Episode 172: Steve Lazarus, Retired FBI Agent, USAF Veteran, and author of “Call me Sonny”

Steven Lazarus has done it all! From serving in the US Air Force, becoming an FBI  agent and now published author! His narrative weaves from the military's rigid focus to the FBI's diverse landscape, where his roles spanned from narcotics to bomb disposal, reflecting on the adaptability required to navigate such shifts. We grapple with the notion that service, sacrifice, and the intensive search for a post-service equilibrium are not just career choices but life-altering decisions with profound personal impacts.
 
 As Stephen unveils his post-FBI life, we are reminded that the pursuit of balance is as vital as any mission. From explosive fieldwork to the quieter, yet profound role of educating intelligence officers, Stephen's journey illustrates the importance of cultivating personal growth alongside professional achievements. His transition to writing a novel illuminates the rich tapestry of life after service, offering a resonant message about the importance of self-care and cherishing relationships amid the aftermath of a high-adrenaline career. Join us for an episode that's as much an exploration of resilience as it is a tribute to those who've served with valor.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

security hot podcast. Let's go. You're dealing with an expert in guerrilla warfare, with a man who's the best with guns, with knives, with his bare hands, a man who's been trained to ignore, ignore weather to live off the land job was disposed of enemy personnel to kill period it's a crazy world we're living in.

Speaker 1: 0:28

Um, I think there's um. I hate the the polarized uh news cycle that we live in. Everybody that is in the government's bad. Every, every fbi agent is a double agent trying to take down and subvert the United States. It is not a good time to be a man of service or a woman of service in any profession here in the United States. We are enemy number one, whether you're a police officer or service member or individuals such as yourself, stephen, that have served our nation in the FBI. But thank you for being here, man. I'm excited to dig into this interview.

Speaker 2: 1:07

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. I'm really looking forward to this. I've checked out some of your podcasts. I love your content, I love your guests and I'm excited and honored to be asked to join.

Speaker 1: 1:16

Absolutely. I love being able to bring in individuals such as yourself that have found, you know, after a life of service. Um, our, you know the guys and women we looked up to that mentored and coached us did. They're really good job of showing resilience and grit while they were in the job. And if your mentors or anything like mine, the guys I looked up to, they stayed in for way too long and then it was just all about services, all about dedicating your life and everything to it, and we kind of emulated that till we realized, like holy cow, like at some point we have to walk away and at some point we have to have that chapter two, that next endeavor.

Speaker 1: 1:52

And that's what I love about your story. I mean, you've served for so long, you gave to our nation, but then you're like heck, no, I'm not done. I'm going to be an author, I'm going to write something. I'm going to take all these crazy stories. I'm going to find ways to cultivate them into something new that people are going to enjoy. So thank you for being here and let's kick it off. How did you find yourself going into the FBI?

Speaker 2: 2:17

I was in the Cold War military. So I joined in 1982, 83. And I was in the Cold War military. I never got anywhere close to getting shot at or what have you and I finally decided that I was in the military police side of the house and everywhere I went I was always this support guy. You always had these guys, all the pilots.

Speaker 2: 2:42

If you're in the Air Force, you want to be a pilot. If you're in the Navy, you want to drive boats. If you're in the Army, you want to be in the combat arms, obviously. But if you're in the Air Force and you're not flying planes, you're a support guy. I just had enough of the condescending thank you for all you do to support the real mission crap. I decided I wanted to be the operator. I wanted to be the guy around whom the mission was built, and so I was in the military police side. I already had a degree in criminal justice. I had managed to throw an MBA on top of that while I was in which actually proved to be of very, very little use.

Speaker 2: 3:16

I don't think I've used it ever once. But I decided to embark on a career in federal law enforcement. I sent out applications to the FBI, the DEA and, thank God and I'm going to qualify this statement in a second thank God the FBI got back to me. First, dea is a fine organization. Some of my best friends are at DEA but I would have been working dope for my entire career and I did work dope for a portion of my career. But the great thing about the FBI was that I was able to work dope. I was able to work street gangs, I was able to work domestic terrorism, I was able to become a bomb technician and, you know, head off to the Middle East for five or six years of my life. So all these opportunities that I had I never really would have had if I hadn't taken the route that I did.

Speaker 1: 4:02

Yeah, that's the Alucard career.

Speaker 2: 4:04

You get a little bit of everything holy cow yes, literally, literally, by dropping a piece of paperwork that we call an ec electronic. It was funny, the fbi called it an electronic communication. It's on paper and, yeah, only the fbi can go up with stuff like that I don't know.

Speaker 1: 4:20

That sounds a lot like the army too.

Speaker 2: 4:22

exactly, but literally by dropping an ec to my boss saying, yeah, I want to go work drugs now, and two weeks later I was on the drug squad. So it's, you know, it's just a set of opportunities again that I never would have had elsewhere.

Speaker 1: 4:34

No, that that that is insane. I mean for a lot of us in the military. You know, you, you branch in if you're an officer or you go through basic training for whatever MOS, and a lot of us can get to the position where you hey, I'm going to transfer out, try something new. But for a lot of people it's like they're stuck and then they ride it out and ETS, or they stay in for the long haul only doing that one job, but you got to sit there and try different options and pick and choose. How did that come about? How did each one of those lateral moves occur? Was it one of those things where it's like, all right, I've mastered this time for a new thing?

Speaker 2: 5:10

Well, when you're first, I'll give you a quick rundown of where I was and how long each one of these things took. So when you first come out of Quantico you're completely at the mercy of whatever your supervisor, your assistant, special agent in charge, your ASAC, wants to assign you to. Sometimes they do a really good job of doing that. You know, like a good buddy of mine, that I went to Quantico with, and you go to Quantico with, a mishmash of people. My two best friends were a guy who ran a nursing home in Alabama before he came in and a guy that negotiated labor contracts for Albertson Supermarkets out west. If you're familiar with Albertson, Supermarkets.

Speaker 2: 5:45

So I mean, and and I was a former military guy we had an age researcher, we had a clinical psychologist, we had a Navy SEAL, we had just all kinds of weird people in our class and usually they do a pretty good job of assigning you based on your background and your, your aptitude. Uh, that said, I've seen, I've seen've seen some level four Arabic speakers assigned to the bank robbery squad. Go scratch your head on that one. I'm not really sure I've seen CPAs sent to the dope squad while they were low on manning, on the white collar squad or things like that. But they saw my military background and they thought the best place for me this was in 1997, was in the domestic terrorism side of the house because there was so much paramilitary outrage going on.

Speaker 2: 6:31

If you keep in mind that the time this was, this was just post-Waco Ruby Ridge. You know Waco Ruby Ridge were 93, 94, 95 was Oklahoma City. The militia movement was really starting to get legs, the mail order militia movement and all these guys you know thinking that they were hard as woodpecker lips because they went to a gun show and bought themselves some BDUs and put them on and romped around in the forest on the weekends. So we had these guys who were going out and obviously some of them were plotting actual you know plots of violence against the government, against individuals, and that was the first thing that I got into was these anti-government extremists, and worked that for a couple of years, put together a few good cases and I really really wanted to be kind of more out on the street doing more you know police-style work. So I put in a request to go to the drug squad. I went there there, worked a number of cases there that were quite interesting, um, and then I was, uh, I was a firearms instructor and I was at quantico going through a class, advanced firearms instruction techniques it's. It's basically working with problem shooters.

