00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening un podcast. You can't predict anything presented by on X Hunt creators are the most comprehensive digital mapping system for hunters. Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google play store, nor where you stand with on x. Okay, we're joined by Lieutenant John Norris like Chuck Norris like Chuck Norris. You got it. It's a different spelling, right, and r e s a little different author of Hidden War um reading that book, man. I was reading the book over the weekend. People are gonna figure out what the book is box when we're talking about a bunch, but it's about like the Hidden War is is the war against illegal pot growers, public lands and otherwise just around reading it, I had like a hundred questions come up, and we'll get I want to get into some background on you and stuff. But the main question I think that needs to be dispassed right away is like you're retired now game warden, lieutenant, but you're a game warden. You came out of like bust of people for not having their fishing license, having too many uh, trout the old stringer. How in the world did it become your guy's responsibility to put to like take on like cartel backed illegal growers. I mean, like, why is that not the cops? Yeah, you know, Steve, that is a great question, and that is the question that everyone started ask when we got into this, and you know, like all of us at the table here in the studio, I grew up loving to hunt fish. The outdoors were kind of the spiritual cornerstone where I was at. So when I met a game warden, you know, for the first time in college, I'm like, wow, you know you actually get paid to do this. You know, you're in your patrol truck, You're thirteen miles in the back country checking me and my hiking partner on a lake, and this is fantastic. And all you're doing is you're protecting wildlife. But you're doing as a solo, solo cop. Remember, it was funny reading near bio information that when you grew up hunting fishing, but we're kind of like not really aware that there were game wardens. The craziest thing, Yeah, so I I it was it was so random that I never met a game ward and growing up because I passed hunter safety at nine years old. My dad brought me into Waterfall first. Then it was big game. You know, four or five generations of conservationists from both Montana, California and everywhere in between. And unlike all my colleagues in the academy when I get there, when I'm like twenty years old, they've been you know, seeing game warden since their first deer camp at twelve years old, and they've been you know, going that path. Well, I certainly would have started much earlier and got a whole different direction towards me in a conservation officer had I met one. That was the first time I met one. I was actually in an engineering program at Santos State University and the Silicon Valley and looking at the r OTC Army Special Forces program. And then I'm on a winter break in the first semester engineering school and I'm camped out thirteen miles into the back country with my brother outlaw, my Baja racing partner. We got a pack horse, we don't have all the right gear. We're kind of new to it, you know, and we're soaked. We hiked all night to get to this lake. So we had an illegal fire in the park. We knew it was illegal, but we had a dryer stuff out. We're pretty wet and keep on with this five day hike, and at that time of year, no one's in the back country. This is a Henry Co State Park, a hundred five thousand acres of pristine country, second largest state park in California and all ours. So we were like, yeah, we're in the wide open, you know, like later on where our big hunts would go. And we see this guy coming down on the four by four. Thought he was a park ranger. Turns out he was a game ward and thinking we were poaching blacktail deer deep rhet because the backtail genetics in that park were epic. I mean, I'm talking Boot and Crockett things that just light us up, right. And so he comes down, finds out we're just dumb kids doing a backpack. We're not hunting. And I've been to Zeer for two and a half hours on that lake and my eyes just blew up and my head started spinning. And when he left, my partner jail. So you questioned him. I questioned him, and he's like, I really regret stopping and talking to these dumb kids this long and I was done. I went back as soon as we got out of the woods, and I changed my major criminal justice in biology and learned what a game ward actually did. I said, that's what I'm supposed to do. So I believe that was like the heavens parted, you know, I mean, non cliche, but seriously it was. It was that random. Had I not met him, I would have been on a catch. His name I did, Oh yeah, yeah, it was Henry Coletto. He was a county game ward, not a state game work. But he later was one of the guys I patrolled with when I got back home many years later. You want to you want to run it into it? We worked together. It was it was fantastic. So that's how that went. So but keep going, yeah, like like it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. So when I got the job, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted a bust guys, spotlight and dear taking too many fish, you know. I wanted to do hunter education and train kids. I love teaching, did that early on in my career, developed into teaching super early, did all that stuff. That's why I envisioned game wardens should do. That was the traditional role. And then fast forward to I started Riverside County way down in southern California and wanted to get back home to the Silicon Valley. I did that in about and did all the traditional stuff in my hometown area back in co where I met that game warden patrolled there. Everything was great. And then in two thousand four, um I stumbled onto with a tip from a high school buddy of mine that was now in his master's thesis at San Jose State in fisheries biology, and he was doing a three year study up a real pristine channel at two creeks where they're steelhead trout, re legged yellow legged frog, real pristine, you know, threatening dangerous species. And he hit me up one day in late spring, right after trout opening. He said, Hey, John, this is weird. One of my transset creeks is completely bone dry. I've got no kid, dead fish, dead frogs. But I'm seeing a bunch of like plastic and debris and stuff down at the bottom of the head waters and something's not right. And keep in mind, guys, these are the headwaters of Coyote Creek. What's one of the last viable steelhead migration trout streams in the Silicon Valley where they went Pacific Ocean all the way up and came to spawn. I mean, these fish were so threatened at the time. We only had a couple of thousand of them left in that part of California. They were like valued at like thirty thou dollars of fish by the FETs, so it was pretty sensitive. So I grabbed grabbed my buddy. I said, okay, jump in the truck. I'll be with you early tomorrow. Let's go up to the drop off. I want to drop into the canyon and see what it is. And that whole thing to me was, okay, there's got to be a farmer diverting for you know, agriculture, because it was you know, kind of not a real wet winner, or you know, maybe it's someone diverting a stream with development, which is what we normally see what we call stream bet alteration violations that we did a lot of in California. So that was always your groove, that was part of your mandate to look at that kind of stuff. Absolutely. Yeah, it wasn't just hunting and fishing enforcement and you know, the poaching versus the legitimate conservationist hunter doing it right like all of us. It was. Environmental damage is to water pollution, development getting into creeks, big housing projects, commercial developments. You guys are involved, you guys are not involved in h just general environmental and fractions would be like considered under your enforcement right. And the bigger, the bigger things when it comes to stream alteration, when it's really heavy impacted from developments, it gets into you know, heavy misdemeanors, felonies, civil finds, very complex environmental investigations that people didn't realize Game Morgans did at the time. So we snow go down to this canyon and we go and find this water hose basically diverting what was left of that creek and that's why it was dry three miles below. So I grabbed my buddy, put him behind me. He's an unarmed biologist and civilian like diverted like how like Basically they dam up the creek and this is a small tributary. This is the headwaters of with Steel that channel, so they damn it up. They put a water hose in it, and they're piping the water somewhere and it was kind of weird because it was like a one inch black polly pipe, which we later learned is the cartel's main method what they used to arrogate, you know, this illegal, legitimate poison cannabis. And so I put them behind me my assault rifle. We have no cell coverage, We're deep in the canyon, no radio coverage. We're hiking down this canyon, and all of a sudden, you know, we go two hundred yards down the creek and there's the start of what was a seven thousand you know plant marijuana plant cartel grow that had been in play for probably five six years. No one had any clue what was going on there. That's why that's you know, I said, I'm like boiling over with questions. Keep in mind, you gotta walk me through, Like how is that possible? That's what I was asking myself, you know. And I still to this day, after doing five hundred plus of these missions and spend the last fifteen years of my career dedicated to the kind of a special operations side of what it took to catch these guys and deal with them safely. It's baffling to think that, and keep in mind, these guys doing it you know, I mean, this isn't you know, a legitimate enterprise. These are cartel gunmen. They're classified as to portable felons, you know, um south of the border. They're on watch list internationally because they've got his streams of narcotics, trafficking, murder, uh you know, environmental destruction, human trafficking, assault, you name it. And those are some of their best growers in their heavily arms. So these guys have already been imported here illegally, smuggled across the border and they've embedded. You've found they they've smuggled across the border to do this job. Yeah, yeah, basically exactly exactly. And we as we get further into it and hidden more really goes into what we learned later on since my first book, Warren in the Woods, of how easy it is from to get here, how you know, involved business wise, the infrastructure of the cartel organizations are and how many are really you know, spread out through not only California, the epicenter of the weed part of what they do, but the method and phetamine production nationally, human trafficking, uh, you know, the synthetic heroine fent and all that's poisoning a lot of people and killing them. There's certainly environmental damages to our public lands and some of those crimes, but the poison cannabis thing is what is just devastating, and well we get more into that, but yeah, so when but back to this, So you guys come down and you say it's seven thousand plants, seven thousand plants kind of public to I want to know why it's poison cannabis. It's we're gonna talk, okay that and I think, yeah, well no, no, but but yeah, let's get through that right away, because yeah, why why are you're saying because you're not using it like a euphemism. It's not a euphemism at all. But what I want to that I need to get this though, Yeah, how many acres is seven thousand plants? They were spread out over probably four or five acres on that particular grow. Because if it's not, how are the people not every couple of days wandering through here? That's a super good question because some of what they do is they're on a lot of public land areas, but more remote tracks, like they're going right into deep canyons that most people don't go into in a park that are just hiking recreationally, but you know who's running into them, Guys like you and me, all of us here that are going for that really pristine trout stream. We're doing a deep back country you know, deer hunt, and we're gonna go to a water hole and we're gonna backtrack tracks and we're gonna look for drops, you know, offseason all that stuff. And so either no one finds them, because it's an area of land that might not be easily accessible. Only the hardcorees get there, and so it's anglers and hunters that find it, or it's a guy like my partner that was doing a bio study. He was a hunter himself and just happened to be in that canyon all the time, and they were kind of keeping out the public for this study area. So he was like he was a facilitating the secret and like unintentional, unintentional, and he was in there. This was like the third year of a five year study he was doing for this thesis, and you know, I love the critters and was freaked out. So none of us had any idea when we walked into and they feel it had been there, had been hiding there how long at least five years. And I'll get into a little more in the story as to why we knew that. And when we go down the canyon and we see the plan and don't forget your honest question. Yeah we're gonna get yeah, the poison thing, and we see I should go back to that because there's so many issues. Just get fired up. Now we're getting back, we're getting backed up. All right, we'll dig out. I love it when I talked poison cannabis. I got to make a very clear distinction between the legitimate cannabis industry that's doing you know, they're growing dispensary quality marijuana that's legally used by recreational users where it's allowed, like California's a regulated state now where I just retired from, and Montana's a regulated state where we're all from here, my our home state of Michigan, home state of Michigan. There go Steve, right, and so you know, and and actually what we're going to get into and I go into this at the very end of Hidden More, especially chapter ten, when I talk about moving forward with regulation and what are the issues on things like public land, environmental crimes. But we actually have the legitimate cannabis industry making pure product, calling us their Earth Warriors, my tactical unit called Earth Warriors. It's kind of not the term I would normally think of from a special operations background, running with retired seals on my team and swat guys and snipers and we're all hunters like myself. But they like what we're doing, you know, and and we like to support their given us. And where it was used to be handcuffs, they've turned to handshakes with the legitimate side of the industry that's really trying to do it right. And there are environmental stewards and we found a percentage of growers all over California that are as deeply environmentally protective as we are. Know they protect their water, they can serve it. So they're saying they don't put out as you'll explain in Discriminate Wildlife poisons. Yeah, and booby traps book full of pictures of like dead mountain lions and bears and littered around these growth sites from them like poisoning up poisoning wildlife because I imagine it gets into the crops. Oh, it totally does. And when I go into poison cannabis. That's exactly what I'm saying, these band toxics that these cartel guys bring across the border. She can't get it