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, them, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. If pop culture has unequivocally sold us one thing, it's the crystal clear image of what we think the face of organized crime looks like. Personas like the Godfather.

Give me justice, should I last? With respect, you don't offer friendship. You don't even think to call me Godfather.

Buying this Hollywood image or any others like it, hook, line, and sinker, would be a big mistake, as ill advised of a mistake as double crossing, say, the mob. Because when it comes down to it, the face of organized crime in America is ever evolving shapeshifting every time a new drug, technology, or emerging industry begins to dominate the market. Somewhere underneath the upticks of gleaming capitalism are organized criminals. And don't just take my word for it, because in this episode of Dark Arenas, I'm getting a crash course in the underworld of organized crime, thanks to a man who battled it for decades and came out the other side unscathed. His name is Dave DeVillers, and he was so successful at prosecuting organized criminal enterprises that some of the most notorious gangs in the world gave him a rather sinister nickname the Devil Man. There was gold plating everywhere inside the Huntington Building. Skyscraper that sat on South High Street in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Gold glittered on the walls, floors, door handles, handrails everywhere. You name it. There were dozens of floors filled with business firms and law offices. The security desk I had to check in with on level three was no joke.

Two men who looked like ex cops checked my ID, confirmed that I had an appointment with Dave DeVillers somewhere in the vast upstairs. Then they directed me to one specific elevator that a guard had to swipe a key card across in order for me to ride up. One more ID check and an intercom conversation outside of a locked glass door a few levels later, and I was finally through. A really nice woman working as a receptionist escorted me inside the law office I was scheduled to conduct my interview in. She asked me to sit down on a white leather couch in a waiting room that overlooked downtown. She then went to get Dave. As I waited for them to reappear, I took a minute to gaze out over Columbus's busy streets. My first thought was that it seemed like all roads led into downtown, kind of like spokes in a wheel. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the roads in downtown were pipelines out, reaching far away from the city center. Honestly, before I could think any harder about which one it was. I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to see Dave de Villers with an outstretched hand.

He wore blue jeans and a dark gray T shirt. That center logo mimicked the iconic Air Jordan Nike logo. But instead of the silhouette of the leaping basketball legend on the front, the logo said Aria and had the silhouette of the famous Game of Thrones character soaring through the air wielding a dagger. We joked about the shirt, and I shamefully admitted that I never finished the popular series. In both his demeanor and his attire, Dave was, to put it nicely, relaxed. His head of white hair was tussled and uncombed. He was chill, which surprised me slightly considering mere weeks before our interview, he was working as a United States attorney. Yeah, like the top dog when it comes to federal prosecutors, dave was relieved of his duties as US. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio after President Biden took office in 2021. Dave had been appointed by President Trump, so after the election, Dave's days of handpicked government service were numbered. It happens to a lot of top level federal employees after an election, so no hard feelings. Dave has taken his firing in stride, though he's a married father who now has more time on his hands than he's ever had.

He's still a practicing attorney, though, in the private sector, because he's not throwing in the towel on his career just quite yet. As we took our seats in his office, one of the first things Dave said was that despite never knowing if he'd have job security working for state or federal departments of justice, he wouldn't trade his 20 plus years as a prosecutor for anything. Why? Because Dave lives and breathes to stop organized crime. A pervasive scourge he says is all around us, and we can't even see it.

There are legitimate businesses that thrive based on organized crime. They're your neighbors. So we've had number of cases where the good drug dealers, quite frankly, that are in their thirty s and forty s and fifty s kind of made it to some extent, maybe did some time or kind of graduated, and it was able to launder their money. So, like, they may have have some chicken businesses and that's what here. There's actually a particular one or some bars or anything that was cash based, and they were able to launder it successfully.

He had me at chicken businesses because all I could think about was that popular television series Breaking Bad, which, shamefully, I admit, I never finished either. I guess sometimes art really does imitate reality, though. Anyway, when Dave first started out as a Franklin County prosecutor nearly 30 years ago in Ohio, he was fresh out of law school, and for some reason, even he can't really explain it, he latched on to organized crime cases right.

Away, did a couple of murders, and then I eventually was named the director of our gang organized crime unit. And this is the 90s, so there were a lot of murders going on, unfortunately, like today, but it was pretty bad, especially the gang murders in the 2000s. It was more like those gangs turned more into organized crime in that they got older and more mature. They want to make money. So it was mostly drug trade, and they kind of got along better. They work with each other if they needed to, and then it kind of got more violent, I think, like around 2006.

