The content of Dark Areas 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. This is.

Crack cocaine. It's as innocent-looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones.

That Oval Office Address from former President George Bush senior in the early '90s epitomized the reality facing America at the time: a drug epidemic that, quite frankly, was tearing apart major American cities, most notably Los Angeles, California. Just how dire the situation had become was made apparent to the public, thanks in large part to mainstream media broadcasting story after story on the topic. America's war on drugs was a headline that kept giving.

We're going to pick up now with a drug enforcement agent whose arrest and torture in Mexico last year had the whole nation's attention. He is telling his story for the first time.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration, also known as the DEA, was in an all-out war to stop drug traffickers both domestically and abroad. Specifically, agents wanted to get dangerous drugs like crack, heroin, and cocaine out of the hands of young people. The agency asked celebrities and athletes to appear in PSAs to help promote its Say No to Drugs campaign. Here's one of those TV spots featuring supermodel and actress, Brooke Shields. What goes in your body eventually shows up on the outside. The bottom line is stay away from.

Drugs, but do it because you care.

About yourself. There's also this intense PSA starring the one and only, Mr. T. I get angry just thinking.

About it, it makes me mad. Little kids doing drugs, it turns my stomach. It hurts the user. It hurts his family, and it hurts his friends.

Despite plastering TVs, schools, and billboards with the dogmatic say no to drugs messaging, the problem never went away. Sure, the types of drugs people consumed changed and have continued to evolve since the '80s and '90s, but the DEA's war on drugs is still waging. In this episode of Dark Arenas, I'm sitting down with a career DEA agent who since the late '90s has been navigating the underground of drug cartels, traffickers, and dealers in America and overseas. This meeting.

Is being recorded.

Meeting DEA agent Melvin Patterson via Zoom was probably one of the most relaxed interviews I've had so far for this show. I think we'll get something between those two. We should be all right. I was in lounge pants and a T-shirt, and he was in a white V-net, sitting at what looked like his kitchen table at home. Normally, I'd fly up to the Washington, D. C. Metro area to interview him in person, but precautions in place for the COVID-19 pandemic were still a little tight at the time, so we agreed that a remote interview was best for everyone. In appearance, Melvin and I couldn't look more different. Despite our stark contrast, though, we do have one thing in common: we're both from the south. It's subtle, but we both have those tinges of rolling pronunciation, twang in our voices when we say the word I too fast. I'm from North Carolina and Melvin is from Texas. Oh, and one more thing. We also both accomplished significant things in the 1990s. I was born and he became a DEA agent.

I graduated the DEA Academy. I entered the academy in June of 1996, and I graduated in October of 1996. October 18th, I don't forget that day. And my first DEA assignment was to Austin, Texas, which was great for me because I grew up in Texas.

For the first few years, Melvin learned the ropes of the DEA, things like how to write search warrants, catalog evidence, and work alongside senior drug task force officers who'd been trying to stop drugs from crossing the Texas border for decades.

My first year, they never called me by my first name. They always called me Ruki. And hey, Ruki, come over and do this. Hey, Ruki, are you going to bring the rookie with you? And I'm like, I'm standing right here.

Something he realized early on was that in order for the DEA to do its job, it has to work hand in hand with other federal agencies because it's all but guaranteed that DEA investigations will intersect with ongoing FBI, ATF and even IRS operations.

Working investigations like cooking a cake and everybody's going to get a piece of this cake because, boom, you've got a slice of guns and you've got a slice of gang violence and then you have a slice of the drugs and you have a slice of money laundering that the IRS can get.

The first step in the DEA's recipe when it starts an investigation is to wait and watch.

We do a lot of surveillance when we're working an investigation. So that's following cars and watching houses and apartments and all that stuff.

Sometimes individual agents work surveillance by themselves. But on big cases where there are multiple perpetrators or a large drug trafficking operation going on, the DEA coordinates teams of people to conduct surveillance.

