In this episode, Jon talks about his career as a game warden in Southern California and how he became one of the most respected conservationists in the state. He talks about how he went from being a deer hunter to one of California s most respected wildlife law enforcers. He also talks about what it's like to run into an illegal grow-up where cartels were growing marijuana. And how he turned it all around and got to where he is today. This episode is a must listen for everyone who has ever wanted to know what it s like to be a Game Warden in California. If you don't know who Jon is, then you're in for a real treat. Jon is a legend in the wildlife law enforcement world. He's been with the department for over 20 years and has been a part of the agency for almost 15 years. Thanks Jon for coming on the show and sharing his story with us. We really appreciate it and it was a pleasure to have him on our show. Thank you Jon for sharing your story and I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with your friends and family and family! Enjoy this episode. -Jon and I really appreciate you! -Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What was it like running into a grow up? 3:30 - How did you feel about it? 4:15 - What would you do if you were a game Warden? 5:40 - What is your favorite part of your job? 6: What was your biggest challenge? 7:00 8: What do you would like to see me do? 9: What s your biggest takeaway from this episode? 10: How would you like to do in the future? 11:20 - What are you looking for? 13:30 14:40 15: How do you think I m looking forward to the next episode of the next one? 16:30 What would your biggest piece of advice for me? 17:00 What kind of thing? 18: What is the biggest thing you re looking for in a game warden? 19:00 How do I m going to do next? 21:40: What you re going to be the most interesting part? 22:00 Can you give me a chance to help me out? 26:50 27:00 My biggest takeaway?
00:00:37.000Along the way, you guys started discovering these illegal grow-ups where cartels were growing marijuana.
00:00:45.000And you turned from being a regular game warden to essentially, well, why don't you let us know how it worked out?
00:00:53.000Yeah, Joe, it was a crazy journey because you don't think of game wardens doing the type of work we were doing when it come to the trespass gross and the cartel issue.
00:01:25.000I just loved it because three generations of family, my grandfather's career Navy, my dad, you know, as an army guy.
00:01:31.000And, you know, we just had conservation in our family, you know, for generations.
00:01:36.000So I got the job, did it, and I did all the traditional stuff to start.
00:01:38.000Came down here to Southern California to start my career in Riverside County.
00:01:42.000So I was just over the hill, you know, from LA here, and working all the traditional stuff.
00:01:47.000Fishing regulations, night hunting, you know, working deer openers.
00:01:51.000It was really cool to be a deer hunter for all those years and then actually go, you know, talk to guys on the other side and see all the good guys out there and some problems.
00:01:59.000And then in 1995, I got to go back home toward the Silicon Valley.
00:02:04.000That's where I'm originally from, born and raised.
00:02:06.000So I live in the suburbs, kind of the foothill areas of the Silicon Valley, south of San Jose there.
00:02:11.000And in 2004, I stumbled into my first cartel, what we call a trespass marijuana grow site.
00:02:20.000And, you know, to specify this stuff now, now that we're regulating, you know, the last couple of years here in California, these are not sanctioned marijuana sites.
00:02:27.000This isn't the legitimate industry that's doing it by the numbers and trying to.
00:02:33.000These are always here, you know, on public lands, destroying our environmental waterways and our wildlife and on private land as well.
00:02:41.000And on that situation, I had a good friend of mine that I grew up with that was doing his master's thesis at San Jose State University, both of our alma mater, on steelhead trout, endangered species, red-legged, yellow-legged frog, and all the aquatics in these two creeks.
00:02:55.000And this was right below Henry Coast State Park, where I really met my first game warden that was an inspiration to get the job.
00:03:01.000So these waterways are really sensitive.
00:03:04.000Headwaters coming down through this stretch for like three miles.
00:04:24.000And they're not the growers that I would have suspected.
00:04:27.000These guys are, you know, they got rifles, they got handguns, they got knives, and they're kind of cruising, working their plants, coming toward us.
00:04:36.000You know, if something crazy goes down right now and I got no backup, I got a civilian with me, these guys are armed, they're not your typical poacher that I've ever encountered.
00:04:48.000We kind of hid out, you know, he's a hunter, I'm a hunter.
00:04:50.000We stayed, you know, using our stocking and stand to the creek bank and just watched as these guys worked their plantation and went on up the hill.
00:04:59.000And I looked at this and went, what did we just walk into?
00:05:20.000Well, we got a team together as fast as we could safely, and usually it takes a couple of weeks, and I want to say within a month we were back there.
00:05:28.000Now, the interesting part was game wardens aren't known for doing this type of work, just like you said at the start, right?
00:05:34.000So they're like, well, you guys know the area, you went in there.
00:05:38.000Help us find it, get us into the area, but we're going to lead the raid.
00:05:41.000And we'll say, of course, this is your jurisdiction.
00:05:43.000We don't normally do this type of stuff, so go for it.
00:06:13.000And at the time, we didn't know about these banned toxic substances, these insecticides, carbofuran, that they're bringing up from Tijuana and transporting, actually smuggling from across the border to put on these plants to keep everything living off of it, not to impact their cash crop.
00:06:29.000And that was out there in some extent, but it was so early, we weren't really aware of the level of toxicity to this stuff and how damaging it is.
00:06:41.000And then when we were done eradicating it, we had all this mess in the creek, right?
00:06:46.000We had camp trash, we had fertilizers, pollutants, propane tanks, all over in this beautiful channel that's now dry because it's been diverted.
00:06:56.000Unbeknownst to us, all that water was totally poisoned, that they were diverting to water the plants.
00:07:39.000So kind of the light bulb went off a little bit that we need to do more to this if we're going to get involved and we need to get involved in these type of grow operations because it was the biggest environmental train wreck I'd ever seen.
00:07:50.000And I'd worked a lot of traditional game warden stuff to protect those resources.
00:07:55.000So once they had gotten everyone out and chopped all the plants up or did what they did, did they try to reclaim the creek?
00:08:03.000Did they try to remove the dam and get the water to run back again?
00:08:38.000And we need to be involved, even though it's not traditional, because we're sworn to protect our resources.
00:08:43.000Well, besides everything game wardens do that you think of from the wildlife standpoint, we're mainline law enforcement just like every police officer, right?
00:08:53.000And then what people don't realize is we go through two more months of additional training in a really long academy that's all wildlife specific, wildlife forensics, wildlife ID, weapons identification, all the things you really need to do the game war inside of it with wildlife in the backcountry,
00:09:10.000But we needed to integrate with other agencies and kind of bring them into our world if we were going to participate.
00:09:15.000So that one case started the change in me to try to build those relationships and get into tactics and tactical circles with some of these, you know, SWAT and special operations units that would go in and do this job.
00:09:28.000Under normal circumstances, if that was just being diverted by a rancher, so if a rancher had done that and the creek was dry, how would you fix that?
00:09:38.000We would have got with him, and it's what's called a streambed alteration violation.
00:09:42.000And it's 1602 in our Fish and Game Code is the section, and it's a very common section because water's diverted for a lot of reasons.
00:09:48.000And you can divert water with a permit in certain circumstances, but you can't completely denude a creek that has wildlife thriving that's a waterway of the state for everybody to enjoy, which this one was.
00:09:58.000And if normally the case would be that they would have to just have the flow come back to exactly how it was before, to remove the dam, and that would be up to the rancher?
00:10:10.000That would be up to the rancher, be part of a penalty.
00:10:13.000You know, it could be a civil, it could be a criminal, it could be a probationary, fix it and you're okay.
00:10:17.000So there was no real, there's no law involved, or nothing in place rather, when you found these grow-ups, like there was no previous precedent?
00:10:30.000And this was, you know, one of the first grows, I think, that any of us had found throughout the state of California as Game Horns.
00:10:36.000I mean, there were other guys finding some things and working, but being from the Silicon Valley and being inspired by those wildlands to everything I became later and what I stand for.
00:10:45.000It was home, you know, and it hit home.
00:10:47.000But seeing that and getting to meet certain guys from the sheriff's department in my first book goes into this whole learning experience of, you know, ad hoc jumping in with other agencies and doing it.
00:11:01.000So you wrote War in the Woods and then Hidden War is the new one?
00:11:04.000Yeah, Hidden Wars, the brand new one that just came out, and they're basically 10 years apart.
00:11:08.000And the cool part about that, Joe, is when you look at the differences, we do some major comparisons, and what War in the Woods covers is that chapter one's that first mission I'm telling you about right now, because that was like, bing, here it is.
00:11:19.000You know, we're not in Kansas anymore, so it's crazy.
00:11:22.000So the people, the higher-ups that were in charge of...
00:11:26.000Trying to eradicate the grow-up and take the cartel guys down.
