remembered vividly him showing
Speaker 1: up with his briefcase and testing them. Oh yes, everybody
Speaker 1: took a test. Everybody. There was a guy that always
Speaker 1: carried around this sort of big boxy briefcase. As I recall,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he could scarely on it. Sure he was
Speaker 1: a good bullshitter, you know it all a little nervous
Speaker 1: spot taking this Dagone thing he asked your questions. I
Speaker 1: guess it works. Ask you what your name is and
Speaker 1: you tell him. Then you tell him a lie and
Speaker 1: so it gives him was a distinction of between the
Speaker 1: truth and lie, whether it works or now, I'd scare
Speaker 1: the shit out of you. So I imagine it would
Speaker 1: keep people straight. And I'm sure he was one of
Speaker 1: the most valuable tools they had, you know, in doing US.
Speaker 1: Shine had graduated from a special course and now he
Speaker 1: was a trained PSC operator. He took it seriously, and Adam,
Speaker 1: like any kid, was curious. So there was something different.
Speaker 1: It was interesting. I didn't know why he's doing it
Speaker 1: on cool. Dad got a new job, you know, and
Speaker 1: the job came with perks like this. One time his
Speaker 1: dad took him on a business trip. They flew down
Speaker 1: to Houston, Texas. Together. They stayed at this cool hotel
Speaker 1: that was connected to a big shopping mall, and at
Speaker 1: some point Shine tells his son, He's like, hey, I
Speaker 1: gotta go out for a little while, you know, don't
Speaker 1: don't leave the room, don't answer the door. Alone in
Speaker 1: his hotel room, Adam watched TV. Minutes turned to hours,
Speaker 1: and he began to think about what his dad had said.
Speaker 1: Don't answer at the door. Why not? Who was it
Speaker 1: that might come knocking. Adam wasn't worried exactly, but he
Speaker 1: began to wonder what was his dad up to. But
Speaker 1: I think maybe whoever he was working with, they had
Speaker 1: another room in the same hotel, so they could have
Speaker 1: been just down the hall. I don't believe he left.
Speaker 1: I think he just grabbed his machine and you know,
Speaker 1: went to another room. Adam didn't ask any questions, and
Speaker 1: he didn't give it too much thought at the time,
Speaker 1: but eventually he started to think back to moments like
Speaker 1: this and wonder maybe what his father did was not
Speaker 1: entirely on the op and up. I mean, who was
Speaker 1: paying him to carry around that briefcase anyway. In fact,
Speaker 1: clues began to surface that Shine was much more than
Speaker 1: just a suburban dad with a mysterious job. One of
Speaker 1: these clues turned up a thousand miles to the South
Speaker 1: Way down in Louisiana and a lonely by you very
Speaker 1: far from Detroit. As Ned continued to investigate the bikers
Speaker 1: in Detroit, detectives in Louisiana, we're looking into a big
Speaker 1: smuggling job. It all began with a guy named Dave Ware. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was a helicopter pilot on the sign to Louisiana
Speaker 1: State Police in our region too southwest Louisiana. One day,
Speaker 1: Dave gets a tip about an abandoned barge, so he
Speaker 1: goes looking for it. Flies up a lonely stretch of
Speaker 1: a Vermilion River, a seventy mile long by you in
Speaker 1: southern Louisiana. It's flat, You've got agriculture fields and then area.
Speaker 1: It's a heavy marsh and thick jungle type area. So
Speaker 1: they were just choppering along. We looked down and we
Speaker 1: see this huge barge tied off with some rope next
Speaker 1: to some trees. And we're like, well, that's odd. And
Speaker 1: we were kind of scratching our heads what to do.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, I'll just land on the barge.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like landing on aircraft carrier. So they
Speaker 1: land on the barge, they get out of the chopper,
Speaker 1: they start poking around. Sure enough, they find a sealed
Speaker 1: hatch welded into the deck, hidden beneath some coils of rope.
Speaker 1: And so I went to the cargo hole of my
Speaker 1: aircraft and dug it my little two bag I always carred,
Speaker 1: and got a screwdriver and started digging at this rubber
Speaker 1: ceilant and you gotta menage. The sun was out and
Speaker 1: it was hot. And when I've popped that ceiling, the
Speaker 1: spew just you know, morstar had come up and the
Speaker 1: smell of marijuana. And we looked at each other and
Speaker 1: smile and said bingo. The barge itself was quite large
Speaker 1: and basically empty. All that remained with the dregs some
Speaker 1: psyche bales that had somehow gotten a wet at the
Speaker 1: bottom of the boat. Apparently the rest of the load,
Speaker 1: totally a few hundred thousand pounds, had all been unloaded,
Speaker 1: successfully dry and ready to smoke. A narcotics agent named
Speaker 1: Roy Fruget took up the investigation. So we walked on
Speaker 1: the barge and we saw marijuana sees all over it.
Speaker 1: We looked through some drawers. We found a Panamanian flag,
Speaker 1: we found a Colombian flag. Well, you don't have to
Speaker 1: be Sherlock Holmes to realize that we stumbled up on
Speaker 1: something that was large and scale and that it was international. Eventually,
Speaker 1: the agents figured out that a local marine contractor had
Speaker 1: been hired to move the barge up the river, and
Speaker 1: as luck would have it, the contractors had a receipt
Speaker 1: with the customer's callback number on it, trace the hallback
Speaker 1: number and it went to a small grocery store in
Speaker 1: a rural area in Judice, Louisiana, and the name of
Speaker 1: the store was the Country Boy Grocery Store. So we
Speaker 1: went to the Country Boy Grocery Store, and I'm talking
Speaker 1: about a small building. It had a couple of gas
Speaker 1: pumps in front, had a small meat market inside. They
Speaker 1: specialized in Cajun food like stuffed chickens, buddha and cracklings,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. So we talked to the owner
Speaker 1: because this guy's first language, which Cajun French, and he said,
Speaker 1: with his accent, he said, you know, in the last
Speaker 1: three months, there's been a lot of foreigners in my store.
