There are few assignments in international law enforcement where the distinction between friend and adversary becomes as dangerously uncertain as it does along portions of the United States–Mexico border. The officers stationed at these crossings are responsible for enforcing federal law, facilitating international commerce, intercepting illicit shipments, and protecting national security. Yet some operate in environments where powerful criminal organizations possess enormous financial resources, maintain influence within local communities, and have demonstrated a willingness to threaten or murder government personnel who interfere with their operations. The consequences extend far beyond drug trafficking. Entire transportation networks, commercial supply chains, and government institutions can become vulnerable to criminal infiltration, leaving honest officials uncertain about whom they can trust and whether the intelligence they share will ultimately be used against them.

For Karlo Villalpando, these circumstances were not theoretical. They were part of his professional life during a decade with Mexican Customs, where he held senior responsibilities that included serving as a port director and working in field operations leadership. His career unfolded during a particularly violent period in Mexico’s struggle against organized crime, beginning under the administration of President Felipe Calderón and continuing through years of cartel fragmentation, territorial conflict, corruption investigations, and increased cooperation with American enforcement agencies. Villalpando witnessed the transformation of customs enforcement from a predominantly regulatory responsibility into a national security mission in which financial interdiction, intelligence collection, firearms trafficking, and the identification of compromised government personnel became central concerns.

During an exclusive interview with The Human Intelligence Ledger, Villalpando described experiences that illuminate the extraordinary complexity of Mexico’s security environment. He recounted being offered virtually anything he wanted by individuals attempting to secure his cooperation, discovering that members of his own team were allegedly working with criminal organizations, and encountering attempted bribery through officials who participated in the same government security meetings he attended. He spoke about cultivating confidential sources long before those individuals understood their potential intelligence value, the difficulties of cooperating with American agencies when corruption threatened the integrity of sensitive information, and the murder of a fellow customs official who refused to abandon her responsibilities.

Perhaps most significantly, Villalpando’s account demonstrates that the struggle against organized crime cannot be understood exclusively through the activities of cartels themselves. It must also be examined through the decisions of individual government officials, the vulnerabilities of legitimate commerce, the motivations of confidential sources, and the institutional systems that either discourage or enable corruption.

Entering Mexican Customs as the Cartel War Intensified

Villalpando joined Mexican Customs in 2009, when the Mexican government’s confrontation with organized crime was producing substantial violence and placing increasing demands on federal enforcement institutions. President Calderón had launched a major campaign against drug trafficking organizations, deploying federal police and military personnel while attempting to disrupt criminal networks that had accumulated substantial influence over transportation corridors, border communities, and regional economies.

The consequences were felt throughout Mexico’s security institutions, including agencies that had historically concentrated on customs regulations and international trade. As trafficking organizations expanded their operations, customs personnel increasingly encountered illicit shipments involving narcotics, firearms, ammunition, and bulk currency. Enforcement officers who interfered with those shipments risked becoming targets of criminal retaliation.

“When I joined customs, Felipe Calderón’s administration in Mexico had already started fighting organized crime. And that’s when we started to see this violence evolving in the country. And it also impacted Mexican customs.”

Villalpando explained that the agency had to reconsider its training, operational procedures, and approach to officer protection. Personnel who had previously been expected to focus on commercial compliance now faced adversaries capable of organizing sophisticated smuggling operations and using violence to secure cooperation. The traditional distinction between economic regulation and national security was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

“We had to start evolving to better protect our agents. So we had to change our training. We had to change our approach to our mission, which is basically making sure that everything that’s coming in and out of the country is complying with Mexican customs law.”

“Then everything turned into a national security mission as well.”

Between 2009 and 2019, Villalpando worked across an extensive network of Mexican customs facilities, including land crossings, airports, and seaports. As his responsibilities expanded, he developed relationships with officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Homeland Security Investigations, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and other agencies involved in border enforcement and criminal investigations.

That exposure provided him with a broader understanding of the relationship between organized crime and international commerce. Criminal organizations depended upon the same transportation systems that facilitated legitimate economic activity, and disrupting their operations required government agencies to distinguish illicit movements from the enormous volume of lawful trade occurring every day.

