Speaker 1: Special Operations, Cobert.
Speaker 2: SPI and.
Speaker 1: The Team House with your host Jack Murphy and David bark.
Speaker 3: Hey.
Speaker 1: Everyone, Welcome to episode three hundred and sixty seven of
Speaker 1: The Teamhouse. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest
Speaker 1: joining us in studio is Seth Harrp. He is himself
Speaker 1: an Army veteran and also the author of the Fort
Speaker 1: Bragg Cartel, Drug Trafficking and Murder and Special Forces, a
Speaker 1: book that in recent weeks has made quite a splash
Speaker 1: out there and arrived at some controversy.
Speaker 2: But I'm glad that is getting the attention.
Speaker 1: It's a book that needs to be read, and it
Speaker 1: needs to get the attention, and hopefully some of these
Speaker 1: things get addressed down there.
Speaker 2: But anyway, let's jump right into it.
Speaker 1: Seth, I want to start off just asking you a
Speaker 1: little bit about kind of how you came up, how
Speaker 1: you grew up, what took you towards the army and
Speaker 1: your military service and then eventually journalism.
Speaker 2: Sure, nothing too special. I was an Army reservist in
Speaker 2: college at the University of Texas and was called up
Speaker 2: to serve when the Iraq War started, did one tour
Speaker 2: in Iraq, and then wrote out the rest of my
Speaker 2: time in the reserves. I actually was a lawyer. I
Speaker 2: practiced law for a few years and then was always
Speaker 2: really passionate about journalism. I had written for my college newspaper,
Speaker 2: including Wallace deployed to a Rock. I was writing for
Speaker 2: the Daily Texan, and that was a really rewarding experience.
Speaker 2: I wanted to get back to that, and so at
Speaker 2: a certain point I actually went back to school for journalism,
Speaker 2: and it's a job I'm doing for about the last
Speaker 2: ten years now. It's been really fun.
Speaker 1: And have you always covered national security stuff or like,
Speaker 1: I'm just a little curious, like what kind of brought
Speaker 1: you towards this subject matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah. One of the fact that I had been in
Speaker 2: Iraq was a way that I could get assignments, especially
Speaker 2: to cover the war in Syria, because at the time
Speaker 2: I graduated from journalism school in twenty sixteen, and as
Speaker 2: you know, because you were over there, a lot a
Speaker 2: lot of journalists left Syria after James Foley was beheaded
Speaker 2: because the security environment was so poor, and the fact
Speaker 2: that I had been in Iraq was a way for
Speaker 2: me to get assignments in Syria. And so I have
Speaker 2: always focused on the either foreign wars or the military
Speaker 2: things of that nature.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk about the Fort Bragg cartel. You know, specifically,
Speaker 1: what kind of tipped you to this subject that you
Speaker 1: know Fort Bragg was an area that you wanted to
Speaker 1: focus on.
Speaker 2: How did that come about? I just read an article
Speaker 2: in the New York Times on December fourth, twenty twenty
Speaker 2: that these two Special Operations soldiers have found murdered on
Speaker 2: Fort Bragg, and that one of them, Billy Levine, had
Speaker 2: previously killed guy in his house and they had been
Speaker 2: ruled to justified homicide. I then read a blog post
Speaker 2: that you wrote, Jack that identified Billy as a Delta
Speaker 2: Force soldier. Yeah. That was really crucial because the entire
Speaker 2: time I had been reporting on the war and the military,
Speaker 2: and even serving in the Army myself, I had never
Speaker 2: heard of a Delta Force guy being in the news
Speaker 2: for any reason. They did keep that pretty quiet. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So that was at the point in which I realized, Okay,
Speaker 2: there's there's got to be a story here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's a little aside on that. I had
Speaker 1: a couple of years later after I wrote that, I
Speaker 1: had a guy I served with in Special Forces who
Speaker 1: went on to become a delta operator hit me up
Speaker 1: out of the blue hand spoken to him in years.
Speaker 2: Hey, you need to change the title of that article. Man.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that's that's clickbait. You can't write that I wrote.
Speaker 1: Do Delta Force operators have a license to kill?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: It's like, dude, you read that whole thing and that's
Speaker 1: your takeaway from that.
Speaker 2: Come on in your interview with Mark Leschinger's family was
Speaker 2: also a really important inspiration because you did that before
Speaker 2: I had even got off the ground, so you know,
Speaker 2: I I saw from what you had reported that there
Speaker 2: was some kind of cover up there, so that was
Speaker 2: an important part of it too. And I just I've
Speaker 2: been in touch with the with the Lushakers or you know,
Speaker 2: they're with Nicole Rick and Tammy maybe and Laura Aleshiker
Speaker 2: who since remarried. I've been in touch with them since
Speaker 2: since then. I'm glad you did. I'm glad that you
Speaker 2: got to talk to them.
Speaker 1: And I mean the stuff that Mark's mother and widow
Speaker 1: and sister told me are like things that well, they
Speaker 1: stick with you, as you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And now the poor girl who witnessed
Speaker 2: the killing, who identify in the book by a pseudonym.
Speaker 2: You know, she's kind of grown up now. That was
Speaker 2: twenty eighteen, so she's, you know, she's a teenager and
Speaker 2: she is writing about this. She's written an essay that
Speaker 2: you know, recalls it because she witnessed her father murdered
Speaker 2: right in front by Billy Levine. So it's it's a
Speaker 2: pretty heavy story.
Speaker 1: Let's kind of dive into that a little bit, because
Speaker 1: Billy Levine, I guess you could say, is kind of
Speaker 1: the focal point of your book, a sort of jumping
Speaker 1: off point. Let's start off and talk about you know
Speaker 1: him and who was his best friend, Mark Leeshakar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Billy was a Delta Force operator. He had done
Speaker 2: fourteen deployments. He had been in since shortly before two
Speaker 2: thousand and one, shortly before nine to eleven. That is,
Speaker 2: he was a guy who had had a severe PTSD,
Speaker 2: moral injury, drug addiction, a lot of the things that
Speaker 2: creep up on guys that are in that community after
Speaker 2: lots of deployments, all that was going on with them.
Speaker 2: His best friend, Mark was a nineteenth Group Green Beret.
Speaker 2: So he was I still to this day don't know
Speaker 2: exactly what he was doing in Bragg. He wasn't on
Speaker 2: active duty, and his group was not at in North Carolina.
Speaker 2: It's in Washington. So I believe he had some kind
Speaker 2: of desk job at Use of Sock, but they haven't
Speaker 2: confirmed it. But in any case, he was at Fort Bragg.
Speaker 2: He's working there. He and Billy had known each other
Speaker 2: from when Lesha was going through the Q course, and
Speaker 2: one thing they really shared in common, or one thing
Speaker 2: that seems to have been a reason why they bonded,
Speaker 2: is you know, they both were ensted using drugs, like
Speaker 2: hard drugs frequently, and you know, at a certain point
Speaker 2: they got out of control. And the first two chapters
Speaker 2: of my book are dedicated to this trip they took
Speaker 2: to Disney World. You already know this whole story. But
Speaker 2: they take their daughters, they both have young daughters, they
Speaker 2: take them to Disney World. The whole time they're at
Speaker 2: Disney World, they're drinking and doing drugs, and Mark evidently
Speaker 2: ingested some bath salts. I don't know if he went
Speaker 2: out and bought that salt. More likely he ingested some
Speaker 2: ecstasy or something that was cut with you know, fillers,
Speaker 2: and he started hallucinating. He was convinced that the car
Speaker 2: was being followed that the car was bugged, and this
Speaker 2: really started to get on Billy's nerves. Billy had really
Speaker 2: bad anger issues, as also can happen to people that
Speaker 2: have been exposed repeatedly to combat, and he was really
Speaker 2: getting annoyed by Mark's you know, Shenanigan's long story short,
Speaker 2: he ends up shooting and killing Mark right in front
Speaker 2: of his house, or right in the foyer of his
Speaker 2: house when they get back to Fayetteville, right in front
Speaker 2: of his daughter who had just let him in the door.
Speaker 2: And the important thing is that the civilian authorities and
Speaker 2: the military authorities at that point jumped in and covered
Speaker 2: this whole thing up and made the case go away
Speaker 2: and papered it over as a justified homicide when you
Speaker 2: can debate over whether it should have been like first
Speaker 2: degree murder, second degree manslaughter, or any of those charges
Speaker 2: I could see appropriate depending upon the prosecutorial decisions. But
Speaker 2: for them to just say it was self defense, that's
Speaker 2: a cover up because Mark at the time of his
Speaker 2: death was unarmed and he didn't even have a screwdriver,
Speaker 2: which was Billy's cover story that he had come out,
Speaker 2: and when they rolled the body, there was no screwdriver. Right.
Speaker 2: The other thing is the bullet fragments under the carpet.
Speaker 1: Bullet fragments don't get under the carpet unless you're doing
Speaker 1: the coupe de grass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, right, And the ballistic evidence shows that he
Speaker 2: shot Mark from multiple angles and they stood over him
Speaker 2: and fired to kill shot, which exactly is what they're
Speaker 2: trained to do.
Speaker 1: And it's sadly what the daughter described seeing after Billy died.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, she started talking about it for the first time. Yeah.
Speaker 2: That murder, of course, is just that was covered up,
Speaker 2: was just a prelude to all the rest of the
Speaker 2: events that happened in the book. I start off with
Speaker 2: it to show the type of impunity that these guys
Speaker 2: have and the link to which the command will go
Speaker 2: to keep if you're in Delta force, that they'll keep
Speaker 2: you out of the news.
Speaker 1: So yeah, let's talk a little bit about that, because,
Speaker 1: as you point out, there's never a trial, There was
Speaker 1: never a real inquiry. As far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: a police sergeant wrote a report said self defense and
Speaker 1: that was it.
Speaker 2: That was the end of it. Yeah, it all just
Speaker 2: sort of went away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, despite the family asking some questions, and I mean
Speaker 1: It's very weird.
