Speaker 1: M I hunted men for a living. That's how I
Speaker 1: looked at it. I went from hunting animals to me
Speaker 1: and when I captured that was my trophy on the wall.
Speaker 1: On this episode of the Burglaries podcast, we're going deep
Speaker 1: undercover in the rough country of southeast Ohio to learn
Speaker 1: about the secret lives of wildlife poachers and the life
Speaker 1: of an undercover wildlife agent by the name of RT. Stewart.
Speaker 1: He worked eighteen years for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Speaker 1: He was one of the lead agents on the largest
Speaker 1: turkey poaching sting in US history. He's a decorated law
Speaker 1: enforcement officer known for going deep undercover, even years at
Speaker 1: a time, and willing to do whatever it took to
Speaker 1: bust the outlaws. And in his career he never had
Speaker 1: a single one of his targets suspects not be convicted
Speaker 1: of crimes. If the bad guys had known him, they'd
Speaker 1: have feared him, but they didn't because he was a ghost.
Speaker 1: We'll hear from author Chip Gross, who wrote a book
Speaker 1: about RT, and will interview Dr Matthew Sharp's of California
Speaker 1: State University about the psychology of undercover agents and the
Speaker 1: personal cost that comes with living a lie. In the
Speaker 1: first episode of this series, yes, I said, series, will
Speaker 1: meet RT and he'll show us the life of an
Speaker 1: undercover agent. And on part two we'll talk about his
Speaker 1: biggest job. You're gonna laugh, be intrigued, and you're gonna cry.
Speaker 1: I really doubt you're gonna want to miss this one.
Speaker 1: Your whole life is lie. Who you talk about stress,
Speaker 1: but when you're young and dumb, you don't even think
Speaker 1: about it. But it's stress. Was it worth it? You're
Speaker 1: too good? Ye. My name is Clay Nukelem and this
Speaker 1: is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten
Speaker 1: but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where
Speaker 1: we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives
Speaker 1: close to the land. Presented by f HF Gear American Maid,
Speaker 1: purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be
Speaker 1: as rugged as the places we explore. Bells Man leads
Speaker 1: a life of danger. The foundation of a functional society
Speaker 1: is that the law of the l and is obeyed
Speaker 1: by the vast majority of the population, and much of
Speaker 1: this is enforced by uniformed law enforcement that patrols our highways,
Speaker 1: cities and towns. Enforcing the law secret ass but there
Speaker 1: is an underground layer of crime that is very difficult
Speaker 1: for a person in uniform to stop. And that's where
Speaker 1: another layer of guile or cunning action of the good
Speaker 1: guys kicks in. At some point in history, the undercover
Speaker 1: agent arose your courage, Mrs so we a chrene. I
Speaker 1: admire your luck, Mr Bond, James Bond, Mr Bond, I
Speaker 1: suppose you wouldn't care to raise the limit. I have
Speaker 1: no objection. The idea the world famous secret agent like
Speaker 1: James Bond is kind of ludicrous, typical of Hollywood. They
Speaker 1: glamorized stuff that often isn't glamorous at all. Dr Matthew
Speaker 1: Sharp's is a professor of psychology at California State University
Speaker 1: and Fresno. He studied undercover agents for a long time.
Speaker 1: Here's what he has to say about old James Bond.
Speaker 1: Where James Bond and there is Sean Connery back in
Speaker 1: the day, but the one I like anyway, and there
Speaker 1: he is wearing his nice tuxedo in a casino, right,
Speaker 1: and he's like before, it's just taller everybody else. And
Speaker 1: get two beautiful women on each army, and so everybody
Speaker 1: else wearing jeans on a T shirt. He's in his
Speaker 1: tuxedo right, and he's a world famous secret agent. There's
Speaker 1: an old song, the second best secret agent in the
Speaker 1: whole wide world, but he's a world famous secretgyent. Well,
Speaker 1: I wants to ask an actual uh spy and undercover,
Speaker 1: a man who spends his life deliberately being as nondescript
Speaker 1: as possible. What would happen to James Bond in real life?
Speaker 1: He didn't even has it. He'd be done in five minutes.
Speaker 1: You can't be a world fat of secret agent. There's
Speaker 1: no future, but you'd like that recognition, and um, you know,
Speaker 1: the clients and services outside police work must be very,
Speaker 1: very difficult because you may get medals where you don't
Speaker 1: even get to take from home and there you are
Speaker 1: with you know, your the veterans of this and that service.
Speaker 1: You can't talk about it, and those stresses have not
Speaker 1: really been addressed, but they're a big problem. There's no
Speaker 1: future in being a world famous secret agent. That's funny.
Speaker 1: Understanding the psychology of undercover agents is a brand new field.
Speaker 1: I guess studying it is an indicator that we're in
Speaker 1: advanced society. Our needs are met to the point we
Speaker 1: now have resources to study the people hired as law
Speaker 1: enforcement that we've commissioned to act as criminals and break
Speaker 1: the law in order to catch the real criminals. When
Speaker 1: you start thinking about it, it's a complex space, and
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if that means are society is advanced.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's regressing. Undercover work is a necessary evil, one
Speaker 1: that we're all thankful for, whether we realize it or not,
Speaker 1: and it lies in an odd philosophical and ethical spot.
Speaker 1: It takes a special breed of person to do this,
Speaker 1: and we're learning it often comes at a high cost
Speaker 1: to the individual, but a net gain for society. It's
Speaker 1: rare that we get a glimpse into the real life
Speaker 1: of an undercover agent. In two thousand twelve, the Kent
Speaker 1: State University Press published a book written by Chip Gross
Speaker 1: titled Poachers Were My Prey. The book is the real
Speaker 1: life story of this undercover agent, RT Stewart. It's a
Speaker 1: tell all book, and it's publishing came with its own
Speaker 1: share of controversy. But in it, RT tells about his
Speaker 1: top ten covert operations, busting the ruffican outlaws of Southeast
Speaker 1: Ohio and West Virginia. Here's off Chip Growth introducing us
Speaker 1: to our t. It just seems like some people in
Speaker 1: this world are perfectly matched for the jobs they do,
Speaker 1: and R. T. Store is definitely one of those people.
Speaker 1: But first of all, he's a very skilled woodsman. He
Speaker 1: knows how to hunt, he knows how to fish, he
Speaker 1: knows how to trap. When the bad guys see that,
Speaker 1: that is a positive in their mind, you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: this guy is for real. And uh, he's very congenial.
Speaker 1: He could get the bad guys to like him and
Speaker 1: trust him very very quickly, sometimes with just within a
Speaker 1: few days. He just got that that knack about him.
Speaker 1: He's a very likable person. Like, what what does it
Speaker 1: take for a person to to have that, to be
Speaker 1: able to do that? I'm not sure because I don't
Speaker 1: have it, and I don't think a lot of people do.