“Since 2009 to 2019, I was able to evolve with the agency, learning how the criminal organizations were operating and how we as customs can improve our capacity to interdict their operations.”

The more he learned about organized crime, however, the more evident another problem became. The challenge was not simply identifying concealed merchandise or intercepting suspicious vehicles. It was determining whether the personnel responsible for enforcement could be trusted to perform their duties.

The Impossible Mathematics of Border Enforcement

One of Villalpando’s most consequential assignments involved serving as a port director in Sonoita, Sonora, where commercial traffic placed significant pressure on a comparatively small enforcement workforce. He recalled that his checkpoint handled approximately 600 to 800 trucks daily, despite having only roughly 35 to 40 officers responsible for continuous operations.

That reality created a fundamental operational problem. Every commercial vehicle potentially contained merchandise requiring inspection, but the volume of traffic made comprehensive inspection impossible. Even an unusually large workforce could not examine every shipment without severely disrupting legitimate commerce.

“The first challenge that you face as a customs officer is that you cannot inspect everything.”

“It’s impossible to inspect everything. That’s a reality that everybody has to understand.”

For customs agencies, therefore, the effectiveness of enforcement depends heavily on intelligence and risk assessment. Officers must identify which vehicles, shipments, individuals, and transportation patterns warrant additional scrutiny. Automated systems, documentation reviews, prior enforcement information, and human sources may all contribute to those decisions.

Villalpando emphasized that the success of inspections depended less on the number performed than on the quality of the information guiding them.

“What institutions try to do in customs, any place in the world, is to be more intelligent with what gets inspected.”

When he became port director, he also learned that successful enforcement could attract unwanted attention from individuals whose financial interests were affected. Criminal organizations and their intermediaries sometimes attempted to establish personal relationships with customs officials, offering incentives or opportunities for cooperation that could later compromise their independence.

“When you try to do the right thing, you start impacting the interests of bad people. And they will not hesitate to reach out and try to make an agreement.”

He believed that limiting unnecessary contact with individuals seeking access to government decision-makers was an important preventive measure. What might begin as an invitation to dinner, a casual social encounter, or a seemingly legitimate professional relationship could become an opportunity for bribery or influence.

“Distance and preventing those contacts is your first line of defense.”

“Because if you’re going out to have a dinner, go to lunch, have a drink, go to a trip with business people, you’re always putting yourself, giving them the opportunity to approach you.”

For Villalpando, corruption prevention began long before an official received a formal proposition. It began with recognizing the circumstances in which an approach could occur and avoiding situations that created unnecessary exposure.

When the People Offering Bribes Wear Government Uniforms

Throughout the interview, Villalpando returned to the institutional consequences of corruption. He was careful to distinguish compromised officials from the many Mexican government employees who continue performing their duties under dangerous circumstances. Nevertheless, he described corruption as the most persistent obstacle to improving public security.

“I’m the first one to admit that obviously corruption is the biggest problem. I also say that not everybody is corrupt. There’s also good people trying to do the right thing and sacrificing their life every day to improve the security conditions in Mexico.”

His understanding of the problem changed substantially when he began encountering individuals who attempted to facilitate criminal activity while holding government positions themselves. Such encounters created a particularly dangerous environment because official status no longer offered a reliable indication of professional integrity.

“Half of the encounters that I had, the person delivering the message was also wearing a uniform.”

“You’re not just fighting the ones on the outside, you’re also fighting the ones on the inside.”

That realization challenged the ordinary assumptions upon which law enforcement cooperation depends. Officers routinely exchange intelligence, coordinate investigations, attend operational meetings, and share information with colleagues from other agencies. When some of those individuals are compromised, normal procedures can become vulnerabilities. Information concerning a planned inspection might reach the target before officers arrive. Intelligence identifying a suspected criminal organization could be disclosed to the same organization. An officer seeking assistance might inadvertently reveal sensitive information to someone working against the investigation.

Villalpando recalled the disappointment of discovering that personnel within his institution were allegedly cooperating with criminal interests.

“First it was sad. It was sad to start learning the amount of people inside of my organization that were involved.”