in America anymore. It was banned by the e p A fifteen years ago because so toxic and the products called carbo furan um. There's all kinds of derivative trade names meta faus, q fur and furdan. But there's all these different derivatives and they have to get it in Mexico because in third world countries don't have the environmental regulations we do. It's still produced. It was designed as an insecticide rodentious side, I say, kill anything aside um to be deluded into like five thousand gallons of water with one twelve ounce container. It's kind of crystalline. And even that was considered so toxic and harmful if it was put on crops to keep animals and insects and every off by the e p A, they banned it. What the cartel growers do, guys, is they diluted with three to five gallons at the most. So this stuff to tea spoons, no joke. A black, big three pound black bear comes into a grow site, gets to a plant, and these guys have it all over the bud, all over the flour, all over on the soil around the plants, and in the waterways directly, and they'll put it out in tunicans like little traps for animals because they don't want anything touching that potentially four thousand dollar black market profit plant. So a black bear ingested, and the picture in my book of that big black bear, Steve was exactly that went in licked up a couple of drops of this that they put in a tunican is like a little perimeter defense. And she died like a couple of minutes later, and just keeled over and she was done. And then her fifty pound cub that also was with her, she was she had a single baby and justested the same poison, didn't die as quickly. And the other picture that's superimposed in that color section of the book is the cub up in the view of the tree, got scared when above mama and I, you know, strung out about ten feet above her mother, a little fit kipoun cub. And you know, I kind of say, it doesn't matter where you sit on the conservation. Preservation, hunt, don't hunt animal rights. You know where we sit opposite of that. Nobody wants to see an animal die that way. So it's just horrendous. No animals should ever be poisoned that way. It's just it's disgusting. And so, you know, I mean when I present on this and I talk about this, whether it's a law enforcement group, of kids, group of political group, a good conservation group like we all here are here, you know, are going to animal rights group, talk to humane society, the Mountain Lion Society. I've been all over those traditionally left groups societies and they see that and they go, we need to support your efforts. You know, let's forget where we sit on this spectrum. Let's unify. Let's fund this to get the clean up done that we need to do. Make sure you guys are doing this thing safe because the violence we've been involved in, the gunfights, my partner almost getting shot and killed in the Silicon Valley. We got some stuff we could share that's crazy to see how violent these guys are. And not only to tactically trained, specialized law enforcement team like we developed into, but what if you were you know, you were on a private, you know, public hunt doing a d I y style and you run across this, you know, I mean, most hunters are equipped to deal with it and get out safely. But we've been up against some pretty crazy guys and so that's the poison cannabis we're dealing with. And the problem with that stuff. What's so nasty about it is this issue doesn't get out, you know, really far enough. I mean I wrote the first book on the topic back in two thousand and ten. We did three years of reality TV with Wild Justice, the first game ward in reality TV on on National Geographic, which was good because it showed you what game wardens do, the diversity of what we do. We're not just checking fishing licenses, you know, and closing the gate and locking, you know, locking up a park at night. We're doing some you know, legitimate, diverse law enforcement stuff. But it exposes issue a little bit. So we've been talking about it for ten years. It's been on worldwide television, it's been in one book. Now Hidden More comes out and I'm still shocked by how many people we'll get the new book. We launched an n r A annual with all Over North being a primary endorser of it, and all these A hunter himself. I didn't know that, and after he read and endorsed it, he told me, he goes, I had no idea. You know, I spent my entire military career fighting foreign drug problems from infiltrating our domestic lands. And we got a team of game wardens and other law enforcement guys, and especially you guys had to get specialized a game wards to fight this and protect our wildlife too, and being a hunter. And he wasn't even fully aware. So when you look at that aspect of it, um the growers are still insulated, not only in California but in the rest of America, and not enough people know about this. So the poison cannabis is going all over the Midwest on the black market, the Eastern Seaboard, um all over the country and being sold on the black markets, being slowed as a pure product. It's getting into that black market that isn't regulated versus a legitimate dispensary. That was that was one of the things I wanted to ask about, and we might aso try to dispatch with that early on. We're all turkey hunt in California, not on public man but on private land front of mine's place, and I was telling her and we noticed the piping all over the damn place you were on one. Yeah, well, because they have her. My friend, a woman I went to graduate school with. Her family had her dad had run cattle and he was a large animal vat and he started he got older and kind of got away from running cattle, and so some of their properties went like relatively unvisited and no one was actually work in the land, and um, so there wasn't a constant presence out there. And I brought up to her like you see this pipe in weird places, and she was always as, it's just people to sneak in to grow. And at this time, uh weed was already legal in California. So it raised the question, why if if you legalize weed in the state, why is there still an incentive Like how did it even come up? The people are still secretly growing and why why would they need to grow on public land? Why don't they like buy property and just grow eat. Yeah, and then why you need to sneak in somewhere and do it on the slot it's it gets down. That's a that's a really good question. And everybody thought that when we regulated in California, and Prop. Sixty fourth recreational did all these medical laws. Other states did it too. That Okay, that's going to stop the black market. Now it's legal. It's no big deal. And it was like a really common argument. It's the main argument here for legalizing drugs. It totally is brother. And here's the problem the backlash. What people don't realize when you dig deeper into it is once you regulate, there's inspections, there's permits you've gotta get, there's fees to that. You're now on big Brother's radar. Right, you're on the governmental radar. So you're gonna be inspected. You've gotta keep your private land grow site open to inspection. Your dispensaries are open to inspection. Use e P A band poison, Yeah, I can't do that. Can't use I mean, the the purification standards on cannabis legitimately now. And I'm gonna take California as an example because I just came from that state and was part of seeing regulation and you know, kind of trying to preach the message of hey, guys, if we're gonna regulate, great, that's the choice of the voters. That's how the legislature is gonna go regardless of what my thoughts are in at that's what we're gonna do. Let's just do it right. Let's make sure we break the back of the black market and don't facilitate more black market. Well in California is an example. When they legitimized recreational marijuana and then all the new medical laws started to come in. They took public land trespass growing, which is cartels from Mexico, from a felony to a misdemeanor. And if you were now check this out guys too, on this fact, if you're a juvenile, and a lot of these guys are juveniles because they're coming up generationally to be trained. You know, they're under eighteen, but they're formidable they're growing. Now, that's a misdemeanor to an infraction for these young growers that are with You know a guy that's a grow boss, we call him and you know he's he's vetted. And these are guys that you know, they're not just random guys coming up trying to make a quick buck because of the living conditions in Mexico. These guys are vetted grow bosses that got their vettedness by doing this successfully diverting water, hiding it from the federal allies, being successful at getting you know, big harvest out and not getting busted. Then they get brought up here because they're basically vetted journeyman that know what they're doing and they're good a lot of them. You read the stories in the book and see some of the pictures of the booby traps and the camouflage that you know the same the like the pungee stick traps. Isn't that crazy? Yeah? Sold one where we just where is it going? Are people and other people in California they're going to a dispensary and they're thinking they're buying like healthy, high quality, clean whatever, regulated inspected weed, and they're buying stuff that's laced with wildlife poisons or going to other states all together. It's sometimes being just like you said, Stevens, sometimes being utilized into dispensaries, you know, and and and masked in that. Fortunately not in super large quantities that we've seen out there but in California, but a majority of it just goes back east and gets into the black market Middle America, illegal states, illegal states, Middle America where kid is have no access medical patients seaboard states like Chicago, New York. It's going everywhere, and I mean we produce you know where I came from in California is eight of the entire nation's black market marijuana resent in private land or this public land thing. But the thing that's also interesting is even though Weed is the one of only six Mediterranean climates on the globe, so it's great growing. That's why it's the Weed state. And we February and almost December outdoors if we have a mile winner um. All those other states that are still involved in it, that still have a cartel presence just for the cannabis side of what they do is still like twenty seven states where it's to a lesser extent being grown on public lands by the cartels, but definitely not the magnitude that we saw in California. So yeah, I mean the biggest thing is is if you're gonna if your cannabis user, be careful. You know, you don't want to be one ingesting toxic poisons that eventually will kill you or the people that you're associated with. But also I don't think anybody that's a legitimate cannabis user wants to be complicit in buy into that black market, especially from you know, a foreign presence. It's you know, not regulated, not supposed to be here with the fast. I don't think people think about it too much, don't they don't. I don't think I wait to say something only people think about that because I don't think people that buy um, people that are buying like hard drugs out of Central and South America, I don't think that they're really cognizant of the blood bath that they fuel. They're not. They're not. If you told them, they're not going to care. You can take it outside of drugs too, I mean, take milk, for example. Do people really think about where that comes from? Point people like? But but I don't think the dairy farmers are going down, moaning each other down and killing hundreds of thousand, tens of thousands of innocent individuals. Not not at all. But there could be environmental damage, there could be others, you know, different man to buy definitely have to buy hard drugs out of Central and South America. You are, uh. My point is that people are very easy to sort of gloss over. No I gloss all overall. I'm I'm not passing judgment. I clossed over all kinds doing real quick. Why uh, why grow in California instead of just going south of the border and bringing it. That's a good question, that's a great question. And basically they're kind of doing both. They're still bringing it from across the border, and they're doing it smuggling, you know, across the border and getting across fairly easily, whether it's tunnels or however they're getting across and also running what they call panga boats one way boats that go around the Mazelon Point and come in and deposit six thousand three to talks about that too. Yeah, we got into pangas and it was something you know, being a being a more of a you know, an inner border kind of woodsy, kind of not on the water that much, you know, domestic unit kind of running all over. We did a lot of you know, ocean stuff. We just had to because the last ten years we've been seeing more and more of these panga boats hitting the shoreline. And you know, last we heard as we were working with you know, different different federal allies and the Homeland Security and Coastguard, you're getting sometimes twin of these boats a month, and we might catch two or three of them, so and then they're making you know that all that poison weed is coming in from off shore trucks and you know runners are there to pick it up. The distribution center is very highly structured, good corporate model. They have distribution centers, stash houses, and it's it's gone in minutes to be distributed all over the country. And I mean, you know you're not only getting that, you're getting some meth imported. And then you get the human trafficking thing, because if you can get that weed in off the coast, you can bring in a threat. You know, you can bring in somebody off this coastline from anywhere. So there's been the domestic you know that the extreme terrorist groups linked to the cartels as potential threats and evidence of that, and that gets into a whole another level of public safety, not just poison weed coming in, which is still horrible. So, yeah, we got to coming in from Mexico, but if they can produce it here, it's that much less of a burden and cost than having to try to pay what it's going to take to get these guys across safely knowing they're probably getting a few of them are going to get caught, right, and then then they're gonna lose that load. Whereas that you know, if they're embedded here and they're really good growers, those guys are embedded for generations and until they get caught, they might go ten, eleven, twelve years. We've cut some guys that have been at it for over a decade and embedded in you know, Palo Alto, Fresno, big city populace centers completely here, illegally fake I d s, not citizens, but just running operations. Back up for a minute too. You were telling a good story about this guy that was doing the He's working on steelhead and all of a sudden his stream runs out of water, and you guys going to investigate and you find a grow operation. Right, walk me through to the end of that, because I got a question, but maybe maybe you'll answer it, okay, So then what happens like you're like, wow, look at this, Look at this. Here we are. This is a n eye opener. Didn't expect this. We keep cruising down, you know, kind of tactically and carefully, like we're stocking animals quietly because you know, the spider senses are tingling. Something's wrong. And then we see two arm growers, you