Speaker 1: But RT does. He's a real chameleon in that he
Speaker 1: can adjust to a lot of different situations. As he
Speaker 1: talked about, he can relate to the kind of scumbag poachers,
Speaker 1: or he can go to Lake Erie and deal with
Speaker 1: marina owners up there and charter boat captains that are
Speaker 1: running boats worth tens of thousands of dollars and still
Speaker 1: slide in and become a member of that group. So
Speaker 1: I think it's a lot of It is kind of
Speaker 1: a natural ability, a natural skill, and he's very very
Speaker 1: good at what he does. He can think on his
Speaker 1: feet very very quickly. He mentions in the book that
Speaker 1: in every undercover operation that he was on, the poachers
Speaker 1: at one point or another accused him or asked him
Speaker 1: if he wasn't undercover wildlife officer, you know, because they've
Speaker 1: always got that in the back of their mind. We
Speaker 1: know we're doing bad stuff. Who's this new guy and
Speaker 1: they're looking at him? Is this the Is this our
Speaker 1: worst nightmare that we don't know about yet? And he
Speaker 1: was able to talk his way out of it every
Speaker 1: single time. And when I asked him how he did it,
Speaker 1: he said, I don't know. He said, it's something I
Speaker 1: prepared for, but I knew I was going to get
Speaker 1: the question, but every time it came up, I had
Speaker 1: to work around it in a different way. RTI. Stewart
Speaker 1: is now in his sixties and he's been retired from
Speaker 1: Ohio dn R for over a decade. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to say this without just saying it. When you
Speaker 1: meet him. He doesn't have the vibe of a career
Speaker 1: law enforcement man. He's got a penful of blue tick
Speaker 1: coon hounds, and he's got duck boats stuffed under every
Speaker 1: shed on his place. And his Southeast Ohio draw is
Speaker 1: surprisingly thick. But that's exactly why he was one of
Speaker 1: the best undercover agents in Ohio dn our history. Today
Speaker 1: his hair is trimmed tight, and it looks like he
Speaker 1: hasn't shaved in a couple of days. But at one
Speaker 1: time he looked like a guitarist from zz Top. Here's
Speaker 1: our t I guess as a kid, I used to
Speaker 1: watch television, and you know, and I always liked the
Speaker 1: I always liked the idea of a ranger or a
Speaker 1: game word or something that nature. And he grew up
Speaker 1: hunting and fishing. Absolutely grew up hunting and fishing. My
Speaker 1: dad was a major. He went in a gun shop
Speaker 1: for forty years. And so how did you become a
Speaker 1: game where in that? What age were you and what
Speaker 1: was your career progression? You know, living in a small
Speaker 1: town and got married and I ended up working in
Speaker 1: a coal mine. You have to live, You've got kids,
Speaker 1: you gotta you gotta make a living. You know that
Speaker 1: wasn't my that wasn't my dream obviously, but you gotta
Speaker 1: make a living, and that's how around here, being uneducated.
Speaker 1: And so I went to work in a coal mine
Speaker 1: and then I left there and went to steel mills,
Speaker 1: and uh got laid off in nineteen eighty one. And
Speaker 1: I was twenty nine or thirty. And when I got
Speaker 1: laid off, that's when that first time they ever laid
Speaker 1: off my life. I remember telling them people that I
Speaker 1: was going to college and become a game warden. I
Speaker 1: was thirty years old when I went to gold. You've
Speaker 1: just learned what are the keys to Artie's success in
Speaker 1: living a life of an undercover agent. He worked in
Speaker 1: a whole mine, in the steel mill for over a decade.
Speaker 1: He'd lived a real life of a rural Appalachian man,
Speaker 1: which you can't fake. RTIs a coon hunter, a cat fisherman,
Speaker 1: a skilled deer in turkey hunter, and a trapper. And
Speaker 1: by the way, Southeast Ohio is considered Appalachia, and as
Speaker 1: a surprise to me, it's even considered the South by
Speaker 1: those that lived there. And RT has never ice fished
Speaker 1: a day in his life, so it passes Steve Ronelli's
Speaker 1: test R. T was hired by the Ohio dn R
Speaker 1: when he was thirty five years old as a uniformed
Speaker 1: game warden. They assigned me to Union County, which was
Speaker 1: I didn't even know where Union County was because I
Speaker 1: had never mean much out of this area that was
Speaker 1: in the that was west of Columbus, which to me,
Speaker 1: that was the city. And the worst thing that could
Speaker 1: have done was said, a give a hill billy with
Speaker 1: a badge and sent him to the city. Well, so
Speaker 1: I went up there and they put me in uniform,
Speaker 1: and I was up there for about a year and
Speaker 1: a half. I was in uniform, and then I was
Speaker 1: always intrigued because I had worked with friends of mine
Speaker 1: that was undercover agents with liquor Control, and I was
Speaker 1: always always intrigued about that. You know. RT told his
Speaker 1: supervisors that if there was ever any need for undercover
Speaker 1: work that he'd be interested in the job. He had
Speaker 1: no training, but he had reason to think that he'd
Speaker 1: be good at It turns out he was right. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind, I was thirty five when I went to
Speaker 1: work as a wildlife officer. I grew up in hunting
Speaker 1: and fishing all my childhood of life and all my
Speaker 1: early adult life, if it flew, swam, or walked, I
Speaker 1: had been involved in it. So with my background in that,
Speaker 1: and I wasn't always an angel. A matter of fact,
Speaker 1: they tried to catch me for five years and couldn't.
Speaker 1: That's why they heard me. Is that right? So I
Speaker 1: just felt I had the knowledge in the background that
Speaker 1: I knew how outlaws worked. I just felt that I
Speaker 1: could do a better job of catching people. Not saying
Speaker 1: that I didn't have a good career while I was
Speaker 1: in uniform. I did. I just felt I could catch
Speaker 1: people that was more detrimental to the population of the
Speaker 1: wildlife than I could getting you. I was already rough
Speaker 1: round the edges, and you're right, you were dangerous. As
Speaker 1: an undercover up, I was feared. Uh, did you have
Speaker 1: the kind of confidence that when you set out on
Speaker 1: a target target acquisition? It was like, man, that's a
Speaker 1: good question. Whatever it takes to get this guy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I had the confidence. I felt I had the ability.
Speaker 1: I felt I had to know how, and I was
Speaker 1: a pretty good actor. I hunted men for a living.
Speaker 1: That's how I looked at him. I went from hunting
Speaker 1: animals to me when I captured that was my trophy
Speaker 1: on the wall. RT has the right to be confident
Speaker 1: and call it like it is, because later he'll reveal
Speaker 1: some of his mistakes. It takes a special person to
Speaker 1: be successful undercover, and as we're beginning to see, Artis
Speaker 1: background set him up to be as good an undercover
Speaker 1: agent as was ever made. And as a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: he never worked a case where he didn't get his
Speaker 1: target suspect. That's incredible. If you're an outlaw, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want Artie Stewart after you, but like a black panther
Speaker 1: creeping up on you in the night, you wouldn't even
Speaker 1: know it was r T. I think with my background,
Speaker 1: I could talk the language that poachers and outlaws could understand.
Speaker 1: I knew what they were thinking. I guess I knew
Speaker 1: what they were after I could talk that, and they
Speaker 1: knew that I wasn't fake when I talked about it,
Speaker 1: and I was. I was always good at reading Pepe.
Speaker 1: I think I was always good at reading people. I
Speaker 1: always felt that I had a good humorous side to me.
Speaker 1: People make people like me. And I also discovered early
Speaker 1: on that if you put this outlaw, put them on
Speaker 1: a pedestal that's what they like. They didn't want competition,
Speaker 1: but they want to be put on a pedestal. They
Speaker 1: wanted esteem from you or anyone. Would that be like
Speaker 1: a number one descriptor of what you see that's congruent throughout.
Speaker 1: They all just want to be They want to be
Speaker 1: put up on that pedestal. They want to be the
Speaker 1: number one person in their peers eyes. They want to
Speaker 1: be the great white hunter. The motivations of outlaws are
Speaker 1: really quite primitive to human nature. They're looking for social
Speaker 1: esteem and for whatever reason, they can't get that inside
Speaker 1: the boundaries of the law, so they've got to cheat
Speaker 1: to get it. I want to underst stand what goes
Speaker 1: into an undercover operation. In Artis book, I was amazed
Speaker 1: at the links he would go to to infiltrate these
Speaker 1: poaching rings. On these undercover operations, you would embed yourself
Speaker 1: completely inside of these communities, correct. I've heard of operations
Speaker 1: where like an undercover guy would like live at his
Speaker 1: normal house with his wife and like drive two hours
Speaker 1: and show up at a gas station that's playing game boards,
Speaker 1: that's playing undercover and playing under Okay, well so tell
Speaker 1: me that's playing. So tell me what you had to do.
Speaker 1: I took I took it very serious. I was I was.
Speaker 1: I took it extremely serious. I would go there, and
Speaker 1: I felt the only way to catch these people, you've
Speaker 1: got to You've got to be part of them. You
Speaker 1: gotta be with them. So I'd go there and find
Speaker 1: a plate and find a place to rent. You want
Speaker 1: to have a target suspect, have a target suspect. We'd
Speaker 1: already have a target list, I say, you know, complaints
Speaker 1: on individuals, and they'll from whatever county the agents put
Speaker 1: together and give us a packet. You know, I need
Speaker 1: to look at these guys and see what's going on.
Speaker 1: So that's what we'd do. So we would we would
Speaker 1: go in and rent a place in the surrounding area.
