1302: Mariana van Zeller | The Drug Cartels Running Small-Town America

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Today on the show, cartels and small town America. Langland executions in places with one stoplight in a dairy queen. Today's guest is one of those people whose job makes some of us envious and the rest of us grateful for our little cubicles. My friend Marianne Van Zeller is a journalist and the host of "Traffic" on National

Geographic. A show where she just casually hangs out with cartel members, human traffickers, armed robbers, people who would absolutely murder most of us within five minutes. She's been embedded, if you can call it that, with drug cartels and Mexico, followed human trafficking routes from Vietnam and to China, investigated rehab scams that literally

kidnapped Native Americans and locked them up in houses and filmed armed, heist crews in South Africa who blow up cars like it's fast and furious, but without the CGI. Oh, and that's just season five of the show. And somehow through all of that, she's still empathetic, curious, shockingly calm, even when the people she's interviewing are wearing skull masks, carrying automatic rifles

are just casually describing crimes that make your skin crawl. We're going to explore why cartels are operating in small town America, why commercial airlines are actually some of the biggest drug traffickers, how journalists stay alive and places where they routinely get murdered, and why some of the most disturbing crimes happening right now aren't happening in dark alleys, they're happening in strip malls and rehab

centers.

“Also, she hosts the hidden third podcast, which you should absolutely be listening to if you”

like this show, but wish it involved even more international crime in moral ambiguity. This episode gets dark, it gets uncomfortable, and it's one of the most fascinating conversations I've had in a long time. I really like Mariana, and I know you will as well. Here we go with Mariana Van Zeller.

One thing I found crazy was that the cartels are operating in small town America, because I don't know, when you think drugs, you think New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and yeah, there's small, pilly towns, but you don't think drug cartels, you think, like there's a rotten doctor, and somebody's trucking the pills over there, you don't think cartels operating in small town America, that's extra scary.

Absolutely. I've been covering the cartel for many years now, and I sort of wanted to do a story about cartel presence in U.S., and once we started researching it, I realized that actually the story should be about all the things that we don't know about, about job presence in U.S., including the fact that they're in small town America.

So one of our first shoots for that episode was in Georgia, and I don't know if you saw

the episode. I watched all of season five. You did. Thank you. Yeah, it was in Georgia, and we started with a murder investigation of this woman who

was tortured, and they cut off her fingers, and then eventually killed her, and she was killed by the cartel, and it was in the middle of nowhere in Georgia. And then we followed the investigation, and she realized that they're everywhere, and particularly like to operate in small town America.

“Because the law enforcement has one sheriff for the whole county, and what's he gonna do?”

Yes, exactly. The law enforcement is here to hide the drugs and have their distribution at work. I suppose that's true, right, because if you're doing a drug buy at a farmhouse, even if the sheriff is right there at the house, all right, you guys, put your hands in there while I wait three hours for the FBI to show up.

Right, and they're all armed with AK47s, and they're 15, and they've got their helicopter on standby, and yours is in Washington, D.C., if they understand why you're calling it. Who gave you authority? No, no, no. I followed the cartel here.

It's just you leave. Yeah, you know, it's so interesting about this, sir, is that in order to get access to the cartel in the US, we actually had to go down to Mexico, and gain permission, and have them say yes. And so we spent quite some time in Cinaloa, and it met a lieutenant, and all these other

people involved. And eventually, it was another member of the cartel that had given us access to an operation in Washington state, and there was some sort of arrests that fell through.

And so then, it moved to the lieutenant, basically, when you go down to Mexico, you have

to meet several people, particularly if you're trying to access something in the United States, and hoping that something will happen. So we met all these people, and there was all these possible options, but then nothing worked out. And then the last one we met was this lieutenant.

You could see in the episode, he's like, all jittery, you know, one of the crates, you see in the meeting him. But we had like 15 minutes with him, and then the Marines were coming, and they all got

United States? Because a lot of these groups have people that work for them in U.S., obviously the U.S. is the end goals where they were sending their drugs. And so eventually, he said, OK, we've got you, and it was all set up, and we were supposed to meet them in Minnesota.

And so we traveled to Minnesota, we're like, we're not a huge team, but we are six people, and you've got lots of gear, and I'm shooting 10 episodes every year.

We get there, and then we waited and waited for days. I'm like, I never showed up, and then

finally we get a call, and he's like, actually, that was a decoy, and we are in another state that we're not allowed to disclose, but come and meet us here. So when we had to do like a company move to this next place, and just hope that they'd be there. You think they were watching you in that place the whole time to see if you were meeting

with the cops like they didn't show up? Sometimes happens when we film in Cinaloa that happens all the time, where they tell us one place and then they don't show up, or we know that they have eyes on the ground, checking us out immediately. Sometimes it's not so much about us, journalists, because they don't know, even if they trust us, they don't know if we're being followed, particularly

me and the kind of work that I, yeah, if the FBI is following you, you're just leading

“them to all sorts of criminals or interpol or something, and what does she do?”

She meets with all the people we can't find, and they readily meet up with her for some reasons. And then film. What I usually say is that it's not as if law enforcement doesn't know where these people are.

It's not as if the whole of Mexican authorities don't know where the funeral cartel is. It's more that it's law enforcement. They have to catch them. In the act, they have to be evidence, it has to be a case built, and not so much in the case of Cinaloa, but here in the United States, at least I don't think it's in their interest

to follow me. But I do get often asked by law enforcement agencies and you ask to go and speak at conferences about what I've learned. That's interesting. That's got to be an interesting balance, because it would be cool to do that.

But on the other hand, when you want to film season six, they're like, so you went and spoke at the FBI four times last year, why are we trusting you with our lieutenant and the secret? Stash House full of drugs?

One of the things I tell always is that we're very, very careful with protecting our

sources. So we even bring masks with us. Okay, I wondered about the masks, because you're going in and you're filming these guys packing, I don't know, pink cocaine or something like that, and they're wearing like a skull mask.

And I'm like, are these guys picking this out? I was like, now, the crew must pick these out, because they're not like, yeah, hold on. We got to go to Walmart, Mariana, and get some masks, and we want cool ones. They didn't have any in the local targets. You got to bring up, however, there was one guy who was like a cook in the United States.

“And he had a ski mask on that said, yes, Daddy, and I'm like, who bought that?”

Well, it was this line. It was the one about the Trank Dope, the Trank. And there's a guy with a ski mask that says, yes, Daddy, embroidered on the front. Okay, so that was his, that had that was his mask. So a lot of the times we do bring disguises, but a lot of the time, because there are situations

in which they say, yes, they're going to be filmed, and then we get there, and they don't have disguises, and then they decide not to do it. So we started bringing our own stuff. We even bring long-sleeved t-shirts, just as a guy's tattoos, glasses, and gloves, and all of it.

But a lot of times, people are prepared.

And so they know there's a film crew coming, and they come up with these amazing, some

of the best masks we've had, having people who have picked their own. We had one guy, season one, where we filmed an episode on scams in Jamaica, it was my favorite episode still. I think it was the second episode we filmed for traffic. And we get there, and we're interviewing all these incredibly super colorful, Jamaicans

are amazing. This is the one where you were under the bridge, and he's like, I was thinking about stealing your camera. Victor, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that.

He was thinking, I was shooting a ship, but he'd realize I was nice. You're a good people right now, and so I'm not going to steal your shot. So instead, I'm going to tell you about how the game works, which is scams. But one of the guys that we interviewed this camera was he showed up with a Trump mask, because he wanted to talk about capitalism, and how it's all about everybody stealing anyways.

So, what's the world? Sensit is topic now, yeah, leaving that jail would be like, we don't want to present it mask. Oh, well, they earned it. We filmed in 2019, yeah.

Oh, yeah. It was his first charm, yeah. Interesting.

“Yeah, I would be like, oh, why do you have to pick that one?”

I don't want to deal with this from the CEO. Yeah, true, but we didn't get in trouble for it. So we are dead. How many cartels are there? Do you know?

I think it's estimated that's around 200 cartels right now operating in Mexico. These are just Mexican cartels. That's way more than I thought, because I would have said, like, five. I don't know. Five big ones.

You know the big ones. C. Gen G and Cinaloa and Haleesco, I mean, Haleesco say Gen G. But there's like a lot more smaller groups. We did a story once, many years ago, for an NGO, not for traffic, but before, about North Thiccilleros, which was a group in Guerrero State that was in charge of the production

of heroin at the time there. And Los Thiccilleros are, they love their Thiccila. There's one, they're those Viagras, you know, those guys. And they're called Viagras because their hair sticks straight up with this gel. And I'm thinking, like, you guys, the branding is so bizarre.

Not just of their own organizations, because many cases, they are organizations, but also of the drugs themselves.

We did a story about fentanyl when it was just starting. So nobody in the US still knew what fentanyl was, because I had done a story on OxyCotten. And then heroin, the progression for OxyCotten into heroin, all my sources on the ground started telling me, hey, there's this new drug hitting in the streets called fentanyl.

It's a pharmaceutical drug, but they're starting to exploit the pharmaceutical drug itself to get them high instead of in a medical treatment centers. And the cartel suddenly has its hands on this. So we went down to Mexico and enjoyed the guy from the Sinovo cartel. He had a kilo of brick of heroin, and it was mixed with fentanyl.

It was when it was still all heroin mixed with just a little bit of fentanyl and then it reversed. But he was telling us, hey, this just recently happened where we the Sinovo cartel decided we were going to get on this business. And they had hired a Colombian chemist to come there and they paid him, I think, $40 or $50,000 for the Colombian chemist to teach them how to make fentanyl.

“And it was the biggest bet and that's why the Sinovo cartel grew so much.”

They were the first in the fentanyl game.

And initially they were just shipping white powder to the US. He didn't in packages and whatnot, but then they realized, wait, dealers and distributors in the US realized there's a way that we can make ours different from the other. So they started mixing it with pink coloring dye or blue and put it pressing it into pills with the M30 to make it look real like it's a pharmaceutical.

And they're very smart. That's the thing about these groups. They're all very entrepreneur by the way, that journal is helping you as brave. Miguel Ahidvagan, he's one of my very good friends. First of all, he seems really cool.