“Because when I started, I thought we were on the same team. We had a very clear mission.”

The emotional consequences were accompanied by frustration. He believed that honest officials frequently possessed information that could support meaningful investigations but lacked the resources, institutional support, or reliable personnel necessary to act as effectively as they wanted.

“The second feeling is frustration because you just want to be able to do more than what’s in your hands.”

The problem extended beyond individual acts of misconduct. When corruption becomes sufficiently widespread, it alters the way officers assess every professional interaction. A colleague who appears cooperative may be concealing illicit relationships. An unfamiliar official requesting intelligence may have legitimate operational reasons or may be gathering information on behalf of a criminal organization. Even trusted professional networks can become vulnerable when personnel change assignments or acquire new financial and personal pressures.

How Corruption Begins With Five Dollars

One of Villalpando’s more revealing explanations concerned the process through which corruption becomes normalized. He described several different categories of compromised personnel, beginning with individuals who enter government employment already intending to exploit their authority for financial gain.

Other officials, however, may begin their careers with legitimate intentions and gradually become involved in misconduct through seemingly minor transactions.

Villalpando offered the example of customs officers accepting small payments to allow restricted food products across the border. The commodities involved might be ordinary agricultural goods rather than narcotics or weapons. Yet the underlying exchange establishes a willingness to use official authority improperly in return for personal compensation.

He described examples in Ciudad Juárez involving people attempting to bring chicken, potatoes, meat, and eggs across the border in quantities or circumstances subject to customs restrictions.

“People trying to bring potatoes, chicken, meat. Things that you would think, like, are you corrupting the customs official to bring that?”

“Yeah, because they were bringing 150 chickens a day to be able to sell them in Juárez.”

The amounts initially exchanged might be relatively small. Villalpando argued, however, that accepting even a minor payment can establish a behavioral pattern and create opportunities for more serious compromises.

“Sometimes it’s the own population that initiates them with five dollars, twenty dollars. They’re like, I’m just bringing chicken. Yeah, but you just initiated somebody into corruption.”

“So the next time when somebody comes and offers a thousand dollars, five thousand dollars, thirty thousand dollars to allow weapons, ammunition, currency, and drugs to move, you’re gonna say yes.”

His analysis was not presented as a universal explanation for every corrupt official. Rather, he identified a progression that he believed could occur when minor misconduct was tolerated and meaningful consequences were absent.

There was also a third category of compromised officers: those subjected to coercion.

Villalpando described the possibility of an officer being stopped while traveling home and threatened with death unless a particular vehicle was permitted to pass through customs without inspection. The officer might possess a genuine fear that refusing the demand would result in retaliation against themselves or their family.

“Hey, tomorrow I’m gonna cross this car, you better not inspect it, or you’re gonna die.”

He acknowledged the enormous difficulty of confronting such threats, particularly in communities where criminal organizations maintain extensive influence.

Nevertheless, he believed government institutions could not successfully resist organized crime unless officials were prepared to uphold their responsibilities and institutions developed credible ways to protect them.

A Port Director Surrounded by Danger

Villalpando’s assignment in Sonoyta exposed him to a security environment in which the threat extended beyond the customs facility itself. He described a small community where criminal influence was sufficiently significant that ordinary activities, including finding housing and commuting to work, could create security concerns.

He recalled the limited infrastructure of the area, the small population, and the practical difficulty of protecting officers who had to travel through potentially dangerous territory.

“You have to drive maybe ten, fifteen miles to get to work in the road that nobody’s protecting. I mean, the level of exposure is so high.”

As port director, Villalpando received security arrangements that reflected the seriousness of the threat. He said he lived within the port facility, where the Mexican Army maintained a continuous security presence. His transportation included an armored vehicle, and two executive protection agents were assigned to assist him.

“We had to live inside the port. We had the Mexican Army twenty-four seven at the port to provide security for the officers, but primarily for senior officials like myself.”

“You had an armored vehicle. You had two executive protection agents.”

Those precautions illustrated the dangers associated with his position, but Villalpando emphasized that ordinary officers did not necessarily enjoy comparable protection.