00:11:31.000So that was their job, was just handling that.
00:11:35.000It was just handling the marijuana aspect of it, right?
00:11:48.000It was one of those things that it was based on the fact that a conservation group from an agency like Fish and Wildlife, like us, we just weren't involved where we would be looking at those environmental damages, right?
00:12:00.000But from a narcotics officer's standpoint, you may see the damages, but it may not register.
00:12:05.000There might not be a mandate or even objective to clean that stuff up.
00:12:08.000And back at the time, DEA was funding all of our states and all of our county teams based on the number of marijuana plants we eradicated.
00:12:17.000So there wasn't any recognition of the environmental damages and any type of funding based on how much reclamation and cleanup you did.
00:12:27.000And we were a big part of making that change, fortunately.
00:12:31.000And there wasn't a lot of funding or point kickback or value to catching bad guys, to catching some of these guys that were doing the damages.
00:12:39.000So a lot of teams then were dropping in on helicopter lines, cutting plants, getting a big plant count, getting funded for it, taking the weed out.
00:13:16.000And so we're only talking about 15 years ago as well, which is really crazy.
00:13:20.000Yeah, it was the start of a big shift in my career because I saw this as a big problem.
00:13:26.000I also, up until in 2005, we were on one of our first, second, third operations since this one we just mentioned in 2004. And on August 5th of 2005, the game completely changed because that's when we were involved in our first gunfight.
00:13:42.000And that's when my partner, Warden, who I trained in the academy, we were partners in the squad.
00:13:48.000I had promoted to be the lieutenant for two and a half counties, the Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, Monterey, part of San Benito, 20 days before this incident happened.
00:13:58.000And I had young Wardens that wanted to participate and do some of the stuff I was doing with the other agencies on the marijuana operational front.
00:14:05.000And this was, you know, right above the tech capital of the world, right there in Silicon Valley in Los Gatos.
00:14:10.000We were in really steep, arid country, you know, August, right before the A-Zone deer opener.
00:14:16.000And it was three game wardens, three sheriff's officers, good sheriff's officers that we met on that first operation in 2004. I just gave you the story on.
00:14:29.000They had heavy weapons like SKSs, the AK-47 derivative, sawed-off shotguns.
00:14:34.000And they had the grow setup where they were basically defending it.
00:14:37.000And when we came in, there was an ambush shot from one of the growers, and that was the one shot the bad guys got off.
00:14:44.000And unfortunately, that's the shot that hit my partner through both legs.
00:14:48.000And that bullet went through the right thigh and tumbled through his right leg, then kept going through his left.
00:14:53.000So he's down, and we're trying to keep him from bleeding out of four holes for the better part of three hours waiting for an air rescue.
00:15:01.000And we didn't, you know, nobody in the country from the standpoint of a law enforcement team had ever been counterattacked by these growers.
00:15:08.000We'd, you know, we'd chase them around, they'd run away, sometimes we'd find weapons, oftentimes we wouldn't.
00:15:14.000But so this was just a real eye-opener, like, what the fuck did we just walk into?
00:15:18.000And plus, my partner was real close to not making it.
00:15:21.000And fortunately, he did survive, or I don't know that we'd be sitting here telling this story and talking about it.
00:15:26.000But that day, when I saw how well they were equipped, the type of weaponry they had, and the fact that I almost didn't come home that day, I went, okay, this is super dangerous.
00:15:38.000We can't do this as standard patrol game wardens.
00:15:40.000We can't do this doing just the traditional stuff.
00:15:43.000We should stay involved in it because aside from being so violent, the environmental damages, Joe, were the worst I'd still ever seen, and they just kept getting worse and worse the more operations I'd work in my home county, right?
00:16:20.000And that largely came from what we saw, you know, in those early years, the 2004 first stop down there on Dexter Canyon Creek, and then what we had on Sierra Azul when my partner was shot in 2005. About then, we started to also see the banned poisons in these grows,
00:17:18.000And it gets smuggled across the border with the grow groups, the drug trafficking groups, because it's so effective, regardless how poisoned it is.
00:17:25.000And we were starting to see more and more of that stuff as we were starting to ramp more of a specialty to doing this job more, you know, thoroughly and safely and get into the cleanup.
00:17:53.000The vast majority, like what was the number that you said, the percentage that is grown in California that's illegally sold through the rest of the country?
00:18:02.000So 70-80% of the entire marijuana population or marijuana product that you're buying if you live in a place like South Dakota or wherever it's, I don't even know if it's legal in South Dakota, wherever it's illegal.
00:18:27.000And then the other problem is that our state laws, when we made marijuana legal recreationally here, we severely lowered the penalty for an illegal grow-op.
00:18:41.000When we started the department's special team, the spec ops marijuana enforcement team that Hidmore goes into...
00:18:49.000Part of my job as being the co-founder of that and the team leader was outreach.
00:18:53.000So I was speaking to legislative groups before we legalized under Prop 64 and then the tighter medicinal marijuana laws that came about that same time.
00:19:03.000And I was talking to anybody, conservation groups that you and I would be part of, preservation animal rights groups, high school kids assemblies, right?
00:19:12.000Watch out, if you're using weed, make sure you're not using this stuff because it's so nasty.
00:19:24.000Let's not lessen any penalties for the trespass grow that the cartels are doing in our public lands and private lands and also the other gang groups.
00:19:35.000But unfortunately, when we did regulate, and all that was passed two years ago, they did water it down.
00:19:41.000So public land cultivation went to, like you said, a felony to a misdemeanor.
00:19:45.000And if you're a juvenile cultivator on public-private land and one of these juvenile cartel members, and there's a lot of young ones learning, it's an infraction.
00:19:55.000And that took a lot of emphasis away from that part of the problem and left us out there basically alone with a couple other agencies to fight it.
00:20:01.000Well, for the average person, that would sound, before you knew about the cartel grows, that would sound like a good idea.
00:20:07.000Well, hey, if marijuana is legal, what's the big deal?
00:20:11.000Then the other problem is, these people that are buying this marijuana in the rest of the country, it's highly likely that they're going to have some of that pesticide on it.
00:20:21.000Has that stuff ever killed someone from smoking this illegal marijuana?
00:20:25.000We don't know if it's killed anybody directly, because by the time it gets distributed throughout the country, it does dissipate a little bit, but it's still highly toxic.
00:20:33.000To put it in perspective, about three years ago, we had two federal officers back east, not even in California, in a public land grow that had all that toxic on it.
00:21:06.000I mean, February to almost December, right?
00:21:08.000And that's why it's grown here, and that's why the black market, both in, you know, the private land communities and the cartels are everywhere across the country with this stuff.
00:21:16.000But they'll go wherever they can to, you know, diversify the network.
00:21:21.000So we do have it in other states to a much lesser extent.
00:21:24.000And then something we need to remember is, even though about half the country has these grows in them to a lesser extent than California...
00:21:31.000These same groups are under the same enterprise that are doing human trafficking, doing gunrunning, you know, to fuel the fight down in Mexico, methamphetamine production, and now the new synthetic fentanyl that's just killing thousands, especially on the East Coast, are coming from these groups.
00:21:58.000And we made really, really careful, even though we're talking about a team in California, game wardens, we're trying to tell a nationwide story because the nation needs to know.
00:22:07.000Well, it seems like you, I mean, not just seems like, it is.
00:22:10.000You guys were not trained for this, and there was no one else there.
00:22:15.000So it was like, hey, put it on the game wardens.
00:22:17.000They're going to have to handle this now.
00:22:19.000Which is really, to me, kind of insane.
00:22:21.000It is, but then at the flip side, we're really passionate about protecting what you and I love, right?
00:22:27.000Our wildlands and our waterways and our wildlife especially.
00:22:30.000So we have a passionate interest in protecting those resources, and not to mention keeping our public safe in the same breath.
00:24:10.000And our point man was about to step into this thing.
00:24:13.000And our canine, Phoebe, that I'm sure, you know, we talked about it on Steven's show, a little bit on Meat Eater, and also Mike Ritland, who has a show called Mic Drop.
00:24:21.000And he's a SEAL Team 3 veteran and canine trainer.
00:24:24.000He really got into the dog stories, right?
00:25:27.000They'll put garbage in them, or they'll use them like when we were in the middle of our...
00:25:30.000Really severe drought that we just came out of here in California a couple of years ago, all these mountain streams were just bone dry.
00:25:37.000So they would go to the lower lands and we were doing a lot of work, you know, in the Delta region, the Sacramento Delta and the lowlands.
00:25:43.000And they, even if they, you know, we're getting water from the Delta and the raised land would dry up, they would dig, hand dig wells, 20, 30 feet deep and they leave them open and they're getting water from them and pumping out water out of the bottom, but those stay open.