He's got a swav factor and he's like chill and he's like, yeah, they would kill us if they found this. I'm like, you're not nervous about that. So he's very good for TV, but also he's really brave because my friend wrote a book about Narco journalist and there's a couple listeners of the show that are anonymous Narco journalist

where they post things under a fake name because they will get killed doing this in Mexican. Yeah, that's right. It's very interesting because I was like, hey, who's this person? Who's on my Instagram? And I was like, what are you doing?

She's like, well, I cover cartels, but I can't use my name or face or anything because they murder people like that all the time. And this guy is now just going to show up on that geo show my face and everything. Yeah, he's incredible. One of his best friends was killed by the cartel actually in Tinaloa.

So this is a guy Miguel. My friend Miguel and I had a, he's from Tinaloa. He started as a print reporter, the story is freaking fascinating. He wrote a book called A Fixer and we optioned the book, my company as soon as he started writing the book, I was like, I'm optioning your book because his story is phenomenal.

But essentially, he became kind of a journalist because he wanted to be a filmmaker like a Hollywood filmmaker and he was working on his film and suddenly he lost all his funding. So it had been shot, but he wasn't able to pay for the editor to get it together. And he needed to figure out how to finish this. So he had worked as a journalist before and went back to the newspaper, which is one of the

latest newspapers in Tinaloa. And was there one suddenly an American crew calls and says they're coming to do a story about the increase in violence in Mexico this several years ago and he was like, how much do you guys pay? Whoa, I want to be that and pretended like he had connections to the cartel and was

going to give them access, but had zero connections to go to. And then starts building connections, his sister-in-law did the hair for one of the cartel bosses, wives and an old classical friend was now involved in one of the distributions. All this stuff and he started trying to figure out and he became the number one person to this day.

And the international news organization or American that wants to go to Mexico and do a story about the cartel, they will go through Miguel and he has the access and the know how. A lot of your interviews are done. There's armed guards around you.

Well, you always do a great job of showing.

There's always a guy in the corner doing this. Our camera team was really good at showing the day. Yeah, like there's some guy who's like, this is amazing and he's like filming like this because he doesn't want to be like, hey man, can you turn to the side when you show your automatic weapon that is fully loaded and I wonder, how do you stay focused when

there's guys who are itchy and possibly on drugs and waiting for the Marines to start shooting through the windows and you're thinking like, okay, focus on the guy in front of me because I have 10 minutes or zero minutes. I don't even know.

“I think we're all afraid of different things.”

That does not a situation that makes me nervous or afraid. You're afraid to run out of time. Yeah, I'm afraid of not getting that. Yeah. That's what I would be thinking.

I'm afraid of big predators like sharks and tigers and shit like that. You dove with the shark and I know and I was scared shit like that. Okay, because I thought, oh, she's such a calm diver. I would never do that. Give me a hundred guys with masks and AK-47s and I will take them all.

But one shark in the ocean and I'm dead. Was it you who touched it? It was. No, yeah, I wouldn't. I'm not doing it.

I was super nervous. But then once you're in the water, it's actually the last of it nerve-wracking. So I'm usually very focused on the interview.

I have this whole thing where a lot of times I bring cigarette, we always have cigarettes

“in the production because a lot of times you have to have meetings before the cameras are”

even turned on and you have to get that person comfortable a lot of times they don't want to be on camera, right? So having cigarettes for me offering people cigarettes or beer or very Portuguese, let it's a way that we're connecting, right? I'm not above you.

I show them photos of my son and my family on my phone. I asked them about their families and it's a way that we're immediately connecting. And I do that even if they say yes, then we sit across from each other and even before we turn on the cameras, I'm asking questions that I know are just like what's your favorite food?

Things that we all share in common and that's my way of humanizing them and them to understand

that I'm there as a human being and then I never have a list of questions in front of

me. So that is number one. And I've worked with directors who like write all these questions that they want me to hear and I hate that because once I read that list of questions, it makes me think that I have to memorize them and then I'm distracted during the interview because I'm thinking

okay, I have to go back to the question that is on the list. And I don't want to break eyesight with them because I want them to feel that this is not work for me, that this is actual human curiosity. Yeah, curiosity. Yeah, I could do that for 15 minutes, maybe even half an hour.

I don't think I could do it for two hours. Like I have a list of things here that other than I would forget to cover, yeah. Sometimes I have some things that I want to hit but I never looked down on the questions more rarely, rarely, yeah, it's interesting, these guys will even meet you in the first place.

Why do you think they do that? They're not getting paid. It increases their risk. This guy's like, oh, the Marines know you're here. So they know we're here.

It's like, Kika die giving you 15 minutes of masked information that does him no good. So three main reasons. Number one is ego. People want to boast about what they do.

“I'll never forget interviewing this guy.”

He's the best money counterfeiter in the world, he's a guy in Peru and he makes these $100 bills and $50 bills that look exactly like the real thing. He's called the finisher. So he adds the crunch to the bill, he makes it look used and the smell and the touch. It's exactly as if it's a real bill but it's not.

And this guy was a driver during the day and at night this is what he does and his family doesn't even know he does it. And he is the best of the best. Why be a driver during the day when you're printing $100 bills? A lot of times it's too actually longer than money.

And so that his family thinks that he has a real job. I see if your family doesn't know. So I don't think he works like eight hours as a driver. He works for a few hours. He tells a family that he's a driver.

He actually has some stories of driving because he's doing it during the day and he can laundered the money and it's not going to be a big question mark. Where is he getting all this money from? But the money that he was making counterfeiting, it wasn't for him actually. He was selling that because if you get caught none of us wants to write up in prison.

So what he would do is that he's making the fake money and he would sell them a fake money to the boss that would then distribute it around the world. Anyway, when I started interviewing him, his life was so exciting.

Oh my God, somebody actually wants to know about this thing that I'm amazing at.

I'm like the Cristiano Ronaldo of fake bills and nobody's ever wanted to know. And behind him. I'm the Treasury would love to talk to him as well. Yeah. I know.

“So I think it's ego and wanting to boast about it.”

In terms of the cartel a lot of times it's posting, wanting to talk about it. Then it's impunity in places like seen a lawyer where people just don't really see a downside. There's so much corruption. Even if the police knows where I am, there's no chance that I'll get you.

Probably could have done it without masks and would have been. And a lot, sometimes we actually have to convince people to do it with masks because they don't want to wear sunglasses or they just want to wear this mask or just mouth covered the mouth and we're insisting on this is silly because if you get in trouble, then we'll get in trouble too.

And our whole team gets in trouble, including people like Miguel Árevaiga who lives in Mexico. Why would you get in trouble for interviewing them? Because if they found out because of a story that we did, they're going to say that maybe we read in the mouth or we gave it to you. I see what you should.

You're not getting in legal trouble for it. You're getting in trouble with a cartel which is much worse. Yeah. Way worse. And so we're very careful with protecting identities.

And then let me just tell you the third reason why I think people talk to us.

And it's this very human characteristic we all share of wanting to be understood. We all want others to understand why we make mistakes, why we do it, why we are who we are. And that's the opportunity that I give everyone. I tell everyone I approach look, I'm not here to judge you. I'm here because I really want to understand why you do what you do.

“Because I think that's ultimately much more interesting.”

And that doesn't mean condoning what they do. Of course, the only time I've seen you almost maybe show that you were judging someone as that pastor who hated gay people in Kenya, he was such a piece of shit this guy. Yeah, and it's not my first time interviewing him. Yeah, it's interviewed him before. Yeah.

You were like right on the edge of I could tell you wanted to just bite his face off. Because he's a terrible person. We actually gotten to be a fight. You saw a little bit of it. It got worse.

He's sitting down front of me and telling me how the LGBTQ community they're everyone is disgusting. And they're eating the poo poo. This is what he says. The great people do is they poop poo.

I saw that. And I was like, this man is mentally ill and an aggressive piece of crap. And he does it all under the guys. I'm not religious, but like, it's really gross and simplistic. He's getting creasing the harm for these kids who are getting shot or beat up because

they're gay in Africa. It's infuriating. It's not an issue that personally affects me, but you can't help but be like, why are

Why are you doing that?

“And I think actually a personally effect is all right, because it's right now it's that”

group, but it could one be one day be, you know, Portuguese people or podcasts, there's

a story. And part of that story was actually to show who it's a lot of the legislation being passed here that influencing what's happening in Africa. So actually, in fact, it's all of us, but yeah, that was a really hard time. I also interviewed an assassin here.

We did an episode on assassins in LA. Most of the episode was filmed in South Africa, which has the highest number of assassinations in one of some of the highest numbers in the world. But we started that episode interviewing an assassin in LA and that was a really interesting one because that's not season five.

That was season four. Okay. I got to rewatch that. Yeah, I was an interesting one. Yeah.

Did you lose your cool during that one? Yeah, because the whole point of the show is also to humanize people behind the mask and

try and understand why they do it.

They do. And in that case, as soon as we arrive, we met him downtown at night, I connected with him through another contact that I have here in U.S., a guy that I really like that has given me access to a lot of underworlds in U.S., and so as we're driving to meet the assassin,

“my contact tells me, hey, by the way, you have to be careful with this guy, because I think”

he might be bipolar because he will be happy one moment and then really angry the next. I was like, dude, where are you taking me through, right? Anyway, we get out of the car. This guy is jittery already and he's like, okay, so what's up? What do you guys want to ask?

I was like, okay, hi, my name is Mariana. Here's the crew. I'm introducing everyone. He's like, just heads up. He takes out his gun from his belt and he's like, do you see this here?

If the police shows up, this is a fucking set up. You're all dead. And so the whole interview I'm thinking, if by chance, the police shows up not because I'm here, but if the police car drives by, he's going to think it's because of us. And I'm trying to make it quick, right?

So I'm asking questions, okay, are you really in a session? What do you mean, how much did you get paid, did all that stuff? And then I wanted to ask my last question was about trying to humanize him. So he says he kills men, not women or children. And I asked him, do you have children?

And what I was trying to get at is that if he was killed, his children would suffer. So even if you're just killing men, suffering is all around you. And as soon as I asked that, he was, he went jumped to very angry and it was like, what the fuck are you asking me, emotional question, I'm not going to get emotional here. What are you trying to do?

I'm not good with this shit and you wanted to be the interview. So that was-- That dude is damaged. He's murdered. He's murdered.