Speaker 2: 7:42

And we're're sitting there with this guy named Gary Hutchison, retired former PG County guy out of Maryland Best shot I've ever seen and he's teaching on the podium and all of a sudden it's a Tuesday morning, somebody comes in and interrupts him, pulls him out of class and we're like, oh shit, that's terrible. I hope the guy's mom didn't just die, because you never, ever, ever see somebody get pulled off the podium when they're instructing. That's sacrosanct, probably, as it is in a lot of the schools. You're going to Instructors up there talking. You don't interrupt them, you don't nothing. He comes back 20 minutes and his face is all ash and he says hey guys, I got some bad news. It looks like maybe we thought it was an accident.

Speaker 2: 8:20

A plane flew into one of the World Trade Center towers and while they were filming, another plane flew into another one. And so, of course, this was the morning of 9-11. And I remember sitting there that night in the board room kind of drinking a beer, you know, decompressing from the day. And the guy next to me asked he says well, what did you used to do? You know, for the FBI, because when we get back home this is all going to change. Sure enough, I got back home on September 13th, two days later, and I was assigned out to the Atlanta airport where I worked for the next three years.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Holy cow, and when you work at an airport, you're doing that, for you're doing everything out there, everything from you know we had international child abductions to drugs, to money laundering to. You know suspected terrorists flying here and there. You work every single crime. You know interstate transportation, stolen goods, international transportation of stolen goods. Did that for a while. They hauled me in.

Speaker 2: 9:20

My boss hauled me in then to be the media rep. My boss called me in then to be the media rep, the PIO, if you will, the public information officer. So I was kind of the face and the voice if you can believe this face of the FBI of Atlanta for three years. I worked gangs for a few years after that when I got tired of standing in front of the camera, camera, um. And then the big ground shift in my career came when my friend don hammond. He pulled me aside and said man, you, you really really need to take a look at the bomb program and becoming a bomb technician. And that was what led me through, like the last 12 years of my career, 11 years of my career yeah, it's.

Speaker 1: 9:55

It's. For many, many of those that were in the military or in federal jobs, 9-11 shifted everything. So many people that I've talked to and interviewed that was a shift in what they were doing, whether they were sitting at an office and decided to enlist or already engaged in service to our nation. Everything changed. It was such a monumental shift for all of us and it doesn't begin to hit us until we do things like this and like trace back, like everything that happened, how it led to so many different things. We were thinking about airport, uh, airport security, back before 9-11. Now it's, it's one of the biggest things.

Speaker 1: 10:43

And for the military, we shifted drastically. How did you maintain that sense of like? Okay, bearing this is going to be my next course of action, because in the military, you know your marching orders, you know where you're going. Now in the FBI, I have to imagine like, okay, I'm going to shift over to bomb, I'm going to shift over to bomb and in that period in time, in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are seeing TTPs change. Did you know that you were about to take a step into an unknown world that was just going to be opened up to some of the most dangerous interactions?

Speaker 2: 11:16

Yeah, it was funny. I was telling you I was in the peacetime military, the Cold War Air Force, and never got shot at, never got blown up. Well, 9-11 took care of that for me Between Iraq and Afghanistan and a total of four tours to those two places. I also did a tour to Kuwait, but I can't look at you with a straight face and call that a combat tour sorry, no one can.

Speaker 2: 11:40

Well, I mean even the guys who stayed on Air Afshan, maybe, maybe, but I stayed in the Kuwait Hilton. So I can't look at you with a straight face and call that a combat tour. But the other two I'll never forget. When I first went to Iraq, we had people trying to blow us up left and right. It was there in 05 and 06. And I wasn't there as a bomb technician. I was there doing the war crimes trial. So I was with the regime crimes liaison team, rclt or something like that, and RCLO, the regime crimes liaison office, we were putting on the trials for Saddam Hussein. So everybody's got one of those moments like holy crap, am I really here? My moment was the very first trial that they did for Saddam Hussein was the Dujail trial, and a lot of people don't even think about Dujail. People think about Saddam, they think about Anfal, they think about the gassing of the Kurds in the north, and that was the big thing. Well, he never got tried for that because they decided to put on the easiest case they could prove first, and that was Dujail. It was another one of these you know, low-level sort of massacres of a town that had dared, you know, rear their heads up against him or something like that, and he just sent the army in and wiped them out. So they got him for crimes against humanity. And everybody was saying there were six other trials, you know, from the Intifada to, you know to the Sharia uprisings, everything. And everybody's saying, well crap, if we hang this guy, you know he's not going to face justice for the other trials. And that's exactly what happened. We said, well, you know, you can only hang a guy once. You can't dig him up and try him and hang him again.

Speaker 2: 13:19

But on the first and second day of the Dujail trial, I am there sitting 10 feet from Saddam Hussein. And that was one of those moments where I'm kind of sitting there saying like crap, is this real? Am I in a TV show or is this for real? And it was something amazing. We were there, we were helping the marshal service. The marshals were running and doing a great job of it too. They were running the courtroom security. We had put in a rocky face that was the marching words put in a rocky face on this thing we don't want a bunch of Americans. But there in the background, just out of the view of the cameras, were the Americans, armed and ready to jump in if something did go horribly wrong, which it never really did. It actually came off quite well. But to answer your question, you know the the moment I noticed that something was really different.

Speaker 2: 14:08

My first tour as a bomb technician was to cobble in 2009. I was three months out of bomb school. Okay, oh shit. And you know, people don't know that, they don't know what name you got done with the ured training. They all they know is like you're either there you know you're the guy or you're not the guy. So I'm there and, uh, I'm going to go pick up this, uh, this army major guy. I didn't even like I didn't. I'll say his name, hell, I don't care. Brian, brian pelly, if you're listening, I, uh, you almost got my ass killed, buddy, I had to go pick up brian, uh, at isaf headquarters.

Speaker 2: 14:45

Uh, I don't know if you were ever in the compound there in cobble or not, but right smack there in isa, in front of isaf headquarters, and I stopped to get, uh, gas, put some gas in my little, uh, my toy land cruiser. We, we called ourselves two guys in a truck, um, our, our outfit, and, uh, probably 30 seconds before I hit the X about 180 pounds of info went off right on the spot where I was supposed to be. I've actually got a video of it. Um, it's a video taken from I went through a security checkpoint. You can see my car going through and I get about 20 meters out in front and past the security checkpoint and you see big white flash and you see me backing up a lot faster than I went through. Um, and yeah, and that was one of those things where you just kind of you, you jump in, you, you, you, you assess the scene, you help everybody that you can Um.