Speaker 1: We didn't want it too close, but we didn't want
Speaker 1: it too far away either, you know, I didn't. We
Speaker 1: didn't want it close enough. We're you know, just the
Speaker 1: walk down the street and walking in in any time,
Speaker 1: you know, But but we wanted a close enough to
Speaker 1: make it a little effort, you know, for him to
Speaker 1: come visit. I remember you saying that you didn't want
Speaker 1: to like live across the street from a poacher because
Speaker 1: he might show up at a time when you're not
Speaker 1: needing him on the phone with your boss or so,
Speaker 1: but but far enough away that he'd have to go
Speaker 1: out of his way to come see you. But you're
Speaker 1: still in the community. Correct, That's exactly right. Why didn't
Speaker 1: nobody tell me that, you know, we didn't have a
Speaker 1: didn't have a book to go by. I think it
Speaker 1: was just instinct instinct. So that's what we do is
Speaker 1: rent a place like that. And my shortest project, I
Speaker 1: think it was like fourteen months or twelve months, and
Speaker 1: then so you would you would live there for like years? Yeah?
Speaker 1: A long was one was four years? Four years? Would
Speaker 1: you go back home to try to come home? But
Speaker 1: it got the point where I did not want to
Speaker 1: come home. I just it was who wants to come
Speaker 1: back to reality? M hmm. I got the point I
Speaker 1: didn't want to come home. This is where things get
Speaker 1: interesting and take an unexpected turn. What I appreciate most
Speaker 1: about our T is how open he is about his struggles.
Speaker 1: It's pretty rare to find a person willing to be
Speaker 1: as honest about himself as our T. At the time,
Speaker 1: there wasn't much known about the psychological effects of living
Speaker 1: a double life, but it turns out r tis experience
Speaker 1: of having difficulty going back and forth between reality and
Speaker 1: his undercover work is a common issue. Dr Matthew Sharps
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Processing under Pressure, Stress, memory, and
Speaker 1: decision Making in law enforcement. He's worked a lot with
Speaker 1: undercover agents, but it's an under researched area. I want
Speaker 1: to see what he says about this. We now know
Speaker 1: that brain cells. If you if a brain cell is active,
Speaker 1: what other brain cells are talking to these synaps The
Speaker 1: connections tend to be strengthened. So if you're in the
Speaker 1: field for a long time, pretending to be a mafiosi,
Speaker 1: pretending to be a drug dealer, what have you, you're
Speaker 1: gonna stows. Those habit pattings start to become a relatively
Speaker 1: automatic you. Okay, So when you go back home to
Speaker 1: your to your your spouse, your family. Lots of times
Speaker 1: undercover people will emerge back into the instead of word,
Speaker 1: emerge back into their undercover persona, and they don't know
Speaker 1: they're doing it. This is usually problematic. An awful lot
Speaker 1: of our life is dealing in terms of automated behaviors.
Speaker 1: It's possible to be so d undercover for so long
Speaker 1: that the functional mechanisms of our identity begin to become scrambled,
Speaker 1: and when you think about it, it's really an odd
Speaker 1: place for a human to occupy. Normal human existence is
Speaker 1: based on us functioning honestly in a state of reality.
Speaker 1: But people who work deep undercover have to live a
Speaker 1: life which, as it turns out, exerts an extreme amount
Speaker 1: of chronic stress on the body that we weren't designed for.
Speaker 1: If you think about our ancient ancestors, they were hunters,
Speaker 1: and hunting presents tremendous acute stress, especially if you're doing
Speaker 1: it with a spear, or a spear has a magazine
Speaker 1: capacity of one. Okay, so that's pretty stressful, But it's
Speaker 1: two or three days of a persistence hunt, or the
Speaker 1: five minutes of jumping up and taking out a deer,
Speaker 1: or back in the day in Irish elk okay, it's cute. Now,
Speaker 1: we had to be able to deal with acute stress
Speaker 1: because if you couldn't, you couldn't survive long enough to reproduce.
Speaker 1: But on ex stress, the symptoms of chronics chronic stress
Speaker 1: don't kill you until you're in middle age or for
Speaker 1: what them was old age, and so we don't seem
Speaker 1: to have a good way of dealing with chronic stress.
Speaker 1: It gets us. One thing is that when you're under stress,
Speaker 1: you're in the human fight or flight response, and that
Speaker 1: ups your blood pressure, it ups your heart rate, it
Speaker 1: ups your breathing rate. All this stuff is wearing on
Speaker 1: the body. It also produces, aside from those three major
Speaker 1: chemicals involved, aldosterone, which is to do assault balance, Cortisol
Speaker 1: that gives you more energy, but it also has an
Speaker 1: erosive quality on some structures. There's research that indicates cord
Speaker 1: assault and have some corrosive agency on a structure in
Speaker 1: the brain called the hippocampus where you actually process your memories.
Speaker 1: But then you have adrenaline, and that's what it puts
Speaker 1: your body into this higher state of being. It's just very,
Speaker 1: very expensive, and because you're using all of these you're
Speaker 1: doing all of this high stress stuff, you tend to
Speaker 1: shut down the systems you don't need. Humans weren't designed
Speaker 1: for chronic or constant stress, were equipped for short term stress.
Speaker 1: And it all goes back to our hunter gatherer roots.
Speaker 1: It's easy to listen to our t stories and feel
Speaker 1: the excitement and James Bond style intrigue of undercover work.
Speaker 1: But all things come with the cost, and it certainly
Speaker 1: did for Ourt. Being an undercover agent is a dirty
Speaker 1: job that enables the rest of us to live normal lives, unaware,
Speaker 1: even oblivious to what's helping keep things stable. I want
Speaker 1: to get back to the nitty gritty mechanics of undercover work,
Speaker 1: and what's a bit mind twisting is that the key
Speaker 1: to living a lie is telling the truth. The best
Speaker 1: undercover agent and I think any of them will tell
Speaker 1: you this, that's been deep undercover or you got to
Speaker 1: stick to the truth. You tell lies, but you don't
Speaker 1: tell them in a sense. You may you may have
Speaker 1: done something. You may just order the time frame, or
Speaker 1: you just order the name, but you stick to the
Speaker 1: truth of reality what you have experienced, and you never
Speaker 1: go wrong because you don't have to remember. And so
Speaker 1: as an big overview, so you've embedded yourself. You have
Speaker 1: your personal story, and then you're trying to infiltrate these
Speaker 1: groups of people or a specific person, and you need
Speaker 1: them to take you hunting, and you need them to
Speaker 1: talk about what they've done. Correct, But did you find
Speaker 1: that these guys wanted to talk once you got the credibility.
Speaker 1: Usually there was a group. When I say a group,
Speaker 1: it might be you know, one, two guys to a
Speaker 1: half a dozen guys that was taking it. Once you
Speaker 1: got the credibility of some of those lower members of
Speaker 1: that gring that helped get you to the top band. Really,
Speaker 1: so you would usually infiltrate by meeting some of the
Speaker 1: lower tier guys really and they would bring you to
Speaker 1: the leader. Creig. It took me, uh, on one particular job,
Speaker 1: you know, I was working, it took me eleven months
Speaker 1: to meet the number one guy. But were they protective
Speaker 1: of him? Was he elusive? He just didn't expose himself
Speaker 1: to many people, know, just to or three people. Isn't
Speaker 1: that common to mankind of what what you're describing there,
Speaker 1: to me is like the social hierarchy of just the
Speaker 1: way that we operate. Correct. There's people that have their
Speaker 1: spheres and they're kind of the leader, and they have
Speaker 1: these young maybe younger maybe just the guys that are
Speaker 1: lower than them on the social and then and that
Speaker 1: guy top guys kind of guarded in some way. Well again,
Speaker 1: there you go, the ego, the power, you know, John
Speaker 1: there he's the top man. But we you know he
Speaker 1: called all the shots, you know, even and that's the
Speaker 1: way it works in legitimate social structures, that's correct, and
Speaker 1: not just with poachers, with any of us anything, racing, racing, sports, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, all kind of things. Uh, it all matches
Speaker 1: the same criteria. So you would infiltrate the groups by
Speaker 1: being so convincing and being the real deal, and then
Speaker 1: you would need to be hunting with go hunting with
Speaker 1: these guys. It would take you as long as eleven
Speaker 1: months to even meet your target guy, and then you'd
Speaker 1: go hunting with them, you'd go drinking with them, you'd
Speaker 1: go to their family events and all of it everything
Speaker 1: you just mentioned, you know. Or you try to find
Speaker 1: good intel and you find out where these guys like
Speaker 1: to hang out or eat, and you try to embed
Speaker 1: yourself into those locations. Sometimes you'll meet some guys lowder
Speaker 1: you know so and so, Yeah, I know so and so,
Speaker 1: And next thing you know, you're you're with a lower
Speaker 1: guy that knows this guy. And then if you can
Speaker 1: do some things or convince him that you are an outlaw,
Speaker 1: and then you do a few things with him, then
Speaker 1: that's you're building your credibilities of them. The web keeps
Speaker 1: getting bigger, but yet the circle keep getting smaller. Who
Speaker 1: It took me eleven months to meet this guy, and
Speaker 1: after I met him, one week of hunt with him.