Yes. Yikes. So if you're feeling uneasy hearing about cartel hit squads operating in towns with fewer cops than Starbucks, good news. Now's the perfect time to hear from our sponsor, who is dramatically less likely to murder

you. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Dell and AMD. I think what the biggest mistakes companies make is treating cyber security like it lives in its own silo because it really doesn't.

It touches everything that keeps a business moving. That's a big reason I like the cyber security tapes. It takes all the stuff that can sound overly technical on paper and turns it into stories that make the stakes feel real. If you're not listening to abstract theory, you're hearing how a small vulnerability

about process, one overlooked decision can ripple across an entire organization. And for businesses thinking seriously about resilience, that matters because cyber security isn't just about catching threats. It's about building environments that are secured by design across servers, networking, storage, and data protection.

So when pressure hits, your business isn't trying to improvise in the dark. Steven Macs or cyber security specialists, they also do a great job of stepping back after the story and translating everything into plain English, what happened, what failed, what could have prevented it, and what leaders should be thinking about now. It's a smart listen for anybody who wants to understand how security issues become business

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If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing people for the show, it is

because of my network, the circle of people I know like and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for yourself for free over at 6minnetnetworking.com. You might not be interviewing drug cartel members and human traffickers, but this will still help you with your work. It'll still help you with your social life.

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You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again all free at 6minnetnetworking.com. Now back to Marianne of Nseller. Are you ever worried about the safety of your crew? Yeah.

I would imagine even though I married and have kids, I would probably be thinking, if we die here, I'm going to feel really bad in the afterlife that I got her, him and him all

It's my fault we're here getting buried in the desert. Yeah.

“It's the biggest thing on my mind, constantly, I'm all our safety.”

I mean, we go through enormous lengths to make sure that we're minimizing the risk. We have hostile environment training, we consult security companies. We don't travel with security in the majority of time because it's just I'm trying to get people to trust me and if I show up with security, it means that I don't trust them.

Trust me, right? Even no matter how much planning you put in place, it's like Mike Tyson says, plans are great until we get punched in the face.

There's always stuff that's going to go wrong and so we have that situation in Niger where

I got stuck in a coup that was also season four and we made that part of the story because we were there to do a story about a legal gold mining and then there was a military coup. We got stuck and there was an incoming war. We were in the one of the most dangerous places on earth with terrorist groups all

around us. The whole time I'm thinking, I'm here, I'm stuck with six other guys, it's all men, but they all have families, all their wives and moms were calling my production company because I'm also the executive producer and all over the company and asking what was

“happening and how can we get them back to safety.”

So it was the worst time of my life, I wasn't able to sleep, it was just nerve wrecking. How long were you stuck there? 10 days. 10 or 10 were stays of my life. That is a long time to be stuck in a military coup when you expected to be home a week

or to whatever prior to that. Oh, we're going to be in an out and 48 hours. That's the only reason that you allowed us to go because it is one of the most dangerous places on earth. You've got Boko Haram and ISIS and Al-Qaeda all operating there.

You've got kidnapping squads and as American showing up with no security is not a good idea. So we've been given the military, the local military or the government gave us military escort that would follow us wherever we went. So we went out into the mines, we drove for eight hours and slept out in the desert and the open desert so that we could film inside the mines and interview the miners that are

illegally mining for gold that is actually funding part of the terrorist groups. So when we came back from sleeping overnight in the desert, we came back to this town called Agaviz and when we arrived, we found out that they were going to coup and immediately they removed the military security from us. So we were left with no protection in a rundown hotel, again, no protection around us.

And no way out. So borders were closed, the airspace was closed and suddenly they started evacuating people from all over the world but from the capital and we were three-day drive to the capital and we couldn't even go because it's too dangerous. So we were literally trapped in one of the most dangerous corners of the world and it was

scariest shit. That is awful. That's not fun. That stuck in a four seasons in the capital with a military surrounding it and like, "Oh, we'll get out of here soon."

It's like, "No, we're at a motel six equivalent." It was actually a building that was a rundown sort of house type thing that was built by Moamarka Duffy when he'd visited in the 80s and they'd left that building there and churned it into basically a rundown hotel. There was like one drop of water was the shower and yeah, it was very hot.

And we ate couscous morning night and day. Yeah, I'm not sure what's worse. The couscous are the threat of being kidnapped by ISIS. Yeah, but I have to say, beautiful part of the world.

It's so beautiful that desert and the landscape, so beautiful and incredible people

“that were essential to figuring out how to get us out of there.”

Yeah, how did you get us in her room? How did that happen? So we had a couple of ticking time clocks. One was the incoming war. So other countries in Africa, the African group of nations that I cannot remember the name

right now, but they were threatening to invade and share and depose the military leaders. And then the Wagner group in Russia were saying that if they did that, they would come in and defend the military cool leaders. And so it was kind of like a proxy war happening in front of our eyes. And so that was one of the ticking time bombs happening.

And the other one was, I had promised my son. You had been his birthday while I was there and he finished his camp. It's a performing arts camp and every year my husband and I have a tradition where we go and pick him up, we see his play that he puts up and it's a very important day for all of us.

And I spent so much of my time on the road that I live with the guilt of spending so much time away from him. So this is a day, the amount of what happens, we go and see his performance is an important day for him and for us, it's my favorite day of the year, quite frankly, I love it. And that was happening.

So we were going to go to Nijer, be there for four days, get out and come back to L.A. and then fly to New York and do the performing arts camp. And then we get stuck. And so I'm seeing the days go by and realizing shit, I'm not going to be able to make it.

And I'm the worst mother in the world, plus I have this incredible team around me whose

families are suffering right now. And we might all die. We might all be kidnapped and die. So all of that was going through my head. And one of the first days of the coup, I went to the airport because I wanted to see if there

was any planes flying in or out, even though I knew the airspace was closed. And I met this amazing guy who was a manager of the airport, his name was Cater.

Nothing. Nothing. Not until we get the permission for the government. It can take months until the airspace opens. You guys are going to be stuck here for a long time.

And I'm on the verge of tears of this moment. And I asked him, do you have kids by chance? And he picks up his phone and shows me photos of his kids. He said, yeah, and I showed him a photo of my son on the phone. I was like, I told him it's his birthday next week.

It was too complicated to explain. It's his birthday. And I need to be there for his birthday. And it's next Friday, and this was like Saturday or Sunday. And it's next Friday.

And so please, Cater, if you find out if there's any planes coming in or out, please let us know, because I need to get my team out of here and my need to get to my son's birthday. Anyway, I'm likely that anything will happen. And we start contacting, we have an evacuation company that we work with. We pay a lot of money to get us out in situations like this.

We filmed us calling the evacuation company, and they are completely useless.

“There's a moment where they say, we have no, and I'm asking, do you have a plant?”

We don't have plants. It's ridiculous. We should watch this episode. It's insane. Why do I pay you $10,000 a month for this insurance?

Oh, have you looked at our death in this number in the policy? It's crazy. So they failed us. So then it was a team in L.A., led by executive producers on traffic, but also my husband is also an executive producer on traffic.

Who's in L.A., and they're like, we're going to have to figure this up because nobody's helping us. So they start contacting different evacuation companies and different groups out there that could possibly do this.

They found a group, amazing people, who had two pilots who were crazy enough to fly with

a private jet in the middle of the night. And they told us they're going to land, they're going to be there for 20 minutes. You've got 20 minutes to get on the plane. The plane is coming from Ibiza, and it was a G5 plane, with people don't know, it's like the most luxurious of private jets.

G-J-T-S-D-S-D-U-U-S, is it to get to European games? Dude, it is insane. There's a big split clash of our lives.

“So basically, after a week of eating couscous and no AC and drip of water.”

And so this is happening. So we're following the plane as it's coming from Ibiza. And the plane's coming. Here, 20 minutes on the ground, and then it's going to Dubai. And it's going to drop us off in Dubai, and in Dubai, we're going to get our commercial

planes to go back home. And it's a long story, but it's worth it or problem. No, it's so far so good. I'm just imagining the pilot going, let me see the runway, and they're like, it's that soccer field down there.

It wasn't a big runway, and they were very brave, because it was an active sort of military potentially at war country. We still have printed out my partner in traffic, Jeff Plunkett, gave me a map when I came back. He printed out the map of what the plane radar thing map looked like at the time.

And you can see, it's this, you couldn't fly through, you see, and you're just pretty big country in the middle of Africa, and it's a red box. And then there's one plane crossing, and it's our plane, that's coming.

And basically, they figured out.

So they're coming, we're seeing it coming from Ibiza. We are, as nervous as you can imagine, as we can be. We arrived at the airport. It was like 5 a.m., the sun was just starting to come up. And we are met by a group of military.

They're all there, and they don't want us to leave. They start creating problems. They start saying that we don't have the proper documentation. And then back and forth, and Qatar, my friend, the manager of the airport, is also there. And suddenly, Qatar takes the reins and starts literally yelling at the military, which

is very risky for him too. And trying to convince them that the papers are in order that we need to leave, and basically doing as an enormous favor, and trying to help us. And eventually, they decide, OK, everybody can leave, except for we had a fixer, the producer, local producer, who is actually from Mali, from the neighboring country, who is with us

and helping us. And they said, everybody can leave, except for the Mali and guy. And that's when I called my husband, and I said, hey, Darren, I'm so sorry, everybody's going. But I'm staying.

I'm sending the team with the gear, everything, but I'm staying with this guy. And I'm in tears, I'm thinking, I get emotional so talking about this. But for me, it was the failure of me as a mother, too, making this decision. And it was really, really hard thinking, yeah, I'm not going to be there.

Most important day of the year for my son, and again, I'm feeling him.

And it was, I'm having all these gigantic guilt problems. And yet again, Kader comes and is yelling at him. And then my husband is on the front of me and says, hey, I'm looking at the flat report. And I think the pilots are Portuguese. Their names are Portuguese.

And I was like, what, OK, so at this point, the plane is landing. And I'm running as fast as I can, as soon as the plane lands, I run to where the plane landed. One of the pilots is coming out of the plane. And I go up to him before the military is able to get close to him, and I tell him, are

you Portuguese? And he's yes. And I said, oh my God. And I explained everything in Portuguese. What was happening?