Speaker 2: 15:38

For for us it was, it was um, it was exploiting the bomb scene. That's what we were there to do. We were in a group called SEXY, combined Explosive Exploitation Cell, and that's a backronym. Clearly Somebody wanted to call themselves SEXY, so they said make a name that comes up with that. So we exploited the scene. We got the dead out of there. There were a few americans that were hurt.

Speaker 2: 16:05

Major pelly actually was waiting for me inside, so he he didn't ever show up because he didn't see my vehicle show up. So he was okay and uh, it wasn't. Until I got back to my hooch later on that night I sat down on my cot and it wasn't like some big, you know emotional moment, but it was. It was a chat with myself and it was just like, hey, steve, this shit's real dude, you better put your head on a swivel and you better start walking around in your yellow zone and get out of your white zone. Because I was absolutely in a white zone when I was driving up on that thing. I said you need to put your head on a swivel and out of your butt and start walking around in the yellow zone and start taking this thing seriously.

Speaker 1: 16:45

And there were several more incidents after that, but that was definitely my, my own personal come I think everybody that goes through multiple deployments gets to that point in time where they realize like maybe I'm being a little bit too complacent, maybe I'm being, and it just takes that one situation, that one event where it's like, oh shit, I'm in an active combat zone. I need to keep my head on a fucking swivel absolutely.

Speaker 2: 17:13

And if you get you absolutely, you get that it can't happen to me or it's not. It's just something that happens to somebody else. It doesn't go. Those poor fellows, I feel terrible for them, but clearly it's not going to happen to me. Oh yeah, no, it can't and it has and it will.

Speaker 1: 17:25

That's why you have to be me an absolute master of the basics, going through your pcc's, pci's, constantly going through the little things. It's always the little things. And when you're younger and I'm sure you felt the same way as you were going through training it's like, ah, whatever, it's just the little things, I'll be fine. But uh, I would imagine after that event, after that blast, it was like okay, no, this is.

Speaker 2: 17:49

Things explode in human bodies oh yeah oh, yeah, yeah, I mean we. I mean we had, uh, you know, we had um sops, for you know what, if you're driving through a traffic circle? And somebody comes up and throws a limpet on the side of your vehicle.

Speaker 2: 18:04

You know, know, we had SLPs for what if somebody just jumps out in front of you? Wait, when do you run somebody over? When do you swerve? When do you stop? Stopping was almost never. You know that kind of stuff. But you know how have you and um, you know we'd roll out and both in civilian clothes and a lightly upper armored uh uh toyota land cruiser with tinted out windows. And when you put all that crap on and you got your m4 next to you and you got grenades in the door, it's a lot. It takes a lot more thinking about how am I going to get out of this vehicle? How am I going to get out of this vehicle? How am I going to unass this thing? Fight if I have to, run, if I have to? How do we do all these things? Windows don't roll down in those things. You can't toss a grenade out the window. So it took a lot of getting used to.

Speaker 1: 19:10

But once you got used to it, when the new guy showed up you were, you were like, hey, listen here, here's how we do business here. And and pay attention, because, man, it's that's the other thing that's unique, uh, to that experience the up armored and sometimes light armored land cruisers and non-standard vehicles. Like you're right, you're not getting out of that thing with any quickness, especially if you're kitted up.

Speaker 2: 19:30

It took me like a minute and a half to get into that vehicle and actually I can give you an example of one of the times where that kind of came into play. I actually call this the worst day of my bureau career and I've been there for people dying. I've been there for people you know. I've been there when cases went south. I've had a lot of bad know bad days, way more good than bad. But the worst day in my, my fbi career, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 19:51

Uh, if you're familiar with jbad road, jalalabad road runs, runs from cobble all the way out to jalalabad, which is how it got its name runs out past phoenix and all that kind of stuff. We were doing a mapping project. We were, we were geo mapping. We had uh, it was a two-ship formation two um lightly armored uh, white toyota land cruisers and we had these gps's attached to us and we were mapping out safe routes for people so that when new people came there they could just plug things into a gps as opposed to getting lost in the streets of Kabul. And we're going down the J-Bad Road and we had just passed I forget what the name of the. We'd just come out the Masoud Circle. We'd just come out there, we'd passed the British base, we were probably about five kilometers from Phoenix and doing 30 miles an hour, which is under the speed limit, and a little girl runs right out in front of me and I hit her head-on with the car, a little, I'm going to say, seven year old girl. And the week before that had happened, um, two Dynacorp guys had gotten massacred by a crowd because they had hit somebody in a crowd and it was on route white, in between the suit circle and the uh, the airport, on Route White, and they had gotten dragged out of their car and beaten to death. And we knew we couldn't stop. So I had just hit a kid and seen her go pinwheeling. I have a video of this too, seen her go pinwheeling across the road. Mind you, the other guys are behind me. The two guys are behind me and the other the other ship in the two ship formation.

Speaker 2: 21:27

And we had to get on the radio and say guys, move, move, move, get to Phoenix, you know, and call Phoenix and let them know we're coming in and we're not going to stop and please don't shoot us. But you know, and, and sure enough, we had Afghan police, all all after us. We had crowds chasing us and, uh, I didn't really care about any of that. What I thought was I just killed a kid and and we got to Phoenix and we were there for about two hours. Uh, wait until it was safe to evac and get back to uh, get back to the embassy compound, and my boss, johnny Bob Jones, calls me up and he says, hey, uh, just to let you know, the girl's alive. I was like, oh shit, really. They had taken her to an Afghan hospital and the uh DSS guys, the the state department guys, had gone and gotten her out of that hospital and taken her to the French hospital at uh, at the airport at Kaya, and the doctors there saved her life. They had the proper equipment. She was in an Afghan hospital. She would have died that night, but the doctors there saved her life. They had the proper equipment. In an FDA hospital she would have died that night, but the doctors there, they actually cracked her head open, relieved some pressure. She's fine after that, and so the worst day turned out to be a little bit better when I found out I hadn't actually killed a child, because I don't know how I would have felt about that. I think I'll have to think about it.

Speaker 2: 22:49

But the sort of funny ending to it is we're sitting there, we're talking to our local national guys I forget what we call them you know the two, the two Afghan guys who were cleared and worked at the embassy and were sort of like our, our fixers for everything, and we were talking a couple of days later. I said, hey, I feel really terrible. Is there anything we can do for the family? And it was clearly not our fault. I actually put the vehicle on two wheels. I thought I had hit her head on. We actually hit her with the left front bumper and just avoided running her over and they said oh yeah, you buy her a goat. I said, come again.

Speaker 2: 23:18

They said no, you buy the family a goat. I said what's that for? He said no, the way it works is you buy them a goat and you take it to them, and you don't, we do, we take it to them. We say this is an offering from the people who are driving the car and if they accept it, under Afghan law, not only are you morally and ethically, but you are legally forgiven. I said, well, how much is a goat? He said 100 bucks. Fantastic, here you go. And we all pitched in, we bought him a goat and I rotated back and about six months later, ali, who was one of the two Afghans, he said, hey, I forgot to send you these, but he sent us these pictures.