I've been out on times where we've had three different teams of surveillance, because what usually happens on a surveillance is people will split up. You have somebody come in, they meet with one person, and then you see that person goes somewhere else. Well, we want to know where they're going and who they're meeting with. So we'll already anticipate that, split the team up and then make plans to split it up again if we have to. So you have a team leader one, team leader two, team leader three, and you all have to communicate so that everybody knows what's going on.

Melvin says the surveillance stage of an investigation is critical. It has to be a high priority if the plan is to execute an eventual bust and make arrests.

You've done your homework, you know this person's habits. So if there's someone that's working in your area of responsibility and you've been watching their house, that's the benefit of doing surveillance and doing really good surveillance. You know this person's habits, you know whether or not they work, you know what door they go in the resident. So this is all intel that you could provide an entry team or something like that. It's a lot safer for everyone as opposed to going in their house where most people feel a little more compelled to defend.

Putting a high priority on surveillance ahead of time hasn't always been the DEA's approach, though. Melvin says in the past, the DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies have had a history of jumping the gun in some cases. Is, and that came with serious consequences.

I think we were a little stubborn and a little hard headed. We accepted the danger and we just, boom, we were going to go after people in their houses and all this stuff. And I think we got a little smarter after we started getting in shootouts and we realized that we're losing officers and we're doing it when we don't really need to do this.

He says in recent decades, thanks to better training and technology, there are fewer instances where the DEA is getting in surprise shootouts with suspected drug traffickers.

We train as if the person on the other side of that door is going to be shooting or protecting their residents, defending that with as much force as they possibly can.

That's not to say shootouts never happened, but Melvin says the rate of agents being killed in raids has declined significantly since the war on drugs began. Surveillance is sharper, communication is better, and plans can be modified at a moment's notice. What's far more common in the field are unpredictable circumstances. You know, Murphy's Law showing up at the worst time and turning everything on its head.

Even when you do everything right, sometimes it still doesn't work out for you.

Melvin shared a perfect example of this.

We were doing surveillance. Our perpetrator was driving a big monster truck. And so he has this big monster truck and there's these restaurants called Taco Cabana. We're going to affect the arrest of this guy. And we thought this is the perfect place to do it. So we're setting cars in place and everybody's calling out. But everybody keeps saying... Things are just a little off. And I thought that was very, very strange.

There was a problem. It just wasn't apparent to Melvin or anyone on his team in the moment.

We have the whole restaurant surrounding. So some people are reporting, yeah, the target vehicle is at the drive through window. I'm looking at the target vehicle right now, not at the drive through window. And nobody corrects it. But they call it, they go, come back, describe the target vehicle. It's a monster truck. It's a black truck. It's Chevrolet. And they describe it to a T. And I was like, okay. And then he starts calling out, do you want us to take it down? We don't want it to get out of the parking lot. We gave the signal to assault the truck. So everybody moved in. That's getting your cars in front of the truck and then some other guys are assigned to come up to take the driver out of the truck, right? So that happened. Well, literally what happened is there were two monster trucks that looked exactly the same, same color, occupied by two people, same race, everything. And they pulled them out. The only thing is one driver was younger than the other driver. So on both sides of this place, we have half our team taking these guys out of the truck.

These are the innocent folks that have nothing to do with the investigation and us taking down the target. And we don't really figure it out until we have both subjects on the ground.

That certainly fits the definition of a snafflew, but thankfully, it didn't have a violent outcome. It's Murphy's Law in full effect, though, to a T. A great way to get around a situation like that is to have, for example, one of your own inside of the right monster truck, to have a player on the other side who's feeding you information. In other words, an undercover agent.

When you're undercover, you're on edge for everything.

Living a lie is typically not something that ends well. When you split your life between living one lifestyle and then drastically changing to live another, it's hard to find a mental balance. You've got to keep up with what lies you've told some people and what cons you're running on others. Undercovered DEA agents are trained to do this, though, not on a personal level, but a professional one.

