The content of Dark Arenas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. A lot of us avoid confrontation. If we have that sense that something uncomfortable or potentially dangerous will result if we confront a person, it's the instinct of self-preservation that prompts most people to walk away, to not get involved. But what if your job required you to confront dangerous criminals on a regular basis? What was your job to study these people, their lives, their families, their movements, and pick the perfect time to catch them off guard? In today's episode, we're peering into the dark arena of what it's like to be a US Marshall, assigned to one of the most dangerous jobs in America, a fugitive task force. I was 15 minutes early when I pulled up to the guard gate of a high-rise government building in the heart of downtown Miami, Florida.

I could already tell it was going to be a hot day. It was 10:00 in the morning on the dot and apparently street sweeping day or something because there wasn't a single car parked on the nearby streets, which is really odd for downtown Miami. Everything was eerie quiet, but the exception of a crowd of homeless men and women gathered beneath an overpass. A middle-aged man caught my attention as he walked out of the guard gatehouse in front of the high rise. I rolled out of my window and he asked me for my ID. He quickly glanced at the card and wondered why I was visiting. I told him who I was there to see, and then I watched him walk back into the guard gatehouse, make a quick phone call, and return. He validated my story, but didn't just wave me in. He actually asked me to open the trunk of my car. After he looked inside, he proceeded to walk around the car, inspecting the underneath of it with a mirror attached to the end of a pole. Once he was satisfied that I wasn't a threat, he buzzed me through the gate. I quickly drove my car under a large rolling garage door and emerged into a narrow concrete parking deck.

Honestly, I wouldn't have expected any less security from the Miami district headquarters of the United States Marshals. The arrival details were so specific for visitors that they even had a numbered parking space that I had to be in while I was visiting the facility. When I finally parked and got out, I saw a young man outfitted in cacky pants, boots, and what looked like a standard issue black T-shirt with the Marshall's logo on it. He was waiting for me and escorted me to the sixth floor to meet Chief Deputy Marshall, Manny Puray.

My name is Manny Puray. I'm an assistant chief deputy Marshall in the Southern district of Florida based out of Miami.

After all of his years as a US Marshall, Manny has landed a big corner office with a window view that looks out over downtown Miami. But it only took me a few seconds to assess him and realize that Manny didn't come across as a desk guy. In fact, he wasn't how I imagined he look at all. He was middle-aged, tall, very muscular, and had a gray beard and shaved head. I noticed he had a lot of tattoos on his arms and spoke with a distinct New York accent. Right away, I suspected at one point he may have worked undercover and definitely worked street cases in the field. Just his tone and overall demeanor, right off the bat, told me he'd seen some stuff. He proved me right when he told me how he started his career with the US Marshals in Washington, DC in 1997.

Dc is the busiest district in the Marshall Service. And when I say that because there's two court systems really in DC. There's the federal court, district court, and superior court. Dc is not a state. So the US marshals there do everything a sheriff does. We do everything there. We handle warrants for urinating in public all the way up to murder. So everything goes through us there in DC. So it's an indoctrination by fire. I wouldn't say the worst place to work, but the busiest place to work. And it's definitely if you don't keep up, it'll eat you.

After a few years under his belt, by the early 2000s, Manny joined the US Marshall's fugitive task force in New York City and eventually ended up here in Miami. M Miami, Florida. How would you sum up the fugitive task force for the US Marshalls in one or two words?

In one or two words? Wow. I don't know you got me in that one. It is what we're known for, but it wasn't always that way. The recent rise in TV and movies, I mean, when I got.

On-tommy Lee Jones thing.

That was it. Tom Lee Jones, the fugitive with Harrison Ford, and then the second movie, Wesley Snipes, and then you had a couple ofon the Swartz and negative the eraser, but we weren't on TV. It was Wild West stuff. If you didn't watch Wild West, you wouldn't know what the Marshalls are and what their job was. But we've definitely gotten more publicity as of late. And because of the task forces, we see more than the average person sees, from seeing their bodies in evictions to seeing us doing a warrant where the kids are living on the floor, on a sheet while the parents are in bed. I have gotten so angry sometimes doing these investigations, like looking at the parents in disgust. I've seen a piss bucket in the middle of the living room. There's a working toilet. I've been in crack houses in DC where the bathtub is just where you go to the bathroom. There's nothing like stepping in human feces while you're doing a warrant.