“So that was the level of risk and that was the level of protection that I was getting from the institution. But just me, right? Everybody else is exposed.”

The distinction matters because corruption and intimidation cannot be separated from the practical security conditions under which enforcement personnel operate. An officer living in a community where criminal organizations exercise substantial influence may encounter risks that persist long after leaving the workplace. Government institutions must therefore confront not only the misconduct of compromised personnel, but also the vulnerability of those attempting to resist criminal pressure.

The Desert Meeting: An Offer of Cars, Properties, and Cash

One of the most extraordinary episodes Villalpando recounted involved an attempted bribery that allegedly originated through another federal government official. While serving as port director, he was contacted about what appeared to be legitimate intelligence involving suspicious commercial trucks. Believing the matter required official coordination, Villalpando traveled approximately two hours through the desert to meet the individual.

The meeting initially followed the structure of an ordinary operational briefing. The official described information concerning trucks and potential enforcement activity, creating the impression that the discussion concerned a legitimate investigation.

Then the conversation changed.

Villalpando recalled that the official closed the file in front of him and disclosed that other individuals had requested the meeting.

“Listen, there’s some people that want to talk to you, and they asked me to set up this meeting.”

The individuals reportedly represented interests experiencing difficulties moving trucks through the customs checkpoint. Villalpando’s enforcement activities were interfering with their operations, and they wanted his cooperation.

The proposed compensation was extensive.

“If you want cars, if you want properties, you want cash, whatever you want. But since you’ve been here in office, they’re having problems getting their trucks across.”

Villalpando found himself in an isolated location, speaking with a fellow government official who was allegedly acting as an intermediary for criminal interests. He understood that an aggressive confrontation could carry unnecessary risk. Rather than responding with threats or declarations of defiance, he adopted a deliberately restrained approach.

He explained that he had never engaged in corruption, did not understand how to organize such an arrangement, and lacked the personnel necessary to facilitate the operation.

“I’m not good at this, not good at corruption. I just got here. I don’t even have the people to help you out to do the operation you’re asking me to do.”

The response was intended to establish that he would not cooperate while avoiding an unnecessary escalation.

But the next statement revealed the possible extent of criminal infiltration within his organization.

“Don’t worry, we can tell you who from your team is already working with us.”

Villalpando described the psychological impact of hearing that individuals under his own authority were allegedly cooperating with the people attempting to bribe him. He initially considered the possibility that the claim was intended to manipulate him, but said that subsequent information convinced him it was not simply a bluff.

“They could have been bluffing, but later we learned that they were not bluffing.”

The episode created an immediate question about operational trust.

“Who do I trust now when I have intel? Who do I trust when I make a detention?”

Those questions capture one of the most consequential effects of institutional corruption. Once a criminal organization establishes influence within an enforcement agency, it may gain access not only to specific decisions but also to information about investigative priorities, personnel, procedures, and operational vulnerabilities. For an honest official, the consequences can be severe even without accepting a single bribe.

Millions in Currency and an Offer to Divide the Seizure

Villalpando described his checkpoint as an important enforcement location for traffic moving from border communities into Mexico’s interior. He recalled that officers were intercepting large amounts of illicit currency, firearms, and ammunition.

According to his account, a checkpoint seizure shortly before his arrival involved approximately $3 million in cash. He further described repeated interdictions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes approaching $1 million, alongside significant quantities of ammunition and firearms.

These figures are Villalpando’s recollections from the interview rather than independently verified seizure totals.

The financial incentives associated with such activity help explain why criminal organizations would seek influence over customs personnel. A successful inspection could disrupt valuable shipments, while an official willing to ignore suspicious cargo could provide substantial economic benefits to a trafficking network.

In one incident, Villalpando recalled officers stopping a bus containing approximately $500,000 in cash. As officials counted the money, one of his colleagues received a message allegedly transmitted through someone associated with another government agency.

The proposed arrangement was straightforward: release the individuals and allow half the currency to leave in exchange for keeping the other half.

“You can keep half of the money if you let them go with the rest of it.”

“And don’t arrest anybody.”

Villalpando described the incident as particularly disturbing because he personally knew the individual he believed was involved in delivering the message. They participated in the same security meetings and operated within the same government environment.