know, one with an a K, one with a pistol and his hip, both having Michetti's and they're walking up the creek and they're tending their plants and they're getting closer to us, and I'm like, they're sort of them out working armed. They're working armed, like they're ready. They're not like when someone finds we'll be like, yeah, I'm guilty. It's it's not that situation at all. Steve the situation and when we get further into the team that developed and why we develop the canines, and every time we go into a grow site, when we run across growers, it's more it's more often and odd that they're not armed than when they are. And if they don't have the gun right on them, then the guns being dropped or it's you know, in camp next to them. But nine times out of tenants on them, because they have a lot to lose, they at least have a pistol on them. Some of them have a slung assault rifle as they're working in the garden because you know, they know law enforcement could be around the corner. They know what our dogs are doing. But when we're going down that canyon. I see these guys armed. I have one assault rifle and an unarmed civilian in no way to radio out. And I'm thinking, if this gets western, I get into a gunfight right now, it's gonna be the worst day in my career. This is not what I was preparing m into my career. Yeah, because game wardens aren't notoriously going in on stuff like this. Now, granted we went in not knowing we were going into but we hit we hit the cut bank. We just laid low. They drifted by, they didn't see us. And then when I saw how the water was diverted as servous as hell. Oh, I was freaked out. Yeah, I mean my adrenaline dump like that first buck. You know that I missed. You got some biologist because he got some Yeah, I got a biologist for he was savvy, you know, he was a hunter. Even he was like, you know, we looked at protocol, not at all. Man. When when when we finally cleared that and we knew they were out of the way, we just looked at each other. Those eyes were huge, and he looked at me and I looked at him, and we kind of nodded, you know, I said, watch your six. We're gonna get out of here carefully. We marked it. And then that was the time I turned on and started to know narcotics Task Force teams, met the Sheriff's department, met guys from their marijuana eradication team that I later became very close to, and Warren the Woods first book goes all into that where that bond was built because game Wards are seeing this environmental crime, but now we're getting this backlash with an agency of like, you know, traditionalists that want to do what we've always done for years. But that that's that's that's what I was driving out my second there's like a question boiling up is uh, it's like such a trope of detective movies. Where's a crime, and then the local cops, right, but then the FBI they come and they assumed like they come and assume jurisdiction. So you you see this, okay, and you're like, oh my gosh, there's these guys and they they got an illegal grow and they're illegally diverting water and they're armed. Um, how does how does the local sheriff's department, the state police not say back off Sonny, Yah, we're going in hot. We're going in hot? Like, how did how did you guys make it? That's the game board? How did It's not logical that would be like, oh, the game boardings will go do it? Well, it was, it was. It was a long process and it was it was. It was met Our efforts of getting involved in that was honestly met with with mixed feelings. You know, like one hand is the group I brought in and I go into this in detail in the book, but I'll share it and just go a little further. Now, Um, all the guys I brought into that mission, there was a narcotics task force that we were working with that lead it because they were had jurisdiction for that area. Now we could have let it. We had jurisdiction. We have a game boardings have more jurisdiction on more properties than any other you know, federal, local, or state law enforcement agency because of open fields and animals belong to everybody, so we can go all over that wherever there's a wildlife impact or wildlife or president that could be posted or poison. But you know, it wasn't our forte and we don't step on toes. We don't go in trying to be something we're not. But I found it. And we're pretty good in the woods. You know. We all hunt and fish like you guys, and we know how to get in quietly and we're good at tracking and you know, being careful with our sound and our scent and stuff like that. So, um, we got a big group in Arcotics Task Force guys. We probably had thirty people in this mission. And where there was um C HP California Highway Patrol, there was state parks, there were narcotic police departments, and there were a couple tactically trained SWAT deputies from Sound of Claire County Sheriff's Office. And the reason I'm gonna highlight that is because what happened on that mission and my first mission, and what I saw that went right and all the things that went wrong, and I saw how the emphasis was on not really catching bad guys. It was we're gonna go in and you know, we're gonna bring this force down the canyon. We're gonna sort of try to sneak up on him and maybe catch them. But um, if we don't catch them, we're gonna let them run away. Don't chase them. You could get injured chasing these guys down. And then we're gonna cut the plants and we're gonna destroy the plants. We're gonnair lift him out with the big Payfalk helicopter. UM federal funding for grants to you know, fund that part of the mission was all based on plant count at the time. And I'm going back to two thousand four. This is you know, there's a historical bill that that matters for hunters everywhere. And I saw that, and we have the opportunity and myself in another game ward and we're kind of the bird dog leads of getting these guys in quietly leading in and then we pull it, went to the side, let their tactical unit kind of come in like a little swat element or seal team the other thing. And um, I knew that if I had been running the mission different, I wasn't gonna Monday morning quarterback because it wasn't my mission. Now I was just the guide since I found it, we could have caught these guys easily and safely. And then when we catch them that time, we didn't. We didn't. They were they were yelled at to put their hands up fifty yards away and they're hidden in their camp, and you know, and they booked, they booked, and nobody wanted to chase them but me and one other game warden and one other sheriff's deputy. It was a sniper and a woodsy guy from Pennsylvania. Yeah, one of my closest friends of this day. And he's he's he's highlighted in the first book especially. Um. We decided to give chase, and it was futile because I had a big head start on us. You know, this was way before canines. We had dialed in on tactics. So we're chasing these guys a good half mile down the canyon. They do get away, and I went, well, you know, I know, if we had got a little closer and stalked up to him safely with rifle cover, we could have just run him into two teams. It really wasn't that hard of a wasn't rocket science. And then we eradicated all the plants, and I looked at all the other guys on the mission and I went, we got four while diversions. I didn't know the magnitude of this pink poison. L Diablo, the carbo fury, and you know that we call it pink death because it kind of looks pink pasty. It was all over, So I had no idea that we were all around some super hazardous material. We didn't have nitral gloves yet any of the protection gear that we now have that we know about, and all that stuff was left out there, and I'm like, are we going to clean this stuff up? We got a big old military helicopter can carry like four thousand pounds, and I mean, can we take not only the plants, maybe able to camp trash, all the poisons of the pesticides and they keep a real clean camp. I'm guessing, Oh yeah, it's their Christine. I mean they're all earth first, back to green you know, it's I'm pack it out really organic. You know they make the organic growers in California. Just go, oh my gosh, this is what we gotta step up to this level. So, um, it didn't get done. And what was funny was that in the cleanup didn't happen, Well, the cleanup didn't happen, the apprehension didn't happen, and uh, we kind of and we were kind of like considered at the time by that task force of all right, game wardens are good in the wood, stumble around to your thing, you know, and guys get us down there, just get out of the way. Let us do our thing. And I thought, well, federally in state, I'm sworn by the state right work for the governor directly, and we're sworn federally. And I'm like, my mandate is first to protect public safety. Second thing is to protect the wildlife, waterways and wild lands of not only our state, but any state on min at any given time. I said, I've done a lot of game woard work now for ten fifteen years, and I've seen a lot of poaching, a lot of environmental destruction stream that stuff. But one guy poaching the trophy buck or taking you know, five too many trout, and what I saw, this one grows site doing to the waterways and everything. It's trivial. And I'm like, and plus, this isn't like the guy that just caught an extra trout, you know, by mistake, or got a little greedy, you know, with his kids fishing one day. This is a foreign entity here illegally with no respect for our wildlife, wild lands, humanity in any way from what I've seen, and that's no exaggeration, and they're embedded and just making millions and millions of dollars a black market profit, destroying our land in the process and threatening anyone that is in to do that. And I thought, well, I don't see any more important job for a game warden to do based on how we're sworn. Now. Granted, I was already more in the tactical element, working with local teams in military and getting into swat training and sniper rifle and you know, all that kind of stuff, And so I had an affinity for going that direction, but not just to be a game ward and trying to do that, but to applied if it could ever be applied. And now I saw this type of environmental criminal that was very dangerous and you can't just check them on your standard patrol route. Walking a creek in a standard you know, it just doesn't fit. It's not safe. Um. So we had we were met with mixed a mixed bag of emotions, you know, and kind of kind of responses. Um. But because of Santa Clair County Sheriff's Office, and I gotta give a shout out to them. And by the way, they're all fans of the show. They wanted me to say hi to you guys. They all listen. A bunch of them saw you when you did that live broadcast and Sacramento recently. Um and you'll read them. They're all codenamed, but they're all they're all fans of love Which and they all hunt fish, you know, so the right way. But those guys saw what we were doing, and they said, you know what, this is crap man, this whole thing that because you're a game war and you're not a real cop or you can't be a special operations guy. You can't be a legitimate swat guy. Let's get together. I saw how you work, You saw how I worked. We could have caught these guys. These other guys running didn't think it was a good deal. So they started bringing us under their wing. And so in two thousand five we started doing missions, and we started doing ourselves and not as you know, the burden bunny cops coming in behind the sheriffs. We were equals. Now. I was getting called in on planning, giving my outdoor you know, knowledge and stuff and hunting and tracking and mapping out things I can imagine, like how to get in and out of right, Yeah, just like planning a hunt, like how to get in and out of areas? How are you going to get in out of the area? Is what rid you're gonna drop down on for your camp and how to recognize a place you're never gonna get through it. It's just like hunting, you know, we just I mean, you change four legged to two leg and it's it's pretty similar. Obviously, there's all the navigational plausibility. How long does it take to walk somewhere, what you can do in the dark and can do in the dark, just on and on right, that's what would be a good glassing point to set up and find them. Seriously, good observation points. When we when we got our Stiper unit, Delta unit wrapped up in this new met team that the second book goes into, it was you know, it wasn't about getting on people all the time, although we did a lot of that. It was about getting overwatch like we would on a hunt, to watch a canyon below, knowing where they were working and getting our team in safe but seeing trends and changes. You tell that story about that you guys had identified an individual that you knew to be heavily involved, but he never came around. And you talked about just sit and watch and watch and watching for a long time, and you didn't want to raid the sight until you could get until you could validate or prove that he was in the know, right from talking about just sitting and observing at intersection out in the woods. Yeah, the big kingpin that knew once he was once he was seen there, it was conspiracy and he was responsible and he waited. That was a two three month deal, you know. And that was with the sheriff's that I mentioned. That was with some good partners. Did you guys have it once you got rolling on this? Did you have a never ending list, like like a never ending list of science that you could never even get to because it takes because because because of the danger element, you can't just go do five or six in a day, right, You've got to make a plan so no one gets hurt. So it's inherently slow. It's by design, right, is inherently slow. You can't just find one one day and grab a team and run in and hit it the next day. I mean, there's so much plan someone as you as you know very well, someone gets shot yeah, yeah, exactly. And the problem we would have is in the early days when we weren't a formalized team and didn't have the capability to plan on ourselves. It was me and a handful of game wardens that were tactically savvy and trained really good at the traditional stuff. But they were starting to see this in other areas of the state and gravitating towards it. So I would bring them down to Silicon Valley or I would be pulled up to say northern California, um if our if our boundary district chiefs would allow the move, and a lot didn't, you know, They're like, no, no, no, that's on marijuana case. That's you're going to be a garbage collector if you want to clean this stuff up, and that's not a game ward and that's for that, that's for the cops, that's for d A. I mean, we had a lot of you know, internal chiefs and caw optin is. It just didn't like it. And nothing against that because it's a traditional job of what we gotta do. The traditional stuff still important. I mean, we can't stop doing the traditional game war and hunting and fishing checks and being a steward out there. Um, but this was now becoming the biggest environmental damage and crime we were seeing throughout California because everything starts in the headwaters and it's everything that happens downstreams. So it took a long time to get to the level where we were accepted. Um, we were equals. We were co planning missions. And what we were doing is we were lending the help to arrest and apprehend and do all the dirty, arduous work of eradicating these