This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511.
I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.
From their incredibly strong yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female
responders, I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've worked for.
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We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier. I ended up buying real
ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been my ride or die through
Murph the last few years as well. But one area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous
sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online
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My local store is here in Gainesville Florida and I've been multiple times and the discounts you see
online are applied also in the stores. So as I mentioned 511 is offering you 15% off every
purchase that you make but I do want to say more often than not they have an even deeper discount
especially around holiday times. But if you use the code SHIELD15 you will get 15% off your order
or in the stores every time you make a purchase. And if you want to hear more about 511, who they
stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with
511 regional director Will Ayres. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast as always my name is
James Gearing and this week is my absolute honor to welcome on the show former NYPD detective,
the ATF agent who rose through the ranks ultimately retiring as deputy assistant director
and the author of the new book The Deadly Path, Pete Forcelli. Now in this conversation we discuss
a host of topics from his powerful 9-11 experience, his own battle with cancer, joining the ATF,
organized crime, cartels, domestic terrorism, the truth behind Operation Fast and Furious,
school shootings, his new book and so much more. Now before he gets this incredibly powerful and
important conversation as I say every week please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen
to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single five star rating
truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for others to find and this is a free
library of 950 episodes now so all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and
women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said I introduce to you Pete Forcelli, enjoy.
Well Pete I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today. Honored to be here, thanks for having me. So where on planet
earth we finding you this afternoon? I'm in Fairfax Virginia just outside of Washington D.C.
where I live now. Beautiful. Rainy day but hey it's good to be here. Yeah it's not raining
now I always feel so bad my guests are in Canada or the UK and I'm always looking out my window with
Florida sunshine and going oh sorry about your day. All right well then first question I would
love to start at the very beginning of your timeline so tell me where you were born and
tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings.
Sure, sure I have one sister. I was born in Yorkers, New York just north of the Bronx,
spent most of my time in Yorkers or Bronx, New York. My parents, my father was a construction
worker, heavy equipment operator so he operated cranes and bulldozers and backhoes and stuff
and my mother worked in a real estate office. Was your dad working in Manhattan, was he on any of
the skyscraper projects? No he mostly worked in the Westchester county so there's a couple towns
in Westchester that had some larger buildings and one of them is the county seat which is White
Plains, New York. So he did a lot of work up there, not too much in New York City. He despised New
York City, he didn't like to go into New York City, hated the traffic so he avoided the city like the
plague. Gotcha, well what about sports? Obviously you ended up being in a very active profession,
what were you playing in the school age? You know I was kind of small as a kid, real skinny so I
mean I played baseball, I was actually pretty good at baseball. Wasn't big enough to be good at
football or basketball so I played them but baseball was mostly what I put my efforts into
because I enjoyed it and again I was pretty decent at it. Not good enough to make it into a
scholarship or into any kind of league or anything but it was fun. I think that's a shame that
a lot of us have that conversation like I was only this kind of athlete rather than looking
at these sports like I loved playing baseball. It doesn't really matter what level we got to
if we actually enjoyed simply playing it. Sure, sure absolutely, it was fun. Well what about
career aspirations? What were you dreaming of becoming when you were a child? You know I didn't
know, there was a period where I thought maybe I'll be a doctor but even though I hated school so
that made absolutely no sense. I kind of wanted to go into law enforcement from a young age
because I used to watch the shows on TV, you know Starsky and Hutch and all these police shows
and I was lured into believing because it's actually very false that policing is very
exciting. It has moments of excitement but for the most part a lot of your time is spent you know
waiting for something or doing paperwork or administrative tasks but yes I was sold at a
pretty young age. I would say maybe like 10 that I wanted to be in the law enforcement world and
kind of never changed course. Did you have any extended family in military or first responders?
My uncle served in the army, didn't talk much about it. This was during the Vietnam era but
other than that no. My family was mostly in the construction industry and I think that's what my
father wanted me to do. In fact I learned how to do carpentry, even went to a trade school during
high school to learn carpentry but I didn't enjoy it and candidly I wasn't very good at it because
I just you know if you don't want to do something if you're not passionate about it you won't be as
good as the folks who are passionate about it. So let's just put it this way, I could hang sheet
rock and do some of those things. You would not want me working on any fine woodworking projects
for you, wasn't that good. I can relate but there were two classes when I was in senior school in
England, there was CDT, Craft Design and Technology and then there was Home Economics which was cooking
and sewing. I was so bad at the woodwork side I signed up for the cooking. So all right well then
what about the kind of environment that you grew up in? In the neighborhood that you lived in was
there crime around you? Was there any kind of underlying elements where you were exposed to
the first responder professions? Oh yeah I grew up in a part of Yonkers that's very close like
I said before to the Bronx so I mean I lived in a large house that had many apartments in it.
Most of them were occupied by extended family members. My grandfather owned the house but on
all sides of us were section 8 housing or public housing and you know we were one of maybe six
white families that lived in the neighborhood. Most of the neighborhood was black and Latino
and it wasn't an affluent community so I mean we had crime you know a lot of property crime but
there was drug dealing that happened that you could watch it through our windows. So I mean I saw things
growing up that gave me a pretty good realization of what you know crime looks like. In fact there
was one time where across the street from my house the Yonkers police department was doing
an undercover operation and shot a guy so I was like wow here I was at this young age just watching
the crime scene tape and all of this stuff going on as the investigation unfolded. It wasn't a great
neighborhood but you know you grew up learning how to deal with people you know how to have
conversations with folks, how to de-escalate situations you know knowing what to look out
for to not become a victim of crime hopefully. So it was you know I don't regret where I grew up. It
was a I think a good learning experience. It certainly helped pave the path for me to be
successful in my law enforcement profession. With this lens that you have now in 2024 when you look
back from your upbringing all the way to the end of your law enforcement career, what do you identify
as some of the factors that contribute to crime in some areas in the States?
Well there's a lot of things a lot of it's socioeconomic. Some of it I would say is attributed
to culture. You know I mean obviously with violent crime you watch the movies of today you know you
watch you listen to some of the music of today and it's it's I don't know how else to describe it but
it glorifies violence you know so I think that certainly contributes to to things and then
currently I mean there's so much political animosity that I don't think that helps anything either.
You know where you have people just out you know they just dislike people who don't think like they
do which is not really what America was about me growing up. I mean most of the people I associated
with were people who really didn't have much in common with me and you work to find that common
ground but if you look at our society today it seems like if somebody doesn't share that exact
same thought pattern that you have or like the same politics that you like or same sort of music
that you're not supposed to get along with each other so I mean I think until we get over that
we're in for some rough days you know. Absolutely well I think the word diversity in the first
responder professions is a perfect example. If you look at it with the wrong lens you just want
people the different colors and genders and sexual orientations in uniform in front of you.
Diversity in my opinion is a spectrum of skills abilities and personalities that will become an
asset on a call. So a domestic violence call where a woman has been assaulted there might be a
compassionate female officer that's the perfect fit for that call. Now you need some you know
door thumper and you ask the linebacker that's 300 pounds to grab the you know grab the halogen
and make it happen you know. So I think this is the problem we focus so much on the minutiae on
minutiae on the pigmentation on the orientation rather than realizing we've got so much in common
and then you can celebrate the differences. Oh 100% there's nothing that you just said that I can't
agree with entirely. I mean you know we should embrace what's different about each other just
as much as we embrace what we have in common because look if everybody imagine how uninteresting
the world would be if we all looked and thought exactly alike. You know I mean it would be really
not a very fun place to live where here I mean you know I enjoy exploring other cultures you know
getting to know about things you know it's funny I remember recently I had gotten in a cab with a
guy who had an accent and I was in a cab with someone who's much younger than me it was for
work and I asked hey where are you from and the person with me was like so offended like oh my
god that's racist that you asked where he was from and in their mind they made an assumption
that he wasn't from the U.S. because he had a very thick accent but in reality he was from Tibet.
So you know I've never been to Tibet I've always been very intrigued by the Himalayas so I mean
this conversation in the car was like for me it was like a chance to explore this different culture
like I respected this person immensely I was like so excited to have this conversation
but to this younger person who's been kind of I guess nurtured in this world where diversity is
like different to them than it is to us like it was offensive like how dare you ask him what he
and I both seem to really enjoy the conversation like he didn't seem the least bit offended but
this much younger person was offended that I would ask hey where are you from because in their mind
that was making an assumption that they weren't from here when the reality was I was celebrating
their you know origins and learning a little bit about them like I've traveled the world
through the conversations I've had with cab drivers and uber drivers you know throughout you
know many decades of work and travel but yeah nowadays I guess that's frowned upon which is
really sad when you think about it because that's how you get to know different things about different
parts of the world and not to dislike them but to actually like explore them and embrace them and
you know be intrigued by them and maybe even like try to sample some of those things yourself you
know I don't know. No I agree completely my wife always groans when I start chatting to the the
uber drivers and you know occasionally you have one like okay they don't want to talk and that's
fine I'm not going to be like badgering them but it's amazing how many conversations you have and
obviously be in English I can start with you know I moved from the UK where are you from another
country originally so it comes a little bit more you know less loaded I guess you'd say but I've
literally had DJ I mean uber drivers who are DJs play his tracks in the car you know and then he
sends me his latest music on Facebook I mean it's you know there's so many great human beings out
there and you know if you happen to engage with someone you know you're missing an opportunity to
learn about as you said someone or a different culture or different religion just by simply
having a conversation which is what humans have done since the beginning of their time.