A lot of the disturbing assignments that Manning worked for the US marshals came in his years in the Washington, DC office. That office in particular, serves a lot of different purposes.

We're not only conducting federal fugitive investigations, we're conducting state investigations, which could be rape, murder, armed robbery. There's a criteria. It has to be a violent crime.

Do you think the average public would be surprised of how many fugitives in a single city are being sought by the US Marshall Task Force?

Yes, the US Marshals make more arrests than every other federal agency combined. Every year, roughly 90,000 a year. We also have more shootings than all federal agencies combined. We have sometimes more shootings than a major metropolitan police department like NYPD because we're doing fugitive takedowns and -.

You mean engaging suspects?

Yes, and fugitive don't want to go back to jail. Every day we get an email, the chiefs and above get emails of shootings that happen. And it's so common now, it's a bad way to think about it. It's like, Oh, another shooting incident. Another shooting incident. But they happen every day, almost every day.

I found that last fact that he mentioned interesting. I mean, it does make sense. If you're going to a wanted criminal's house to get him or her to comply, they're usually not going to go willingly because they've been out on the run and don't want to go back to prison. Manny says it's those scenarios where gunfire is often exchanged on both sides.

Nobody wants to go back to prison. So even a week more on the street is a week more on the street. That's how they did. That's why they run. If you had the choice of doing 30 more days on the street, you take it.

Manny has lost several colleagues on his task forces who were shot by people wanting to stay out of prison. He says, sadly, the fugitive themselves are often shot, too. To. He says violent confrontations have become more and more common in recent years.

I personally have responded to a lot of line-of-duty deaths and shootings. Since 2010, it's been more prevalent than before. That's my personal marker.

The uptick in violent interactions and getting used to this new normal has forced the marshals to plan more meticulously how fugitive task force members track down and extract some of the most wanted criminals in America.

We adapt with the times. There was a time where you would do a hit on the house and take down the door and rush, rush, rush before they get to flush the drugs. Martial service mentality now is we don't care about him flushing the drugs. We care about our deputy going home. I had made it back in the days in D. C, me and my partner, two of us, we would go knock on the door. I'd take the house caddy corner and he'd take the front door and it'd be a misdemeanor warrant, but it's a warrant. We're just going to jail. And that's the way it was done back then. It was a catty corner. Now, you guys got to bring 10 guys there. You got to take each corner of the house. When one car is designated as an emergency vehicle, everybody has to route to the hospital and the GPS. I mean, there's just planning on top of planning now because we are adapting.

They are adapting, so we are adapting. But even the best laid plans can go off the rails fast. A reality, Manny himself found to be true while staring down the wrong end of a wanted gang.

Member's gun. I didn't have any vest on. I had one magazine, one gun. He pulls the gun up to the front window, and we exchange shots.

It's August 24th, 2011, in Boyton Beach, Florida, the sun is already making the day sweltering hot. A US Marshall's fugitive task force, led by Manny Purey, has made a makeshift command post near an apartment complex, and they're going over their mission: Find and extract wanted felon, Samir Herrera.

The judge, unbeknownst to me, why I would let him out on bail. So he's out on bail. While on bail, Samir Herrera commits a home invasion and stab somebody up in the home and robs him. The guy doesn't die, but now he's wanted for attempted murder, a home invasion. So we get the case of Samir Herera. I think he made it a year on the streets before he did this again. This is all a gang. I think the name of the gang was the Latin syndicate. And so he was part of this gang. So we used investigative methods to track down where he was. His girlfriend had worked as a nurse in a hospital in Broward County, and she was also a gang member as well. We located him in the complex in Boyt Beach. We developed a plan. We were in a meet spot. The plan did not go as planned because we were going to hit eyes on at a house. We had one guy already parked in the parking lot. We were following them. The girlfriend came. Samir came down with the dog, did not park, didn't go in the house, went back in the car.