plants and a hundred degree weather, you know, after an all night raid. But then we were starting to bring these agencies into Hey, guys, if we're gonna do this, help us. You've got a helicopter here today. Okay, it's a thousand dollars an hour to run this blade. It's gonna disappear. We're never gonna have a helicopter back in this canyon. Can we take three four more hours bringing more people or just do it ourselves? If we're not wrecked, and let's back up the trash, let's restore the creek, because if we just leave and winter hits all that crap swashing right into the creek, it's just a continual environmental train wrecks. You guys, you would do it all in one fell swoop. We're doing it all in point fell swoop. You'd come in m apprehend suspects like that lingo apprehend suspects, Um, do whatever that involves, right, collect evidence and then start picking up garbage and bottling up. Cut a bunch of nasty plants and stack those up and then going to like hazmat mode. Yeah, going to hasmatt mode and do a cleanup mode. And you know a lot of agencies that want to do that. And when he laughed, it was like that thing was never there to some extent, to some extent, and and you had to tear out irrigation tons of it. Yeah, the black pipe, even though that's not the biggest poisoning element out there with all the other stuff. Some of that pipe was running three miles to another county to get water for one grow, no exaggeration. We track win three miles one day. Is that all brought in on just people's backs. Yeah, this is a crazy thing, bro. They these guys, I will give them an a for effort. They are hard workers. They're the toughest guys. They're bringing in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of yards of this pipe on their backs, the running loads, hundred pound loads continuously to get all their growth, the big five gallon propane tanks, all the clones of marijuana, the seeds, the camping gear. And they can't just go park at the local trailhead. Oh no, No, they're gonna take crazy routes. They gotta take crazy routes, and a lot of them. Some of them are, you know, as close as three four yards from a five billion dollar home on the edge of the kid I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding, especially where we started, because a lot of that stuff, like haven't spent some time they are, a lot of that stuff is just like impenetrable. Yeah, like brush rush, yeah, you know, coyote brush, and they go around here. Wouldn't fly, people would see it from so far away. But there it's like dnse it's dance. It's dance and deeply cut very much, very much. But they can get away with a too. You know, they could be to three hundred yards away from an affluent community in the Silicon Valley, a kids science camp, we've had that, and then they can be eight miles into crazy hike into the back country, you know, almost above alpine level, didn't you guys. I think I feel like I saw this in your book that you guys found some growth sites on designated wilderness areas. We did. We did. We had a we had an issue with one of the coolest missions I've read. It was like a top five in my career and it was definitely one of the top couple. While I ran, I think that's prohibited on a federal wilderness area, right, I think, so you can't. You can't ride a bike. You definitely can't can't ride a bike. I don't think you grow cannabis and cans and you know, kill kill golden trout and stuff like that. But yeah, we did. We got in some wilderness areas and you know, we were finding this stuff on grows um. We did one thing over on the eastern Sierra California, and there's a species of a subspecies of rocky Mountain big horn sheep called the Sierra Nevada horn sheep. They're all up there in that lone Pine area, you know, below Mount Whitney, and there's not a lot of them. They're about six hundred at their at their peak population. And something. Our agency had put millions and millions of dollars into, you know, doing hands and then in Seen we had just an excessively heavy winner. So those glacier snow packs were you know, they they stayed up a lot longer, and the sheep were pushed really low while they were getting pushed into grow country. And these guys, these cartel guys were coming up from l A and coming up on the Eastern Sierra, getting in that real pristine golden trout wilderness, you know, kind of above above timber level, and they were putting grows at like nine thousand feet. And we're up there, you know, doing scouts and recons and we find grow sites and it's you know, I mean, what is on what's the value of a big horn sheep. That's only six hundred of them in the world, you know. And then there's black bears, and so we're finding black bears poisoned. We actually found a massive, beautiful seventeen year old ram, you know, just the sentinel of that species. Lion killed. But the only the reason he was lion killed was he had ingested some of those poisons. He was only a hundred yards from a grow he found and he adjested some of those poisons and just walked off and was in the process of dying. So he was an easy target for a cat. So the cat got him, which you know where you see at the you know, end of a sheep's life, of course, but that cat's probably poison it did to do. We never found that cat, but when we started to see that, um, we said, hey, there's no just raidingness and you know, chasing guys around and cutting plants. This crap needs to get out of here. Now. Their sheep all over in this area, and you know, they're even more sensitive than like, you know, threat endangered steelheaded trout. There's far less of them, so we're we're talking a great species, you know, and just in that part and people wouldn't think that would be in California, but that was a California species in one area. So I learned a lot more about a different species of sheep. It was super cool being a big game hunter. I was just blown away. And we we spent you know, se a part part of a good month and a half up there doing missions like that. It was cool. How do how do most of the sites get reported? Our people? Do people out recreating. Find them? Do you guys find them yourself? Do you find them from the air. It's it's it's a mixed bag. We we find a bunch from the air. Um, we can do a lot with Google Earth. You know. Now Google it's gotten good enough. Just like when I'm learning a hunting route on a on a on a big game hunt. We're looking around and we're looking at six months ago, six months now in a traditional area. And really if you find a south facing slope sometimes other facing slopes where there's a water source, you know, through the summer, one out of two times if we go do a scout and we don't know anything's out there, we don't see anything from the air, there hasn't been a tip. It's maybe not even a historical grow site that's had grows there in the past. We just go, Okay, this area has a good, you know, annual stream and it might be really really trickling, but it's enough to you know, fortify marijuana, and it's in the right area and it's remote and it's never really been hit. Let's go scout it. It's hunting. Yeah, there it is exactly it was like to find it like this would be likely habitat not Yeah, one out of two times we will find a grow doing that. The guys that are in the game and it is I mean it's kind of fun. You're hunting it. You know, if you find it, you get you know, you get the Easter egg that day. You're like, oh, yeah, now we got a mission. But hunters, anglers hardcore you know, back country guys, hikers that get off the standard trail. You know, see man track signs off of a main hiking trail and wanted skill explore where does that go? Or they see that water you know that that semi annual blue line on the topo mapp or on their GPS screen and they go, you know, I just want to go check that out. I mean, I'd be hunting today. I'm scouting or putting a camera out on public land or whatever, um or whatever, and they're checking it out and they're like, oh, oh there's plants. Oh I hear. Oh that's a guy with an a K forty seven um tippy tolling out you know, weapon up and then calling us right away hopefully. So you mentioned, uh, there's some pictures in your book there are interesting just talking about man tracks. Do you guys found I know what you're gonna go to now. Yeah, you have like trail cam images of guys with carpet right strafed the booth, but also fake cattle tracks like a slip on cow print. Yeah, you strafed your boot. Yeah, so you can make like a cow print when you're going places you're not supposed to be. Yeah. And the funny part about that was we were getting duped for about a half a season. We were, you know, on a lot of public land like forest service lands, national forests. They're still catalyses, right, So these growers were realizing, hey, these you know, some of these teams are getting really good at finding our man tracks, even if we try to brush them. They know where you know, the water is, so they're kind of bisecting our tracks. So these guys would put those fake cow hoobs, you know, on the bottom of their feet, tie them off, go clumping around with the cattle, get up where the cattle are, then take them off, well, you know, a couple hundred yards into the dense stuff like you just mentioned, Steve, And then you know, we're looking around for man tracks, knowing there's a gross somewhere up there, and overseen his cattle tracks. And then we caught a guy and he had that in his backpack. When we are clever bastard, I'm like, I'll give him another a for effort. But yeah, and then the felt bottoms on the you know, on the feet, they're they're they're definitely dedicated and diligent at counter tracking and staying camouflage. These are hard to find. Um, you know, they're they're not maver, They're not half they're not half assen it by no means in terms of people finding sites. Are there areas where there's such a presence that a place gets a reputation among local hunters and anglers or other users where it winds up being that the idea is that it's not a good place to hang out. That's happened, especially in California. What we call it, we call that a d t O traditional grow area and DTO is just short for drug trafficking organization. It's basically an official term that you see in the book that's you know, a law enforcement term for basically cartail groups a majority of any drug traffing organization referring to a cartel group mostly out of Mexico, UM and we do have those traditional areas, and these guys will go in, they'll set up a grow and they'll not be successful at it two or three years, and then it gets caught, you know, we busted or some agency does. And then they go another half mile up the canyon on the same water source and they put another grow in because they're smart enough to know that the resources we put into finding these and the fact that we don't find near all of them, and there's only so much money, there's only so many guys dedicated to doing this type of work with all the other law enforcement stuff we gotta do, and we set it before. On the game ward in front is one example. You know, there's lessen four game warders, an example that I just came from my old home state of California and less and there's twelve of us on my specialized tactical unit with two canines. And granted those teams are getting bigger, but I think of all the other impacts to poaching we got to do with the attraitional stuff, commercial wildlife sales, black market ivory, you know, uh, you name it. The traditional poachers doing their thing. So these guys know by just doing the odds and playing the numbers. If their particular sector has ten or eleven grows out in the forest and they lose even eight of them, two or three them are gonna make them about thirty million dollars profit. And that gets to the attrition of, hey, if we put enough out there, we're not gonna get some of some of them are going to make it. Does I want to ask how valuable these are? Very? Yeah, they're They're valuable to the point where let's take an average growth site and this is this is the lower end of the average size save five thousand plants. You know, that's medium to medium small from what we were used to see. And I had some of the Silicon Valley foothills in northern California when we were statewide that you know, reached fifty thou plants and covered like two football fields and they were spread out over a mile. I mean crazy, But five thousand plants. It approximately two thousand dollars on the black market per pant plant. That's kind of conservative. And if you do all those zeros and multiply, you know, a five thousand plant grow is still up in the several millions of black market profits. If we don't interdict it. So not only is there a bunch of money involved, but our whole thing was, man, let's get this stuff, not let it get too big, because we don't want any of it harvested. And they dry it, they process it, they weigh it on scales. Actually in the grow site. They put in one pound bags and they take it into sea bag and it's ready for sale. They just gotta get it out of the woods, get it to their pickup car, get it to a distribution center, and then it's nationwide and we know it's all poison, carbo furience. It comes out ready to roll in their camps, very organized digital scales, you know, vacuum bags of one pound wrapping material. Um. It's ready to go and they hang it, they dry it, they trim it, um. They they're very efficient. It's like working away. It's like working away. It's like going into an indoor growth site and a dispensary, except it's you know, the bizarro version of that. It's nuts. I remember one time I was scouting for muskrats in Michigan one time and I was out cattail marsh and found a growth site that was it was all five gallon buckets. It was five gallon buckets laid out in a cattail marsh. I mean, you never like no one in a million years and find it if it wasn't for someone looking for muskrat hut. Yeah, you were going deep, man what I'm saying. But there's no one like camped out there but and looking at and and going through your book. I mean, it's like you guys can't take for granted people are living in tents and stuff, guarding, guarding, working Like a lot of these places have residents. Yeah, it's most of them. Do the big ones that get above ten thousand plants you can't like, and especially if they're way in to the back country. A grower crew can't like hike in all day and all night and tend it and water it and tend those plants before they start drying out or before they get impacted by animals or they gotta move for sunlight or whatever and then leave and then come back. They live in the site and these some of these complexes we've seen are so elaborate. I mean, you know, adobes cut into the side of hills and camouflage like little ho chi min tunnels, I mean there's a lot of make a lot of references to you know, had you know, some of my family veterans in the family and relatives, you know, Vietnam veterans. I'd show him pictures or videos and s somewhere or TV on this and see the pictures in the book, and go I thought I was back man on the you know, in order being on board this is crazy, And I go, yeah, and we we would literally walk five ft from this thing before we see something wrong in the brush on the wall and then it's dug out like a tunnel and it's you know, like a hooch that houses four guys. There's guns in it, there's a kitchen that's all hidden um processing areas. Like