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Welcome guys to episode 194 of Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name's James Gearing.
And this week, I am extremely excited
to bring to you Jay Dobbins.
Now Jay was the ATF agent who went undercover
and infiltrated the Hell's Angels for almost two years.
And we discussed that part of his life.
He's written two fantastic books
that I highly suggest you guys read.
No Angel talks about his operations there.
And then Catching Hell is a broader view
of his career within the ATF.
And what's sad really is he gave so much to his career.
He adores his career, he adores many of his peers.
But there were people in the infrastructure
of where he worked that made it incredibly hard,
even worked against him.
He was left completely vulnerable after these operations
when there were death threats against him and his family
that were enacted as well.
His house was burned down
and really abandoned by some of these people.
So a very interesting look at the ownership
that someone can have and then still be failed
by the wrong people being in very, very vital areas
in an infrastructure of a business
or a fire department or a police department.
So something very relatable.
And the other thing that really blew me away about him
was his compassion.
Even though he was surrounded
by some very, very horrendous people,
you will hear some of the compassion that he showed.
And even now, so a very powerful story.
I know you guys are gonna really enjoy this.
As I always say before we start the episode,
whichever podcast app that you're listening to,
listening to this through, please go to that.
Make sure you subscribe to the podcast
and then rate the show.
Leave a five star review if you think it's worth it
and leave some feedback.
I love reading the feedback.
And then most importantly, after you hear this,
you're gonna think, wow, other people need to hear this.
So use social media for good and share this episode
and the other episodes and enable the people
that need to hear it to actually be exposed to it
and hear it as well.
So with that being said, introduce to you Jay Dobbins.
Enjoy.
["Dreams of a New World"]
So Jay, I wanna start by saying thank you so much
for agreeing to come on the podcast.
Thank you, thanks for having me
and hello to your audience.
Thank you and I'll say thanks again to Bethann
for connecting us, I appreciate that.
The first question and because of the nature of who you are,
I don't have to be specific,
but where are we finding you on planet earth today?
I live in Arizona.
This is home, I went to high school and college out here
and have been in and out of Arizona over the years,
professionally with my career, but this is where I live.
So yeah, I love it here.
Beautiful, all right, so I wanna start
at the very beginning.
So if you wouldn't mind, just give me an overview
of what your mom and dad did and if you had any siblings.
Yeah, I grew up in a very white bread middle-class family.
I've got a younger sister and a younger brother.
My mom and dad got along very well
and remained married until my dad passed,
50 plus years of marriage.
My mom's still around, she's got a ton of energy.
And she's a walking tornado at 80 years old.
And I grew up in a middle-class,
average, all-American household.
My father was a carpenter, he pounded nails for.
My mom was a house cleaner.
My mom scrubbed people's toilets for a living
that didn't wanna scrub their own toilets.
I grew up in a very blue class,
work first, play second family.
That's how I was molded.
Right, now we're gonna talk about,
I'd love to hear the story about the fight
in your front yard in a moment, but your dad himself,
what had developed the strength in him
that then he was able to mentor onto you?
My dad grew up without a father in his life.
And I think that he was one of the guys
who took an unfortunate event like that from his childhood
and didn't want it repeated with his kids.
And he was very involved in all of us,
in all of his kids, in our lives,
in being an active, both my parents,
active participants in everything we were doing,
from school to sports to social events to everything.
My folks were always very interested and enthusiastic
and supportive of whatever that we were doing
as long as we were moving forward on a good path.
Beautiful.
So just as an observation for a moment,
while we're in the whole parenting conversation,
you have got to see an array of criminal element,
if you like, from all races,
all the whole spectrum of races.
Were there any common denominators that you saw
if you were able to even hear some of the backstories
of some of these men and women
that you think were contributing factors to them
finding themselves down that road instead of,
for example, law enforcement
or something that's contributing to the society?
You know, to be honest, from my experience,
I don't know that there is a common denominator
because I cross paths with people
who were suspects of investigations
who were from broken homes
and rough upbringings,
all the way up to people who had affluent lifestyles
and had everything placed in front of them
that you would think would lead to success.
So I think it comes down to personal choices,
like for all of us, for all of us,
in everyday life, everything we do.
Every day we're confronted with free will
and personal choices and what path do we take?
Yeah, and I agree 100%.
I mean, definitely some of these upbringings
set some people up for failure,
but absolutely, the end of the day, there's ownership.
And I've had people on here that have been,
I mean, their life story even makes yours
seem like a Disney movie,
like some boy soldiers in Sierra Leone
and all kinds of people.
No doubt.
And they came out incredibly well at the end of it.
No doubt.
I think those are the stories that we as common men
like love and embrace the stories of people
who thrive and achieve and succeed
when every single element of their life
is standing in the way of that.
And they somehow find a way to become amazing
and do incredible things.
Those are the stories that inspire us.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and I wanna go to that fight
because I know it was kind of an anchor point in your life,
but when I was reading it, obviously,
you're in the middle of a fist fight
in the front lawn of your house.
But what you didn't talk about in the book
was how that came about
and why that kid was beating up a seven-year-old.
You know what?
I don't know necessarily,
I don't know though that I recall the backstory
other than I was pretty much a sissy when I was a kid.
And I was probably an easy mark.
I was probably someone who a bully type
was I was easy to take advantage of.
I wasn't interested in fighting back.
I wasn't interested in resisting.
And that is typical of the bully predator mentality
is there's people as kids and as adults
who somehow make themselves feel bigger and stronger
by making someone else feel smaller and weaker.
It's part of society, it's part of humanity.
Yeah, and that parallel is obviously
with the physical side
and obviously the criminal element that you looked at,
but also within the infrastructure of society
and the agencies that you work for as well.
Yeah, I think that it's probably an element of human nature.
It's probably part of any individuals
or a certain individual's character
that there's people out there in the world
who use their position, use their influence,
use their wisdom to elevate people and to inspire people.
There's also people out there
that use it with a predator mentality
that try to take advantage of people
and hold people down and hold them back.
So when you were lying there
and you'd been attacked by this kid,
if you wouldn't mind just kind of telling people
out there listening the rest of the story
and how powerful that was then for you moving forward.
Sure, I was probably an eight-year-old kid.
I was just, I was soft.
I was a sissy and I was getting the crap beat out of me
in the front yard of my house.
And I wasn't fighting back.
I was being overpowered
and I actually wasn't probably trying to resist very hard.
I was playing possum thinking like,
if maybe if I just give up, this beating will stop.
And what I didn't know is that my dad was watching
this fight take place from inside our house.
And I heard the door open
and I thought my savior had arrived.
I thought my dad was coming out to put an end
to this beating and chase this bully off.
And instead what he did is he told the bully,
the bully saw my dad and started to get up off me.
And my dad said, no, stay on him.
Like keep hitting him.
And I was like, oh my God, like this is my dad.
This is my hero.
This is my idol.
Like, why are you not rescuing me?
And the kid was like kind of giving me
some half-assed punches.
And my dad was egging him on.
My dad was encouraging him.
Like hit him, hit him harder, hit him more.
Hit him like you were hitting him before I came out here.
You know, and this kid's blasting me.
And then at some point just gets up and dashes off.
And my dad came over and picked me up
and you know, my nose was bleeding.
And I just had my ass beat in front of my idol.
And I was humiliated.
And my dad picked me up and got me on my feet.
And he was like, you have to learn to fight back
and to resist.
Cause if you don't, you are gonna be a victim
for the rest of your life.
There's always someone out there bigger
and stronger than you.
That doesn't matter.
You have to fight back.
And that lesson, that message from my dad
at that very young age kind of turned me.
It was just that father's wisdom.
And I'm sure it was painful for my dad to do that.
He's a very mild guy.
He was a peaceful man.
He was very a sweet man.
And he was just a kind person.
But I'm sure he felt like, man,
like I have to use this moment as a teaching lesson
or else my kid is gonna spend his life
getting his ass whipped.
Yeah, and it was such a powerful moment.
I can totally relate to your dad's parenting
because you talk about him and you talk about growing up
in a very white neighborhood,
but him being very compassionate and kind
and not embracing the racist philosophy
that some of the people in the town embraced.
And I think it really boils down to that,
don't mistake my kindness for weakness.
And I have the same with my little boy, he does jujitsu.
And I hate watching when he does tournaments
and he's getting choked and turned around like a pretzel.