Speaker 1: You're in in So they're vulnerable once you get up
Speaker 1: to the top. Yes, because I feel that they feel
Speaker 1: that you have met the credibility of everybody, and you've
Speaker 1: been around for a year, you know, and everybody else's
Speaker 1: vouching for you. Just like a good hunter, putting in
Speaker 1: the time and having patience is very valuable. And RT
Speaker 1: understood human nature. He was good with people and had
Speaker 1: a natural instinct for how to gain trust. In some ways,
Speaker 1: it's kind of scary how good he was. I'm actually
Speaker 1: beginning to wonder if any of my friends are real.
Speaker 1: And I've said it from the beginning. I suspect Brent
Speaker 1: Reeves is a double undercover agent sent in to bust me.
Speaker 1: What a great cover to say I used to work undercover.
Speaker 1: What they're after I don't know, and who they are
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know who they is, they are,
Speaker 1: who they were, I don't know who sent Britt Reeves.
Speaker 1: What I'm trying to say, I don't know. But it's
Speaker 1: typical of the Mountain people to be suspicious of flat Landers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: back to the nitty gritty with r T and keep
Speaker 1: your eyeland, Brent Reeves, you had a legitimate new name,
Speaker 1: new documentation. So what what was the name that you used? Well?
Speaker 1: I had two of them. First one was Bob Thomas
Speaker 1: and the second one was Bill. Was there any strategy
Speaker 1: in those like Bob Thomas sounds like such a generic name. No, okay,
Speaker 1: did you make that? You just made it up. I
Speaker 1: made it up. I guess they were probably like man,
Speaker 1: no way undercover agent would be Bob Thomas, right right, right,
Speaker 1: right right, So you had you had, I d That's
Speaker 1: another thing that we we did not know at the time,
Speaker 1: but I told I got in trouble, got rifted going
Speaker 1: to go take me to jail because I got captured
Speaker 1: speeding in a schools zome one time was going thirty
Speaker 1: mile an hour in a twenty mile zone and I
Speaker 1: didn't have the proper identification. So you're working undercover. I
Speaker 1: had a driver's relations but that's all I had, you know,
Speaker 1: which was easy to acquire, was a driver's license. And
Speaker 1: you couldn't tell this officer who you were. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: You just took it. Absolutely yeah. It come back not
Speaker 1: in foul, would they run to the licensed flates? Not
Speaker 1: in foul? I mean, could mean a lot of things.
Speaker 1: So you went to jail for that? Yeah? Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that and a lot of other things. Yeah, we'll just
Speaker 1: stick with that, okay. Uh. And they thought I was
Speaker 1: caring drug. You know, I was pretty rough looking, was
Speaker 1: in a town that I shouldn't have been in, had
Speaker 1: a trail truck and said farm use route on it.
Speaker 1: And I was in a high dollar out you know,
Speaker 1: hide dollar town and looked like scum. But you were
Speaker 1: working under coach. I was working under cover. It was
Speaker 1: legitimate what you were doing. And so this guy was like, man,
Speaker 1: I just I just got me a dandy. Well it
Speaker 1: was it was a female, and I never had good
Speaker 1: luck with female when they rest pulled me over, so
Speaker 1: I didn't have good luck with her either. Be anyhow,
Speaker 1: you got out of jail. I got out, but it
Speaker 1: took me. Did you call? I keep I keep going
Speaker 1: down these rabbit trailers, but they're just too interesting. Who
Speaker 1: do you call when you're an undercover agent and you've
Speaker 1: been arrested? No one, no one? You just kind of
Speaker 1: write it out, which, you know, how far do you go?
Speaker 1: You know? How far do you write it out? You know?
Speaker 1: Finally I got to a point to where and I
Speaker 1: was not in the town that I was working. So
Speaker 1: I finally asked for a supervisor, and so he come
Speaker 1: back and I was locked up the back of the truck. Well,
Speaker 1: they thought I stole the truck. But when they run
Speaker 1: finally done a search on it, I can hear it
Speaker 1: come back over the radio. Belongs to a high division
Speaker 1: the natural Resources. I'm going, holy, what if I was
Speaker 1: sitting here with a bad guy in the back of
Speaker 1: car with me? So it was a good experience that
Speaker 1: happened with no bad guy with me. I told him
Speaker 1: make a phone call, and he made a phone call
Speaker 1: and finally got ahold of him. And I found this
Speaker 1: out later. He said, we got a guy here claims
Speaker 1: to be one of yours. Pretty roughly, they didn't give
Speaker 1: me dad. Yep, he's mine, that's our, that's mine, he's mine.
Speaker 1: He's one of our good ones. Yeah, yeah, I'll claim
Speaker 1: they let you out of jail. So through that you
Speaker 1: learned that you needed to really deep cover everywhere everywhere.
Speaker 1: So what they did from men on when they purchased
Speaker 1: a new vehicle, when that truck come from the factory.
Speaker 1: It went to our undercover name. R T was pioneering
Speaker 1: undercover work in Ohio. This just hadn't been done to
Speaker 1: this scale here, and they were learning a lot the
Speaker 1: hard way. I keep going back to the isolation of
Speaker 1: this type of work. Who do you call when you
Speaker 1: get arrested while working undercover? The answer is no one.
Speaker 1: I think we take for granted the social networks we
Speaker 1: have and probably wouldn't realize how important they are until
Speaker 1: they're gone. Are our social networks give stability to our lives,
Speaker 1: and their absence and deep undercover work adds to the
Speaker 1: chronic stress. And hey, speaking of vehicles, I want to
Speaker 1: ask Bob Thomas about his specialty hunting rig. You had
Speaker 1: on several operations. You had a custom van that was
Speaker 1: decked out with video recording equipment. And this is back
Speaker 1: in the nineties, so it wasn't like we got cameras
Speaker 1: on phones today. No, we didn't even have cell phones. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: on my very first operation, we were out spotlighting and
Speaker 1: shooting deer and having a great time, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, red light starts flashing, you know, and off
Speaker 1: we go the car case. You know, I'm not driving
Speaker 1: without the gun, out to win and the gun goes off.
Speaker 1: This is when you're undercover with a poacher, under game
Speaker 1: warden comes after you. Well, we didn't know. We never knew.
Speaker 1: We never did find out who it was because they
Speaker 1: never caught us. I don't know who it was. A
Speaker 1: game Morgan, Sheriff's department, or a local farmer, don't know
Speaker 1: who it was. We took off and this guy was
Speaker 1: going to Hunter a mile an hour on these roads.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think of Hunter mount out but
Speaker 1: very you know, accession dangerous and that scared me. That's scared.
Speaker 1: You're out of control. I was out of control. So
Speaker 1: therefore I decided I need to drive. I can control
Speaker 1: the situation. Yeah, And how can you control the situation
Speaker 1: if you just got a pickup truck with a cab,
Speaker 1: you didn't have all you have with a single cab.
Speaker 1: So if you got a party at a bar and
Speaker 1: you've got four or five guys participating in that bar,
Speaker 1: you know, and you know, get together whatever it is,
Speaker 1: and all you got to pick up truck and hold
Speaker 1: free people that it breaks the party up. So I
Speaker 1: come up with the idea of a van. I thought
Speaker 1: a van you know, everybody can participate and I'm driving. Man.