Speaker 2: The way it all went down. It is. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: I recently obtained a copy of Billy Levine's memoir. Someone
Speaker 2: that he had been in rehab with in Texas sent
Speaker 2: me a copy. I wrote in the book that Billy
Speaker 2: had been working on this document at the time of
Speaker 2: his death, but I had never seen it. Someone actually
Speaker 2: sent it to me, and it was incredible to see
Speaker 2: to read Billy narrating his downward spiral. And one of
Speaker 2: the things he talks about is that shooting. And you know,
Speaker 2: among the details that he that he goes into are
Speaker 2: exactly how he shot Mark. You know, he even says
Speaker 2: he almost takes pride in it. It's strange, he almost
Speaker 2: takes pride in how, you know, efficiently he dispatched Mark,
Speaker 2: because he One little bit of it that I'm recalling
Speaker 2: is that, you know, he said that as he stood
Speaker 2: over him having killed him, he was prepared to shoot
Speaker 2: him again in the head. Small detail, but you know,
Speaker 2: it made an impression. Oh, you know, the reason I
Speaker 2: brought that up, the reason why I wanted to mention
Speaker 2: it was not that particular detail, but rather what happened
Speaker 2: when he got to the police station. Because Billy writes
Speaker 2: about that too, and you know, it was incredible by
Speaker 2: his account, the sort of entitlement that he showed, and
Speaker 2: he was like outraged that they had even questioned him.
Speaker 2: He was, by his own account, was telling them things
Speaker 2: like you know, do you know who I am? And
Speaker 2: was resentful of the fact that they had even brought
Speaker 2: him to the police station. And he seemed to expect
Speaker 2: everyone to just take his word for it that it
Speaker 2: was self defense, even though, as you know, he told
Speaker 2: his direct superior in Delta Force originally that Mark had
Speaker 2: committed suicide, and then he told a nine one one
Speaker 2: dispatcher that it was stranger who had broken into his house.
Speaker 2: But he still was like offended at these.
Speaker 1: Recover stories at a minimum, h so, but he shocked
Speaker 1: that the police are even asking him these questions.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the attitude that comes across in the
Speaker 2: in his account of it that he wrote. Maybe he
Speaker 2: behaved himself more professionally at the time, but it didn't
Speaker 2: seem like it the way he wrote about it. I mean,
Speaker 2: he was like pulling rank is the wrong word because
Speaker 2: it wasn't rank. But he was just playing that Delta
Speaker 2: carte hard with the with the sheriff's deputies.
Speaker 1: What else did Billy have to say in this memoir
Speaker 1: that he wrote.
Speaker 2: So much I'm still just processing. I only read it
Speaker 2: two days ago. But he was even crazier than I thought,
Speaker 2: you know, in the book, I'm not in the business
Speaker 2: of portraying any of these guys as monsters, like that's
Speaker 2: just not person of all, because I've met all their
Speaker 2: family members and talked to them, and I think that
Speaker 2: they have done monstrous things, including Mark Leshcheker by a
Speaker 2: lot of accounts. You know, the reason he couldn't make
Speaker 2: it through Delta's election was because he had committed certain
Speaker 2: war crimes in Afghanistan. Still Levine as well, you know,
Speaker 2: he had done terrible things. But I still try to
Speaker 2: portray them as much as possible as humans and show
Speaker 2: like they didn't start out this way. It was the
Speaker 2: result of external factors acting on them to turn them
Speaker 2: this way. But reading this memoir that Levine wrote, I
Speaker 2: realized that he was even crazier than I thought. Like
Speaker 2: I didn't him he was way off the deep end.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: He was so paranoid and violent and aggressive, Like you
Speaker 2: can just feel the anger and aggression on every page
Speaker 2: of the stuff that he wrote.
Speaker 1: And as you go through talking about Billy's trajectory and experience,
Speaker 1: you kind of uncover in the book that there's like
Speaker 1: this larger theme about criminality around Fort Bragg, that while
Speaker 1: Billy's situation is fairly extreme and I guess you could
Speaker 1: say abnormal, but it's not that abnormal. I mean, you
Speaker 1: uncover a whole string of murders, rapes, drug trafficking.
Speaker 2: Around the base. It is apparently is a practice on
Speaker 2: part of the Special Forces Command as well as the
Speaker 2: District Attorney of Cumberland County that these guys get special
Speaker 2: treatment when they turn up in handcuffs. And you know,
Speaker 2: it's what the motives for that are as a matter
Speaker 2: of conjecture, but I assume it's to protect the Special
Speaker 2: Forces from embarrassment, because reporters will jump all over stories
Speaker 2: if they relate to the Special Forces, So that dynamic
Speaker 2: is definitely in play. And yeah, I showcase after case
Speaker 2: in the book of guys who are accused of murder, rape,
Speaker 2: drug trafficking, what have you, who are just immediately let
Speaker 2: off the hook. I mean there are exceptions.
Speaker 1: Of course, Dan Gould is in prison right for smuggling
Speaker 1: cocaine from Columbia in a punching bag.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, two of them, Yeah yeah, a million dollars
Speaker 2: worth of cocaine. You know. But I interviewed the officer,
Speaker 2: the army officer who is at the DEA station or
Speaker 2: at the US embassy rather in Bogota, who caught who
Speaker 2: got wind of this scheme, and he said he had
Speaker 2: a really hard time convincing the DEA to investigate, and
Speaker 2: you know, he couldn't even get them interested in it
Speaker 2: until he finally brought them the punching bags and put
Speaker 2: them through an X ray machine and it clearly showed
Speaker 2: them a full pack full of cod.
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Speaker 2: You talk about.
Speaker 1: Aaron Scanlon is another one, allegedly raped by Christopher Vallejo
Speaker 1: and Chrysto Christo. The unfortunately we know sex crimes happen
Speaker 1: in America doesn't shock any of us per se, but
Speaker 1: the way her trial was handled was a circus, like
Speaker 1: totally like off the wall inappropriate. Can you tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about kind of? And also the other
Speaker 1: thing too, is that I find quite often is how
Speaker 1: when one of these cases comes down, the local police
Speaker 1: department and the military police will bounce it around between
Speaker 1: each other like pointing fingers in both directions to try
Speaker 1: to I don't know avoid having to address the issue.
Speaker 2: M Yeah, you know, talking about rape trials and stuff
Speaker 2: and sexual assault in the military. That brings up a
Speaker 2: lot of toxicity, especially among the people that are like
Speaker 2: consuming these stories and debating them on the internet. But
Speaker 2: Aaron Scanlon was an army officer who after this encounter
Speaker 2: with Crystobo Viejo, she immediately told several people that she
Speaker 2: had been raped, Like within minutes she told people, I
Speaker 2: feel like I just got raped. She also went directly
Speaker 2: to a hospital and had a rape kit done. She
Speaker 2: did everything by the book and reporting that rape. She
Speaker 2: has text messages with Krystobal Vajejo where she accuses him
Speaker 2: directly of rape and he doesn't respond. My point is
Speaker 2: that people may not like this, It may not like
Speaker 2: that I bring attention to some things like that, but nevertheless,
Speaker 2: this is real what she didn't have any reason to
Speaker 2: lie about this. People want to impune not necessarily her,
Speaker 2: but women who are in this situation. They want to
Speaker 2: impune their motives or say that whatever. But in this case,
Speaker 2: it really wasn't that way from the evidence. And Chris Bayeho,
Speaker 2: he was charged with rape. But as we're discussing at
Speaker 2: a certain point, the Special Forces Command steps in, approaches
Speaker 2: the district attorney and they work out a deal so
Speaker 2: that this is the charges in civilian court. Go Away
Speaker 2: gets transferred to Fort Bragg to be carried out in
Speaker 2: the under a court martial goes on and on, like
Speaker 2: the time is just dragging on, and then they finally
Speaker 2: have a trial and then surprise, you know, it's an acquittal.
Speaker 2: So that's another case of what I describe as a
Speaker 2: cover up, because I won't go into details now, but
Speaker 2: you know, I talk about a lot of it regularities
Speaker 2: in that trial, and there's one I'll call out in particular,
Speaker 2: just like it's funny how in the cases where the
Speaker 2: military doesn't actually want a conviction, that the prosecutor who
Speaker 2: gets put on the case is someone who's never tried
Speaker 2: a case before. That happened in the Eddie Gallagher case. Now,
Speaker 2: it seems to have been some contingency there where the
Speaker 2: lead prosecutor actually had to deal with some situations. But
Speaker 2: Eddie Gallagher was prosecuted by a guy who had never
Speaker 2: tried a murder trial before. That would almost never happen
Speaker 2: in the civilian court. You would never allow prosecutor who'd
Speaker 2: never done a capital case to try a capital case.
Speaker 2: Same thing happened in the case of Vaejo. The prosecutors
Speaker 2: that they put on that case it was their first
Speaker 2: trial ever, so and they got schooled by his civilian
Speaker 2: attorney who has defended lots and lots of capital cases.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's so much to go into. I don't
Speaker 2: even know where to begin.
Speaker 1: Another example you talk about, there's a very chapter in
Speaker 1: your book about the cover girls who work in the
Speaker 1: mission support troupe and some sexual harassment allegations at Delta Force,
Speaker 1: and I mean that was it was pretty gross to
Speaker 1: read that that, you know, somebody allegedly called this woman
Speaker 1: into her into his office and had her bend over
Speaker 1: to inspect her underwear, and like, what in the world
Speaker 1: is going on here?
Speaker 2: Guys want to deny that, you know, I see all
Speaker 2: the comments that that's one they really jumped on that.
Speaker 2: Politico excerpted that chapter of the book, and so a
Speaker 2: lot of people, you know, have been jumping on that
Speaker 2: to say that this environment is much more professional than
Speaker 2: I portrayed. All I can say is, y'all should have
Speaker 2: talked to me when I was reporting the book and
Speaker 2: I was calling all you guys and trying to get
Speaker 2: you to comment. I would have happily included those statements,
Speaker 2: but I'm left to go on not just Courtney Williams's testimony.
Speaker 2: I would have never published something that was single source.
Speaker 2: I reached out to one of her colleagues who's identified
Speaker 2: in the book by a pseudonym, without Courtney knowing about
Speaker 2: the other woman, and vice versa, kept him completely sat
Speaker 2: interviewed them completely separately, and to the extent that their
Speaker 2: stories matched. That's what I published in the book. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what I have to say about those criticisms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: And I watched, you know, Brent's response to your book
Speaker 1: and what was in the article, And I mean, I
Speaker 1: believe Brent's telling his truth that he would not ever
Speaker 1: treat a woman in the unit like that. I believe
Speaker 1: him when he's saying that. But I mean, if you
Speaker 1: weren't in that room, you really can't say. I mean,
Speaker 1: he said, by his own admission, he said, I didn't
Speaker 1: know this woman, I never met her.