Well I listen I you know I have an accent I've traveled different places even within the United
States I have a very thick New York accent so when I would travel down south people would ask me
questions like I looked at it as as flattering that they would want to know a little bit about
like where I'm from and everything and you know so I just think it's a good thing you know I think
that's actually respectful to have those conversations so again it's just sad to see
where we're at now where there's others who just they think that somehow that's not something that
we should embrace and explore and get to know each other better because look the more I think we get
to know each other as human beings the less animosity and the less you know less bad stuff
we would see in our world today with you if you actually grew to respect one another as opposed
to feel like you need to walk around with your guard up or just you know make these blanket
assumptions that you shouldn't have conversations to learn more about your fellow human being you
know it's crazy absolutely yeah I mean I get all the you know British teeth jokes and I saw one on
social media the day and it said you know what what is the UK what is the UK's greatest achievement
and then someone wrote given the world the most independence days so you know you've got to even
you know it's not coming from a bad place we have to be able to joke that's another form of
communication now being nasty is a whole entire conversation but this fear of even making jokes
with each other because you might offend someone I think is very dangerous you know to your point
growing up there were jokes and look some of it's you know it's taboo now there were ethnic jokes
and I grew up like I said in a neighborhood where there weren't many people who looked like me I was
one of the few white families but we joked with each other and it was never from a position of
hatred or from a position of trying to be disrespectful it actually kind of made us I guess
more humble because you could laugh at yourself where now man those are fighting words and it's
just very sad to see where we've gone as a culture where you can't kind of poke fun in a respectful
way at each other or laugh at things that look in some ways they're funny you know and look there's
been plenty of Italian jokes over the years that I've heard that I don't I don't get mad I was never
in the mafia you know I mean so but I just I just laugh it off and look some of it's funny you know
so but yeah it's just it's a different time than when we grew up you know I mean I'm probably a
bit older than you I'm I'm 58 years old so I mean but back when I grew up racial humor was
we all did it to each other and it and nobody took offense the only thing that was offline back in
those days were mother jokes you couldn't joke about somebody's mother. That's shifted. Everything else
yeah everything else was fair game back then. Well let's get to law enforcement then so walk me
through your journey into NYPD. Sure I took the test to be a New York City cop I actually took the
test for the Yonkers police department the list was much shorter very difficult test took the New
York City test I was 16 and a half when I took the test to be a New York City cop they were allowed
that back then passed it so then I just had to wait to turn 20 to get hired so you know um finished
school did some work as a carpenter at a New York medical college named New York Medical College in
Valhalla eventually NYPD called me so um started back then there were three different departments
in New York and they all came with the same list it was New York City Housing Authority police
the Transit Authority police and the NYPD so I got called by the New York City Housing Authority
police which at first I was disappointed because I didn't know much about them and I wanted to be an
NYPD cop right so um when I started the job I was 20 walked the beat in the projects in the Bronx
loved it great job best job I ever had I would say smaller department so everybody knew each other
the bosses knew your kids names you knew your boss's kids names so I did that for uh you know
in uniform on patrol for about five years then I went into plain clothes where I still did patrol
duties but like dressed like a civilian for two years it's called anti-crime back in the day
then um I got asked to go into the detective bureau I was referred and so I interviewed passed
so I became a detective in January of 1994 which is around the time my daughter was born
and then um then Rudy Giuliani merged the three departments together so um when that happened I
stayed in the detective bureau but now I was in NYPD so I worked in the 47th precinct for a while
in the 45th precinct which are both still in the Bronx which is where I worked most of my career
and then um about two years later I was asked to go into the Bronx Homicide Task Force
so um murders were off the hook in the Bronx at the time they average like 600 murders a year which
is kind of appalling when you think the Bronx is just one county right so I went into the
homicide squad started working on a lot of federal cases with the DEA ATF FBI and it really started
to like that world because the sentences were much more strict um you had a lot more um just a lot
more flexibility on working cases in a lot more time like with the regular cases in the Bronx it
was like it was a grind you know they wanted to get the cases done churned in churned out and move
on to the next case as fast as possible where with the federal stuff you took your time and I really
liked that like being able to sink your teeth into something and follow like all the evidence not just
the most prominent evidence so I took the test to become an ATF agent and I passed it and then I
jumped ship in um June of 2001 became an ATF agent in New York City worked there for six years
promoted to a supervisor's position in Phoenix which was a rough five years of my life um then I
went back went into ATF headquarters for a very very short time then up to Canada for two years
where I was the ATF liaison to the eastern part of Canada which was an amazing experience Canadian
cops are absolutely great people a lot of fun I'm surprised my liver survived that assignment but
but I made it back to headquarters for a year where I was put in charge of leadership training
then I went down to Miami for roughly three years where I was the second in command of the office
and then eventually promoted to run that office and then I got brought back to headquarters for
my last just under four years where I was the head of training for ATF and then I retired.
I'm going to go all the way back to the beginning of your new NYPD journey and we'll
walk forward again firstly the anti-crime patrol um were you around was that an era where there
was a lot more foot patrols a lot more kind of um being amongst the people that kind of what they
refer to as community policing today? Not in anti-crime because in anti-crime we mostly were
just going to areas where there was a lot of violent crime and mostly like felony reports
like came over the radio but when I started walking a beat that's that's exactly what we did
like I walked the footpost in the projects sometimes on a midnight shift sometimes on
four to twelve shifts sometimes during the day and let me tell you it was the most rewarding
part of the career because you got to know the people that lived in the neighborhood that you
patrolled you knew who the residents were you knew where they lived you knew like which kid
belonged to which parent you knew the merchants uh in the area and they got to know you so I mean
it was personal so you built relationships with these people and look there were some people who
were knuckleheads who broke the law and I arrested them and it was funny because when I would make
arrests sometimes people resisted and you'd have to use force which I know was not always a pretty
thing but the community was always very supportive because they knew because they knew me that I was
fair and not like somebody who just came in and gave people a hard time like if somebody had to
park the car and it was double parked to run upstairs and drop something off I would never
go right to summons hey where you going okay hey come right back so I mean you have that relationship
um you don't really get to do that in in other forms of policing really than than walking a bead
or or being on patrol in uniform but it's really very rewarding and I even had like some fathers
try to marry me off to their daughters and whatnot so I mean it was it was fun to get invited to
birthday parties where you really couldn't go because the department would have looked upon that
you know as as you know becoming too close with people but you'd always find like a nice way to
bow out or just make an appearance at the party say hello to people and then leave without like
indulging and you know taking their food or drinking any kind of alcohol or anything but no
I that that to me is something that I think policing should do more of nowadays a lot more of
um they got away from that and I don't understand why yeah I mean it's you know now you obviously
have some departments that are doing well you know you see videos of cops playing basketball with kids
or you know dancing on tiktok which may not be quite the right thing to do you kind of again
find that middle ground but yeah I feel like you know especially now with the way that law enforcement
has been painted in the media they've created a them and us so they've they've solidified the them
and us you know between the people in uniform the people are not which has broken down you know any
opportunity of that middle ground and I don't know if you've had the same you know experience in your
career but for me when I look at you know the people that are ran on as a firefighter paramedic
and just the people in general and you know this I feel like it's a projection of for example a
hate of law enforcement but when you actually go into the communities that's not the case at all
of course there are some people that dislike and whether they've been you know indoctrinated in some
college or you know they grew up in a hood where the cops were the bad guys but most normal people
stand squarely in the middle I believe and so I think if we were able to negate some of this
media propaganda against the police and just bravely you know put officers back into communities I
think that that middle ground would widen and widen those extremists would become smaller
I think you're entirely correct look the media has done a lot to divide us for what
look if it bleeds it leads I get it you know so them demonizing law enforcement you know
I guess serves some of their purposes and I absolutely think some of our politicians
have very dirty hands in that as well for varying reasons maybe it's getting money or donations or
just stirring up the pot but I agree with you and I've seen some of the interviews where they talk
to people in the inner city these are mostly people of color and they ask them their opinion of police
and sure every now and then you'll see somebody who doesn't like the police but more often than
not it's like hey we want more police but I think that would increase as we were saying look trust
is a tremendous tool you know and when you build relationships with the community and the police
departments you know builds those relationships with the community trust the police that's
tremendous that's very powerful and I don't think it's entirely gone but I know it needs some love
it needs some work so I just think that the departments that take the proper steps to do
those things they fare better now as far as like stopping the car and getting out and playing
basketball that's great I see nothing wrong with that because it humanizes the police but I mean
it needs to be it needs to be consistent and it needs to be more than that one stop like you need
to just not you can't just go someplace once shake hands and expect people to you got to go back you
know you got to ask questions you got to listen more so than talk you know and hear what their
problems are and then you got to kind of act on them you know or give good advice like I always
viewed being a beat cop as someone who was I know it's going to sound horrible because cops aren't
social workers but when I found it was sometimes just important to listen to them and hear them
out and kind of tell them you know give them some good meaningful advice on how to protect themselves
and their family and then of course be there for them when things went sideways but um you know
nowadays too many police departments you've become like robotic where you're responding to 911 jobs
taking a report and leaving and there's no relationship building I think that's where
it is a lot of work that can be done and I think it would have a huge impact well that kind of
ties in with what I was thinking you know as you were talking as far as the call load now
going back to the homicide division and you've got 900 murders that year what impact does on that
immense call load does that have on each individual case and and you know without overworking under
staffing element can that increase the chances of you know a wrongful conviction or something like
that well yeah in fact it's weird that you bring that up I just actually did a listen to a podcast
that I had done with a woman from Fox News named Emily Campagno about wrongful convictions
um yeah like when you know when I was in the Bronx homicide squad like I said before we had roughly
600 murders a year now the way it worked back then was you had four days if you caught a murder
you had four days where you got nothing else so that murder was your sole responsibility for four
days then you caught other cases so you had that dynamic plus the dynamic of CompStat which was a
good thing because it held people accountable but it was a bad thing because now bosses wanted results
quick so what happened is you had people that if they had an informant that had some information
or they they got some evidence they would develop tunnel vision and they would go and and try to make
an arrest as soon as possible when sometimes there was other evidence that could have been followed
so what happened is they would prioritize what looked promising and focus exclusively on that
so what happened was um much later in my career I wound up actually getting um nine people out of
jail for stuff they didn't do one of them was a robber eight of those were for murders though
and of those eight seven were convicted and if you looked at the files like you know because
and I never sought out specifically to go get people out of jail that's not what I was doing
I wasn't like you know calling anybody's baby ugly but what happened is when I was working on
federal cases we would interview defendants and like I said the difference was we had a lot of
time so you would look at what the defendants would tell you and you don't just take what they
say at face value you have to corroborate every little thing because if they're going to be a
witness for you you want to make sure that they're credible and that they're nothing's going to blow
up when they sit on the witness stand so but what happened is a couple times people would come in
talk about murders they were involved in and we would pull the files and see wait a minute
somebody was arrested for this right and then in like I said in most of those instances they were
convicted so which is it's very difficult to get an innocent person now just so now you're looking
at every little piece of evidence in that file and what this person is telling you and you're
trying to put the so long story short in all of those cases these people had intimate knowledge
of things that were in that murder that were in the file and then when you would look at the file
more closely like more often than not and I would say in nine out of ten of these cases
the the actual path to the correct bad guy was in there but somehow because of an you know an
informant or because of something you know sometimes it was time that other leads weren't
followed up on that would have taken them in the right path but instead because of again that
volume and because of other factors they made an arrest and it turned out they arrested the wrong
person but yeah to your point that grind was not necessarily always good for justice.