00:25:56.000So yeah, our big, our big game animals drop into those, or we could drop into them.
00:26:04.000Is there an estimate of how many cartel members are growing in this country right now?
00:26:10.000If you say there's 27, 28 states, is that what you said?
00:26:13.000Is there a rough estimate of how many cartel members are here right now doing this kind of stuff?
00:26:20.000You know, it's a real approximation because you only know based on who you catch or who you've been able to debrief.
00:26:26.000But like in California, we know from the amount of grows we deal with every year just on the trespass, you know, cartel front, and the number of operatives it takes to run a grow and get it started and then harvest it.
00:26:45.000And the reason we say that, and I always go very conservative because it's such a kind of a silent enterprise and it's really hard to get some of this data, but we've just validated it through the numbers of things we run across.
00:26:57.000You know, when you look at the fact that it takes two skilled growers that are vetted because they cut their teeth down in Mexico doing it effectively under the Federalist nose.
00:27:25.000They're out there for six months at a time.
00:27:27.000You said they were walking around with carpet strapped to their feet so they didn't leave footprints?
00:27:32.000Yeah, in Hidmore especially, we have a whole lot of photos in that book about things we've seen on trail cameras, and they will put felt-lined, lined soft felt on their shoes, tie them up tight, and if they're walking like an old forest road that's got a gravel base, you'll never see that track.
00:27:49.000I mean, you've tracked big game, I've done it.
00:27:51.000It's the same type of technique, and if you don't have any sign...
00:27:55.000I mean, they're really good at disguising them.
00:27:57.000We actually found a guy, and I have a picture of this in the book and also in the PowerPoint when I teach to this throughout the country.
00:28:04.000Cow hooves actually carved out of wood because a couple years ago, we were, you know, the U.S. Forest Service, a lot of this grow problem is on our national forests.
00:28:13.000You know, Northern California, Northeastern California, not so much Silicon Valley where I started, but the rest of the state, even down here.
00:28:20.000And what these guys would do is there's cattle leases on those properties where, you know, ranchers can run cattle on part of the forest and, you know, or a joint on private property.
00:28:28.000And we were getting tips on a bunch of grows, you know, or you've seen them from the air or a hunter or angler would report them or we'd have a suspicion because of a waterway or we'd see some plants from satellite or whatever.
00:28:38.000And we'd go try to find this grow and we weren't picking up tracks.
00:28:41.000And we're, you know, we're pretty good at finding these things now.
00:28:44.000We've been trial and error in it for a lot of years.
00:28:47.000But we're seeing a lot of cattle tracks because we're running around with cows.
00:28:50.000And sure enough, they were putting on cow hooves and strapping them on top or underneath their boots, clomping around to disguise themselves as cattle.
00:29:00.000And then once they get way up into a deep canyon where they're going to put their grow, they just take them off and throw them in a backpack.
00:29:54.000And then they're finding the water source and maybe they're following it and it's dry or it's diverted like what I found in 2004 that started this whole craziness.
00:31:28.000And there was a real shift in just public land presence of these cartel growers.
00:31:33.000And by the time I retired last year, it was almost a 50-50 split.
00:31:37.000So ranches like Tahone Ranch, a private hunting club in the Silicon Valley, one up in Shasta County.
00:31:43.000So You know, where they're doing big-time conservation projects to get blacktail and mule deer and tule elk and everything else up in numbers.
00:31:51.000And now they've got this presence on their hunting club hitting one of their sensitive waterways, you know.
00:31:56.000So it's not just a public land thing, and it's really good for everybody listening to know that.
00:32:00.000You could find it anywhere, and you stumbled on it.
00:32:03.000And it's funny you mentioned the reporting parties.
00:32:05.000The cool thing, after I did Stephen's show on Meat Eater and talked to those guys, we started to get tips.
00:32:12.000I actually got a tip, and it's in play.
00:32:15.000I won't say too much more about it, but we'll be talking when it's all over and done, but it's going to get handled.
00:32:21.000It's so cool to see the guys like you and I that hunt and love it and love the passion of what's out there are out there stumbling on this stuff and getting out safely.
00:32:41.000Fortunately, it doesn't happen a lot where we have a lot of fatalities.
00:32:45.000But I want to say about five, six years ago, we had a father-daughter combination on a deer hunt up in one of the D zones in northeastern California.
00:32:54.000And they were shot at by cartel growers going in on a deer opener to try to harvest her first deer.
00:32:59.000You know, she was coming up through the program.
00:33:07.000We've had people run out of gardens by some of these growers.
00:33:12.000We have had other shots fired, and we've had people just stay out of areas because once they see it or they see a guy holding a weapon like that in...
00:33:19.000A marijuana plantation they know isn't legit, they're out of there.
00:33:23.000Is there an area where they, I mean, it's all public land mostly, and private land, ranch land, but is there an area of the state where there's more of them?
00:33:34.000You know, that's what I thought when I started.
00:33:36.000I mean, you hear about the Humboldt, you know, Trinity, the Emerald Triangle, right?
00:33:45.000But I mean, from Silicon Valley, where I'm from, you wouldn't think of those foothills in that part of the state, you know, being so overrun.
00:33:53.000And during those, what I call, you know, the formative years of learning this and getting involved in it and specializing in it, we were really, I got to give a shout out to the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office and the guys then that took us on as equals.
00:34:04.000And my partners that really brought us in as, you know, not only tacticians, but tracking and able to identify sign as wardens doing the hunting thing in the woods, where we could go and really specialize at this and be a lot safer and do it a lot better than when my partner got shot in 05. And we were doing 25...
00:34:22.000Public and private land cartel grows in the Silicon Valley at least 20 to 25 a season.
00:34:31.000So for folks who don't know what the season is, explain that.
00:34:35.000Yeah, the eradication season, what we call the gross season when we operate the heaviest, is usually...
00:34:40.000An early start would be sometime mid-May, and then we go all the way to about the end of September.
00:34:45.000I mean, there's some wiggle room on both ends of that, depending on water and how long the winter goes.
00:34:50.000But from May to pretty much the end of September, it's going on.
00:34:54.000So just somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six months, and you're looking at 25 different operations?
00:34:59.000Yeah, and that's in just Santa Clara County as an example.
00:35:02.000And when we formed the full-time team in 2013, and we had representatives, and we have representatives on our marijuana enforcement team, our agency-specific team, We have guys covering every part of the state and responsible team members spread out covering every county.
00:35:20.000And as of now, and we've been, well, we had six full operational years before I retired.
00:35:26.000Now it's in good hands and the team's doing fantastic work.
00:35:29.000We've had at least a grow, if not several, in every county in the state, and most counties multiple.
00:35:34.000So to put it in perspective, on an average, your team would do 125 missions, if not more.
00:35:40.000So that's 125 grow sites that we were responsible for doing the workup, the planning, going in and doing the apprehension, the stalking to catch these guys with our canines and with our tactics.
00:35:51.000Then doing the eradication, and 90% of them are all, you know, tainted in that ferdan and the carbofuran, sometimes to the point that it's so freshly applied that we can't touch the plants for a couple of weeks.
00:36:02.000We can't even, even with protective gear, with nitrile gloves, face protection, masks, the whole nine.
00:36:10.000And no exaggeration to put it in perspective, the two officers on the federal level that were exposed just ingested some of those fumes, and you get blindness, you get nausea, you can't breathe.
00:36:22.000They were out of circulation, fortunately not fatally, but they were out of circulation for weeks, sometimes months.
00:36:27.000And federal OSHA came down with the Forest Service, and of course working closely from the state level, We suddenly were under a lot of protocol on decontamination, what we couldn't touch, and new basic tactics for our safety, for human safety, came down,
00:36:44.000So these guys putting this stuff on there, we may not be able to even touch the plants or even cut them safely or put them in nets and contaminate all our gear until it has a chance to dissipate a little bit, and that's 14 days.
00:36:56.000So what would you guys do if you stumbled upon something and you knew that it was freshly applied?
00:36:59.000Would you just have a bunch of officers stand by and guard the area to make sure that these guys didn't come back to try to reclaim the plants?
00:38:00.000And kind of what I'm all about, being a game warden, and now in phase two in retirement, I'm really trying to speak more nationally to what the thin green line is.
00:38:59.000Yeah, we have teams now in our agency, and most of the states do, called wildlife trafficking teams.
00:39:05.000And it was a good program that came out of the Obama administration that all the states had to do it.
00:39:10.000We were kind of already doing it, but we had to formalize a little bit.
00:39:13.000And that was an added challenge that happened right after we formed the whole cannabis enforcement program, which started with the tactical unit that I co-formed.
