784: Ramy Romany | Unwrapping the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt

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This episode is sponsored in part by TurboTax. TurboTax has experts who can help relieve you from the stress of taxes and file for you so you can do not taxes with TurboTax. An expert will do your taxes from start to finish, ensuring your taxes are done right guaranteed so you can relax. Feels good to be done with your taxes. Doesn't it come to TurboTax and don't do your taxes? Visit TurboTax dot com to learn more into it. TurboTax full service products only VIDEO Meeting Well, expert does your taxes required to guarantee details at TurboTax.com/ guarantees? This episode is sponsored in part by Care.com. Making Momo. Our two hairless cats are the littlest members of the family. They deserve the best. So when we're out of town, we go on Care.com to find local, experienced and background checked pet caregivers. You can find dog walkers, cat sitters, long or short term care options, all at Care.com slash pets. 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Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash A.I. is where you can find it today on the show Neil Woods, who spent years undercover in the Drug Squad in the UK and now campaigns for the end of the drug war. Quite the 180 there in terms of career. He spent 14 years undercover, so this guy knows what he's talking about will discover how undercover operations work. We'll explore the types of skills of persuasion and manipulation used in undercover work. We'll also hear stories of close calls and epic failures while working undercover. We'll also learn about police corruption, violence, as well as the problems with drug policing and why it's doomed to fail. Lots to cover. Here we go with Neil Wood's. Let's start from the beginning, I've heard you say I was in a very good cop. Why do you say that? I sort of stumbled into policing by accident, really, because I went I went to university by mistake to study business studies, and I remember thinking, why on earth I might study? Why do I choose to study there? So it was terribly boring. I dropped out of university and then couldn't make the mind to what to do and decided to flip a coin. And that took me into applying for the police, but only when I got into the uniform. Did I realize how young I was. I was 19, and I found out I was very sheltered. So the first two years, I mean, I really struggled. You know, I struggled with confrontation. I struggled to learn in this sort of hyper macho environment. And to be fair, I really wasn't very good at it. I just I was just very slow to learn and develop and to be confident in a situation and manage conflict and manage people. It was a real stretch for me, so I only kept going for the first two years just to prove to myself I could survive that first two years. It wasn't. It wasn't a longing for a long career, so to speak. You grew up kind of geeky, self-described geek. I can identify with that. Dungeons and Dragons sense of honor reading a lot sense of duty. Is that why you became a cop in the first place? I mean, you said you flipped a coin, but there has to be a little bit more to it than that or not. I mean, it wasn't the reason why I went into the place. I didn't have a sense of duty or a sense to fight the good fight or anything. It was just it seemed like an adventure. It just seemed like something would be different every day. I developed my sense of duty really after three or four years in the job, you know, I realized, you know, I had a responsibility here. I wasn't just surviving. I actually had to try and do everything I could to do the right thing. And that sort of value system was rooted in all of the geeky literature that I read and all of that sort of stuff that I was into as a kid, really? Did you fit in well with the cops? Because a lot of times self-described Dungeons and Dragons geeks don't always fit in with these sort of dude bro macho cop culture? Maybe it's different in the UK. There was definitely an element of chalk and cheese with policing. What is that? It's got to be a British term. I always forget when I'm speaking to Americans, I come out with all these sayings and I forget that they're very British. Yeah, I mean, I love it, but I don't know what it means. Chalk and cheese can look quite similar. Oh, chalk and cheese, chalk and cheese? Yeah. They can look very similar, but you know, you find out that they're very different when you bite into them. There was an element of chalk and cheese with me and place of surrender. And the one saying, Well, what football team do you support as in soccer? Yeah, for you Americans out there and it says, I don't follow football at all. And he looked at me that seriously and said, Well, what do you talk about? There was a sort of cultural thing. I'm not suggesting that all police officers are boring just into football, but not many of them wants to talk about music and fantasy fiction or science fiction. You know, those kind of things. So yeah, I was a little bit of difference. Yeah, I can imagine. So you're not really fitting in well with the police, but maybe this makes you good at your job later on, or at least less detectable as an undercover. Tell me about the first domestic disturbance call. You went on with a guy that's chasing you with the knife because this is kind of a ridiculous image in my head. It was one of the first calls I went to when I was allowed out on my own without my tutor stood beside me and I was on foot. So I was on my own and on on foot patrol, and I got sent to this domestic dispute and it was a guy actually that I knew because in company with my tutor, we'd arrested him for drink driving. I don't think he was on bail for that at the time. And there was this domestic dispute at this house. It was in the daytime. I knocked on the door and was just screaming, just constant screaming. He was screaming. His wife was screaming. And I went in and he went, You recognise you and. And he reached for a Stanley knife, a short, very sharp, razor sharp blade. There's hardly anything in the room apart from one large sofa and a television and to memory. I don't think it was anything else, but the sofa was in the middle of the room, and I ended up being chased around this sofa by this guy who was drunk and shouting and screaming at me, but chasing me with his knife. And you know, we don't have guns in the U.K. we don't. We don't carry them as police officers. And if they'd required me to carry one, I would have resigned. It's no way I would carry on. So I got my little stick. They gave us for protection, a little truncheon, and I'm thinking, Well, what am I going to do with that? So I carried on running anyway, stopped at one point and he got this knife and he slashed his wrist. Oh wow. And then he slashed his other wrist and said, Right, your next. And then carried on running round after me. But he was getting tired and he was alright. He was drunk already, and obviously he's bleeding and he was bleeding quite a lot. As one does when you slash both of your wrists and start running. Yeah. And by this time, I remember to radio for backup as well. And so eventually some backup got that. But that was an interesting first solo domestic dispute, I would imagine at that point. Do you kind of think, OK, this is what I'm in for, it's going to there's going to be more like this or you thinking that this is a one off? I just got lucky. It was a clear indication that, you know, every day. Going to be unpredictable, but there was still a lot of the unpredictability that still at its core appealed to me. I was just struggling to be good at dealing with it, if that makes sense. You ended up on the Drug Squad during the early 90s, which I don't know if it was the same there, but that was the crack epidemic here in the United States. There was a moral panic about this. Tell me what's going on around this time in the UK and for the police? Yeah. Well, the reason I got a drug squad attachment was because of that moral panic. And the problem we had in the UK is that we didn't we haven't got any crack until the early 90s. So we were having all the tabloid newspapers telling lurid stories about how crack cocaine was destroying neighborhoods in America. You know, we had repeated images of Nancy Reagan telling us that one smoker crack would get you addicted for life. And, you know, I believed all that rubbish at the time. But that was what got me a drug squad attachment because suddenly we got crack cocaine in our inner cities and the public was already whipped up into a frenzy of fear by the newspapers and by the media. So this created a fairly rapid political response. The government instructed the police to make drugs its number one priority above anything above terrorism, above domestic violence above anything, and injected loads of money into policing to do that. And so that's why I, after only four years and got this attachment to the drug squad, which I thought was quite unlikely at the time, to be honest. Tell me about your first undercover drug buy. This is like kind of the beginning of your undercover work in the UK, right? Or at least drug undercover work in the UK. We had undercover work and we'd had it for decades, but certainly the high end undercover work, you know, the verging on spy type undercover work. But the idea of of doing undercover work at a low level, at street level. This was entirely new and it had happened for a long time in the states. But we hadn't done it. So I remember I was only two weeks into my attachment and one of them said one of the drug squad said, Do you want to have a go at buying some crack? I thought, OK. And it gave me a £20 note. They quickly set up and observations points, and I was pointed to this terrace door. And so I went to knock on this door. This huge guy opened and looked at me and said, Who are you? You're not a student. Are you f**king hate students? And then at that moment, it occurred to me. I actually didn't have a cover story. I had no idea who I was, but I thought, Well, I'll do. Yeah, I'm a student. And of course, then I was questioned, Why are you stupid? I've just told you I hate students. But he found it funny and quite quickly agreed to sell me a rock of crack cocaine, gave him a £20, and as I was turning and walking away, he said. You take care now. Don't get yourself arrested, which I thought was quite sweet. It, it really. And so I walked back to the drug squad and said, Yeah, I've got it. I've got my little stone. And that day defined, well, the rest of my life, really. It's it's, you know, it's taken on that long, convoluted journey which has brought me here to to speak to you. But I think the important thing to note from that day was that actually it was really easy. I just knocked on someone's door. He didn't know there was going to be a cop stood on his doorstep at all, so it was easy. But of course, my presence in that marketplace changed things for everybody because he went to prison, and certainly everybody knew there was a new tactic on town. Yeah, he reminds me of that movie with Ricky Gervais The Invention of Lying. Have you seen that movie? Yeah, very clever script. Very good. It is. It's a really just you. You don't say this about movies very often these days. Very unique storyline, right? I mean, the idea behind it for those who don't know Ricky Gervais, he just lies and nobody expects it because there's no such thing as lying in whatever universe he's in. I can't remember the exact reason that this is the case for him, so he's easily able to manipulate people into doing what he wants. And he says, Oh yeah, after you die, you go to heaven and people are like, Wow, you know what happens after you die? So he's going on a world tour. All these talk shows, among other things, where he's the man who knows what happens after you die and nobody expects that he's just making things up. And the reason that this is a parallel for me is nobody's expecting you to be a cop. There's no like, Hey, you're not a cop, are you? There's no suspicion because no one, no police officer during this time is going and trying to buy drugs from drug