“That was the hardest one because the person that was sending the message, I knew him.”

“I was sitting with him every week in the security meetings. And I was more than likely going to continue to be sitting in the meetings with him.”

The implications extended beyond that particular seizure. Officers attempting to enforce the law could be placed in situations where colleagues were simultaneously protecting criminal interests. Government meetings intended to facilitate cooperation could bring honest personnel into regular contact with individuals whose conduct undermined the same mission.

Villalpando did not identify the implicated agency or individual in the interview. His account therefore remains an attributed allegation rather than a documented finding against a named official.

Nevertheless, the experience illustrates why corruption can be so difficult to investigate. The institutions required to identify and confront misconduct may contain personnel who benefit from concealing it.

Why Fear Kept Him Alive

When I asked Villalpando whether the experience frightened him, he acknowledged that fear had been a constant presence throughout his assignment.

His response challenged the popular image of law enforcement professionals as individuals who succeed by eliminating fear. Instead, Villalpando argued that fear can serve as an essential component of sound operational judgment.

“Fear is something that I always kept with me.”

He explained that his earlier experience as a firefighter had influenced his understanding of personal risk.

“We always used to say the firefighter that’s not afraid of fire is the one that gets burned.”

For Villalpando, the lesson translated directly into customs enforcement. Recognizing danger encouraged him to remain careful about personal relationships, the information he disclosed, and the individuals he approached for assistance.

“You never wanted to lose that fear because that also kept you alive.”

He emphasized that fear did not lead him to accept criminal propositions. Rather, it reminded him that he was operating in an environment where seemingly ordinary professional interactions could have serious consequences.

His survival strategy also depended upon building relationships with individuals he believed he could trust.

Villalpando completed a master’s program in national security through the Mexican Navy, studying alongside officers from the Navy, Army, and other federal institutions. The program brought together personnel whose careers involved national defense and security responsibilities.

Those relationships proved useful during his later customs assignments. When confronted with troubling incidents, Villalpando could reach out to trusted contacts outside his immediate organization for guidance or support.

He explained that developing this informal support network helped him navigate situations involving suspicious approaches and threats.

The experience demonstrates the practical value of professional trust networks in environments where corruption may compromise ordinary chains of command. Relationships established through education, training, and previous assignments can become important sources of support when government personnel encounter operational uncertainty.

Human Intelligence Begins Long Before Recruitment

Perhaps the most significant intelligence lesson from Villalpando’s interview concerned his deliberate effort to cultivate sources before they understood that they might eventually provide valuable information.

Beginning around 2010, Villalpando participated in the Mexican Customs Academy’s training program. His responsibilities included helping develop instruction and working with personnel preparing to enter customs service.

He recognized that newly trained officers would eventually encounter corruption, attempts at recruitment by criminal organizations, and internal pressure from compromised colleagues. Some would need guidance. Others would witness criminal activity. A smaller number might possess information important enough to support major investigations.

Rather than waiting until an officer approached him with an intelligence lead, Villalpando began establishing relationships during the training process.

“I learned very fast in my career that I needed to start developing sources before they even realized there were going to be sources.”

He viewed the academy as an environment in which he could establish credibility and become someone officers would feel comfortable contacting later.

“I realized that was a place to start planting the seed on my future sources.”

His reasoning was based on anticipating the professional challenges these individuals would face.

“They were gonna be exposed to corruption, they were gonna be exposed to organized crime, and they were going to be exposed to internal groups that were going to try to pull them as a new officer to be corrupt.”

According to Villalpando, these relationships eventually became an important source of actionable information. He estimated that approximately half of his intelligence came from internally developed sources, while the remaining half originated through exchanges with American agencies.

“I would say that fifty percent of my intel came from them, and the other fifty percent came with the exchange with U.S. agencies.”

Although he valued international intelligence cooperation, Villalpando believed the relationships he cultivated within Mexican Customs provided particularly important operational advantages.

“The biggest value came from my internal development of sources and that intelligence.”