But again, like you said,
it's not only protecting themselves
that one day they might be the one that stops the bully
from hurting someone else or even killing someone else.
Well, I think that like all of us,
I'm sure everybody out there listening to this,
for a lot of us on a daily basis,
there's some obstacle in your path that wants to stop you,
that wants to beat you down.
And like we have to resist,
we have to fight back against those.
Otherwise someone else is always,
or some circumstance is always dictating
the path of our life.
And so it doesn't end.
It's not just for kids.
It's not just kids being bullied.
It goes all the way through life, through adult life.
And it happens professionally, it happens personally,
it happens in relationships.
It's a nonstop challenge.
And we have to learn and train ourselves
and almost brainwash ourselves
into that warrior mindset mentality
that when something's wrong, when I see something wrong,
when I see something that's not right,
either someone trying to take advantage of me
or someone trying to take advantage of someone else,
I have to do something about it.
Yeah, absolutely.
And did that turn your kind of career aspirations early
to be some sort of protector when you got older?
No, well, you know what?
I had always dreamed of being a football player,
a professional football player.
I had a nice college career
and that's where I thought my life was going as a young man.
As it turned out, I wasn't good enough.
I did everything I could to prepare myself
and I just was not good enough to be competitive,
to make a living professionally playing football.
And when it boils down to it,
like when I look at my career, my sports career,
my professional career, my life,
probably the only thing that I was ever really good at
in my life and the only thing was standing up to bullies,
which probably goes back to that beating
in my front yard as a kid.
And I don't even know that I was necessarily good at it.
I was just willing to, I was willing to try.
Yeah, and then that was what you were known for
on the football field too.
It wasn't so much like the physical prowess,
but more the toughness.
Yeah, I think that the fans of the teams I played on,
no one looked at me and said,
wow, that's an amazing athlete.
That's an exceptional football player right there.
I think what they saw and admired in me as an athlete was,
I played reckless and I played tough
and I tried to play through pain and through injuries.
And the common man can relate to that.
Like we see it, like in all levels of sports today,
as sports fans, you see people that are just
physically blessed and gifted
and have amazing physical talents.
And we admire those, but personally, I like the guy
who's out there who doesn't have all those God given skills
and talents who just fights back hard and grinds
and tries to achieve like more, almost more mentally
and emotionally than physically.
Yeah, and then you talk about that at the end of your career,
like you said, when you weren't a football player,
you said when you weren't good enough,
I thought that was such an interesting conclusion
because a lot of people don't do that.
They make excuses.
Oh, it was because of this that I didn't succeed.
And you realize in your full potential,
you'd come so far, but that was the perimeter
of your ability within that game.
And to just have the maturity to say,
all right, I've got to here, now I need to transition,
I thought was good because there's so many of those
could have been out there that blame, are blown out this
or ruptured that for the end of their career.
I think that that is one of the curses of life
that can creep into our existence is that,
like we don't want to admit failure, like no one wants to.
No one wants to admit that they didn't succeed.
And so we have a tendency to protect ourselves
by making excuses for failures
or blaming someone else for failures.
And I've learned just over time, not to do that.
I don't make excuses.
I don't lay blame.
I try to own my decisions and the things
that have happened to me and look at myself.
And if I'm gonna blame somebody, I blame me.
If there's an excuse, it's because of something that I did,
not pointing a finger at somebody else.
And it's just, when I learned to do that,
it brought a lot of peace to my life
because I wasn't looking for someone else to be responsible
for either my success or my failure.
Absolutely, I wanna really explore that
when we get into the organizational side
because it is such a double edged sword.
Like there's a certain amount of ownership
that you can have, but then you can also be an environment
where no matter how much you own your own path,
there's roadblocks everywhere that force you to,
have to remove yourself from that environment.
All right, well then with the football,
you talked about concussions.
What were the kind of after effects of that?
Well, at the time, when I was involved in football,
this was, when I was at my peak was in the early eighties,
mid eighties, all the attention on concussions
and the concussion protocol that's out there
on all levels of sports.
I coach high school football now.
We are very, very concerned, even on the youth level,
on the high school level about taking care
of our athletes, of our kids' brains.
In the early eighties, there wasn't that attention on it.
If you got knocked out and if you didn't come back,
you were considered soft.
You, like now there's guys who literally get knocked out.
They wanna come back.
Doctors and trainers won't let them
because they know that that bruise
that's occurred on your brain,
needs to heal, it needs time.
It has long-term effects.
At the time I was playing the game,
man, if you didn't get back up and shake your head
and get back in it, man, you were, you know,
you were someone who couldn't be counted on.
And I never, I never wanted that.
You know, my dad, as an athlete, my dad told me again,
like another lesson from my dad,
he told me, you know what the worst four-letter word
someone can say to you is?
What's the worst four-letter word someone can call you?
And I'm thinking, and it's like, and it's not a swear word.
It's soft, S-O-F-T, never let someone say you're soft.
And that was part of the brainwashing for me as a kid
that was like, man, I'm never gonna let anybody
call me soft, you might knock me out,
you might knock me down, you might knock my head off,
but I'll be damned if I'm gonna lay here
and let you celebrate over me.
I'm gonna get back up and show you
that I'm tougher than you think I am.
Yeah, and that's the same thing that happened
in the fire service when we first had the SCBAs,
the air tanks that we have on our back.
There was that mentality of if you use that,
you're being a pussy.
And then fast forward to all the cancer awareness
and they're like, okay, now we get it.
And now obviously it's a standard, but there were so many
kind of mythologies from when we were younger
and the generation before that of what a man was.
I think even some of them come from Hollywood
and I've talked about this before.
And now we're realizing, like PTSD is a perfect example.
Like, no, it's okay for a man that's seen some horrible shit
to actually hold his hand up and say,
I'm hurting right now and this is really bothering me.
I think it's the evolution and the education
and understanding of what it is
and education and understanding like in all walks of life,
like for your audience out there that's hockey fans.
Not all that long ago, like within my lifetime
of watching sports, there was a time when hockey players
did not wear headgear.
They didn't like, they didn't wear any head protection.
And it ultimately became mandated that you had to.
And there were guys, like old school hockey players
who thought like putting a helmet on to play hockey
where you've got a hard disc heading towards your head
at a hundred miles an hour, like actually protecting
your head with a helmet made you a pussy.
That's just the evolution and education and wisdom
of time and understanding.
Yeah, absolutely.
I couldn't agree more.
Well then let's transition to you left football
and then obviously you had to work out what was next.
So how did you find ATF?
You know, it's kind of a, it's almost ridiculous sometimes
in how this came about.
When my football career ended, my dreams changed.
I didn't really have a plan B.
And at the time the television show Miami Vice
was very popular.
This is mid eighties.
And I saw Sonny Crockett, like wearing a Hugo Boss suit
and driving a Lamborghini around South Beach
and meeting with some drug kingpin.
And I saw the glamor of it and the sexiness of it.
big fan of this show.
I'm gonna be a big fan of this show.
I'm gonna be a big fan of it.
And I thought like, man, I can do that.
You know, I knew what I didn't wanna do.
I was never a money guy.
I was never like, that was never a part of my life.
I never was interested in chasing money
or chasing the dollar.
I wanted to do something and I advised this
to my own kids, to the kids I coach,
to the kids I speak to.
When you make a choice for yourself professionally,
be motivated by the salary, be motivated by the ideal
that when your alarm clock goes off in the morning
and when you have to get up and put your feet on the ground,
go do something that you love.
Go do something that if they would let you do it,
you would do it for free.
If you can find that, if you can figure out
whatever that is in your life, man, you know,
we spend so much time at work.
We spend the bulk of our lives, you know,
definitely the vast majority of our adult lives
going to a job.
Like find something that you have a passion for,
find something that you love.
And if you can figure out a way to make money doing that,
pay your bills, support your lifestyle, that's great.
If you can make a ton of money doing it and you love it,
that's even better.
But don't let the dollar bill motivate your decisions.
Find something that you have an undying passion for
and then let that be your life.
Let that be what you stand for.
Absolutely.
So when you first entered the profession,
did you get a Lamborghini and a nice white suit to go with?
Oh my goodness, you know what?
And I'll tell you that's the backside of that story, right?
So I was, I let Hollywood brainwash me
into what I think, what I thought the job was.