Speaker 2: You can't really say it didn't happen. Well, Courtney says
Speaker 2: that a lot of the guys were professional and that
Speaker 2: where they were cool and they were nice. She talks
Speaker 2: about the ones who are like good guys. She also
Speaker 2: including Billy Levine. She said he was very respectful. He
Speaker 2: would have never that wasn't his style. He was crazy
Speaker 2: in a different kind of way. Yeah, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: mean that it doesn't happen, right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's not so much a cultural thing, but their assholes everywhere.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the.
Speaker 4: Command, even though it's not necessarily a cultural thing, the command.
Speaker 4: And we see this all the time, even in the
Speaker 4: conventional military, where the command wants these things to go
Speaker 4: away because it looks bad for the unit commander, it
Speaker 4: looks bad publicity wise, you know.
Speaker 2: And yeah, yeah, it's worth pointing out too.
Speaker 1: I mean, the lack of transparency in Jaysock, in the
Speaker 1: special Operations community, and I would include the CIA in
Speaker 1: this argument as well. The lack of transparency has not
Speaker 1: done these bureaucracies any favors. It just allows these problems
Speaker 1: to fester and metastasize, and things that should have been
Speaker 1: exposed to daylight and gotten fixed years and years and
Speaker 1: years ago. Sexual harassment, sexual assault in the military being
Speaker 1: a big one. Those are things that could have been fixed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, And you know, they really made an enemy
Speaker 2: out of Courtney Williams. And she was willing to talk
Speaker 2: all this, say all this stuff about her work because
Speaker 2: she felt that she had been treated unfairly, and I
Speaker 2: ended up really sympathy with her. Uh.
Speaker 1: Another interesting thing, I mean maybe interesting to some people. Anyways,
Speaker 1: You talk about how us to Soak the command actually
Speaker 1: gets used as a dumping ground for fired operators. In
Speaker 1: some cases, they're you can get fired from the unit
Speaker 1: for anything. You know, it doesn't mean you're a bad
Speaker 1: guy by any means, but some of these guys are
Speaker 1: having serious issues. And like you quote one guy saying
Speaker 1: like this is a force protection issue because some of
Speaker 1: these guys.
Speaker 2: Are just so off the wall. Yeah, I remember I
Speaker 2: got that document from CID through FOYA, and it was
Speaker 2: I was blown away. I actually quoted it at great
Speaker 2: length in the book because Yeah, the commander of the
Speaker 2: headquarters company at USUSAK says that he had at any
Speaker 2: given time he had as many as a dozen like
Speaker 2: guys that had been kicked out of the unit. And
Speaker 2: he talks about how dangerous it was to have guys
Speaker 2: that a lot of times didn't know why they were
Speaker 2: reporting there, didn't know why they had been expelled from
Speaker 2: the unit, had all kinds of problems. Yeah, and he
Speaker 2: even says at one point they busted and excel to
Speaker 2: operator who had at the front gate, who had an
Speaker 2: ar ten in the backseat with a blanket over it.
Speaker 2: So he was strongly suggesting or stating out right he
Speaker 2: was worried one of these dudes is going to do
Speaker 2: a mass shooting, which was sobering to read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, another one I wanted to ask you about. I mean,
Speaker 1: you do, I don't know how deep you want to
Speaker 1: go into it. But another disturbing one is Enrique Roman Martinez,
Speaker 1: eighty second Airborne soldier goes camping in North Carolina with
Speaker 1: some of his army buddies and ends up dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that one takes it to a totally different place.
Speaker 2: I mean, the rest of this stuff is like gangland stuff,
Speaker 2: mafia type stuff, cartel stuff, but the case of Enrique
Speaker 2: Roman Martinez is like some X files shit. To be honest,
Speaker 2: like he disappears. Yeah, and you know some you probably
Speaker 2: recalled Jack that A lot of the suspicion initially focused
Speaker 2: on the seven soldiers that were with him on that
Speaker 2: camping trip, but thanks to the Roman mar Tina's family.
Speaker 2: I got CID's whole file on that case, which was
Speaker 2: sixteen hundred pages. Like they it was like the most
Speaker 2: extensive murder investigation in army history. And man, they seemed
Speaker 2: like they left no stone unturned. And you can read
Speaker 2: all these kids. I call them kids because they were
Speaker 2: like between the ages of nineteen and twenty two. These
Speaker 2: are junior soldiers in the eighty second And their stories
Speaker 2: never changed from the beginning. They just said, you know,
Speaker 2: they admitted that they took drugs, they took LSD, that
Speaker 2: some of them did, that Enrique was tripping. He was
Speaker 2: having a bad trip and was having these eerily He
Speaker 2: was having these premonitions of his own imminent mortality. He
Speaker 2: was convinced that he was about to die. But they
Speaker 2: all just thought he was having a bad trip and
Speaker 2: went to bed and when they woke up, he was gone.
Speaker 2: That's all any of them could tell the police. Then
Speaker 2: his head washes ashore on the island, you know, two
Speaker 2: days or three days later, and medical examiners look at
Speaker 2: it and say, this guy's head was chopped off with
Speaker 2: an axe. So who could have done that? And why?
Speaker 2: I think the why is the most important question because
Speaker 2: although they could never find any forensic evidence connecting any
Speaker 2: of these young soldiers to the murder, none of them
Speaker 2: had blood on them, none of them had any injuries.
Speaker 2: They inspected their hands, you know, just as cops are
Speaker 2: trained to do, none of that. But beyond that, none
Speaker 2: of them had a reason to kill and Enriqui it
Speaker 2: ever came to light. People speculated this reason or that reason,
Speaker 2: but there was never any evidence for any of it.
Speaker 2: And again, the stories never changed. So for seven people
Speaker 2: to keep their stories consistent over a period of years,
Speaker 2: well under the microscope and getting interiorated constantly and also
Speaker 2: charged with drug use and charged with disobeying orders, the
Speaker 2: fact that they didn't change their story, I think is
Speaker 2: really important, and that remains unsolved to this day. It
Speaker 2: remains unsolved. One of the strangest cold cases in army history,
Speaker 2: in North Carolina history, and whoever killed Enrique Roman Martinez
Speaker 2: is still out there. That's what's chilling.
Speaker 1: And one more that I want to talk about before
Speaker 1: we start to circle back to Billy Levine is Thacker
Speaker 1: and the Rayford drop zone. And he's like a second,
Speaker 1: if not a third generation drug trafficker. Yeah, on this airfield. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's kind of wild.
Speaker 2: I struggled where to put that in the book. My
Speaker 2: editor Alison Lawrence, and she knows how hard we we.
Speaker 2: We struggle to find the right place for that material.
Speaker 2: You know that airfield. For folks who don't know, it's
Speaker 2: called a Rayford drop zone. This is a real business stuff.
Speaker 2: To be very careful about what I say about them.
Speaker 2: It's a privately owned business. It was founded by Gene
Speaker 2: Thackers and og special Forces guy who served like in
Speaker 2: the Jungles of Laos. I even have a picture of
Speaker 2: him with the Prince of Laos at a certain point,
Speaker 2: like a black and white photo. I don't think it
Speaker 2: was vang Pow there Wasn't he like a warlord? Yeah?
Speaker 2: This so he was part of the Humong, right, So
Speaker 2: this picture was with the and the Hmong were deeply
Speaker 2: involved in drug trafficking. Famously, this picture was actually with
Speaker 2: the because so were the Royal Laoatian forces. The Royal
Speaker 2: Lao Army was also deeply involved in drug trafficking, also
Speaker 2: allied with the Special Forces in the CIA. This person
Speaker 2: was a member of that Laotian government and he was
Speaker 2: actually busted at a certain point with thirteen million dollars worth,
Speaker 2: a heroin personally smuggling and trying to smuggle into Paris.
Speaker 2: I totally digress. You see the problem with this story.
Speaker 2: It starts going backwards in time and to all these
Speaker 2: other deep dark aspects. It really was a technical challenge
Speaker 2: and it shrunk and shrunk construct Now it's like two
Speaker 2: pages of the book. But there was just so much there.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's this story. This whole movie could be
Speaker 2: made about the guy's career. He was a major drug trafficker.
Speaker 2: Gene Thacker was It's like a Barry Seal sort of story.
Speaker 2: Well he knew Berry Seal. Berry Seal was one of
Speaker 2: his boys. Yeah, Barry Seal, and also Andrew Thornton, the
Speaker 2: guy who Cocaine Bear. The whole Cocaine Bear story is
Speaker 2: like is directly involved in this guy and the Rayfer
Speaker 2: drop zone. This airport that's right on the periphy of
Speaker 2: Port Bragg where Delta does their Halo training and where
Speaker 2: I think maybe the whole greenber maybe you know better
Speaker 2: than I do. Do all the Green Bereys do Halo.
Speaker 2: There is it just Delta.
Speaker 1: No, Mostly they're out at uh McColl jumping. Who's the
Speaker 1: training stuff, and then there's a couple of drop zones
Speaker 1: on brag. But there's also the what is it the
Speaker 1: Paraclet Parachute Club out there.
Speaker 2: That's the private parachuting club that's based there that Levine
Speaker 2: was evidently a member of. Yeah, now I don't have
Speaker 2: any you know, dirt, so to speak on that company.
Speaker 2: I don't know that they had anything to do with anything.
Speaker 2: In fact, Billy worked at this airport. It's all like
Speaker 2: connected in a way where the dots are right next
Speaker 2: to each other, but you can't draw the lines between them. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Levine's last job was working at this airport. He was
Speaker 2: on jump Master order. He was training guys to do hehou.
Speaker 1: And probably the accelerated free fall course that they run
Speaker 1: out there.
Speaker 2: I would imagine that's what it is. He talks about
Speaker 2: it extensively in his memoir and details exactly what his
Speaker 2: job title was. It was something along those lines. But
Speaker 2: this airport in the eighties was a massive center of
Speaker 2: massive drug draffick. I got all these FBI documents that
Speaker 2: talk about Gene Thacker's role in it, but they could
Speaker 2: never catch this guy. I started to admire him in
Speaker 2: a certain way because he was so good at bringing
Speaker 2: you know, hundreds of kilos of coke into the United
Speaker 2: States on these little airplanes that he maintained there right
Speaker 2: by Fort Bragg. At one point, Florida State authorities chase
Speaker 2: him because Thacker was a pilot, and they chase him,
Speaker 2: you know, coming into the country from the Caribbean. But
Speaker 2: then they have to veer off at the end because
Speaker 2: they don't want to enter four bags airspace, and so
Speaker 2: he gets away clean. But you know the cocaine bear story,
Speaker 2: that's that's this is the real story. I mean, I
Speaker 2: have to bury it and foot notes in my book.