00:39:21.000And then all these watershed enforcement teams popped up for cannabis regulation to check the new licensed growers, people trying to do it legitimately, and water use and make sure there weren't abuses.
00:39:32.000Then wildlife trafficking became a huge issue.
00:39:35.000The commercialization of wildlife is a huge billion dollar industry worldwide on everything from abalone to sturgeon row to black bear gallbladders, and now ivory especially.
00:39:45.000The black bear gallbladder one is so weird.
00:41:09.000Now, because this is now a problem that people are aware of, have there been significant resources that have been allocated to try to handle this stuff?
00:41:18.000Are there new programs to train these young officers coming up?
00:41:23.000Is there a specific task force that handles that, and then the rest of the guys handle fish and wildlife, or is it just same people, but now you have a whole different level of responsibility?
00:41:34.000Yeah, it's really cool in California because we are one of the most progressive game warden agencies.
00:41:41.000And it's interesting because I just spoke back in July, I spoke at the NAWIA conference, which is basically the annual game wardens conference for all of us from all over the country.
00:41:56.000And we're the first state to have a dedicated, you know, kind of tactical unit for this cartel growth threat because it's so big in California.
00:42:05.000But to share that with everybody nationally in my world in the thin green line and for them to start having it happening on the refuges and even just to know this stuff's getting back to their parts of the world and poisoning their cannabis users, you know, unsuspectingly.
00:42:24.000And so that was one thing to see, hey, we need to have a baseline training.
00:42:27.000And the way we do it here in California is we all go through a really stringent academy.
00:42:31.000Everyone gets their basic tools, arrest control and defensive tactics, you know, and firearms training and all of that and get good at being the traditional game warden and doing all the traditional stuff.
00:42:41.000And they get, you know, get their feet wet out doing their own thing for a couple of years and And then we start to find the people that have the motivation or want to get onto a specialized unit, like our MET team or one of the watershed teams or the wildlife trafficking team.
00:42:56.000Very seldomly do we put a fresh person there because, you know, I think to really be a good game warden, you got to cut your teeth on all the traditional stuff that's critical of just having to check guys with guns all the time.
00:43:08.000You know, most cops look at that and go, that's crazy.
00:43:11.000I mean, everybody you check has a knife or a firearm.
00:43:15.000Well, fortunately, 99% of them are guys like you and me that want to see a game warden, and the game warden wants to see us.
00:43:19.000But for that one felon that's on parole, and he's in the woods hiding out, and we run across that a lot, and I ran across a ton of that down here in SoCal at the start of my career, and I've got some interesting stories about that.
00:43:31.000So guys who skip bail, and then they go and hide?
00:43:55.000And I'm in that truck cruising, and something I got into down here that was just crazy, but I will say this, it was a heck of a learning curve, and I'm really blessed it went out the way it did, and I was safe in it, but we would get gangbangers from LA here, and they would go over into Riverside County and get into my kind of rural foothills and on the edge of the National Forest,
00:44:14.000and they'd have AK-47s, and they'd have automatic pistols, and they would spotlight through these canyons Gunning for everything.
00:44:26.000They'd get to the end of a canyon that has an outlet of a dam, throw a gill net out, and spend all night there just gill netting fish, and hunting freely and shooting, killing everything with their spotlights.
00:44:37.000Grab their gill net, grab hundreds of fish, pack up, and then head back to the L.A. Basin.
00:45:09.000I'm never going to bite a bad guy, but she's going to lick him to death and try to turn him our way.
00:45:15.000But I didn't even have a companion dog at the time.
00:45:17.000And I would go and run into these guys and go, okay, this is what I learned in the academy, that head-on spotlighting stop that you never want to have, or getting behind them blacked out and tracking them down.
00:45:28.000And next thing I know, I got AKs, and I got all these frickin' prohibited exotic weapons, and I'm going, this is crazy.
00:45:46.000And they were all armed, and it was one of my heaviest, most intense cases, and I had been on one year.
00:45:52.000So this was 1994. And what we were doing in the Riverside squad is we were just saturating the area because we were getting everybody from over on the LA side here spotlighting all our games.
00:46:12.000But spotlighting is where you use an artificial light, whether it's a handheld spotlight, a flashlight, whatever.
00:46:17.000And you go into remote areas and you look to find animals at night because they freeze, they're really relaxed, their eyes glow, and then you shoot them that way.
00:46:25.000You kill them illegally at night after dark, which is never allowed.
00:46:28.000You know, it's usually in or out of hunting season because anyone's going to spotlight a deer nine times out of ten.
00:46:33.000They're not licensed or they're not going to do it during season like we do.
00:46:38.000So in our world as game wardens, that's the ultimate wildlife criminal because they're going to kill does, you know, that have that unborn trophy buck for good genetics.
00:46:48.000They're going to kill a trophy deer way in the rut, you know, that, you know, needs to go another year or whatever.
00:46:54.000That was like, if I can cut my teeth and get, you know, become a reputable game warden and going after the hardcores, that was the game then.
00:47:01.000So it was 94. And I'm pulling these guys out and calling them out on a loudspeaker.
00:47:12.000I mean, we even had the sheriff's office helicopter come in several nights.
00:47:16.000Once we got to know each other and they realized, who is this game warden?
00:47:19.000And what are these game wardens in Riverside County going out into just crazy areas by themselves?
00:47:23.000They'd monitor our traffic and they'd come in on the helicopter and light it up and call these bad guys out on loudspeakers just to make sure we were okay.
00:47:30.000Feels good when the cavalry comes on those nights, man, let me tell you.
00:47:33.000Well, so in those sort of situations, they just didn't know that you would ever run into someone that's that armed, that many guys in the van or what have you.
00:48:08.000So, a squad of seven game wardens, to put it in perspective, check this out, brother.
00:48:13.000When I was supervising traditional patrol before we started the Special Ops Met team in Santa Clara County, we always had vacancies because we were always low on bodies.
00:48:22.000We couldn't hire game wardens fast enough.
00:48:24.000We weren't funded for it or whatever the case may be.
00:48:25.000So we might have four or five game wardens for seven positions.
00:48:29.000And we had to cover all of Santa Clara County, which is everything from the city to all those foothills.
00:48:33.000And there's a lot of it in Silicon Valley people don't realize.
00:48:37.000All of San Benito County, which is huge.
00:48:40.000Hollister, Gilroy, right where I'm from in Gilroy, that whole area down to the south.
00:48:43.000That is just massive mountain country, full of wildlife.
00:49:44.000Like, do you get to a vantage point in glass?
00:49:46.000Yeah, it's just like glass in a big basin for elk, right?
00:49:49.000You get in a really good overwatch, you get the most visibility, you know, hide the truck, and you watch.
00:49:54.000And you find areas where it's likely to happen.
00:49:57.000And it takes a while to learn where that's going to be, just because you've got this huge district and you could have 20 places where guys spotlight.
00:50:04.000But until you get into the area as a new warden and really get to figure it all out, you don't know where to be and it's a trial and error.
00:50:10.000But, you know, it took me six months, give or take, just going out there and scouting hard and seeing where this road goes and how does that canyon look?
00:50:17.000What type of water do I have down there?
00:50:19.000What am I seeing at low light in the evening when animals are coming to water?
00:51:17.000You're talking about enormous pieces of land that you guys are responsible for.
00:51:22.000It's hard for people to put into perspective that don't spend any time in the woods that you would be able to even find these folks in this enormous area.
00:51:33.000It starts off as a needle in a haystack type thing, you know?
00:51:36.000But once you get into it, you get fairly good at it.
00:51:39.000But it always is difficult because, again, just the percentages of catching a guy on the right night that he's going to be out there.
00:51:45.000And then you got the guys that kind of get savvy to knowing where the game warden lives, driving by his house, looking for his patrol truck to see if he's out that night.
00:52:11.000So we get very community-oriented in community functions, in conservation groups, and everybody knows us, whether it's a big city or a small little town in the mountains.
00:52:19.000So you got guys doing the cat and mouse thing looking for us and making sure, hey, is this truck there or is he out patrolling?
00:53:15.000You have a tag, but you just really got to get that meat.
00:53:17.000I mean, there are certain cases where you just kind of feel for that person to go.
00:53:21.000I see where the motivation was, you know, and a very small percentage of poachers are that way, but some of them are just, you know, they're just trying to feed their family.
00:54:00.000And one of them had a $50,000 no-bail warrant for cocaine trafficking out of Mexico.
00:54:06.000And that was in that week that we had a crazy spotlight and things going on.
00:54:10.000So it was just the demographic of down here, where up north it wouldn't be necessarily that felon, but that guy that just wanted that trophy buck and to cheat to get it.