On the escalation of gang violence, dave saw emerge in the early 2000s revolved around one thing identity.

Organized crime changes. So, when I started, it was really gangs. It was like bloods crips folks, gangster disciples. They weren't actually talking to people in La. Or anything. They were their own gang. They took on their personas, their habits and stuff. And it was lurking times when people were getting shot for wearing a blue bandana on a street he's not supposed to be on. And it was just that it wasn't really about money. It's about just these kind of rival gangs shooting at each other.

Dave says the one thing you've got to understand about some criminal enterprises is that it's not all about the money, guns, and drugs for them. For many, it's about ideology and ingrained identities. He compares the intense dogma some gangs have to that of terrorist organizations.

I would say very much that organized crimes, organized crime, whether it's terrorism or not. I'd argue that Ms 13, they're so freaking weird about the stuff they do. They've got this bizarre dogma to them. They're not really rich gang. They don't make a lot of money. They're just there kind of like ideology. Kind of like kind of like there's.

More ideology than purpose.

Yeah, they're like vikings or something. They're just this strange sort of group that does these things. They make a little bit of money, but they're not rich off it.

Since about 2015, dave's caseload and number of defendants grew bigger and bigger, mostly because rival gangs started burying hatchets mending fences and brokering partnerships with one goal in mind move more drugs, make more profit. Plain and simple, this idea of why fight one another when we can both mutually benefit from a partnership. Dave's case in point example of this kind of conglomeration is the Sinaloa cartel. The Sinaloa is an international crime organization based out of Mexico that's said to be one of the most powerful drug trafficking syndicates in the world. It gave rise to drug kingpins like El Chapo after a major crackdown in the organization splintered into subgroups, with the most dominant one cropping up in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Dave says in the years since it fractured, the cartel has rebuilt and slowly invaded many major American cities.

Sinaloa controls Columbus, and at first, the Sinaloa was here kind of on their own, doing the street sales of drugs. But now they're complete bad with the Columbus guys and Dayton guys, quite frankly, it's a market, basically. It's like a franchise. They come with kilos of now it's fentanyl. It's cocaine and heroin for a long time, and now it's fentanyl. Easy to move small amounts. And kilos could be 100 kilos of heroin with kilo of fentanyl. So they bring it in, they sell it to these people, the people in Columbus to sometimes they sell it here, but often Columbus isn't sourced city. So it goes to West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, that's kind of how and there are people, my colleagues in West Virginia why do I have all these guys with six one four tattoos in my jail? It's because they're all the six one four.

Columbus a source city. That's what Dave referred to Columbus as. Which got me thinking back to all those streets I was watching down below while sitting in the waiting room. Maybe my second thought was right after all. Maybe all roads don't lead to Columbus. Maybe they lead away from it.

Columbus is one of those cities where there's 100 miles to the west is Indianapolis. 100 miles to the east is Pittsburgh. 100 miles north is Cleveland. 100 miles south is Cincinnati. And Columbus is the biggest of all those cities. It used to not be that big of a city to get groove. So it's the biggest of all those cities. And you can just go to one place and that's your hub where everything else goes. And they make connections here. That's the real thing, is the connections that they've made. And there are people that actually from Ohio that gone to Mexico and found the connections. It goes both ways.

It's a scary thought. I mean, honestly, how can you catch anyone if their enterprise is that spread out and that powerful day's answer is one word, or rather an acronym. Rico. Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The legal hammer. Federal prosecutors wield like Arya Stark. Wields a sharp weapon. Do you think Rico cases happen a lot more than people think federally?

Yeah.

According to the US. Department of justice. The Federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as Rico, was enacted in 1970. The statute explains that it's unlawful for a person or persons to acquire, operate, or receive income from an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. The definition also includes a lot of other things, but that's the gist. According to Dave, there are state Rico laws as well, but the one he liked to use the most was the federal one because, well, everything is bigger and better in federal court.

We have to prove that an enterprise exists, so it's a group of people associated in fact, we also have to prove an interstate nexus federally, and that's drugs or guns, because they all come in know the cocaine and heroin isn't made in Columbus. So that's the easy part.

What isn't easy is connecting all of the conspiring players who are involved in a racketeering enterprise, which can be tricky.

You want to connect these people to each other, and it's hard to do. They use nicknames and street names, but you get their phones, you get their contact lists.

You also get the people closest to targets to give up information, sometimes even.