Speaker 2: But you see, I can't even talk about this without
Speaker 2: getting sidetracked indefinitely. So let me just say the cocaine
Speaker 2: You know, the cocaine bear story, right, I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't know, but I know the movie, right movie.
Speaker 2: I didn't see the movie, but the bear that overdosed
Speaker 2: in a bunch of cocaine, and.
Speaker 4: I thought I thought it was a fake I thought
Speaker 4: it was just a fiction movie.
Speaker 1: So it was based on reality.
Speaker 2: It's supposedly a true story. In fact, when that movie
Speaker 2: came out, the New York Times and The Washington Post
Speaker 2: both ran stories saying, is the cocaine bear story true? Yesterday?
Speaker 2: Is here's the true story. It was about Andrew Thornton,
Speaker 2: this ex Fort Bragg paratrooper who turned into a drug
Speaker 2: trafficker and was moving all this weight into the US,
Speaker 2: and he threw the coke because what they would do
Speaker 2: is rig the coke with paradrop parag drop whatever, yeah,
Speaker 2: and then come back and get it later. But he
Speaker 2: died on one of his on his last jump. He
Speaker 2: he he parachuted, didn't pull in time, and or something
Speaker 2: happened and he died. And so supposedly a bear got
Speaker 2: into a bunch of the cocaine that he had dropped,
Speaker 2: an overdose and died. But when I really investigated the
Speaker 2: story and went back into the news archives and read
Speaker 2: everything in sequential order about what had been what had
Speaker 2: actually happened, it was crystal clear that that bear thing
Speaker 2: would never happen. And that was a cover story for
Speaker 2: the cops who freaking stole that cocaine and told the
Speaker 2: press that a bear had eaten it. That was their
Speaker 2: cover story. And the medical examiner that the AP interviewed
Speaker 2: this is like nineteen eighty five. He just tells the
Speaker 2: reporters in the room straight up. He's like, yeah, that
Speaker 2: bear didn't eat the cocaine, and the question is where's
Speaker 2: the cocaine. This is only the like the nineteen eighties
Speaker 2: per portion of this story because as you know, Thatcker's son,
Speaker 2: Tim Thacker, who went on to run the airport and
Speaker 2: was a Delta Horce pilot. He was a major drug
Speaker 2: trafficker too, and in fact, North Carolina federal prosecuars in
Speaker 2: North Carolina described him when he was convicted as the
Speaker 2: biggest methamphetamine trafficker in North Carolina street. So this is
Speaker 2: the guy running Delta Force's little airport where Billy Levine works.
Speaker 1: Interesting, and Thacker's still in the clink the sun.
Speaker 2: Oh wait forty years Yeah, yeah, they threw the book
Speaker 2: at him.
Speaker 1: So we can't brush past without talking about this incident
Speaker 1: that happened just in the last couple of years. Where
Speaker 1: was it one of the was it the co pilot
Speaker 1: jumped off the back ramp?
Speaker 2: Right, That's how I got pulled into this airport story
Speaker 2: because in twenty twenty two a guy just literally fell
Speaker 2: out of the sky.
Speaker 1: That's another X Files type Uh yeah, what happened here?
Speaker 2: Right? Yeah? I mean and the NTSP has nothing on that.
Speaker 2: Like they investigated and they ultimately it was just inconclusive.
Speaker 2: He was the pilot for Ramper Aviation, which is a
Speaker 2: country that does a company that does a lot of
Speaker 2: recruiting for it does a lot of contracting for USISK
Speaker 2: and for the Navy Seals. And Charles Crooks was his name.
Speaker 2: He was a young pilot and for some reason they
Speaker 2: were doing I mean, they were flying Special Forces soldiers
Speaker 2: that day, presumably Delta operators on training flights. And one
Speaker 2: of their return flights he just fell out of the
Speaker 2: plane without a parachute. Why nobody can really say. So
Speaker 2: that's the mystery. They got me drawn to this whole
Speaker 2: airport thing. It's really not central to the book, but
Speaker 2: eventually I just use it as an example of how
Speaker 2: Fort Bragg's like this Bermuda Triangle for weird stuff that
Speaker 2: never gets explained exactly. All right, So tell us who
Speaker 2: is Freddie Huff. Freddie Huff, as you know, was a
Speaker 2: North Carolina State trooper who was very good at his job.
Speaker 2: He was like the best at asset forfeiture. He sees
Speaker 2: something like nine million dollars in cash. I've looked at
Speaker 2: these police reports where he's like pulling an inconspicuous Mazda
Speaker 2: minivan over and finding like four hundred thousand dollars in cash,
Speaker 2: like hidden in some secret compartm. He just had the
Speaker 2: knack to do this. But and he was going around
Speaker 2: the country giving lectures an asset forfeiture. He was seconded
Speaker 2: or deputized by the DEA, and the sky seemed to
Speaker 2: be the limit for his law enforcement career until he
Speaker 2: gave a DWI ticket to a guy, an insurance executive
Speaker 2: in North Carolina who is a big donor to the
Speaker 2: governor in North Carolina. That'll do it. That did it
Speaker 2: for Freddy. He was fired before the month was out,
Speaker 2: they said, and they got him for selling a pair
Speaker 2: of state issued shoes on eBay, some complete pretense in
Speaker 2: Freddie's view, which is easy to understand why he would
Speaker 2: think that. And at that point, you know he's unemployed.
Speaker 2: He's totally embittered towards law enforcement. He has all this
Speaker 2: knowledge about the drug trafficking world. He's kind of a
Speaker 2: savant at like detecting smugglers, and he decides, well, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna I'm gonna get into the game myself, and that's
Speaker 2: what he did, and he turned into a massive drug trafficker.
Speaker 1: The way I understood it was that he first started
Speaker 1: like an import export business, I think, selling washers and
Speaker 1: dryers down in Mexico, and then, like a good entrepreneur, thinks,
Speaker 1: what can I bring back with me on the return trip. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he had all this nohow from being a police officer,
Speaker 1: like I was told, he had like a ritual. He
Speaker 1: would get like naked in the hotel room and wipe
Speaker 1: down all the satchels of drugs with pneumonia, like wrap them,
Speaker 1: rub it down again, wrap it again with cellophane. And
Speaker 1: then when he drove through the border, he'd have open
Speaker 1: containers in his car of pneumonia to burn out the
Speaker 1: noses of the dogs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, he shared some of those details with me
Speaker 2: as well, double bagging the bricks and shop towels that
Speaker 2: have been soaked in ammonia. And he also used diversion tactics.
Speaker 2: They would have their associate, himI Rosato, who was also
Speaker 2: convicted with Huff. You know they would have he was
Speaker 2: because Huff did not look like a drug trafficker. He's
Speaker 2: a six foot something white guy, high and tight haircut,
Speaker 2: usually wore a full suit and tie, and he's got
Speaker 2: law enforcement badges, you know, in his wallet, knows how
Speaker 2: to talk to police, et cetera. He does not fit
Speaker 2: the profile. Now his buddy, his plug, himI Rosato, did
Speaker 2: look like a drug trafficker. Fit the stereotype. And what
Speaker 2: they would do is Hi May when they were rolling
Speaker 2: up to the checkpoint, the CBP checkpoint outside Laredo, Hime
Speaker 2: would smoke a joint and just fill up the car
Speaker 2: with smoke, but he would toss it before they got
Speaker 2: to the checkpoint. So when he got there to come
Speaker 2: into the United States, he would roll down the windows
Speaker 2: and like these billows of marijuana smoke like che and
Speaker 2: jump exactly. And so of course officers say step out
Speaker 2: of the car, dude, you know, get the dogs over here.
Speaker 2: They're giving him the fourth degree, but he doesn't have
Speaker 2: anything right and actually smoking weed is decriminalized in Mexico,
Speaker 2: so they don't get him on that side either. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: Freddie Huff just cruises pass with like ten kilos of coke,
Speaker 2: five hundred thousand dollars worth of drugs, you know, and
Speaker 2: they just wave at him. Have a nice day, sir.
Speaker 2: Are you a US citizen? Yes?
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Speaker 1: And so he's bringing this stuff up to North Carolina
Speaker 1: for distribution in the Fort Bragg area.
Speaker 2: Apparently he was the biggest drug dealer in the Carolinas.
Speaker 2: I mean the people that associated with him, they all
Speaker 2: told me Freddie was big man. He was everyone respected him.
Speaker 2: He was hooking up the Bloods and the crips, gangster disciples,
Speaker 2: all the street gangs to operate, like in the Raleigh
Speaker 2: Durham area, in the central part of North Carolina and
Speaker 2: around Fort Bragg. You know, Freddie was the guy. He
Speaker 2: was the one bringing up you know up. There's different
Speaker 2: estimates in federal court documents, but on the outside end
Speaker 2: of it, on the high end, it may have been
Speaker 2: three tons of coke that he smuggled in the US
Speaker 2: in his career.
Speaker 1: And you write about you know how he was almost
Speaker 1: like a little poblo escobar there in North Carolina, like
Speaker 1: he was living large for a while there.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, Apparently he didn't save much of his money.
Speaker 2: He blew it all by his own admission on prostitutes,
Speaker 2: high high priced prostitutes and gambling and then doing a
Speaker 2: cocaine himself.
Speaker 1: That was his downfall, was using his own product.
Speaker 2: Really oh yeah, he admits that that it made him
Speaker 2: super paranoid. You know, I really personally, I've never done cocaine,
Speaker 2: certainly never done it in an extended way. But apparently
Speaker 2: they say that it can make you really paranoid. And
Speaker 2: that's something I've seen again and again in writing this book,
Speaker 2: is the dudes that have a really bad coke problem.
Speaker 2: They ended up super paranoid thinking that people were plotting
Speaker 2: to kill them, and then plotting to kill those other people.
Speaker 2: So it can take you to a dark place. And
Speaker 2: that's what hoppen into Freddie.
Speaker 1: And so, and Freddie was connected to another character here.
Speaker 1: We needed another person. We need to talk about Tim
Speaker 1: Dumas who he was a warrant officer of logistics guy
Speaker 1: for special Forces out of gets out of the military.
Speaker 2: And was he if I understand correctly.