Yeah I think it's important you know to paint the whole picture of all these incidents I mean I talk
about sleep deprivation in some of the gray area officer-involved shootings you know had that
officer been forced for another shift what was the level of training you know other than just
hanging that individual up you know I mean it's it's horrendous as we have this conversation.
I woke this morning to see that a young airman who was attached to one of the special forces
divisions was killed in a kind of um I don't know if it was a warrant being served or what it was
but they entered the wrong house and he heard this banging grabbed his arm you know his pistol as
any of us would and then the door burst open and they shot him dead and they had the wrong house
you know so that obviously is not those officers waking up saying I hope we're going to kill a
black person today it's a series of failures that led to that catastrophic event and you know we
have to kind of reverse engineer some of these. Yeah yeah no doubt but I mean the the thing that's
troubling I think is a lot of times and for political reasons or most often people will
look at an incident like that and right away jump to a conclusion that it was bad or that it was
ill will in the heart of someone where look sometimes officers are making a decision that's
based on bad information they got from an informant you know and again you should do what they can to
corroborate as much as they can but sometimes you also you're limited but how much information you
have to to do that but law enforcement often acts on split second decisions that people will then
look at for minutes and hours and weeks and sometimes years and second guess and I don't
think that that's necessarily always fair to law enforcement and look the reality is law enforcement
these are organizations made up of people and people are fallible and they make mistakes
and I think when that happens the the real like fix is to work on training and to discuss the
problem and find ways to make it not happen again instead of always rushing to blame somebody and
turn it into you know some sort of a scandal and I don't think that we as a country do that very
well very often it's like you know what's going to cause the most news headlines and what's going to
get the most news coverage for some politician that's looking for talking points you know to
talk about whether it's too much you know fund the police or defund the police or or whatever
you know I mean we see a lot of that now and the thing I'll say is when I started my policing
career in New York New York was a very democratic city the mayor at the time was a mayor named Ed
Koch the city council was very democratic they supported police you know there was never talk
of defunding or hey let's do away with this training or let's cut this or cut that it was
always about public safety and I wish folks would focus on those discussions more like what will
really work for public safety instead of finger pointing which doesn't really fix anything.
Well the other thing that you hardly ever hear anyone discuss is why are our streets so dangerous
in the first place that our officers are put in these situations that sadly you know end fatally
for the officer or for the person they're pursuing. When you look back at the homicide era of your
career what impact did the illicit drug industry have on a lot of the crime that you were witnessing
with your own eyes? Oh it was huge because look there's a lot of money to be made in drugs I would
say the vast majority of the murders that I responded to had something to do whether directly
or indirectly with the crack trade in the Bronx you know I mean they were people making millions
of dollars and you know they got drunk and I say drunk I don't mean like you know literally they
they were intoxicated with that that um the power that came with that money the ability to go out
and go to a club and throw a ton of money around and have the women come after them I mean it was
just um the guy used to used to interview these people after they were arrested or sometimes on
these racketeering cases and when you look at the amount of money that they were making and the
attention they were getting I mean rap songs uh written you know um glamorizing some of these
people literally like peter rolock for example um I can understand why they would be enamored with
that lifestyle uh but yeah that with that came a lot of despair and a lot of death on the streets
of the Bronx and on other parts of the United States Baltimore you know many other cities on
the east coast I know on the west coast it tended to be methamphetamine and some other drugs but I
mean you name your city and you name your drug of choice and a lot of death follows um those paths
this is always a difficult question to ask someone who spent a career in law enforcement and told to
enforce certain laws that we have but as a firefighter paramedic as my career my career
progressed and I pulled sheet after sheet over teenagers that had died over drug turf in some
apartment complex or you know street I started realizing you know the the ripple effect of the
prohibition laws now my ironically my parent my mom and my brother moved to Portugal about 20 years
ago and when I started the podcast she said hey did you know what they did about decriminalization
here and I went and she sat with the guy we had two conversations now and they kind of walked me
through it and they had a horrendous epidemic of addiction in Portugal after one of the wars in
Africa one of the colonies and rather than stay with the war on drugs model that you know they
kind of viewed as not working they moved to decriminalization of addiction now the smugglers
and the sellers got the full weight of the law but the addicts were funneled into addiction
counseling job creation you know mental health counseling that was also funded so that was created
as they did it not just change the laws and add no kind of resources for it and they ended up you
know making a massive dent and then they freed up law enforcement and the court systems for the really
bad people and the addicts were and most of them actually kind of got back on their feet and went
back into the workforce and then some of course are still living on the streets and there's safe
injection sites but you know a huge portion like we said that middle ground again they made a
massive impact and they went to one of the lowest addiction rates in the whole of Europe less than
10 years for me personally this is just my perspective I feel like it's been an epic failure
when it comes to the war on drugs because we've kind of demonized addiction and therefore sent
our addicts into the shadows and empowered the underworld which is now trickled into obviously
not just this country but Colombia and Mexico and some of those other areas this is a huge you know
prequel to the question but what is your perspective on the war on drugs and if you could be king for a
day what would you do to to change it so that maybe we could create a different kind of dynamic
on the streets of the US? It's not very different from what you described look the first thing I'll
say is with marijuana and look I get it people say marijuana is a gateway drug and to some degree it
is but is it any more of a gateway drug than alcohol or tobacco? No I don't believe it is
and then I look at the violence and again this is from 35 years of hands-on policing I never saw
somebody go out and commit a crime because they needed to get high on marijuana never just never
saw it right and so I've been around a long time I did see violence attributed to people selling
marijuana right dealer on dealer somebody protecting turf somebody doing a home invasion
because if I steal a bunch of marijuana I can sell it for entire profit as opposed to paying for it
and you know only making a portion of that money back so I mean I would say legalizing marijuana
is something that I would absolutely not oppose and I look do I want to see people getting high
and do I think it makes you any smarter to smoke? No but again I've never seen a lot of violent
crime attributed to marijuana use just dealing so you know I don't think we've done that successfully
here in the United States because in some of the areas where they have legalized marijuana like
Colorado they're seeing crime because it's still cheaper to buy or it's still it's still profitable
to smuggle marijuana in and sell it for less money than you'd pay the store so I mean they have to
get it right now with the other drugs um look I've seen a lot of people and you have too
overdoses you see things clearly it's not working I mean we've been in this war on drugs for
generations do I think that we've done a good job at getting help for addicts no and look I am firmly
in the lane that addiction is not a crime addiction isn't illness right same thing with alcohol
addiction right but people don't get as offended with that for some reason and when it's just as
deadly and it does just as many bad things to your body but when it comes to the dealers I think
Portugal gets it right you know incarcerate the dealers there needs to be repercussions
for the folks who engage in the trade now I don't know how much of a difference it would have made
but I can tell you many of the drug dealing arrests that I've made over the years the dealers
played it down to attempted possession or something like that and they got out just to continue to
deal so perhaps if there was actual penalty and in the federal system there normally is
I mean there's people who did life for drug dealing federally and rarely in New York state
that I see that it would have to be a tremendous amount of cocaine or heroin or whatever but I
think that perhaps if they did a better job at disciplining those who trafficked in the narcotics
and did a better job at caring for those who had drug problems we wouldn't be in a situation that
we're in so I look we haven't gotten it right and the fact that we're still fighting the war on drugs
the fact that we've lost over a hundred thousand people roughly a year to fentanyl poisoning
it screams that we're failing so what do we do to fix it but it goes back to what we were saying
earlier until you can get politicians and leaders from various sectors to sit down and really talk
instead of point fingers at each other looking for donations I don't know that we'll see any
any real meaningful change no no I think it looking at it at the most basal economic
way as well supply and demand if you can help your communities heal from their traumas that
they're drowning in illicit drugs and alcohol it doesn't matter what it is marijuana then
you're gonna remove customers from that illicit drug trade and I think that's the part that
people don't seem to understand is that you know you cut the head off the snake then is
it gonna be completely gone of course not and then yes I understand that some people will shift
their criminal activities from over here to a different way but again I think you'd make a huge
huge huge impact and then you know rather than 600 murders and or you know an agency maybe you'll
have 50 murders and they'll have the resources to make sure it's done diligently yeah no there's no
doubt about it and look the more like the bigger the pool of people that you have to deal with is
right then that's harder so I mean if you were to wean people off of drugs because of treatment or
whatever and then that pool got smaller and smaller then there's even more effort you could
focus on that much smaller cadre of people who are still struggling with that problem
but when you have so many people and and look it's not from any one group too I mean you know I you
see a lot more of it in urban areas because people don't have a house with property where they can
sit in the backyard out of sight of police they're sitting on the front stoop where the police drive
by so I mean there's a lot of other things that factor into this too where people will like to
portray it as it's it's a problem that affects one sector of our population and not another it
affects everybody there are white kids dying just as much as there are black kids dying Latinos
Asians although I think the population of Asians who who um abuse substances is lower so I mean
you also have to think about like cultural beyond the cultural beliefs beyond you know um just what
happens in the streets too I mean how how kids are raised matters culture matters you know I mean
and but I mean holistically we need to attack this problem and fix it 100 well speaking of Manhattan
then I know that you entered the ATF and then shortly after that 9-11 happened so talk to me
about your ground experience excuse me ground zero experience that day sure I was actually
heading to federal court which was actually the US Attorney's Office was just in the federal court
which is about a quarter mile away from ground zero as the crow flies and I wasn't down there yet I
was on the FDR drive which is the main road on the eastern side of Manhattan and I got a phone call
from my boss saying that a plane had struck the north tower and even though I wasn't that far from
the World Trade Center there were and those were the two tallest buildings in New York City there
were plenty of skyscrapers between me and them so I couldn't see anything so in my mind I'm thinking
some small propeller plane or a smaller you know commuter jet or something had hit the trade center
so I started to drive in that direction got there somewhat quickly parked for the first time I found
a parking space but I haven't actually go look for one right I pulled up I remember when I pulled
up to the building I was on the north side of the north tower and I remember like leaning forward
in the car because you know you ever pull up too close to a traffic light you can't see it so you
got to lean forward to wait for it to change kind of like that and I was looking up at the building
and I saw people waving white cloths imagine t-shirts perhaps trying to get the attention
of people but down below and I remember thinking to myself going back to the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing that the helicopters rescued some people from the upper floors so my thoughts at that point
were still not knowing it was a commercial airliner that hit the building I'm like wow those
people I guess they'll get rescued and then whoever's below the fire will get out and let
me just get out and see what I can do to help so I put on a windbreaker that I had an ATF agent