wild it's crazy, But explain the alluded this alluded to this earlier. Explain the like then, like the hell is the pungee pit four? I mean, who, like, how's that? That's not really gonna save your growth site? No? No? See, like so a game ward and falls in and gets like impaled on sharp sticks. I mean do they think that then everybody's just gonna leave and not come back. Yeah, I mean, it's like it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense other than you look at the mindset of the of the criminal you're dealing with it. Hey, someone's coming into my growth site and I don't want an animal, I don't want a person. I don't care what harm I do to them, but I'm gonna do anything i can harm them to such a level that I'm going to impede as much progress as they make in their element of what their mission is. So when we started to see pungee pits like and that picture was from a national park, that was that was you know Park National Park, Shasta County, And that was that was Brian Boyd, one of our premier canaine handler, and canine Phoebe, and a bunch of guys from Shaftsa County Sheriff's Office. Um, and that was when we had our full time team. So we were up there. We were all over the place and one of our point guys, a really good guy from Schafta County Sheriff's Office that we work with, almost stepped in that. And our canine Phoebe, because she's been trained to detect so many other sense our apprehension guru dog, she sniffed up on the band poisons and and alerted because that you know, that tarp was so camouflage, he was gonna walk right into it. And what they're doing on those pungee pits, like in Vietnam they used to, you know, the Vietcong would dig the pungee pit for our soul, human human exprement exactly. And then what these guys do is they take the band poise and they take the pink down. But but but they play that same game. Yeah, but track what I'm saying, where is the wind? There's no win. Where is the wind? And maiming or killing a person like that, it's just viciousness. There's no game because it's not like you're like, oh, we got him, now we'll continue to grow weed for ten years. Yeah, it's like, you know what, we hurt this guy, we slowed down his operation, We got a piece of him, and we're going to just move out. The other reason they put kind of bizarre because like, yeah, and the only other advantage they have is if you think of they put those pungee pits just like that the little bear trap with the tuna can or snares. They put him on the edge of the grow or on the edge of a camp. So if a team falls into that, they're not those guys are gonna lose the grow, but they're probably gonna get away because now we've got it, just went in and we formed a perimeter. We're looking for guns. We're not going to continue to assault that grow, and if we do, it's gonna be you know, several minutes, if not hours later. And what's gonna happen now is those guys have escaped trails and they they're good at what they do, and they get not gonna save the site, but you might they might buy you the time to go and and we like to catch him because as we know, they're so vetted, they're gonna get out of one grow and they're gonna be thrown in another one within a day. It's that, you know, it's like a journeyman moving around on a contracting job. Okay, you're not that needed here, but you know we need you twenty miles to the north on another one that we're doing. It's that same mindset model. Tell everyone about bringing dogs into this. I love it when you talk dogs. Man coming in the office and all your dogs. I get a little yellow lab that's retired as a companion canine. You know, she's nine. She was a companion canine with me at work for for six years and she wasn't gonna buy any cartel growers' gonna lick him to death, but she could sniff it out. Um. But I'm gonna talk about the dog development, which really started completely from scratch. So you know, you have you have law enforcement dogs that are working in cities, and they're working out of cars, and they're you know, they're very close to back up and doing traditional law enforcement canine stuff and those dogs are amazing save our lives all the time. And then you got war dogs. You know that My Seal Team buddies have worked around, you know, and they evolved that whole canine program. I mean relatively recently, even our military special forces guys. Um, it's been about a twenty year process. Especially the last ten years, it's really changed. We were the same way on met but we were having to take kind of a tell you what Matt means, Matt, I didn't even do that. Yeah, we're the marijuana Enforcement team, and the Marijuan Enforcement Team was the official term of the tactical unit that we built a pilot program out and I hand picked all the right guys from across the state to do just that. We weren't doing traditional work anymore, of the hunting, the fishing, you know, the traditional coaching stuff we're um chief might carry on. Was so you know, uh concerned with this issue, and he believed in us enough to say, Okay, we're gonna take some heat on this politically, and it's not you know, might be met a little weird in inter outer agency, but I want to test it. So you guys build it and we'll do three months in summer. I'll get to the dogs. But this this is relevant if you bear with me. And in six weeks into this thing, since we weren't just at Hawk, all over the state hodgepodge in it with different agencies, suddenly that we the training was better. You know, I got better equipment for the guys. We were all becoming a cohesive unit like any small unit in special ops does. UM. We got the support and the funding to go out and be boundary lists so we didn't have to worry about, oh now I'm into Northern California boundary. It's not my district. I can't go into this. You know, this Captain's territory. Now we were just working four headquarters for the chief and going anywhere we needed to, just like a small unit should be, you know. And in six weeks we were documenting everything. We're far safer, We're catching a bunch more guys. Our dogs were tearing it up. We had two great dogs, and we thought were just running out of money, and myself and uh, the captain that co founded the team with me, we're meeting with all the chiefs to like beg for money and can we keep going. We want to prove ourselves by the end of summer, and they said, hey, we've been talking before you guys got here. We're done with that. We need this full time by January one, So build it. Get the testing protocol. It's open to everybody, but obviously we have some vetted guys that are really good at it. Test them objectively, and we had to basically build the first special operations force in fish and wildlife in our hunter to your history. Test the guys and know, hey, you're leaving patrol. You know it's one way and if if it succeeds, you're great. If this thing fails, well you're gonna go back to patrol. But it's going to be different. You know, I don't know how welcome you're gonna be. And um, we just hit the ground running from until I retired. Now it's running great, And it was just it was amazing how much stuff we were not documenting, how much poisons we were taking out that wasn't getting logged to know the amount, how much hundreds of miles of black polly pipe. Steve guys, you know, I'm when I retired. I mean, you weren't you weren't you weren't cataloging You're not enough? Yeah, no, I mean everybody, everybody was doing a little different because like like Brian Boyd with Canine Phoebe, he'd be working with Shasta all the time, apprehending a bunch of guys with you know, with that team, tearing a bunch of plants, taking a bunch of poisons out, but nobody was doing the documentation that was getting back to us. And then I was doing my thing with Santa Clair County Sheriff's Office and I was, you know, honing tactics with them, and we were developing things without dogs at that time, but I wasn't documented anything. I was along for their ride because we weren't running missions. So when we started as a full time team, we were running missions, we were equals if we were using other agencies or being with them and are Our different approach was we're three pronged team. Okay, Met's gonna arrest and apprehend, you know, as aggressively as we can safely with dogs without dogs. We're gonna hunt these guys. We're not going to just go in and fly the helicopter in and drop in scarum away and cut plants. Secondly, we're gonna cut plants safely if we can. Now we're aware of the poisons. Sometimes we couldn't cut them because they're too toxically tainted. They need like fourteen days just to like dissipate a little before we can go in with the nitro gloves, the face masks, the proper protection equipment to even touch this stuff, so we don't contaminate everything. So we take the plants out. That's phase two. But phase three that we would push on any agency we would help on a mission, if Met was going to be involved, if I was going to send my guys there is you guys gotta help us reclammate. You gotta help us clean up the damages, restore the waterways. I want the wildlife content to be pristine when we leave. And if we can't do it that day, get it on the books to do it in the in the near future. Or if we don't have a helicopter that day to pull it all out, Steve, then what we're gonna do. We're gonna bag it in really really heavy contractor bags. Get it in an area where it can of road into the stream, you know, through a year, through a winter with all that fishery and all those wildlife drinking off those water sources, and we'll come back with a chopper. You guys even came back with mules. We came back with mules. Yeah, we had some wilderness areas or we didn't have a blade, you know. We Funding was always an issue because the most expensive part about these missions is a cleanup. So it gets to Horsemen's expensive, very expensive because of man manpower, equipment, manpower and equipment, you know, and you need a helicopter to pull this stuff out, and a lot of times you need a lot of blade time because if it's a big grow, you're gonna have you know, ten eleven, twelve, sometimes twenty loads of six pound loads of a net and you're gonna have to fly it to you know, a disposal area, you're gonna have to come back. So it's a big cost and a big cost that we're constantly reaching out to, you know, conservation friends to help us out um foundations, UM that we we have, Uh, well you go get outside of money to do cleanups, we have to, huh. One of the one of the groups that we've been working with, there's a really good group called the California um Wildlife Offers Foundation, And it's like you know, ex chiefs and you know, affluent donors that are conservation patriotically oriented and they formed a foundation about ten years ago and just bring money in for the oh crap moments like you know, we lose a canine to death and you know, a canine and all the training that goes into a canine, I mean, that's that's at endeavor. And then the tactical gear our team needed, night vision, you know, battle helmets. I mean I built a sniper team that had never been built before. So you know, you start getting into weapons like that besides normal patrol weapons, and there's no budget for it, and it's already unconventional anyway. We had to get outside sources to fund that, and we had a lot of good help on the canine front, especially with our new dogs and keeping our dogs safe and that equipment we needed um from our Wildlife Officers Foundation to good effect in some other places too. Yeah, So get into the dog like how you use the dogs. It's pretty interesting the dogs. It is risky for the dog on a couple levels. And and as you probably notice from the book, we've we've honed tactics a little bit because our dogs are starting to get hurt because these guys, these cartel growers, are aware of what our dogs can do. Um. The dogs are trained to be as quiet as they can go in with us. Um. If we see that they have a weapon and they're pulling that weapon, we're going to deploy a dog. We're not going to try to take that guy head on and get into a gun fight if we can avoid it. Um. We had had I think we had about four gun fights up until we really got the dogs honed, and they were happening more and more frequently because a lot of times, not every time, fortunately, but a lot of times these guys don't want to give up, even if they have a whole tactical unit of highly trained officers on them with big weaponry. So they're keeping their shotgun up, they're pulling that pistol, and then we have to we have to do what we gotta do to stay safe and you know, solve the problem. Um. But it was always close calls, close calls, close calls. In two thousand five in the Silicon Valley foothills and August fifth, the two thousand five a date you know, burned in Forever. That was the first officer involve shooting we had in a cartel grow site, and it was the first officer in the nation that had ever been hurt or hit by one of these growers. It happened to be my young game ward and partner that I had not only trained in the academy, but he had come on to be a partner in my squad in Santa Clara County and one of the best game wardens we've ever had. Great guy, and he wanted to go on a raid and I'm like, absolutely, I'm working with the Sheriff's office. This was the pre met days, right, this is going way back, and we're hiking up in there, and it was harvest time and it was an area they've been going eight to ten years a growers from working in a remote area of public land right above the Silicon Valley, the tech capital there, and um, the guys were the growers were there and they had armed gunmen just defending the grow during harvest time. I mean hardened cartel guys from down south in full camo s kss a k S pistols where all the patron st monikers on their hats and belt buckles and and and tactically they were set up right in the site. You know, they used the early morning light to their advantage. They had a little dugout parapet that they could kind of hide behind a brush wall. And you know, we're looking, we're scanning, we're doing everything we can. We're going through this grow site. And we hear one shot ring out and they only got one shot off, fortunately because we all reacted the way we needed to before the gunfight got any further. But sadly, that one shot hit my partner through both of his legs. So he was hit with an AK forty seven round through his right leg and then it exited his left leg. So he was bleeding out of four holes for the better part of three hours. And because no agency had ever been attacked like that from these guys, air support wasn't really coordinated with their administration. No one knew who would come and help us because he couldn't hike out, so we needed helicopter lift. Some helicopter teams wouldn't come in because they said, hey, that's a hot zone. Man, We're not a military bird, you know, We're like, we're we're we're a fire you know, we're a califire reputed and we're a hue and you know, if that's not a secure site and you just guys saw it, he's gonna shoot us out of the air. We're gonna more casualties, which made sense. But my partner brother, you know, is bleeding out to death and he's fighting three hours and he's fighting shock, and he was all all all fight, you know, he wasn't gonna quit um. And and it was his it was his will to survive and his will to stay in the game that really kept him