Speaker 1: Was he like Freddie Huff's connection into like the local
Speaker 1: black mafia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I don't know about the black mafia. He
Speaker 2: was his connection to Fort Bragg. Okay, so Timothy Duma
Speaker 2: and a key connection to Billy Levine's murder, which we
Speaker 2: haven't got to yet. We'll walk into that. But Dumas
Speaker 2: was a member of the ninety fifth Civil Affairs Brigade,
Speaker 2: and in my book, that unit comes up again and
Speaker 2: again with their people being involved in some really questionable incidents.
Speaker 1: The Sciots unit down there at Bragg too. Apparently it's
Speaker 1: not the syops units too, also some weird stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah, for sure, the fourth Psychologue Operations Group
Speaker 2: and the eighth definitely. But you know, I've taken heat
Speaker 2: online for people from people because of my characterization of
Speaker 2: the ninety fifth Civil Affairs Brigade, with people saying this
Speaker 2: unit's not even soft, you know, blah blah blah, the
Speaker 2: Civil Affairs like it's a joke. But I have Dumas's
Speaker 2: enlistment record, and I know that he worked with Jaysock.
Speaker 2: He was at the he was part of the Jaysok
Speaker 2: led task force in Afghanistan and during four deployments, and
Speaker 2: he talks, you know, in his separation packet which I've read,
Speaker 2: you know, he talks about his Jaysock deployments and he
Speaker 2: even has email correspondence with the Admiral William McRaven. So
Speaker 2: I don't really, I can't pretend that I understand exactly
Speaker 2: what the ninety fifth does.
Speaker 1: But he got kicked out of the army for getting
Speaker 1: creative with the supply room, right, So he was kicked
Speaker 1: out of the army for drug use. But his separation
Speaker 1: packet makes clear that for the he was a supply officer,
Speaker 1: a yeah, quartermaster. But his separation packet makes clear that
Speaker 1: his entire military career he was losing sensitive items, failing
Speaker 1: to keep track of you know, gear and weapons, and
Speaker 1: basically just stealing stuff. I mean, that's it's well substantiated
Speaker 1: that Dumas was using his position, and also people close
Speaker 1: to him in the same unit, Christopher Mann, someone who
Speaker 1: was never named. People were convicted were charged and convicted
Speaker 1: of stealing millions of dollars worth of military property. So
Speaker 1: it's clear as day that Dumas was also involved in
Speaker 1: that theft, particularly of weapons and diverting weapons to the
Speaker 1: black market, which is another big criminal activity.
Speaker 2: It takes place around for Bragg. However, he was he
Speaker 2: was kicked out of the military for drug use. That
Speaker 2: was like the official reason, but there was more to
Speaker 2: it obviously, And so what is.
Speaker 1: Well, first, let's talk a little bit about a little
Speaker 1: bit more about the association between Dumas and Huff. Those
Speaker 1: guys were like pretty tight and they were doing some
Speaker 1: other nefarious activities together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Huff is trafficking drugs for two years independently,
Speaker 2: and then in twenty eighteen he meets Timothy Dumas and
Speaker 2: the introduction. He was introduced to Dumas as a drug traffer.
Speaker 2: Someone told him, Hey, this guy moves a lot of weight.
Speaker 2: And Dumas told Huff that he was a soldier at
Speaker 2: Fort Bragg and that there was a group of Special
Speaker 2: Forces soldiers at Fort Bragg that were like a little cartel,
Speaker 2: a little gang. That's where the title of the book
Speaker 2: comes from. Billy Levine was one of them. He was
Speaker 2: one of the guys that was working with Dumas. There
Speaker 2: were other people that were part of this group and
Speaker 2: they're distributing tons of drugs on for bragging around it.
Speaker 2: And Huff found this partnership with Dumas to be very
Speaker 2: lucrative because Dumas, you know, it's one thing to traffic
Speaker 2: drugs into the United States. That's hard enough, but then
Speaker 2: you got to sell it right turn into money. That's
Speaker 2: a really hard thing to do. Sometimes you got to
Speaker 2: find buyers, people that can liquidate coke. And that was
Speaker 2: what Dumas was able to do. He was able to
Speaker 2: offload a ton of Freddy's product right onto Fort Bragg, where,
Speaker 2: you know, as I document my book, a lot of
Speaker 2: these guys do cocaine, a surprising himount more than I
Speaker 2: would have guessed. So it's you know, the fact that
Speaker 2: Fort Bragg is this massive drug market is why it
Speaker 2: mattered to Freddy.
Speaker 1: And tell us about these like fake police raids that
Speaker 1: they were doing at times.
Speaker 2: Well, so they both of them are doing tons of
Speaker 2: drugs and getting deeper and deeper into trouble and they
Speaker 2: start having money problems because Freddie made millions of dollars
Speaker 2: when he blew it all on. You know, we already
Speaker 2: we already said what he blew it on. You know
Speaker 2: again by his own admission, he said that the girls
Speaker 2: in aeros dot Com costs seven hundred to twelve hundred
Speaker 2: dollars an hour news to me. So that's where the
Speaker 2: money was going. And they got stolen from by some guy,
Speaker 2: some gangbanger in I think durham Ra or Ralei maybe,
Speaker 2: who stole a bunch of drugs from them, and they
Speaker 2: owed money to some Puerto Rican plug because they were
Speaker 2: also bringing drugs in from the Caribbean. It wasn't just Mexico.
Speaker 2: I don't know if we specified that, but Freddy was
Speaker 2: working with the Lozetto's cartel in Mexico. So they're bringing
Speaker 2: a ton of product from Mexico, but they're also bringing
Speaker 2: it from Puerto Rico. They got behind with their Puerto
Speaker 2: Rican suppliers and believed that the Puerto Ricans were going
Speaker 2: to have them killed, and so in order to get
Speaker 2: their product back, this guy was a street you know,
Speaker 2: street gangster named hundred K was this sort of hood alias.
Speaker 2: This guy steals a bunch of coke from and they're like,
Speaker 2: all right, well, we got to go get it back,
Speaker 2: and so they disguised themselves as US marshals. They got
Speaker 2: they made they fabricated these uniforms and they created a
Speaker 2: police car. They bought it from a police auction left
Speaker 2: it still registered to the state. They had all of it,
Speaker 2: like the versimilitude was very exact. And then they went
Speaker 2: and hidnapped his right hand man, this dude name that
Speaker 2: went by the name Rise, kidnapped him, held him prisoner,
Speaker 2: and told hundred K that they were going to chop
Speaker 2: off his head if they didn't give him the money.
Speaker 2: And so it just goes on and on from there.
Speaker 2: But you know, Huff and Dumas, they were they were
Speaker 2: impersonating police officers. They were breaking into houses, they were
Speaker 2: shooting at people, they were kicking people's door downs, they
Speaker 2: were driving around like they were cops. And you know,
Speaker 2: it pretty clear this wasn't going to last forever. This
Speaker 2: is yeah, things didn't catch.
Speaker 1: Up, like it started starting to catch up with them
Speaker 1: right when I think they hit it was the Mexicans.
Speaker 1: And like the old lady, the mother in the house
Speaker 1: started having like a stroke or a heart attack or something,
Speaker 1: and they had to call an ambulance because they I
Speaker 1: guess there's some honor among thieves. They weren't there to
Speaker 1: kill the old lady, you know.
Speaker 2: I think that, and also I'm sure they didn't mean to.
Speaker 2: But also, Huff, you know, being a police officer, knew
Speaker 2: that he could be charged with murder if that woman
Speaker 2: had died, because she was like flex cuffed and everything. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2: I mean, you flex cuff an old lady robbing her
Speaker 2: house and she dies, you're gonna get charged with murder.
Speaker 2: So Huff, knowing that, uses a drop phone to call
Speaker 2: the emergency services. But what he doesn't realize is that
Speaker 2: there's a hospital like two blocks away. So they immediately
Speaker 2: show up and and like what the phone was. Yet
Speaker 2: something doesn't compute about these guys, maybe the fact that
Speaker 2: they're wearing ski mask and bags of loot over their shoulders.
Speaker 2: And so the cops show up, and Freddy didn't know
Speaker 2: this was possible, but they, you know, they picked up
Speaker 2: the phone that he had wiped, and they're actually able
Speaker 2: to geolocate it and show this phone has been in
Speaker 2: proximity with this phone, and these two phones have been
Speaker 2: moving around the city and so and that other phone's
Speaker 2: in his name, and he was on a federal watch
Speaker 2: list and so that's when the Feds moved in for Freddie.
Speaker 1: Okay, and let's walk this back into like what is
Speaker 1: Billy Levine's association with.
Speaker 2: Dumas they work together dealing drugs in Fayeville, and there's
Speaker 2: strong evidence of that from multiple sources. But Levine was
Speaker 2: also working with civilians to sell drugs. He was working
Speaker 2: with a lot of dealers in and around Bayville. Dumas
Speaker 2: apparently was the biggest. I mean, I should have said
Speaker 2: before Billy's memoir he uses pseudonyms for everybody, so sometimes
Speaker 2: it's hard to tell who he's talking about. And I'm
Speaker 2: still not sure which of the traffickers with whom he's
Speaker 2: working He's what pseudonym he uses for Dumas. I have
Speaker 2: to go through it a few more times and read
Speaker 2: it more carefully. But I've got other eyewitness accounts that
Speaker 2: put them together in the same time, in same place,
Speaker 2: and then obviously they were found dead together. Tell us
Speaker 2: about that. So December second, twenty twenty, is a deer
Speaker 2: hunter walking around Lake MacArthur on Fort Bragg and he
Speaker 2: sees Billy Levine's truck just abandoned in the woods back there,
Speaker 2: and a short distance away, Timothy Dumas is laying on
Speaker 2: the ground, a dead from a gunshot to the forehead.
Speaker 2: Apparently looks like he's been killed execution style, and Levine
Speaker 2: was in the back of his own truck, wrapped up
Speaker 2: in a blanket, having been shot multiple times in the torso.
Speaker 2: So that's the double murder on for Brag that we
Speaker 2: talked about the beginning of this I read about in
Speaker 2: the New York Times and that you heard about right
Speaker 2: away too, And that's when all of this stuff kind
Speaker 2: of started to come to light for the first time
Speaker 2: because prior to that, you know, the fact that Levin
Speaker 2: had been the shooter and the Mark Lesher case was
Speaker 2: not publicly disclosed until Levin himself was killed. Yeah, they
Speaker 2: kept it pretty quiet. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And that's the problem with sweeping problems under the carpet
Speaker 1: is they get worse and worse and worse until you
Speaker 1: can't anymore.