written on the back so I remember walking out and I turned I went south on Greenwich Street and then
I turned left and went on Bessie Street and I came to the corner of Church and Bessie Street
is this tremendous plane engine a little banged up but mostly intact that it's just sitting there
and I was like wow this is a commercial airliner because those things look big when it's on a plane
when you see it standing in the street they're huge so at that point you know I realized I'm
still trying to process in my head like what happened here did the pilot have a heart attack
is a computer error like what's still I guess not that sharp you know me personally so I just
did what cops do tried to keep people moving so the ambulances could come in and the fire trucks
would come in and I went up the stairs because the towers didn't sit at ground level they sat on like
a mezzanine I went up to the mezzanine and walked towards the south tower because people were
congregating and tried to get them to keep moving and then that's when the second plane hit and I
remember just before the plane hit I remember looking to my left and there was a young
latina EMT who was taking care of a patient who was badly injured on the ground from the first
plane strike and I remember looking back in her direction and I saw now she's laying down and I
literally watched like the color leave her face and her eyes stopped blinking and I'm like wow she's
she's dead I mean I didn't get a chance to take her pulse or anything but to me it appeared very
clear that she was gone and I remember turning back and looking at the north tower and just trying
to again trying to figure out because there's so much happening that what do I do next like what
hole can I fill at this very moment to be useful and I remember seeing for the first time somebody
jump from the building and it was weird because as a cop I had responded to calls of jumpers
especially in New York City so usually it was a crime scene because the person jumped or
or it was somebody sitting on a ledge who really just wanted to be talked off the ledge so to speak
I never saw somebody actually jump and I remember I remember like when I saw the person jumping like
almost bracing like I was about to get punched in the face because I was terrified to hear the sound
that their body would make when it hit the ground so and I did I heard it and I still could hear it
and then I remember shortly afterwards I'm still kind of near the base of the south tower at this
point the second person jumps that I saw and there were others and that person hit an overhang where
they were you know when you go to be under the rain by the front of the building and that made
like this thunderous noise and at this point I was like I just can't be here because I'm going to get
hit with either debris or a person so I went back down those steps on Vessi Street and I ran into
one of my managers who said hey you need to round up the rest of the ATF folks no one showed up at
the rendezvous location which you know you know with fire drills you're supposed to meet somewhere
so they can do a headcount nobody showed up so I got sent back into the ground zero area I stayed
on the on the east side of it so I was on church street and I ran into a colleague of mine who's
just weeping because his wife was in one of the two towers and he couldn't find her and then I ran
into two ATF agents you know who was supposed to show up at that location and didn't and I remember
talking to two of them Sal the Sal and Jason and I was looking across the street at ground zero so
I was on the other side of the street now and I see a bunch of New York City cops walking south
and heading into the site and one of them was a guy named Vinny Dan so I had worked with I went
to the academy with and then we went to this thing called operation pressure point together so I knew
Vinny pretty well and he was with a guy named John Coughlin who was a big Irishman on the pipe band
played the bagpipes and Walter Weaver who was a younger cop who I knew who just we always used to
talk about watches I used to love wristwatches he loved watches and I remember Vinny looks at me and
he grabs his shirt he's like like throws his hands up like hey what's up because when I left the NYPD
I quietly left there was no retirement party or anything like that I left on a Friday I went
to work with ATF on a Monday so Vinny didn't know so he was like what's up with the ATF jacket
and I kind of put my hands up like saying hey I guess we'll we'll talk about it later and then
literally I'm watching those guys walk into the area where the south tower is and all of a sudden
Jason the agent grabbed my shoulder like really hard and he just said one word he said run and I
remember looking up and if you ever see the footage of the south tower when it fell the first top the
top cant's over it looked like it was falling like a domino towards the east river but what happened
was the top canted and then it collapsed downward I just started running north and I got hit in the
back with something I didn't know what it was not and not it didn't injure me but it was enough to
get my attention and I saw there was some police cars and a fire truck there so I remember getting
on my hands and knees and rolling under the fire truck and then saying you know okay I felt safe
for about a minute probably was just a few seconds and then the dust cloud came and it hit me in the
face and that cloud was very gritty like the particles were rough so as I would blink my eyes
it felt like somebody was sandpapering my eyeballs and then it was tough to breathe and I was like
hey stupid you're gonna die here so I got out from under the truck and then just continued to run
north and I heard somebody yelling they were saying over here over here but it didn't sound
like somebody who was like in distress so it sounded like somebody who maybe was offering like
help so I ran towards that voice and then a person grabbed me by my collar brought me to a water
fountain and I washed out my eyes and then went out after you know that and tried to help rescue
people but either people were dead or they were moving on there so there really was no one to
help you were buried and gone and I know they rescued a few people I didn't see any of the
people that were rescued so but I spent three days there on the scene you know took a nap on the
evening of night number two but for the most part just tried to see if we can help and recover
people but it was it was really a very helpless feeling because again people got away or they
were gone so but yeah and then I spent like you know for about a month a couple days a week on
the pile trying to help and then you know for six months that followed either there or at the landfill
just trying to be a part of the recovery effort you know it was rough it's horrendous I've heard
several people say the exact same thing like there was nothing to rescue it was just everything was
vaporized and I actually had uh one of the port authority cops that they did pull out will him in
oh on the show and that was incredible to hear that story yeah yeah well I remember at one point on
the first day we helped a colleague get to the hospital she was pregnant and um she it was
Beekman downtown hospital was not very far from ground zero so we probably about a half mile maybe
three quarter of a mile walk and when I approached like you were coming down the stairs behind one
police plaza you could look under the Brooklyn bridge overpass you could start to see the front
of the hospital there's gurneys out front and there's paramedics there's nurses there's doctors
there's lab coats people in scrubs not a single patient on a gurney so when we got there and
actually some of them were like hey where is everybody like they seemed like upset like if
it was our fault because they wanted to help they wanted to tend to patients but there were no
patients which was good for the young lady camera that we brought there because she had like immediate
meet medical attention from like a huge cast of people but yeah it was it was kind of surreal to
see all of these gurneys you know they had this mass triage you know set up and everything but no
one on a gurney no one getting the blood pressure taken no one getting treated you either walked
away or you were crushed a lot of people romanticized about 9 12 especially during the pandemic you know
and i think that was the kindness and compassion and community that a lot of us kind of you know
yearn for again i think like i said it is there we just i think just need to see it on the screens
need to make it um visceral again what was your experience of the following days and the community
and the city banding together truthfully i think it's what i saw after 9 11 that helped me not lose
my mind from 9 11 like i remember you know there were many examples but i mean i remember at one
point about two or three weeks after 9 11 you know because it i had a variety of duties mostly it was
on the pile passing the bucket up bucket down because they didn't want to bring heavy equipment
because if there were people trapped the heavy equipment would shake the ground and crush and
kill them but sometimes i'd be stuck going to a command post and fbi had a command post that was
banned by people from all different agencies and i sat there i don't think the phone ever rang once
to be honest with you but i remember one day going out and there were these people who were
grilling on the 55 gallon drums that were cut in half they were grilling every day so i mean if
so but i remember one day just asking them like hey you know who are you guys and the guy told me
yeah we're from an alcoholics anonymous chapter in texas and what happened was they had saw what
happened and they felt so moved that they threw their stuff in pickup trucks and cars and drove
up to manhattan that's not a short drive as you know and they spent the many days out there grilling
food that was donated you know by variety of stores and whatnot but these guys slept in their
cars and grilled food for first responders you know and i remember even many months after 9 11
i was at the landfill one day and it was just very nauseating work because i mean that particular day
i was tasked with working on a conveyor belt so what happened was they would take the larger
debris and they would barge it over to the landfill and then they would use heavy equipment to lay it
out somewhat flat and you'd look to see if you could find anything a wedding ring a finger a bone
a picture anything to give back to family so then after that you would use rakes to break the stuff
apart to continue to look for stuff and then the smaller stuff would get put on these conveyor belts
and you would stand there for hours watching this stuff go by and you would look for again anything
a wedding ring a finger you know something and if you saw it you would stop the conveyor belt and
take it to the medical examiner's tent but i mean it was very nauseating to stand there all day just
watch stuff go by you know on these belts but i remember one time looking to my right and there
was a gentleman who had a patch on his uniform it said charlotte had a hornet's nest on it was a
charlotte mecklenburg police department or something along those lines and i asked him i
said hey what are you doing here and his response was you know my um my kid was born on september
11th i couldn't come up here this is the soonest i can get up here i didn't want to leave my wife
alone with the baby so here's a guy many months later who's a police officer from another part of
the country who took the trek up to new york to be a part of something that i thought was pretty
important and then like i remember the very famous footage of george bush on the pile with old
firemen who recently passed god bless him um i was probably about 20 yards from george bush when he
made that speech with the bullhorn um behind me were probably 50 to 60 chicago firefighters
there were cops there from toronto vancouver police from all different parts of the country
so i mean yeah to your point the way people came together was amazing the other thing is to get
into that scene it was only one way in and one way out and i was on the west side highway and
there was like a gate that you'd have to pass through now policing in new york city was a very
thankless profession people never thanked you for doing your job with some exceptions like there
were a couple cases where i made an arrest for a murder or for a couple times for like rapes
where the family would thank you for catching the bad guy that hurt their family member but for the
most part you weren't thanked but i remember if you would go into the site and you would dig for
hours and you'd be exhausted i mean just ground down and then as you're leaving there would be
thousands of people standing there with bottles of water trying to hand them in the car window
cheering like literally cheering like we were rock stars to the point where you just wanted to
turn around and go back in and dig some more because the energy that the crowd their appreciation
gave us so yeah it was unbelievable um so yeah 912 uh i think that if we could ever get back to
living with that sort of mentality consistently this would be one hell of a country to live in
and it's already a great country but yeah it was amazing it was really amazing yeah and i couldn't
agree more you know and this is the thing when we bring some of these issues to the forefront and
have conversations with people that really understand like yourself that bring solutions to these
it's investing in the country you know it's pushing back from the the negativity in division
and the pigeonholing that's kind of pushing everyone apart when we think about the first
responders even you know as as beautiful as that was now that kind of fades and now we've got
firefighters begging for some sort of financial support as their men and women are dying from
the 9-eleven related cancers i know you had a personal experience with that too so talk to me
about that kind of side of it you've already served selflessly on the pile talk to me about the cost
well there were a few things one is i lost seven friends on 9-eleven um six cops one firefighter so
i went into a really dark place after that because i lost friends in the line of duty before you know
i had friends killed in line of duty paul heidelberger bosh john williamson hector fontanez
all died but they died in separate incidents right and it was far apart from one another to lose seven
friends in one time really brought me into a very dark place like i couldn't even go to police