Speaker 1: That was just that instinct of just knowing what you
Speaker 1: needed to do. I think it was yeah, absolutely, you know,
Speaker 1: and how do you keep the party going? But if
Speaker 1: you can take everybody, I'm driving, I got a van,
Speaker 1: everybody can go. Let's go the way we went. Did
Speaker 1: your van have a name? Did you call it anything?
Speaker 1: Poch coach, post coach, the boat now did you say
Speaker 1: that you use let's take the poach coach? Poach coach? Man?
Speaker 1: I met you were there, number one guy. Oh, they
Speaker 1: love me. Everybody knows that to fit in, you gotta
Speaker 1: have the right ride. Think about the boldness of naming
Speaker 1: your undercover rig the poach coach. That's almost as bold
Speaker 1: as Brent Reeves cover, being that he used to work undercover.
Speaker 1: In Arties book, he tells the details of countless poaching
Speaker 1: incidents where he was involved in the killing of illegal
Speaker 1: deer in Turkey. The deer were primarily killed while spotlighting
Speaker 1: or jack lighting. If you live in the land of
Speaker 1: the ice fishermen, surprisingly you never had two poach a deer.
Speaker 1: To keep his cover. He was the driver, so it
Speaker 1: was hard for him to be the shooter too. However,
Speaker 1: he would randomly show up with a fresh killed set
Speaker 1: of buck Antler's turkey fans and beards that were supplied
Speaker 1: to him by the Ohio dn R that he'd show
Speaker 1: off to the poachers with a made up story of
Speaker 1: how he'd snagged one the night before when they couldn't go.
Speaker 1: On a separate note, Brent Reeves is constantly showing me
Speaker 1: coon hides, claiming his tree and walker treat him. But
Speaker 1: I find that odd because we all know that tree
Speaker 1: and walkers don't tree real Coon's with the van. They
Speaker 1: agreed that I wouldn't drink, but we're poaching. I don't drink,
Speaker 1: and I tell him, you know, and the boys and
Speaker 1: I don't mind getting caught for shooting a deer, but
Speaker 1: I said, I don't need no d w I I said, so,
Speaker 1: if we're gonna poach, I'm not gonna drink while we're driving.
Speaker 1: You were the You were their favorite guy man, You're
Speaker 1: the designated dry Absolutely put them all up there on
Speaker 1: that pedestal. It was important for arties and the public
Speaker 1: safety that there weren't drunk drivers cruising around in the
Speaker 1: name of covert government operations, and not surprisingly most of
Speaker 1: the poaching rings involved alcohol and many even illegal drugs,
Speaker 1: and that poacher pedestal was also very important too, almost
Speaker 1: as important as video surveillance equipment. Then we decided, well
Speaker 1: we need a van, which we got a van, and
Speaker 1: then we need to figure out a way to record
Speaker 1: this stuff, you know. So there was an agency the
Speaker 1: they called it the Bad House, and it was it
Speaker 1: was very it was very uh secluded. All they did was,
Speaker 1: I think they worked under the Attorney high Attorney general
Speaker 1: levels and all they did was installed video equipment in vehicles,
Speaker 1: vehicles whatever. This is a government agency. Yeah, they hooked
Speaker 1: us up with the great big old VCR boxes, you know,
Speaker 1: the VCR tape Hi to one of those things. You
Speaker 1: don't because he had we build a spatial box and
Speaker 1: put it in the back there. But you had to
Speaker 1: get out and go around and plug it all in,
Speaker 1: run off of d C, you know, and had to
Speaker 1: plug it all in and only ran about two hours,
Speaker 1: so you had to be you know, know what you're doing.
Speaker 1: And the sometimes you drop the poacher to off pick
Speaker 1: up a deer, and what you do. You go down
Speaker 1: the road and jump out real quickly, change tapes, you know,
Speaker 1: and then we had an infrared light and over the
Speaker 1: over the sunvisor. How do you hide a way that
Speaker 1: we just didn't hit it by being out in the open.
Speaker 1: It was all infrareded lights, but it was designed like
Speaker 1: a Confederate flag. Yeah, hung right over top the sunfighters,
Speaker 1: so pitch black. The guy is shooting down the front seat.
Speaker 1: You know he's lit up, so the cameras picked him
Speaker 1: up sea And I'd have guys mentioned to me about that,
Speaker 1: you know what, what is it? And I'd tell them
Speaker 1: story about my handicapped son that passed away. He was
Speaker 1: in the electronics and he made that for me. It
Speaker 1: don't work, but just senttle middle when I keep it
Speaker 1: up there, I had a pulled down. Let's assume we
Speaker 1: fix it. I don't put her back up. Sometimes when
Speaker 1: you hear about all these governments surveillance operations, it makes
Speaker 1: you scratch your head. Americans have always valued independence from
Speaker 1: government and our rights to privacy. All I can say
Speaker 1: is when you break the law, you lose the right
Speaker 1: to that privacy in some situations, and there are very
Speaker 1: strict laws about what type of evidence is permissible in
Speaker 1: court and how it's obtained. You use that van on
Speaker 1: multiple operations. Yeah, yeah, that that this will just an
Speaker 1: old she'll be van at the time. Yeah, what your
Speaker 1: model and makeing, Oh this is probably a having the
Speaker 1: sixty eight or sixty nine old van. So it was old.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it was old back then. And then uh
Speaker 1: that was the first one was but then the then
Speaker 1: we graduated a little bit. Probably got about a seventies
Speaker 1: model mid step maybe in the eight eighty five model.
Speaker 1: But then when they've we've done a full time undercar operation.
Speaker 1: Kevin asked me, who was my supervisor recent time to
Speaker 1: get a vehicle? What what? What would your favorite vehicle?
Speaker 1: B I said, a four wheel drive van. Next thing
Speaker 1: I knew, I had a brand new, jacked up full
Speaker 1: wheel drive van. Yeah. And then we had a little
Speaker 1: modern day equipment, you know where I didn't have to
Speaker 1: get out and turn the switches along and I could
Speaker 1: do them by a little switch here by. And I
Speaker 1: had videos in the front. I had videos in the
Speaker 1: front seat, videos coming out the side, videos going out
Speaker 1: the back. Now I'd control to all of that. But
Speaker 1: what what was your story for why a guy like
Speaker 1: you would have a van like that? Well, there you
Speaker 1: go again. You have to have a good cover. You know,
Speaker 1: like a brand new van specially well I worked in
Speaker 1: a coal mine and I had been covered up injured,
Speaker 1: which I had been, and I was on conversation and
Speaker 1: made it having gotten a major, big settlement, big settlement.
Speaker 1: So now is that true? Absolutely? Man, I don't even
Speaker 1: have it. Yeah, I'm confused with reality and the But
Speaker 1: here's what we did. We had, uh, my boss, he
Speaker 1: knew of an agency that was a friend of his
Speaker 1: that was an actual compensation lawyer. So he approached him
Speaker 1: and he would draw up he had a false foul
Speaker 1: on me, and he would send me letters into mail
Speaker 1: of how much you know my claim and everything, you
Speaker 1: know what was, what it was, and how much money
Speaker 1: I was getting and think of that nature. I'd leave
Speaker 1: them paperwork laying around in my house or on the
Speaker 1: day or wherever. And we found by reviewing videotape later
Speaker 1: that when I was not present with these guys, they
Speaker 1: would read it. Wow yeah yeah yeah. If you got
Speaker 1: somebody in the cabin, ar truck or a van and
Speaker 1: you go in the gas station and there's some personal
Speaker 1: letter there, they pick it up and it validates you
Speaker 1: without you absolutely deep cover mane. So that's how I
Speaker 1: proved that I had a lot of money to be
Speaker 1: able to afford it, and that they accepted it deep cover.
Speaker 1: Everything had to have a story and to clarify RT
Speaker 1: was covered up in a coal mine. In real life,
Speaker 1: coal spilled all over him and he was injured. But
Speaker 1: the lie was that he didn't actually get a big settlement,
Speaker 1: so he was covered up, but he didn't get a
Speaker 1: settlement in his real life and his undercover life he
Speaker 1: was covered up and got a settlement and got money.