Subconsciously, girlfriend or wife bring them in. They'd have no idea where they're coming. You start asking them questions, and maybe we're tickling a wire on a wire on a jail call. We want them to know and say, what the hell is going on? Not knowing we're listening. And sometimes they don't know what they're there for and they can slip up. Sometimes we'll say, do you have your phone with you? Can you pull out your phone? Can you tell us? Do you have a contact list? That's how we find out. Like nicknames. So can you pull up A? Like sure. Like who's A? A is, you know, a dog or who is a dog? A dog is Christopher Harris. What's his phone number? And you can make 2 hours doing that. But right then, you go up by the pen and get all these numbers. You can put all these people together and there's your enterprise.

By far the best option, Dave says, will help a prosecutor prove a Rico case and avoid significant opposition from a defense attorney is taking out the lowest members of a criminal organization and getting them to turn state's evidence. The little players, you know, the ones who will sing like birds if they're.

Pinched hard enough, you kind of start to rest people on little things and other people flip. They don't want to go to they don't want the death penalty or go to prison for life. So they'll go to prison for 1520 years and cooperate against the guys that are going to face the death penalty or life.

It's that last part that he mentioned, the getting people to flip part. Dave says that's oftentimes critical to developing a strong Rico prosecution. When it gets to that point, prosecutors have to be willing to strike a plea deal with an unsavory or violent criminal in exchange for damning information about a criminal enterprise that investigators would never be able to obtain otherwise.

There's two things in the criminal justice system that the vast majority of prosecutors, vast majority of defense attorneys agree upon, and that's jury trials. The other one is plea agreements.

Dave says plea agreements with criminals are just part of the process. There's no way around it. I guess that falls into the category of unnecessary evil. How can you sit across from a person who you believe is a murderer or a drug dealer and say, in order to get three more of you, I'm going to make a deal with you? What is that dynamic? Like?

Yeah, you have to. I mean, that's just the way you've got to do it. Your job isn't just to prosecute, to stop crime. And if you're not cutting deals with people, you're never, ever going to be able to prove your case. You're never going to be able to find out what happened, whether you use them in an undercover capacity or just for information, somebody that's already got caught doing something horrible, and you're going to try to get them to tell you what happened.

Dave's opinion on this is unwavering. He believes that snitches are essential to cracking an organized crime case. But he says there is a line prosecutors have to draw somewhere.

There's certain rules. You don't cut a deal with a murderer to go after the co conspirators, right? You don't cut a deal with a rapist. You don't cut a deal with a child abuser. You've got to be able to justify not just to yourself and to your bosses, but to eventually try a fact why you did this. So there's accountability in it and credibility.

Prosecutors are also beholden to victims'families to ensure that a plea agreement is what the family wants. Dave says it was rare in his career to have a family not understand the reason why he wanted to cut a bad guy or a bad woman a deal in exchange for a better shot at justice.

Eventually you may go to one and say, I want to take the guy that killed your child and I want to cut him a deal to cooperate against everybody else. But you'd be surprised how often they agree with you. If you spend the time, you explain what's going on, explain what could do, and like, I'm going to send these other people to prison the rest of their life that killed your son. But to be able to do that, I need this guy. I need to convince him he's still going to go to prison, he's going to go for a long time. He's still going to admit to what he did. That's a big part of it. That he admits to what he did and cooperates in open court, that helps them kind of understand what's going on.

Whether it's a Rico case or a Shoplifting case in general. Dave says the criminal justice system in America would collapse if plea deals weren't in play. Without them, he says, the sheer volume of cases would be unsustainable.

Only about 3% of all cases go to trial right, in criminal. So you're like, well, that seems 97 or please doesn't seem right. But what that allows us to do is those cases, those 3% of cases, we're allowed to take our time and the jurors and use those to scrutinize those cases. Right. Those are the cases where they're saying, no, I didn't do it. And we're saying you did, and you have the time, the energy, the finances to be able to do that. We can do that. But if there's no plea agreements, if we were trying all 100% of cases, our system would collapse.

Another essential tool to successfully taking down organized crime rings is the use of criminal informants. People who are on the inside of the beast, who either got squeezed or jammed up on a small offense and flip, or are someone who are still actively participating in a criminal enterprise but have gotten assurties from the government that they'll be protected. These are people who know information that could get them killed. Dave has had experience with all kinds of informants and witnesses, some of whom didn't survive. He thought of one man right off.