So I'm talking to all this on the radio to the guys in the parking lot thinking they're coming. So we're going to call or pin this guy in the car.

A malfunction in the team's radio system prevented Manny's play-by-play of Ferreira and his girlfriend's movements from getting through to the rest of his team, waiting on the other side of the complex for instructions. He didn't know that no backup was coming, and Manny approached Ferreira's car.

When I went to pin this guy in, there was nobody, just me, my partner, Dan Leicata, who's now the war supervisor here, Sean Sandler, and I didn't have any vest on. I had one magazine, one gun because that's not the plan. The plan is to watch this guy go in, go back to the meek spot, tack up while Sean's still watching the house and go hit the house. I block his car as much as I can. I'm making a long story short. He pulls a gun up to the front window and we exchange shots. He reverses. He had a Nissan Ultima, which is a great car for stopping bullets, I find out. So he knocks an F-150 over, literally on his side. He hits it so hard in reverse. He knocks the F-150 on the side. I remember seeing the truck fall in slow motion. This is a long complex. So he guns it through the complex. Now we go all going. This is a slow motion part for me. I'm trying to be conscious of how many magazines I have, how many bullets I have left. So we get into a chase. Somewhere, he crashes in the end of the development.

What we heard from witnesses is he tried to bail out. He crashed into an elementary school, which is after hours. He passed out from blood loss. We could take him into custody. His girlfriend was in the car, too. She actually ended up getting grazed, too, with bullets. We couldn't find the gun for a while. We had the casings, we knew it wasn't. But some gardeners found the gun in the bushes two months later. It was green. It was camouflage block. So it was hard to find.

Despite the violent change of plans, Manny was uninjured, and Herrera did survive to face justice. Thirty-three-year-old Samir.

Herrera left federal court in West Palm Beach today in.

A wheelchair after his pretrial detention hearing. Marshals say.

Herrera opened fire on.

Them and an apartment.

Complex in.

Boyton Beach as they tried to serve him a warrant. When the dust finally settled after Herrera's arrest, Manny and his team came to a disturbing and dark conclusion as to what would have happened if their plan at the apartment complex had gone how they originally intended.

His bedroom window was overlooked in the courtyard, so we would have to breach the outside gate and then breach the door in front of a bay window. It's very hard to do, even with two shields. And when the SWAT team afterwards hit his house because we saw somebody else in the house while this is all happening, they found him and they found in his bed an AK-47, a sniper rifle, some handgun. So he could have just pointed down at us and killed us all or saw us coming. So it was a bad that we had a shooting on the outside, but it was good that we caught him on the outside with only a handgun instead of all the weapons he had upstairs.

Scurding death and the Herrera arrest is just one example, Manny told me about, that demonstrates how dangerous his job really is. I think it also speaks to how dangerous wanted fugitives can be to greater society. A high-speed chase and shootout initiated by a felon on the run can put many people in harm's way. Manny has seen firsthand how far fugitives will go to avoid apprehension. Some of these stories are seriously dark. There are plenty of.

Fugitives that have military backgrounds. They know how to shoot on the move. They know contact cover principles. They know things like that. We have had fugitives jump from five stories and not make it or try to make it to an adjacent firescape and not make it. Those kinds of.

Things were all actions I expected fugitives would do, but I did not expect what Manning was about to tell me next.

They trained their dogs to attack us. It happened to us here. And people can't handle the fact that they just shot a dog. They removed the voice boxes so you can't hear them barking. And they do some devious things. That's dark. Yeah.

As surprising as some of Manny's real-life examples like this were, I expected a certain level of depravity from violent offenders who want to keep committing crimes. I was completely unprepared, though, to learn that that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are much worse ways that fugitives try to outsmart the US marshals.

There's some really movie-time, devious things they do: razor blades and the stair banisters.

As simple as a US Marshall's job may seem. We're not making a case.