There's a need for it. And sometimes you fit a role. You know what I mean? You're perfect for the role. So sometimes it's your background, sometimes it's your look, sometimes it's your race, whatever. So you go through that and you embrace it.

Part of embracing Undercover work is accepting that your mental limits are going to be tested.

When you're undercover, you're on edge for everything. You're worried about someone may recognize you from your childhood and not even know you to be associating with these people or this or that. So they may be a little confused that why you're hanging out with these people. And so you've got to keep those two things completely compartmentalized, and you got to handle it really, really quick.

Melvin says undercover assignments are usually brief because the DEA wants to take drug operations down as quickly as possible. But there have been some cases where agents spent longer stents under cover because the case called for it.

The FBI and the DEA and the ATF, they used to put guys under cover and they would be under cover for months, a long, long time. From the time I've been on for 96 to now, I've never done a long term under cover assignment. Now, I've been under cover and I've done under cover with the same organization for quite a while, but it's like clocking in and clocking out. Just for the afternoon, I'm going to go meet with this guy and I'm undercover then. But I'm never going and I'm not going to hang out with them for the next week and be undercover with them for a week. We didn't do that. And I don't know. I mean, I'm not saying that we don't do that. I'm not aware of it. And I haven't had that experience at all in my career.

Melvin says a common misconception that pop culture depicts about undercover work is that agents have to go through loyalty tests in order to be initiated into a criminal enterprise. From his experience, he says that ritual just isn't based in reality.

I don't like the tests that you see on TVs and movies where you got to do a line of Coke in front of them or something like that. It's so funny because I guess I always tell people the level of investigations that we're doing, it's not people that are really trying to beat their chest and test each other that way. You got to remember the motivation of drug trafficking. For everybody to make money, it's to be profitable. So if you're going to try to subject me to some sophomoreic rituals or test or this or that, I'm going to go find somebody else that's a lot more professional. So you're going to lose a potential client because this person won't do a line of Coke in front of you or won't allow you to subject them to anything like that.

Showing up as a new person wanting to get into business with drug traffickers is not how under covers approach their jobs. Melvin says, usually it takes months of planning to plant an Undercover. And the most successful way to ensure the agent will be accepted into an organization is to utilize an informant as a liaison.

Informants are paramount. I'll tell you that right now. They're paramount to any investigation. They can get places, they can get intel that we couldn't do, even sometimes as under covers. Informants, they are main way into organizations a lot of times. I know myself personally, I don't think there was a time that I just went by myself and was able to work myself into an organization without the introduction of an informant. So that's how valuable they can be.

Sometimes informants are criminals that the DEA has covertly arrested and gotten to flip. So their cooperation isn't entirely voluntary, if you know what I mean. Other times, informants are people who willingly choose, for whatever reason, to betray a drug cartel or criminal enterprise.

Where I've had a lot of success is where you have an informant that comes in and they're angry and they're upset because they were wrong. That's where you have a fuse. When you have angry, motivated informants or potential informants, you have to get their information. So you can be in a dead slumber in the middle of the night. You better get up and you better go talk to them right then because you know exactly what's going to happen. They're going to make up and then all is going to be forgiven and you've lost your opportunity. If this is a very, very tough individual that you're trying to get a hold of or get intel on. But when they're mad and when they're upset and they can't speak fast enough and they can't tell you enough information. So you need to be there to take advantage of something like that.

There are also informants who are completely unaware that they're even informants, which I know sounds wild, but it's true. Melvin gave me a great example of this.

He was this guy that was a mechanic and he worked on people's cars all the time. So he happened to work on one of our target's cars and that's the only person he would go to. So we befriended the mechanic and became pretty good friends with him. And the mechanic didn't know anything about what I did, just was working on a car. I started asking about the target's vehicle. And so he started telling me more and more about the car. I was like, I really like it. If they ever want to sell it or anything, if you know anything about it, I'd like to ask them more things about that type of vehicle. Just find out if they have problems with this or that and where they got this one. It was just a neat way to get in there. And he wound up introducing me to the target. So we had a whole conversation just about cars and we were able to work it more towards the drug nexus that we wanted to get in with. So the target was very comfortable with me because in that case, there was this mechanic very innocence.