The reality is the Hugo Boss suit was a pair
of cutoff camos and a white beater t-shirt and flip flops.
The Lamborghini was an 82 Malibu that was on the fritz.
You know, the big mansion where the drug deals
were going down was a single wide trailer
that was half tilted off the blocks.
The Kingpin, the glamorous, handsome Kingpin
in the movies and on television was some guy, you know,
sitting at the corner of a condemned bar
with his plumber's crack hanging out
and didn't have two nickels to rub together
to buy his next beer.
And that ton of dope that I saw on television
that was sitting on some barge out in Miami Harbor,
you know, it was an eight ball of cocaine
that was so stepped on with baby laxative,
you'd shit before you'd get high off of it.
It was something exact opposite.
The reality of it is was exactly the opposite
of what Hollywood led me to believe.
But when I saw what it really was, I loved it.
I loved it.
It didn't discourage me.
I wasn't, I didn't think like,
hey, this isn't what I signed on for.
I loved my job.
I was excited every day to go see if I could do something
to make some difference in somebody's life.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure everyone listening
can relate to that because it's, you know,
mainly first responders and military
and people that in the medical industry
that are trying to do the same thing themselves.
And like you said, that's what wakes you up every day,
but it's funny again how that intersects
with the whole Hollywood thing.
And we really are fed some fallacies
and with the fire service, you know,
you take Bagdra for example,
they don't mention the 3 a.m. tummy aches
that you run on 20 times for every one fire call
that you might get.
But again, you know, when you're out there
and you're actually doing something good in the community,
the good calls offset the bullshit of the job.
Well, I think that for any first responder out there,
for the military audience, for the fire audience,
for the law enforcement audience,
people in corrections, all those things,
like for me personally, I took a great sense of pride
in knowing that my agency had awarded me a badge and a gun
and sent me out to try to make a difference.
But even more importantly is, and for all of us
in that universe of public service,
and it goes to doctors and nurses and school teachers
and all those things, is that I took a great sense of pride
in being put in a position to stand up to the predators
in the community and the thieves and the people
that had wicked mindsets in the community
on behalf of the good and innocent people out there
who simply wanted to live a safe and peaceful life,
but simply couldn't or wouldn't take care of themselves.
You know, they ask us, our communities ask us
as first responders, take care of us, keep us safe,
keep our families safe.
We can't do it on our own.
We need your help.
I was always hugely honored by that.
Well, speaking of that, you just entered this world
and obviously you got into the undercover.
What I'm really curious about,
I didn't find this explored that much in the book
because obviously your story is just incredible
and all the different incidents that you responded to
and the operations that you were involved with,
but how did you deal with the fear?
Because obviously a lot of the men and women
that I work alongside, they're like me.
Some sort of radio signal goes off,
we're told to go to address and then they deal with
whatever they face with, but the undercover side
obviously is a whole different animal.
So to come from a collegiate football player
into the world of law enforcement,
what was your kind of self-talk to be able to get into that?
At that point, you'd be able to do the undercover stuff.
Well, you know, when, like I developed my experience
and expertise over time.
I had, over the 27 years that I was a federal agent,
I participated in well over 500 undercover operations,
some less dramatic than others,
some more risky than others, but for me,
you know, I don't know that I ever overcame the fear.
I think that we wanna push forward
that mindset that we're fearless.
And I think you can go into perilous situations
and go in aggressively and with a survivor's mindset
and still have some fear in you.
It's human nature.
I think when fear is completely absent,
it probably affects your risk assessment.
It affects your ability to process situational awareness.
I did get to a point in my career
where I was like that.
And I don't know if it was necessarily fearlessness.
I think it became recklessness
and any of us in our professions.
When we get to that point, we become dangerous,
not only to ourselves, but to the people around us
that we're working with.
Yeah, I mean, that complacency,
like you said, the overconfidence
or even the lack of caring is something
that a lot of us see later in our careers.
And I'm sure part of it is actually the effects of the job
and the work hours and the shifts and the sleep
and everything else.
But I think the constant reminder of our mortality
starts to go away because the further into your career
you get, if something hasn't happened,
the less of a reality that becomes
versus the wide-eyed first guy on the job
that sees all the potential things that could go wrong.
Well, there was a point in my career
where I had been shot a couple of times.
I had seen all kinds of nastiness out in the world
and it had maybe jaded my personality.
It had altered my DNA to some extent
where into my own error,
like my ego and maybe chasing what I believe
to be some false legacy, some hero syndrome
started affecting the decisions I was making.
And I became dangerous.
I became dangerous to myself
and I was putting myself in situations that
or allowing myself to be a part of situations
that I could have stepped away from, that I didn't.
And when I look back at those now,
it's actually, it's pretty embarrassing.
It's humiliating at times because it's one thing
if I make a decision and I don't care for myself
and I end up in a body bag because I made bad choices.
That's one thing.
It's another thing when I'm making those choices
and then I'm endangering the people that I work with
and the people that are supporting me
and that the people that are there with me.
When I'm making decisions that also put them at risk
for personal reasons, for ego reasons
or for legacy reasons, man, that's like, you can't do that.
You can't do that in our profession
because those people that were there supporting me
and helping me, they had wives and husbands and kids
and mothers and fathers and friends
that they wanted to go home and see it.
And I got to a point in my career
where I was making decisions
that was never crossing my mind.
It was never crossing my mind
that someone was gonna have to come in
and save me or rescue me from some situation
that I allowed myself to get into based on a bad decision.
And the after effects on them or the potential risk to them
were not part of my decision-making process.
And that's an embarrassing statement to make about yourself
as a first responder.
Yeah, and that's a very real thing for us
because that's again, that complacency
ties in with the training.
So, we get people that walk through a door
and they're fired up and they're ready to go.
And then you get 10 years into your career or even deeper,
there is that side where they're like,
well, I know the job, what's the worst that's gonna happen?
But you're absolutely right.
If you're a lone responder
and the only person that's gonna get hurt is you,
then that's your choice to make then.
But that's not the case,
whether you're in law enforcement or fire
or whatever branch you're in,
your failure is then gonna have a domino effect
for all the people around you.
Well, exactly.
And that was, and there's been several errors
and flaws in my personality that in hindsight
that I'm not at all proud of.
But there's, like I got to the point,
like every day I brainwashed myself to think,
to believe that I was the baddest cat on the streets.
Like I was bulletproof and I was invincible.
And I felt like I needed to do that
to thrive and succeed and achieve professionally.
And there's probably some truth to that,
but there's always someone bigger and stronger out there.
And it doesn't even have to be necessarily
someone bigger and stronger.
In law enforcement, you can take some strung out junkie,
but you put a gun in that guy's hand
and man, that's the great equalizer.
That takes someone who you could physically dominate
and it levels the playing field.
And I had lost sight of all that.
Yeah, well, another thing that really strikes me
in the book, just to go earlier in your career again,
was the compassion side.
So you had a altercation with a group,
one of them was Kevin Hatton,
who tried to run you over, tried to shoot you.
And then in the hospital,
you guys are in the ER at the same time.
And you're basically wheeled up together.
And the way you describe it is that you had empathy for him.
So where did that come from after this guy
tried to literally slaughter you in the streets?
Well, that's a good question.
And I don't know that I necessarily have
a great answer for it other than, here I am.
I was just in this gunfight with this gangster
over a machine gun deal.
And I'm looking at this kid and the fear in his eyes
as a 17 year old kid.
And I was thinking like, man, you know what?
This kid, he's a baby.
And he just made a decision
that is gonna change the trajectory of his life forever.
And he made a decision without any real life experience
behind him.
It's one thing in the cop game,
it's one thing when a 50 year old points a gun at you
and the potential after effects of what that means.
When you're 50 years old,
you've been around long enough to know better.
When you're 17, I don't know that you even understand
what it means yet.
And I was like, man, this kid's life just changed.
He never had a chance.
He was living in a ghetto.
He was a member of a gang.
He's never even given himself a chance
to see what he can be yet.
And now that's gonna be taken away forever.
And that's something that I've witnessed
in the calls that we run on.
So you take that same gangbanger, but he's dead.
He's been shot, he's 15.
And he's fought for whatever apartment complex
that he lives in for that year.
And it's just, it's heart wrenching
because yes, the decisions they've made,
obviously they're in some sort of gang conflict.
But like you said, could that kid have been a doctor?
Could they have been a police officer?