Speaker 2: 23:57

It was a little girl standing there and, god bless her, she looked great she, and she was smiling in the, you know, the yard of her family's kalad or hut or whatever it was. And then they showed the goat, and then they showed the goat being butchered, because obviously they don't you know, they're not keeping the goat as a pet, but she was just standing there. Yeah, you know, there she got the goat and they were butchering it up and uh, and you know, those, uh, that's, that's always like the hardest thing to deal with is injury to any civilian noncombatant.

Speaker 1: 24:27

But the children, man, and it's, it's. That's just one of the thousands and thousands of stories. Because you're not driving through these areas and you know perfect harmony at the speed limit You're trying to get from point A to point B as fast. Speed is security. That's every military operating, everybody in Afghanistan, everybody in Iraq, and that could happen to any of us and it has happened to a lot of people. Because kids are running desperately to try to get into the convoy area, to try to get something, because people throw food, they throw water bottles, they throw Gatorades, all sorts sorts of candies. And you'd establish this pattern that if americans are coming through or certain vehicles are coming through, get close to the road and next, you know, freaking accident happens.

Speaker 2: 25:13

But man like oh yeah, the big shit show that blackwater got in trouble for in the roundabout in baghdad. That was like six months after I was there. And look man, I'm not one of the things I'm really big on and this is my law enforcement background is if you weren't there, don't talk about it.

Speaker 2: 25:29

Don't talk shit about the guys that were if you were not in the arena. Do not, do not bash the decision makers. And I don't know, man, maybe some stuff could have done better. They could have done better in the in the AR portion of it and everything, but as far as what they were, I drove through that roundabout every damn day. I know exactly what they were going through Exactly. And people, if you don't know that, all you see is well, they, you know they shot up a bunch of bunch of civilian vehicles. Well, you know, it wasn't too long before that that some Blackwater guys were cut in half and burned and hung from a bridge.

Speaker 1: 26:01

So you know, walk 100 miles in their shoes before you open your pile the people that like to do the Monday morning quarterbacking on others, that went out there to do a job that's extremely dangerous and we don't talk enough about it. They always get the worst press coverage. All those guys did that situation, like you said, there's no need and no room for us and we villainize them and they got hammered. They got hammered, lives, careers like destroyed, purely because they thought they were just cowboys out there.

Speaker 2: 26:41

Well, you know, I mean it takes on a groupthink kind of a thing, and if you even take away the context of, like, the violence and the war fighting and what have you? You know, one of the companies that probably I know I owe a great deal of my quality of life to, that just got vilified back then, was Halliburton. You know, there was Halliburton this and Halliburton that. I'm like hey, buddy, come on over here and eat the meals that Halliburton is providing, live in the place. There is no other company that can do what Halliburton is doing. Yet all people could think about was Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton. Therefore, and they get so single-minded I think people just like shitting on other people and other organizations.

Speaker 1: 27:22

I think it just makes them feel yeah, it was one of those things where it's like, well, it has ties to this guy, so it's got to be bad. And, uh, the people that benefited from it were some of the most vocal advocates against it. It's like, look, I'm perfectly fine living in a hole in the ground. I'm combat arms, are you? If you're not, shut the fuck up, don't bite the hand that's feeding you guy, because they're providing all the luxuries, all those little niceties Like I didn't give a shit about it, but all the and we call them fob. It's no offense to you guys, but that's you know. You stay on the fob and you like your steak and lobster night? Yep, well, that's brought to you by who else, so don't complain. Have you heard?

Speaker 2: 28:04

the rap song Fobbit no, you haven't heard it. No, dude, when you get a chance, I will send it to you. Some guy, some, some troop over there who clearly was not a Fob. He did a rap song called Fobbit and I've got it and, uh, I'll, I'll hit you up on LinkedIn, I'll send you. I'll send a copy to the three through LinkedIn. It's hysterical.

Speaker 1: 28:24

It was, it's it's one of the craziest things and it it was a very people that were enjoying those luxuries, that were constantly excited about their, their life on a fob, that were really vocal advocates against, and it's like, okay, well, come live how the other people live in this situation. Come join us. Absolutely, absolutely, oh my gosh. But yeah, anytime you're on any any of those routes, doing any sort of movement, that was just one of the concepts and you have so many threats, like the first thing you have to worry about is ieds and ttps. You never know what the enemy. It wasn't that long ago before they were shoving explosives in the random carcasses of animals and detonating those, and how many suicide vests were brought into the AOR. So it's one of those things where you have to be easy on yourself and understand like, hey, I did everything I could, I did absolutely everything I could and thank God it had a happy ending. But at the end of the day, man, like it could have been any of us. Any of us could have been that situation.

Speaker 2: 29:32

Absolutely, absolutely. I didn't even know what an EFP was until I went to to Afghanistan, um, and they were mostly being used in Iraq. They weren't being used in Afghanistan a whole lot, mostly because the guys in Afghanistan weren't smart enough to understand how to set them up, but the guys in Iraq were. I think they started being used in Afghanistan more a little bit later on. But I mean just the ingenuity. The enemy is ingenious For people who live in huts and wipe their ass with a bare hand. We make fun of that. They're actually very ingenious warfighters and they're incredibly deadly.

Speaker 1: 30:10

Absolutely Our American citizens, and I get it, I love patriotism, but they constantly harped on oh, these backwards people living in caves.

Speaker 1: 30:21

I'm like you have no idea what being a product of that environment and having to do with so little and being exceptional at creativity, like the ways that they targeted us in Iraq with EFPs and improvised explosive devices I mean that takes a lot of skillset and a lot of knowledge and it was making the most with what little they had.

Speaker 1: 30:47

And, man, if it wasn't for guys like yourself that were students of these, that's one thing that saved a lot of lives the ability to utilize FBI and other government agencies to come into the battlefield to study the TTPs and then bring it back stateside, break it all down and then rapidly distribute this information so that we could survive. In just those two years from 2007, 2008 was a really big progression, and then 2009, 2010 was insane progression of ttps and how to check and and mitigate these explosive devices. I remember leaving iraq in 2008 thinking, oh man, like it was dangerous. We got figured out. Coming back and seeing the progression of devices I mean the original duke system, so the improvised duke systems that came after them, uh, all the the rhinos, all the stuff that was rapidly developed to help us survive like that, and that was the biggest, that all the stuff that was rapidly developed to help us survive like that, and that was the biggest.

Speaker 2: 31:49

That was. The biggest thing was the was the development of all the different different ecm, uh sets and and, and the evolution of ecm as we went along, as they went from doing things like you know, using lrcts, long-range cordless telephones to set them off to use, and you know different kinds of radio frequencies and uh. That was one thing I I actually was very proud to be a part of. Was was all the exploitation, both the forensic and the electronic, and the scientific exploitation. There were actually I probably processed a total of about in three tours in afghanistan.