funerals i never missed a police funeral because i thought it was my duty to pay respect to the
fallen but because i was so close to the tower that fell and i saw three of those guys walk in
the tower i felt really guilty that i was still alive so i i dealt with something that i thought
was fake called survivor's guilt but it it haunted me for a while where i just didn't feel good to be
here um and then that later manifested into ptsd but then um ironically in 2018 i was diagnosed
with lung cancer which they attributed to 9-eleven i never smoked a cigarette in my life so i lost my
right lung um to lung cancer didn't end at that time it's funny because it was around this time
that the parkland shooting happened that i responded to when i was kind of coping with my own
mortality at this point because i didn't know had it spread yet because the lung was removed
i had just gotten back to work about two weeks three weeks before parkland so i mean i wasn't
sure what my long-time prognosis was going to be but it was also around this time that i you know
realized hey man i really spent so much time being so into the job right and then you know dealing
with the stuff that was going on in my head from 9-eleven that i really wasn't a very good father
husband because i put everything else first i put the job first i let things get to me were to the
point where it was bothering me mentally that i decided to finally get some help to get you know
past all the things that i had dealt with because i said hey man i came into this profession hole i
want to leave hole so i mean that was something i had to cope with after 9-eleven but luckily the
lung cancer we took out the right lung which took some time to get used to moving around with less
oxygen capacity but now i'm fine i just can't go for long runs or anything but i did the tunnel
to towers around a couple years ago how did you see even sell it yeah yeah i did what a great
charity but that that man should he should be a saint he's just he should get the presidential
medal of freedom but um it just yeah it took some time um but i thankfully i was one of the lucky
ones i didn't need chemo didn't need radiation because those things can kill you too and now
it's um you know it's six years cancer-free so it's it's something that i have in the rearview mirror
you know i look back occasionally but i don't stare beautiful yeah i mean it's i don't think
i've ever had anyone that's literally had a lung removed but i agree with you completely what
terrifies me about chemo is i think it does kill more people than it saves i really do it just
doesn't make any sense to me that you basically age and orange the entire body and then cross
your fingers and hope that you know it regenerates and restarts in a healthy way but i think there's
a lot of immunotherapy um technology coming through that's actually kind of targeting a much
more precise way i think even bolstering the body's own ability to fight those cancers now but um so
yeah i mean the surgery only i mean thank goodness that was uh that was a solution for you yeah well
i'll tell you you know one of the scariest moments of that entire ordeal frankly was you know again i
didn't know so to find out my prognosis i was sent to the moffitt cancer institute which is in tampa
and um you know when i pulled up and i saw all these people sitting out front you know in
wheelchairs and whatnot or showing up for either leaving their treatment or arriving in their
treatment i saw these people who were like great you know they're complex you could tell they were
struggling um and you know i that's the only moment during my time you know figuring out what was
going to happen with me that i actually lost it you know i i choked up i broke down and um in having
the conversations at that hospital i realized the heroes that work at that hospital every single day
that see people who are fighting for their lives and see people like i couldn't look at these folks
without breaking down myself how do they go to work every day and deal with people some of them
children who are in you know in battles life and death battles with a variety of different cancers
and then you realize like we always think of heroes we think of cops and firemen and emts
that are out there rushing to the scene there are plenty of other heroes that you never really
think about right what's the old saying that not all heroes wear capes some of them wear lab coach
you know uh but i was i was really just moved by the professionalism and just what those folks at
that center deal with and that's just one of many cancer centers throughout the country so you know
it was a real eye-opener for me absolutely well you mentioned parkland i know we're jumping ahead
a little bit but i actually had a couple of you know groups of guests on that particular you know
topic and it's just down the road for me i live in the central florida central florida but i had
tony and tori gonzalez tori was in the school um one of her um excuse me one of her her boyfriend
wakim was one of the the guys that was killed the teenagers that was killed and then tony was on
shift as a firefighter that day and responded to the shooting in his daughter's school and then i
had the one of the battalion chiefs and the fire chief at the time from coral springs who was one
of the departments that responded and so you had the kind of pre-plan response view and then you
had the real kind of human father daughter experience as well and it was just devastating
you hear the the dispatch tapes from you know how it happened and you see the kind of diagram they
created where the shooter went and just the mass execution that occurred you know it was it was
horrendous but at least in that particular event you know the the law enforcement and the fire
response was you know excellent and they they saved a lot of lives even though they lost a lot
talk to me about your experience in that particular shooting sure well i wasn't close by i was down in
our office in um in miami we actually was in darrell right near the dolphin mall and i remember it
came on tv that there was a mass shooting in school and every now and then there would be like false
alarms or a report of a shooting that would turn out to be false so i was i didn't jump in the car
and respond right away but then i remember there was coverage and a helicopter was flown over and
and in the footage you could see the body of the coach and there was a coach who tried to defend
the kids he was killed outside and when i saw that this was you know being aired on television i
realized okay this isn't a false alarm so i got in the car and drove up to the scene lights and
sirens took me probably about a half an hour to get there because doral was not that close to parkland
but i remember getting there and a sheriff israel was already on the scene there was a massive
police presence in fact the crime scene at that point had already been so big that it was quite
a walk to get from where my car was parked to where the sheriff and the command staff were and
this was shortly after i came back to work from the surgery so let me tell you like there's footage
of me giving a press conference with them as well with these other law enforcement professionals
and i remember that day and this is after i did the walkthrough of the scene my thought process
was don't faint because i was so winded from having to walk around and be moving around on my feet
not used to being diminished lung capacity that i don't even remember what i said at the press
conference but i just as i was talking i was just thinking to myself try to say something intelligent
and don't faint but um what i remember is um you know when i did the walkthrough of the scene it was
difficult and i had seen a lot of dead bodies by that point between 9 11 which was horrific
and my time as a homicide detective you know i hate to say it you build up a shield when you see a
lot of death because you have to protect yourself but i it had been so long since that that my shield
was down plus i was at this point i didn't know if my cancer had spread i didn't know my situation
was and i hate to sound that because i don't want to make it sound like i'm worried about me
but i mean i was grappling with a number of things my own mortality being one of them and i'm looking
at these bodies of these young kids who you know many of them look like they were seniors perhaps
some juniors in high school who were you know in the prime of their lives like about in the most
exciting time of our life right you leave in high school and going about to do some really important
things go to college whatever and i remember some of the kids obviously died sheltering other kids
with their own bodies like they were on top and uh and you say to yourself like wow like
how impactful is that here you have kids right you know you don't think about like
that put themselves in front of their colleagues like you you almost think of soldiers and policemen
and firemen you know risking their lives for others you don't think of it from teenagers
and it was a just a difficult thing to comprehend and it really had a profound impact on me but by
the time i got there nicholas cruz had already been apprehended we weren't sure yet where he
got the gun we that was our role find out how he got the gun we found that he bought like seven
other guns over the course of a year from a variety of different gun stores so then our
concern is is there it was he working with somebody else is another kid gonna go do a
shooting somewhere else like was there some sort of a grievance you know because sometimes kids
get upset and they spin each other up and people do dumb things uh it turned out thank god that
nicholas cruz acted alone but again it was a tough scene because you know i i my guard was down you
know and even if my guard was up i don't know that i would have been able to get through that
scene without being impacted by it but so much other stuff was going on at the time that it just
really it hit me and i you know there's things in your life that you see in our profession whether
you're a paramedic a fireman a cop that you can't unsee that bother you and that scene is one of the
things of my 35 year career that creeps in at night sometimes and you know it caused me to lose some
sleep and really feel bad um about how it happened and how how we fail as a as a culture to prepare
to prevent violence you know in these sorts of instances because i mean it's happening far too
frequently and i think the politicians love to blame the gun which is an inanimate object right
and and we don't often think of the other contributing factors because there's a lot of
them i would argue video games i would argue music i would argue just the the culture of today where
we glamorize violence you know the the ease of getting firearms you know for for some people
you know some people just are engaged in trafficking guns to others but you know i
nobody wants to have the important discussions i remember at the scene you had certain politicians
were talking about we need to ban guns and then you had other politicians saying no no we need
to arm all teachers well i know some teachers and some of them are i would be frightened if they had
a gun but but again no rational discussion just like many of the other problems we're discussing
today people don't want to talk about it they want to take sides so nothing gets solved i couldn't
agree more and it breaks my heart when those same i guess the media stations of each of those sides
start shoving their microphones into these you know traumatized parents faces and start asking them
about that and you know we've got these children lying dead in these classrooms
and a coach lying dead as you said out on the playing field and yet immediately it's like
world war one and you've got two trenches pro gun and anti-gun and if you read i had that lieutenant
colonel dave grossman on a couple of times and his book assassination generation is phenomenal
i mean you look at the programming that happens with video games i mean the the sleep deprivation
which no one talks about these kids that are up all night drinking energy drinks and gaming are
slowly creating psychosis you got the side effects of psychiatric meds you got unadressed
unadressed trauma i mean all these other compounding elements that make the pie chart
for that vicious i mean that excuse me that perfect storm of psychosis if you're just looking at that
one piece of the pie over and over again we're going to keep burying our children and this is
the problem it's not a political discussion it's a horrendous issue that we have to come together
get all the greatest minds and finally stop but if you're just using it to incentivize your political
career then you know shame on you it's fucking disgusting i couldn't say it better and look i'm
glad that you've read uh and hadn't spoken colonel grossman because i'm a firm believer in his work
i think it's very well researched i think it's very accurate when you look at some of these video
games like you know like the what is it the miami um the ones with the yeah the grand theft yeah
number five the number five supposedly made more money than the entire music industry collectively
from what he says in his book i don't doubt it but i mean when you look at how it desensitizes
young people from killing right and then we have to realize not everybody is stable there are some
amongst us who are emotionally unstable and they're the ones who are perhaps most profoundly impacted
by this i mean but that's the discussion that you can you can't talk about media you can't talk about
the movies i remember growing up as a kid um they couldn't show like if you ever watched the shows
from the 1970s when they shot the gun out of somebody's hand very unrealistic right but that
was because they couldn't show people getting shot on tv back then it was considered too obscene to
show now look at the stuff that they're showing in tv and movies it's it's i mean people basically
exploding from like 50 caliber bullets going through their bodies it's become so graphic
that i think it's desensitized us as a population so i mean there are so many different layers to
the onion and unless you're willing to address them all then it's you're never going to fix the
problem that's why i wish some people would just if you're not going to talk about the thing
holistically just shut up you know i agree 100 and it's a complete disservice to all these children
that are laying in graves you know i mean it's that simple if you have a tragedy there is only