Could it have been a number of things?
And it's heartbreaking to see,
as we said at the beginning of the interview,
that some of these kids were just set up for failure.
And yes, the great ones thrive despite it,
but so many of them fall down that trap
and end up either in the situation you described
or in a body bag.
Well, your answer to that previous statement
is yes to all those things.
There's some kid out there who's 15 years old,
who's now dead behind gang violence.
Yes, he could have been a doctor or a lawyer
or a great politician or some great leader or a coach
or a teacher or any number of things that could have,
or he could have taken life's experiences and wisdom
and used that to help someone else.
And because of those choices,
and a lot of them are based on oftentimes immaturity
and lack of opportunity, we'll never find out.
We'll never find out.
We'll never get to hear what that hero story
could have been for that kid.
Yeah, it's tragic.
It really is.
Now, just to go on a tangent, because I'm very curious,
you spent an entire career in ATF.
So obviously, around the drugs and the firearms.
As an observation from a pure outsider,
I'm a firefighter from England.
I'm not involved in that world at all.
But the common theme obviously seems to be the drugs.
Now, we run on civilians that are overdosing.
We see the crime side that's dealing
and getting killed over drugs.
I had a guy from Portugal, his name is João Gulao,
and he was one of the guys that spearheaded them
decriminalizing drug use.
Not selling drugs, not smuggling drugs,
but just the actual addicts themselves.
And they had an incredible change.
They went from the worst drug epidemic in Europe
to the best, like the least.
What is just your perspective, not politically,
but just your philosophy on the way
that we have our quote unquote war on drugs at the moment.
And if there's maybe some better ways of doing it
to take some of this crime off the streets
with the drug problem that we have.
Well, so much of our crime is drug-driven crime.
And not just narcotics trafficking,
not just cartel business,
but people that are breaking into someone's house
to steal a TV.
People that are stealing a car.
People that are snatching a purse off some lady's shoulder
on the street.
They're typically not doing that just to do it.
They're doing it to acquire money to buy drugs, typically.
Typically, not all the time, but typically.
And I don't know if I'm staying on point here,
but yes, there's people out there
who make a bad decision at some point in their life
who don't have an evil heart,
who don't have a criminal mentality,
who get caught up in the drug game, in drug use.
And man, those drugs, it's the devil.
It gets a hold of them.
And they don't necessarily have a predator mentality,
but that physical craving for the high
takes them down paths that they oftentimes
don't wanna go down and wouldn't go down.
But they've been altered.
And so how do we address that?
How do we treat that?
How do we help people that are experiencing that
and not just categorize all of them as criminals
or predators or violent
and help them try to escape that world?
If I had that answer, it would be amazing.
I wish I did.
I don't.
Yeah, I mean, that model has worked well.
And I understand it's not apples to apples.
It's a small country versus our huge country.
But when those addicts in that country, in this model,
when those addicts became patients, not criminals,
and they were filtered through a rehab program,
not a justice system, firstly, the shame
and the fear of being arrested
and the shame of being an addict was removed.
But now they also weren't classified as criminals.
They could then gain employment much easier.
So they broke that vicious cycle of addiction,
prison, addiction, prison that we seem to see a lot here.
Yeah, I think if you take someone who is caught up
in drug use, drug consumption,
I don't know that necessarily like locking them in a cage
and thinking that a prison sentence
or a jail sentence is gonna cure that.
I think we're learning and seeing that many times it's not.
It's not, especially when you're taking people
that don't have a violent street mentality
and are simply consumed by a bad choice they made
and don't have the resources or the ability
to escape it or address it.
Like how do we help those people?
How do we help those?
There's some people out there that absolutely need
to be locked in a cage, but there's a lot that don't.
There's a lot that don't.
Yeah, another guest I had on the show
was a prison warden from Norway.
And again, this is not the, I forget Anders,
whatever his last name was, the psychopath
that murdered all those poor kids in that summer camp.
He's locked away in a cage.
That guy is a complete sociopath.
But they have prison models where there's one,
it's called Bastog, it's on an island just off Oslo.
So it's an island, they're still in prison.
But the layout is more like a town.
So the prisoners have to cook for themselves.
They clean, they live in houses together.
They have the work that they go to.
So there is that kind of rehabilitation side to it
where they're not locked away.
They're actually taught to function.
So one day, cause everyone's gonna get released
at some point, unless they're on death row,
when they move back into a neighborhood,
they have been taught to function.
You know, at least have a much higher ability to function
again in society rather than be in that vicious cycle.
Yeah, how do we equip them?
And how do we prepare them for society?
And how do we like restore their self esteem
and help them understand that they have a value.
They have value to the world.
That, I mean, those are key questions
and that they're simple questions to ask.
They're very difficult questions to answer.
I know this from personal experience and just from me,
just from my own life.
I've made a million mistakes in my life.
I've had a million errors in judgment
and I've been blessed to have a million
and one second chances.
I think nearly everybody, nearly deserves a second chance.
There are some people who are just so far off the rails
that they probably don't get a second chance.
But pretty much everybody deserves a second chance.
Yeah, I agree.
And then also, you know, the religious doctrine
that a lot of us hold dear to our hearts
says the same thing, you know?
And I don't think that, you know,
a lot of these prophets that they have in their books
were saying, oh, you know, if you screw up once,
then that's it, you're done, turn your back.
Well, and I know like just from personal experience,
like I've had a million second chances.
I've made a million mistakes and I've had people in my life
who've given me another opportunity
to see if I can fix it.
So we all need that.
We all need that until that, you know,
from the Christian perspective, you know,
there's been one person who's ever had their feet
on this planet who was perfect.
Everybody else needs second chances.
Absolutely, and I couldn't agree more.
And then you read about the stories
that take Jesus for a moment, you know?
He wasn't prejudiced.
If you read the stories, there was nothing, you know,
we're all God's children.
He isn't saying, oh, I love all you,
except that guy over there, he's an asshole.
You know, it's pretty blatant that it was just pure love
and kindness and compassion.
Yeah, and I think just from that perspective,
from the Christian perspective,
those were actually the people that Jesus was drawn to,
were the people that were flawed,
the people that were making mistakes,
the people that were troubled.
He wasn't spending a lot of time trying to fix the people
that were like perfect and living ideal lives.
He's trying to save those of us that, like myself,
who like have made mistakes and were very flawed.
And, you know, if we as societies
can embrace that a little more,
all of us will be better off.
Yeah, absolutely.
And then like you said, there's only one of him.
So we all have to be part of that.
And I think a lot of people listening are part of that.
If you're doing these professions
and trying to make the world better,
you are part of the solution.
But that kind of philosophy needs to be promoted
and nurtured rather than some of this divisive,
you know, pigeonholing that we see
in some elements of society.
Well, I think, you know, like for anybody
that is faith-based, whatever your faith is,
is that, you know, God does not promise any of us
a safe journey, that through faith,
he promises us a safe landing.
And so there's always hope.
There's always hope.
And I think that there's people who give up on hope,
and those are the ones
that we need to wrap our arms around.
Absolutely.
Well, speaking of that,
because I don't want to get you to recount
your entire stories of, you know,
Operation Black Biscuit and some of these,
because you've written incredible books
and you've done some incredible stories
and documentaries on those.
But speaking of that,
are there any people that really come to mind
that were deep, deep, deep in these bad arenas
that pulled themselves out
and have become great people now?
Yeah, you know, I know several people
who were on a very tragic, terrible path.
Their trajectory was towards violent death
or extended prison sentence, very likely both.
Who, you know, many times,
like, you know, often through the help of others,
but many times actually rescued themselves
and said, man, this is not the life.
This is like, I'm better than this.
This is not, this is not who I want to be
and what I want to do.
Who've either been rescued or rescued themselves
and now make positive contributions to society
and help other people learn from their mistakes.
Those are great stories.
Those are fabulous stories of someone
who was at the very bottom,
who somehow was either inspired
or inspired themselves to be special.
Yeah, and then that's the thing, you know,
you're pulling yourself out from the ashes, as it were.
I try and be very transparent with my life story so far
in the fact that it's been really easy.
Like I had a great, you know,
a great child who grew up on a farm in England.
You know, I've never lost a child illness,
I've never had any horrendous injuries
or anything like that.
So my life is good.
So our goal is to raise other people up
and identify that somebody else is doing it.