00:54:19.000If I could give you a magic wand, Okay.
00:54:21.000And you could, like, I could say, John, it's up to you.
00:54:40.000Because there's this perception that game wardens just check fishing licenses or they might not be real cops, We're paid about 40% less than a county sheriff, than a highway patrolman, than a city police guy.
00:54:53.000You think it's because of perception, really?
00:54:56.000Perception and public lack of knowledge, perhaps.
00:54:58.000So as far as funds get allocated, they say, well, game wardens, come on.
00:55:14.000You know, 15 years, plus or minus, something that really started to legitimize us.
00:55:20.000And in 2010, when my first book came out, War in the Woods, that's when the Wild Justice Game War and Reality Show and National Geographic Channel aired for the first time, and that was our agency.
00:55:31.000And that was the first of what are now a lot of Game Warden shows, and the more the merrier.
00:55:39.000It was us, you know, so I'm partially a little bit.
00:55:42.000Right, but is it mostly busting people for wildlife, or is it you get into the marijuana stuff, too?
00:55:47.000We do actually get into the marijuana stuff.
00:55:49.000Something the Wild Justice film crews really resonated with.
00:55:53.000A lot of the guys that are on the team now, myself included, ended up being featured like their main people for the better part of like three seasons because we weren't just bringing them the poaching cases, the traditional stuff which needed to get shown.
00:56:04.000And we didn't have our formalized team yet, but I was embedded with Santa Clara County.
00:56:08.000Brian and Canine Phoebe were up in Shasta, but we were getting brought together for the show, and he was starting to work down with me in the Bay Area and bringing that Wonder Dog Phoebe into the mix that he had honed for years.
00:56:20.000And we started to show this cartel marijuana stuff through the show.
00:56:32.000And it's the same thing with writing these books and doing the TV I do.
00:56:36.000It's a fine line between risking some exposure or getting the message out.
00:56:42.000Like I said, we're so thin on the thin green line, we need all the exposure we can get.
00:56:45.000We're a little agency, our funding's limited, but we're doing a multitude of jobs even outside of the marijuana stuff.
00:56:50.000So that started to help, and now we're starting to get the recognition of the professionalism and the capabilities we have, especially with this tactical unit.
00:56:59.000To hopefully help with things like salary and numbers.
00:57:14.000And if I wasn't embedded there as a family member, I couldn't have afforded to stay.
00:57:17.000And I had great, great wardens come in and do fantastic work that didn't want to leave Silicon Valley, but they're like, I can't buy a house here.
00:57:25.000I've got to go to Butte County or I've got to go to Shasta County.
00:57:27.000I've got to get in the woods a little bit.
00:57:59.000And has there been discussion, like, to someone to bring this up, like, this is one of the primary problems with having marijuana federally illegal, with California having it state legal, that there is this massive confusion and this, you know, diminishing of penalties in California with growing illegally.
00:58:23.000I said, look, if we're going to regulate, and we need to regulate to stop this black market, Let's do it smart.
00:58:31.000You know, let's, for one, everything we really tried to push here in California was regulate legitimate cannabis the correct way, keep people safe.
00:58:46.000And as long as people aren't hurting themselves or other people, they're not destroying waterways, we're not getting in gunfights over it, great.
00:58:54.000But for like the, you know, the outdoor trespassing with these cartels, We're good to go.
00:59:27.000You know, because of the black market.
00:59:29.000So you can take, you know, cannabis even out of the equation and look at the environmental impacts and look at the public safety, but we have to do something to regulate this thing uniformly across the board, and we have to break the black market.
00:59:42.000But what I've seen, and I go into the last chapter of my new book, Hidden Work, extensively on this, is what are the challenges moving forward after seeing regulation in play for two years?
00:59:51.000Boots on the ground, watching it, and having a great relationship with legitimate cannabis growers.
00:59:56.000And I'll tell you a few stories that really opened my eyes and got us unified, right?
01:00:01.000Because the whole thing is we need to be unified on this concept.
01:00:04.000Not polarized left or right, anti-cannabis, pro-cannabis.
01:00:07.000Let's get unified environmental safety, public safety, all of it.
01:00:13.000But because of how we've regulated and the licensing fees and the protocol and everything else, we've had all of these black market growers in the 215 days that wanted to get legal and saw everything coming and the cost to do it and being on Big Brother's radar or law enforcement's radar.
01:00:52.000The thing that was really interesting, and I never saw this coming, but when we were about to roll out Prop 64 and it had been voted for recreational and the medical laws were tightening up, I was the first law enforcement guy, being from a marijuana enforcement team,
01:01:07.000to go into these California Grower Association-hosted grower meetings.
01:01:12.000And my first one was in Santa Cruz, right over the hill from my place, right?
01:01:15.000And I mean, I'm in the, you know, I'm in the BDUs, the camo bottoms, the polo.
01:01:19.000I'm going into my, you know, my training attire for Met.
01:01:22.000And the look on 500 Grover's faces when I walked into that meeting, just like, what's he doing here?
01:02:17.000Yeah, I've got photos in the new book on trail cam with felt on their feet, covering their tracks with these sea bags, 100 plus pounds, and a spool of pipe going up, man.
01:02:26.000People don't know how hard that is to do.
01:02:27.000I mean, if these guys just took a legit job, they'd be like the best employees you'd ever have.
01:03:05.000It was such a turnaround, you know, from the traditional relationship between law enforcement and the cannabis world.
01:03:12.000And to be the one guy there with all of the growing community there and then go from complete horror that I was there as an adversary or judgment or anything of that or, you know, to...
01:03:23.000To do anything negative from an enforcement standpoint, to suddenly having real talks of what was going out.
01:03:29.000And I could kind of see the authenticity, the genuineness on some of their faces, the way they reacted to my slides, to the videos.
01:03:37.000And so when I left that first meeting, I remember I just got flooded in my patrol truck.
01:03:42.000And I had Apollo with me, my little lab, and she's an icebreaker.
01:03:45.000I thought, well, it could be an interesting meeting.
01:03:46.000I should have the dog for pets, you know?
01:03:48.000And she jumped in, and all these growers were coming to my truck, and I'm packing up my stuff, and I'm like, wow, this is weird.
01:03:54.000And it was all these farmer supervisors from all over the state, Mendocino County, up in the Emerald Triangle, Santa Cruz, and they're just giving me their cards.
01:04:01.000I go, hey, Lieutenant, I have workers.
01:04:43.000Let's have a certain percentage of it designated for wardens.
01:04:48.000That's starting to happen, too, because now that we've had a couple of years and we're seeing some of the regulatory funding and the taxes trickle back, I'm in contact with my team all the time.
01:04:58.000I still get to see them periodically and train and do things like that and really give them a shout-out for all the amazing risks they're taking and the work they're doing and promote their message of what they're out there doing.
01:05:09.000But the money's starting to come back to us now.
01:08:21.000But when you get to the border issue, you brought up that good point of it's not just that cartel element for this poison cannabis stuff or this toxically tainted cannabis is a better way to phrase it.
01:08:32.000It's the smuggling, the human trafficking.
01:08:34.000It's all those other crimes that methamphetamine production.
01:09:17.000There's just an insane amount of violence that's going on down there, an insane amount of crime, and so much of it is connected to the illegal drug trade.
01:09:26.000And look, you're not going to kill at all if you make marijuana legal, but you would kill a percentage.
01:09:32.000At least it would make it a little bit better, and it would stop that.
01:09:35.000Yeah, and one of the things we get from getting that regulation, if we can stop that black market for cartel weed, we're going to save a lot of wildlife.
01:09:45.000We're going to preserve a lot of waterways, right?
01:09:47.000Because all those other crimes are very heinous and very destructive, and I hate to see the human trafficking and all the meth problems and anything that relates to violence or a deterioration of a soul, but...
01:10:20.000I said, look, if we lose all of our open space to a problem like this, and it compounds the problem, and we lose our wildlife and good water, you may not be in the outdoors right now.
01:10:32.000You might be on your freaking digital device all the time and looking at wildlife through a screen.
01:10:38.000But if you ever do go out and you get that peace and tranquility and you get centered like we do, run a trail, hike a LA County mountain trail or open space, don't even get that far in the woods, it's just soothing.
01:10:51.000And if the new generations that aren't getting that from the cities can get that or they can get their kids doing it or their grandkids or hear about it, But it's not there to go to.
01:11:01.000That to me, man, we're just not paying it forward enough.
01:11:04.000So this is something I got to stay on and I really appreciate you and what you stand for because of the message.
01:11:11.000I think just so many people don't know.
01:11:13.000Yeah, I just think that's a big part of it.