And I said, they're saying that he doesn't have the right paperwork.

“But if you are OK, that I think you can convince them to let us enter the plane, because”

he didn't have the visa for Dubai. And that was our next stop. And pilot could just bullshit that one, maybe. The pilot could say, no, you can't take any one on your plane if they don't have the visa. So you go to the next place.

But because he's Portuguese, we spoke our language. I think in many ways, that helped. And so anyway, fast forward, he starts talking to the military, Kader is helping.

I'm the last one. I'm running to the plane, happiest moment in my life. And I hear somebody call Mariana, Mariana, and I look back and it's Kader. And he turns to me and says, happy birthday to you or something. Oh, that's the moment that everything came out of my gosh.

Did you kiss the ground Dubai when you landed? I would imagine you guys, Mariana. Kiss the ground in the US when I landed at JFK, yeah. I would be like, pilot, tell us the second we are out of missile range from Nigeric ground forces or out of this big red box.

The whole team was crying, and the saddest part for us was, like, I remember looking out the window and just thinking it was a terrible 10 days for us.

This is the future of a country with incredible promise and amazing people.

Everyone from the gold miners, the gold traders, to the people working at our hotel, to Kader. These are all amazing human beings who every chance they had were trying to help us and where people just like you and I, their mothers and fathers and who now have their future fucked up because of politics and leadership.

It's interesting when that could happen, a lot of people online were like, good. They're getting rid of the colonial French. Obviously, those people don't know anything about these kinds of things. They just believe whatever the sort of Russian they're overthrowing the imperialist Americans. Look, the military is going to let people live free now.

It's like, that's not how any punta has ever worked in the history of military. No, and these countries have enormous promise and potential, but they need investment. And what we were doing until up until that point, there was actually a lot of investment. The United States invested, I think, over $100 million in building these military bases. They had two military bases there, no longer.

I was money lost, but the idea behind those military bases was to prevent attacks from terrorist groups that would eventually possibly what happened in Afghanistan, organized and attacked the United States, security and other countries matters, ultimately for security here at home.

“And that's what was happening there and is not happening anymore, unfortunately.”

I was surprised to hear one of your sources said that commercial airlines in the US transport the most drugs, not like truckers or secret networks, it's like, no, that lady who has three bags on Delta Plus, two of them are closed and one of them is full of Methanthademy. And Delta was that interesting that he said, this was our interview for Cratel US. They were interviewed a guy called El Gringo, who's an American guy, doesn't speak

a word of Spanish yet, is one of the biggest contributors for the Cratel here in the US, fascinating guy. And yeah, he says, when I asked him, how do you distribute drugs, and I was thinking you was saying, I have these like four wheel shrugs, that's what I was thinking is like, no, Delta Airlines.

Yeah, Delta Airlines. Delta Airlines. Got a million miles. Strippers, strippers and Delta Airlines. I thought that was interesting, why strippers?

I think in his women is always better, right, because they're less people suspect them last.

And I think strippers, because they're more likely to do risky behavior in my have not sure why. Or they're way out of his situation successfully. I don't know. Yeah, they know how to charm people.

Thank you. Is it don't open that? It's full of Delta. I don't know. I'm trying to think of what the advantage is.

“I think the way they dress to probably throws people, nothing against strippers.”

No, I mean, it's legal way to make money, except if you're transporting drugs for a Gringo, then here on the line. How long does it take to plan and shoot each episode of the show? A long time, months, sometimes even years, like the Niger episode, we started pitching it on season two.

It took us two and a half, three years to convince Niger. I thought it was safe for us to go to the show. So Nigeria has to sign off on this. I thought maybe you made it and then you just sold them the episodes or something. No, it's very much a partnership where every story we pitch them stories at the beginning

of each season. And then they say yes to some and no to others. The majority of the stories they say yes to, but they are definitely stories that they are not interested in. And then once we start before we hit the ground, we have weekly meetings with them and

discussing everything. And this is we're interviewing this is how the story is going to unfold or this is what we're hoping to get. And even when we're on the ground, we have to send them reports. And then they see when we get back, we start editing.

They see Reft one, Reft two, all of the final cut, fine cut, all of it.

“Were they thrilled about your Niger experience after not wanting to do it for three seasons?”

And they're like, good thing we let you do that in the cost of 100 grand and rescue fees or whatever.

Yeah, my first thought when I realized there had been a coup was shit.

Not you was going to be so pissed. My thought was like, Nadgeel, they're going to skip there. So, if you would be people involved and they're going to want to pull us out of the country, medialine, we haven't even finished our story. And then I realized, oh, no, even if you wanted to get out of the country, you can't.

No, Nadgeel security people were like, we got to get them out of there. Oh, it's impossible. All right. I'm going to make a shit. Because there's nothing I can do from here.

They were a little bit betrayed and they were also having sleepless nights trying to figure out how to cope with it. This is going to be a bad look if they all get murdered. Yeah, it's not good. How do we figure this out?

Which episode made you feel the most unsafe when filming, except for, of course, that? New Year. New Year. Yeah. The Assassin's One in season four.

Yeah. That was scary. Some moments, obviously. We're not talking about drug source scams. It's actually Assassin's.

There are moments that weren't so comfortable.

and trying to see who can save themselves, you know, free for all where everybody just tries to get out of there as fast as they can.

And when you're with the Cartel, there's always a dilemma.

What do I do? Do I pretend I'm with them and just follow them or do we try to hide if the Marines show up? It's just always complicated. What do you do?

What do you decide? Oh my gosh. You need like a white surrender, net geoflag. That's the same thing. Yeah.

Lower that case. Yes, yes. Yeah. We're just interviewing these people. Yeah.

We always carry press passes with us. And in some situations, I can share. We also have press things on the side of the trucks that we travel with and that's always important too. But that, unfortunately, Matt is less and less in the world.

It does. Yeah.

I remember back in the day, I always said, go out and take photos of things.

And then it was like, now you need a bulletproof vest with the press velcro to take photos of things.

“And it was like, and you should probably get a helmet and goggles to do this.”

And then it was like, oh, no, the cops are still going to shoot you in the head with a rubber bullet. Anyway, because they just don't care. And then I was like, all right, maybe I should get a different job. Is that how you find yourself here?

That's right. Exactly. Is there anything you learned while planning these episodes? That almost got you in a trouble? Think, God, we have a satellite tracker, or think, you mentioned you have the hostile environment

training, but what do you do with that knowledge? They teach us what to do if somebody gets shots. How to use a tourniquet. First responder. Yeah.

First responders, but also then real scenarios. They show us videos of situations where they're shootings. But also, if you're being followed, what to do with a surveillance, telecommunications, how to make sure that you're not being listened, how to protect your sources. You learn everything.

I remember an interesting funny story about this is, for season 1, when we first started shooting traffic, I'd been reporting on black markets for years at that point. But I had just hired a team of camera folks that hadn't. The in fact I'd been working with Andy Burden on his show. And that's different.

Yeah. Different games. That came to an end. I reached out. And I asked if they wanted to work on my show.

I loved Burden's show, and I loved how it looked. And I had spent a lot of time doing these stories, but doing them was like, kind of held cameras and not the best quality. And with traffic, we wanted to combine guns of journalism or boots on the ground journalism with beautiful imagery, nadgeal style, right?

And so we hired these guys. And so it was one of the first hostile environment training of this type where we're actually going to hang out with the cartel and the criminal underworld.

“And I remember the guy that was teaching us at the time.”

He's a British military former military dude, really fun guy. And he turns to us and he says, OK. So now what do we do if you get kidnapped, ladies, there is a chance you will be raped. And so if this stood at them and explains what to do in those situations, I look at the guys and they're like, oh, yes, my God, this is not happening.

And then he looks at the guys and his gentleman. It's not a myth. You are going to get raped. So this is what you have to do. Oh, my God.

And I see all of their faces like, what? Yeah. I don't know if we should be doing this show. And they were brave and they did it. But we still talk about that.

I was filming all of the enemies ladies cooking fun, aside of a street in a hanoi last season. What the hell did you get me into? That's right. Yeah. Geez.

Oh, my God. But they did it. And no one got raped. Yeah. No.

It's so far. Season five. Yeah. I thought it was interesting to see a local cartel is murdering the fentanyl cooks now. Or recently.

Can you explain why that is?

“Because I thought you explained well in the show, but I think people are going to be confused.”

There's tons of fentanyl here in the United States. It's coming from the cartel or it was coming from the cartel. There's bodies piling up on top of 20,000 fentanyl pills under an overpass. What's going on? So American authorities started going really heavy on the chapel family, right?

The chapitos as they call the sons of El Chapo was caught brought to the United States. And then the Sinalo cartel was run by the chapitos on one side, El Mayo, who's the legendary shadow partner of El Chapo, everybody knows El Chapo, but nobody knows El Mayo. But he was the equal partner for the Sinalo cartel.

And in many ways, sort of more crucial to the operations of the cartel, he was the

whole corruption that had the liais on the partnerships with governments and law enforcement around the world in order to be able to move his drugs at the scale that they did. And once in chapel was brought to the United States, the government started really going after, particularly the chapitos, because they were in charge of a lot of the fentanyl production.

And I don't know if you remember, it was a thing called the Kulia Canatso, where the Mexican Marines went and detained apprehended a video Guzman, who is one of the chapelson. Oh, was this one made so round of the barracks? Yeah, exactly. We're going to kill all your families if you don't let it go.

So the military detains this dude, the son of El Chapo, and immediately all the different factions of the Sinalo cartel got together and said, no, they were not going to let this happen. So they brought the whole of the Kulia Canatso, which is the capital of Sinalo, down to its knees and demanded the release of a video Guzman in Chaposon.

They released him a few years later, they released him because they had to, it was so embarrassing

And in empowered the American government in this pursuit, too, because what they saying,

“you guys aren't going to be able to bring them to justice.”

So we are going to work with you, and we're going to be much more involved in making sure that we're bringing them to justice and stopping the production of fentanyl. And so they are started to be more and more pressure, because now they're dealing with the American government wanting to come there and take them and arrest them. And so when it started getting heated, they realized, okay, we have to do something

about it because nobody wants to end up in prison. So they asked, let's stop production of fentanyl, because that will get the authorities off our backs, the American authorities off our backs. And they did, and they stopped production for a while, but because if there's not just one or two chemists, just hundreds or thousands of chemists, and they all depend on this now for

living, a lot of chemists decided to not abide by the rules and the rules of the cartel, and they kept making fentanyl. So those were the ones who started being killed. And I heard when we were doing that story, because it made no sense, because I knew that they were still fentanyl coming across, was that they already had large deposits.