alive. But we realized that day when he got here, rescued and finally made it out as he was going into shock um and survived and recovered and actually is a lieutenant now in California doing great work, Thank heaven. Um. You know, just just we we really looked out on that one, or we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. I don't know that we would have continued to do this work. Like you said, what are you doing? Um that right, and then told me there's got to be a better way to detect these guys, you know, and um, certainly we can go face to face. We can do that. And that was right before literally like a couple of months before we started doing an apprehension Canaine program. And that was before Brian Boyd Warren, buddy of mine and a longtime teammate who I brought into met when we started. That's when him and Knaine Phoebe were made it up when she was just about a year and a half old and they had to kind of trial and error these apprehension tactics are going in and keeping her quiet and you know, it's hot, we're going on long hikes, and then how do you identify a bad guy not on an open field and a concrete parking letter, in an alley or in a building right or near a car, but through all that brush and you said it before, Steve, how choked up that terrain gets. That's of our missions. So you guys, what we're dealing with is we're going in and she's got to see what that target is. We'll usually see the gun we're hiding, we're landing in wait, just typical hunting situation. And then um, when we go to make that announcement, we gotta get close enough that we don't lose our suspect. And we got to deploy her knowing that we got to get on that dog quickly because if he pulls a gun or a knife or anything on the dog, the dog is gonna get hurt, or we're gonna get shot at. Or you're creeping. You like creep up on the people. We creep up on the people. We spent something We have literally spent five hours moving twenty yards and watching them and just like hear him talking working, you're here talking working or their process and or they aren't quite up out of camp and you know you don't want to, you know, break cover for safety, just just things that you naturally got to do. And there's been a lot. How tight do you like to get for you spring the trap, you know, you know, buddy. It all depends guys on on on venue. It all depends. One time you guys, you guys were looking through their tent window. Yeah, yeah, one time. I mean literally, it's been good morning, not coffee I'm delivering, you know, and you're just right there. And sometimes it's been open field. You're in some sort of meadow, there's a processing area, and you know that they're getting Nancy, the dogs getting Nancy. And sometimes it's you know, fifty yards. Well it needs to be close, It really needs to be close because they have the advantage. I mean, they know their terrain. They have escaped trails, they walk it morning, noon and night. They know every sound. They know where the animal bird sounds are. They know when something makes us sound like you know from a good hunt, that that you know, that blue jay, that that stellar j that just burns us down, you know, or it's a raven here in Montana, a pine square or something like, oh man on that white tail and it goes a little sucker, same thing. They know every sound. And so nine times out of ten, if a team isn't really honed at taking their time and taking a long, slow, tactical stock in they're burned before they even get to the grow a gig to grow, and you know there's a pot of food cooking, there's tracks. You know, you don't see guns usually take them with them, but that's all they take. And so it took a lot of years to go, okay, how are we This is a real this is a very formal labissary to catch. And then the challenge came up like a hunt of a you know, real nice animal. You're spending your lifetime going after um and and that experience, and so we would get a little more honed. Okay, well that was a little too far to deploy the dog, or a little too far to make an announcement and announce and you know from cover and now we're gonna that was a little too close because you know, we got him before he got us, but it was you know, kind of oh crap distance. So it just veries a little bits close. And so the dog mostly just goes in to take down the guy that like, that's his main job. That's one of the two primaries. And that's I'm glad you brought that up because I would not I would have forgot to cover that. But the other thing is our apprehension do ugs you know are honestly some of the some of the finest. And we have our other agencies now local agency sheriff's departments and um, federal agencies that have incredible dogs that we work with. The whole dog thing is really kind of morphed, especially the last decade. But um, they're not just going in there to apprehend, They're going in to smell. Because like Phoebe is an example, is a great detection dog as much as she was an apprehension dog. Detection of what, detection of marijuana, detection of how they smell being in the woods that long, and the food they eat, they have a distinct smell because they don't growers. The growers exactly, Um, the band poisons. We can train our dogs to pick up that scent of that poison that we can't touch. I mean you're talking forty four thousand times on that nose of that pub and so um, you know. Traditionally, our our apprehension dogs are detection dogs are trained to sniff abalone, black bear gun cartridges, powder, Yeah, for poached animals or a guy that you know, you guys have abalone dogs. We got abalone dogs because we're around the California coastline and commercial abalone deal. You know. So Phoebe was every bit of good. And Phoebe got really amazing at detecting the girls we get in and detecting men from tracks on the ground or their smell. And then she starts, you know, she starts squirling up sheets. She gets Birdie. That's it. She's Birdie big time, and she you know, it took her a couple of years to calm down. There were a lot of missed apprehensions because she's running through brush. One bad guy runs a partner next to hers, and camouflage were face painted. We all look the same, and she's like, overload, who's the bad guy? You know? And then miss missed the apprehension. But let me say apprehension me the dog. The dog is catching the person. The dogs catching the person. And not to sugarcoat it. When they go to guns, I mean it's deadly forced. Now that dog is biting them with all the force that dog can bite them on, not leafalley, but putting enough pain compliance on them, whether they bite him in the thigh, the calf, the shoulder, the forearm. Canines. Different canines are wire different to buy different parts. I understand the legality on that, absolutely, No. Yeah, so the dog knows. The dog doesn't attack until unless it sees a gun. The dog is does attack until we give the command and release the dog to do so, gun or not. So the dog is just running like if it encounters a backpacker, it's not gonna maul the back now, No, not at all. And that's all. That's what I was trying to figure out, Like, how do you avoid just it whatever, loose on something stranger. It doesn't do it until you're like they're that individual. Yeah, And I'm glad you brought that up because I always look at it from our you know, you said use of force and policy types things, you know, and from the layman, one of this dog just sees a gun and goes man, how does that work? You know? And but from this standpoint, about two three years in, Phoebe started to become the dog and we knew we had a you know, that special dog. And we all have great dogs, but we've all had that or heard about that one in a million dog, right, that hunting dog, whether it's a waterfowl dog and mpland dog. Phoebe was that dog. And I'm gonna get into my other our other dogs here in a minute, but I'm gonna talk about Phoebe because she's not only legendary from saving lives and putting up great numbers. She was as socialist my yellow labs. She never been an officer. Um. She was the kind of canine, no exaggeration. Guys, we're doing a briefing three in the morning. We're under headlamps. We're with our group of met guys. We might have other agencies, Feds, county guys. We might have thirty guys there, and everybody looks kind of the same. And plus it's dark and we're all in the battle gear and plate carries and rifles and face paint. She would go around Brian. We do a briefing, you know, we brief everybody, our guys on the canines. We know him. We're trained to handle the canines with our handlers in case he gets tied up or hurt. But we have to tell everybody a brief that we're working with. Hey, this is my dog, this is her name. This is the command you give if you know she's on the bike and I'm disabled or you know in you know sidebard or whatever and I gotta get the dog off or needs to protect me or whatever. The com I can't say. I can't give that. I can't give that away. Is it a word? Word, it's a word, but I'll say it off the air. Yeah. So anyway, she um, and you can yell a word, scream it, yell it, whisper it. She got that good. Not all dogs are that. They get kind of wired up. But what she would do is, guys, she would go around and hip check every officer. Look you're right in the eye. Wait till you petitor, look you I I and kind of like I got you today, I know you now. And she would do it in a big circle every time she did it to me, and I knew her. She was like a family dog. She'd come and hang out with my dog before missions. And so in all the chaos, all the cacophony and all the drama when it goes down and it just it gets crazy out there. If it's multiple multiple cartel guys and multiple guns were splitting the team up and we're in different camps. Um, she never been about you know, I've never been a good guy. And one of those things that if she got a little confused, we just point the weapon in the direction where she got to go and she's like, all right, I got it, and she just keeps going. And by the time um, she semi retired in ten, she had a hundred sixteen bite apprehensions on armed gunmen and she had nine hundred more arrests where she bade him and didn't have to bite because arrests. Yeah, yeah, so almost a thousand if you look at one tenth of those being actual bites. And so see how many hundred sixteen bites and sixteen bite apprehensions and nine hundred apprehensions where she just got up to them but they gave up so they didn't get a bite because they didn't want any part of that. But when also they get volved, the dog doesn't attack, right, it would no longer threat. You know he's in custody if he puts the gun down and says, hey, I don't want you know a lot of them, Okay, So it's not a given that you're gonna get absolutely not. No, no, see, we were only gonna let that dog that's like keep being curious about like you're like toll on it, but like keepe, curious about how like how this is received by administrators the public. What I was like, Okay, you got some dogs and it seems pretty sophisticated dogs. They're very sophisticated dogs. They're highly trained. I mean you look at the way we train our dogs, the way say it's Seal Team buddies of ours train their dogs, and how they're you know, designed, and how their the mission is a little different, but the level of training, the level of control, the level of restraint or the level of aggression that needs to be executed when it does, it's the same. We use the same type of dogs that are special forces do for a reason because what you just said, Steve, is policy on how much force can you use. And when you come from a state like California, not only California, but I mean canine at hensons are scrutinized stay in the world, right, you know, chill it really like what dogs are biting people? Why would you ever have to bite somebody with a dog? So um, But to get to that point, yeah, we we we stay right within the you know, only use the force we need. And it's not only us with our weapons. It's dogs too. But what I can say, and all those bites she made, and I mean, I don't know if any other dog that has ever come close to those those numbers. And that's not a dig, but she prevented so many gun fights when we had her on the team permanently once we started in um with all the crazy missions we had when the team was developed, over the five years I was there with it running it, she prevented at least forty gun fights no exaggeration, twenty of which two of them. That's well. The third chapter of Hidden War, as you notice, went into that where we weren't a team yet. It was a year before we had our full time team. But I was able to bring Brian and Phoebe down to Santa Clara County with my Sheriff's partners, and we had two armed guys coming right at us once pulling a tarist judge. Brian's like, John, I got this guy take my dog. And so Phoebe's biting another guy that's pulling another gun, and I'm like, I guess I'm dealing with the dog now because I was his covered in his canine support that day. So I'm dealing with the dog. But that guy that had that gun, it was a Russian torqu croft pistol, and Phoebe had him bit and was putting bite pressure on his back calf, and he was laying on his belly, and she was putting enough pressure on him that he couldn't just pull the gun out real quick and start shooting me and my rifle cover. He was struggling and under pain, and he got it to write about here when I dove on his back, and had she not been there, I would have had to engage that guy. He would have engaged me or three guys behind me, and several of us would have been hurt. And then that's when the light bulb went off. I went, I've worked with you a lot of times with Phoebe all through some Wild Justice filming when we did the Nagio thing, and we would work together and not catch anybody, and then we'd go apart with the film crews and catch other people. But I had never seen Phoebe actually doing apprehension, even though I knew how cool she was and how awesome Brian was as a handler. In that symbiotic canine handler relationship they had developed, and when that when it was my life and my guys, and it got so crazy and I was this close to getting in another one and having to shoot myself since the first gun fight No. Five, when when Kyle was shot, I was like, we need this all the time. When we're doing this job with these cartel growers, we need this all the time. We can't be We're gonna do it, but we have one dog that's doing this statewide, and we're doing it in four different parts of the state, and Phoebe's tied up in Shasta and now we're gonna go just rogue it on foot. And we had some other gunfights we could not get out of because we didn't have a dog on several missions. And so when we got the full time team and how we built it, it was a godsend, guys, no exaggeration, because I had moose dogs get shot. We've had we haven't had one shot that I know of, but we've had them stabbed fatally. What started to happen and I go into this a little bit, as you remember in the book, and I have a couple of pictures where you got one dog got stabbed but then recovered right. But recovered, and that was one that did recover that got stabbed, But there are several that didn't recover, and they weren't with our agency. There were with other agencies. But um, we all kind of took a big breath and went, Okay, is there any way we could have prevented that? Is there anything we could have done to change or cane