Speaker 1: What about checking in with your supervisors and stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: would you go months without talking to him? Well, no,
Speaker 1: he'd get kind of upset. Okay, my boss, his real
Speaker 1: name is Dan Schneider, work in a Turkey case and
Speaker 1: I hadn't checked in with him. I had a phone
Speaker 1: at the house and had a had a recorder on.
Speaker 1: And the deal was that you never calling. If you
Speaker 1: call and leave a message, you never have say anything
Speaker 1: about anything. It may take code or something. For example,
Speaker 1: we had a Spatial bank account and they put money
Speaker 1: in my bank and Kevin he'd call up and said, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you. I'll give you nine hundred and
Speaker 1: sixteen dollars and not though in thirty two cents for
Speaker 1: that dog. That's how I knew how much money he
Speaker 1: was putting in my bank. So your supervisor would call
Speaker 1: about buying a dog and leave you a message. So
Speaker 1: if somebody's if I'm in the restroom or outside and
Speaker 1: them guys are in the house and he calls and
Speaker 1: leaves a message, you know, they never have caught onto it. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I hadn't talked to hadn't talked to him the day
Speaker 1: any quite a while, and he was getting a little concerned.
Speaker 1: I come home from hunting one day. We've been turkey hunting.
Speaker 1: I played the message and he goes it, calling in
Speaker 1: checking on You see a man eight talked to you wild,
Speaker 1: just hadn't talked to you know. I thought maybe you
Speaker 1: might give me calls. So we talked about hunting in
Speaker 1: the future here or something like that. And he said, oh,
Speaker 1: by the way, this is Boss Gobbler. This is the boss.
Speaker 1: He was letting me know. He would let me know
Speaker 1: he was he's the boss. Better call a better call.
Speaker 1: So that's what his nickname put. Even to this bay,
Speaker 1: A lot of people associated with the Boss Gottling, the
Speaker 1: Boss Gobbler. I like it. I want to get to
Speaker 1: a more serious question with urt to be able to
Speaker 1: do what you did undercover, you're living a lie. I mean,
Speaker 1: you're you're before these people. You're living a lie. It
Speaker 1: almost feels like you would have to be a good
Speaker 1: actor like and I don't know if that's the would
Speaker 1: be the best descriptor perfect description. Did it ever bother
Speaker 1: you to be so deep in with these guys? I
Speaker 1: mean living complete deception, Like their perception of you was
Speaker 1: absolutely false, and you had fabricated that with them, gained
Speaker 1: their real trust because they're they're in the real world
Speaker 1: and you you control their future. These were these were
Speaker 1: human beings that at some level there may have been
Speaker 1: parts of their life that you respected. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm putting words in your are sometimes even maybe
Speaker 1: likable people they were. But did it bother you ever
Speaker 1: to be that deceptive inside of people's world only one time?
Speaker 1: One time? The rest of the people I had, they
Speaker 1: were bad people. I wouldn't be around those individuals. Wasn't
Speaker 1: from my job. I despised some of those individuals, but
Speaker 1: I had to act like I loved. However, there was
Speaker 1: one individual and it was Operation Redbud and his name
Speaker 1: was and Uh he was. I liked that Feller if
Speaker 1: the only difference between him and me was I was
Speaker 1: on one side of defense and he was on the other.
Speaker 1: We were best friends, and I felt bad. There was
Speaker 1: many times that I would drive home thinking I need
Speaker 1: to war, I need to tell him. Really like you,
Speaker 1: you thought about breaking your cover because you liked this
Speaker 1: guy so much. That's held deep by them. And I
Speaker 1: felt that I was. I was really forgetting who I
Speaker 1: really was. I was forgetting that I who I was,
Speaker 1: forgetting that I was. I was here for the for
Speaker 1: the for the good. But yet I felt that much
Speaker 1: attached to that Feller that I felt like I needed warning.
Speaker 1: Our team never acted on his desire to warn the suspect.
Speaker 1: And you guys may remember our Genuine Outlaws series. The
Speaker 1: title was a play on words. The guys we talked
Speaker 1: about were really genuine Outlaws, and they were also genuine
Speaker 1: people revered by many in the community. If you're new
Speaker 1: to Bargrease and missed that series, you should go check
Speaker 1: it out. It's one of the most intriguing stories we've
Speaker 1: ever told. Our team brought up a very interesting point
Speaker 1: about identity. He said he was forgetting who he was
Speaker 1: and he was finding himself and deared to the criminal,
Speaker 1: the person he was trying to catch. However, Dr Sharp
Speaker 1: says that that's not uncommon for undercover agents, and what
Speaker 1: you're describing here is extremely calm. About half of undercover
Speaker 1: people do start not necessarily to identify with the target
Speaker 1: targets or individuals who are in the target population, but
Speaker 1: they started to feel sympathetic to our them. They started
Speaker 1: to become friends with him. It makes an awful lot
Speaker 1: of sense. That's interesting. Half of undercover agents find themselves
Speaker 1: and deared in some way to the people they're chasing.
Speaker 1: It's really hard for a human to be all business
Speaker 1: and override human nature. I want to prod a little
Speaker 1: harder on our t about identity, and he has something
Speaker 1: to say. You said that there was a point in
Speaker 1: your career when you you kind of lost your identity.
Speaker 1: Talk to me about that. You're so deep undercover, You're
Speaker 1: you're living, you have your own house, you have your
Speaker 1: own account. You can't leave Bob Thomas. There was there
Speaker 1: was I remember in the book there was a time
Speaker 1: when you said you were like thinking of thought, and
Speaker 1: you thought that you were Bob Thomas, and it kind
Speaker 1: of scared you. No, I've told Gyp that was with Redbud.
Speaker 1: It was a second project, and I was deep. I
Speaker 1: hadn't been home in ages, and I was deep. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we were in uh, the state of West Virginia
Speaker 1: on a hunting trip, and nobody had any clue where
Speaker 1: I didn't even know. More of that, my boss had
Speaker 1: no clue. And I'm living in this shack here with
Speaker 1: these guys. I think it's four of us being in there,
Speaker 1: you know, about four or five days already stayed in
Speaker 1: the same house, you know. And I really had no
Speaker 1: fear that they knew who I was. I mean, I
Speaker 1: was just that confident that they had new idea who
Speaker 1: I was. On this one particular evening there was I
Speaker 1: was out by myself a video on and narrating to myself.
Speaker 1: You know. On this video, I had two d you
Speaker 1: video cameras, and I had one from my own personal use,
Speaker 1: you know that I thought I'd used maybe down the route,
Speaker 1: and I had one that worked with you know, but
Speaker 1: on this particular one of talking about being hunting with
Speaker 1: so and so and move here in West Virginia, somewhere
Speaker 1: on this beautiful mountain, on this sunset and signing off
Speaker 1: Bob Thomas, I went, any who I am? I am
Speaker 1: deep cover here, man, you know, talking to myself. Man,
Speaker 1: for some reason, that just hit me right in the face,
Speaker 1: you know that. I guess that was the first time
Speaker 1: I really alone by myself, talked to myself and called
Speaker 1: myself that, you know, and I went, man, I'm living.
Speaker 1: Ever of these guys, you know, they ain't got no
Speaker 1: idea who I am, and I ain't even sure who
Speaker 1: I am anymore. Even if you've never consciously thought about
Speaker 1: your identity. From a philosophical position, it doesn't matter. As humans,
Speaker 1: we spend our lives crafting identity and our deeply vested
Speaker 1: in others perceiving us in the way that we view ourselves.
Speaker 1: The very definition of instability is not knowing who you are.
Speaker 1: I've always been very interested in identity. The very nature
Speaker 1: of this work puts a human in a very odd spot.
Speaker 1: I had a question for Dr Sharps, So would you
Speaker 1: say that undercover work is a relatively new experience for
Speaker 1: humans or have people been doing this for generations? Like
Speaker 1: where they become a chameleon, becomes something different to fit
Speaker 1: in with a certain group. Two get something back and
Speaker 1: in this case, we're trying to get justice, law and order.
Speaker 1: But is this I mean, it feels like this is
Speaker 1: a human experiment in a sense, and people are doing
Speaker 1: stuff that they really weren't designed to do. And I
Speaker 1: am I thinking about that right. It's a very interesting question.
Speaker 1: If you go back into the Hunter to gather a world.