Speaker 2: 32:24

I think I probably top process a total of about 50 or 60 bombing sites, um, and there were two occasions where we came up with forensics off of that bomb site that that linked in to to known actors, known bad actors, who'd either, you know, been been rolled up in the early stages of the war or been incarcerated at Abu Ghraib or wherever anywhere else. And on one of those instances I actually got to see action taking an objective through through the eyes of the predator. No shit, that was uh, that was one of my favorite nights. So we just say well, if you're not doing anything at two o'clock tonight, um, we're gonna here's, here's the objective, here's, here's the pc and here's the objective, here's his name. And we got that, got that from something that you guys took out of this bomb site and we're going to action this house tonight. And that was probably one of my best days in the FBI.

Speaker 1: 33:14

What people don't understand is that long chain of custody when it comes to exploitation and SOF. When you're going through and exploiting your target house, you're going through collecting all that data, all that metrics. There's avenues to send that back to the FBI. There's courses of action that you take when you find things and you exploit them from and it's not. You know. Tv shows and movies make it seem sexy like this. It's like less than 24 hours We'll have this data back to you. It takes a little longer to that, but when you're able to connect some, a big time player in your AO through that exploitation and it makes it all the way back and they connect it and then that becomes actionable intelligence that another team perhaps can utilize. Dude, that's a.

Speaker 2: 34:01

that's a lot of movement, that's a lot of people pouring sweat, tears and dedication into making it happen and yeah, and in our case, in this, in this case, it didn't even go back to the states we were. We were what's called level one assets. So level one was the guys actually sitting there and picking stuff up. Nice, the level two labs were actually there in country um, and the the one level two lab was up at I I'm having a senior moment now where the big Air Force base was Not Balad, the other Bagram.

Speaker 1: 34:30

Thank you, Steve.

Speaker 2: 34:31

Bagram and the level two lab was actually up at Bagram, so this stuff only went as far as Bagram and they were able to make a match on it. Hell yeah, and again, it was just one of those things where, yeah, we rolled this guy up before we know who he is. One of those things where, yeah, we rolled this guy up before we know who he is, we know where he is and we're going to go ahead and take care of that tonight.

Speaker 1: 34:50

Yeah, that's, that's. That's a great feeling that is, and people don't don't realize how, how important and impactful having that interoperability to being able to work, cause you can't do everything in your own. You can't do everything, as you know, just within soft. You can't do everything just within SOF. You have to be able to have those connective tissues in other organizations. There's a lot of individuals that are working their asses off day and night to help you frigging, find those intel gaps and frigging, put that pin where it needs to go. And then you're like, oh shit, we just illuminated a huge network. I remember that's one of the biggest things that I I've always admired about our ability to utilize every resource. And people are there, they're, they're, they're there and they're willing. Uh, how satisfying was watching that predator feed the whole thing just went white.

Speaker 2: 35:43

And the funny thing was, you know, and I knew, I knew I was gonna be a room full of professionals and uh, I so I knew I wasn't, you know gonna, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker, or anything like that. But it's just everybody's just quiet and everybody's kind of like nodded, say all right, check, yeah done yeah, and where do you go after that?

Speaker 1: 36:03

where do you like? That has to be like one of those defining moments where like, okay, like I've, I think I've, I've gotten my experience, I think I've gotten the, the, the full FBI in Afghanistan, experience Like yeah, so I, I, by then I'd spent, you know, probably a total of about two, two and a half years, uh, between Iraq and Afghanistan and Kuwait.

Speaker 2: 36:28

Um, it was probably time for me to start spending a little bit more time at home, maybe paying attention to the marriage. Uh, little did I know I was going to be a day late and a dollar short in that regard, but, um, I took a, uh, I I took a, um, basically a, a, a dream sheet assignment and I moved to Vermont. And I moved to Vermont because you're allowed once in your FBI career, you're allowed to take an OP. It's called an Office of Preference and basically you can just say, hey, you know, one day I'd like to go to the Tampa office, and they put you in a list and they say, okay, stand in line, and when your name comes up they call you and you either go where you don't go.

Speaker 2: 37:07

So I took this, this, this move, and move my uh, my wife at the time and myself and one of our daughters to Vermont, because I'd been skiing there my entire life at Killington and, um it, we just loved it there. And it turns out that vacationing somewhere and living somewhere are two totally separate things. So I spent a couple of years there, really missed being. I was a part-time bomb technician. I got into a few things. As a matter of fact, I was one of the first bomb technicians to respond to the Boston bombings, the Boston Marathon bombings.

Speaker 1: 37:39

No way.

Speaker 2: 37:41

Because I was right up the road. So as soon as the bombs went off, headquarters called every bomb technician within a 200 mile radius and said get to Boston. So I was there pretty quickly but I really missed the full-time stuff and so a job came open in something called the render safe unit, and if you're familiar with, like HRT, the hostage rescue team, that's part of the critical incident response group. So it's, that's the, the grab and go guys at quantico, and the explosive component of that is the render safe unit and what it is. The best way to explain it to you, it's the fbi's nuclear bomb slot and the whole idea is that if, uh, improvised nuke somehow makes its way into the country and we find it without it going off, of course not that we find it because there's a smoking hole in the ground or mushroom cloud, but we find it.

Speaker 2: 38:31

That's not the kind of thing you can deal with remotely or with a robot. Some, some poor schmucks got to go, put hands on that thing and actually diagnose it and take it apart and return the, the, the, the nastiest bits and pieces, bits and pieces to to custody. You know the, the nuclear, you know the visible material and what have you. So it was kind of a high-speed unit. We paired nicely with SEAL Team 6 and with ODD or, excuse me, oda, because they have the OCONUS mission for that exact same thing. So we spent a lot of time training with them, met some great guys in those units and I spent the last four years of my career uh, down there at Quantico just learning, because part of the TTPs for that unit is entry and it's not only just getting into a place but it's getting into a place without setting off alarms or triggering the device or things like that.

Speaker 2: 39:32

So you get all kinds of high-speed training and those sorts of things. And I think one of my moments of clarity came when I was hanging off the side of a five-stack of Conexes by a half half inch rope in July in Houston, texas, with a drill in my hand over here trying to drill a hole through a connex 40 feet off the ground and hope I didn't get too close to the rope, because if the rope gets cut, well you know you're fucked. So so I can stick a camera in and I'm just looking at this and I'm I climbed up this stupid thing and now I'm hanging off side and I just like I kind of had a moment of clarity. I'm like, dude, you're 55. Give it up already. And the FBI at 57, they kick you out the door anyway.