So they were going to move those deposits off fentanyl to the United States and stop the production in the hopes that would prevent the American government from coming after them. So like, oh, we're going to stop producing it great.

What we didn't tell them was we have 15 million pills in a warehouse somewhere.

Yeah. And we went to one of those labs where it was still being produced. But then we also went to an underground lab with a guy showing us that he was a chemist and he did everything in an underground lab under his house, which was insane. That wasn't so good to reach for the drainage tunnel.

Yeah. That happened to pass under his house and then he figured that out, he was like, I have the best lab situation in the world, nobody's ever going to claim it. Yeah. So we went under and he wasn't producing fentanyl anymore, because he was visited by two

cartel members who basically threatened to kill him if he continued. Jeez. That's crazy to me. Back to human trafficking, cartel violence, and why commercial airlines are apparently the world's most efficient drug meals.

But first, a quick word from a company whose business model does not involve cutting anyone's leg tendons. We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored and part by Better Help. March includes International Women's Day and it's had me thinking about how much women

carry that most of us don't fully see. I look at my wife Jen, she's the architect of fun in our house, birthday parties, little adventures, special outings that make life feel bright. She's also running the behind-the-scenes operations, schedules, school logistics, all the moving pieces that keep everything from falling apart.

There's an invisible mental load that's basically always on.

And because she makes it look effortless, it's easy to forget. It still has weight.

“I think a lot of women operate like that, capable, organized, steady, while quietly carrying”

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The dope thing is disgusting, by the way.

“So dope mixed with the zylazine, which I think is a veterinary tranquilizer.”

That's right. The whole, I mean, forget, just say no to drugs, like that whole campaign. Just show that ladies arm from the harm reduction clinic. This look like someone took hamburger meat, shoved it into a bag of human skin and then

it with a needle. It was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen on TV. And I can imagine, it must have smelled terrible because it looked like she just had a rotten arm. It was like zombie.

Yeah. So we were there in a small clinic in Kensington, Pennsylvania, which is ground zero for trangto. Trangto, but it does, it's fentanyl mixed with the animal tranquilizer. What it does is that fentanyl gives you a really high, but unlike heroin, the high goes away

very fast. So they figured out a new drug that they could mix there, which is a tranquilizer that allows that high to stay high longer, which is ultimately what every user drug user usually is after. And so they started using it, and they didn't even know there was tranquilizer in it.

“They just realized, oh, this is a good high, let's keep using this, right?”

But what they didn't know most people didn't, it's a new sort of medical phenomenon.

Nobody has studied this because it's so new and it's never shown up anywhere because nobody

is willingly using horse tranquilizer on themselves. This is that it creates these horrible wounds that look like leprosy. Essentially, I don't know if you've seen films of like leprosy back in the day when it was still big in India. It looks like that.

It's like big open wounds with like pus coming out, and it's just one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. In this case, we were in this clinic run by these sort of volunteers, amazing people, who are dressing the wounds and unwrapping. And we were seeing them doing this, two dozens of people, and asking if we could film

this woman agree to the film, then we see this amazing guy who is doing it again, volunteering his time and opening up this wound, he's not no medical training, but he's learned himself how to do it. And he's treating this woman's arm, and the moment he unrapsed the gals, the smell is everything you can imagine.

It's super powerful, but yet this is a human being who's being treated.

“The worst thing I could do is start talking about how much the smell drain.”

So what that taught me in the guy said so well, somebody's been covering the drug epidemic for so long, that we're approaching it all wrong. This is a public health crisis that's happening in America. We essentially have thousands of people on the streets of America nowadays hooked on this drug.

You might think that they're there because they want and they're doing the drugs because they want to nobody wants to be out there like this, nobody willingly do this. It's a public health crisis. It's like leprosy. So many other diseases that we've been able to combat and fight against.

And here for some reason, because we think that they have a choice, we allow it to happen. And the reason also why they're being treated in this like roadside clinic and said going to hospitals, we spoke to a lot of these users and they were all saying, we go to the hospitals. They're so much stereotyping and they're immediately, they're stigmatized and they're treated

as junkies, not treated as human beings. And that's what with our episode, we tried to do is really humanize these people and try to show this other side so that they're human beings just like us and need help. It's a scary path, right? Because it had a friend who had a back injury.

So he got oxycon and then he got hooked on oxycon and then he couldn't get it anymore. So he started doing heroin. But now you can't get heroin. So you do fentanyl. Now you can't get fentanyl.

You're doing the trinkdope. So it's like you end up with a guy's construction worker. This guy was an MMA fighter. You know, you get a back injury and it's like dot dot dot, five years later. They're in an alley covered in open sores and it's like disgusted.

Every conversation every time I bring up the opioid epidemic, somebody has a story like that. And the vast majority of them starts with an injury. I had an EP, I'm not going to name him, but I had an executive producer and television that worked with me for some time.

Who had seen my coverage on the opioid epidemic and called me one day and says, hey, you know, I do what just happens to me. I went in for like a tooth surgery and they gave me opiates and I had no idea, some people have been brain chemistry that makes them a whole hooked.

You never had an addictive personality or anything and it was like, I spent two months

doing these opiates, reading off those opiates was the hardest thing I've ever done in my entire life. And he said, I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Just talking about how this normal person goes and in two months is super hooked. He doesn't know, still how he managed to get off the other way.

But for a lot of people, they don't.

“And so that's what I mean when I say it's not a choice.”

Yeah, it isn't a choice. I'm curious, you're clearly careful not to touch any of this stuff. If you go to a drug lab, I don't know, what kind of precautions do you take? Because that stuff is in the air and it's on the bag and it's on the table and you put your elbow down.

And now you've got, I don't know, zylazine on your elbow. As long as you don't put it on your mouth or your eyes or you ingest it, you were in Miami where they had bags and bags of drank dope and they were mixing the fentanyl with the zylazine. So we used gloves, which is the appropriate thing to do and they were using gloves too. But when I was in a lab in Mexico and saw them making fentanyl, this was for Season 1 of

fentanyl. How was insane? We went in with like hazmat shoots and like big masks and respirators and we looked like those movies about epidemics, whether scientists walk in there and they can barely

That's what we looked like when we were filming.

So it's main my team. My guys are holding their cameras through the masks and we can barely move with these gigantic suits and these dudes, two dudes from the Sinolecartel that made the chemists for Sinolecartel making fentanyl. They had gloves and they had one of those just COVID masks.

Yeah, it's a scarf right here on this face. And I was like, aren't you scared? I was like, no, this is actually great because I know the fentanyl is potent. I know I've got it. I know I've made it.

He's making it. I know I've got the end product when I start feeling through my skin because it comes in through the skin. You see, the fumes are everywhere. This is why we're using these sort of respirator masks.

But I know I start getting my heart starts being really fast and that's when I know I've got the good chips. Wow. Wow. These guys are crazy.

They're insane. What are the saddest episodes?

“I think was the long women in Vietnam getting kidnapped essentially and sold to Chinese men.”

Tell us how they get snatched and scammed because it's really extra disturbing. It's not better if their family sells them. Don't get me wrong. But it's really scary to think you're going shopping and your friends like, hey, let's go get something to drink and then your friend sells you to a Chinese guy.

And you just vanish. Yeah. It's essentially what's happening there. We heard dozens, we talked to dozens of women who told similar stories, who were these are among villages.

So it's empoverished communities in the mountains of Northern Vietnam and not a lot of job opportunities, not a lot of education and a lot of times they would meet people that foreigners or Chinese people or more wealthy Vietnamese people that would come through and they'd start charming them. It's a lot what happens here actually with pimps.

And then say, hey, do you want to go for dinner with me and then the next thing they know, they're being handcuffed and blindfolded and taken across to border to China and sold to men. And one of the most horrific stories I heard there was this woman, something similar to her happened.

She was kidnapped, sold. She found herself living in a small apartment with a Chinese man and his parents, all living in the same apartment. And this is happening in China, by the way, because of one child's policy. For people who don't know, there's not enough women to marry in China because they had

a one child policy. You want it to son. If you can only have one, you abort or got rid of the girls and now there's one girl for every, I don't know, three men or something, two men or something. It's not as big, but there's a lot of single men.

And in China, it's incredibly important, culturally, very important to get married. You're seen as a failure if you don't get married and if you don't have children. You are parents, it'll be the biggest sort of sadness of their lives if your kids don't give you grandkids.

Basically, it's very important, culturally in China.

So there's enormous pressure on these men and they can't find Chinese women, so they're going and paying people to go find them wives elsewhere. So this case of this Vietnamese woman shows up. She was young, I'm not sure if she was a teenager, but she was young. And she shows up with this small, tiny apartment, this guy, they lock her in a room.

And the parents live there too, but they lock her in a room. The guy comes in, just have sex with her. She eventually gets pregnant. It's forced to give birth to this child. They take away the child from her and let her see the child once in a while, let the child

go into the room to be with her. She gives birth to a second child. And then after they want two kids, give them two kids and then they say, okay, if you

“want, you can go back to Vietnam and she says, will I be able to see my kids again?”

And this says, no, you can either go back to Vietnam and be with your family or you stay here, live your health rest of your life locked in a room, but you'll be able to see your kids. So she had to make this decision. It was terrible.

It was devastating. You forgot that they sterilized her before she left because they didn't want her to start another family. For what reason, I don't really understand. Yeah, I didn't even remember that part.

We were part of it that I think. That was particularly horrifying. If they're going to let her go back and see the kids only on FaceTime, what's the difference if she has more kids? They just didn't want her to.

I don't know, it seemed to extra evil. It's x-ray. Well, when I started talking about her kids and how often did she get to talk to them, because it's not just that she is not able to live with the kids or ever see them again. It's the fact that she has to live with the guilt of having made that choice.

She abandoned her children and that it's her fault. The whole thing was so disgusting.

“I think was she the one, she was like 12 when she got taken there by her friend.”