dealers and then arresting them is not a thing. So you're playing on easy mode for the next bit. Yeah, I would assume that's very well put. Actually, I'm going to I'm going to steal your mind. I'm on easy mode. That's a good. That's a very good, a good way of putting it. But of course, it develops through the levels, so to speak very quickly because, you know, the drug squad's at their eyes lit up. You know, this was a way of of coping with the pressure of needing results from above. You know, this was certainly a way of getting lots of results. So in no time at all, I was working weeks and weeks at a time. Then in no time at all, it was no less than six or seven months. I was doing at a time and I was being loaned out to all of the other truck squads all over England, and it escalated very quickly. It felt like I was struggling to keep up with those level progressions, if that's the way to put it. When you bust someone, don't you have to reveal your identity at some point, either when they get arrested, they figure it out, but also is there not a trial where it's like, Yes, I bought crack from him and I'm a police officer and they're like, Oh, doesn't that compromise your ability to go undercover again? Well, I mean, maybe I pushed my look, maybe because I did it with the space of 14 years. Yeah, you know, I was traveling some distance in between each operation, and I would have a completely different legend. And when I gave evidence in Crown Court, I was always behind a screen, so no one could see me. OK? I would continue to use the pseudonym the same pseudonym. In fact, there was. I remember when I gave evidence in the Crown Court in Leicester, in the city of Leicester. There was a credible threat to my life, so I was having a full surveillance team following me away from the Crown Court to make sure I wasn't being being followed and I was being smuggled in at strange times and in disguises and things like that. So. But, you know, no photographs of me got out and I was successfully moving around from place to place. And obviously that the personality I was betraying each place was different enough that I stayed safe. We don't have that here. You have a right, a constitutional right, essentially to confront your accuser. And so you have to show up and be like, I'm the one who saw him and they had, you know, you have to look them in the eye. There's no screen. Maybe there certain circumstances for minors and things like that, but you're pretty much burned when it comes to this in court here in the United States for different reasons that probably have persisted for a good reason. How do these undercover operations work? I assume you've got to amass some evidence. Do you arrest everyone in one go when you're trying to go up the chain? I assume he didn't just stick with low level dealers, right? You're trying to pull the whole weed out. The job would end when you've got a reasonable chance of when you can be sure that you've caught everyone, you're going to catch and then everyone's arrested in one go. Just to give you an idea of how it set up. So I would be loaned out by a specialist cover policing unit called the East Midlands Special Operations Unit. And I would be loaned out to a particular constabulary, but they would have to set everything up ready for me, so I would have to have a team around me, so I would have to have. This is the way, how it got developed anyway. I would have to have a techie guy, an intel officer, statement person, senior investigating officer, all of these, all of these team around me would have to be set up and they would have to be removed completely from normal policing so they'd be in a separate location, completely coc**ned, not allowed to speak to any of the police at all during the operation. And they would all be shut down the day before I got there and they would be given a briefing. They would be given what's called a lawful order, and they will be told you cannot ask the undercover operative his real name. You cannot ask him where he's from. Don't ask him any personal details. And if you do, you will be disciplined and they have to sign the receipt of this lawful order. So everything was coc**ned completely. And of course, the reason for that is to protect against corruption, to protect my life. But I think it's really worth pointing to. Fact is incredibly important to point out that those kind of safeguards do not exist for anything else, only drugs investigations, which I think is an important observation. Yeah, because of corruption, because of corruption. By doing that, they're acknowledging we can't really trust our own cops because if we could, we wouldn't need this system. The silo system. Exactly. That's a nationally adopted model that has to happen for those kind of operations. So that system in of itself is proof of the level of endemic corruption within policing as a result of our current drug policy. But join me to tell you about one of the one of the operations. Yeah, I've got a bunch of questions about a lot of the operations. I'm curious about how the operations work and you know what the largest bust is in terms of arrests. You know, if you pull out of the whole weed, how big is that weed? Well, I suppose the biggest operation are dead at the end of the operation. Up to seven months, there were 96 people that had gathered evidence against Oh wow, six of them were the main targets, and the main targets were a very infamous gang called the Burger Bar Boys, which you know is a very it's a very British name for an organised crime group. I know it really is. If you ran into a gang named the Burger Bar Boys, it would be from like an 80s music video or something. It's not. But then here they are in the UK, killing people. Probably. Yeah, I mean, the six main targets in that gang, one of them was implicated in seven different murders. He was the person who provided the machine guns for a double murder of two young women. But the intelligence before this was horrific. They were using routine sexual violence, gang rape, cow man kidnappings, maiming all of these kind of things. So they were as brutal at people as I've ever met. I built my legend with these particular people very, very carefully and in a very considered way. And in order to do that, you know, I went into the town where they had where they were operating. And, you know, I look for the most vulnerable people to manipulate the most vulnerable, problematic drug users. And the reason I look for the most vulnerable is because the most vulnerable are the easiest to manipulate. Know, and if that sounds ruthless. Well, of course, it's ruthless. You know, that's the nature of the work, and that's what the work became. But the most vulnerable people tend to have the best connections and I can make them do what I want, really. I can make them jump through hoops and get them to introduce me directly to these various dangerous individuals. But that operation took seven months. As I said, it was 96 people that we had evidence against the six main gangsters, plus 90 of their support staff. You know, the sex workers they were using the runners. People are stashing. But that one was unusual because after those seven months, I knew I'd kill everybody. There was no one else to me. You know, there was no rumors of anybody. There was no nicknames, no names to the people. And it is still me. I've got everyone's phone number. All of the phone data was all all linked up. Everything was corroborated. It was like evidentially tied up, almost with a perfect bow. And so I thought this is going to be spectacularly impact, if so, for the arrest phase of it. When I finished the happiness, once I did my last day, then they go into the arrest phase and I completely step away and there'll be sort of evidential packages created for each target. But there was hundreds of police involved hundreds. All of the surrounding police forces were brought in to help. But after the dust settled for that, I spoke to the intel officer just afterwards and he said to me we managed to interrupt the drug supply in the town of Northampton for a full two hours. So after seven months of work and you know, I was convinced I was going to die on multiple occasions in that operation. In fact, at one point they stripped me at gunpoint. While I say point, I mean, he left it tucked into his trousers, but he showed me the gun to make sure I knew he meant it. Yeah, I was thought I was going to die. Then I was stripped at gunpoint. I was assaulted every single day of those operations, so I was in immediate danger of violence every single day. All of the resources that went into me and the other cops for the sake of interrupting the drug supply for two hours. It's it's astounding, really. That is the reality of trucks policing at every level. The cops are really, really good at catching drug dealers. They're especially good at it in the UK, they're especially good at it in the USA. But that's a significant part of the problem because all you do is you create an opportunity for somebody else. I don't know that it's the back of our boys infamous rivals, the Johnson crew. Another very British name, I suppose. Yeah. I don't know. It's the Johnson crew that took up that opportunity that was created for them. But you so you can sort of picture the scene, can't you? The rival gang girl sat round. One of them comes into the room and says, Put the call in boys, we're going to make a fortune. Guess what the cops have done for us? They've locked up the burger bar boys. Yeah, and no one goes without their drugs from any police activity in the drug market. No one and the police might be really good at catching drug dealers, but the size of the market stays the same, which means all the police are doing is they're changing the shape of that market, constantly changing the shape of that market. It's never an improvement. Man, I just want to comment on a few things here. Ninety six people in an organization, one that's a huge boss, but two that's a big organization. Managing 96 people would be a nightmare when they're all criminals. Sort of by definition, it would be even more difficult, I think, to manage an organization of that size. And yeah, you're right, the rival gang probably rolls in and says all the competition's gone for at least a few months. Roll out all of our runners on all the corners, recruit some new folks, call everybody, you know, and we're just going to take over that network. And of course, the word is going to spread like wildfire among the users because people are going to go, Did you hear our dealer got busted? Don't worry, the Johnson cruise on it. Just go to the same place where you bought yesterday, and there's going to be a different guy there with a different colored hat and you're off to the races. It strikes you is how professional these organizations are, and the cops might be great at their job, but it doesn't make a difference because we're not really attacking the proper part of the problem. I'd love to go back to manipulation for a second here. What made you so good at weaponizing your empathy, so to speak? I suppose that comes back to one of your earlier questions about whether being a geek actually helped me with undercover work because I was I wasn't a very good uniformed cop, but I did take to undercover work like a duck to water. I really did. But in order to learn and adapt because I was given no training so that I wasn't trained to do it, I was literally just making it up as I went along and I, I helped to design the national training for years after I've been doing the work. So there was no training. So for me, it was about learning about the people around me and and listening to them and actually trying to understand what they were feeling, what the motivations were. You know, that's empathy, isn't it? It's tough to try to stand in those shoes. And I went into that work with a very prejudiced view, a very stigmatized view of people who use drugs problematically. I looked down on them. I rarely did. I saw people who were using heroin problematically as someone who who were just stupid enough to tried it in the first place just didn't have the. Will pilots get out of it and