01:11:16.000What's interesting to me, too, is that the allocation of resources, it's so, when you have something that's illegal, you're not getting any of that money.
01:11:25.000And if it was legal, there's an enormous amount of money that could go to schools and fix the roads, and we can allocate it to a bunch of different- Big time.
01:11:50.000That's where they were getting their money from, because there was such a demand.
01:11:54.000It's really a disgusting, dumb way to approach a problem that is, in many people's ideas, a social problem.
01:12:02.000That money could go to so many different positive things.
01:12:06.000Yeah, and when we're perpetuating it through that reason and many others, we're basically embedding the problem in our country.
01:12:13.000And Ed said this, Calderon, we were dialoguing earlier this week, and he said, you know, he's kind of looked at things from the border and south and the issues coming in from the border, from the cartel front.
01:12:23.000He said, you know, now I'm getting wind of your book and I'm starting to analyze what you guys are fighting on the ground inside the borders in California and the rest of the country.
01:12:32.000I mean, it's not like it's just coming across.
01:12:33.000I mean, the enterprise is embedded here in the nation because they have the pipeline, they have the distribution, they have a market, and they don't have to deal with the border issue.
01:12:42.000And they're comfortable because of exactly where we're at and what people aren't aware of.
01:12:46.000And in California, that it's just a misdemeanor, which is even more insane.
01:13:04.000Now, the saving grace of that is when we get the environmental crimes that we bring from the fish and wildlife standpoint to those charges for these guys, we get it back to felony status.
01:13:16.000Because we had an interesting thing happen.
01:13:18.000As soon as all that regulation started two years ago, and those trespass grow crimes were watered down to what we're talking about, district attorneys all throughout the state said, oh man, we're not going to be able to prosecute these crimes.
01:13:31.000I mean, we're not going to have a jury that's sympathetic to these issues.
01:13:59.000Teams stop working and accept us and like the feds, you know, and not only that DA's couldn't prosecute.
01:14:05.000So I remember speaking for the California District Attorney Association on this and saying guys there's a solution.
01:14:12.000Everybody, no matter where they sit on the cannabis spectrum, everybody hates to see Bambi dead, water poisoned.
01:14:20.000Everyone has a little bit of environmental passion in them on both sides of the fence.
01:14:24.000And that's where I say here we can unify and not worry about where we sit on the for or against.
01:14:30.000And if you take these water code enhancements, if you take the felony and the penal code from the banned toxics like carbofuran, if you take a streambed alteration diversion or dead wildlife or littering close to a state waterway, you stack all those up, you get all these penalties.
01:14:44.000And you can convict on that, you know, even in a sympathetic jury on, say, a cannabis issue.
01:14:49.000So we started to prosecute these cases and they started to come back.
01:15:09.000They'll go to jail here if it's a sanctuary-type state scenario and they're going to stay in our justice system and they will do jail time here.
01:15:18.000If we're working with ICE and our feds and Homeland Security, especially ICE agents, and they are classified as a deportable felon, they will get deported.
01:15:39.000Especially if there's someone who's high up in the cartel or is making a good amount of money for the cartel, it's highly likely that with a lot of corruption they might go free.
01:16:19.000And what you just said, it's like, because of the money involved.
01:16:22.000And we know, and I go into this and hit more a little bit, what I can talk about under, you know, just what we learned without putting names out there is, it's $4,000 to $7,000 for these grow organizations in these cartel cells to bring their best growers back across.
01:16:46.000Boats, I was always thinking, like, how the fuck are you going to protect the border when you just get a boat and just kind of like go past and pull in somewhere in California and hop out?
01:16:55.000Yeah, well, something we learned recently, and it's been about the last five years...
01:16:59.000And it was really starting to hit the California coastline and the Oregon coastline heavy when we started our unit in 2013 was these panga boats.
01:17:50.000Yeah, I got some pretty cool pictures in the book.
01:17:52.000So these guys just pull the boat in, and then, this is obviously one that got busted, and then they just have someone waiting for them, and they unload that stuff into trucks.
01:18:01.000And they got a distribution network ready to go, and then that boat's just disposed of.
01:18:05.000And again, ladies and gentlemen, this is all because of an illegal demand.
01:18:10.000This stuff wouldn't be profitable if we were growing it here in the United States and if the only way you would sell it at a store was if it was regulated and licensed and you knew that it was tested and it was all grown here.
01:18:22.000You had a certificate of where the farmer was.
01:19:09.000I mean, obviously, I'm kidding about shoot him, but their situation is just as grave.
01:19:14.000I mean, you're living in Mexico, and you're fucked, and there's no way for you to get by legally.
01:19:20.000And you're a young man, you get recruited into one of these cartels, and next thing you know, you've been in for 10 years, and you've committed a few murders, and you're involved in drug trafficking.
01:19:47.000I mean, and a lot of that, again, is backed by illegal drug sales.
01:19:52.000If you don't have illegal drug sales, you don't have nearly as much profit or incentive, and you have less of that.
01:19:58.000And it sounds counterintuitive for people to make things illegal that are legal, or make things legal that are illegal, and you would stop the crime.
01:20:08.000It is, and I always look at it this way.
01:20:10.000I said, look, regardless of where you sit on the emotional spectrum on this, against cannabis, for cannabis, let's all look at the issue of environmental purity, safety in America, and really be real as to what's going to help the problem.
01:20:25.000And you hit it on the head when you said, well, yeah, there's all that mess stuff going on and this, that.
01:20:29.000And there is, but I'm a realist and we've got to do something right now.
01:20:32.000And I think if we're going to federally regulate to any type of consistency, we're still many years off from that.
01:20:38.000So what are we going to do in the meantime if that's going to happen?
01:20:41.000We've still got to deal with this grow mess going on in predominantly California and all this stuff getting out to our public and being tainted.
01:20:49.000We still have to deal with the meth issue and the gun running and all of that.
01:20:52.000And knowing that it's embedded in our country, we need to have people aware of it.
01:20:56.000And not only law enforcement, but bring that thin green line a little bigger with conservationists like yourself and people that are in the know, people that are in the outdoors, and just putting the word out.
01:21:06.000I mean, it's crazy that 10 years have passed since the first book and 10 years have passed since we did those three good years of Wild Justice TV. But in that interim...
01:21:38.000It's one team out of part of the state and other teams are doing some stuff too at the federal level and state level and we're only getting maybe 50% of this stuff if we're lucky.
01:22:11.000Have a team, maybe four teams in the state.
01:22:14.000Have them all trained together, have them all uniformly committed to tactics and training, because it is quite advanced what some of our guys are doing, from a sniper team to tracking to all the stuff we get into.
01:22:28.000Not only for this job, but for anything else we come up with from an American public safety threat.
01:22:36.000And we hadn't gotten into this grow mess yet, Joe, to the level of the cartel front.
01:22:41.000But I knew back then, game wardens are going to have to be tactically trained as well as any other law enforcement officer.
01:22:47.000And we're going to have to have our own tactical unit because we're doing some pretty crazy stuff for wildlife crimes.
01:22:51.000You know, and then Homeland Security on a potential terrorist threat.
01:22:55.000You need to have tactical units that are there with every other agency and military teams because we're all thin in numbers.
01:23:01.000And if something big goes down, I need to know that the sniper team we built with MET and these tacticians can go in and integrate with San Jose PD SWAT. They can integrate with military personnel, you know, wherever.
01:24:12.000The thing that's cool about these dogs, and I can't talk enough about it, man, because no matter where you sit, everybody loves a good dog story.
01:24:20.000And, you know, some people say, well, dual purpose, you got to bite guys.
01:24:29.000It's a lifesaver for the suspect, too, because it usually involves a potential gunfight that the dog basically, you know, alleviated because she or he was there.
01:24:38.000So we got our canine program in agency going kind of full speed around 2008-ish.
01:24:53.000And then we have the detection-level dog, and most of those are Labradors, like Marshall, like Apollo, because labs have such amazing noses.
01:25:23.000We're unsupported, and those dogs might have to sit quietly after hiking eight miles and sit in a prone quietly while we're watching and observing and stalking in on suspects to make an apprehension and arrest safely and hopefully avoid a gunfight.
01:25:37.000And we've also found with the mouths, like I said, they just hold up better on average, and there's certainly exceptions to that.
01:25:46.000But when we got our dual purpose program back on track, these are dogs that will bite when they need to on command, but they have great noses, so they'll still detect wonderfully, you know, finding evidence, finding tainted weed, whatever the case may be, a firearm, a bear gallbladder.
01:26:01.000All of that, but they'll also, you know, like Phoebe was nicknamed the fur missile because when it was time for her to go to work and some guy was going to pull a weapon on us, she was all business.