So he had no reason to be suspicious of me and it wind up working out.

The last and more common type of informants are the professionals, people who make a living selling secrets to the DEA. Now, a lot of times these informants have criminal histories themselves, but it's those rap sheets that allow them access to vast amounts of information on a potential drug trafficking operation.

They have access to a lot of information, either overseas or here, stateside. And they provide us with lots of intel that really help us. There's people that are, quote-unquote, professional informants. That's what they do for a living. And they're phenomenal at it, but they're a little slimy. You know what I mean? If they're a professional, then I'm worried about them. I don't have the same trust factor that I do with someone that's more the professional type, the innocent person that's the mechanic or what have you. You get a little slime on you when you're dealing with someone that's a professional.

Because these informants' sole motivation is to get paid, the DEA has to build a stronger case around the information they provide. An entire investigation can't hinge on the word of a paid informant, or at least it's not supposed to. Again, that's where combining a professional informant's information along with planting an undercover DEA agent becomes super important.

The goal with Undercovers is to get rid of the informant. So what you want to do is replace the informant by working an agent into it. And by doing that, you're getting someone that's a little more trustworthy in the eyes of the court. So everything they see and tell the court carries a lot more weight than a career criminal.

And just like under covers have to accept the risks of their job, informants have to be willing to accept the risks that come with theirs, which in a lot of cases can come down to life or death. How did these people stay alive and how do they avoid detection and threats? Because it does seem like once someone opens their mouth, they can become a target. So there is risk there on these individuals' parts. There is.

But it's not as tragic as I think TV and movies make it out to be. They love to portray that the informant life is getting threatened. And not that that doesn't happen, because it does happen. And I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about losing informants. I don't know that you can, I don't know if I can say that, but I don't know that you will have had a career as long as mine and not lose an informant. I don't know if that's possible to do, and that's unfortunate. But if you look at the totality of all the informants we've worked with, I can't tell you how many times that people have told me, hey, they'll kill me, they'll do this or that. They have to come to grips with that at the very beginning, because I'm not going to I can't play that game with them. They're too afraid or this and that. Hey, if you're going to talk, you got to feel comfortable with the risk, everything that's involved. But here's the goal. And I'm upfront with them right at the very beginning. What's amazing to me is there's a lot of people that promise them things that you can't promise informants things that you cannot deliver.

You should never tell an informant they will never have to testify. You can't control that. We can't. So we should tell them, I'm going to do everything I can to stop you from having to do that. But if it comes down to it and you have to get started, you have to do it. So you just need to come to a grip to that. I'll give you a moment to think about it. But if you don't want to do it by all means, don't do it. But those are the rules. This is how this is going to happen. Otherwise, we can't go forward.

Melvin stated the obvious, which is that informants and undercover work wouldn't be necessary if drugs didn't exist.

I think they're crippling the world.

That feels like a captain-obvious statement, but the reason he says the war on drugs hasn't wane is because America's demand for illegal substances is extremely high, maybe the highest it's ever been. Where there's a market for something, there are people who are going to do everything in their power to make a profit from it, regardless of whether lives hang in the balance.

Drugs are coming from other countries, but they're coming here because we're asking for the drugs. The reality is there's a huge demand for drugs, illegal drugs, and we've got huge addiction problems and overdose problems. Before we start blaming the other countries for sending it to us, we need to look in the mirror and blame ourselves for demanding it. I don't know what our insatiable demand for mood altering drugs is, and I can only point to addiction or problems with addiction. But yes, there's lots of countries that there're going to be doing this if it wasn't for the US's demand for this.

There are entire countries whose main economic driver is the United States demand for drugs.