one thing left to learn from that tragedy and make sure it doesn't happen again it's your only your
only option they're already dead all you can do is try and fix it in their memory yeah well what's
the saying if you don't know history you're bound to repeat it exactly well speaking of firearms is
a good kind of segue to 2009 so you you're in the atf you know you find yourself in arizona
kind of walk me through the the kind of years and weeks leading up to operation fast and furious
and then let's talk about god forbid whistleblowing which ironically the initial i looked up the term
and originally it was you know to warn people of danger it was a good thing now it seems to be a
dirty word well when i had gotten out to arizona i had spent years before that in new york working
on mostly gun cases and making big cases other little cases because that's your job so you'd go
after the low-hanging fruit charge them with a gun violation and then you did what worked in the
judicial system you proffer them you're superseding indictments you build cases against co-defendants
you know i mean it just was putting a puzzle together so i had done roughly 200 or so gun
cases in new york so and i'm not saying that to brag i just wanted i had some experience doing it
in new york before i got to arizona so i didn't just you know fall off of the turnip truck or
something so i get out to arizona and um my first weekend out there i get a call from one of my
agents who got a call from a licensed gun dealer a business saying that somebody had come in and
wanted to buy all the ak-47 variant rifles they had on the shelves person had a bag of money
unusual so the dealer would call us again i'm only in town now for about a week so we would
roll out there the transaction takes place where the dealer didn't sell till we were nearby we
follow the car we stop the car we separate the people in the car we start asking them a bunch
of questions we catch them in lies we wind up seizing 13 ak-47 variant rifles so and my agents
called the u.s attorney's office to get these people prosecuted and the u.s attorney said okay
let them go we'll indict it later so in new york what would have happened is take them to jail
you know and we'll just you know so you take them to the county jail which was bronx central booking
they would draw up a criminal complaint and then we would go get them the next day and take them
to federal court so the idea of letting them go was somewhat foreign to me but i'm new in a
different part of the country and things operate differently in different regions so i'm like okay
didn't like it but all right so watch that happen and then i would see that similar dynamic unfold
again and again and again where a licensed dealer would call us tip us off to suspicious information
we would do what cops do all over the country every single day right everywhere which was stop
the car ask the questions build a case build probable cause seize the weapons but again and
again and again those indictments never came so then we had some other things that would happen
like for example there was a case where a gun was trafficked now the dealer didn't suspect a straw
purchase which is straw purchase which is when somebody buys a gun for somebody else it's an
act of deception so when the dealers would notice it they would call us but sometimes if the
straw purchaser was good they would notice and the gun would wind up somewhere in this particular
instance the gun wound up at a shooting scene in canonea mexico which is 42 miles south of the
arizona border and 21 people who did four of them are cops mexican cops four other mexican cops were
kidnapped and brought into the desert and beaten and left for dead they survived so my agents
identify the straw purchaser he confesses to his role in the scheme tells who we gave the gun to
they find him that person confesses as well the u.s attorney's office declines that case for
prosecution saying well the gun is in mexico and from that point forward they came up with this
finding which they were the only u.s attorney's office in the country to do this that once the
bot once the gun is in mexico the body of the crime is in mexico so you can't prosecute the case
well realistically what you're charging them for is lying on the form right because they're
checking a box this is are you buying this gun for yourself um or you know and they were saying yes
so we had the forms in hand but they would develop body of the crime corpus electi corpus
electi we heard it over and over and over again so we wound up having to take some cases to the
county prosecutors we had a formulated relationship with the state attorney general's office which
didn't even have a gun trafficking unit but they were kind enough to fill that void but yet the
prosecutors whose job it was to enforce the federal gun laws were punting constantly punting
so anyway um in 2009 my group's mission changed phoenix had become the capital of home invasions
and kidnappings in the united states and second in this hemisphere behind mexico city which was a
distinction that they did not like so i had some experience work in those kinds of cases so my
group was tasked with working with the phoenix police department on those cases and a new group
was stood up to work mexico bound firearms trafficking cases so um we don't know what's
going on in that group but i attended a couple meetings where they were talking about this one
case that had a lot of guns the first meeting i remember was roughly 600 guns and my thoughts
were that they found some treasure trove of old intelligence and they were going to work backwards
and build this case but then as the numbers would go up we would start asking hey are you guys
interviewing these straw purchasers like what's going on and we were today we're doing something
different but we still didn't know what's happening so now in december of 2010 border patrol agent
brian terry gets killed and we didn't know this at the time but there was rumblings um that one of
the guns or two of the guns that were found at the scene were trafficked as part of this investigation
that was called jacob chambers and others but it was actually nicknamed fast and furious because
the defendants drove those souped up japanese cars like they did in the movie so water cooler
starts uh talk starts happening and then we start getting calls from dealers who are saying hey man
why are our guns getting traced from crime scenes because when we would do interdictions
the guns would never get traced because there was no need to trace them because we knew where they
came from so now the dealers are calling saying hey why are our guns getting traced we're hearing
this water cooler talk about brian terry his death being linked to two guns well at a subsequent
meeting the head of the atf phoenix office named bill newell comes he's talking to all of the
supervisors i was one of those supervisors and he's like hey my suggestion is you folks stay away
from john dotson who was an agent in that group um he's contacted senator grassley's office and
don't be surprised if john doesn't find himself indicted so at this point i'm saying to myself
wait a minute time out we had dozens and dozens and dozens of firearms traffickers that we referred
to this u.s attorney's office of prosecution right including one dirty dealer who admitted that about
a thousand of his guns made it to mexico now they're talking about a dining john like for me that
was like a bridge too far and it's around this time that we're finding out was actually happening
in that group so well i went home that night had a conversation with my wife and told her what was
going on and i said i'm thinking of calling senator grassley's office myself and her response was
if you don't you're not the guy i'm married i just talked about some extra pressure right so um so the
next day i called up senator grassley's office i remember that brian downey was the guy who answered
the phone and i told him i said brian i know that eric holder and the department of justice and atf
are telling you that john thompson's a liar and that atf doesn't want guns well i'm here to tell
you john's not lying and if you give me a subpoena i'll tell you everything that you need to know
and they did so i got a subpoena i was deposed uh in a roughly six seven eight hour deposition
where i put everything that i experienced in the previous three years on the table
and then later was um you know uh testified in front of the committee which is a dogged pony show
because that's where the politicians themselves get to quite a view and with them it's 90 of its
talking points rarely is it about getting to the truth but yeah from it was around that point where
um the u.s attorney's office decided that they didn't like what i had to say so it turned into
a lot of accusations and it's been four years battling to clear my name from accusations that
they made because they didn't want to admit to their malfeasance in passing up on all those cases
talk to me about the the philosophy of of whistleblowing again like i said it's become a
buzzword now a dirty word you know it's one of those phrases that seems to um almost imply like
oh it's some you know someone whining but it's funny i had the joker willink on the show a while
ago now and i was talking about the problems we have in the fire service and you know that
unless we pull this out the shadows we're going to keep burying firefighters and he actually used
the word you know well if you're you know a whistleblower and i'm like is that a good thing or a bad
thing and now when you again like i said you look up the origin of the word it's a good thing
you know police officers will blow in a whistle when an armed robber is running through a community
to warn everyone you know what i mean so how how was talk to me about the courage it took to to
stand up and advocate for your friend and do the right thing and then how have you seen that phrase
the uh you know the act of simply saying you know this is wrong kind of torn apart the last 10 years
or so well i mean full disclosure john wasn't my friend i had not met john over to that point
and if i had crossed paths with him i don't remember it um so it wasn't like i was trying
to defend a friend it's just that what was happening there to me we saw appalling because
it went beyond just them indicting john frankly in my mind at that point because i mean like i
enjoyed what i did in my career with atf because i made progress on a lot of cases like i did things
i never thought i would be able to do but i did it because i had partnership with prosecutors
i mean so like to reach your full potential as an investigator you need that so i saw my agents try
and try and try and because of things that were beyond their control i realized them they're never
going to be able to do they're never going to get that satisfaction that i got and it's not because
of them it was because these prosecutors were either too much or too little or too much
it was because these prosecutors were either too lazy or didn't care so that was one of the things
that factored in and of course there was a dead border patrol agent so i didn't view it as anything
other than my duty really you know now with whistleblowing in general what i will say is
once i did step forward a couple things first i was warned hey man they're going to come for you
by a guy who previously blew the whistle i named jay dobbins who was the first atf agent to
infiltrate the hell's angels who did through hell i had jay on the show amazing story yeah well i
yeah well you heard about the fire bombing of his house i was in arizona when that all happened so i
knew what jay went through when i was like oh shit i guess i'm in for it so i was accused of
perjury there were some other things that the u.s attorneys over tried to push back on me
but i mean for me it was never about what required courage it was more like i felt this was what i
had to do the funny thing is when when i was engaged in the whistleblowing i was told by
someone who i respected atf who was the chief of staff or became the chief of staff who said you
know they're really upset with you people because you're a supervisor you know you should have
they're in their mind like as a member of the leadership team i should have been the last one
to come forward now this is department of justice not just atf and i'm like wait a minute if if i'm
supposedly a member of the leadership team and i see something that's really messed up and needs
to be fixed i would think as a leader it's my duty to come forward so i mean that's what i think
you know if you raised your hand and took an oath to serve the constitution you're really serving
the people right i never took an oath and named the president or a cabinet secretary or some
director it was about the people so i viewed it as it just was my duty to do it but um by the same
token though i i had people afterwards like hey you blew the whistle on fast and furious right
you know i have a boss who you know i think he drinks too much at night you know sometimes he
comes in with a hangover it's like so wait that's because i blew the whistle now i'm like the town
rat like you think it's my job i think if you don't like what you're seeing then report it you
know i mean i don't know what to tell you so there is a connotation where some people think that
whistleblowers have an axe to grind with the organization or people or somehow they're
malcontented i loved my job i i even was very good friends with some of the people who were on the
wrong side of fast and furious but the reality was is again brian terry was dead his family wanted
answers as to what happened they were never given the answers which is one of the reasons why i
wrote the book and it just went against the grain of everything that we did and look i made plenty
of mistakes in my career plenty um some of them i even talk about in my book and my opinion is
if you're out there and you do things trying to do the right thing and you fail something happens
own it right you have a duty explain what happened and i've done that like hey this is what i try to
do here's where we are this you know and every time i was like all right dust me off get me back
in the fight right but to sit there and lie to the people and to lie to the people you're working
with to me was a bridge too far so i mean that's look i think whistleblowing can be noble but i
think there's some people's points there are some whistleblowers who do it for the wrong reasons