tough? That was just awful judgment. But when I realized I spent a lot of time trying to get to some people and every single person who was using drugs problematically, I mean, every single one of them I spoke to was trying to deal with some emotional pain, and almost all of them was. It was from some kind of childhood trauma. You know, I spoke to one young woman who went by the name of Uber and she said, Well, I can stop taking heroin every few weeks. I do. I come off it so it gets cheaper to bring my tolerance down for a couple of weeks, she said. But the trouble is, after two weeks of heroin, I start to feel suicidal again because I can remember how it felt the touch of my uncle's fingernails when he used to sexually abuse me as a little girl. And so for her using her, it was very rational decision, actually very rational. And so it is for a great number of people and in feeling that sort of gut wrenching understanding of that pain and being able to very quickly see that pain in the faces of other people and seeing so many traits in common, I felt immersed in understanding them all. But this is that's the twisted thing, really. And that's why I sort of refer to it as weaponizing empathy, because empathy, traditionally that kind of level of understanding and appreciation for other people's struggles is usually it's used for goods. You know, if you're going out of your way to learn about people, normally there's a positive outcome or there's something positive you can do about it. But I was doing the opposite. I was doing it so that I could manipulate them and get them to do what I want, which, you know, with every passing year that actually became emotionally really difficult for me. So I was crushing my own feelings in this regard in this growing sense of guilt that, you know, these people are hurting and I'm doing nothing to help them. I'm doing everything to hurt them, actually. Right? You're taking away their source of medication. You're possibly putting them in prison. You're pretending to be their friend. I mean, it's it's it's kind of awful if you think about it and I'm sure that you have. Well, it is. But the thing is, but because I believed in the work, right? I believed in the end result, I believed in catching the gangster at the end of the operation. Like I was constantly justifying it to myself, so I would push down my doubts. But it got to. I mean, one particular person I'll tell you about, I got to know. And this was for an operation in the city of Nottingham. And this guy was really useful to me because he was on bail for dealing heroin and he was connected to the periphery of a cartel I was trying to investigate, called the best with cartel headed by this very infamous British gangster called Colin Gun. And this guy Comey, I mean, I spent loads of time with him. I learned that his particular emotional pain was the abuse that he got from his father. Never forget him saying this, he says, Oh yeah, yeah, my dad used to beat me, but only when I deserved it. Oh man, you know, those kind of phrases really, really stuck with me. So I got to know Comey. But I think it's about Comey is he was really good company had this really brilliant observational wit. You know, we could sit together in the street and watch someone go by, and he would just find some piece of comedy in characters, you know, just characters walking by. That was a an appealing trait, you know? And he was good fun, and I enjoyed his company. I went shop lifting with him, stealing from shops. That was great fun, actually. Yeah, I bet, especially because, you know, you're not actually going to get in trouble for it. So it's kind of a thrill that's in a way quite harmless at that point. Yeah, I mean, we take it in turns to be look out and the only way that I won't go into that too much more. But the point is, at the end of the operation again, it was a seven month operation. He did introduce me to a set of lieutenants at one of the main gangsters. But at the end of the operation, he he was also arrested. He was committing offences on bail, which I was. I recorded evidence of. So he ended up getting three and a half years in prison, but he wasn't when he was in the police station. He ended up being on minute to minute watch, suicide watch. And the reason that he was suicidal, as he told the interviewing officers, was because he thought I was his one friend in the world. A man, it never had anyone he could properly talk to about how he was feeling. And he thought finally found someone who was a friend and who he could get on with, and for him that my betrayal was just the last straw and in an extremely difficult life and so tipped him over and he became suicidal. I heard about that again from the Intel guy. He was just filling me in with, you know, what had happened? Not quite sure why he told me that, but he when he told me my world to start spinning, you know, I felt literally nauseous and churning butterflies, and I just felt horrific. Straight away, I thought, Well, I can't do this anymore. I cannot do undercover work anymore. It's just too emotionally difficult. But I got myself manipulated back into it. I got talked into it. It's going back to do the operation for the Berg about boys because the problem is by that point, I become quite a sort of troubleshooter. So if they had already been to undercover operatives trying to get close to the big boys and they hadn't managed it, so I was. Ready to go into that, you know, because that would become, you know, my role to do the difficult, difficult operations. It seems like he started to realize when you're policing, when you're working with these vulnerable people, do you think it's fair to say that one of the worst things to happen to these people was not necessarily the drugs of the drug addiction? Of course, those are terrible, but it seems like meeting you is actually up there alongside those those tragedies. Yeah, that's well put as well. Meeting me really was the worst thing that could possibly happen to these people. The second worst thing was to be exploited by and manipulated by the gangsters. Yeah, but meeting me is the cop. You know, they're looking at time inside. Not only are they looking at time inside, but some of them. Some of the people over time have been desperate not to get a prison sentence too short because if they don't get a long prison sentence, then they're terrified. They're going to be accused of being a police informant, and they're not even going to come out of jail in one piece. I remember actually coming the chap I was talking about, he actually got arrested after I'd been manipulating him for about three or four weeks, and he was becoming really useful to me. But he got arrested and I'm thinking, Oh no, he's on bail. He's going to get remanded in custody. He's not going to get bail. He's not going to come out. I'm going to have to start working on someone else. This is going to set my job back. And then I saw him later on that day, he came out into the street. I thought, Wow, how on earth did he get bail? But I was stood talking to three of his other mates and they were all whispering. How did he get bail? How did he get bail? And he came up and said, I can't believe what's happened today says, I can't f**king believe it. He says I was in those in the cell, and the two bloody drug squad came in and they started offering me a deals and they they said, You need to stop informant for us. And I said, No way, man. And then they said, you can either start telling us things or we'll let people on the street know that you're dead. Oh, man. So I said, So what did you do? And he says, Well, I tell them to stick it there. And he said, there's no way I'm going to start gratitude for that because I don't know, do I? One of them might be working with the same people I work for? I want to go back. You mentioned your skill set. You were a problem solver. I've heard you mention that organized crime, you know, exploits people from dealers to users. You are learning about how these people were exploited. Did that give you more skills to pretend to be exploited in the same way and thus blend in? Does that question make sense? It's a little convoluted. No, that makes sense. It did because I had to play a role, right? Although I have to emphasize I'm not an actor. Undercover work is not acting. Definitely wouldn't have the skills for acting. I had to play a different version of myself, but sometimes that version of myself would be the submissive, exploited character. That would mean that I would allow myself to be exploited to be have a way later on when they say, Hey, go, there's a quarter ounce, you can go and sell lot. You pay me when you sold it. There was sometimes that was the kind of relationship you had to have with the regional managers, so to speak. You know, that's just slightly step up from the street level. That's where the opportunities could come from sometimes. Yeah, that's right. What are the crimes that are the most fun to commit? Was it shoplifting? Was it or was there something else that was better? Well, I mean, I've broken into a car. I've done shoplifting, but that's the only kind of things that I actually did. I mean, at that point, there was a sort of very common sense approach that I knew that anything I did might get questioned in a preliminary hearing. The concern would be whether the evidence would be admissible as a result of what I'd done or not done. So I had to just think through a pragmatic and commonsense lens, but I was just stealing if I've got the intention of eventually returning the goods to the value of the goods. It's not stealing anyway because my intent isn't there, so it's not theft. So I was quite comfortable, really. I didn't really have this kind of strict those kind of strictures or agreements beforehand. The only agreements really that we had and I used to get. Read this by instructions from the senior investigating officer before deployments was a list of things that I must not do, and the number one of those was I must not act as an agent provocateur. That is, to cause somebody to commit a crime that they wouldn't have already committed or to commit a more serious crime than they would have done. That was the absolute. You must never do that. We call that entrapment. I don't know if that's entrapment and you must never, ever do. Yeah, that makes sense. And by the way, if you are thinking of shoplifting and then using the rationale, Oh, I intended to give the goods back later, you better be a cop if you're going to go with that line of reasoning, because I don't think that it works very well for the rest of us. No, no, I don't. I don't think it would. But there's actually a very sinister thing happened in the UK just just last year, and we have a new act of parliament called the Covert Human Intelligence Source Act, and it actually gives a blanket immunity to all state operatives to commit crimes. Blanket immunity. And that includes police informants, which is really sinister, really undemocratic. And that's just happened. Explain that a little bit. Well, it's an act of parliament, which means undercover cops are allowed in advance to be forgiven for any crime that they commit while it's being deployed. Not any crime. It's a win there, including agent provocateur. They even wrote in that and now under the cover up. Tape is allowed to be an agent provocateur as well. Honestly, it's a blanket immunity for crime. That's a terrible idea. It's extraordinary. Yeah, it is. It is. It's extraordinary. But we have extremists in the charge in the UK at the moment. That is such a bad idea. Like, there's a million reasons why that's a bad idea, but the most obvious ones are you can now essentially pressure people into committing crimes that otherwise would not commit crimes, which is the entire reason that that is prohibited. And you're going to end up with police getting vulnerable people like you described and or minor, you know, young people, whatever, for whatever reason, to do things that they would never do and they're going to end up in prison as a result. I can't believe that this past. This is so dumb. I'm shocked to hear that. It is extraordinary, really. It is. Many of us activists tried our best to get it stopped. I gave briefings to parliamentarians in the House of Lords, lots of meetings and briefings to try and explain that this was really bad idea. Explain that from my point of view, that at the peak of my most manipulative undercover career, when I was most driven and most believing in the cause, I quite likely would have steps much further over the lines than I did with this legislation in place. So. And there's certainly plenty of undercover cops, less less ethical than me. So yeah, it's a terrible idea. It's an horrendous idea, but it's Lorna. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Neil Woods. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Angie's List. Angie's List is now Angie. That's Angie. They've made it easier than ever to get all your home projects done right. My 80 year old dad stubbornly refused to hire people to do the yard work, which is drive me nuts. He was getting sunburn every week and spending hours mowing the lawn made absolutely no sense. 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The course is all about improving your relationship building skills. It's not gross. It's not schmaltzy. It's not awkward. There's no cheesy tactics that are going to make you wish you weren't doing the course. It's just going to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend. It's all practical and real, easy to do in just six minutes a day. Many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company. You can find it all again for free at Jordan Harbinger accom course. Now back to Neil Wood's. When you were doing undercover work, did you ever have to try the drugs? It always seems to me like a dealer would want you to do the drugs with them or in front of them at some point. I mean, you can only make excuses for so long, right? Well, not very often, thankfully. Thankfully, I never had to try heroin. That would have been terrifying. I never had to try crack that. Wouldn't it particularly worried me? You wouldn't have been as worried about crack. No, not really. I tried cannabis a few times. OK, but you know, it's just cannabis. And, you know, so I live in California, that's that doesn't even that's not even that's outside the scope of what we're even talking about, in my opinion. But there's two instances where I did particularly notable instances when I used drugs on an operation. And the first one was doing it for about four years. I went into this free party at a free party, which is like a rave party, OK, but it's free, and it was this huge empty premises and I was sent in by the drug squad because they said there were these big hitters coming these gangster dealers. And quite quickly it was it was clear that there was no big hitter criminals there. There was just a room full of hippie ravers, sinister when someone came up to us and said, Hey, do you need some? Do you need some ease? I said, Yeah, and he just gave us to ease. I said, how much? She says, Oh no, no, you can have them. Everything's free in here, man, and have a good time. Yeah. So my colleague and I, she said, there's no way I'm gathering evidence against her. Just no way. I'm just not do it. I'm thinking, You know what? You're right. Let's not. So what should? What should we do? Let's just enjoy it and then describe some like just describe anyone, you know, make it up later. All right. All right. And she says, in fact, let's get stoned. I thought, Well, no. So yeah, we so we got some skunk and some resin, and she may very skillfully made a sort of double blunt. This is your police colleague. Yeah. So we spent the next two to three hours dancing to some fantastic techno. I mean, really marvelous, marvelous underground techno is fun. It was brilliant. And then went back to the squad. And, you know, with the debrief, I thought, Well, this is my undercover career governments. It finished. We just look completely out of it. Well, that's what I thought. But, you know, they didn't bat an eyelid. They didn't say anything. So my career survived, but were great for no. But but another time when I took drugs undercover, it wasn't quite as fun. And the reason for this is that this is a really quite heavy job because I was going into this pop, which is the meeting point between three major cities where organized crime went into this village pub to meet. And there were some really vicious characters in there who were doing massive organized car thefts, antique burglaries, drug dealing, huge operation. And I made a terrible mistake, and that was that I made myself out to be a connoisseur of amphetamines, which I'm not at all. But it just seemed to be something I could talk about. You know, I could talk about Benzedrine, I could talk about refined methamphetamine or whatever. Anyway, the main target of this operation came up to me one day, and he says, Hey, you have got a present for you. And he held up this little see-through ceni bag and it had this rather toxic looking pink goo in it. And he opened the bag and it smelled like the urine from a glue sniffing cat. Oh gosh. And the trouble is, I must have had a moment of reticence flash across my face that he picked up on, you know, there's a high level dude. Yeah. And I saw a moment suspicion flicker across his face before he composed himself. And so I thought, Oh, we've got a bit of suspicion here. I'm going to have to throw water on the suspicion. And in order to do that, I'm going to have to suddenly show a lot of enthusiasm. So I stuck my finger in this bag and got some of it, stuck it in my mouth. It's nasty. Oh, and he said, you're going to need more than that with your tolerance, right? With your tolerance? Yeah, exactly. Oh gosh. Oh my God. So I had another big scoop and put it in and swallowed it. And in no time at all, my stomach was starting to feel quite hot. I was starting to sweat and my heart was starting to go. Anyway, I made my excuses and I got out and I got to the team. I told them what happened and they were all panicking. And how do we need to get you to a doctor? I thought, Well, no, I know. I know enough about the stuff that I'm not going to overdose. You know, you need to take an enormous amount of amphetamine ready to to kill yourself that way, but it wasn't comfortable at all. I mean, this was anxiety inducing. I had to be driven home. I remember on the way home I was thinking, I've got eight cans of beer in my fridge and I can't wait to get that done. I think that's definitely going to take the edge off. Yeah. I'm just being sat at home, finishing the eighth card and feeling no different at all. Still, like jaw clenching, like fist clenching, climbing the wall. I didn't sleep at all for two nights and not much the third night. Oh wow. That's how strong it was. Amphetamine at the time in the UK was on average five percent pure. This was 40 percent pure. Oh my gosh. And that's had a lot. Mind you, mind you, my house has never been so tidy. I was going to say, Man, you're you're probably all your closet had the clothing sorted by color and everything. Like, how did you get the degroote so shiny, I used a toothbrush and a toothpick, my man? Oh my God. Yeah, it was like the farmer self-publishing empty wine bottles. Like why? Why would I do that? Yeah, I want to touch back on corruption. Because you mentioned that the drug squad, you had those ISO, what do you call it? Confidentiality kind of isolation rules. It seems clearly there's corruption, just impossible to prevent, especially when it comes to drugs, because there's just too much money in it. Is that right? We didn't go further, actually and say the drug money corruption is impossible to prevent. It's impossible to fight against. If the drug markets were legally controlled, the finances were legitimate rather than illicit, then organized crime. Corruption would virtually not exist because there is not enough money in the value of the criminality to corrupt our police and criminal justice systems globally. It just isn't. But it's not just the value in the market which causes the corruption, it's actually the mechanism of policing. You mentioned policing increases corruption. Is that because let me just take a stab at this if you bust, let's say the burger bar boys, they might go away. But then the Johnson crew gets more business. So they what? They're more profitable. They have more money to invest in protection and corruption. Is that one of the reasons why this just increases as you police the issue? Yeah, exactly. So once you're one step away from the street and upwards in the pyramid, if the drug market system, then what? Policing more often than not does is it creates monopolies or cooperatives. If anyone's watched the wire, that is a perfect example of how it actually happens. You got cooperatives. It's a good defense against policing, but you know you take out competition. The person is most likely to take up. That gap in the market is a rival gang, so they increase their market share. They have more disposable income. And if organized crime have more disposable income, it will always be invested in corruption. Always. And this pans out at every level, all over the world, and there's some very famous example. So, for example, in Mexico, they used to be 20 cartels. And now there are three cartels, and those cartels have a joke gross domestic product or GDP bigger the most West African countries, those West African countries. Many of them are now narco states because transnational organized crime has completely taken them over. I'm talking about Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal. They've completely taken over because it's much more cost effective to take over an entire government than it is individual customs officers and West Africa has become an important help for the distribution of cocaine. That is only possible because the mechanism of policing thins out the competition. It makes organized crime more efficient. I'll put it this way. Drugs prohibition is the mother of crime and drugs. Policing refines the effectiveness in a sort of Darwinian way of organized crime. That is, while an extremely important point and also really, really highlights the hopelessness. Not that we needed more of highlighting of hopelessness, right? But that really highlights the hopelessness of policing the way that we currently police. That really brings into focus the point I made about the fact that where the cops are really good at catching drug dealers, that is really the problem. Because the better the police are at it, the more that that's superheated and speeds up the process. So, you know, if you had more military, more weapons, more police, more doors kicked in, you're just speeding up that process. You are just super heating it. So you're not only are you creating monopolies, but of course you're also creating violence because if you disrupt the market, you get more violence as well. Tell me a little bit about the corruption that you saw with the police. I'll give you two examples. One is I was doing an operation and I've told you how coc**ned and separate it has to be. One day I almost accidentally bought cocaine of one of the main targets in Leeds and Bradford. Leeds and Bradford is a big conurbation. It's one of the biggest population areas in the UK. Just yeah. Accidentally write direct to the top. Bought some cocaine off all of the big guys in this big BMW Four-by-four thing. And so the intel officer was so excited, he says, Oh, you know, if we could do so much with this, let's get an ops point put out where we know he's hanging out. Let's get some corroborating evidence and I'm saying, hang on. No, I got my cover officer to explain and put my foot down on my behalf. You know, it was like my agent in the the workings of it says, No, don't do that. Promise me you're not going to do that. He says, OK, OK. He says, Look, we're a sell here. We're a sell. We're a sell for a reason. This was on the Friday, the Monday morning. He was very sheepish. He says, Yeah, I know you said, don't do that, but I couldn't help. Just resist, you know, like calling a mate and a proactive unit saying it might be worth you sitting in an observations points out. Anyway, this observation van was