I and tactics, and you know, they become I mean, we're all dog people here in the room, man. There there there are family and they go home with us. They're not just work dogs. We have them as pets from the start in canines. We retire with them. And so you know when some of our are our allied agency brothers on the federal level, we're losing dogs because these cartel guys were starting to realize, Hey, if that dog's really far away from the officers and I'm not pulling guns, and I suck in that dog and I take the bite, but I got a fixed blade of eight to ten inches on my hip, and I can stab for that jugular up in front of those ribs. I can take this dog out because I know this dog has shut down. About thirty of my partners grows and that team would not have been as good maybe or in their mind of catching so many guys and really apprehending our main guy or a couple of guys in that grow and not only shutting it down, but putting these guys in jail and putting the hurt on them and when they would be in that violent and so if we take their dogs, we're gonna slow these guys down and make them less effective. They they're not done that way. UM, so we we hone some things and none of our dogs. Um we're stabbed fatally, but I mean being she She passed away sadly last year at thirteen years old, and um it was a leukemia. Um. She had been semi retired even though she was checked out as a seven year old dog healthwise by the ved at like twelve, she was still actually technically deployable. You know, our administrators rightfully, so are our canine program leads, and and even myself and Brian and all of our other guys on the team were like, you know, she has had a historical career. Man, let's if we can get another dog up in her place. That she's getting up there. She's like battling the odds of age. You know, it's not common for a twelve year old Belgium mall to be out apprehending guy's hardcore still they're usually done, but she was doing it. So we pulled her and we developed the new dog, which is Brian's current dog, a male, a little bigger than Phoebe. He's doing great work. What's one of those dogs way? You know somewhere the real lightweight little little missiles we call them a little female missiles and males maybe fifty five pounds sixty pounds max. And then the big ones. You know, so a fifty pound dog can take a person down. Puts crazy. We got we got a little lightweight one work and a that um, just a straight firm missile. Man, I'm no joke. You guys are think about training up some mountain lions if we could do what we would, man, that's a good idea. Hey, our people are people in your community? Um, are they miffed that that you do? You feel that you that you revealed too much about how your guys, how you guys like to operate by writing a book about it, you know, not so much. It's been one of those things where we balance it, you know, and our agency, and I was one of not the only, but one of a few. You know that we're kind of targeted by. I'll go back to Wild Justice and the TV thing because that was a big exposure. Ever, even outside of the book, Um, the thing for me was, you know, it wasn't about you know, showboating anything game wardens do, or what I was doing or what my guys was doing. It was I've been dyed in the Little Leven Wildlife wild lands and waterway since I was a kid. And when I saw the destruction, man, it broke my heart. And when I saw this car, healthing happened. And I'm like, Okay, you know, we can take the easy path, in the safer path, maybe go do the fishing license compliance stuff, or we can dive into this. But here's a problem. No one knows this that's going on. We're not going to fight it alone. I don't care for the most whiz bang tactical, high speed low drag seal Team six slack team doing our thing. We're gonna w one tiny little dance in this issue in one part of California. This is going on nationally and I'm like, and I keep hearing the same thing over and over again, over and over again. Hey, nobody knows. Nobody knows other law enforcement teams that are coming up in other states and even in our own state having the same challenge, and they're like, can you train us? Can You'm given presentations on the shootouts we were in one where my partner was shot. We have a whole debrief presentation. I do PowerPoint radio tapes for l groups all over the country. So all the mistakes we made and almost got shot and killed. I don't want to see that happen in any of my brothers are like, we're talking about that story you have where you had a guy that was down for three hours, right, yeah, you know, or all of us in the room being out and you guys get hurt. I get hurt hunting, you know, off duty doing my thing because I'm out there, you know, with just my family. Um so we we we waghed do we talk about or do we not talk about it? And one thing I do in the book and we did on TV two we give away stuff that isn't really super secret. I mean, if you really dig deep, you're gonna find it. It's pretty common stuff. I mean, I don't talk about the the inner team tactics you know right now, um on these broadcasts. I certainly didn't reveal them on TV, but we got to give up a little to get the message out. The other thing we needed to do besides getting this issue out was I just felt like we needed to legitimize game wards everywhere. The thin green line of conservation officers was checking out your shirt where it's like, it's like what you call the the blue the thin blue line. Yeah, and this is the thing green he's got. He's got one of the shirts with the with the black and white flag on it, with the game warden green. Yeah. Well you notice that I've never seen on those floor. Yeah, And that's just that's that's that's the same thing. It's just you're looking at rangers, conservation officers, border patrol, You're looking at those of us that are in our wild lands without a lot of support, and you know, not to take anything away from the thin blue line because we're all law enforcement. You know, this isn't anything different. It's just showing that as thin as the blue line is, there are so few game wards per capita compared to our populations throughout the entire country. And obviously we still have all that traditional wildlife poaching going on that we talked about that we you know, some of us don't do a lot of anymore. And you and you're not. And then you've got this too, Yeah, you're not. You're not acting like that's not important. No, no, And there's some Pennessee sections and hid more that you probably noticed where we did a study between the first book and the second book. It's been exactly a decade and we look at the population of every state in the nation numbers and the game ward numbers, and you've got this explanation multimillion growth in impacts to our wild lands and we've added like eight hundred game wards nationally and it like, you know, ten years ago there's forty six game wards. Now you've got a forty seven. So it boys, it really comes down to um sharing what we need to share. Not only you know, talk about what the thing green line of conservation warriors do nationally, even outside of the special ops stuff, the traditional stuff, but letting all you guys know that our eyes and ears, I mean, we're all team. You guys are avian hunters for all the right reasons. You're in the woods for all the right reasons. We call you, you know, fellow hunters, force multipliers. You're gonna find it, You're savvy around it, you're gonna get out safely because you've got great skills and you're piste off. And I rate to see this happen on your public lands or even private honey ranches. California is a fifty fifty split right now. When I retired and Steve, this is guys, this is an interesting stat we I did those stats as I keep them all annually and I tabulate my my spreadsheets. It was literally a fifty fifty ratio of private land, personal ranches that the cartels are infiltrated and public lands. So I could be on one of my buddies blacktail hunting clubs that I grew on, grew up on, doing a blacktail deer hunt, or I'm doing a you know, spring hog hunt, thinking, oh man, you know he won't be this deep in. My buddy and his ranchers and his cattlemen are running fence all the time, and I find a grow site, like you got to be freaking kidding me. I don't want to name the place, but I was on his place was a big ranch and they do a lot of like there's a lot of there's a big recreation program on his ranch. They run cab but they also have like an actual recreation program, an advertised recreation program. And when I was talking to those guys, it's a constant thing of theirs. Yeah, it's become literally the biggest people backpacking in and a state. And this is on a on a very active ranch property and they're constantly encountering illegal grow sites to pop up. Yeah, and not happy about it. Yeah, And it's you hit it on the head to the point where how much do you want to keep hunting? I mean, how much is that starting to outweigh? Are you know? We have dwindling consumptive users and conservation actually hunt in California, And I mean I go back to my old home state and I say, look, there's so much good resource there. That is a beautiful state, and we're losing you know, hunting numbers like exponentially. And that's necessarily not helping because I go back and one out of two times, even on private land, I'm gonna run into a grow site and I'm like, dude, I really want to deal with the grow site today when I'm on one of my few hunts because I still go back. I have little kids, and yeah, problems, but the Turkey and you know, it's a great state. I mean, there's some really cool hunts out there, so we want to we want to counter that as much as possible. Hey, uh, I don't expect you to do this out of memory, but in your book you have in the end, you have a little bit of a snaps as the house of you put some metrics okay around miles of pipe the stat sheet. Yeah, rat open that up and rattle a couple of those off. It's kind of funny to look at the It's kind of funny to look at the list. I can't remember where I encountered it in there, so so looking at breaking it down, like you said, the metrics, breaking down the stats um in six years between and the end of our team destroyed three million of the of the contaminated marijuana plants, all carbo fuen contaminated. It's three million plants, three million plants that would have hit that black market. And then we uh, then we destroyed almost fifty nine thousand, or twenty nine tons of process marijuana. And that's the stuff in the one pound bags with all the poisons on it about to go back east or you know, be sold in the black market. I've forgotten it was that high. Actually, twenty nine tons daying um, seventy felony arrests and armed gunmen UM seized six one firearms during those missions, and I'm sure we didn't get them all. That's a pretty significant almost a thousand felony arrests, almost as south yet almost just under a thousand felony arrests. And you know, our our dogs were a big part of that making that happen that Are there a lot of the same individuals that are rolled up in there. Are you guys pretty successful at prosecuting people, Well, we're successful at prosecuting him. Now when we get the environmental crime Enhancement's keep in mind when it went felonyto misdemeanor once legality started in California and miss ametar to infraction, very few d a's offices would even prosecute these on the local level because they wouldn't get a jury on a marijuana case and take those risks and and you know, convictim. They didn't want to do that, but we would say, wait a minute, you know they were within a hundred fifty feet of a stream, or they were using a band poison and I'm glad you Brobably they overstayed their fourteen day federal camping limit exactly, so let's make it a felony again. But Steve, the thing that you just you just triggered, which is great, that I forgot to mention, is that band toxic poi and as a felony in the California Peano coade is one example. So even to possess it now it becomes a felony. If they divert a waterway, if they you know, block up a creek, if they alter a stream bed, all that becomes a felony enhancement. So that's how we're starting to get prosecutions even after regulation is working. But we had a yeah, we had six hundred one firearms UM four and fifty tons of just general gross site trash. And that's that's one team at twelve not getting everything, and a bunch of other teams that have done other work, other good work that hasn't even been food packaging, propane cans, toilet excrement in the creeks, trash, dumps. And if we haven't got it in one year, imagine five years of that with guys living out their freight month straight. It's it's a train wreck. They must have to start to hide the trash. After a while they try to. They actually dig big like compos you know, like like landfill holes, and we'll go out and see him, and we'll do a reclamation and clean up one, and then all of a sudden there's another layer and another layer. And the worst part about it, you brought up a good point is they'll they'll have these holes that are like almost twenty ft deep for the next grow site the next year, for their trash or for a water catchment, and they don't cover it up, so animals are coming in and deer slipping into it and going to their death. We're walking in. We could walk into one on a scout. So you have that besides the pungee pits and you know the little little trail things. And something listeners especially should know about is good. But um, yeah, four and fifty tons of just general grow site waste, and you talk about polly pipe, guys, before two point three five million feet or four d forty five miles of black polypipe. I mean that's more about polly pipe. Yeah, that's a one inch line. That's how much of that crap we took out. Four five So that's one tip of Montana to the other far corner of Montana. That's the whole stretch of californa half of California. It's crazy. Um. And then and then forty six tons of fertilizers, seven fifty gallons of the illegal toxic chemicals the yea seven yeah, and then seven three. This is the one that UM, this had I think is one that's underlooked, and it's important because every time we take out a water diversion, just think what that water diversion was due. And it wasn't only blocking water for everything downstream that you survived, mostly our wildlife or our drinking water, but it was also poison in the water to the grow site. And what was you know ingesting that all that wildlife. So and that's basically seven water dams we dismantled in that time, and there's a lot more out there. So UM and then those dams, when you look at the number amount of water they would steal, and we didn't know how much water was really being impacted. California was in their most severe drought in a century between about twenty thirteen and about remember that, and the whole country was taken notice. Yeah, and it was. It was just really dry. And so all the cartel grow sites, like in the traditional mountains of northern California Silicon Valley, it just wasn't happening. They couldn't even get underground water. So they were like in the Delta, they were doing stuff in weird places. But the science finally came out and we just and we were able to learn that an hot aird outdoor grow each plant takes between ten and twelve gallons of water per day stolen for up to ninety days before it's harvested. So