they do it because it's personal for me it wasn't personal at all it was more about this is broken
here and this needs to be fixed because people were dying in mexico on the other end of those
guns that were being trafficked that the u.s attorney's office didn't care about brian terry's
dead my agents were never going to be able to do cases the way they should have been able to do
them so there were just so many things that just all together i felt needed to be fixed and you
can't fix what you're not willing to talk about i couldn't agree more and it's it's amazing because
if you look at the profession the only one that i know which is obviously fire and ems there are
so many great people in that in that job and they love doing that job but what's happened is a
devolution of the environment they work in you know they work more hours they run more calls they
get less staffing and you watch this slow destruction and you know the the overdoses and
suicides and the heart attacks and the cancers and that is what i'm trying to bring out to the light
is that if if burying firefighters doesn't move you then maybe you should fucking find someone else
to be in that seat because that should move you to the very core and you know so advocating for that
and bringing that to the forefront i think is imperative and what i also see which is so
heartbreaking and i don't know if you had this experience you know in those four years i see
the immense mental health impact that organizational betrayal has on great firefighters
and paramedics and police officers and dispatches who have service burning in their heart but the
organization they work for you know turns their back on them or doesn't support them when they
need it or creates an environment that they're barely seeing their family because they're being
forced to stay shift after shift after shift yeah no it's rough and look i full disclosure i was
blessed like many whistleblowers whether it's people that blow the whistle on local police
departments or federal agencies are crushed right um i think some of them it happens because they
they make it personal about me versus you me versus the organization like i tried not to do that
but i was blessed in a way that i had a couple of people in atf that had moved up in the ranks who
were like hey man as long as you're telling the truth right i have your back just don't embellish
don't lie don't stretch any truths so they gave me the space they didn't really fight for me but
they gave me the space to fight for myself so but i mean there was a period where um you know i
the lawyer's bills were crippling my wife had any replacement so for me to even make the mortgage
i had a pawn watches that i had acquired as a detective used to collect watches i had a pawn
the rifle my grandfather left me this old rifle it was a family for generations had a pawn it
um there was one one one month where we literally had to take all my power tools and have a yard
sale and there's nothing as humbling machine said nothing it's very humbling to be standing in your
driveway selling a 200 drill right for 50 only to have some guy say i'm not going to give you a
penny more than 15 for it um and you know that hey man i don't want to sell this but i gotta make
the mortgage payment or we're gonna get thrown out of this house so i mean it was a rough four
years man i mean got to the point where um we we were broke and what saved us was a tax refund
and then a short sale of our house and me beaten feet to get to washington dc and leaving phoenix
behind and in some ways leaving all the you know the stuff i was dealing with behind but it was
it was rough so and i know a lot of whistleblowers go through that and for many of them it's worse
because there there is no support i had a couple people supporting me and then for them often is
divorce there's alcoholism because it just spirals so i had a very thin thread of support but that
thin thread was enough for me to cling on to to keep my sanity and to get me through it which
again i mean i think that's something that that with these situations when people do blow the
whistle on something that's legitimate i think the right thing to do is say hey man you know i know
what you're doing is tough um i'm here for you if you want to have a conversation you know just not
ostracize that person because the other thing you know there were people who i would see in the
bathroom or i would see in a stairwell like i mean washing my hands hey thanks for what you did
but in public they avoided me like i was like radioactive because they were afraid if i get
seen talking to pete then that could hurt my career so they supported me quietly but which really is
not very helpful but if they saw me in the atrium at headquarters they would run away from me like
i was on fire so i mean that's the other thing is you know you do get somewhat ostracized and
you become a pariah within your own organization which eventually that wore off for me thank god
but for some people that that never does you know so they leave and especially the people that love
their profession they feel like this true sense of betrayal because the thing that they loved
didn't love them back absolutely well speaking of this entire kind of story that we walked through
today then what made you decide to sit down and write a book and let's talk about what people
can find between the covers sure well a couple things one is my last assignment was the head of
training for atf and i would run into people who would this happened in phoenix in phoenix there
were seven groups one group did this right but if you talk to people who atf agents walked guns well
if you talk to agents in other parts of the country they had no idea what happened so we had
suggested why not do like the military does do an after action report and a training so people will
know what happened so it never gets repeated again and we would be told by atf management
and the oj no we don't talk about fast and furious it's like like um i think what's it
valdermort from uh not that i have or like fight club right we don't talk about fight club so
going back to what i said earlier like if you don't know history you can repeat history so and
what happened in fast and furious is not what a lot of people think it was basically like they
abandoned a lot of basic policing techniques to try to get fancy and then prosecutors um you know
heavily involved in it so i was offended that you know agents didn't know and we couldn't tell them
so there were a lot of agents that just wanted to hear it so i said let me write the story for them
and then brian terry's family like i testified at the hearing on june 15 2011 in front of congress
it was on c-span not that anybody watches c-span i get that but brian terry's mother sat at the
other end of the table that i sat at so i got to meet her before and briefly after the hearing
she was a kind woman like she reminded me of my mother my friends she's like a woman probably
like the woman living next door to you on either side just good person a good american her son was
a hero and her son was part of this elite team within the border patrol i met brian's cousin
bob great guy secret service agent he wanted answers didn't get him i stayed in touch with
brian's brother kent great guy mechanic works on old cars up in michigan and his two sisters who
i've interacted with on social media a bit they're just kind good people and all they wanted to know
is what happened so i mean i know i couldn't answer all of their questions but i wanted to
answer as many of them as i could so that people will know what really happened in phoenix and
here's the other thing some of the people who had the most blood on their hands are still working
in government i named them i say where they're at but i mean there's nothing in the book that i
couldn't prove through either evidence or through witnesses and nothing in the book is speculation
it's all stuff that i personally experienced or personally witnessed um because i you know again
you got to be able to defend yourself from lawsuits and when the people you're writing about are
federal prosecutors you better make damn sure you can do that so but i want folks to know what
really happened then look there's another part of that case that that wasn't spoken of and that was
that there was a guy who was smuggling grenades to the sinaloa cartel that the same prosecutor
the champion fast and furious was dealing with and he let this guy keep making grenades for the
cartel for years so it's all in the book just as a i don't think i even asked you this part
when you kind of overlook or excuse me look over all the elements that led to these oversights
what was some of the main failures as a cautionary tale well that is a great question and i'm so glad
you asked it inexperience and the failure to lead look on the prosecutor side i would say laziness
and incompetence but there were people in atf who promoted very very quickly right um to the point
where they didn't have much street experience they didn't do things like our profession isn't
something you learn overnight you know like say this stuff that you did as a paramedic or amt or
a firefighter you learn by doing and as you spend more time you learn what to look out for
i think that if someone with more experience was running the phoenix field division fast and furious
would have never happened i think that there were people in that chain of command it's the same thing
so i mean and again it goes to as to why i think knowing history helps prevent repeating history
so yeah it was inexperienced poor leadership a leader that wanted to make everybody happy
didn't know how to say no coupled with some really bad lawyers that led to a lot of death and
destruction on the south of the border and led to the death of brian terry who was a hero
well thank you for that i wanted to shift to some closing questions so i can be mindful of your time
um we talked about your book what about other books are there any books that you love to recommend
to people that can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated sure no there's
plenty of good books one would be a man hunters by the guys who narcos was based on steve murphy
and javier peña it's about the takedown of pablo escobar because of my fascination with the cartels
and having dealt with all that is fast and furious stuff you know i read in that book was really
pretty enlightening and the narcos series on netflix was also quite good there was another
book written by jonathan green he's a um he's a british journalist who now lives in massachusetts
it's jonathan um from uh springfield massachusetts he he did a deep dive into a
bronx gang called the sex money murder gang that really gives a interesting perspective because
he actually spent a lot of time with the suspects got to know them on a very very personal level and
it kind of shows how our society has managed to take young kids from inner cities and just turn
them into something um frightening actually i mean some of these kids were involved in shootings at
age 11 you know so i mean jonathan really i mean he really went out there and put himself in harm's
way to get this story and i think he accurately told the story about like urban crime in a way
that most folks would really appreciate reading um so the book is called sex money murder a tale of
cracked blood and betrayal and i think it's a really excellent read and then a favorite of mine
that i read recently uh was it's an old one serpico um about the story of frank serpico somebody said
hey your situation reminds me of serpico uh what let me tell you what man i nothing like frank
serpico he really put himself in harm's way and got shot in the face for speaking truth to power
so i mean if somebody wants to read an old story it's from the 70s but a very very good book just
talking about the cartels quickly when we go back to our prohibition conversation if we were able to
massively reduce addiction and put the other world of addiction back into the hands of the medical
profession what impact would that have on the violence over our borders because i'm just making
an assumption that i know there's also avocados and you know guns and other things too but a lot
of this is still you know narcotics based so for me going back to that cut the head off the snake
if we didn't have consumers for the illicit drug trade in the u.s then basic economics would
dictate that that would weaken some of the cartels over the border yes and no like the cartels made a
lot of their money in drugs i mean that was the lion's share of their profits for decades now it's
human smuggling right so and you know look the gun trafficking goes south so if they didn't need to
protect their turf they wouldn't need all of those guns where they're taking on mexican military and
police and in some instances winning but now they're making a lot more money in smuggling people
than they are in smuggling drugs or as much money but look they'll get their hands in anything
for example it's funny um we're having this discussion right now last year um i read that
the sinaloa cartel and cjng which is the jalisco cartel the new generation they they made four
billion dollars each in recent years tobacco smuggling so i mean i think you know and here
in this country we were looking at the mental ban and they were talking about potentially a
combustible nicotine ban i think anytime we ban anything right someone is going to capitalize
on the black market that's created like i know in the northeast for example it's just really
because of the tax charges uh hesbala and organized crime italian and asian organized crime
were making a ton of money smuggling cigarettes from cheap places like virginia to new york and
selling them not having to pay those taxes so you know they were basically stealing what the new
yorkers thought was tax money um they were putting it in their pockets and using it for other things
so i i think first we do need to secure our borders they're not secured but yeah i think
stopping the flow of drugs or the demand for drugs would be a huge step in the right direction
but there's other things i mean we just need to be mindful that every time look it's a cat and mouse
game right with these cartels and with criminal groups so you know when law enforcement or the
country or laws pivot to change things they they change as well they try to adapt like if i can't
make money doing this where do i go to next to make money because it's not going to be working in a
store or doing legitimate business that's not the kind of folks we're dealing with so i do think