Speaker 2: 40:16

So it wasn't long after that that a buddy of mine, the guy that actually got me into the bomb program, called me up. He was out, he was running his own company now and said do you want to go do some contract work over in Abu Dhabi? I said yeah, hell yeah, contract work. That usually pays pretty well, doesn't it? So, and I just told this, I just had a speaking engagement two days ago to this uh, kind of like a citizen's Academy kind of thing up in Wilmington, uh, delaware. And uh, I said, well, if you've been paying attention, you'll notice that for the last five years of my career between the Middle East and the RenderSafe unit, I wasn't home a whole lot. And if you weren't paying attention, well, trust me, my ex-wife was. And so by this time my marriage had fallen apart and I was moving to the Florida Keys. So I'm kind of beach bumming it down in the Florida Keys, hanging out, trying to look as much like Jimmy Buffett as I possibly could, probably drinking too much, and I get this opportunity to go to Abu Dhabi.

Speaker 2: 41:18

So I go over there and I said, well, what's the work? Is it like close protection? Is it like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. I said, no, no, you're going to go to work every day in a pair of khakis and a golf shirt and you're going to teach aspiring intelligence officers, um, all the the tools of the intelligence trade. I said, guys, you know, I never worked CI like a day in my life. I have no idea what that is. He said, don't worry about it, you'll, you'll, you'll do just fine, Trust me, it's. It's down at this level right here and it really is.

Speaker 2: 41:47

It's basically teaching. It is literally basically teaching in their, their basic course. For you know kids who they have a national service requirement in the United Arab Emirates and if your parents have got some money, um, you know they can kind of swing it. If they got the WASTA, they can swing it so that you go to the intelligence services as opposed to going in the army and going to get shot at by the Houthis in Yemen, which is far preferable. And so we're trying to teach these kids about, you know, opening sources and running sources and how to write reports and interrogation techniques and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 42:21

And I did that for about three and a half years on and off, more on than off and that's where I met my current wife, susan. Susan is a retired agent out of the Houston office. She had done kind of the same thing as me. She had just gotten divorced, she had taken a job in Abu Dhabi and, yeah, we met and started dating about a year and a half later and just ran off to Vegas this past, the last April.

Speaker 1: 42:48

Yeah, you've. You've had pretty much the the same experiences are soft professionals which is go, go until everything breaks and you push, and you push, and you push, and you push. And then you have that moment of reckoning like, oh, I can't do this anymore, I can't do this anymore. And now I have to ask you, on this side of your career, in this next chapter, what are you doing to take care of yourself? Because, after a life dedicated to service to our nation and being close to death so many times explosions, working yourself at a high stress level how are you putting things back into that homeostasis, finding that balance back in your life?

Speaker 2: 43:29

I think, first off, by realizing, yeah, what I did and the point that it brought me to, I mean it, it cost me my marriage and I really was. I was, uh, I was drinking too much, I was, I was absent and and, by the way, yeah, this was not one of those, you know, fuck you. No, fuck you divorces. It's very amicable. We're actually better friends now than we were, um, uh, before. My kids are great with it. My kids, uh, love Susan, my new wife, and all that. So, so there's no, there's none of that weighing on me or anything, but absolutely, if I look back, I'm a hundred percent to blame for, you know, a hundred percent to blame for the marriage falling apart. There was no beating or cheating, but there was complete detachment and absenteeism on my part. Because I got to a point and I think a lot of people do this you get so drawn in by what's going on over there that you'd rather be there than here and it's kind of like running a marathon, or I've never run a marathon, run a half, but like run, or like run a 10K. You, yeah, it's like I used to run the peach tree 10k, the peach tree road race in atlanta every year it's a 10k race and it's on july 4th. It's hotter than hell. And every time you finish the peach tree, as you're walking back from piedmont park back to wherever you parked your car, there's these assholes that are handing out flyers for another 10K. The last thing you want to hear it's like after just having a baby, hey, you want to have another baby? No, you don't. You don't even want to think about that shit right now. But after a while the pain goes away and you forget and I think it's the same thing with deployments you forget, you're like, oh, god damn, man, that was exciting. That's some of the most adrenaline-filled time of my life. I really do. And then each time you go back, it's like, yeah, I'm back, I'm back. And then, in a shorter time period, each time you go back, it's like, oh, that's right, I fucking hate this, it sucks. And so what I did was I just started being mindful. I think in retirement and I've got a good woman to remind me of that as well that you know. No, you do got to take care of yourself.

Speaker 2: 45:32

I'm in the best shape of my life right now, danny I. I get up every single morning, up no later than four o'clock in the gym, no later than five um, my dog and I walked. We walked seven miles this morning. I can't really run anymore on my back and my knees but I can walk all day, all day long, every day. Um, just kind of eating right, and and you know, if a, if a, if a thing comes down the pike, like if the company I was working for says you want to come do like a little, you know, 30 day quick hit or something like that, I might go do something like that.

Speaker 2: 46:08

But right now, what comes first is my wellness. Well, first of all, the number one thing that comes first is my relationship with my wife. Yeah, cause I'm not fucking that up again. Okay, this is, this is my second wife and she is going to be my last wife. Um, so I'm not fucking that up again. And uh, the next thing that comes is is my personal wellness. You know I've I've found other things to do.

Speaker 2: 46:31

I umpire high school baseball. Um, matter of fact, I just had a game the other day. Yeah, I got a got a high school baseball game here, coming up short. I played baseball all through, all through, high school myself. I love it, love being on the field, love being around the kids and everything. It's just, it's something cool to do. So I have very little stress in my life but I'm so busy.

Speaker 2: 46:52

I don't know if this happened to you or not, but Susan and I, you know, we both look around at our daily lives, like she just left out to go, you know, to her book club and some other things she's doing. We look around in our daily lives and we were like when the hell did we have time to work a full-time job with all the stuff that we do now? So I would say, yeah, the number one thing is just being mindful of all right. Why are you in the position you're in right now? What got you here, what was good about it, what was bad about it and what do you not want to repeat? And the number one thing I don't want to repeat ever, ever, ever again is being an absentee husband.

Speaker 1: 47:25

Dude, I am so glad you said that there's so many guys that don't pick up on that and they continue to make the same mistakes. And then it's like third marriage, fourth marriage, fifth marriage, some have six. And I'm telling you, if that's you, if you're bouncing from relationship to relationship to relationship into a marriage, into a marriage, stop the common denominator's you. If you're bouncing from relationship to relationship to relationship, into a marriage, into a marriage, stop. The common denominator is you, my man. The common denominator is you.

Speaker 1: 47:52

If you don't change, if you don't realize the importance of living a life with somebody else, like understanding that it's not just about you and your adventures. Now you have a companion and that's a beautiful thing Like that is your best friend, that is the person that you go on adventures with that is some of the ads and bring something more to your life. Cherish that, be willing to wait and nobody was advocating for that when I was younger. I wish I would have listened to that the importance of being patient, waiting and finding the right person and taking care of yourself first and having those moments of reflection.