when you do all the on ten thousand plant grow for ninety days ten to twelve gallons, you know a plant. How many millions and hundreds of millions of gallons of our water was being stolen in our worst drout would take us to ab at it. We did. We actually calculated it, and the dams that we dismantled were responsible for twelve billion gallons of water conservative estimate, that was pulled out of its natural course of its natural course whether it was drinking, wildlife, habitat, whatever, and that was very conserved because that doesn't take into account any of the private land grows that were quasi legal or maybe not legal at the time, and people were doing it wrong, maybe diverting their own water, but not a cartel public land trespassing. So that really got the governor's attention, and that's when we started to get teams for watershed enforcement and stuff like that. So yeah, in the West, right fight over water exactly. I'm quote like that. That's it. I call water is life. I mean, it's it's gold. You know, it's more precious than gold in states and so pristine states like we have here in in true you know, public land Mecca of Montana. I always keep an eye out for this stuff and that it's been in this state before, not as much fortunately because of the terrain, but um, the Mountain states will get it and they have and it's it's just something we got good enough environment to grow here. It is, but it's a very short summer the grow the grow window is really tight, really tight, so it doesn't happen often. But up here we get a little bit of that, but we get a lot of the methamphetam in the fat in al and we certainly always have the gun running and trafficking because that's in every state these same groups. We gotta remember, guys, is you know, the poison, cannabis production and all the drama my team focused on is a kind of a focused mission. That's only one element of what these groups do. They're doing all kinds of stuff. They're on the same organization, and you know, when they're not growing weed in the summer, they're cook a meth in the winter, they're doing fat in al, they're running guns. And something people don't understand, and I didn't know this until towards the end of my career and we are really in bed in intel circles, was that of all the hundreds of millions of dollars of profit these cannabis growers, these cartel guys make a third or more of those profits go just two guns and ammunition stolen in America to fight the cartel wars south of the border because they don't have the EMMA and they don't have the infrastructure for weapons, and down there they're at full on war because it's it's you know, it's wild West hands off up here. Fortunately, they want to play nice. They want to draw attention and you have you know, law enforcement or public outrest. And the other thing is they want to keep it as quite as possible because it's gonna hurt business. Hence one of the reasons we name the book hid More. You know, it's just one of these things. Let's try to keep it under the weight our domestic eco terrorism thing, if you will. And I'm glad we're not having that here. Our job to be a lot different. But um, a lot of that is going into guns and going down south of the border. So um, kind of a little uh eye opening fact there. Okay, so uh tell people real quick. We've talked about hidding war a couple of times. But but but talking about plug both of your books in the best way for people to find you if I don't know how much you want to be found, But well, at least you can plug yourself, plug yourself, all right, basically whatever degree you're comfortable, no, no problem. You can get copies of hitting More, that's the newest book, and you can go back and get the old one, the first one, or in the Woods on Amazon. Um, there's an audio book out I'm gonna be doing an audio read. Well. The audio book will be read in August. It's on Kendall UM. You can get it through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, any major bookstore. You can also get it through me if you want you through. If you want a personalized copy, I work that out, you know, through my email, and you just get me on John Norris dot com, on my website and on Instagram Facebook and O R E S j O h N N O R E s on Instagram, Facebook and the website, So real easy. And I encourage feedback questions, you know. I try to answer all the questions I can and UM educate because we we were getting a lot of public awareness. Now now that I'm retired and out of California, it's kind of cool to be going more on a national level and presenting on the book, doing signings, doing presentations to this stuff with some pictures and video, and just sharing some stories that everybody seems to resonate with rather conservations or not. You know, kind of a unified front. So I just appreciate you guys. One. I love the work you guys do, love what you stand for. UM fan, myself, my team members, are all fans, so they're really excited to hear this, and thanks for spreading the word. It goes a long way, and we are one big team here, you know, trying to protect our wildlife, waterways and wild lands, and you guys are stewards of it at the top level. I appreciate it. I didn't ask you if you got you got your final conclude you're saying thank you, great questions. Guys. He's gotta go check on as illegal grow on Joe's joke. Um, yeah, I think I got anything more anything open book. I'll share what I can. Yeah, thanks for coming on. And it's like, uh yeah, I'm glad you guys. You know, I'm glad you guys are out there and it's interesting. I think one of the biggest, like my concluder is um, I don't think people realize the complexity of game Warden life. That's it like growing up man, Yeah, hand I was like everyways, just like you know, you didn't talk fondly of the game Warden. Yeah, it's like he's we gotta watch our back, I gotta watch over back. He's you know, he's on her, but he's always suspecting us. I know, I didn't have that fear because I never met one, but everybody else it was the same thing. And then once you get to your point in life or you're not where you haven't recently broken a law, you start. Now I see a game ward and I'm like, hey, hey, I'm your buddy, because yeah, we all went through those moments. I'm not gonna say, yeah, I didn't know what I was doing. The game warden get that first Crossman seven sixty, and you know, you're on every Blackbird Hunt and whatever else you can. You're like, oh, there there's really a limit. There's an on game. Oh okay, yeah, you know bad stuff, but um but no it is. And that's I really appreciate you seeing that, Steve, because that's the thing. The whole thing now for me is like we said before, is don't you know, don't simplify what game wardens do. You know, they're legitimate law enforcement officers no matter what state they're from. They're highly trained, and they're out there by themselves, you know, And it was it was hard enough to deal with a poacher with a felony warrant or or you know, a guy that could get really violent on you. You know, we a lot of fugitive recovery, your guys hiding out in wild lands. That's where you know, these guys that need to stay off the grid, not to go back to prisons, and not to mention that most of the people you go and talk to are probably already toting a gun, already going a gun. The flip side of it, you gotta run a lot of math in your head, right, you got to. When I was doing all the traditional stuff for the majority of my career, the cool thing was is that I knew the guys I was contacting. They were cool. You know, they might help. Can we check? I want to check, Hey, what do you want? That's why I feel like it's helpful to have game wardens, and I know a lot of them do. It's helpful to have game wardens that come out of a hunting and fishing background. Thank you, because thank you for saying. But you know what I'm saying, just to sort of have a sense of having to read on people because people that are gonna be It's like people that have this thing where there's suspicious as someone like, well, why does he need a gun? Right for something like that's not the right attitude to have. You gotta kind of know who you're dealing with. And I think I feel that would be a major advantage. I'm just saying that's the only way, the only path, but I feel a major advantage would be having people who understand culturally the groups of individuals they're likely to be policing in order to make those those really those judgment decisions that you can't explain, and teach someone about how to read a situation, reading a person's intents right where someone could walk into it and get a really wrong impression of what's going on, or adversely miss things that they that someone else would have picked up on. Yeah, that you hit it on the head. Haven't known the culture. And that's what we've seen, right, most of us, at least from my academy. I'm a dinosaur, you know. When I you know, going back to like the early nineties when I started, we all grew up handloading, you know, we learned how to use a rifle early. We were taught at the respect of it, very comfortable around firearms like you, like all of us, you know, and um, then as we started to get to the latter generations of game, Warden's coming in the last ten years, and I was you know, I taught at the Academy a lot of a lot of subjects and been an instructor in my whole career, and you know, we would get people coming into the job, these young you know, college kids that have how many of you guys hunt? Two hands go up at a forty cadets. I'm like, okay, how many of you have done a lot of shooting with a rifle, and like six hands go up, like wow. So we're going to teach people to shoot weapons in this. We're gonna get them qualified, and then we're gonna have to get them comfortable. Like like you just said, Steve, Hey, if I didn't have that background that we all have, going up to a guy with a gun, even that's a cool sportsman, Hey, how you doing and that rifle comes out? I mean, that's an O crap moment. And training past that to get the comfort level. It really is an upward It's a learning curve that is so steep compared to the traditional guys you know that have been on it and gals that have done it for a long time. So it definitely helps and it keeps you know that one Warden, no matter how much experience they have in the field because of their background from overreacting or in some cases underreacting. Because you're right, it's a good judge of character. I mean, you know from your experience how easy it is to see someone that's really what we call hanky with a weapon or really relaxed, and it's like, hey, it's another buddy hunter. We're on the range site and this guy is not a threat. But it's that fine line. So yeah, it's it's it's a tough game. Well, thanks again for I'm not Man. Thanks to help people go find your book. It's pretty interesting read, and especially that you know people from other states are just beginning to deal with this. I'm guessing the problem is not going to go away. Um. Unfortunately, it's not going to go away. And I mean there's all kinds of debates on you know, do we legalize nationally, do we do this? Do we do that? In In chapter ten, I go into not so much solutions because there are no easy solutions, but things to consider coming from a state that is a heavy cannabis state on the legitimate and also the dark side, um, and looking at what has worked and hasn't worked. And looking at our you know, our home state now in Montana, what's working and not work Colorado some others, you know, like maybe some you're probably experiences like what you got back in Michigan. Um. I think legislatively, we need to really think that if we're going to regulate, we gotta let regulate right. And one thing I can say that I get into in this book a little bit without giving it all the way is don't go easier on these public land trespass cartel foreign growers. Let's go harder, you know, because there's gonna be tax money. There's gonna be funding coming in millions and millions of dollars now from legitimate anibus that are now paying into the government pot that really needs to go back to this stuff. In California, we're supposed to start seeing those proceeds actually this year from legality that started two years ago. So where we were millions of dollars short and only able to reclamatecent of all the growth sites we went and start to finish. Now, maybe we can get to that d percent mark. Maybe we can put double the amount of officers on doing reclamation education and UH and just spread the word. So I think we need to learn from our mistakes and and not be you know, so cocky in our position that we're not making mistakes. Hey, we made a lot of mistakes before we formed this team. We made mistakes as we formed this team, and we were you know, there are a lot of things we could have done differently, and that's one of the things. When we formed MET as well as when we do legality. They're almost kind of two parallel courses. Let's just try to fail forward, you know. And one thing I'm doing now and my teammates back in California are we become very effective specialized, UM diversified. But the cool thing about you know, being more successful would be more effective environmentally, which is great. But of what I was mandated to do as a lieutenant and team leader of the unit was outreach. So it was to do interviews, it was to do podcasts, it was to you know, if we had to do TV documentaries, investigative news, things like wild Justice. You know, certainly there were parameters that I could work within UM. And I think being retired, I'm glad I met you guys now and not then, because we can talk a little more freely, not to discredit anything, but get down to the raw real answers. You know of what's working and I think and what we discussed today, and you guys amazing questions. Thank you for those questions. I think we've kind of broke a lot of that down and I think a lot of fired up. You know, outdoorsmen and women are gonna gonna think a lot about it, and I know appreciate any input you guys, how are your listeners do? Yeah? Thanks man, Thanks again for coming on until we can talk all day. But we asked a really interesting idea of widening that discrepancy between the right way to produce the product and the wrong way. But again, we could talk all day. Concluded, you guys might want to hook up with on at and do like a historical growth site layer because those would be some good hunting spots here soon. That would be good right across the parking lot. You can go ahead over their next Okay, no hundreds had found him for six years. Get that referral from the meat Eator team and I might get in the door. They have to work up a new icon. I know what it will be. I know what it will be. There's one in your book. All right, thanks John Norris. Uh is that a John Norris Jr. I'm a junior. Yeah, there you go. All right, thank you very much. Thanks guys, Okay everyone, thanks for listening. Again. And if I said it once, I said a thousand times. Please go check out our feature length doc mentory about hunting in America today called Stars in the Sky. You can find it at Stars in the Sky film dot com. It is available for streaming and download. Again, do us yourself a good turn, do us a good turn Stars in the Sky. Find it at Stars in the Sky film dot com. You can stream it, you can download it, and you can watch it again and again. Thank you.