01:26:11.000And the cool thing about a dog like her, and Mike Ritland and I got into this on his show especially, and he was blown away.
01:26:16.000He said, I've never heard of a dog in a domestic law enforcement team that's had like, she had 116 apprehension bites in her career.
01:27:16.000That is so insane because if you fly over like Humboldt or any of these areas, particularly Medicino, Northern California, the density of the forest, the public land out there, there's a lot of land.
01:27:30.000There's a lot of land and a lot of potential we're not seeing.
01:27:36.000So when you look at Phoebe as a canine and you go, well, let's see, she was in the field doing these type of operations for about seven or eight years.
01:27:45.000And yeah, that's great from a record standpoint and numbers and the life she saved, but it gives you like a snapshot of the issue.
01:27:52.000How many guys did we not catch that were out there armed that way, that we weren't involved in?
01:28:01.000Phoebe, I go into this in the new book especially, in 2012, but right before our team started, Phoebe saved my life, Brian's life, and all these other operators in Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley, right where I grew up, because she engaged a guy that was pulling a Russian automatic pistol on me and I was the support for Brian.
01:28:20.000I was basically his canine handler or support guy.
01:28:23.000And Brian had to deal with this other grower's partner that had a big Taurus Judge revolver on his hip, and he was pulling it.
01:28:29.000So he goes for that guy and says, John, just take my dog.
01:28:32.000And Phoebe's on the bite, and he's biting this guy in the calf.
01:28:35.000And this guy's nose down, and we don't know he's got this weapon.
01:28:57.000Our team's been in six, and I've been on the ground for four out of the six that our guys have been involved in, and they've all been around this particular problem.
01:29:05.000We had a lot less once the team got formalized, and we started using dogs, but we still had two during the window of the team being operational that we couldn't avoid.
01:29:14.000And dogs played a big part in that, as I go into the new stories.
01:29:18.000I mean, when I was listening to that podcast with Steve Rinella, the Meat Eater podcast with you, and I was like, I can't believe that there's not some sort of another division of law enforcement that gets involved in this and that we're requiring game wardens to essentially become something completely different.
01:30:38.000And even though it's an uphill battle with a whole regulation debate and stuff, every grow site we interdict and stop and take that tainted cannabis out of the market or restore that waterway and clean up that grow site.
01:30:49.000And we clean them all up now that we go into.
01:30:51.000And the other agencies now support us and clean up with their own resources.
01:30:55.000Because game wardens have got so legitimate in working with other agencies that are non-conservation groups, sheriff's departments, right?
01:31:07.000We see the value in reclamating and cleaning up these grows to the point where Obama's drug czar addressed a lot of us when my team was starting up and our group was working heavy.
01:31:19.000And it was a real compliment, but finally, more importantly, it got the news out where he said, I want this model rewarded, what Fish and Wildlife is doing with this cleanup.
01:31:57.000It literally took 12, 13 years to get there.
01:32:00.000So when you guys have a situation like the first one you found in 2004 and you stumble upon this dry creek and there's all this debris and there's toxic chemicals, what kind of a cleanup is involved here and how long does something like that take before you can bring that creek back to where those steelhead can run and to where it's supposed to be?
01:32:20.000We're looking on an average one full day and we're looking at having to have a helicopter for a whole day and having to have anywhere between, you know, ideally 12 to maybe more officers in there.
01:32:31.000And a lot of it will have some volunteer groups coming in.
01:32:33.000We have a program in California Fish and Wildlife called the NRVP program, the Natural Resource Volunteer Program.
01:32:39.000And when we started our pilot program in 2013, we did an operation called Pristine to test this theory if we could have this full-time team being effective.
01:32:47.000And if it wasn't for like 40 of these volunteers that are helicopter trained to go in with us and do the cleanup, we would have reclamated less than half of what we were able to do.
01:32:57.000But when we do a reclamation, it's probably more expensive than doing the tactical operation planning and the takedown for the first part of the phase.
01:34:09.000On an average one, we're going to go a quarter to half a mile at least.
01:34:12.000And even though that black pipe isn't poisoning the water directly, once all the poisons are taken out, That water line is an infrastructure piece that it's their black gold.
01:34:21.000I kind of use the term black gold when I start teaching to this, that if you leave that water diversion in place and you take out their whole grow site, you know, you take out their camp and all that, but all they got to do is reconnect a water line and put a 10 up and bring in seeds and get their little camouflage system going.
01:34:36.000Very small investment to put a grow back there.
01:34:40.000And one of the things that really got other agencies convinced that we need to reclimate, too, the way we sold it is not only on an environmental protection standpoint, because other agencies care about the environment, but it's not a mandate.
01:34:52.000But it was something like, it's also deterrence.
01:34:55.000Because when we debrief some of these guys we caught, these upper levels, and I dive into this in the new book especially...
01:35:01.000I finally got to ask the questions to these upper level cartel guys running grows, running meth, running all.
01:35:09.000And I said, you know, it's interesting.
01:35:11.000We notice that when we eradicate a grow site, traditionally, back before we change this process, and we just take out the plants and we leave, we notice there's a grow like there, back there, next year, or maybe two seasons again,
01:35:29.000And the answer I got was, well, we know how taxed you guys are and how much resources you expend and you can't possibly get all of our grows, so we'll try it.
01:35:38.000And 50% of the time, even though it was rated like two years before and it's on your radar, we'll actually get away with a harvest.
01:35:45.000And I asked, well, if we start doing this reclamation and we take all your stuff out and restore the waterway and move the tents and just completely sanitize the site, let all the natural growth come back, preserve the creek.
01:35:56.000He said, we're not going to come back to that.
01:35:59.000We're going to bring tens of thousands of dollars in new infrastructure.
01:36:01.000We're going to have to run a whole other water line.
01:36:04.000It's already on your radar, you know, from a couple of years ago when you guys raided it.
01:36:08.000That's not a good business investment in a business model for us to take that chance.
01:36:13.000And we kind of knew that because we were seeing the trend on the ground, but to hear it from this guy's mouth and validate what we suspected and have it come back as true and all the other things I got to learn, I mean, just, it changed the game for us.
01:36:25.000And that happened, I'm going to say about a year to a year and a half right before we started our unit.
01:36:30.000So we went in building the Met team in 2013 with this mindset in place and, uh, um, Nate Arnold, who was a district captain at the time, my partner in building this, and I'm going to give a shout out right now to Mike Carrion, who was our chief of the law enforcement division, and one of my mentors and friends way back in the academy in 92. He greenlit us to test this program and take all of us out of patrol in an already depleted force.
01:36:56.000So you can imagine there was some resistance.
01:36:59.000There was some middle management and executive staffers like, Why are we doing this?
01:37:03.000We're not supposed to be doing marijuana work.
01:37:06.000You're cleaning up grow sites, chasing bad guys.
01:37:09.000And Mike said, no, I believe in you guys.
01:37:11.000Test it, document it, and see what we've got to do with this.
01:37:13.000And we were six weeks into a three-month test program, and he is the chief and all the deputy chiefs had talked about what we were doing out there, and we were now documenting these insane numbers of what was happening.
01:40:03.000We're going to help other agencies that are doing the work.
01:40:05.000But we're going to do it under the caveat that we're going to do a three-prong approach.
01:40:09.000We're going to apprehend as diligently as we can and catch these guys through our dogs, through our tactics, because just chasing them around and knowing they're going to get away, there's no deterrence in that.
01:41:55.000I mean, it's like I don't want to shoot a deer with a blow dart either and just go, look, I got one, ha ha, and then let them wake up, Jesus, and get out of there.
01:42:27.000Well, if they're listed and they're so threatened, the way to keep steelhead fishing going, like in California, is, okay, guys, you can catch them, but you've got to release them.
01:43:02.000Yeah, and you just look at how sensitive they are, and in that one creek in the 2004 grow, that was the worst scenario that could have happened.
01:43:10.000That they hit the headwaters of the start of this spawning channel that went to a creek called Coyote Creek that actually went all the way into San Jose to the South Bay of the ocean.
01:43:19.000So that pollution situation from those banned poisons was just decimating, you know, three to five miles of creek.
01:43:25.000So we had to take that waterway diversion out.
01:43:52.000And something that's interesting, and we get into this especially in book two, is there's a group called IERC out of UC Davis, Dr. Murad Gabriel and his colleagues.
01:44:02.000And they're going in as an NGO, and they're the scientists that really validated the devastation these banned poisons do when the Pacific fissure that was almost completely wiped out as a threatened species in California was linked to DTO grow poisons.
01:44:16.000And that kind of came to surface about five or six years ago.
01:44:19.000And then kind of the light bulb went off that, hey, this is an outside scientific group of an NGO, a non-governmental organization, that's working hand-in-hand with California Department of Fish and Wildlife and U.S. Forest Service.