put outside this guy's house. Well, no, this guy's house. And after these cops have been in this observation for a few hours, balaclava men rush to it, tied it with rope, pulled petrol all over it and set fire to it. They set fire to the. And with the police inside a few hours after it was there, yeah. Oh my God. Wow, yeah. So did they survive? They did survive. They they managed to get out. None of them were injured. But obviously the message was quite clear. And funnily enough, that main player disappeared. He changed his number instantly. He changed his car. And obviously, the phone number that I'd so worked hard to get the contact that just that all died broke the code, he went outside the bubble. You know, this is going to happen. But there was another one in the operation for Nottingham, the one with coming. The day after coming, it introduced me to one of the lieutenants who interrogated me with a knife pressed into my groin, which is really quite off-putting, to say the least. Yeah. So I've been interrogated by him, and I include that just to show you just how aware my mind was. Because this is in the evening, but I managed to buy crack of him. And then the next morning at an early briefing to my backup team had gone off sick. So I was introduced to two new cops, and this is four and a half months into an operation, which is unsettling. As it was, it was. Yeah, I don't want to be meeting new people. I met the first one shook his hand. Not no problem with him. The second one shook his hand. And, you know, almost literally, the houses went up in the back of my neck. You know, when you've been working undercover for that many weeks, four and a half months by this stage, your sensors are really fine tuned. You know, that turned up to near paranoia level and you're very, very sensitive to nuance in body language. And this guy was just wrong. Really wrong. Didn't even speak to him again. Just went straight to the boss running. It says, Look, boss has no way I can trust this guy I don't want in the operation. I'm not going out on the streets. In fact, ending it now if he's going to be part of it. And he was great, says, yeah, no problem. We'll just run short handed. They don't know anything about the job. They've not been in the briefing. They're all they've been told is to turn up this morning and they might be here for a few months. That's it. So they're excluded now. I just put this on my mind. I was reassured. I knew that he wasn't going to be there. I just got on with my job. But a year later, Nottinghamshire Constabulary in a very brilliant job, not my job. An additional operation. They managed to catch this infamous gangster that I was trying to get close to called Colin Gun and the whole of the best food cartel. At that point, they found out that the police officer that I'd taken exception to was an employee of the gangster Colin Powell, while he was part of the best with cartel. Now he wasn't corrupted while he was in the place, he was paid to join the police and he'd been in the police for seven years. By the time I met him, he could look him up. He was called DCI Charlie Fletcher. When the judge sentenced him, he said, I'm sentence you to a year for every year that you were in the police. So he got seven years in prison, but he was being paid two thousand pounds a month on top of his police wages plus bonuses when he provided good information about what was going on. Now I'd come across corruption and the hints of corruption and things that really looks like corruption so many times that I shouldn't have been surprised. But you know, being that close to me, it's still shocking and unsettling. But in a debrief with the senior cops from AMS, who one of them said to me, Well, what? Say, Look, we know this happens. Of course, this happens with this much money involved. How can it not happen? So it was clear to me then as a senior leader of that covert police group, he was perfectly aware and accepting of that level of corruption as an inevitability from drugs, organised crime. And you know, now I'm part of Leap, the Law Enforcement Action Partnership and the wider worldwide movement. I speak to police all over the world. And I spoke to senior police and it's accepted everywhere. It's understood that this level of corruption is inevitable as a result of the drug policy regime that we have. But the trouble is, this might be understood widely by senior police within covert policing and the covert policing world around the world. But this is something the public needs to understand because the public was better informed about that reality. I believe that we would have policy change quicker. I would imagine through your career, there's been a few times where you other close calls, right? I mean, I would imagine you having bought accidentally, however, that happens. But cocaine from the one guy and they tried to light the van, the surveillance van on fire, that was that could have been you. But have you ever gotten? I mean, you have to wear a wire and a camera at certain points? Has that ever you ever had a close call with that? Because that's something you see often in Hollywood films. Is somebody having a wire enter and talking their way out of it? Or, you know, taking it off in the bathroom before because they have a feeling anything like that in your history? Yeah, unfortunately. I mean, yeah, I did have my wire found it was in Leicester City of Leicester, and it was right near the end of an operation. But I bore of a fairly big hits in gangster fairly early on in the operation, but it stepped away from the streets he wasn't normally hands on. But because it was near the beginning, I hadn't had an. A corroborative footage because you don't wear a camera early, you wear it when you feel pretty confident that people have got to know you. They're not suspicious of you. So we need to get corroborative footage and I kept phoning him up trying to get to buy some products off him. But it would only send Romney wouldn't come out himself, so I thought, Well, I know he's into its clothes. So I got hold of some counterfeit clothing, some counterfeit Stone Island jackets. And so he was interested in not only, but he brought a couple of his gangster mates that had not met before and they turned up and we met in this secluded car park. Now I say secluded, but it was actually really near the the city center of Leicester. But it was sort of like what we call the inner ring road. So it's like a dual carriageway like highway, like a McDonalds to buy in and a big car park. And there was no one else in this car park. You're right. What end of it? And he started looking at the jackets and his mates trying him on and and he says, Are you just telling me these or do you want something? And I said, Well, if you carry why I love it, I love a tow of you. I said, All right. And he got this massive block of cracker like, huge. He's peeling back the cellophane and it's like bigger than a VHS box than are. You're old enough to remember VHS. I'm not sure I am. Yeah, it was huge. Anyway, like a book. It's like a book for kids, but it's not a book. Yes, I think. Or maybe a little smaller in other dimensions. Google is so Tic-Tac it. So he sat in the back in the car and he's trying to cook this little sliver, the pathetic little piece of it of this massive block. But while he's doing that, it's me suddenly looking at me and he's looking at me really strangely. And he says, How long have you known him since I've known him months, I've known you meant something to me. And then then he suddenly pushed me against this fence. It's like a steel triangular, pointy, sharp fence. Big, you know, stuck a security fence, push me back against there and he start feeling my clothes. And it doesn't have to look for very long because I'm wearing like a denim jacket on and my camera is actually in a little hole drilled in the metal bottom of a denim jacket. Now this is two a month and we're not talking James Bond tech here. Once he'd found that camera, there was no doubt what it was winking up at him. You know, a little glistening sort of hole and a little little gem of a camera in there. And he says, Man, he's f**king hate man. And at that point, one of the advantages I quickly realized that I had working undercover is that at the times when I thought I was going to die or I was in serious danger, my surge of adrenaline, which was inevitable, generally gave me a real, serene feeling. It made time slow down, which had the sort of beneficial effect of making me feel like I had all the time in the world to think. And this was an advantage on numerous occasions because I could think, OK, well, I've got to do here, but I've got to do is to stop him convincing him of what he's found. He trusts me. So if I can prevent that communication, interrupt it long enough to get away, I might survive. So I launched into a torrent of abuse. I didn't give him any space to tell his mate. I just said, What the f**k you do in picking up my f**king clothes? What the f**k you? Who the f**k are you? And anyway, it's not even my f**king jacket. A barrage of Jacqui this morning. It was hanging off the back of the chair. So what do I f**king know about this book and jacket anyway? And what you doing picking up my clothes anyway? And I went on and on in this constant stream of abuse without giving him any gaps at all to allow him to explain what he found. It had the secondary effect of him really, this not being what he expected. He was completely stunned by this onslaught and yet clear from the sea, from the look on his face. He's actually starting to even doubt himself like, Oh, surely not the cops not going to do that. I mean, he's actually threatening me. I'm like six foot four and built like a brick s**thouse, and he's the is hitting me as he's swearing at me. No cop wouldn't be that stupid, would they? And I took the jacket as well, and I'm folding up this jacket slowly as I can to make it look like I had all the time in the world and I put in it back in the cellophane all the time shouting this abuse and I start walking as slowly as I can, thinking, Well, if I run, it's like running away from a pack of wolves, they're going to follow you. So I just kept slowly shouting and walking really slowly. I got halfway across the car park thinking while increasing my odds of survival here. Yeah, and then I hear running behind me these footsteps, and I thought, OK, I wonder if I just spin round and I punch hard enough to the first one and then I start running. Maybe I'll go away. So I'm ready to hit him and he I come out and it's the guy that trust me, this guy I've known for months, he says, Oh, don't my ma mate is a dickhead and I says, Yeah, he is a dead cat. Yeah, and he's been picking up my clothes and I don't know what is going on about. So he says, Anyway, don't you on this thing? I don't think, you know, you want to sell me crack now. So I got my toe quit out my pocket and I cannot get even the totally quid. And he gave me the stone. And at this point, his mate still stood at the car, screaming at it. He say, Mate, he's f**king five. Oh, I'm telling you he's. Egmont, and he's like just dismissing him and putting the toe quote in his pocket, and I start walking again and then he goes back and then the shouting and arguing, now their argument and I'm still walking and then I hear the car engine go and this and the wheels screech. I thought, OK, I don't need to walk slowly anymore, and I start sprinting. But by this point, I've got almost to the exit the car park and I'm up to the highway, the dual carriageway and onto the pavement, the sidewalk. So I turn left to start running on the sidewalk and the car came out of the side at the entrance and starts driving at the sidewalk behind me. So now you know they're after you. If they're driving on the sidewalk, yeah, there's no doubt at all. So he's driving after me, but quite near to it. There's a roundabout junction and where the junction is, where the sidewalk meets the the road, there's a steel railing, there's a railing to separate the, you know, to protect the sidewalk. I just got to that point, but there was no room for the car to go further forward and it screeched to