We're not doing undercover work to watch bad guy number one sell to bad guy number two and get it on the deal, and get them. No, we already have the warrant. The judge says, Bring this guy to me.

And that's our job. The criminals that the fugitive task forces are after many times have entire networks of people helping them or housing them. So figuring out how to get to the individual can become a much bigger game of cat and mouse.

There's been people that have been on the run for 20 years, and we finally get them. There's been ones that just slipped through the system through technical error that had lived on a run, and they weren't really hiding at all. Criminals can work the system. We have fugitives that never stepped foot in the United States before. They're in Colombia, and they're part of a drug trafficking organization. They've never been here. So it's very hard for us to work those cases. Manny says.

That the criminals who fall into those categories most often try to avoid capture by hiding. I've seen some good some good hunters.

I mean, people in the washing machine, people underneath a sink. Imagine being at that stress level all the time. The door knocks, the postman comes to the door, you're hiding in a bathtub or something like that. It must be stressful to live your life that way.

Yeah, that lifestyle does sound really stressful, but for the criminals, it is a way to survive. Manny says because a lot of fugitives are affiliated with larger criminal enterprises, they don't want the US marshals to find out where they're harboring whatever illegal activity they're wanted for. That's where he says their creativity and concealment graduates to a new level.

There's some really movie-time, devious things they do: razor blades and the stair banisters. Hitting departments to hide drugs and guns. There was one place in Washington Heights in New York. I mean, it's sophisticated stuff. And this is an old project apartment. We got the guy to show us the hidden compartment, and it was a car alarm that you open your door and you had to put in a safety pin at the same time or a paper clip inside a hole. The end of a paper clip is small, so you have to know where this hole is on the door, put it in there, and would open up, and you couldn't see it was seamless. They opened up. There was three kilos of cocaine in there and a gun. These hidden compartments are like people who do them in cars, and they are like, It is genius. It is genius. If they made it a legal trade, it would be phenomenal.

For Manny, it's not the shooting, stabbing, or even modified attack dogs that are the most disturbing tactics used by fugitives. He says the worst methods used by wanted felons is when an innocent person's life becomes collateral, forcing US marshals into impossible situations.

Countless times, fugitives, big, tough men, I'm not going to jail, will answer the door with the two-year-old in their hand. I'm like, What man does that? What father does that? And they do it constantly.

Do they do it so that they don't get shot at?

Yes, they do it so they don't get taken down or I didn't use a baby as a shield. How do you do that? It was done a week and a half ago with us here, a week and a half ago. And I have the pictures to show you. He doesn't.

Take any enjoyment when an arrest means a family will be split up. You go home with.

That now. You go home with that. I just took somebody's father away, especially if you're a parent. That bills and bills and.

Bills on you. He doesn't like taking away parents of young children, but in the end, he knows it's often for their safety.

I remember I never forget there was a duplex apartment in the high rise in the Bronx, and we had just taken the husband outside, and we walked in. We were looking for his wife, I believe, and there was an infant six months on the bed and nobody in his house. And we're searching everywhere. And I said, I know the husband didn't leave his infant in the bed. We were looking all right. And I just yelled. I said, Okay, we're going to take the baby to family services if you don't come out. And this woman poked her head into the window from the 30th floor. She was out on the ledge the whole time. And this is winter. And I was in shock. She's like, Okay, okay, I'm coming. So people will do crazy things to hide. I've seen people cut out the middle of the bed. People are geniuses when it comes to if they have their plan to hide, we have to have a plan to find them better.

As we wrapped up our interview, I once again found it almost ironic. Manny has this giant view of South Florida all around him just outside of his office window. But he spent more hours on the clock in the thick of the city that sits below him. He spent more time trying to understand the dark corners where criminals congregate than he's ever spent filing papers underneath his fluorescent lights. For Manny, that's exactly the way he wants it. This episode of Dark Areas was written and produced by Delia D. Ambra, with writing assistants from executive producer, Ashley Flowers. You can find pictures and all of the source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas. Com. Dark Arenas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?