This approach offers a compelling example of relationship-based human intelligence collection. Source development does not always begin with a formal recruitment conversation. It may begin when a respected instructor establishes credibility with a new officer, when a professional contact offers guidance during a difficult situation, or when an individual recognizes that a trusted colleague can receive information without immediately exposing them to unnecessary risk.

Those relationships can take years to develop, and their value may remain uncertain until a critical event occurs.

The Problem of Trusting an Informant Who Is Also Corrupt

Villalpando was equally candid about the dangers associated with cultivating sources inside compromised institutions. Not every individual providing intelligence was necessarily an honest officer. Some possessed valuable information precisely because they were involved in misconduct themselves.

That reality created an operational and ethical dilemma. A corrupt official might expose a larger criminal network while continuing to participate in unlawful activity. The information could help disrupt substantial trafficking operations, but maintaining the relationship could involve difficult decisions about credibility, accountability, and the potential harm associated with the source’s continuing conduct.

Villalpando acknowledged that relationships with such individuals could begin to resemble friendships.

“It’s difficult in your mind when you start developing what feels almost like a friendship.”

“Some of them were still doing bad things. But I had more value on the intel that I was getting from them.”

He described evaluating the damage caused by misconduct against the potential benefits of intelligence that might allow authorities to disrupt larger operations. This was his account of the judgment involved, not a general endorsement of permitting criminal conduct by government informants.

The complexities extended beyond balancing investigative value and potential harm. Villalpando understood that an individual providing information could simultaneously be seeking information from him.

A source might disclose a corruption arrangement and then attempt to determine whether Villalpando was willing to participate. What appeared to be an intelligence conversation could become an attempted recruitment.

“Every time they call me, I always had to remember that they could also be trying to get intel from me.”

He offered an example of how an officer might disclose an illicit payment arrangement and then suggest that Villalpando join the operation.

“The assistant port director is paying us every Friday, and they’re giving us ten thousand dollars. And hey, would you want to be part of this?”

Such situations demonstrate why reliable human intelligence collection requires more than establishing rapport. The collector must remain conscious of the source’s motivations, divided loyalties, and possible efforts to manipulate the relationship.

Villalpando understood that a person willing to betray one institution or criminal associate could also betray the individual receiving the information.

For intelligence professionals, his experience reinforces the importance of maintaining analytical distance even when an informant appears cooperative and provides valuable leads.

A Smuggler Who Wanted to Expose Corrupt Customs Officers

One of Villalpando’s most illustrative source-development stories concerned an incident he placed around 2012, when a customs officer contacted him about an individual involved in illegally moving cigarettes and liquor across the border.

The individual reportedly wanted to speak with someone capable of addressing corruption within the customs operation. His motivation, however, was not an objection to the underlying smuggling activity.

According to Villalpando, the smuggler had become dissatisfied because corrupt officials were demanding increasingly large payments to permit merchandise to cross.

“There’s a guy here that wants to talk to somebody because the customs officials that are here right now, they’re raising the price too high to be able to cross liquor and cigarettes.”

The alleged scheme involved substantial quantities of merchandise. Villalpando described thousands of cigarettes and hundreds of bottles of liquor being moved daily to evade duties and regulations.

Through the customs officer who contacted him, Villalpando established communication with the individual involved in the operation.

The smuggler reportedly explained that his family had been involved in the business for two generations and that previous arrangements with corrupt officials had become financially unacceptable.

He offered to provide names, recordings, and information regarding payments.

Villalpando said the intelligence ultimately contributed to a significant enforcement action and attracted recognition from American authorities.

“That led to a big bust. I mean, it was in the news.”

The details of that operation have not been independently matched to a specific public enforcement record for this article. Nevertheless, Villalpando’s recollection illustrates how intelligence collection may depend upon sources whose motivations are complicated, self-interested, or criminal.

The source was apparently seeking relief from escalating corruption costs rather than attempting to end smuggling. Yet his information could potentially expose government misconduct that would otherwise remain concealed.

Villalpando explained that his earlier relationships with academy-trained officers were essential to creating opportunities for such information to reach him.

“I knew what they were gonna face. And I knew that they were gonna have or look for somebody to call when shit hit the fan.”