hold. And I sort of glance behind me and I think the car must have been no further away than two meters. That's how close I was to being run down by the. So I carried on running a bit, then I got to a crossing on the other side of the roundabout and I saw the car go round and round the roundabout again. Just looking at me, it's going slowly. But by this point I thought, Well, they can't get me now unless they get out the car and start sprinting. So I went back to a walk and I still sort of act it out, you know, like, I don't know what you're on about. Looking at my clothes and staring at it, like, what's he on about, you know? But from there, it was actually easy for me to get to the pedestrian area, which was in the very center of the city where no cars could go. And from that point, I managed to get away and get back to the safe location and go back to a safe location. Did the debrief at all the intel guy, the description of the other gangsters, the number plate of the car, the make and model, and he went away a couple of minutes. He came back, he was laughing. This is what you're laughing. I said, Well, I don't know why they didn't just shoot you because he's got loads of intelligence. They've got a gun in the car. And, you know, we all laughed, were pissed ourselves, laughing at that. It seemed like the funniest thing in the world that they could have just shot me instead of trying to run. But you know, that's where humor becomes the cushion. Yeah. You know, and after those moments, geez, do you think they thought maybe I shouldn't shoot a cop? But then again, they were trying to run you over the car, so I don't know. I don't know if the logic stands. I remember when we did finally have some training to work undercover. We had what we call the level one undercover people. The people who do high end stuff and they were teaching is all about the stated cases. You know, all of the legality and all of the technical stuff that we needed to know. And one of them who I eventually got really friendly with said to me, You know, I think you're all f**king nuts as there is no way you would get me doing the job that you're doing. There's just no way I would do it because I've got backup. I've got backed up legends for a year before I do my work, and all of the people I'm dealing with are all that civilised. They're not stupid enough to murderers if they find us. But the says that you're dealing with on the streets, they'll kill you because they're either stupid or reckless. And that's the point that at that level where you've got that Darwinian thing going on, which has been created by drugs policing, it's the most ruthless and violent survive, and we are literally teaching our young men how to be more ruthless and violent. And so this makes it perpetually more dangerous for everyone on the streets. And that's not just and it's a point that's worth pointing out that yet it became more dangerous for me. But actually, it was my presence on those streets which made it more dangerous for everyone else. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Neil Woods. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Peloton. Trying a new workout is like learning a new skill. It can be overwhelming, and the uncertainty can be a major barrier to actually getting started. Peloton's approach to convenience is very helpful for people who are looking to take on a new fitness skill or routine. Everything is designed to be as simple and streamlined as possible. From the easy to use touchscreen interface to the wide range of class options and personalized recommendations, you can access a variety of live and on demand classes, including cycling, running strength. 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Starbucks ready to drink coffee delivers an uplifting boost that helps you tune into the moments that matter wherever you are. It's Starbucks coffee, conveniently packaged for life on the go, which we now are as the pandemic winds down or whatever it's doing as a dad of two. My hands are literally full. I'm always on the go. Ain't nobody got time to whip up fancy coffee beverages to start the day? I got diapers to change. I got a little teeth to brush. I got tiny buds to wipe. Anybody with kids knows how chaotic mornings are. That's why I love that I can grab a bottled frappuccino chilled coffee drink and have my favorite Starbucks coffee ready to go lubricate those vocal chords. These sweet, sweet vocal chords right before my podcast interview. Like the one you're listening to right now with Neil Wood's We Love the range of Starbucks ready to drink coffee. There's a plethora of options depending on what mood you happen to be in. My go to is the classic chilled cafe latte, but if I'm feeling a little sweet tooth, I reach for that Frappuccino. I'm going to do the long view from here on out chilled coffee drink. And if I need an extra boost to conquer the day I go for the Nitro Cold Brew, but you get to play nice with that stuff. That stuff will take you for a ride if you're not ready for it. We stuck our drink fridge with Starbucks, ready to drink coffee, so it's within arm's reach. Also a perfect treat whenever we have guests over Starbucks coffee ready for right now. Shot the full lineup online or in store wherever you buy groceries. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our sponsors. All of the deals, all the discount codes, all those fancy URLs, you can find them all in one place. Jordan Harbinger Akam Slash deals is where they're at. That page is searchable. Of course, you can always search for any sponsor using the AI chat bot on the website as well over there at Jordan Harbinger Icon. Thank you so much for supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Neil Woods. I think I heard you say that violence is like an insurance policy, because if you get arrested, you're going to write on the person who you are least scared of, not the guy who's going to peel your skin off with a hot knife, but the guy who's maybe just going to like, slap you around or threaten you and has not doesn't have a reputation for being a complete psychopath. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Now, the intelligence war is the most important war part of the war for policing. You know, the police informants are that most important tool in this thing. But the use of police informants that obviously organized crime know that the police is and that's what's created this situation. So yeah, you build up the reputation. So you're not the first person that gets grassed up. You actually take time to torture people to create that reputation. There's a famous gangster in the UK, one of the people he suspected has been an informant. He got witnesses. He caught him. He made him drink petrol. He taunted him, locked him in the boot of the car and then set fire to the car. No one's grasping that man up. No, but that currency of fear has been created by the police use of informants. We need to be seeing it in those terms. We need to be framing it in those terms and and stop treating what the police do as a success because look at the carnage in the wake of these arrests. Look at the carnage in the wake of those drug seizures. When you're on these operations, do you have any sort of panic button for when you get in a tough situation? It doesn't sound like it because you would have used it with the guy who you were selling Stone Island Jackets, which, by the way, I Google, they look really nice. Do you have any way to get back up or is it just they're far away from you? And so it doesn't help. Theoretically, in the rules, we were meant to have backup and backup where they could get to you. But the trouble is that beginning of any operation, I would make it very clear to my backup. I don't ever want to see you. I don't want you anywhere near me. In fact, I don't even want you at all. No disrespect. You know, I don't want you because to me, my biggest risk was my backup doing something which was out of my control, so I didn't want them nearby. But, you know, some operations, I had an open mike. My phone was with some technical equipment so that it also became an open microphone so that I could call for backup. I remember for the pope job, I ended up having to take amphetamine. The signal for that was I would find an ashtray. You know, you could still smoke in pubs and find an ashtray and took it through the nearest window or through the front window because there was an observation points in the front of that. So there were sometimes signals, but for the most part, I was on my own. And despite having got myself into more near-death experiences than I would care to start listing, I still felt safer with the back of being far away. To be honest, I bet. Yeah, especially if they're going to do stuff like, well, you mentioned the corruption and the guy who had to call his friend and set up the observation point. And I mean, it's just at that point. It's like, you don't even really want the risk. They just add risk to the operation more than they had safety from the sound of it. Yeah, absolutely. I prefer to work on my own and I just didn't want anything, anything that was out of my control. I didn't want anything to do with. Although I did, I did work with some brilliant other operatives. The best were always women, but I much prefer to work on my own just because not having to think about someone else is is a bonus. Thinking on your feet is a second to second thing to do. You know you don't want to start second guessing someone else's behaviour. Speaking of violence, tell me about the guy, the samurai sword guy. This is such a ridiculous story. Yeah, this is. Again, this is quite early on. This was in within my first four years and it was in the city of Stoke on Trent, which is a Midland town, very deprived, post-industrial, lots of two up, two down sort of working-class type houses. And I've been buying heroin off this guy and weights of heroin, you know, decent weights of heroin for a few weeks. I remember calling on him one day and the intel guy said, Yeah, he's been wandering between his addresses. He had four different addresses he was operating from. He's been wandering between addresses with a samurai sword, and I thought, Wow, a fine, I'm going to knock on. His door is used to me anyway. I knocked on the door and set the scene, but there's two up, two down, very working class, sort of old fashioned English house. There were two stone steps up, so when I opened the door, he was taller than me. He was further up. I was looking up at him. This is the door opened. He put the samurai sword to my throat and he's screaming at me. I mean, his face was blood red. He says, You're f**king drug squad. You're f**king Drug Squad J.G. I know you are a man. I know. No, you are. I've got. Yeah. And he steps closer to me in the swords closer. I could feel it. Honestly, I thought this was it. I'm going to die. This wasn't just the sword, it was the expression on his face and body language, the saliva flying out at me. And then this woman sort of pops a hat out behind him, and I saw her ahead. She started laughing at her. I thought he was going to say he was dead, thought it was going to admit it, and she was pissing herself, laughing. Then he started laughing. And yeah, he was just joking. But maybe he just wanted to try out his new sword or something. But then, you know, was he joking or was it just his routine? About developing is is reputation and intimidating as regular customers remind me who's boss? Then I ended up having a sort of argument with him as well because I said, Well, if you got if you got half a T, I just want a reasonable little bite of heroin. This is no, I've got anything like that, and I to argue with him about the deals I wanted and I ended up walking away with for £10 deals, which had been hard work to get and I started putting them in the cigarette packet. And as I as I look up, as this guy in front of me and he's got a knife pressing into my, well, no, actually touching me, it's pointing towards my stomach. He's trying to rub me for the heroin. I just want to talk about frying pan of fire in front of the house where you bought the heroin, about the