Speaker 1: Probably not. But I mean, if you look, you look
Speaker 1: at the Old Testament, you've got spies entering the cities there.
Speaker 1: Now we have World War One of Sydney Riley and Matahari,
Speaker 1: and the American Civil War riattal number of agents male
Speaker 1: and female in the Revolutionary War agents, so a lot
Speaker 1: of undercover works been going for a long time. But
Speaker 1: this is a very old thing and the stresses are
Speaker 1: very old too, So in bear Grease time, undercover operations
Speaker 1: are relatively new. Humans have only been doing this for
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand years. When people started grouping up
Speaker 1: in cities, forming governments, plant and wheat, and having political interest,
Speaker 1: that's when they started employing deceit to infiltrate tight knit
Speaker 1: groups to gain information that couldn't be gotten without guile.
Speaker 1: I think we could say with some degree of certainty
Speaker 1: that if a falsome man befriended you hang with me,
Speaker 1: you could trust him. He may have ill intent for you,
Speaker 1: but you'd see it coming. If he approached you and
Speaker 1: wanted your meat, your land, or your woman, he'd just
Speaker 1: fight you out right. I hope you know that I'm joking,
Speaker 1: But my main point is that the complexity of society
Speaker 1: has increased exponentially since our hunter gatherer dates. However, human
Speaker 1: nature remains the same. And I'm also not saying that
Speaker 1: undercover work is bad. It's just really interesting that for
Speaker 1: the greater good of society, we hire men to act
Speaker 1: like they're bad. I wanted to get some details from
Speaker 1: RT about these close relationships that he built with criminals.
Speaker 1: I'm making a mental checklist of all the plays that
Speaker 1: real friendship Brent Reeves has made at Meat. Do you
Speaker 1: have friends that you now suspect your undercover agents? Do
Speaker 1: they wear overalls, have suspicious beards and dark rimmed glasses.
Speaker 1: There was one time when you said that you felt
Speaker 1: like you're gonna ask to be a pall bearer at
Speaker 1: some guys few general like a man's That was my
Speaker 1: last so like that was one of them. There was
Speaker 1: another one, I think where you were at Thanksgiving dinner
Speaker 1: with these people, and like, can you tell me some
Speaker 1: of those stories? Well, yeah, I'm over referred because he's
Speaker 1: the only one farty uncle, sirring he got some respect
Speaker 1: to my respect. He's I can tell some of his stuff.
Speaker 1: He had a very very loving wife and he had
Speaker 1: two children that were very young at the time. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he loved dearly the children. They kind of liked me,
Speaker 1: and I'd always bring him candy in different things, you know.
Speaker 1: And I found out another thing is if if you
Speaker 1: keep the wife happy over one of the outlaws, you're in.
Speaker 1: If you don't keep her happy, you're out. That's a fact.
Speaker 1: That's a life tip, right, that's a life tip. Not
Speaker 1: not even poacher. But if you keep the light wife
Speaker 1: happy and you and she likes you, you're good. She
Speaker 1: was very nice, and she would call me up and
Speaker 1: ask me what what. For example, she'd call me up
Speaker 1: and say, what birthday come on up? Or Christmas coming up?
Speaker 1: What what can I getting for Christmas? What can I
Speaker 1: get for your birthday? You know? Thanks to that nature,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, oh man, and the kids, they you know,
Speaker 1: call us uncle and things like that. I mean, we
Speaker 1: were just that close knowing what coming down eventually, that
Speaker 1: was a hard, hard time to deal with that though
Speaker 1: you were going to Thanksgiving dinners with these people. I
Speaker 1: never went to Christmas, but I invite me Thanksgiving dinner
Speaker 1: and things of that nature, and uh, and I'd go
Speaker 1: because I portrayed not have a family, you know, and
Speaker 1: if I did have a family, they were far off.
Speaker 1: I was basically the loner, didn't have nothing, didn't have nobody,
Speaker 1: and they they felt sorry for me in that sense.
Speaker 1: Was when it comes to holidays and things, you know,
Speaker 1: So you'd you'd sit there on kids, play on your
Speaker 1: lap and sit there in the house with them talk,
Speaker 1: you know, just like we're doing today. Friends you know,
Speaker 1: friends friends, good friend and you could you could fake
Speaker 1: that though yeah, does that scramble your insides with him?
Speaker 1: It did? Doing only I had to. I had to
Speaker 1: deal with that demon of knowing that I want to
Speaker 1: destroy his life, but yet I've become that close to him.
Speaker 1: Very interesting and kind of spooky. Today, undercover agents are
Speaker 1: better equipped to understand the potential hazards of going deep undercover,
Speaker 1: but back then they were just shooting from the hip.
Speaker 1: But keeping in mind our supervisors nor myself had any
Speaker 1: experience in this, and we were we were you know,
Speaker 1: we didn't have any POI we were Lewis and Clark
Speaker 1: of the Division wild Life undercover. That's correct. So you
Speaker 1: know we had nothing. Now do you look back at
Speaker 1: it now you think, yeah, yeah, I was too close,
Speaker 1: but my boss didn't realize it, nor did I realize it.
Speaker 1: And we hadn't met the number one guy yet who
Speaker 1: was after Yeah, so that was the project that took
Speaker 1: me eleven months to meeting. So I had a whole
Speaker 1: year eleven months hanging out with Clawk. We drank together.
Speaker 1: I even helped him moved, he put drywall on his house.
Speaker 1: We did everything together. Not a lot of gear traveled
Speaker 1: one hunting trips together. I guess people would just after
Speaker 1: some period of time you were so deep undercovered that
Speaker 1: they would it just wouldn't even enter their minds that
Speaker 1: you were undercovered. Like if some guy showed up at
Speaker 1: their camp and was like, hey, I want to go
Speaker 1: hunting with you, you know, kind of bright eyed and
Speaker 1: bushy tailed, they might be like wait a minute. But
Speaker 1: like helping them hang drywall and being that close to him,
Speaker 1: like they didn't have a clue. I don't think they
Speaker 1: had a clue, and and they were telling you everything,
Speaker 1: they were showing you everything. You were video in this stuff,
Speaker 1: doing everything, you were doing it with them. And then
Speaker 1: I keep going back to the kind of the brilliance
Speaker 1: of who and I've just met you. But you know
Speaker 1: you don't come across as a as a shiny Wildlife
Speaker 1: Officer undercover guy. I mean, I am shocked in a pole.
Speaker 1: I am shocked in a hold hurt my feeling? What
Speaker 1: do you mean not a shiny and polish game ward
Speaker 1: Why you've hurt my feeling? Well, the only the only
Speaker 1: other game warden to know, how that I know his name,
Speaker 1: Chip Gross. Well he look at this now you're talking.
Speaker 1: You're shiny and polish. He wouldn't have fit in with
Speaker 1: those guys. Absolutely. Yeah. So so Chip Gross is sitting
Speaker 1: here with us right now. Remember Chip Gross is the
Speaker 1: author of the book about r T Poachers Were My Prey.
Speaker 1: You can buy it on Amazon, and he's retired Ohio
Speaker 1: game boarding and maintains a close friendship with his old
Speaker 1: buddy r T. While we're giving Chip a hard time,
Speaker 1: he once almost got our T into some serious trouble.
Speaker 1: Here's Chip again. RT is undercover and um, I've been
Speaker 1: wanting to do a story on just the undercover unit itself,
Speaker 1: not be real specific, but just that we have an
Speaker 1: undercover unit and so forth. At the time, I was
Speaker 1: the editor of the Division of Wildlife's magazine is called
Speaker 1: Wild Ohio. It was a quarterly publication, so I could
Speaker 1: pretty much put in there what I wanted to. And
Speaker 1: I thought, well, it's time to do a story on
Speaker 1: the other country undercover unit. And I went to the
Speaker 1: law enforcement supervisors and I said, is it okay to
Speaker 1: do this because I knew it was very sensitive, and
Speaker 1: they said yeah, I just don't be real specific, and
Speaker 1: I said I won't. So we did a story about that.
Speaker 1: The issue comes out and one of the bad guys
Speaker 1: gets a copy, Yeah, gets a copy of the story,
Speaker 1: gets he gets the magazine. At the time, the magazine
Speaker 1: was free. All he had to do was sign up
Speaker 1: and it went out by the tens of thousands across Ohio.