They blurt together in my mind, but her friend asked her to go hang out or something and then she woke up in a car and the other one, she said they brought her to a room. There was a bunch of Vietnamese people in there, two of them or three of them try to run away. And they cut their leg tendons so they couldn't run away. This is like a really large organized crime operation that's able to smuggle people across

the border. And that nobody's talking about it because it's not in the interest of either China or Vietnam to expose this. And journalism is very heavily surveilled in those countries. And our whole experience in Vietnam was insane.

It was at the moment we landed. We knew we were under surveillance. We had a government minder that would follow us everywhere. I had to show him my list of questions so he'd pretend like wrote fake questions and he'd give me okay.

And then I'd sit down and start interviewing people.

And the first person I interviewed, I started asking them the questions I wanted to ask.

And these were people that had gotten in trouble for trafficking.

them questions.

But then I started asking the questions that I wanted to ask.

And immediately we get stopped from the government minder who, by the way, is also traveling with the police officers. We have a government minder and a police officer checking every single interview and listening and there with us. And then our van one day disappears for hours and it's our production van that we rented.

But the government minder and the police decide to disappear with our van. So we know that it was either checked and bogged and probably both. That's when we realized, oh my God, they're not just listening in on our interviews. They're actually listening in on our private conversations in the van. And then there were situations in the hotel where I truly believe my phone was bogged

at the hotel because it was a crazy light situation and conversations that are having that I knew that there was no other way they would know unless they were listening. So the whole situation was crazy and we started going out in the middle of the night when they weren't watching and trying to figure out ways to do this story. It's a creepy feeling to have the government spine.

I went to North Korea. It's a tourism-ish trip.

“But I remember going I went 2012, 13, 14, and 15, I think.”

You went every single year?

Yeah. For three, four years? For four years. Yeah. And then it became illegal actually after that to go.

So I decided to sell the tour company. Was your tour company? You would bring people? It was bringing people. So it was like we had a partner in Beijing that was a British company running in China

that would bring people and they were like 20 years behind. So it was like you need a website and then like yeah we have this URL slash North Korea dash trips and I'm like how about how to go to North Korea.com and they're like oh that's a good idea and then you would have to like email them on a forum that was broken half the time or call China and leave a message and they would call you back during business

hours and I was like how about a chat about in the corner where people ask questions

and then it says we don't know we'll email you back but you're emailing and this squeeze and newsletters and they were just like wow yeah so we're like wait we're gonna run this and we'll sell you the leads and so that was the company and then I would get all these free trips. So I was like okay I'm gonna go and I talk about it on the show and people go I want

to go with it. So we would go and then it would fill up another one and another one I just kept going for free. It's fun. But I remember being in the hotel and there's like the hotel phone and it was on a desk

and when you're at a hotel there's a wire for the lamp and a wire for the phone. This desk had a hundred wires coming out of the back and I don't think in one of these is for the phone one of these is for the lamp. What are the other gazillion wires and then you'd be talking with a friend in there and the phone light would turn on a little bit and then turn off when you're done.

“That's right that's what was happening in my, but I kept thinking like maybe I'm imagining”

this because that's what I thought too. How technically inept must they be to not figure out how to not make that light go on when they're all. Well, Soviet era wire tapping technology from this North Korea slash China and I remember things like that and I remember being in the bathroom and people were like do you think

they're filming us and I was like don't be ridiculous and then I remember taking over the long shower and all the steam went on the mirror except for this circle and I was like why would that be there and it was like only if that's a different temperature than the rest of the mirror and it's what's a circle as why would it be right there and I was like guys turning your shower tell them if you have a circle and they're like yeah we have

a circle and it's not in the exact same spot so it's not like the mirror was made and there's a glass thing there it was like somebody circle was a little bit over here and I'm the person circle was a little bit up here and I was like there's something behind the mirror. Have you watched the apple show silo, by the way, if you watch it that's exactly where

they hit all the cameras behind the mirror. Oh my gosh, so there's a hidden floor in the hotel where you say and we walked through that floor this is where auto warm beer actually walks through that floor but the kid who got arrested and ended up dying there so we would walk through that floor and they would catch us there but I remember going and we'd just say oh we're looking for the bathroom.

Why is it a secret? It's a secret floor because it's employees only and they have meeting rooms and there's propaganda posters all over the walls and everything and he stole one of those posters

“that's why he went to jail but we walked around there and when they would catch us we”

would just say we're looking for the bathroom and pretend to be really drunk or actually be really drunk, there's the case was happen to be and I remember one time we were walking around and we walked to dead end in the hallway on one of the hallways and there was a pile of cameras on the floor and it was like why do they have a pile of cameras? Where would those go?

They obviously go in the rooms or in the public area and I remember looking at the little circle lens in the camera and going I wonder how big that is exactly and I wanted to go and touch it and be like okay and then go back to my shower and be like okay but I didn't have a chance to do that but I was just thinking like they're filming us in the fricking bathroom.

Oh my god. Yeah. I didn't think about it in the bathroom. You question your sanity though right? You're like I mean paranoid why would they care and weird things do happen like you're

one you go in there you tell them what you do you run a podcast and then three years later you have the same guy and he goes Jordan how's your podcast going and you're like okay. There's no way here. You either have the best memory of anybody I've ever met or there's a file on me that you read before I get here and you're like oh that's the podcast guy because what the hell

the heck Lee it's unnerving and you start gaslighting yourself no that can't be can it no

I'm being paranoid I'm not that important that he did know that thing it's just bizarre being watched like that. Yeah there was a moment where we all decided we were going to get so we're in the northern Vietnam and again we're being followed and everything we're doing we're thinking oh my god this is crazy they know everything or moves and everything and because they do a lot

of tailoring and Vietnam you can get your suits done for like a hundred bucks you get the most beautiful custom made suit so my whole team decide we're all gonna get suits minutes so we do and then that night we kind of like left the hotel without telling our government minder and went to good Vietnamese food and there we are and who shows up but the

“tailor and he's sitting at a table right next to us and he's like that's what yeah and this”

is like a big town with lots of restaurants and everything the tailor is also a spy teacher Taylor what's that thing Taylor spot yeah and then it's like no it's just a coincidence is it though or did the government minder go like hey they think I'm not following them you have to go follow them and pretend that you're just seeing them there yeah we don't know I mean it could be level of paranoia it could

be actually real exactly just because you what's that phrase just because your paranoia doesn't mean they aren't out to get you yeah that's might actually be the case you mentioned in the Vietnam episode that in some of the villages something like 10% of the people are missing yeah some of the smaller villages and some of them trafficking organizations that were there believed that a lot of them were in

fact kidnapped and taken to China some of them take jobs in big cities and don't come back but it's still an enormous number and you have families all over Vietnam looking for their daughters having no idea what happened to them if you take a job don't you call your parents and say by the way I'm alive yeah of course yeah maybe they took a job but then you're not missing you're just not at home

that's different they kidnapped these people off and off the street and I think you'd mentioned something like the witnesses bystanders don't intervene because there's a ritual so that's what's so unfortunate about all this too is that in the home culture the way that people getting engaged or one of the cultural traditions that they have there is that for a man to ask for a woman's

hand to get married he actually there's some strange cultural tradition where they go and kidnapped them from a public street they take them on the back of their bike or take them to the car wherever and it's sort of a thing that they do and then they go and present them to the parents and they get engaged the problem is that this is also how traffickers are kidnapping women so they're actually

using the cultural tradition as it is guys to actually kidnapped women it's very unfortunate I grew up in Detroit and there's a lot of among there from after the Vietnam War it's like one of our ethnic minorities that no one else has ever heard of and that's why you're so comfortable saying their name back and forth I was like no one knows about the mom yeah everyone says how long or something

it's wrong anyway so my friend was dating one of these girls and they ended up

“getting engaged and she's like so here's the thing you have to kidnap me with”

your friends so you know this too yeah and I remember being like how are we doing this and he's like yeah I have to plan a kidnapping I didn't end up being part of it would have been awesome but because he ended up postponing it

and stuff and I moved but basically he had to stage a kidnapping where it was

like a bunch of buddies and him had to go when her and her friends were hang out unexpectedly I mean it was all planned and then go and kidnap her and then basically show up with her to the parents and be like I'm marrying your daughter and it's pretty cool when it's not actually human trafficking and it was really hard actually because there's a ton of footage out there on YouTube of

real kidnapping things and of these traditions so even for us like our archival producer lost their mind trying to figure out what's real and what's just a marriage proposal I'm so happy you mentioned that even we're reporting we make we fact check but it's good to have this corroborated this is actually the case and happens even outside of the country it's unusual and I remember

being like she's messing with you dude don't do that you're gonna get arrested

“and it was like you have to plan it carefully because if your neighbors see you”

yanking your girl out of the house they're going to call the police and you're gonna get shot or arrested no here's a thing all of a sudden it's a ritual we've been dating for a while oh yeah okay tell it to the judge tell it to the judge I was so frustrated for you during these Vietnam interviews though hey do you know anyone who's human trafficking and they like look over to the

cop in the government minor and they're like no not me meanwhile I know that he was a human trafficker bro you just got out of prison for human trafficking we all know that your guilty you did your time what's the deal I don't know nothing don't worry about it myself for God's sake why do we show up and do yeah and we had people who agreed to talk to was the police showed up at their

house until them not to talk to us it was really hard and it wasn't really until we partnered with that Asian undercover group of journalists they were

amazing and they were the ones who went into some of these brothels using

undercover footage and they were actually able to get all the stuff that we needed because until that point we thought we didn't have a story and then we met them and they started doing this incredible work so this at least we

the brothel thing is extra gross so you think oh they're getting married off to

“guys and China all right they're starting a family it's definitely not ideal”

it's definitely still human trafficking and then you find out oh not all of them get married some of them just get locked in a storage units so that they can get raped over the ones that don't get married you think the worst of the worst is living in the situation that that woman lived right in the house with the family Chinese family locked in the room and forced to give birth to kids but

in this case there's even worse which are those that don't get married they're put in brothels because the traffickers have to figure out how to make money out of this commodity work for them with these women are just commodities and yeah being locked in those rooms and this undercover journalists it's this

incredible work where he shows up at this brothel and he says he's like this

long corridor and every single door on both sides are women that are locked and forced to have sex with men and they're not making any money and they're in the dark in the dark and so he goes into the one of the rooms it's complete darkness and there once he gets in one point I think he turns on the light and they tell no no no no turn off the light because he wants to see what's

happening it's the madam that runs the brothel that takes him there as soon as he gets in she locks the door from the outside so then he's in there he says he saw there was three women and they start whispering to him and saying okay what can we do for you and he's like nothing because he was just filming undercover nothing and don't want anything from you and trying to

grab how you can get out of there and they start saying look if you don't have

“sex with one of us you have to pick one because if you don't have sex with one”

of us they're gonna beat us so you have to pick one and it's this moment for a

year and where he's trying to figure out what to do and then he just starts knocking on the door and comes up with an excuse that he doesn't like the darkness or something I can remember exactly what is his cues to get out of there but he got the footage of that whole situation if you're listening to this thinking man I need a shower a nap and maybe some therapy same now how about a

discount on that therapy and or a mattress we'll be right back this episode is sponsored in part by fundara powered by nerd wallet running a small business is tough and when it's time to get alone it can feel impossible to find a lender you actually trust a lot of small business owners don't need financing because something is wrong sometimes you need help making payroll