There are some places where it's ridiculously poor. I mean, I can't explain to you, and these people are working, they're exploited. I mean, they're exploited by the Narco traffickers to work in these jobs. But if they weren't doing that, they wouldn't be making anything. And it's because of our demand.

Melvin says drugs come into the US in a lot of the same ways that they always have through the.

Borders- Tunnels are huge.

-and through shipping ports and airports.

I saw a lady, she was flying in into the United States from Colombia, I want to say. A flight attendant noticed that she was sweating profusely and she just wasn't sitting in her seat. Right? Like she just seems very, very uncomfortable in her seat. And finally, I think she passed out or something. She just kept sweating, kept sweating. And she passed out. And they got her medical attention and they rushed her off the plane and they found out that she had drugs embedded into her buttocks. The manners in which people think of and continue to come up with to get drugs into the United States are just endless. I always have to ask myself, well, this is what we're getting. What are we not getting? And that's what scares me.

It should scare all of us, because in addition to drug traffickers physically transporting drugs into the country by such devious means, there's also a completely unseen world of drug trafficking that's skyrocketed in the last decade. And that world exists behind computer screens in the tangled and terrifying Dark Web.

On the Dark Web, anything goes. Nothing's too dark.

The modern day drug trafficker is not some guy with chest hair and a disgustingly deep, V-neck button down sitting on a pile of cocaine and cash in some mansion somewhere. That stuff is for Hollywood. Melvin says the modern day trafficker that the DEA is after is sitting behind a keyboard.

The trafficker is a much more intelligent trafficker than what we first dealt with when I initially came on. So we were still dealing with people meeting in parking lot and communicating on the phone. And it's gotten a lot more difficult. And just as phones have gotten a lot more complicated or complex, everyone has those and everyone's a lot more savvy with phones. We're dealing with traffickers that have grown up using phones their whole lives, pretty much. I can go sit on someone's house and I'm not going to see anything for all day long because they're on the Internet and they're doing all their business through the Internet or on the Dark Web. So everything they do. We've had some of the biggest traffickers that we've arrested in probably going 10 years back up to present. They were all guys and gals that did stuff solely on the Internet. They brought their product in from overseas through the mail. They had pretty much finished product because it was usually synthetic, some synthetic. So they created a conversion lab somewhere maybe in their residence, usually somewhere else, and then they distributed. So it just became a lot more complex and different, a lot more intelligent.

Like I said, the trafficker is a lot more intelligent, a lot more computer savvy. They know exactly what they're doing.

Even the currency that dealers and buyers are exchanging via the Internet is intangible.

People are paying for making drug transactions with Bitcoin. So that's being exchanged. And all we know is basically a sign on me.

A lot of online drug traffickers are pretty good about covering their digital trail, but not all are. In fact, Melvin says because the online market for drugs is so hot right now, some traffickers get greedy and careless with their communications.

We're out there as well. And sometimes we could be communicating and you have no idea that you're communicating with a DEA agent.

Now, I'm not going to explain how to access the Dark Web because honestly, I'm afraid of it. But if you do enough research, you can figure it out. According to Melvin, once you're in, it's a free for all. Guns, drugs, illicit material. If you can think of it, it's in the Dark Web.

It's very scary. And I think people let go of their inhibitions when they're on the Dark Web and they feel the need to explore and venture into any and everything. It really is the Wild West. I mean, on the Dark Web, anything goes. Nothing's too dark. Nothing's out of bounds there. And it's scary. It's scary that we have people in our society that are very comfortable frequenting there. And it's also the place where lots of drug transactions take place.

There are retailers in this space who sell parts of machinery meant to produce pharmaceuticals. Melvin says the big item in recent years that drug traffickers are buying parts for are mass production tablet machines, devices that compress chemicals into pill form.

They order them in pieces because you have to register it if you order one complete into the United States. So you're violating the when you bring it in pieces and then you put it back together. But these machines have gotten so good now that it's virtually impossible to tell a real pill from a generic pill. We've held them side by side. We've seen them. We've seized them. So someone that's purchasing these pills, the only thing you know is if it's a pill that you should have a prescription for, then it's a generic.