drugs is a huge part of their motivation and their profits um and look just for the sake of americans
and people's lives i think it would be great to fix that problem but then the next problem i think
is human trafficking and sealing the border when you look at mexico for example because i think
the other conversation of the border crisis is why are so many people fleeing if you could be king
for a day obviously we're talking about someone else's country now what are the elements of that
nation um that you would fix to maybe stop so many people flooding into our country in the first place
well i think that's a question and i probably am not smart enough to answer because i know like
in some countries it's it's the culture i mean it's it's um you know dictatorships you know
you look at india for example i mean they still have a caste system i know in some other countries
you know there are there are pecking orders as to who's you know who's treated certain ways so i
think if you feel oppressed you're going to try to get away from that and come here i think some of
its political some of its environmental some of its people think that there's more opportunity here
so i you know i don't know how i would fix those things some of them are fleeing crime i mean if
you look at honduras and some of those other countries the crime is insane um so i mean you
know it's just that's just a tremendous tremendous um task even figure out how you would fix those
problems in other countries i think look first thing we need to do is clean up our own house
before we start telling other people how to clean up theirs you know absolutely well speaking of
other going back to another country when you were assigned to miami did you have any excuse me any
interaction with haiti at all i did very very limited um obviously haiti is a mess poorest
country in this hemisphere but even there like i would deal with um other federal agencies like if
if we went to another country to arrest somebody usually there's a judicial process where you have
to arrest them take them to courts in their country there's a process in haiti you just show up they
give you leave i mean that that country is so dysfunctional and so poor and so corrupt
that really that they just need to start from the beginning i mean i don't even know where they
would start but i mean there there's almost not a government there even when there was a government
there it was almost there you know i guess symbolically but haiti's a mess i feel bad for
the folks that live there um but yeah they got a long way to go i think before they're back on
their feet they've been the poorest country in this hemisphere for decades i mean it's so sad i
went there on a cruise and there's a little tiny corner of it called labadee that they've got
fenced off it's the ship comedian referred to it as uh fake haiti or jurassic park but you know when
you're pulling into it it is one of the most beautiful places i've ever been to i mean these
beautiful mountainous you know tree-covered mountains so the irony is if they were able to
stabilize the government they would probably make a fortune as a country in tourism alone but instead
you know that they're literally murdering each other because of the complete crisis that's going
on and we literally you know if if whoever it was if a nation was able to stabilize it i think the
potential for wealth for that country is literally across the ocean oh thousand percent i mean look
they're on the same island as the dominican republic they're on hispanola the dominican
republic has a thriving tourist industry and you could say the same for gaza right i mean you know
obviously there's a lot of things there the thousands of years of hatred a lot of political
unrest you know i mean that's that's an even bigger fish to fry but i mean gaza is on the
mediterranean i mean waterfront property they if if they could stabilize themselves and have a
tourist industry they could probably make a ton of money it's from what i understand it's beautiful
waterfront property it's just been decimated by years of hatred and political unrest and religious
animosity and you name it you know yeah it's heartbreaking i had a doctor on the show who's
a chicago er physician who was over there kind of earlier this year and he talked about landing you
know in in israel going to jerusalem and seeing muslims and jews and christians all praying
alongside each other and then you go into gaza and it's fenced off and there's guards and you
know obviously what's happening now is unfolding him right in front of his eyes you know and it's
it's just horrendous because again as we said at the beginning of this conversation
those people have way more in common than they do differences but the you know the powers that be
had persuaded them that they are each other's enemy yeah look that's a problem everywhere in this
on our planet you know i mean we're all human we all bleed the same right we're all the same
um instead we focus on what's different and that's just unfortunate if we could if we could all just
get along on a global level what a great place this would be right absolutely all right well i
asked you about books what about films and documentaries any of those that you love
you know something i haven't been to the movies in such a long time i think the last movie i saw
in the theater was inception so i'm not the person i guess that you would go to for that there's been
some good documentaries other than i've seen i saw one recently about the the the
the baghwan shri rajneesh the indian guru who came here and created a city just outside of um
i believe it's not too far from portland oregon i forgot the name of it i think it's called it's a
weird world or something that was very interesting um i know narcos isn't a documentary per se it's
kind of like a docudrama that i thought was great i did i did like breaking bad in some of those
shows that were on but there i haven't really been engaged in watching much tv or movies lately
because i'm so busy between writing and you know just speaking about the book just trying to get
the book to sell that's kind of taking a lot of my time they just made an excellent documentary
i think it was on netflix about timothy mcvay and the oklahoma bombing and they did an amazing job
of really kind of rolling back the origins of some of the white supremacy movements and
you know some of the failures you know obviously waco and how all these just like we talked about
that pie chart how they all came together to create that moment of psychosis and you know
send that i use this term not with endearment you know the foot soldier out to to commit that
atrocity yeah yeah horrible horrible thing i remember i remember the pictures of the children
being taken out of the daycare center from that event heartbreaking horrendous all right well then
speaking of great people because one of my friends chris was the firefighter that was you know holding
that child iconically in that picture and that that you talk about mental health that crushed him
absolutely crushed him um are there any people that you recommend to come on this podcast as a
guest to speak to the first responders military and associated professions of the world sure it
is a few actually i mean obviously ken croak who i work with at atf recently wrote a book about his
infiltration of the pagans motorcycle gang and you know anytime you do a case like that that involves
you know um deep deep undercover work you know there's a physical and emotional toll that that
takes on you or your family he just published a book it's called riding with evil um great great
guy very honest guy which i think is important um who else trying to think lou valo's did some
undercover work um he had a storefront where they basically posed as a corrupt business to get people
to command and sell contraband to them um i know he's uh it's v e l a v no v a l o z e lou valo's
so he'd be another great guy to have on and then i'm sure you've probably had steve murphy
um from uh the uh he's one of the characters that narcos is actually based on um he's doing some
interesting stuff now he's out actually in french polynesia or something trying to recover one of
the first ships that was sunk during the war between the u.s and japan um very interesting guy
so steve murphy brilliant no i haven't had him on either so some great people there thank you
all right well then the last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you and
the book online and i normally say what do you what do you do to decompress i'm going to extend
that because you talked about some of the mental health struggles and understandably so after you
know some of the traumatic calls your own near-death experience with the cancer
what were the tools that you found helped navigate you out of some of those darknesses
sure i actually met a gentleman named anthony profeta he's a meditation coach that lives down
in florida he's a former medical student who went into medicine and then didn't like medicine
because he found that you know there was a lot of pressure to prescribe drugs to people so he left
medicine and started to study meditation so when i had cancer one of the byproducts was uh stroke
level high blood pressure so i didn't know if i was going to live or die i had a family i mean
there's so many things that went through my mind and he kind of coached me on meditating which at
first i thought meditation was for weirdos you know they're in a consortium position you know
you chant and i didn't realize that there's so many different ways to meditate and so many different
things to do so he actually managed to coach me in such a way that i never needed to go on blood
pressure medication even though my doctor thought i was gonna have a stroke so i mean my blood
pressure is now controlled through meditation so that that worked for me um and then truthfully i
now speak at the 9-eleven memorial and museum a few times a year uh sometimes like three times
sometimes five and it's at first i couldn't set foot on ground zero and now i actually find it
therapeutic to talk about it because i think that it just helps relieve some of that pressure but it
also i think is important to remember the heroism of that day you know that people you know there
wasn't just people in uniform that lost their lives there were people in those buildings who
could have left but they had a colleague who was paralyzed with fear or physically handicapped who
couldn't get down the stairs and they're like hey instead of leaving them there and saying hey i'll
see you they stayed with them you know and even when when the south tower collapsed people stayed
in the north tower knowing hey that's probably going to be our fate too but i'm not leaving you
so i mean this is just such amazing stories that i now find some some peace in going there and
talking about it so i do that and sometimes i've been asked to give that same presentation to law
enforcement groups or a couple different coast guard stations which i love to coast guard great
people so i mean just talking about it i think is therapeutic and granted that some people meditation
is not going to work they're going to need medication for some people talking about it
might not be the answer so i just think the trick is to find what works for you but the most important
thing is to talk to somebody whether it's a priest a neighbor someone who went through the same thing
that you went through keeping it inside is not the answer and i did that for way way way too long and
it looked like it cost me um it cost me a lot of enjoyment in life where you spend so much time
inside your head just thinking about things and it really you know they're not worth thinking
about because you can't undo what's done did you find the writing process writing process cathartic
yes and no i found it to be a pain in the ass to be honest with you but i thought it was a story
that had to be told i'll tell you selling books is way way harder than writing books because he
the problem that the publishers don't really do that that much to help you so um you know just
you're kind of left to your own devices to market the book um it was somewhat therapeutic and at
least knowing that the story is told so hopefully someone will read it and maybe they won't go down
that path of abandoning the basics and maybe they'll just say hey maybe we shouldn't do this so and
then like i have heard from the terry family um they they've really enjoyed reading it and getting
some answers and that to me was worth all the money in the world that they appreciated it
because like i said they were good people and they lost a hero and they deserve to know what happened
absolutely well speaking of the book then for people listening where are the best places to
find the book and or yourself on online sure the book is on amazon or wrote any of the major
retailers barnes and noble books a million target even has it it's not on a lot of shelves for some
reason but they have it so i you know so far the feedback has been good so you can check the reviews
if somebody chooses to read it please leave a review because that helps but as far as like
reaching out to me i have a website it's www peterjforseli.com so signed copies of the book can be
gotten there but i mean if somebody wants to reach out about like some of these conversations
about um you know surviving 9-eleven and you know just you know understanding the importance of
taking care of yourself you know i do speak for the coast guard for a couple other organizations
in the past and i'm open to doing that for others as well because i think it's important that we
take care of each other as a community you know i mean we're all in this together you know we're
all on this planet it's you know it's just important to look out for your fellow human being
i couldn't agree more well pete i want to thank you so so much it's been such an amazing conversation
you know and i think again some of the questions through the lens of someone who is in a senior
position in the atf that had stood up for what was right through their career that it stood on ground
zero for weeks and weeks and weeks um you know it's it's been invaluable so i want to thank you so
so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the behind the shield podcast today
oh it's been an honor james and listen thanks for what you're doing because i mean
you know some of the stuff especially with self-care and pdst you know that stuff awareness
it's it's vitally important so thank you for having me and god bless