And identify that some people have had challenges
when they were young.
And like I said, I've mentioned some of these people,
like, you know, if you grew up and your parents were murdered
and you were made to be a boy soldier in Sierra Leone,
you're probably going to have a harder time coming out of that
than a suburban, you know, American kid.
But if he can do it, then we can all do it.
But it needs all the people that are doing well
to reach our arm out and help those people
that were somewhere dark and bring them up.
Yeah, and I think that it's a tribute to all the people,
like in public service and the social workers
and the doctors and the nurses and all those people out there
who have chosen a path for themselves
that gives to the greater good,
that is designed to try to help other people.
And that's, you know, like that is,
that is a blessing in itself.
Like those professions, the people that are in those
professions are rewarded for their sacrifice
and their service and their commitment
by something other than money, than financially.
They find satisfaction in what they're doing
beyond just collecting a paycheck.
Beyond just collecting a paycheck.
Yeah, now that transitions quite well
to what I wanna talk about next.
So just knowing the fire service,
these are men and women that will literally do it for free.
There are men and women all over the country
doing this very job for free.
There are men and women doing the same thing
in England for free, all over the planet.
And I see sometimes that gets taken advantage of,
you know, this is 2019,
most of these more densely populated areas
should have their career firefighters
and they should be taken care of financially,
you know, in a normal way.
They're not gonna get rich being a firefighter,
but especially on the health side.
And you see the other side.
So you've got these men and women that sign up
because they wanna go out there
and they wanna make a difference.
But then you see, and I love your term, slap dicks.
It's exactly, it's perfect.
These people that are in administrative positions
that may or may not have done the job for a moment
or even higher up in political positions
that are creating so much resistance
and so much organizational stress
and getting in the way of these people that are out there
risking their lives, trying to make the world better.
So I guess when was it where you really realized
that that was gonna be a part of your journey as well?
I think that any of us that are part of
an organizational structure and especially for those of us
that are at the bottom of that structure
that are like the people with boots on the ground,
we're gonna work for people who are amazing leaders,
who get it and who offer support
and make decisions for the greater good.
And then you know what?
There's always gonna be people in there who are selfish
and hide behind some moral or ethical position
but really all they care about is themselves
and their own advancement
and their own achievement and recognition.
And I think that probably happened,
it doesn't only happen in the first responder world,
it happens in business and it happens in all walks of life.
And it comes back to personal choices.
Like who are you?
What do you stand for?
Yeah, now yours is a very extreme example though
because as you got further into your career,
you had death threats on your family
and those same people basically refuse
to even help protect your family.
Well, yeah, I think there was,
I ran into a perfect storm of supervision
that had the combination of corruption and incompetence.
And that's, man, that's bad.
That's really hard to overcome.
And even with that, even with people that I worked for,
that I had dedicated my professional life
to working for who abandoned me
and betrayed me and my family when we needed their help.
Going back to earlier in our conversation,
you know what, man, I've forgiven all those people
I'm not sitting here, I don't burn for anybody.
I'm not wishing that any of the people that caused harm
or that made decisions that were intended
to hurt me or my family,
man, I don't have the ill will for them.
I don't get any satisfaction out of seeing
something negative happen in their life.
I don't, I've moved past that personally,
mentally and emotionally and spiritually,
I've moved past that.
Yeah, well, I think what I found frustrating
with a lesser version of the same thing
that I've come across somewhat recently
is in professions like yours and mine,
that selfishness can also lead to the people that we serve,
risking their lives,
or even losing their lives.
I think that's what really angers me in some of these scenarios.
Yeah, like I said, the people that I was working for
that had control and authority over me
and what was happening with me professionally,
they were incompetent and they were corrupt.
And that is, that's what I found frustrating.
They were corrupt and that is,
that's a very, very dangerous, very dangerous combination.
The perfect storm of that is really hard to overcome
and some really bad and tragic things took place.
And there is some frustration on my part
that none of those people were ever held accountable
for what they did and in some cases didn't do.
But you know what, that's not for me to figure out.
I did my best to expose it, I did my best to challenge it.
I did my best actually to help prevent
what they did to me from happening to someone else.
In some aspects of that, I succeeded,
in other aspects of it, I failed,
but I've got a clear conscience
that I at least tried and stood up to it.
Yeah, and that's all you can do.
And it is frustrating because to me,
you would hope as you walk through the door of a profession
that the people to your left and right of you
understand the drive to help as much as you do.
And many of the men and women do, some even more,
but then when you see up within some
of these organizational structure,
that there's literally a lack of compassionate caring
for the very mission that you hold so dearly to your heart,
it is infuriating and it is a cancer
that you see in some places.
And like you said, there's some great leaders
and there's some great organizations
where it's the complete opposite,
where they've got it right all the way through
and then the bad apples are absolute minority.
But there's other places where that whole chain is full
and the good guys are speckled around there
and it's a very frustrating work environment to be in.
Well, I think for all of us,
I worked for people who supervised me
that I absolutely adore,
that I would run through a block wall for
or jump off a skyscraper for if they asked me to do it
because of who they were and because of what they stood for
in their leadership.
I also worked for people that I literally would not piss on
if they were standing in front of me on fire.
And that's, you know, but they've done that.
They've done that.
And I found like oftentimes the people that preach
about family and about teamwork and about morale
and about ethics, the ones that like try to jam it
down your throat the most are the ones
that are least likely to actually live by their own words.
Yeah.
Now with that, so with you being in that organization
for so long, what do you think were some of the factors
that contributed to so many people like that
climbing the chain?
Because again, we see that
and I see a certain causation in my profession
which is the bar at the door.
Like if you're required to be a certain ability
and a certain fitness and, you know, drive,
it's very hard for turds to get through at that level
and then promote up.
Within your organization, what was it you think contributed
to those people being allowed to thrive
in that environment?
Well, you know, and I think almost from personal observation,
almost the opposite held true.
And this is not universal.
And I'm not trying to paint an entire job title
or profession with a broad brush.
But when people who don't achieve at the core level,
who are not good at the basic elements of the job,
if they're willing to raise their hand and move
and be relocated and simply because of that
can be promoted and you're not promoting quality.
You're not promoting wisdom or job knowledge
or understanding.
You're just promoting people that have a willingness
to play the game.
And then that's dangerous.
That's dangerous.
And like I said, like I work for some amazing,
amazing supervisors, people that like have,
like all my love and admiration.
But I work for some people that literally
should never have been given a badge or a gun,
should never have been in the profession in the first place,
who rose to positions of great influence and great power.
And then based on their own insecurities or jealousies
or any number of factors used their power
and influence to hurt people.
And that's the exact opposite
of what they're supposed to be doing.
Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more.
And we have the same, we have the same.
And again, this is a spectrum of people
in the spectrum of departments
of which there are many, many great ones,
but there is that common denominator.
And I hear it from people all over the globe
where the screw ups get promoted.
And obviously some great people get promoted too,
but there is that yes man, you know,
ladder where, yeah, if you're prepared to do
whatever certain managements want,
you can climb through with very little ability.
And if there's a lack of caring for the people
under your command,
that is absolute recipe for disaster then.
Well, yeah, like we see it all the time.
People who promote based on their like willingness
to just do what they're told
and completely vanquish their own opinions
or their own experience or their own wisdom
and just nod their head to somebody above them
for favor or to get along.
And that, you know, that's dangerous.
And then you get those people that rise up
into those positions of influence
and then they start promoting people
that they see themselves in.
And it just builds and it becomes massive.
And now you have an entire structure of people
who don't stand for anything other than themselves.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's tragic.
And you know, the sad thing is,
and I had Jocko Willink on here, you know,
so I was picking his brains for leadership
and obviously his philosophy is a lot of ownership.
And I think a lot of people,
well, some people, I wouldn't say a lot,
some people, I know I was in this position,
find themselves in an environment where they're like,
look, I'm trying to own everything I can.
I'm owning my entire world.
But if other people around me are not owning theirs,
there's a certain point where you're like,
you know, I've tried everything I can to change.
Just like you were saying, you know,
maybe it's time now for me to change my environment
because I'm just not able to facilitate
any more change where I am.
Well, and I think it goes back to what we said earlier
in the conversation is that there's some people out there
that refuse to take any ownership.
They refuse to conduct any self-assessment or self-review.
And anything that goes wrong is somebody else's fault.