Speaker 1: What do you mean by foreigners? He said, you know,
Speaker 1: he said, out of towner's people with blonde hair and
Speaker 1: blue eyes, and ten he said, you know, Florida looking people.
Speaker 1: So turns out these Florida looking people had rented a
Speaker 1: couple of houses nearby. The agents got search warrants. There
Speaker 1: was a three bedroom, two bath ranch style house. It
Speaker 1: was close to the Country Bar grocery store, and when
Speaker 1: we hit it, it had lots and lots of bunk beds,
Speaker 1: lots of beer bottles, lots of cans of beer, some'm
Speaker 1: half empty, half eaten sandwiches on the floor. I remember
Speaker 1: one of my guys said it looked like a scene
Speaker 1: from Animal House. Roy starts poking around in the living
Speaker 1: room and on the coffee table, I saw a large
Speaker 1: red book and a hard bound New York Times World Atlas.
Speaker 1: I opened it up, started looking at it, looking actually
Speaker 1: for the Gulf of Mexico. Saw that there was a
Speaker 1: chart with a pen marking places through the Gulf of Mexico,
Speaker 1: and then I backed it up and it went down
Speaker 1: to barn Kill, Columbia. It was quite literally mapped out
Speaker 1: in front of them, evidence of an international syndicate with
Speaker 1: rats for smoking tons of drugs into the United States.
Speaker 1: But everyone is gone. They don't have a single suspect.
Speaker 1: Roy and his partner, Harvey Duplantis, continued to search the house.
Speaker 1: We found a yellow notepad with lines on it like
Speaker 1: you would use in school, and it didn't have any
Speaker 1: writing on it, but it had indentations where somebody had
Speaker 1: written on the page above it and then tore the
Speaker 1: page off. Harvey remembered from grade school. He took a
Speaker 1: number two pencil out of his truck and he scratched
Speaker 1: over the indentations and we found a note. Of course,
Speaker 1: we didn't have the whole note, just whatever came up
Speaker 1: that Harvey could scribble out there, but it basically said
Speaker 1: he was bringing more people. More people were on the way.
Speaker 1: Harvey kneels over the table, carefully rubbing a pencil over
Speaker 1: the pad, deciphering this cryptic note word by word, the
Speaker 1: whole thing right out of a Hitchcock movie. This is
Speaker 1: exactly what carry Grant does in north By Northwest, and
Speaker 1: it works. At the bottom of the pad, there's actually
Speaker 1: a signature. Someone wrote their name as if authorizing these orders,
Speaker 1: and slowly the letters of the name appear S H,
Speaker 1: I and E. Shine. Back in Detroit, Ned had no
Speaker 1: idea what had gone down in Louisiana. He was back
Speaker 1: at the office doing a bit of good old fashioned
Speaker 1: detective work, following up on that tip that Toby had
Speaker 1: given him about his brother, and the deeper Ned dug
Speaker 1: into Shine's life, the more he found. We're looking at
Speaker 1: what he has, a house and cars and everything, and
Speaker 1: no source of income. And then we're pulling phone records,
Speaker 1: bank records and everything, and huge deposits of fifty to
Speaker 1: sixty thousand at a time, and we're getting travel records
Speaker 1: from credit cards, and Ned says that those travel records
Speaker 1: were suspicious. For instance, Shine its spend some time down
Speaker 1: in the Cayman Islands, which was known as a money
Speaker 1: laundering hub. So might Shine be his guy, the one
Speaker 1: Ned had been looking for the key to it all.
Speaker 1: If Ned was right, he had found his link to
Speaker 1: a distant, shadowy drug network, But it didn't seem like
Speaker 1: he had quite enough to go on. Ned believed if
Speaker 1: he could just sit down with Shine, talk to him,
Speaker 1: man to man, he might be able to work him,
Speaker 1: maybe even flip him. He was starting to strategize, even
Speaker 1: though he didn't have much to threaten Shine with except
Speaker 1: maybe his badge. It sounds like you were doing some
Speaker 1: serious bullshitting of your own. And also you could be
Speaker 1: barking up the wrong tree. You don't know for sure
Speaker 1: the magnitude or the right part of the game. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the FBI knows a lot, but a lot of it
Speaker 1: is a game to try to ferret out the information
Speaker 1: you need. When you throw down the FBI badge and credentials,
Speaker 1: it horrifies guilty people. They think the FBI knows everything.
Speaker 1: Next time, a deep Cover, Ned goes to flip Shine.
Speaker 1: Shine had a family, and it was really a devoted
Speaker 1: family guy. You know, I just I'm gonna take every
Speaker 1: penny they got. I'm gonna take the house, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: take the cars, I'm gonna take the bank accounts. Everything's
Speaker 1: gonna be gone. And that struck a dagger in them.
Speaker 1: Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by
Speaker 1: Karen Shakerji. Our story editor is Jack Hitt. Original music
Speaker 1: and our theme was composed by Luis Gara and Flawn
Speaker 1: Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Mia
Speaker 1: Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by
Speaker 1: Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly
Speaker 1: Mcgliori Lee, Tom Mullad Mayakining, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland,
Speaker 1: Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Special thanks
Speaker 1: also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. I'm Jake Albern