Basically, you never know what you're going to get if you consume a pill that came from one of these Frankenstein tablet makers.

They do a really good job making them look authentic. But when it comes to mixing the material, it's just literally impossible. If you're not in a place that takes the measures to do it in a safe manner because they have no idea what binding material they're going to use. Or when they do mix it up, did a lethal dose of fentanyl get mixed in half of the pill? And you have virtually no fentanyl in the other half of the pill?

Melvin told me straight up, There is no reality in which drug trafficking doesn't cost human lives. It inherently attracts violence. And people caught in the crossfire are usually users who take the wrong substance or a deadly dose.

I'm always taken aback when people talk about nonviolent drug crimes. I go, show me where there's nonviolent drug crimes. I would like to see those. But you hear that a lot, and not to be political or anything like that, but I go, that's clearly people that are not walking in our shoes. There's always violence and there's always victims.

And it's not just users' lives who are ruined by drugs. Sometimes the heroes of the story find themselves caught up in the job for too long and live to see themselves become the victims. Yeah, I'm talking about when DEA agents are lured by the tempting lifestyles and large bank accounts of a drug empire. That whole you become who you hang out with thing. Are agents exposing themselves to ultimately turn.

Honestly, we're looking for the type of individual that would not be tempted by that. That's what we're trying to hire. Now, we're not always successful in doing that, because obviously you can see cases where we've had people, they've given in to temptation and they've stolen things. People, I got to tell you, there's people I've worked with that I just thought I really, really knew. And the next thing you know, I'm reading about them in the news there they stole money. I'm like, what? It's just really, really shocking.

I mean, ask yourself the question. If you closed a large DEA investigation and were responsible for counting and storing millions of dollars of Mr. Drug lord's money, would you be tempted to take some for yourself? Melvin found himself in that situation when he was a rookie. Let me be clear. He never considered stealing any money, but he did have a supervisor teach him a valuable lesson about who might be willing to cross that line.

We had executed a search warrant and we seized all this evidence and I was processing money. And I was processing it on my desk. And I had money all strewn out. You record everything and you record serial numbers and all this stuff. Anyway, I walked to the copy room, the copy room to grab some stuff. And I walked back and I had things all sectioned out. And when I come back, one section is missing. It's a small amount, but I'm walking and I'm counting everything and I'm going crazy. I go, I know. I just have this right here. So I'm looking at my paperwork and it's showing I have a section, but it's missing. So I'm going nuts. And a senior agent says, hey, rookie, come over here. And he goes, I'm going to teach you because I want to teach you the biggest lesson that I hope you remember the rest of your career. And he goes, you have no idea what we're going through in our lives, our personal lives. That's me. That's all these guys and gals that you see in here. He goes, don't trust anyone when you're processing evidence. He goes, you trust them to the point that you can trust them.

But he goes, you never walk away when you're processing evidence. And you make sure that evidence gets processed and you get a witness. And then he handed me that section of money that I was missing because he did not want me being naive and getting taken advantage of.

That lesson is one Melvin has carried with him his entire career, a hard truth that you can't predict what people will do, whether it's a drug trafficker hold up inside a house somewhere or your own colleague who caves in a moment of desperation.

I don't know the stressors that my partner is going through at home, if he's in debt. I don't know that. And I don't know if he or she is tempted to take money at one point at a time. But I can tell you right now, we've seized a lots of money. I've never been tempted because I would look at it like this. I go, that would be a short term mistake that would affect me in the long term. I think I'm going to make more money in a long happy career with DEA than I could ever make by just sticking something in my pocket.

I wholeheartedly agree. I'm just fine with the empty pockets of my lounge pants at home. And Melvin, he's had a rewarding career with the DEA because he's played by the rules and the government has compensated him well. This episode of Dark Arenas was written and produced by Delia D'Ambra, with writing assistants from executive producer, Ashley Flowers. You can find pictures and 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?