They never look at themselves and say like,
man, where did I drop the ball here?
What could I have done better?
They look at themselves from this spectrum of being perfect.
And if something didn't turn out perfectly,
it had to be somebody else's fault.
There has to be someone to blame.
This couldn't have been me.
And I'll say this in defense of management in general,
the management of my agency.
I'll tell you this,
I wouldn't have wanted to be my supervisor.
I wouldn't have wanted to supervise me.
I'm stubborn, I'm thick-headed.
I was not an easy person to manage.
There's some people that did it amazingly well
and very effectively.
And that was typically through honesty,
people that were honest with me,
people that were truthful with me,
people that managed and maintained their own integrity
and dignity.
You can't help but respect people like that.
But when you get people that you don't respect
or you lose respect for and who are just kind of
they're just counterfeit.
They're fake.
Man, it's hard to believe in them.
It's hard, you lose your trust in them.
Yeah, well, speaking of honesty,
Mike Ritten asked you a great question on his podcast.
And I kind of want to ask the same one
because I think it's a question that a lot of people have
when they think about undercover.
And I think it was basically when you were in that role
and you were undercover with numerous roles,
but the Hell's Angels specifically,
I think his question was,
was there any point where the line between good and bad
got blurred?
So I will ask that same question.
Was there any time where you felt
like you were starting to lose control
of the parameters of good and bad?
You know, I'll tell you where it blurred for me.
And it's a humiliating story to tell.
And it's, I take no pride in this
is that I never necessarily had that blurred line
with the suspects I was working on.
I always was able to like be fairly clearly defined
on who I was and what I was doing
and what we were trying to accomplish.
My line blurred on the personal side.
I became so entrenched in what I was doing
and I became so overwhelmed by the persona,
the undercover fake person that I was playing
that it began to dominate my life.
And I didn't treat my family very well.
I complain about being betrayed and abandoned
by the people that I worked for.
And, you know, tell my woe is me story about that.
The reality is, is that I abandoned and betrayed
my own family in exchange for my job.
I turned my back on them and I made my job
and what I was doing and who I was
more important than my wife and my kids.
And so I really have no one or nothing to whine about
or complain to because the things that I'm complaining
about how my agency and certain managers
in my agency treated me, I did the same thing
to my own wife and kids.
The people that loved me the most,
the people that were the most loyal to me
and the most dedicated to me
were the ones that I treated the worst.
And that's a humiliating statement to make about yourself
in an open public forum.
But like I said, I don't make excuses.
I'm not laying blame.
I try to be open about myself.
And if I didn't say that, and if I didn't tell that story,
everything else I've said or will say
wouldn't be credible.
And was that the ultimate decision to step away from ATF
or was it more of a forceful push?
It was, I would say if I was gonna pick one or the other
of those characterizations, it would be a forceful push.
Ultimately, the decision to leave was my decision.
But to back up a little bit,
the decision to get out of undercover work
was not my decision.
I was forced out of it.
I was pushed out of it.
And to be quite honest,
I would have never stopped doing that on my own.
I had become incapable of it
because my undercover role, my undercover job
morphed from something that I did to who I was.
It stopped becoming my profession
and it became my existence.
And that, man, that's dangerous.
And at the time I couldn't see it.
And the people that pushed me out of it
or forced me out of it, I was very resentful towards
for a long time.
Like, how can you take this away from me?
That's the one thing that I love.
How can you take it away from me?
And in hindsight, it was the best thing
they ever could have done for me.
I just couldn't see it at the time.
And that was after how many years?
Oh my goodness, that was, you know,
my career was 27 years long.
That was a good, and 20 years of day in and day out
undercover work that had just become
such an important big part of my life.
That everything else had been pushed aside,
including my wife, including my kids, everything,
my decision-making process, my risk assessment.
Everything was being driven by my ego
and by like chasing some false legacy,
some self-created hero syndrome.
And it was like, to be quite honest with you,
I had become dangerous.
I needed to be, I needed to have my leash jerked back
and I was very resistant to it.
And only after getting out of it and stepping back from it
and being able to look at it with clearer eyes,
did I see that those people that I was fighting against
actually were doing what was best for me and my family.
Yeah, now what was that transition like out?
Because for example, if I was a fireman for 25 years,
30 years, at least when I leave,
and you mentioned about the identity,
that's something we see, it causes a lot of problems
with some firefighters, cops,
is if that's all you've identified as,
then when you retire, they really, really struggle.
Whereas the guys that do it a little bit more healthily
have other interests and when they transition,
they were like, well, I'll always be a policeman at heart,
but now I'm doing this.
But they can walk away, especially the fire department,
we can walk away, no one's gonna be out to kill us
or anything after we retire.
What was your transition from the career into retirement?
And was it a rocky one?
It was, it was slow.
I was resistant to it.
But I will say this, I mean, people look at me
and people meet me and they think like,
oh, you know what, that guy can't get out of role.
That was one of the complaints against me for a long time.
People said, oh, like he can't get out of role.
The truth of it is, is that I was never really in role.
I was always just me.
When I was in my undercover role,
like what you see is what you get.
I didn't change much, I didn't become some other person
to become successful in undercover work.
I always just, like I didn't put on an act.
I wasn't an actor, I was just myself.
So if you don't like me now,
you probably wouldn't have liked me 30 years ago either.
My personality and attitude
and presentation hasn't changed very much.
You know, on the other hand,
if you liked me or enjoyed me 30 years ago,
you'd probably still get along with me now.
You'd probably still get along with me now.
And what about the mental side?
So that was, you know, some of the observations,
but did you have any problems with the things that you'd seen?
I mean, you talk about the body in the barrel in the desert
and some of the awful grotesque things that you had to witness.
Was there any knock-on effect from that?
Yeah, I think that, you know, any of us in these professions,
when you do it for long enough
and when you see the things that we see
and when our professions,
at least the old school mentality towards our professions
was that that's the, you know, that's the job,
that's the cost of business, choke it down,
ignore it, bury it.
It's what we do.
When you've done that long enough,
it alters your DNA.
It literally changes your personality.
And there was one event in my life
that, like, really was super, super impactful on me
is that I responded to the Columbine High School massacre
and to see the bodies of those kids
who were trapped, you know, in that cafeteria,
who were trapped in that library,
and were hunted down.
They were like, they were like literally sheeps
trapped in a pen with wolves,
and no way to escape, no way to defend themselves,
nowhere to go for safety or help.
And that, you know what,
like I developed an anger from witnessing that,
that I'm not sure ever left me.
Yeah, and I can't imagine,
yeah, and obviously there were lots of people
that responded to all these mass shootings that we've had,
but the trauma that has, but the anger,
I understand so much,
and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier.
Yeah, we know now as first responders, as medics,
as law enforcement officers,
that had we had different tactics,
we could have saved some more, not all,
but some more of the people that were bleeding out,
that were right by the windows.
And that's where that complacency
and that poor management ties in,
is if we're not willing to learn from horrendous things like that
and ask ourselves how can we do it better and have ownership,
then the same amount of people are going to die again next time,
which is completely inexcusable.
Well, I think what's hard for us in the profession,
or for anybody, are those events that are completely senseless,
that you go from Columbine to the school shootings,
to the 9-11 attacks,
to the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City,
to any big or small senseless attack,
the bombing at the Boston Marathon.
If you have a couple of gangsters
that get in some dispute out on the street
and kill each other during a drug deal,
no one celebrates that.
Like, there's no...
That's not okay. There's no satisfaction in it.
But you can, at least to balance it internally,
saying, hey, look, this is a lifestyle these people chose.
And if you're going to live this lifestyle,
and if you're going to play this game,
this is a potential consequence.
But you go back to Columbine, you know,
those kids went to school that day to learn
and to sit in the classroom and to hang out with their friends
and to go to practice after school
or go to their club or do all those things.
And the senselessness of it,
the senselessness of, you know,
having airliners fly into skyscrapers in New York City,
you know, the senselessness of bombs being set off
at the Boston Marathon and killing people and maiming people.
Those that...
We just are not capable of internally answering
or processing the why to those things.
No, because there is no...
And it's interesting the way that yours
and Chris Field's life intersected.
I know, you know, that was an ATF building as well.
You guys had offices in there and then obviously the response.
And there's Chris holding Bailey outside.
And, you know, another tragic, tragic event
that daycare was completely destroyed.