The top of his head, bill John Decker. This was a Rico case involving these guys who are basically this is kind of more traditional organized crime. They're a bunch of guys from the West Side. They're like this white gang, if you like white organized crime. Older guys, like families and families. Like their grandfather was a criminal and criminal and criminal. And their specialty was stealing. Harley Davidson's basically taking them all apart so the Vin isn't there, and they can kind of resell them, mostly in Kentucky and West Virginia. But this one guy, Bill John Dak, was really good at stealing. Like, he knew how to get on and crank it up and go. We catch him, he flips. We know they're going after him. We have him in a safe house like in the east side of Columbus. We know they find out about it. So we get rid of them and we send them to Pennsylvania, and they're kind of watching them. And so the FBI was bringing Know kind of to me. And then we're about a week away from trial. He's sitting right in front of me. I'm kind of prepping. I'm like, all right.

He goes, hey, I need to go back to the he drove, just kind of drove himself. He wasn't witness Protection program didn't want that. But he took kind of the witness protection light because I got booze back at that place. Can I go get that? I'm like, no, you can't go back there. You know, they're trying to kill you. He's like, yeah, they won't be there because, no, you cannot go back there. You've got to just go back or I'm going to call FBA now and take you back. And they're like, no, no, I'm good. I'll just go back. And sure enough, he went out there, right? I saw the pictures. He just got brittle on the porch. They were waiting for him, and he got Know killed.

Does a case collapse, that case?

A lot of it did. We still went to trial. We still convicted of Rico. I think we got reversed in a bunch of recounts, though.

So, yeah. Organized crime rings don't like it when one of their own turns against them. Dave knew every informant or witness that he struck a deal with was putting their life on the line. And you know, that whole time heals all wounds, it's water under the bridge kind of thing. Well, there's none of that in the organized crime world. None. Dave's. Exhibit A for this. Tommy Henderson.

This guy Tommy Henderson, he's an old time organized crime guy here in Columbus. In the 1980s. He robbed a bank in Manken, Georgia. Got like, $350,000 out with these other people he's with. They get back to Columbus, they get the money. Two of the people that cooperate got kind of caught. They end up cooperating. He killed another witness, one of the guys that was with him because he thought he was going to flip. The other people end up flipping, too. Goes to trial in Georgia, gets convicted of bank robbery, gets, like, 1213 years. These people are in a witness protection program. They leave, they're in it for ten, eight years. They get out of it, they come back to Columbus, and both of them are killed by him? By him within two years.

So he does his time, and then about a decade later, he kills the witnesses who testified against him. Just for principal?

Yeah, absolutely principal. One in 96 on his birthday and one in 97 on his birthday.

And it's not just criminal informants who've had to watch their backs. For years. Dave himself wore a target around his neck, one that almost cost him everything.

The judge calls us up and calls them up, and they dave, your family's calm. They're on the way to New York because they were going to put a bomb in my house.

When you face off with organized criminal enterprises for a living, ODS are your life isn't going to be a cakewalk. You're dealing with some really dangerous people. Dave knows firsthand that organized criminal syndicates will do anything to undermine a federal investigation or trial. Anything, including taking out a lead prosecutor.

Someone will step into my place. If something happened, there'd probably be a lot of people wanting to do it because that's just the way it is. But it's mostly disrupting because they know that it'll slow things down and maybe a statute problem, or they want to terminate witnesses and things.

As a federal attorney who focused solely on shutting down organized crime, dave represented a threat, even though enterprises wouldn't formally recognize him as one. During his career, he learned that criminals across the American Midwest and overseas began referring to him as the Devil Man, a nuisance, a thorn that, if left unchecked, would grow to hurt them. The nickname is a play on Dave's last name DeVillers. Deviller, devilman. You get the idea. I personally think it has a nice ring to it. And Dave definitely likes it. He says as soon as he found out that's what the criminal underworld was calling him, he owned it. But becoming the Devil Man came with some serious risks. He shared one story with me that I think really drives home the point of just how dangerous organized crime rings.

Are the ex clan who were this was in the early 2000s, but there were professional hitmen here in Columbus and they worked for other drug dealers. They'd go kill their rivals or kill their witnesses. This guy named Ronald Dawson was like the head of it. Kind of big guy, a scar face. And really well, we were taken off his know, we really do it by conspiracy. We couldn't do a rico. We had to do it kind of piecemeal and for murders and trying them. He was in the press. He was out in the news saying, snitches get stitches. You got to be careful what you look happy for. I mean, he's really trying to threaten us in the media, the FBI and the prosecutors and ATF as an ATF agent that was working it too. And one day I'm driving home. We lived in a place called New Albany at the time, and I wasn't paying attention to anything. I just old, kind of a state prosecutor time still and kind of a clunker. And I look out in the back and there's this car with no front license plate and kind of behind me but downtown.