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that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions your psychology your relationships it's a two minute read comes out every Wednesday if you haven't signed up yet I invite you to come check it out it is a great companion to the show Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news is where you can find it now for the rest of my conversation with Mariana Van Zeller you know like in my house

watching this in my office comfortable beverage in my hand I'm just like oh my god the only real difference is I just happen to not be born in a village and the mountains of Vietnam it's like the dice roll the biggest learning that I've had from all these years covering black markets is that I usually use this line that I read once that I love which is the wheel of history turns and where

and when you were born determines whether you get crushed or raised by it and we are the lucky ones we got the lottery ticket right we were born where we were we got opportunities that we did we got access to great our education and so

what are we doing with these opportunities are we given because we're not the girl and Vietnam or even some of these traffickers even some sea car use in senaloa where this is the environment they grew up and this is all that's

“offered to them this is all they know and I will never forget the center of”

you that I did with the 16 17 year old kid in Peru who's carrying cocaine on his back like kilos and kilos of cocaine backbreaking work through the mountains of Peru seeing some of his friends being killed in front of him by rival groups at this point has seen dozens of people being killed extreme violence really difficult work really dangerous and when I asked him why are you doing this he

says look I've always wanted to be a dentist I've always wanted to go to the

college my parents can't afford it and so this is the only work that I will allow me to go to college and I say why college what you want to do is says I want to be a dentist nice and why do you want to be a dentist because in my little town all the posters that I see you for dentists is posters of people with big smiles so I want people smile I want to be crying I own show that's so sad I

know so and said he's humping cocaine to the jungle exactly hoping that one day you can become a dentist so that's what I want to show to be I want people to see many of these traffickers again do we do not condone what they do it's difficult to even empathize but the majority of the people that I talk to are people just like you and me that don't have the opportunities or the luck that we

have yeah you do a good job of not glamorizing it but humanizing the people involved but not making excuses for the people who are doing criminalize and I ask all of them hard questions it's my job as a journalist I'm not there to then have fun with them no I'm trying to connect on a human level and treat people with respect and try to find the humanity out of them because by

finding the humanity then you really get the depth of the reporting that you need to understand why things like this happen but at the same time I'm also

holding them accountable for what they do so even the cartel like you're always

told their questions that you don't ask the cartel I will always ask those questions of the cartel what's a question you don't ask the cart one of the first ones is what cartel they belong to they don't like being asked that bosses and structures or names and things like that I try to always do my job as a journalist which is a whole people accountable props by the way to whoever does the

music on the show because whoever they are they find like the best Vietnamese rap with an electronic music dance beat behind it and I'm like whoever picked

“that is fire like I think that was actually our director of that after so”

drug moraskin is really good with yeah yeah I was like where do you even find something like that you don't type that into Spotify and find that I just a hit we also have an amazing music supervisor Dan Wilcox he's an amazing supervisor he also finds really good music yeah it's pretty cool to have something like that someone is just spending hours finding the perfect track

or gets really lucky here and there and finds a track or finds a track and goes one day I'm gonna use this and then when they're looking for music it's ah be it and it means rap from the nineties I'm doing I love that you notice it thank you yeah it's part of the production thing and it's like if I did a TV show I would do traffic it's already taken but very rarely do I envy someone else's

job because I have a pretty cool one too I talked to smart people interesting people all day but traffic and like what I trade maybe I mean it's a little scary getting stuck in these air after a coup I do have little kids my wife would it would not be interested in me trading but I could probably do a couple seasons of traffic yeah you came to an end we did five seasons this was the last

season yeah I did not know that my final question was what do we expect next season yeah yeah told you not to have ruined it yeah now now I'm paying the price for what's your favorite part of the job you think or what was your favorite so what comes next let me tell you what comes next because I'm still working in black markets I have a podcast that I love started doing this a few months

ago and I think the way I describe it is in many ways traffic was sort of the map of these black markets and the podcasts is a little bit like the diary right it's where I actually get to sit with people and have intimate

conversations on traffic you'd see like these people have incredible fascinating

stories and yet you'd hear like two three four minutes of their lives and here we have a platform where we can talk and I can understand who they are why they do what they do and these are people with some of the most fascinating lives right people that work and have operated somehow in these black markets so I've got that and I'm working on other shows it's just the privilege of a lifetime

right being able to see things and nobody else excuse you see's and connecting with people you know becoming friends with victims of human trafficking in Vietnam or with the kids that's carrying cocaine or Jamaican scammer tweety that will

“never forget there's all these people again not condoning what a lot of them do”

but creating connections with them and feeling like the privilege of walking their shoes for a little bit and understanding their lives is amazing it just expands your mind in a way that I think we all should be exposed to I agree we did five amazing seasons we got nominated for 29 Emmys last year was the most Emmy nominated unscripted show in the history of the Emmys which is

crazy and we're gonna be up for a bunch hopefully oh my god I'm jinxing it already

figure out a way to keep doing what I do elsewhere yeah I was gonna say if you can

do it on YouTube or there's so many apps and streaming services now it's kind of like with podcasting when I was younger I wanted to be on the radio and then I got it satellite radio and it was like the station manager would go what if you do this really lame thing that makes your show exactly like everyone else's show and then we cancel it because it's just like everyone else's show but not and it's

“no thanks I'm gonna do this podcasting thing and I remember everybody is like what a loser”

podcasting is for losers now all those radio guys are doing podcasts because it makes more money and you don't have to listen to some knucklehead station manager who doesn't understand what you do yeah that's exactly it so that's my plan for the future is that I can figure out how to grow the YouTube channel that I have I mean it's a good show and it was very successful very popular right for five seasons a lot of people love it I remember when I left

satellite radio the station manager goes you guys are just on fire it's really something anyway we're not going to continue and I was like what did I misunderstand about this is fire like repeat the last rewind that's so hollywood though right you are beloved anyway that was our last season what are you talking about how does that follow by the way South Africa looks so cool and beautiful but holy crap that plays the wild west your arm is hard yeah ice thing yeah

that was a crazy story right the highest yeah the highest cruise blowing up armored cars and then

“they're like how do we keep these people secure and it's like helicopter chase and escort thing”

and I'm like can't you just have more guards and they're like oh that sounds expensive we're not doing that it's a war game between the security companies and the robbers and the high scanks and they're all trying to one up each other and they're all one up in each other constantly so now you've got like a war on the highways of South Africa it's insane in Johannesburg particularly in Durbania it's crazy and this woman's like oh our plans since they're shooting these is to make them bomb proof

it's like maybe there's another social justice like make them bullet proof which they did and then the highest cruise were like oh yeah take a look at that this rifle that shoots through bullet proof yeah and they started using explosives soap and these things up and now we're going to make them bomb proof and they're going to come up with something else it's a cat mouth game you could not pay me enough to be an armored car driver in South Africa after saying that episode the guy who's been

shot multiple times who thought he was dead was he'd been robbed like 14 times and then he was there's a video which isn't sane where he's looks like an active word essentially he's being shot out from all sides he's wounded he thinks he's about to die he's like trying to radio to call for help and then he gets back on a truck a couple months later and his back doing that armored truck that was the guy who's like oh he's going to kill me so he's shot

the guy if you're like a hole in the truck you was able to shoot the guy shooting at him this is like a story from Iraq yeah or Hollywood yeah and he's like an old dude who looks like he should be a mall security guard yeah so this is the part that made me feel bad is that this guy obviously I asked him why is he retiring because he can't afford to retire he's taken bullets for the security company just give this guy his full pay and let him retire he's seriously and I don't know what

wages are like in South Africa but I'm going to go ahead and guess he's not making a six-figure salary no not at all these guys are making nothing and they're risking their lives I notice you're emotional at times with interviews people who've lost children or simply saying insane things like the pastor we talked about before like gay people should be executed and so how do you decide when to blur the line between like 60 minutes journalists who shows absolutely no emotion and being

more human with the person in front of you that the line doesn't exist for me because I believe journalism is not just about holding people accountable and it's not about objectivity I think perhaps

one of the most important jobs is connecting people creating connections between us the viewers the

listeners and people on the other side of the world that we think we have nothing in common with I think that's one of the most powerful tools in journalism I also think then in many situations that work the job of a journalist is very much like a caretaker when I'm interviewing the victims and even some of the really sad stories behind some of the traffickers and people involved in these black markets I am almost their therapist these are people who have never shared their stories there's a

very important care taking part of the journalism profession that people usually don't talk with about

“that I think is very important and it's the only way that you can show the complete picture and”

I am also human being so if I am going to get emotional I am going to show that I am emotional and I'm hoping that the viewers and listeners will feel that and will feel what I'm feeling at the time

and will care ultimately it's all about making people care about these issues in the world

yeah would you let your son do traffic on that jail or would you talk him out of it? I would love for him to be a journalist because I love my job so much and I think he's 15 years old now I think that I've led such a fascinating life that I wouldn't want to him not to have it

the way I am is that they were never fearful you were never helicopter parents they allowed me to explore the world if I wanted to go up trees if I wanted to move to Syria which I did right after yeah I moved to Syria right after Columbia University the war in Iraq had just started I wanted to be close to the action I wanted to be reporting from the Middle East at the time I didn't know anyone in