Speaker 2: 48:29

Oh, yeah, I'll tell you a warning sign right now. And you hear it all the time, man, I heard it, I heard it, I said it myself, I heard it myself when I was deployed with the FBI. And now I hear it over in Abu Dhabi oh, let's, let's call her. You know, kathy, kathy, oh, she's fine with it? No, she's not. She's fine with me being over here? No, she's not. And if she is, if she is okay with not being with the person she married, well then you've got a problem that you have yet to really focus on and face. Um, because right now, like you know, my, my wife and I, because we both have, um, uh, history with this company, they, they know our rules. Real simple you hire both of us on. If you want to want us to come over and do a quick contract, you know we'll, we will leave our dog for a few weeks, but not's both of us or it's neither of us. And they know that we're, we're, we're a team, and you don't get, and you don't get two hotel rooms.

Speaker 1: 49:27

You get one hotel sleep, yeah, and that, and that's, that's the marching orders, and they know, and they know that that is so smart being able to find somebody that is passionate for the same things you are, that is a go-getter, and then later on in life, you're a team and she You're a team.

Speaker 2: 49:43

She's into fitness as much as I am too. She was out walking the full seven with us this morning. She's in the gym with me in the mornings. We've got so so, so much in common. It's a great fit. We found each other at that perfect sweet spot in life.

Speaker 1: 50:01

Now I want to ask you about your book, man. How did you A dive into being an author and B how did you find the story? How did you be Cause I? I know that there's gotta be some influence from the work you did. How did you come up with that and to be able to be creative enough to write a book that took all those aspects of your life and made it into a compelling story?

Speaker 2: 50:25

So to start from the broadest part of the picture, you know I always tell people this. No one's ever going to confuse me with, you know, with Tom Cruise or Ryan Reynolds okay, I'm a solid seven man, I'm a solid seven and I'm okay with that. When it came to athletics, I was good, you know, I was a good kid in high school. I was, eh, you know, I was a good kid in high school. I was in college. When it came to academics, you know, I wasn't ruining the curve for either the dummies or the. I was Mr. I mean, going back to kindergarten, it's like holy crap, this guy can write. You really have an ability and that becomes and you know this, being a vet, one of the biggest problems we have in the military is people can't write a damn performance report. And as a senior NCO or as an officer or something like that, you're saying like, oh shit, I got to rewrite this whole thing. I can't send this to the boss, you know, and uh, or a performance report, an op order, a, you know, or whatever. You know the thoughts that are running around in your head. Can you organize them and put them on paper so it makes some sense to people. That's always something I was able to do. Um, I also have always had a vivid imagination. I am, believe it or not, a very introverted person, introverted people. You find themselves talking to themselves a lot. We often come off as sounding eloquent, but it's because when we're not sounding eloquent, we look like fucking Dustin Hoffman and Rain man talking to ourselves, because we're rehearsing the conversation before we're about to have it. So we imagine the conversations and you know. So these are all. This is all the strange shit running around inside my head. So that's kind of the setup for it. I've got a creative juices. I've always been able to write.

Speaker 2: 52:19

So in 1998, I locked a guy up by the name of Andre Twitty and we locked him up because he threatened to unleash a bioterror attack on the Atlanta subway system on the July 4th weekend in 1998. Oh shit, and we got him at his initial appearance in front of the judge, judge Feldman I still remember the magistrate's name and the Northern District of Georgia. Myself and my partner, dan Morrison, are sitting behind him and he turns around before the judge comes in. Sitting behind him and he turns around before the judge comes in and, just as casual, as he please says when I get out and I will get out I'm going to kill both of you. I'm going to kill your families too. Like okay, fair enough, wrote it down, handed it off to the prosecutor. He got an extra five years tacked on top of his 10 years. Now, if you're doing math in your head, his 10 years Now, if you're doing math in your head, you're like five and 10, that's 15 from 1998, 2013.

Speaker 2: 53:14

Where is he? He's still in jail because this asshole and I think he's just a loud mouth but he has continued threatening people from prison guards to other prisoners, to judges, to attorneys, to prosecutors throughout his entire life. He actually ended up at Admax out in Florence, colorado, the US Supermax prison. It's the only United States federal Supermax prison. It's Ad Max out in Florence. If you've never been there, it's one of the scariest places I've ever been.

Speaker 1: 53:40

Yeah, they got all who's over there Everybody.

Speaker 2: 53:46

Eric Rudolph is there. Terry Nichols is there. Ramsey Youssef is there. Terry nichols is there. Ramsey yusef is there. The unabomber was there. Was hansen was there. Rotten hell, you piece of shit. Um. So all these guys were there, um, and and then my guy was there, um, and he's actually finally getting out of prison on july 4th of this year, finally getting out of prison on July 4th of this year. So I'll keep an eye out for him. I'll have the welcome wagon ready for him.

Speaker 2: 54:18

But anyway, going back to 1998, my ex-wife used to sweat what's going to happen when this guy makes good on his promise. I said, don't worry about it, he's locked up. She said, well, what if he could hire a hit man? And I kind of just dismissive wave of the hand oh, come on. Until it was time to write a book. We found ourselves in Abu Dhabi in 2021.

Speaker 2: 54:37

Susan and I had just started dating and we were staying together in a suite at the Marriott and we came to a point where she had a contract, but I didn't, you know't, they didn't renew my contract for this. It's going to be about six weeks. She said what are you going to do? Are you going to go home? I said no, I'm going to stay right here. I said what are you going to do? Are you just going to go to the pool in the gym all day? I said, I don't know, maybe take a nap. Whatever. I said, you know, start writing that book.

Speaker 2: 55:12

And I started with the premise of, and the book opens with the scene of a guy who's locked up in Ad Max and an attorney. A mysterious attorney comes to visit him with attorney client privilege and he hands him a hit list and of people who wronged him actually the people who are responsible for him, ultimately ending up at Ad Max, and the attorney takes the list back to Atlanta and sets the wheels in motion. And that's what the rest of the book is about. It's about a murder for hire network. And then you meet our protagonists. And our protagonist is this guy, bryce Chandler, who is, as luck would have it, a retired FBI agent from Atlanta who got divorced and moved to the Florida Keys and started a PI business, which I did not do and uh, um, all of a sudden he threw it through a a happening of different circumstances. He's just stumbles across all of this stuff and it kind of goes from there.

Speaker 1: 56:04

It's called, it's called call me Sonny, and you have to read the book to find out who sunny is yeah, yeah, this, uh, I, I, I now need to friggin not only read the book, but I need to see a netflix movie.

Speaker 2: 56:17

Uh, hey from your lip to god's ears. My friend, if there's anybody out there who thinks that, uh, that a good kind of a hard-boiled detective, if you think, if you liked, you know, if you liked, um, who was the guy that the the patterson guy. Uh, bosh, if you like bosh, I think this guy's a lot like bosh. Um, I, you know, I didn't, I didn't rip him off or anything like that, but I think I think it reads a lot like michael patterson or david baldacci or you know some of those kinds of things where they got these hard-boiled, you know, fictional detective types, yeah and I gotta to imagine being able to reflect back on your own life.

Speaker 1: 56:55

Kind of felt like a good, like send off to the career, being able to dip into that life and reflect back oh, I'm going to take this, I'm going to take that. Did you find it as like cathartic, as a way of like, okay, this is my final goodbye to this beautiful career I had and kind of giving a rebirth.