And I hear honking because it doesn't want to get close to me. I'm like, well that's weird. But I didn't think anything of it. And I'm driving and all of a sudden I'm on a highway near where my house is. And you see this car is just flying. I was probably a mile in front of it. It starts flying through. Some people are honking because it's trying to get through the traffic. And I'm like, that's that same. I'm like and you see a guy in the back seat with his knees kind of where the windows in the back seat. I don't know if he's got a gun. I can't say he had a gun. I have no idea. But they're a comment. So I just hit it. And I know I need to get to a substation, a police station, which is kind of close to my house. And I run like a red light through. Like this is rush hour. I'm lucky I didn't get it. And I'm like I see them run it too. And I'm like, are you crazy guys? Crazy. So I pull in. You see them kind of stop. You see them kind of take off and go.

The cops, they run in as they tell them they go and they get it. So the next day I didn't even tell my wife. Cops came to the house like, look, here's what we're going to do. I go, I want to follow me again. I want to get this over with. I don't want to think who did this? Because there was a bunch of gangs I was doing at the time, I figured it was this one. So I go to my car and it's all planned out. There's helicopters and now I do call my wife. Julia's caps out. They're going to come talk to you. They're undercover. So they come to the house, she just had a baby, and they're like, hey, we're going to take care of this. We're just going to see if we can get them to follow him again. So I do my same. I walk to my park, right? Get in the car, and this SWAT officer is hiding with a shotgun. He's like, hey, Dave, I got the.

Shotgun in your backseat.

Yeah. So I'm driving and nothing happens. But there's a helicopter over us, and there's, like, all these other cars and all these radios going on, like, no, no. We pull in and the cops in my house walk in. My wife's like, hey, baby, I'm home.

Dave evaded harm for that moment, but several weeks later, the threat reappeared, and this time it had escalated.

We ended up getting Dawson and going to trial, and during that trial, they tried everything to intimidate us and stuff. And I was like in the trial doing a witness, and I saw my boss and the sack, the FBI sack, come in, and I'm like, finishing the witness, and the judge calls us up and calls them up, and they, Dave, your family's calling. They're on their way to New York because they were going to put a bomb in my house. So they gave them the New York state troopers and they flew with them to New York and stayed there in a state troopers guard for that whole period. So we're under swap protection for a year. I didn't drive my car for a year. They took my kids to school. We were just under complete swap protection.

Obviously, Dave is still around today, so it looks like his enemies are still losing. Throughout all of his years and the knowledge he took in about organized crime, ideology and operations, that garnered him some special attention from the US and foreign governments. In 2004, he was handpicked by the Department of justice to assist in the prosecution of Saddam Hussein.

We were trying to prove that the crimes against humanity, which were genocide, mass deportation I think there was a rape camp charge, too. He conspired with these other people who know Secretary of Defense, the governors in Kurdistan. They were trying to wipe out areas. Like, there was Mosul, Khur, Kuk, which were Arab and Kurdish. They wanted to drive them out of there, right? They want to drive them out of there. They used chemical weapons. It was weapons of mass destructions used as well. The special weapons, he called them kidnapping someone from the village, putting them in a helicopter and dropping them in a square to terrify the people. So they'd flee the village, go in the valleys, and then they could kill them all with the gas.

Seriously dark stuff. Dave spent a lot of time learning about Saddam, just like he'd done for countless other gang leaders. He put behind bars in America.

He's not dumb. I mean, he was smart. And the things he did, it really was like organized crime again in that everything he did was about existing, about keeping his power. That's all it was.

After Saddam Hussein's eventual conviction and execution, dave returned to the US. And continued fighting organized crime domestically, a mission he says protects thousands of people, both physically and financially. He's been credited for filing charges against government officials, business owners and corporate investors who were accused of racketeering. I stood on that. Just what exactly his resume really meant to the general public as I left the golden lobby and security desk and crossed the street to get lunch before my flight home. Directly across from the Huntington building is the Ohio State House, a historical landmark and the old home to Ohio's legislators. As I sat on a bench eating my lunch and watching an Ohio State trooper pace around the entrance, I wondered just how many people could have come in and out of that building over the years who maybe would have been afraid of the devil.

Man.

This episode of Dark Arenas was written and produced by Delia Diambra with writing assistance from executive producer Ashley Flowers. You can find pictures and source material for this episode on our website. Darkerinas.com. Dark Arenas is an audio chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?