length of forecasts. So really close. Got really close to it. And I just looked up and I thought, No, no way, you know, after what I've just gone through for this heroin, there's just no way you're having it. I sort of started running backwards, fast, as fast as I could, as I was still putting it in the cigarette packet, gripping it. He was obviously struggling a bit. He was. He wasn't very well. He was an unhealthy, problematic heroin user and thankfully I could run faster than him. But as I started running away from, he says, No, no, no, just hang on a minute, come here a minute. Thinking what? No, no, I won't. So I ended up sort of running in a bit reminiscent of the sofa actually from earlier on in my career that a little bit of to and fro through the side of a car. But then again, I just sprinted and he couldn't keep up with me. This is so ridiculous. At what point with the samurai sword up to your neck or a knife at your belly getting robbed of the heroin you just bought? Are you thinking, Well, this was the this was a s**tty choice of careers? Yeah. I mean, to be honest, though, at that point, at that point in my career, I probably had been doing it for three years. I thought it was just a real buzz. I got back to the debrief, to the safe location. And yeah, I could have died, but I was buzzing and and at that point I was I was I was loving, developing in the role I was living, getting better at it. I was loving that sort of personal sense of development where you're improving really rapidly, you know, and that's a that's a very hard thing to experience whatever you're trying to develop. And also, I was developing this reputation of someone who could deal with that kind of thing calmly and as a young man that really boosted by ego. It was sort of boosting my sense of self and I was enjoying it was a heady experience, and it was before I was having the true doubts. It was obviously a long, long time before I would realise how much damage that was doing to my mental health. I had no idea at all the idea of it being undercover as stressful. Maybe the stress is different. It seems like it's already a very lonely experience, and it's even more lonely because the police you worked with could only know your cover identity. You can't even bond with or fraternize with the police you're working with because they don't even know who you really are. Were you able to balance a family life and relationship with give kids or anything or we stick them with cats for now? No, no. I've got three cats now, but yeah, I've got two cats. And at the time, after 1997, I had kids. So in the early 2000s, when I was doing long term work, I would arrange my cover story to give myself time and, you know, do my best to get home every Sunday and take my kids swimming on a Sunday morning, which was a peculiar shift of pace. You know, bet, especially when I was doing jobs like the Nottinghamshire one or the one with the big boys. It was an amazing sense of stress relief, but did I balance it adequately? How to know the is? I also had an abusive relationship. My my wife was abusive. So as peculiar as it sounds, at some low points, it was an escape to get away and stop, you know, going by gangsters. So it was at an odd time. But I did do my absolute best to see my kids and I would spend a lot of time reading them stories at bedtime. It's just that when I was doing very long deployments in that same book, we'd lost quite a long time that I would be reading them if that makes sense. Yeah, it does vary. So you're reading four pages per night, but you only get one night a week. It takes two months to read a book. You forget the beginning by the time you get to the end. I did have long breaks in between a lot of the long operation, so so that helps with the balance I think can croak. Episode six 73. He did. He was undercover with a biker gang, an outlaw biker gang, and he was talking about the stresses of having this stuff bleed into your home life. And he was married to another federal agent. So it wasn't even the lack of understanding. It was just the fact that he would come back after being at a meth binge party where he didn't do the drugs. But I mean, you come back stinky after riding a motorcycle across country with a bunch of thugs and then, you know, you're just a disgusting kind of guy who's been around disgusting people and you have to compartmentalize all that and be a dad to to hopefully normal kids and go to the zoo or whatever he was talking about the difficulty of balancing that, the almost impossibility of balancing that. I know we're running a little bit low on time. I would love to talk a little bit about the effects that this is. Had on you. You mentioned mental health problems from the work. What does that entail? Did you feel it coming on at the time? Is that hindsight? I mean, I didn't feel it coming on at the time, and now I realize that all of those near-death experiences, you know, a point in the summer I saw, it's my sorrow. They've had an impact. But the biggest thing for me is is this profound sense of guilt. You know, the harm that I've caused to other people because, you know, I made a conscious decision to keep doing it, even though I doubt so I'm diagnosed with complex PTSD. And one of the complexities is that I have moral injury. That's a facet of my problems. But no, it didn't start, really, but I didn't have a problem until about 2010. My world started collapsing. I didn't understand why I was feeling the way I was confused. Brain fog, hypervigilance. It just went really downhill. You know, a real crisis and a bit up and down since I escaped my marriage, which helped, but I went downhill. I've had all of the counseling, tried all of the different medications. None of that's really helps. But I'm in a fairly stable, comfortable place at the moment. And part of that is because I manage my time well. And part of that is is in my activism. You know, I'm I'm active and I'm doing something positive to try and deal with the harms that I've caused. That is really useful for me to do. But sometimes, though, I overdo it and work too hard and I have a I can have a really low I collapse, you know, I've had suicidal ideation, but 2018 and all sorts of nasty spirals to go down some days and some weeks can be an incredible struggle. And you know, when you have those attacks of hypervigilance and a sudden attack, it's bizarre because the fear that I feel from my mental health damage is much more extreme than the fear I felt during the events that caused them. It's like a tiger's just jumped out and about to eat me, kind of fair. You know, I didn't feel that level of fear when I was with the big boys. So it's much worse from the mental health. But again, I must apologize to you because I put you off because in December, just gone, I wasn't capable of stringing two sentences together because I was in a very, very low place indeed. To be honest, it's been worth the wait. I'll tell you that, and I'm glad that you are out of that funk, at least for the time being. I mean, no apology necessary. Do you always feel like you're in danger or are you able to relax at some point? I mean, you mentioned not feeling that kind of fear when you're with the burger bar boys, but surely there's some fear for me. I'm not sure I would ever be able to relax. Maybe relaxing is what gets you injured or killed in the first place. At the start of the time when I did the Burger Boys operation, I'd already experienced several instances of obvious corruption, including the one one that I told you about. I didn't trust anything around me, and I was going into this operation because I thought it was the right thing to do to catch these gangsters. But I didn't trust anything, and so I had my own way of sticking two fingers or sticking the middle finger up at the universe and the operation. I use my real name as a pseudonym. I went by the by the pseudonym of Woody, which was almost my real name. And I did that just just as a f**k you to the universe. That's an idea of my mindset at the time because I thought, I can't trust anyone around me. You know, it's clear just how dangerous this operation is, and I'm more I'm in more danger from the corruption that is endemic than I am from the gangsters on the street. So that was my way, was my bravado sort of forcing my way to do it. But for that operation, whereas earlier in my career, I would be able to relax and feel relaxed in everyone's company and manage the risks and not feel in fear all the time for the big boys operation I was, I fell in fear on almost every day. So it was exhausting, really, because, yeah, I was I felt fear and I was pushing through that all the time, you know? And I had many instances during that operation to reinforce that fear and remind me that, yeah, I'm risking a lot here. What was the breaking point for you when you decided that maybe you were the enemy, after all and not the hero in the story? Well, I mean, there were so many of them. There's so many of them. And the trouble is they built up incrementally. So when I force myself to face up to all of my doubts, it came like a tide. I've been pushing them down and every vulnerable person that needed help that I've manipulated. Every time that I carried on going despite my own doubts just hit me like a ton of bricks. But I suppose the instance really was in the town of Brighton, where Brighton had the highest drug death per capita in the country. There was huge numbers of drug deaths from heroin and the drug dealing gangs there, which were from Liverpool and London and Birmingham, and they were in competition. They were using the homeless, the street homeless population, as proxy dealers. But the word on the streets was that some of the people were dying were actually being murdered. They were being given a dodgy dose to kill them because these gangs were saying, Look, you're the nominated person, you're the only person that comes to deal with me, a new deal to everyone else. So you're the only person if I can even see anyone. All when I deal to you, I'm going to kill you. And there were so many instances of people who were the to dealers ended up dead. And everyone on the streets was convinced that there was being casual murders happening. And you know, when I raised this concern and I told him again and again, this is what people were talking about and then another person was found dead. The attitude of the cops that I was working for was, Yeah, well, it's just another junkie in it. Or maybe shoplifting will go down today. And it was quite clear to me, and I'm not saying this about all of the police I work with because there were many cops I worked with who were very kind and very professional. But the attitude amongst those particular cops was horrendous. It was a bullying atmosphere. They tried to bully and intimidate me. And whereas in complete and stark contrast, many of the people that I was getting to know on the streets were fascinating, thoughtful, kind people who just needed some real help. And that contrast was astonishing. It was dramatic. That was the last straw for me, really. The insensitivity, the apparent deaths, the refusal to even consider the possibility that it might be criminal acts causing these deaths. Just the sheer inhumanity, really. And I knew then that I had to do something about it. I had to try and do something about this somehow. I mean, it was a few years before I found Leap and I realized before I found that there was an international organization of people dislike me. But at that point, I knew I had to do something, something the effect of prohibition was to create new drug users. Can you speak to that a little bit because it doesn't really make sense when you first look at it until it's explained, right? It seems like prohibition puts things underground. OK, maybe things are harder to get. Maybe they become more expensive. But how does it lead to more people using the drugs, especially in the UK? OK, so in our history in the UK, we had a system of drug policy which was the opposing view, the opposing worldview to the American version. It was called the British System Capital B Capital S, and the British system held its own for a long time. But