Syria I didn't know Arabic that was basically next door to a huge war and my parents never told me

don't go they were always supporters and trusted my common sense sometimes to their detriment but yeah well but that's the kind of parent I am to with my son is I want him to explore the world I want him to make mistakes I want him to sometimes feel uncomfortable get outside

“it's comfort zone I think that's very important and I think there's an instinct or not an instinct”

but usually parents try to protect their kids to their detriment in a way sometimes too much I'm not saying that yes my son go out and hang out with drug traffickers but do something every day that makes you feel a little uncomfortable because that's the way that you evolve and you become a better human being I agree with that it's easy for us to say and then it's mom I'm going to go to Venezuela and I'm going to meet up with these people who are human traffickers that also

sell cocaine and you're like I come from zero credibility telling you not to do that because it's too dangerous so have fun he's 15 right now so obviously you wouldn't go now but later in life when I went to Syria I was like 26 or 27 years old and when I started doing these sort of stories yeah I was around that age and I think at that point I had a little bit of experience I was a little bit more mature I had conversations with my parents about it and I think that I would prepare

him and tell him everything that I know and hope that he would make good decisions and have the training that he needs to have although I didn't have any training when I went. Yes it's easy yeah that's kind of bullshit yeah exactly what I would try to get him to hold on mommy's coming with you. Probably I'd be with like binoculars. I won't say anything I swear I'll just hang out in the fans. No mom yeah although it would be great to have your mom be your EP if your mom is

Mariana Van Zilman is there is there any place that's been just impossible to film in so far but is on the top of your list. Oh Nascaria would be one of them I would love to get Nascaria any Ron we've had plans to go to Iran we've been pitching a story on Iran since she's a none of traffic so far I hasn't worked out for us. Now might not be the best time to go to Iran. Although it's possibly would it be the best plan to go this is when we want to be there yeah that's true

although getting stuck there now. Yeah it's just it's very dangerous and particularly as a journalist and yeah there's all reasons and not to go. I was trying to go there with my poochies best work so because you're a fly under the radar. Right you know a little bit until they realize

“what you could you have to apply for a journalism permit to film and they're going to at least”

google you and then you doesn't matter what color your passport is at that point. Have you ever had a scrap anything because footage didn't work out or it got lost or your camera got stolen or something. Not like that but we had a story we were going to do once about uranium and nuclear weapons and the trafficking of nuclear weapons and uranium and we were going to Ukraine this was way before the war. I was again see I think was yeah I was he's on one of traffic so this was

2019. Our producer and director was already on the ground and they called us and it was like

do not come we have to get out of the country there's shit happening and so we never did that story

and that's one that I'm satisfied. We were really looking forward to doing that story. That was before the war so the shit happening is what organized crime or something or you can't even say what it was. I think it was a mix of paranoia and the government talking to people that they would we would get in trouble if we did it and then the people that were going to take doesn't give us some of the sexes deciding they didn't want to do it. Who's a combination thing?

So what other shows are you working on or what other documentaries are you working on? So I'm working on the hidden third the podcast you can catch it on YouTube. I don't like doing on the show. Hey those bills, I need some of your viewers Jordan rule listeners and then I'm also working on a really fun show. I can't tell a lot about it but it's a really fun show for NGO bout scams. I can tell you a little bit about it. It's essentially

the idea. It's called Super Scam Me and it's a show I pitched them which is I've reported on scams

extensively. I've been all around the world talking to scams victims but I've never thought what

it's like to be a scam victim myself. So for limited time, period of time, I say yes to every single scam that comes my way. I answer every phone call, reply to every email. I create this persona that I put out online and I open myself up to romance dating, romance scams, crypto, all the scams you can think of. It's an experiment. So right now you have dudes from Bangladesh messaging you

“and telling you how beautiful you are or whatever. You should invest in their secret crypto platform”

that's made them 100% return. You have no idea. I am talking to three breads. It's a couple of canneryves. I think four George Clooney's because celebrity scams are huge right now. I have

It's funny when you are a willing participant and knowing it's a scam. So we covered those

“pigbutchering scams and scams centers and things also you covered in traffic. And one of the things”

that I was wondering about is what if I just started talking to these people knowing it was a scam because before I used to berate them in Chinese and be like, I'm a Chinese party official and they'd be like, I'm sorry, we'll take you off of our list. And then when I found out they were being held there captive and they weren't willingly doing it a lot of the time, I started messaging back and being like, hey, are you okay? And I'm like, what do you mean? And I'm like, are you in a

Cambodian or Burmese scams center and you can't escape? And some of them will reply and go, yes. And is there anything I could do to help you think and they're going to go, yeah, just to pause it crypto and they're like, can you tell someone that I'm here? And I've had people send me

like their family's phone number and they're like, I'm deleting this account. But just please tell me

you did that. Oh my god, that's so sad. It was a guy and Dubai told me he reached out to me because like he heard the podcast or it saw the podcast on YouTube that I did covering this. And he said,

“I'm trapped in Dubai in the UAE and he drew a map of the scam center and he called me and we”

recorded the calls and everything. And I called a prosecutor in Santa Clara who covers a lot of crypto scams, Aaron West. Aaron West, I love Aaron, we went for there for this story. So she said, there's no evidence of this happening in Dubai. This is a couple of years ago. And then about last year, she called me back and she goes, so you're right. There is a huge organized crime connection. There's a Chinese gang working there. We think that the guy you talk to maybe a part of

this thing. So he ended up escaping and deleting all of his media. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, we interviewed a lot of victims from these crime compounds who had just been able to flee this scam compounds and were in Thailand on our story, scam city. And some of the Indians that had just fled this calm compounds went through Dubai. They applied to it for a job in Dubai. They got to Dubai and they met a woman who lure them for a job in Myanmar and then they got stuck in these compounds.

And these kids were beat and tortured with electric shocks. It was the whole thing. That's this guy told me that, and I thought, oh, is this real? Someone's winding me up. But it all got corroborated. I mean, not his particular stories, but it was all like, yeah, they're getting shocked with the batons. And then he sent me all of the personnel with all the photos of everybody who worked there, kind of giving it to the FBI. So I have all these guys from Sierra Leone who work for the security.

This is the chief enforcer. This is the guy who beats us. This is the boss. Here's a photo of the boss. Here's his nickname in Chinese. I don't know what's real name. And so the FBI was like going through all these files. And they're like, oh, yeah, okay. Interesting. This totally makes sense. Did you meet with the FBI? Yeah, they came to my house. My wife was thrilled about that. She's like, what are you doing? I don't like how they work for me. They were interested. So do you think they were

investigating this because they know him has done anything? Well, what they were mostly interested in this same guy said there were scams. And they didn't seem to care about that. The FBI agent Tennessee cared about it because it was his beat or whatever. But what really got their attention was this guy on the recorded call had said they meet with Russians all the time and they have an insider at a US bank. And they're going to do some kind of thing at the US bank and steal all the money

in the personal data. And then the FBI came over like that night because they were like, we want to know if there's going to be a terrorist attack on a bank in the United States. They were really interested in that. So I asked that guy from Warren information about that. They told me who the Russians were and how they changed all of the IP address. He just knew who they were. He didn't have their full names or anything. But there's a company that comes in and installs VPNs so that they

can change their IP addresses every week. So he gave off all of the vendor information and they

“I think the FBI was like, I'm speculating here. I think they were thinking, if we can find out who”

that VPN company is, we can monitor that VPN company and find out which bank it is and what they're going to do, which is probably a good way to investigate that. I should talk to you when we, yeah, we filmed two summers ago. But all of this would have been good information for us even for our story, yeah. Next time. Yeah, next time. Yeah, I need you as my sister. I would happily join the Van Zelle Crew. Thanks for coming in. This has been super fascinating. I had such a fun time. Thanks for having me Jordan.

You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with Amanda Katarzi, who was raised in a cult and later sex and labor traffic. The women were trained to be insanely submissive,

like you could never say no to any man and then the men were trained in a very military way.

These people are well armed and well trained and it's a whole group that thinks that the world is evil and they need to repopulate the world with their people to bring the kingdom of God. When you turn 13 in that culture, you're an adult. So to be 13 years old being courted by men twice my age, three times my age, to see if I would make a good wife, it was just kind of outrageous. So I moved to California to go to school and I start training MMA. And my trafficker was there.

He was actually one of my boxing coaches. Then he's like, you know, I like you and so now we're dating.

always seek me up to his cabin on the mountain, which was really far away from everybody out.

“No phone service, isolation and it was on a Native American reservation. So whatever they wanted”

to do to me, they could. Oops, you accidentally got getting raped. That was very common of going to go train and then all of a sudden now that you fought 12 rounds now, you're going to be raped. A girl ran a red light in T-bone by truck. So I fought on my phone and I texted my trafficker

and I say, hey, I almost just died at the car accident. He said, is your face stopped? And I'm like,

no, he said, well, you're still good, but then something isn't right here. This is who I want to be.

“This is what I want and it was like I was coming out of water. I had this moment of clarity”

and I knew something wasn't right and I knew this was what I wanted and I knew I needed to act for us in order to get out of that situation because I knew it would get sucked back in. To hear how she escaped her dire situation, check out episode 631 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. If this episode stuck with you, good, it should because behind the cartels, the trafficking, the scams and the violence are systems that don't look like movie villains. They look like

paperwork. They look like airline luggage. They look like fake rehab centers set up in a house that would otherwise be an Airbnb. They look like government silence and people who learn to look the other way because it's safer than speaking up. Mariana has seen this world up close, armed guards, surveillance intimidation and moments where everything could have gone sideways fast and she still keeps going because if nobody tells these stories, the silence wins. Check out Mariana's podcast,

the hidden third, wherever you're listening now. Of course, all things Mariana Van Zeller will be in

the show notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support this show, all at Jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking as well over at six minute networking.com and I'm Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn where the same people are. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger,

“Jason, Sanderson, Robert Fogity, Tata Sadlaskas, Ian Beard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember,”

we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's into a little bit of a dark side of stuff, loves the show traffic is into kind of this true, creamy stuff. Definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn

and we'll see you next time.