Speaker 2: As bad as the murder of Mark Leshiker was for
Speaker 2: Delta Force, it was way worse when Levine himself turned
Speaker 2: up murder and people started to say, oh, what about
Speaker 2: this guy he killed eighteen months ago? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, uh, I mean someone has been arrested for those
Speaker 1: for those murders.
Speaker 2: Now, who was that?
Speaker 1: And do we have any sort of I guess educated
Speaker 1: opinions or you know, anything you uncovered in this book
Speaker 1: about what actually happened there.
Speaker 2: That arrest of Kenneth Maurice quake really came out of
Speaker 2: left field because there were so many suspects. There's so
Speaker 2: many people who had a motive to kill and Dumas,
Speaker 2: I mean Dumas had was also a guy who was
Speaker 2: who is believed to have killed people. He apparently killed
Speaker 2: a guy named uh named Green, Joey Green aka Joey
Speaker 2: Bananas is identified in the book, and he may have
Speaker 2: done other murders for hire. So Dumas had a lot
Speaker 2: of people who wanted to kill him, and Levigne as well.
Speaker 2: It could have been you know, Mark suspicion. There was
Speaker 2: suspicion initially on Mark Leshiger's former teammates. Want to be clear,
Speaker 2: there's no evidence of that that I ever disclosed or
Speaker 2: that ever uncovered. But people wondered, you know, the fact
Speaker 2: that he killed Mark made people wonder. And apparently these
Speaker 2: guys have some of them had made some threats, so
Speaker 2: their suspicion on them, their suspicion on Billy's cartel associates,
Speaker 2: which his memoir goes deep into. And then finally there's
Speaker 2: a lot of people who thought more conspira more conspiratorial
Speaker 2: minded people you know, believe that someone that his own
Speaker 2: teammates could have done it, that Levine was messing up
Speaker 2: so badly that someone you know on the inside took
Speaker 2: him out. But in twenty twenty three, the Department of
Speaker 2: Justice indicted a twenty year old black kid named Kenneth
Speaker 2: Maurice Quick, who lived two counties away from Fort Bragg,
Speaker 2: has no connections to the military, and was already facing
Speaker 2: life in prison for an unrelated murder. So his trial
Speaker 2: is scheduled to begin in early twenty twenty six. And
Speaker 2: you know, a lot of the sources I interviewed are
Speaker 2: very dismissive of the possibility of his guilt and say,
Speaker 2: you know, couldn't have been him. They're just framing them. Personally,
Speaker 2: I have to believe that the Department of Justice doesn't
Speaker 2: accuse he will or murder lightly. I'm still not at
Speaker 2: the point. Obviously, I'm very critical of many elements of
Speaker 2: the US government in the book, but I am not
Speaker 2: to the point where I believe that the DOJ just
Speaker 2: frames people in order to solve the case. That said,
Speaker 2: if Kenneth Maurice Quick did it, then again, like we
Speaker 2: got to be careful how we talk about this because
Speaker 2: this is a death penalty case that's ongoing, and these
Speaker 2: are real people. I don't want to prejudice the case.
Speaker 2: I don't want to say something that it's not supported
Speaker 2: or what have you. But what I would like to
Speaker 2: know about that case is if Maurice Quick did it.
Speaker 2: If Quick did it, who put him up to it?
Speaker 2: Because he was twenty years old, I guarantee you he
Speaker 2: did not take out these to veteran special operators aged
Speaker 2: thirty seven and forty four, both of whom were really
Speaker 2: serious dudes that you do not want to mess with.
Speaker 2: It would be hard to take out under any circumstances,
Speaker 2: guys who were always armed, who always kept their head
Speaker 2: on the swivel. How he could have done that by
Speaker 2: himself really challenges the imagination. Yeah, yeah, and so I
Speaker 2: hope they will look beyond him and see who might
Speaker 2: have been who might have put him up to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, twenty year old kid out on the drop zone
Speaker 1: at Fort Bragg, killing two.
Speaker 2: Why was he at Fort Bragg? Weird? He has no
Speaker 2: connections to that base. He lived an hour away. He
Speaker 2: had all of his previous arrests, by the way, took
Speaker 2: place in his town of Laurenburg, North Carolina. He had
Speaker 2: been arrested there multiple times and is accused of having
Speaker 2: committed a murder there. At one point he was arrested,
Speaker 2: there was like this shootout of these these a group
Speaker 2: of guys met at this at this trailer to do
Speaker 2: a drug deal and it erupted into a close quarters
Speaker 2: gunfight and there was like three guys laying dead. Kenneth
Speaker 2: Maurice Quick laying there shot several times. Police came arrested him,
Speaker 2: and once he recovered from his wounds, he was charged
Speaker 2: with killing one of those other guys. So I don't
Speaker 2: doubt that he is capable or if everything the police
Speaker 2: alleged about him is true, it seems that he is
Speaker 2: capable of killing somebody. But again, why these guys? Why
Speaker 2: for Bragg? Another thing is the ballistic evidence. Quick was
Speaker 2: arrested like three or four times for an unlawful possession
Speaker 2: of a firearm by a felon, and he always carried
Speaker 2: a glock. He always carried a nine millimeter glock, and
Speaker 2: the weapon that was used to kill Dumas was apparently
Speaker 2: a twenty two or a three eighty. So maybe a
Speaker 2: small detail, but it's one more reason to question like
Speaker 2: what exactly the evidence is against Quick and he's pleaded
Speaker 2: not guilty by the way, which is an important point.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I So one of the big quest inestion that comes
Speaker 1: out of this book for me is what is the
Speaker 1: relationship between special Operations on Fort Bragg and the Cumberland
Speaker 1: County Police. Because the police department gives so many free
Speaker 1: passes to these guys for murder, rape, drug trafficking, I mean,
Speaker 1: really serious crimes, it gets to the point where it's like,
Speaker 1: come on, man, what are we doing here? What's really
Speaker 1: going on here? Is there some sort of money transactional
Speaker 1: relationship happening?
Speaker 2: What is it? Because it doesn't make sense. Yeah, I've
Speaker 2: never seen any evidence of money changing hands. There is
Speaker 2: a lot, you know, we've heard over the years in
Speaker 2: general in the United States, there's a lot of corruption
Speaker 2: in sheriff's departments and among sheriff's deputies, particularly in small towns.
Speaker 2: That said, the dynamic that I see and perceive that
Speaker 2: was explained to me by unit employees like Courtney Williams,
Speaker 2: is that they have processes in place when one of
Speaker 2: their guys turns up in handcuffs. You know, they really
Speaker 2: spring into action and try to make it go away.
Speaker 2: I mean they that's they really do try to make
Speaker 2: it go away. They try to because Delta Force doesn't
Speaker 2: want any press positive or negative. You know this as
Speaker 2: well as I do.
Speaker 1: They what they like probably fear the most is increased
Speaker 1: legislation and increased oversight.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, and they really want to avoid that, right,
Speaker 2: So you can see the incentives that are at work.
Speaker 2: It may not necessarily be that they have such that
Speaker 2: they hold guys like Billy Levine and Chris vayeho and
Speaker 2: Is a high esteem and they want to protect him,
Speaker 2: They want to protect the unit, right, And so it's
Speaker 2: not hard to imagine the power dynamics there because you're
Speaker 2: talking about a relatively small town. You know, the DA
Speaker 2: is just a country lawyer, basically Billy West dealing with Jaysok,
Speaker 2: you know, which is one of the most you know,
Speaker 2: central institutions of the US government with incredible powers that
Speaker 2: we really only know a fraction of.
Speaker 1: So and Freddie Huff is in prison still to this day.
Speaker 1: So and Thacker is still in prison. And the person
Speaker 1: who's been accused of murdering Billy and dumonts or in prison.
Speaker 2: So you know, you.
Speaker 1: Point to Fort Bragg being like, I don't know if
Speaker 1: this is right or not, but you make it sort
Speaker 1: of sound like in your book, like it is this
Speaker 1: sort of like toxic hub of murder and drug trafficking.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's Fort Bragg like uniquely bad by comparison
Speaker 1: to other military installations.
Speaker 2: In your research, I mean it seems that way to me.
Speaker 2: That's exactly what I've been saying all this time, is
Speaker 2: that this is not normal for a military base to
Speaker 2: have this many murders and this many deaths. And people
Speaker 2: will say, well, Fort Bragg's the biggest base, and it is,
Speaker 2: but on a per capitol level still it's much higher
Speaker 2: than any other bases. You know, a soldier dies at
Speaker 2: Fort Bragg every week. That's a really high mortality rate
Speaker 2: when you're talking about a population of fifty thousand young
Speaker 2: men who are all physically fit, like by definition, and
Speaker 2: the primary cause of death is suicide. We know that
Speaker 2: the suicide rate at Fort Bragg is like four times
Speaker 2: a national average and is significantly higher than any other
Speaker 2: military base. There's also a ton of overdoses at Fort Bragg,
Speaker 2: which we have rock solid data from the Department of Defense,
Speaker 2: which Senator Edward Marky secured after reading one of my stories,
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone, he got the Pentagon turnover this data, and
Speaker 2: it shows just what I had alleged, which is at
Speaker 2: the overdose rate there is way higher than any other
Speaker 2: military base in both absolute and per capita terms. Those
Speaker 2: being the two highest causes of death are the most
Speaker 2: frequent causes of death. By itself demonstrates there's a problem
Speaker 2: here with this culture. And then on top of that,
Speaker 2: there's all these unsolved murders. A little harder to quantify,
Speaker 2: but you know, I'm tracking like maybe twenty four cases
Speaker 2: of Fort Bragg soldiers who have been either murdered or
Speaker 2: convicted of murder or charged with murder since twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: Very hard to compare that to other bases because you know,
Speaker 2: I had to piece together this data. There's not like
Speaker 2: a repository of that type of data. But I just
Speaker 2: have there been twenty murders at Fort Hood. I mean,
Speaker 2: I know there were a lot at a certain point,
Speaker 2: there was like six in a row, but I don't
Speaker 2: see it. I think Fort Bragg is pretty unique in
Speaker 2: this regard, and it could use some oversight in this regard.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: response to the book. It's been out for what two
Speaker 1: weeks now, and I mean it's definitely taken off. It's
Speaker 1: gotten a lot of attention, a lot of needed attention.