01:44:30.000But they're showing the devastation of this stuff in the soil.
01:44:34.000And in the water, well after the grove's eradicated, it's not just, you know, in and around the plants.
01:44:40.000So some of these sites, if you don't do a complete, you know, soil overhaul and, you know, get all that lining out of the creeks, it's not going to be completely restored.
01:44:50.000And sometimes that can take, you know, we might not have the resources to get back in there for a year or half a year.
01:44:55.000We always try to get it before the end of the year when the rains come, but it's not always possible.
01:45:06.000Is that the case with ground water in the ground as well?
01:45:10.000They dissipate toxicity somewhat everywhere, but they don't dissipate to the point where they're not harmful on some level.
01:45:17.000So as a case in point, I have a slide I show on my PowerPoint that actually came from IERC, and we've seen this multiple times.
01:45:24.000You have a scientist, and he's in the big rubber nitrile gloves, the long sleeve, the face protection.
01:45:30.000The hat, and he's got a gray fox carcass that right next to a plant in the soil that he ingested this stuff, right, on a tainted plant, and the fox died within minutes.
01:45:41.000And then there's a golden eagle that comes in after, and it could have been days after, we don't know, you know, and they're carry-on feeders, right?
01:45:48.000So the golden eagle lands, starts just picking just on the surface, on the body of this, doesn't even get into the carcass.
01:45:55.000And here's a dead golden eagle in the photo, right next to the...
01:45:57.000It's like, man, just put a radioactive time bomb in that animal.
01:47:27.000But this particular problem that we're facing has so many far-reaching effects that we don't even see.
01:47:34.000You know, as a hunter, it's just disgusting.
01:47:36.000Well, it's so counterintuitive to people that may be animal rights activists or vegans that hunters are responsible for the reason why we have such large populations of these animals and wildlife protection and How much money comes from hunting tags and then recreational firearm sales.
01:47:54.000I mean, that's really the majority of the money that goes to preserve these wild lands and keep these animals alive.
01:48:01.000And when you tell that to animal rights people or vegans, they panic.
01:48:05.000It's like, listen, the reason why these animals exist, the reason why they're protected is because people hunt them.
01:48:14.000You know, you were talking about Rocky Mountain Elk, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Federation has done an amazing job of repopulating areas like now they have successful populations in places like Kentucky, where they were eradicated at one point in time.
01:48:37.000When people, you know, needed food and they didn't have refrigerators.
01:48:41.000So you would shoot something and it was only good for a few days and they would go out and shoot some more and they would sell that food and that food was these wild animals and it was completely unregulated hunting.
01:48:54.000I mean, we know about it with the buffalo because we've all seen those horrific photographs of these mounds of skulls.
01:49:01.000But, I mean, that was the case with antelope and deer, and they've done such an amazing job that now there's more deer in this country than there were when Columbus was here.
01:49:11.000It's interesting when you bring up elk because of, you know, being a worldwide hunter myself and doing it for so long.
01:49:19.000I've never taken an elk myself, but I've been on these amazing elk hunts where I've guided, you know, people really deserving of getting their first elk as an example.
01:49:27.000And you'll like this story being a fellow, you know, an elk guy.
01:49:30.000We had a tag in Santa Clara County that was for one bull for a tule elk.
01:49:35.000And one thing we have in this state especially is we have some of the best tule elk on the planet.
01:49:39.000They're beautiful, smaller species and just a beautiful animal.
01:49:44.000And I saw this tag pop up for residents or non-residents, and it was only one tag.
01:49:51.000But nobody would put in for it because all our tule elk are on private land and no one has access.
01:49:56.000So this gentleman drew this tule elk tag.
01:50:27.000He had drawn it in a similar county, in Alameda County, the year before and could never get to any access to harvest his elk.
01:50:35.000So I get a call through the Hunter Education Program, like, hey man, I know you know all your ranchers and friends there in Santa Clara County.
01:50:41.000Do you have a ranch that we could set him up on?
01:51:16.000And then I'm helping, you know, guide him with the ranch owner.
01:51:19.000And what we thought was the bull we'd been watching for months, you know, and all our scouting was going to be a fairly, you know, not a super difficult hunt.
01:51:26.000Turned out to be an all-day affair, of course.
01:52:44.000But seeing people like that, you know, harvest an animal they'd never have access to, it's just amazing.
01:52:50.000And then unfortunately that tag got eliminated in our department and I've been pushing with our wildlife management side to bring that tag back, man.
01:55:44.000We were, you know, hopeful that we'd get a big reach, especially with book two.
01:55:49.000And being retired, I can speak a little more freely and, you know, go more national.
01:55:52.000I mean, obviously, when I was working agency, you got to be careful what you say.
01:55:55.000And everything's very, very stringently looked at.
01:55:59.000But it's been really good because it hasn't just played to the audience I normally work with, conservation and tactics and law enforcement and hunters and outdoorsmen and women.
01:56:11.000The cannabis community is really behind this book.
01:57:50.000I think it's going to have some effect from the standpoint of when we start to see the non-consumptive users as I think we need a documentary.
01:58:18.000That changes things for people, positive or negative, even when they're inaccurate.
01:58:23.000You hear all sorts of rumblings about things after a good influential documentary comes out.
01:58:30.000Yeah, we're actually, it's cool you brought that up because I'm co-producing with a very good independent filmmaker named Lou Doros, a film called Altered State.
01:58:40.000And this one's been in the works for about a year.
01:58:43.000And it's actually going to be going to be networked and distributed through a new, it's called Planet Cannabis Entertainment Network.
01:59:01.000And the nice thing is the reason we're agreeing to do it with them is there's no content control, you know, issues.
01:59:07.000We're going to get to tell an objective story, not biased.
01:59:10.000We're going to tell, you know, we're going to be embedded with legitimate growers that we've worked effectively with all on the environmental issue.
01:59:18.000What's not working with regulation now?
01:59:20.000What do we need to do to regulation to fix it?
01:59:22.000We're embedded with law enforcement teams again, doing the work I've done with the team and telling their story, and we're in production currently.
01:59:29.000So this is going to be a cool process, and I'm going to be involved and on the ground and working with Lou to narrate it and interview folks, and I'll be back in the field all throughout the state for the next couple of months and beyond.
02:01:10.000Uncle Chuck, brother from another mother.
02:01:12.000Yeah, he's N-O-R-I-S. But yeah, you can also hit me on Instagram and follow for all that stuff.
02:01:17.000Besides my website, it's just J-O-H-N-N-O-R-E-S. And I do put this out that if people want to email me directly and they want a signed copy of the book or they have questions.
02:01:26.000And since Meat Eater and other podcasts, I get so many people wanting to be game wardens now, coming out of the military, little kids growing up.
02:01:32.000And I've been nonstop on that since Steve's show.
02:01:41.000Yeah, hopefully someone's listening to this.
02:01:43.000Yeah, thanks for the sentiment, but I've got to give a shout-out to Blake B. and Brian, and Blake's here in the green room with me now, and I've got to give them credit for tuning me into your podcast.
02:01:53.000They're big friends, so thank you, guys.
02:01:55.000And I'm also doing a cool custom knife with Mike Velikamp out of V-Knives, and we're making the Trailblazer custom folder.
02:02:02.000It's like the dream knife, Joe, that I never had 30 years on Ops, but it's an everyday carry, so some stuff there.
02:02:09.000And being an elk hunter, you'll appreciate this.
02:02:12.000I'm doing some pretty cool stuff with Axial Precision Rifles.
02:02:15.000They're a long-range rifle company out of Idaho.
02:02:18.000And my partner Terry Hewn and I are running that new.300 PRC for everything from long distance, from our tactical experience, target shooting, but also a good elk gun.
02:02:27.000And that's going to kind of become my new elk platform.
02:02:50.000So that's one of the really, really cool things.
02:02:52.000And my publisher, Caribou Publishing, and this is interesting, I think you'll appreciate how this kind of comes together, but Henry Wu and my friends over at Recoil Magazine and Gun Digest and Caribou and Blade Show and Blade Magazine, they're all the same entity.
02:03:05.000And this book with Caribou Publishing was a step out, an expansion book of national issues related to things they hold dear coming from a gun publication, you know, and written objectively not against cannabis.
02:03:18.000So it was really, you know, it didn't seem like the right fit when you look at it from the outside, but it was perfect.
02:03:25.000Well, I think everybody wants the same objective, right?
02:03:27.000They want safety, and for sure, anybody who cares and loves wildlife and these wild lands They don't want this to continue.
02:03:35.000They want this to be cleaned up, and we've got to find a solution.