19 kids were killed.
And for what?
For some lunatics supposed response to the Waco.
Yeah, well, Timothy McVeigh, you know,
targeted and attacked the Murrow Federal Building
in Oklahoma City based on his hatred for ATF.
And, you know, 19 babies were killed in that daycare center
along with, what, 168 other people.
What, to prove a point to like you think you changed something?
You didn't.
You didn't. He didn't.
He actually probably did.
McVeigh actually probably did the opposite
of what he intended it to, was that he empowered people
and he unified people because, you know,
the good and innocent people in the world
ultimately will rally together.
Humanity and good will win.
And it will overcome, you know, all the hatred out there.
You look at the, just the natural disasters that take place.
People, good people, when seeing others, you know,
confronted with tragedy, they'll do the right thing.
And good people will win.
Yeah.
Yeah, and like you said, you see it so many times with that.
And I think one thing as a culture, we just need to learn
is we don't have to wait for a disaster
to start acting like that, you know.
It starts to filter off and people in New York,
they talk about the observation where, you know,
obviously shortly after 9-11,
what we saw the New Yorkers doing was absolutely incredible.
But the New Yorkers talk about, well, a year after
they started sliding back to the very unfriendly nature
of how they conduct their business.
And I think if we could harness that tribal community
that we have in times of pain like that and keep it going longer,
that in turn will have a ripple effect and maybe drive down
some of the hatred that we see.
Well, it's just, you know, when you look at the big picture,
the 30,000-foot view of politics and culture and society,
it's just, it's so driven by hatred.
And it truly is shocking the way we as human beings
all over the world treat other human beings.
Yeah, it is.
And then especially when there's this facade of some great mission,
when really, when it boils down to it, it's money and power and greed.
Ain't that the truth?
You look at, you know, like all this is there's ultimately people
that are in powerful positions and are motivated by hate, money and greed.
Yeah, it's awful.
Well, Jay, I want to transition to some closing questions.
We've been chatting for an hour and a half and I want to be mindful of your time.
But before we do that, I want to talk about one thing.
Obviously, Bethann connected us and I had Chris on as well
and you guys are all connected with the Vibe Infusion Group.
So how did you get involved with that?
I just, you know, I'm a fan of their product.
I think they're putting out some new and unique products
that are, you know, out of the ordinary
and have benefits to them that are like all different things.
Like I'm very excited to see their Calm Bar come out,
which is, you know, got the makeup of that bar,
addresses anxiety and depression and things like that
and people that, you know, suffer from elements of that.
So I'm just, I'm excited to see what they do and where they go
and I've allowed them to use my name if they can
and how they can to promote that.
Yeah, and like I was telling Chris, I think it's a very simple switch.
You know, I have a lot of, you know, men and women that I work alongside
that don't have the ability to cook, you know, good food.
So we have to have snacks and this to me is a very healthy way
of, you know, having a snack when you're in a rescue ambulance
or a police car or whatever it is,
versus a snicker or a donut or, you know, the other alternatives.
And if you can also have a therapeutic effect,
like the Energy Bar obviously will give you an up
if you're beginning of your shift.
Like you said, the Calm, if you're trying to kind of deregulate
at the end of a shift, then that would be a good one when they release that.
But I think it's just a good clean product and we need more of those.
Yeah, and you know what, in all sincerity,
like I believe in what they're trying to do.
I get nothing for that.
I'm not a paid spokesman.
I'm not being compensated to speak about their product.
It's just, I think it's, I think what they're doing
and what they're producing has a benefit to the first responder community.
And so I've gotten behind it.
But I'm not some paid influencer that's trying to get people to buy their product.
It's just something that I think is good for us.
Yeah, well imagine that.
I do that a lot on this show.
If something works, I'll shout from the rooftops
because it's good and I'd rather people do that than use the shitty alternative.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of people out there that will speak up
and say something flattering about anything for the right amount of money.
And like I don't judge anybody.
Like I'm not telling people how to live their lives
and I'm not assessing any kind of like judgment for the people that do that.
It's just, it's not what I'm doing, it's not what I'm about.
I just, I've spoken up on their behalf because I think it's good,
a good product for the people in the first responder community.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
All right, well, so you've got two books,
No Angel, which specifically talks about Operation Black Biscuit
and then Catching Hell, which is kind of like a broader overview,
which I just finished, is an incredible book.
Are you in the process of writing another one or is that it for now?
You know what, I'm not.
I'm not writing for a lot of people that are writers and successful writers.
It's very easy for them.
They're just, they're good writers.
Writing for me is very hard.
It's difficult and maybe because I'm talking about
and writing about difficult topics for me
or things that are very personal, I try, like, I think you've read both those books,
No Angel and Catching Hell, they're not hero books.
They're not, they're not I love me books.
They're not like self-glorifying flattering books, but they are honest.
When I wrote my books, I knew that I was going to put my name on them.
My name was going to be on the cover and I wanted them to be authentic.
I didn't want to try to present myself as being someone's knight in shining armor
and some hero because that's not who I am.
You know, I'm a common man who was placed in some uncommon situations
and just did the best I could.
Some days succeeding, you know, many days failing and making mistakes.
And I tried to be open and honest about all of it.
Yeah, and you were and like you said, the ownership there is very, very clear.
And, you know, the way you talk, like you said about making a million mistakes
and being given a million and one chances.
And that's why I think it was so relatable to me.
And I'm not just blow and smoke up your ass.
I totally mean this when I say this.
I have struggled to read a lot recently.
So I've been doing the audiobooks when I drive and I genuinely couldn't put this book down.
It just resonated with me and it wasn't like in a captivating, you know, Harry Potter type way.
It was just the honesty and it doesn't matter if you're an ATF or law enforcement or the ER.
You know, all of us in these professions, I could relate to the good times in your stories
and I could relate to the professional frustrations and, you know, the ethical decisions.
And it was, I think the fact that you made it so honest is what was so endearing to me as a reader.
Well, that's very kind.
And I think that that, like your characterization of it is what I was trying to do.
And I think ultimately what maybe has lent itself to the success of those books is because of that.
That you don't have to be a cop or a first responder to translate some of the stories
that are told there into your own life and see the comparison and see that ultimately kind of what all of us go through,
regardless of what our personal life might be or the profession we've chosen,
we all kind of go through the same problems and we have to figure them out and deal with them and resolve them,
you know, oftentimes in the same way.
Absolutely.
All right. Well, one of my first closing questions is the same thing.
So we talked about your books.
Is there a book by someone else that you love to recommend to people?
It can be about what we've talked about or something completely different.
Oh, my goodness.
You may have interviewed my friend, Jason Redman.
He wrote a book called The Trident, which is an amazing book.
Jason was a or is a Navy SEAL who experienced some of the most catastrophic physical injuries that anybody could imagine.
And his story of overcoming those is pretty amazing.
Pretty, you know, he's someone that I admire.
I have another friend named Jason Sheckley, who's a police department officer who,
like many of us in the in the first responder profession, took the job for the right reasons.
He didn't take it to become famous or rich.
He took it with a greater good mentality to try to help people and was trapped in a burning vehicle and suffered some horrific,
like horrific burns over a huge amount of his body.
And when you hear his story, when you hear Jason Sheckley's story,
when you hear Jason Redman's story, like people like me, when you feel like when you feel kind of pathetic,
when you feel sad for yourself, oh, this didn't turn out the way it's supposed to and I deserve better.
You know, why me? And then you read stories from from these guys who are friends of mine and you read about
what they had to overcome and what they had to go through.
You realize, all of us can realize that as bad as you think things might be for you,
you don't have to look far for me just to my right or to my left to either one of these guys to realize,
man, people have it way harder and way tougher than than I do than we do.
And it's it's enlightening.
It opens your eyes like, hey, man, like don't take any time feeling sorry for yourself,
because there's people who have it much worse who would trade their life for your life at the snap of a fingers
if they had the chance.
Absolutely. And I've heard of Jason.
I haven't heard of Jason Sheckley.
But one of my questions is always is there a person you recommend to come on this show?
So I'm going to snatch both those names from you and assume that they would both be great guests.
They were amazing. They're amazing.
The downside is that for Jay Dobbins is that if you get Jason Sheckley or Jason Redman on your podcast,
no one's going to want to listen to me. You're going to want to listen to them.
I disagree. They're really amazing.
They're really amazing. But it is.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but it is.