Speaker 1: I think, what has the response been like from the
Speaker 1: public and from the military community.
Speaker 2: The response has been, on the whole, it's been really positive.
Speaker 2: You know, I thought the book would do well. My
Speaker 2: editor had a lot of confidence in it. None of
Speaker 2: us expected it to be like a massive bestseller, like
Speaker 2: on the top of the New York Times bestseller list,
Speaker 2: and that has really amplified, you know, the response that
Speaker 2: I've gotten from the military community, which actually is and
Speaker 2: a lot of cases, is very positive. I get letters
Speaker 2: or emails and messages every day from veterans who tell
Speaker 2: me more stories, just said that they liked the book,
Speaker 2: they dug it, and they can add this or that.
Speaker 2: But there is a significant component in like the operator community,
Speaker 2: I think, who are really resentful of how adversarial you
Speaker 2: know the book is. What an aggressive line I took
Speaker 2: you against them, which you know I can totally own,
Speaker 2: Like it's not only because of this criminal stuff, but
Speaker 2: also because I strongly oppose the post nine to eleven
Speaker 2: war paradigm that these guys have been front and center
Speaker 2: and prosecuting for years. So I get asked, I do
Speaker 2: get threats, nothing specific so far, but the tempo has
Speaker 2: definitely been increasing. I've seen stuff online that does cause
Speaker 2: me to worry, and my team, you know, all of
Speaker 2: them have I've kind of laughed all the stuff off.
Speaker 2: I've never let that effect anything that I wrote or
Speaker 2: affect anything that I did in any way. But I've
Speaker 2: gotten to the point where so many people have asked me,
Speaker 2: am I not concerned about security that I feel like
Speaker 2: I need to. Yeah, I do need to take measures.
Speaker 2: But before I do any of that stuff, before I
Speaker 2: go into hiding, like what's his name, Salmon Rushti or something,
Speaker 2: I mean, I would just like to I know a
Speaker 2: lot of these guys watch your show, so I would
Speaker 2: liked if any of them are watching these guys that are, allegedly,
Speaker 2: according to these suspicions, that are plotting to like kill me,
Speaker 2: I would just say why, Because you know, I am
Speaker 2: an American patriot. I was born in Texas, and you
Speaker 2: know I went to public school, I went I served
Speaker 2: in the Army, I worked for I was a lawyer.
Speaker 2: I worked for the Texas State government. I Am not
Speaker 2: some wild eyed, crazy, I don't know, woke whatever culture warrior.
Speaker 2: That's not where I'm coming from at this and I
Speaker 2: was never it was never my intention to like throw
Speaker 2: shade on anyone's service. The stuff that I write about
Speaker 2: in the book are crimes. They're serious crimes. You're talking
Speaker 2: about drug trafficking, murder, rape, all this stuff. I'm an
Speaker 2: investigative reporter. That's what I'm supposed to do, especially when
Speaker 2: it's apparently related to this elite military unit. Do I
Speaker 2: not have the right and actually the obligation as a
Speaker 2: reporter to look into this type of stuff? You really
Speaker 2: want me to sugarcoat it and write on every page, well,
Speaker 2: these guys are heroes, and thank them for their service.
Speaker 2: And I just want to talk about these bad apples.
Speaker 2: I don't waste any time with that. I'm just telling
Speaker 2: the story, right. And if guys are so offended by it,
Speaker 2: are they really gonna murder a US journalist on US
Speaker 2: soil to protect their impunity to commit these serious felonies
Speaker 2: like in make our country like a third world country,
Speaker 2: you know where journalists get killed for writing about these
Speaker 2: legitimate stories.
Speaker 1: Like I would point out, you know, Seth Harp did
Speaker 1: not invent the criminal activity that you depict in your book.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not your fault that these things happen.
Speaker 1: You're writing about it and telling people that there's a problem,
Speaker 1: and they need to be told it's a problem because
Speaker 1: they've ignored it over and over and over again.
Speaker 5: Yeah, do you know for a fact that it's that
Speaker 5: it is like operators and soldiers that are doing this
Speaker 5: or is it fanboys that are saying that they are
Speaker 5: because I and not that they wouldn't, you know.
Speaker 4: Not that there aren't guys out there that wouldn't, but
Speaker 4: I know, especially with like Alpha and with Code over Country,
Speaker 4: that that like a lot of the vitriol came from,
Speaker 4: like uh, like the fans, right, the how dare you
Speaker 4: uh talk shit about US service members or Navy seals
Speaker 4: or these brave heroes you know? And I mean I
Speaker 4: would just add on to that that look at if
Speaker 4: if you're if you're a soldier or a veteran or
Speaker 4: even a you know, somebody who admires the military, this
Speaker 4: kind of stuff is important and for you to try
Speaker 4: to shut down a journalist who is writing on this
Speaker 4: stuff again, you know, this isn't like some leftist rant
Speaker 4: about the evils of the US military. This shit, this
Speaker 4: stuff needs to get policed up. Like if you're proud
Speaker 4: of the military, then you should be proud of people
Speaker 4: like Seth who exposed this kind of stuff, because this
Speaker 4: weakens the military. This this you know, these units with
Speaker 4: this highest spree accord in this high you know, level
Speaker 4: of performance should not have these type of people in
Speaker 4: the unit. And you know, and if if like it's
Speaker 4: it's a process of you know, TBIs and post traumatic
Speaker 4: stress and things like that that lead to stuff like this,
Speaker 4: then the command should be sitting up and seeing this
Speaker 4: stuff and not ignoring it until it gets to this point.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, thank you for saying, sodell, I appreciate that.
Speaker 2: And you know a lot of guys will strongly disagree
Speaker 2: with the stuff that I wrote about US foreign policy
Speaker 2: and against foreign wars, and that's okay. It should be
Speaker 2: okay because we have the First Amendment right to talk
Speaker 2: about these things that are important to our country and
Speaker 2: to our government. But there ought to be a confluence
Speaker 2: of interest to at a minimum, wherever you stand on
Speaker 2: that spectrum, you should not want, you know, people in
Speaker 2: units like Delta Force to be committing murders and doing
Speaker 2: drug trafficking and getting away with it. I don't understand
Speaker 2: who that would help or who would stand up in
Speaker 2: defense of that.
Speaker 1: I think this book also comes at kind of an
Speaker 1: interesting period of time where the wars have sort.
Speaker 2: Of wound down.
Speaker 1: You have this population of veterans that are now retiring
Speaker 1: from the military or getting out of the military, and
Speaker 1: they're in civilian life, and they're kind of having to
Speaker 1: process that experience and what it meant to them, what
Speaker 1: it was. As the years go on, you know, you
Speaker 1: see you hit the We're kind of getting to the
Speaker 1: time period where guys find themselves in AA programs, finding
Speaker 1: religion in many cases, like there's a lot it's a
Speaker 1: period of reflection, I think, on the global War on Terror,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of things that happened during the
Speaker 1: war that got swept under the carpet, some ugly stuff
Speaker 1: that's going to come out. It's in this book, it's
Speaker 1: going to come out in other books.
Speaker 2: In Billy Levine's memoir, he describes in three cases committing
Speaker 2: unlawful killings in the course of Delta Force raids, and
Speaker 2: he just mentions it completely in a completely casual way,
Speaker 2: as as if like no one would even question that.
Speaker 2: He doesn't even seem to know what he's saying. I'll
Speaker 2: tell you one example, the twenty fifteen raid that killed
Speaker 2: that Isis financier Abu sayef Oh in Syria. It was
Speaker 2: the first cross border raid I think kind of kicked
Speaker 2: off the US war in Syria against ISIS. So I
Speaker 2: knew he was on that raid because I had his
Speaker 2: enlistened record and the dates matched, so I knew he participated.
Speaker 2: But in his memoir heves an incredible first person account
Speaker 2: of that which is just it's something. It's like nothing
Speaker 2: I've ever seen before, because, as you know, these guys
Speaker 2: don't talk, and they don't write about books, and when
Speaker 2: they do write about it, they don't talk about operational details.
Speaker 2: Billy broke all those rules. And you know, just one
Speaker 2: little thing I can tell you in that raid that
Speaker 2: he recounts, you know, they had orders to take Abusayev alive.
Speaker 2: Now one of the operators ended up shooting him dead
Speaker 2: because apparently he reached for a pistol. According to Levine.
Speaker 2: While that's happening, you know, Levin's clearing another room and
Speaker 2: his dog takes down a guy that's there, and the
Speaker 2: guy has his arm all shredded from being attacked by
Speaker 2: this canine. And this prisoner is brought to Levine unarmed,
Speaker 2: and Levin specifically says that he had his hands up
Speaker 2: by his head, and Levin said that he moved the
Speaker 2: hair out of the guy's face because I guess he
Speaker 2: had long hair, and when he saw that it wasn't
Speaker 2: Abu sayaf, he shot him in the head and killed him.
Speaker 2: And he even said that, you know, his mouth was
Speaker 2: slightly open when he pulled the trigger, and that a
Speaker 2: piece of the guy's brain matter went straight back into
Speaker 2: the back of his throat and he had to spit
Speaker 2: out a piece of this guy's brain. And he just
Speaker 2: describes this totally illegal killing in a casual way that
Speaker 2: makes me think that it must have been routine. I
Speaker 2: don't know to other guys in the unit that they
Speaker 2: are they that casual about executing prisoners, because that totally
Speaker 2: is totally forbidden by the laws of war. And that
Speaker 2: doesn't make me, you know, a Namby Pamby, you know,
Speaker 2: lawyer e guy type of guy to point that out
Speaker 2: that's fundamental that you don't execute prisoners again, it's like,
Speaker 2: do you want our country to be a third world country? Like,
Speaker 2: do you want the military to be a professional military?
Speaker 2: Like I would certainly say yes, you know. So that's
Speaker 2: just one example about some of the reckoning with some
Speaker 2: of the operation.