Speaker 2: 57:12

Yeah, well, it did a couple of things. First of all, it allowed me to write from a from a point of realism. So I didn't make this guy a superhero. I didn't make the FBI something that it's not. I speak very plainly about the FBI. I've got an idiot ASAC in there. Uh, this is an assistant special agent in charge. I developed him very carefully. It was funny when I looked at, uh, I won't say who the guy is because you know he, he doesn't deserve this, but I looked at, uh, susan, and I was just literally she had come back from work one evening and I was starting to write the name of this character uh, greg Peoples, and that's his name in the book, greg Peoples. And he's the idiot ASAP who just fucks up everything he touches. And I said who's the worst? I had to name him. I couldn't think of a name. I said who's the worst FBI supervisor you've ever worked for? Without blinking, she shot out a name and I modified that name.

Speaker 2: 58:07

And I modified that name to the point to where, if the guy reads this book, he would probably, if he knew that Susan was my wife or, at the time, my girlfriend, he would probably know that, yeah, this is him. But it's cool. I've gotten to kill a few people that I didn't like, you know, I just named them a character in the book and I killed them.

Speaker 1: 58:27

Ultimate revenge.

Speaker 2: 58:30

Yeah, exactly Exactly. If you get killed in the book you were somebody I did not like in real life. Um, but very, very few people. Matter of fact about, the only person in there who's not purposefully named is is the protagonist, price jammer. I was just looking for something. It's hard when you write a book, you gotta go do a lot of google foo. Um, you got a. Like I want to name this guy such and such. Well, if I wanted to name him hieronymus bosh, I would quickly find out. No, there's already a guy named harry bosh. Yeah, okay, if I wanted to name him jack reacher, you'd quickly find out. But you know, it's not only those, it's these other ones were like oh, there's already a series about this guy. So I kept digging down and digging down and the only bryce chandler I could find anywhere and if you're out there listening, here's to you my friend was a guy who, like he's doing something now in corporate america and he used to play tight end for illinois carbondale or something like that.

Speaker 1: 59:25

I was like you.

Speaker 2: 59:27

You know, good enough, man, anonymous enough. It's not about you, sir, Please don't sue me. Exactly, exactly, we've got that disclaimer. You know, everybody in here is fictitious and yeah, all that good stuff.

Speaker 1: 59:41

Do you ever think you're? You'll find yourself telling more of a real life story about your career. Or is it now more about the the fictional side of the house?

Speaker 2: 59:52

I think it's the fictional. I don't. I don't think that my career, um, and I appreciate being on web web, you know webinars and I appreciate being on podcasts and I appreciate like the other night I was speaking to the university of Wilmington they do a true crime lecture series. So I appreciate that there's people that are interested in that kind of thing and, yeah, I can definitely cobble something together from 22 years that'll keep you entertained for an hour and a half. But I don't think there's anything particular about you know, I'm not Joe Pistone. You know who you know is Donnie Brasco. I'm not, you know, I'm not the guy who did, and I'm not aw shucksing and being all self-deprecating or anything like that, but I don't think there's anything truly remarkable about my journey.

Speaker 2: 1:00:35

Um, the FBI is full of a bunch of really truly exceptional people. Um, and I do hate the bad press we've gotten, but yeah, so definitely we've had some missteps, but damn it, if you have a problem, you fix the problem. Yeah, you don't. You don't burn the house down If you, if you're it, if you have a problem, you fix the problem. Yeah, you don't, you don't burn the house down if you, if you're, if you, if you got you know room needs painted. You paint the room.

Speaker 1: 1:00:54

You don't burn the house down exactly that's, and it's the same thing that our police officers are facing in a lot of areas in the united states people calling for hey, we've got to shut down police officers, we gotta, we have to cut back on our numbers. I'm like, ok, well, who's going to come when you need assistance? Who's going to be there when you absolutely when everything fails like social programs are going to save you when someone's trying to shoot you and stab you? That's not the answer. But we're so quick to villainize the institutions that are out there working to keep us safe and, yeah, sometimes it requires them to do things that you're not going to like and they're not going to be popular. But at the end of the day, I'd rather have police officers on the street and I'd rather have federal agencies out there doing their jobs to help keep our country running smoothly.

Speaker 2: 1:01:48

And you're right.

Speaker 1: 1:01:50

If you find it uncover something that's wrong, you take care of that. You don't just burn the whole thing down to the ground.

Speaker 2: 1:01:58

Absolutely. I can absolutely take a look at the pictures of the George Floyd arrests and I can absolutely say, okay, dude, get off his neck. No, come on, man, get off. You got like eight officers there, get off the dude's neck. I can absolutely take a look at, if you want to go old school, the rodney king video and say, okay, this is getting a little recreation. This is getting a little recreational at this point. Yeah, guys, on the ground you got 20 cops around, lock them up.

Speaker 2: 1:02:26

Nobody can justify the situation but at the same time, great, you found the problem. Fix the problem no, doesn't mean shutting down the police, the police department. It means fixing the problem.

Speaker 1: 1:02:38

Yep, so yeah, steve I thought my dog was gonna walk in the frame here, but but she didn't.

Speaker 2: 1:02:46

She walked around the back of the camera.

Speaker 1: 1:02:48

She's used to these podcasts yeah, don't worry, I've got a giant schnauzer that, for the first four seasons, would always be on camera jumping up at the worst times. Steven, thank you so much for being here today. Brother, I can't tell you how excited I am to be reading your book and I really do hope I see huge potential because, just like you said I mean Bosh is a hit, jack Breacher is a hit I mean these are the things that people want to see on screen. So, fingers crossed, we can get this to Netflix and, yeah, hopefully they hire somebody From your lips to God's ears.

Speaker 2: 1:03:20

man, I appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 1:03:22

We'll put it out there, man, and to everybody tuning in, check out, the name of the book is Call Me Sunny. Available on Amazon. It's available in Barnes Noble. Where else can we get the book right now?

Speaker 2: 1:03:36

That's pretty much it for right now. And everybody does ask is there going to be an Audible? Probably not an Audible with this one. It's available hardback, paperback, kindle. It costs a lot of money. I'm with a small independent publisher right now called Boylan Dalton and it costs probably more money to hire a narrator. If you don't do one of those audibles right, they just come out sounding wonky because you know it's like somebody with my voice trying to read for female characters. So you know you change from this to good morning, dear.

Speaker 1: 1:04:10

And it just sounds so stupid. I don't know, man, I think that could be, you know, one of the, the, uh, the quirks of making so much better, so never say no, exactly exactly thank you so much for being on here today, brother.

Speaker 1: 1:04:21

I appreciate you and everybody ends uh, we'll see you next time. Take care, if you like what we're doing and you enjoying the show, don't forget to share us. Like us, subscribe and head on over to our patreon, where you can be part of our community and get access to all of our episodes as soon as they drop. And remember we get through this together, take care.