I've had so many people like that on here already.
You know, firemen that got burned in a collapse and, you know,
Marines and other members of the military that lost their legs or people that were born with no arms and no legs.
And just all these different physical challenges or mental challenges.
And like you said, it just reprograms us.
And it's just down to gratitude for waking up every morning.
Even if you take a first breath and it's clean air, you're already doing better than about a third of the world.
Well, I think that's it.
I think that is probably, you know, the key is gratitude.
And I've tried to have gratitude for everything, including my problems,
including my mistakes, including the things that haven't been fortunate because they were put there for a reason.
Now, whether I take advantage of the reason, whether I learn from the reason,
whether I gain some wisdom, you know, that's on me.
But I have to be gracious and thankful for those things because, man, if you don't,
you just you end up feeling defeated over everything.
Problems, you know, problems that hit our life can be good.
You know, there's a silver lining there.
You may have to look for it and you may have to really look hard for it.
But there's a silver lining in everything.
Yeah, well, it's like you said with the forced retirement.
Then you had the time to actually look back and realize the impact it was having on your family and yourself.
And then it was a blessing in disguise, ultimately.
Yeah, Jason Sheckerley's book is called Burning Shield.
And then Jason Redman's book is called The Trident.
And they're both, man, if you can talk with those guys,
you just walk away amazed at the resiliency of their spirit.
Brilliant. Well, I would definitely reach out to both of them and see if I can get them on as well,
because I would love to hear both their stories. So thank you.
That's the next question. Same kind of thing about the book.
But is there a movie and or a documentary that you love?
You know, I just saw a pretty a couple of pretty amazing movies like like,
I mean, we start talking about movies. We're going to be on this call for for hours because I'm a big movie fan.
But I just recently saw a movie called The Rider,
which is the story of a rodeo cowboy who suffers traumatic brain injury
and his struggle to find normalcy outside.
You know, like what he loved and what he wants to do and who he wanted to be.
And it's it's based on a true story.
And actually, the star of the movie is actually that the actor in the movie is the real life person who suffered it.
And it's pretty, pretty moving, pretty moving movie.
And it talks a lot of what we've talked about in this and this discussion is applied there.
And then I just recently saw a movie called The Mustang,
which is about a prison program where they rescue wild Mustangs and the inmates who are in this program
train these wild horses for auction.
And that was it's also based on a true story.
And that's it was a really good human factor, both of them,
just about the human factor and about about people like and based in truth,
which is the movies personally that I enjoy.
I enjoy like truthful movies about real people and real events versus,
you know, some alien that, you know, that comes here to turn into a robot to save the world.
And like those aren't the kind of movies I go to see.
I can relate. I've done a few of the same as well, but the violent slasher movies,
you know, the torture movies that seem to be so popular as a fireman,
that they turn my stomach.
It's like I don't understand why you were entertained by that death immutilation
that you and I have seen for real and is disgusting.
Yeah, I'm like I'm always like I'm always inspired by some kind of truth based story that
that that is, you know, that has an inspiring resilient element to it.
Like I want to go like beyond be entertained.
I want to be uplifted.
Like can you do like can you do that for me in a movie?
If you can, I'm going to stand in line and buy my ticket.
Absolutely.
All right. So the last question we talk about before where people can find your work is
what do you do now to decompress?
Because actually before I ask that, let me preface that by telling everyone.
So you're not a big fan of riding motorcycles, even though you went undercover with the Hells
Angels for two years, is that right?
I'm not. I have a motorcycle.
It never gets ridden.
It sits in my garage with a sheet over it.
It's not my thing.
It never really was my thing.
I didn't I didn't despise it.
It just wasn't my thing.
I know there's people that you know, live to ride and ride to live totally cool with that man.
That's that's that they they generate a lot of enjoyment from that.
It's just wasn't my thing.
And you know, the second half of your question, what do I do now?
I coach high school football, which I get a lot of joy from.
I'm not the greatest football coach by any means.
I probably get more from the kids I coach than I give back to them.
To be quite honest, I like I enjoy being around them.
I enjoy seeing them achieve.
I enjoy seeing them improve and succeed and thrive and and see the result of commitment
and hard work and how it impacts them.
I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.
I do some writing. I do like I do like I do some consulting in the entertainment industry
and film and television.
And. You know, that's I do some public speaking.
I speak at police conferences and I speak at law enforcement events and some corporate events.
And between all those three things, I'm as busy as I can be.
Excellent. Are you happy now?
I am. You know what? I laugh and smile every day,
even on the days probably when I'm not supposed to or when things are happening
that should prevent me from doing that, because when it comes down to it,
is that like we have to make ourselves happy.
Like you can't rely and depend on someone else to make you happy.
We have to do it to ourselves.
And so there's days when I literally have to force myself to laugh or smile.
But I do it. I do it.
I try to drive that myself and not not depend on someone else to bring that out in me.
Yeah, again, it comes back to that gratitude, isn't it?
If you can find the joy in what you do have instead of what you don't have.
That's how you get to that happiness piece, even if things are kind of shitty at that moment.
Yeah, and I think that all of us, you know, all of us are we all have our crosses to bear.
Everyone's dealing with the situations in their life.
And I think we see people who are less fortunate are struggling and we can have
and we should have empathy and compassion for them.
And we should try to help them if and when we can.
But the bottom line is, is that we all have our own problems.
We're all dealing with the problems in our life.
And whether they be good or bad, that there are responsibility.
And so you see other people out there that that have issues.
Like I said, we should be empathetic towards those people and compassionate towards them.
But you still got to handle your but you still got to live your life.
Absolutely. All right.
Well, if people listening want to want to find the books, want to reach out to you,
what's the best place for them to go online?
Yeah, the easiest way is I have a website and that everything is pretty much self-contained.
It's just JDobbins.com.
It's J-A-Y-D-O-B-Y-N-S.
And there's you know, there's background information there and there's links to my books.
And and I appreciate you throwing that out there.
And if anybody's interested and wants to, you know, get on their computer and look that up,
pretty easy to find.
Brilliant. Well, I also want to say a shout out to Greg Armisen as well,
because when I interviewed him a while ago, you were the person he recommended to come on the show as well.
So I want to say thank you to Greg. But yeah, he's amazing.
Greg's another one of those guys and Greg's got a bunch of books out there that are really good.
And talk about a guy who walks the walk.
Like that dude is 100% legit.
Like he lives every day, every second of every day.
He lives the life that he talks about.
There's nothing counterfeit or fake about that dude.
Yeah, and you can tell just from talking to him, he's just so passionate about everything he does.
And like you said, so positive.
There's no hate.
There's no piss and vinegar to anything that we talked about in the interview.
He was just, you know, just so driven to make the world better and to, you know,
spread the word of what he believes as well.
And he's so passionate about that too.
Yeah, Greg's one of those guys.
I actually became friends with Greg and Jason Redman, you know,
in another amazing interview that you should chase is Josh Manns.
Josh was shot and literally died on a battlefield in Afghanistan
and was brought back to life by an amazing medical team
and has taken those events and translates them to the rest of us to be inspired by.
But Jason and Greg Iman and Josh Manns, I met those guys all at the same time.
And I'm like just a huge fan of those guys.
Along with, you know, like we mentioned Jason Sheckley, Chris Shields.
Those are guys that I look up to that are heroes for me that I try to be
and wish I could be as good of people and as good of men as they are.
And they set great examples for all of us.
Yeah, well you have to and I just want to kind of close this interview by saying,
you know, when I read the books and I have my little answer cheat sheet in front of me,
you know, what I was going to ask you.
And then as we got talking, I realized that like I said, you know, your story is out there.
The books have been written.
But what I got from this is like you said, it's not an act.
From the outside, you look like you're a perfect fit to infiltrate a bike gang.
But the reality is you're incredibly kind, compassionate person who, you know,
stayed on the right side even though you were deep undercover who, you know,
showed moments of compassion like we talked about with Kevin Hatton.
And that was the person that I really wanted to explore today.
And it's just been an absolute joy to talk to you and hear your opinion after such a huge career
and such a terrifying, you know, job in my opinion to come out the other end.
Certainly, you know, not being treated well by certain members of your organization
and to still have the attitude that you have.
It was like I said, it was an honor to talk to you and I appreciate you taking the time
to reach out to the audience.
That's very kind. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed our conversation.