Speaker 1: One of the other things I was criticized. I saw
Speaker 1: people criticizing you was you know, and Billy allegedly had
Speaker 1: his canine eat the brains of killed enemy apparently, yeah,
Speaker 1: and people were like, oh, that's not true. That well,
Speaker 1: I spoke to the same person you did, and her
Speaker 1: story was exactly the same as what she told you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Nicole Rick. Yeah. Not only that, but people
Speaker 2: jump for some reason, people jumped all over that detail
Speaker 2: to say this must be made up, and therefore the
Speaker 2: whole book's made up. The crazy thing is that I
Speaker 2: don't know if you saw this, but somebody on those
Speaker 2: forums then posted a video shot by a drone that
Speaker 2: shows exactly what I was talking about. It was mind
Speaker 2: blowing to see this emerge. It showed a canine clearly
Speaker 2: marked as like I don't know if it was Delta,
Speaker 2: but it was clearly a Special Operations knine just absolutely
Speaker 2: going to town on a dead body attacking it in
Speaker 2: the head area in a the vicious way that an
Speaker 2: attack dog would do. So it was like visual proof
Speaker 2: of exactly what I wish you were making this stuff up.
Speaker 1: I really do, me too, because it's so painful and
Speaker 1: it's it makes all of us very uncomfortable, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: to have to address it, but again it gets worse
Speaker 1: and worse if you don't.
Speaker 2: You stand up to it and look, that's not necessarily
Speaker 2: you don't have to see that as necessarily as a
Speaker 2: war crime. Like it's an attack dog and the body
Speaker 2: it's a dead body. You know, dogs are gonna be dogs.
Speaker 2: But it illustrates the brutality of the world that these
Speaker 2: guys come up in. And you see that on every
Speaker 2: page of Billy Levine's memoir where he's talking about participating
Speaker 2: in all these raids, and you can just feel like
Speaker 2: that anger and you know, aggression that he later takes
Speaker 2: out on the people. Because I didn't get into the
Speaker 2: half of it unfortunately. I mean, for reading his memoir,
Speaker 2: I realize I only covered about half, maybe let's say
Speaker 2: half of the stuff that he was up to in
Speaker 2: Fayeville in the eighteen months after Mark was murdered. In
Speaker 2: between and when Billy was murdered during that time. This
Speaker 2: guy was out of his fucking mind and he was
Speaker 2: going around armed all the time, he casing civilians houses.
Speaker 2: He was convinced that this person was trying to kill him,
Speaker 2: and that person was trying to kill him. He says
Speaker 2: he was working for the cartel. He says that, you know,
Speaker 2: he says, these guys knew what my skill set was,
Speaker 2: and you know, I proved it to them multiple times.
Speaker 2: He's very broadly hinting at having done murders for hire
Speaker 2: for cartel figures around Fayetteville. And he also describes three
Speaker 2: brutal beatings that he gives people who had stolen drugs
Speaker 2: from him or stolen something else from him. And he
Speaker 2: talks about being like totally covered in blood and beating
Speaker 2: the shit out of a guy with a hammer, and
Speaker 2: like he was like he looks around and he sees
Speaker 2: that everyone is afraid of him because he's got his
Speaker 2: shirt off and he's covered in blood, and he's like
Speaker 2: the writing this is if people are gonna admire this
Speaker 2: about him, Like he doesn't realize that he's lost his mind.
Speaker 2: It's really sad and scary to see, like how far
Speaker 2: off the deep end, he was, Is.
Speaker 4: There anything from the memoir, because because you just recently
Speaker 4: got that after this went pressed, anything from the memoir
Speaker 4: that you wish were in here or that would have
Speaker 4: changed something in here?
Speaker 2: Nothing that would have changed it. I wish all of
Speaker 2: it was in there, because you know, I never met
Speaker 2: Billy Levy and I never talked to them, and now
Speaker 2: here I have one hundred and fifty eight pages in
Speaker 2: his own words, and like, if anything, it just emphasizes
Speaker 2: all the stuff that I wrote. It just puts it
Speaker 2: in even stronger terms to where no one could doubt it,
Speaker 2: you know, hearing it from from the horse's mouth.
Speaker 1: Are there in any of the you know, other criticisms, outrages,
Speaker 1: pushback you've gotten on the book, anything else you'd like
Speaker 1: to respond to or clarify for anyone.
Speaker 2: You know, something I say again and again in interviews,
Speaker 2: I really don't dwell on it. In the book. I
Speaker 2: do write it in two places at least, is it
Speaker 2: I don't allege that everyone in Delta Force is a criminal,
Speaker 2: and I don't think that I write. I quote people
Speaker 2: who say that, like the unit, guys kind of separate
Speaker 2: themselves into the group. There's like the guys who don't drink,
Speaker 2: who are like super Christian warriors for God, who by
Speaker 2: their own lights are ethical people, maybe extremely ethical in
Speaker 2: probably a lot of cases. And then there's the other guys.
Speaker 2: And you know, my book really focuses on the other
Speaker 2: guys because you have to pick a subject, and that's
Speaker 2: clearly you know, it's my job to write about the
Speaker 2: bad guys, not the good ones. Right. But I recognize
Speaker 2: and acknowledge that there are people in these units who
Speaker 2: I disagree with the foreign with you know, the wars
Speaker 2: that they have, that they have fought in and participated
Speaker 2: in them. But I recognize that from their perspective, they are,
Speaker 2: you know, doing the right thing, that they joined the
Speaker 2: military for the right reasons, and that by their own,
Speaker 2: you know, internal standards that comported themselves in an ethical way.
Speaker 2: I've never doubted that, and I am not trying to
Speaker 2: say that every single person who's in Delta Forces like
Speaker 2: Billy Levine. So that's just a clarification that I can't
Speaker 2: make often enough to the guys who think that, you know,
Speaker 2: like I said, throwing shade on all of their service,
Speaker 2: that's not what I know what it's like to be,
Speaker 2: to be young and to think that joining the military
Speaker 2: and join the army and be a cool thing to do.
Speaker 2: That's what I did. And you know, my path diverged
Speaker 2: at a certain point from these guys, but I like
Speaker 2: culturally am sympathetic to them. I come from the same
Speaker 2: sort of cultural place, you know, being from rural Texas
Speaker 2: and so forth. So you know, I'm not the you know,
Speaker 2: the enemy that I think a lot of them. I
Speaker 2: think I think that I am.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's next, I mean, with all the additional stuff
Speaker 1: that's starting to come to light and this trial will
Speaker 1: probably be resolved on six or twenty twenty seven, do
Speaker 1: you think there's a follow up to the Fort braggcartel.
Speaker 2: We'll see. I'll probably write something maybe for Rolling Stone
Speaker 2: about Billy's memoir and about the revelations that it contains,
Speaker 2: how it reflects on the book, the details that it adds,
Speaker 2: and it's a story in its own right, just hearing
Speaker 2: someone who is so damaged like chronicle their own downfall.
Speaker 2: And again, you know, it really points to the people
Speaker 2: who may have been responsible for his death. Levin and
Speaker 2: his memoir says that he was working with the biggest
Speaker 2: drug trafficker in this part of North Carolina and around Bayeville.
Speaker 2: He says he was a Mexican man named Uno, and
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's the name that he actually
Speaker 2: went by or if that's a pseudonym that Billy made up,
Speaker 2: because he calls a lot of people by their pseudonyms.
Speaker 2: So and then you know, the last chapters of his
Speaker 2: he describes him as a short Mexican guy, featherweight, covered
Speaker 2: head to toe with tattoos, but someone who was very fearsome.
Speaker 2: And there's even one scene where he describes this man
Speaker 2: Uno just brutally beating the shit out of a white
Speaker 2: drug dealer with dreadlocks and then standing over him and
Speaker 2: cutting all of his dreadlocks off with a pair of scissors.
Speaker 2: I mean, the under the view of the Fayetteville underworld
Speaker 2: that Billy Levine's memoir presents is truly incredible, surreal. And
Speaker 2: in the last you know, Billy stopped writing this in
Speaker 2: May twenty twenty, so seven months after before he was killed,
Speaker 2: and the final two chapters of his memoir he is
Speaker 2: talking about how this guy who knows trying to kill him,
Speaker 2: and it's hard to say whether that's paranoia or the
Speaker 2: dude really was And did, so there's a lot to
Speaker 2: explore there. I'll probably write an article about that and
Speaker 2: also cover you know, quicks murder trial.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sadly it was sort of scratching the surface, as
Speaker 1: I think you understand. There's like so much.
Speaker 2: More going on there. Yeah, yeah, seems like it. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So people can find the Fort back, the Fort Bragg Caartel.
Speaker 1: It's out now, you can find it. Where should people
Speaker 1: go to look for it?
Speaker 2: Seth anywhere books are sold. I know it's sold out
Speaker 2: in a lot of places. Amazon there's like a three
Speaker 2: week wait. A lot of big bookstores are sold out,
Speaker 2: but the last I checked, you could still get it
Speaker 2: in one to two days from Barnes and Noble other
Speaker 2: online booksellers. Check your local bookstore. You can find a
Speaker 2: copy if you if you make an effort, and they've
Speaker 2: send another order to the printer for more copies. So
Speaker 2: if you can't get it right now, just hold on.
Speaker 2: There's more that are.
Speaker 1: They can also check out the ebook that never outsells.
Speaker 2: I don't encourage any of that. I'm about paper paper
Speaker 2: books exclusively, but if folks want to do that, when
Speaker 2: you get their Kendle, I'm not here to judge. But yeah,
Speaker 2: that's an option, all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's out there if you can't find it in
Speaker 1: the bookshop. Seth anything before we get going, I mean
Speaker 1: anything that I haven't covered or haven't asked you about
Speaker 1: that you want to talk about.
Speaker 2: Not specifically, you know, I'll just say that, you know,
Speaker 2: I call you out in the acknowledgment section of the
Speaker 2: book to talk about your contributions to the investigation. You
Speaker 2: and I talked from time to time while I was
Speaker 2: I appreciate the leads that you gave me, and thanks
Speaker 2: for having me on your show.
Speaker 1: Yeahs coming, absolutely, man. I strongly believe in the kind
Speaker 1: of work that you're doing here. And you know, this
Speaker 1: show is often like almost a celebration of people's military
Speaker 1: service and so many ways, but there are times where
Speaker 1: we do have to talk about the dark side. This book,
Speaker 1: Code over Country, ALP. Yeah, some of these works are important. Also,
Speaker 1: Alpha is a great book, so is Code over Country.
Speaker 1: Both of those books are very well written. I admire
Speaker 1: Matthew Cole and David Phillips very much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they're both good writers.
Speaker 1: So for everyone else out there, thank you for joining
Speaker 1: us tonight. Please go check out Seth's book. There'll be
Speaker 1: links down the description also that you can go and
Speaker 1: click on and we'll see all of you guys next time.
Speaker 2: Hey guys, it's Jack.
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