the American system was that you should treat addiction as a moral failing and criminalize those people who were addicted to the British system was if you developed a problem with drugs, you went to a doctor and you got some help. Fairly simple, but opposing views. And the British system was entrenched and it worked. Then the Second World War happened, and America became the true superpower because America bankrolled, you know, UK war effort. We only paid that war debt off in 2015. But that meant that U.S. policy was became dominant in every regard, and that includes drug policy. And it's the reason that every country in the world now is the same drug laws because it's dictated by you. U.S. policy. So the British system died with a single conventions in 1961, but the British system? It's lasted a few more years and it lasted until the end of the 1960s, where the doctors were shut down. Everything was criminalized. We have the Misuse of Drugs Act. If we talk about just heroin, the point is the British system ended. There was only one thousand and forty six heroin consumers in the UK, and the number was falling. Doctors were shut down. The market was handed to organised crime. And in less than 15 years, we had 300000 heroin consumers. We caught up with everywhere else that we hadn't had the problem before. You know, the US had had hundreds of thousands in the 1920s, whereas we measured ours in the hundreds. In the 1920s and the 30s and the 40s in the 50s, we went suddenly caught up with the USA and we had all of the organized crime and the crime wave that came with it. All the associated problems now. The reason for that is if a doctor is controlling the supply of heroin, there is no incentive to find new customers. There is no financial incentive at all. There is only the incentive to take care of the health of the customer sat in front of you and to see what else that person might need as soon as the markets undertook organized crime. And there's a massive business incentive to find new customers. Now, there's no shortage of people out there in emotional pain. And for those people with emotional pain, heroin can be quite a useful thing. But the greatest tool that organized crime will use is they will exploit what we call use of dealers, someone who has developed a habit and they'll be encouraged to develop habit big enough to certainly need more money. So then they commit crime and they'll be exploited that way, or they'll be encouraged to find five new customers. OK, if you can find five new customers that'll pay for your habit, and I increase my mark here. And that's what happens. That's the business model. It's like multilevel marketing. It's ridiculous. Yeah, exactly. And mean, but it's but it's, you know, facilitated by the fact that people in emotional pain will find it addictive. And I must emphasize 25 percent of people who use heroin have got a problem with it. That means a 75 percent of people haven't. I mean, they're like casual users. Is that what that means? Yeah, it's obviously much higher than other drugs for all the other drugs. It's about 10 percent. For most drug use, 90 percent of people use drugs don't have any problematic relationship with it at all. The 10 percent that do, it's a sliding scale. Some people need more intervention than others. It's the same for alcohol. So the idea of criminalizing all those people, you know, it makes a nonsense of the need to criminalize and criminalizing doesn't help anyway. So the UK history as regards the end of the British system is a very clear piece of evidence. The disaster, the catastrophe of drug prohibition just creates incentive for more problematic use. Neil, this was incredible and well worth the wait. Thank you for being so open and vulnerable, man. You're a hell of a storyteller to boot, and I really want to thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. I know the listeners appreciate this really, really fascinating, and I hope to meet you in person one day. I think this is really just a knockout episode. Well, thank you very much for inviting me on. It's been lovely to meet you over this computer screen. Apologies again for messing you around with the scheduling, but great. We got to chat eventually, and it's genuinely been really nice meeting you. You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with a former DEA agents that brought down Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. If you've watched the TV show Narcos, these are the real life Steve Murphy and Javier Pena the whole war. Pablo Escobar is based on the extradition Colombia wanted to extradite him, and that's when he started war. Colombia backed down on the extradition. So for me personally, I always thought Pablo would never be taken alive. Here's a guy that's responsible for we estimate 10, 15, maybe 20000 murders bombing of a commercial airline, killing of a presidential candidate, though putting a bomb at the newspaper editor because they wrote a bad story on him. It's outrageous. And there's some people getting killed every day, you know, car bombs 10 to 15 on a daily basis. Yeah, that was his war on Colombia, and it was just all innocent people being at the wrong place at the wrong time. They made it clear to us this is all about killing Pablo Escobar and the real heroes in the search of Pablo Escobar were the Colombian national police are the ones who took down this one. Absolutely. People are still out there that think Pablo Escobar is some kind of hero, but they have no idea what they're talking about when they're talking about, you know, he's a hero or he did this for his community. He didn't do anything. He killed people. What he was and in reality, was a manipulator. He was a master manipulator. Yeah, we understand that we as a world cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem. You know, we cannot put enough people in jail to stop it because there's so many evil people out there waiting to take advantage of you and us. They'll do anything to make money and take advantage of others to hear what it was like to chase the slippery drug kingpin responsible for thousands of deaths. Check out episode 453 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Well, such a good episode is such a good conversation now, this all makes sense to me, right? When you catch a burglar, break ins go down because there's only so many people willing to break into somebody's house and commit that kind of crime. But when you arrest a drug dealer, crime just goes way up because you've created a power vacuum in the market and people are going to fight over that power in the market that market share. There's virtually unlimited number of people who are willing to engage in drug dealing because it's so lucrative. You don't have to be some kind of criminal thug gang member. You can just be somebody who sees a market gap and is willing to break the law to do it. The police corruption that was especially startling. Neal told me that police have pressure to plant evidence and find things because if they raid a place and they don't find anything, it's on them now. That sounds kind of unfair. But Neil did spend 14 years in the police force, so I sort of take this as a very credible thing for him to say. I will never personally forget working for a landlord in Detroit, working with cops to bust drug dealers who are in the building. We would enter the building, we would enter the unit with the landlord and the cops would raid the place and they would split up the take, whether there was cash, guns, drugs, whatever it was, they would throw some of the evidence and they would make everybody take their share if it was weed or other drugs. Because if everybody had to take some, we were all guilty of taking some. So that was kind of how they made sure that nobody snitched. I personally tossed it out the window on the way home. I had no use for that stuff, especially back then, and I'm not putting something in my body that I seized with the police from a random apartment in Detroit. But this was up there. I mean, the amount of corruption I witnessed just personally from the Detroit police in the 90s was quite staggering, and I can believe that it happens in many other locations, especially big cities. Also, Neal was quite clear offline. The war on drugs separates the community and the police because people use drugs. It's a normal human thing. Not that everybody does it, but a whole hell of a lot of non-criminal or non otherwise criminal people do. It alienates the police from the community and murders solve. Rates go way down. It's a kind of a longer process how this happens. But let's just say Mexico right now they solve less than one percent of murders. The United States, it's like 65 percent, which sounds like a lot until you think about before Nixon's war on drugs, it was 85 percent, and that murder assault rate is dropping despite DNA and super advanced forensics cameras everywhere, phones everywhere. So that says a lot. That means the actual drop in investigative capability could be well, is significantly higher. I mean, think about it, it's a drop. Despite all these tools by 20 percent, that's really, really incredible. A lot of that has to do with the fact that the community and the police are now separate entities, and this is a sort of multifaceted problem. But we see new problems cropping up with our police in our communities every single day. If you're paying any attention to the news or social media or I don't know anything going on around you. Neil also blames the way we police for the fact that kids are now selling drugs in the UK. Again, this is UK specific stuff. Crime adapts to policing. Kids aren't in circles with junky drug informants most of the time. You can pay kids less. They're not as suspicious if they're out hanging out in the street. And there's an endless supply of them. They don't know any better. The sentences they get are lower. They can't understand consequences as well. There's a lot of kids out there selling drugs in the US and in the UK right now, and Neil says that that is in part due to the way we police. You're not blaming the actual cops. You saying that policies we have for drugs policing are what make that a sad reality? Big thank you to Neil Woods. All things Neil Woods will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger dot com. Reminder to go. Check out our chat board at Jordan Harbinger.com/ A.I. You can find anything from any episode we've ever done on the show. Pretty cool transcripts are in the show. Notes videos up on YouTube. Advertisers deals. Discount codes All ways to support the show are going to be at Jordan Harbinger.com/ deals. I know I say it all the time, but I'll say it once more. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn, and I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage or bad people, whatever you choose, really and manage relationships using system software and tiny habits over at our six minute networking course. That course is free. Silver, it's over at Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash course I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. Build relationships before you need them. I've taught this to military, government, corporate places I can't even talk about. So if you I know you think I'm awesome at networking already, well, you're still going to learn something because the spy agencies I've talked to certainly didn't have a problem learning something from this. And if you're really bad at it and you think I don't want to go to mixers, I hate stuff like that. Don't worry, this is all online. I designed it for introverts to do from their phone, so no panic. No YMCA mixers were stale cookies and Kool-Aid, and most of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger Jason. Sanderson. Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this shows you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know, maybe a cop or maybe somebody is interested in public policy or just the drug war that would benefit from hearing this. Please share this episode with him. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. 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