Speaker 1: So the next time our team meets with him, here
Speaker 1: he comes with the magazine and says, look at this,
Speaker 1: the Division of Wildlife has undercover officers. And there again
Speaker 1: I put Unknowingly, I put Urt on the spot, and
Speaker 1: he's got us somehow work his way out of that
Speaker 1: because they're suspecting, you know, is this one of the guys,
Speaker 1: Is this one of the officers. So inadvertently I put
Speaker 1: him in a crack and I didn't know that till
Speaker 1: years later. RT wasn't happy about Chip's article, but later
Speaker 1: Chip would write a tell all book about everything art
Speaker 1: Ever did. I guess everything is about timing. I want
Speaker 1: to go back to something that Artie touched on in
Speaker 1: the beginning, something actually very serious. It's when he said
Speaker 1: he didn't want to go back to his real life.
Speaker 1: And as we go into this section, I want to
Speaker 1: highlight and commend the vulnerability of RT as he talks freely.
Speaker 1: I'd call it humility and being well grounded. This might
Speaker 1: sound ironic, but RT isn't trying to portray himself as
Speaker 1: something that he isn't, at least not anymore. And you
Speaker 1: said something earlier to about there was a time when
Speaker 1: you didn't want to go back. Well, when you come home,
Speaker 1: you got kids, and you got bills, You've got responsibilities.
Speaker 1: Who wants who wants that I was living? I was
Speaker 1: living another life, an outlaw, a rush, constantly doing things.
Speaker 1: And then when you come home. You know, you go down,
Speaker 1: stress goes down, your adrenaline goes down, and then your
Speaker 1: face with the reality. You know, uh, kids need this,
Speaker 1: the kids need that. You know, we gotta pay this bill.
Speaker 1: It's passed through. You know, the house needs this. You
Speaker 1: know what. I'm going back. I don't worry about this stuff.
Speaker 1: So I didn't like reality. Is that Is that something
Speaker 1: that you regret? Yeah, there was a lot of things
Speaker 1: that looking back on it I regret. But now I
Speaker 1: look back in and going that was that was stupid.
Speaker 1: It was too incre roosting my job. I didn't play
Speaker 1: at it. I was it. I never went to my
Speaker 1: children's events. If I did go to a was home
Speaker 1: and went to a ballgame or something, always set on
Speaker 1: the opposite side because you never know who's gonna see.
Speaker 1: I never went through graduations. I never went to none
Speaker 1: of that because you never know who's kin folks coming
Speaker 1: in to see something goody graduate, their grandson or their
Speaker 1: niece or nephew. And I just never did. I never
Speaker 1: participated any of that. Dude, I'd look back and miss it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I missed a lot of things growing up with my children.
Speaker 1: But today we have a great relationship. They understood it.
Speaker 1: They understand it, and I think they're proud of their dad.
Speaker 1: That's really good to hear our T say that. It's
Speaker 1: a touch of that bare grease redemption that we all want.
Speaker 1: Here's our T now getting down to the heart of
Speaker 1: it all. You talk about stress, it's unbearable, it's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: How do you tell a lie on a lie detector's test.
Speaker 1: It's a measured by the level of stress. Your whole
Speaker 1: life is lie. So you talk about stress, but when
Speaker 1: you're young and dumb, you don't even think about it.
Speaker 1: But it's stress. Do you think they had long term
Speaker 1: effects on you? That's why I had to retard healthy
Speaker 1: shoe cold stress. Was it worth it? Oh, you're too good? No, No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. If I look back at it. If I
Speaker 1: had to do it over again and I knew what
Speaker 1: I knew right now, I'd just say no. But at
Speaker 1: the time is the only thing I knew and the
Speaker 1: only thing I wanted to do. Yeah, I you know,
Speaker 1: I'm proud of what I did, proud of what I've done,
Speaker 1: and I have no regrets in that regard. Would I
Speaker 1: do it over again? When I do some things different
Speaker 1: with my family. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It takes some
Speaker 1: guts to say that it was it worth it, and
Speaker 1: I respect the honesty of that. I think many people
Speaker 1: might have found a way to lie to themselves about
Speaker 1: the choices they've made. However, he's proud of the work
Speaker 1: that he did, and that's a complex place to stand.
Speaker 1: RT is complex. There's one thing I can guarantee you.
Speaker 1: It's that if you met Urt in a grocery store,
Speaker 1: you might be tempted to judge his book simply by
Speaker 1: its cover. But I'm here to tell you that this
Speaker 1: man was a brilliant undercover agent and a master of
Speaker 1: understanding the nuance of the peculiar version of humanity that
Speaker 1: lives in the rural regions of Appalachia. He dedicated himself
Speaker 1: to his craft and his work ethic pushed him to
Speaker 1: be the best, and there's some nobility inside of that.
Speaker 1: He left it all on the court. I want to
Speaker 1: ask r. T one more thing. Here's my synopsis of undercover,
Speaker 1: and you tell me what you think about this is
Speaker 1: that you're being asked to do something that is incredibly
Speaker 1: unnatural and goes against everything that should be the fabric
Speaker 1: of a human that keeps them together, which ultimately is
Speaker 1: the truth and authenticity. And you are being paid and
Speaker 1: have to and by choice, I mean, no way made
Speaker 1: you do this, and and and and for the good
Speaker 1: of society. It's such a complex space because for the
Speaker 1: good of society you were serving our communities by doing this,
Speaker 1: but also at a human level, at the Art Stewart level,
Speaker 1: you were doing something that was like really unnatural, which
Speaker 1: is completely living a lie and making it seem like
Speaker 1: the truth. And it just feels like that would have
Speaker 1: a tendency to like tear somebody apart. Hey, you're good
Speaker 1: at what you do. You because you're asking some questions
Speaker 1: It's rarely been asked, but you're absolutely right. It is
Speaker 1: something hard to deal with. And I think that's why
Speaker 1: I decided I didn't want to come home. I didn't
Speaker 1: have to deal with it. I could just deal with
Speaker 1: one side of my life, and that was the bad side.
Speaker 1: They're just saying, and I have it out there hanging
Speaker 1: out there is uh. One of my real close friends
Speaker 1: who was an undercover agent, gave it to me and
Speaker 1: it says the Eagle and the Wolf. Have you ever
Speaker 1: heard this? The Eagle and the Wolf. The wolf is
Speaker 1: a luner. He does this, he does all the bad things.
Speaker 1: Or an eagle is a source high in the air,
Speaker 1: stands for good and all the good parts. The eagle
Speaker 1: on the wolf. And the bottom question is who am I?
Speaker 1: And the answer is the one I feed and that
Speaker 1: there's a lot of truth to that. Who am I? Well,
Speaker 1: at that particular time, I was the wolf, That's who U.
Speaker 1: I eat it, lived it, and did it. But yet
Speaker 1: knowing at some point in my life I would be
Speaker 1: that eagle, I'm a bit at a loss for words.
Speaker 1: This is usually part of the podcast where I wrap
Speaker 1: everything up that's been said in a nice little bow
Speaker 1: and we're all happy. But I think I'll just let
Speaker 1: what RT said sink in. I can't thank you all
Speaker 1: enough for listening to bear Grease. On the next full
Speaker 1: Bear Grease episode, we'll be right back here with RT
Speaker 1: as he tells of his biggest undercover operation ever called
Speaker 1: Operation Redbud, which at the time was the largest turkey
Speaker 1: poaching sting in US history. It's a fascinating story that
Speaker 1: you and your bros won't want to miss, and hey,
Speaker 1: please leave us a review on iTunes. Keep telling your
Speaker 1: buddies about Bear Grease and On another note, you can
Speaker 1: watch Meet Eat season eleven on the Metiator website for free.
Speaker 1: All you have to do is sign up with your
Speaker 1: email address and the episodes will roll out one per
Speaker 1: week until the season is complete. So Meat Eater season
Speaker 1: eleven ain't on Netflix, It's on thumb meat eater dot com,
Speaker 1: and eventually my moose hunt is gonna be on there,
Speaker 1: so you have to check it out. So anyway, have
Speaker 1: a great week and I look forward to talking with
Speaker 1: everybody on the render