His account underscores a defining characteristic of human intelligence: the operational value of information does not necessarily correspond to the moral character of the individual providing it. Effective collection requires understanding motivations, assessing credibility, and distinguishing useful leads from manipulation.

The Murder of Jaime Zapata and the Collapse of Institutional Confidence

The conversation eventually turned to February 15, 2011, when Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Jaime Zapata was murdered and fellow agent Victor Avila was wounded during an attack by members of Los Zetas in Mexico.

The killing represented a major event in United States–Mexico law enforcement relations. It demonstrated the willingness of cartel gunmen to attack American federal personnel and intensified concerns about criminal violence, intelligence security, and institutional cooperation.

Villalpando clarified that he had not personally known Zapata, but remembered the impact of the attack and the broader atmosphere of uncertainty surrounding that period.

“It was a hurricane.”

He recalled that the incident, subsequent investigations, and controversies surrounding firearms trafficking produced significant pressure on Mexican agencies and complicated relationships with American counterparts.

“Who do we trust? Who don’t we trust?”

Villalpando expressed his belief that American enforcement personnel became more selective about which Mexican counterparts they engaged after the incident. In an environment where sensitive intelligence could be compromised through corruption, relationships that had not yet established sufficient confidence became particularly vulnerable.

“I think U.S. agencies operating in Mexico took a step back and were only talking to very specific vetted groups.”

His broader observation was particularly telling.

“Not because everybody’s blue, you can trust them.”

Villalpando also discussed Operation Fast and Furious in connection with the period’s firearms-trafficking controversies. His recollection of how particular weapons related to that operation should be treated as his understanding of those events, rather than independent confirmation of their provenance.

The central significance of his account was the effect of cartel violence and alleged corruption on institutional confidence. Cooperation between governments depends upon information being shared with individuals who can protect its integrity. Once that confidence deteriorates, even legitimate operations become more difficult to coordinate.

Celia Cuevas: A Customs Officer Who Paid With Her Life

For Villalpando, the violence of 2011 was deeply personal.

He recounted the killing of Celia Cuevas, a colleague and friend who served as an assistant port director in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas.

According to his account, Cuevas was involved in a routine customs enforcement matter concerning a vehicle carrying plants subject to regulatory requirements.

The inspection was not a major narcotics operation. It concerned agricultural merchandise and the administrative responsibilities of customs personnel.

Villalpando said Cuevas received a telephone call warning her to permit the vehicle to cross.

She refused.

“She gets a call saying that she better let that vehicle cross. And, you know, she hung up, she did her job.”

Later that day, according to Villalpando, Cuevas was attacked and killed while traveling between customs facilities in Piedras Negras.

He believed the killing was connected to Los Zetas and regarded it as one of the clearest illustrations of the dangers confronting honest Mexican government officials.

The incident carried particular emotional weight because the enforcement activity itself was comparatively ordinary. Cuevas was not attempting to arrest a cartel leader or execute a major national security operation. She was performing her responsibilities under customs law.

Yet Villalpando recalled that she was killed after refusing to abandon those duties.

“We lost a colleague and a friend in Piedras Negras, Coahuila.”

“She was one of those officers that I’ve been saying, that there’s honest people, that they give their lives to do the right thing.”

When I asked him to identify her by name, he answered simply: Celia Cuevas.

Her death represented something Villalpando believed was too frequently overlooked in discussions of Mexican corruption: the sacrifices of officers who refuse to participate in criminal activity.

“I know corruption is the biggest problem, but I also know not everybody’s corrupt.”

“There’s people that have given their life, and there’s people that every day they wake up and try to do their job knowing that it could be the last day.”

Villalpando’s account is a reminder that institutional corruption and institutional sacrifice can coexist. A government agency may contain individuals engaged in serious misconduct while other personnel within the same organization risk their lives attempting to uphold the law.

To describe an entire institution as corrupt without acknowledging those sacrifices risks obscuring the people who are often most exposed to criminal retaliation.

Intelligence Sharing Between Mexico and the United States

Villalpando’s experience with American enforcement agencies gave him a particularly detailed understanding of the importance of operational intelligence sharing.

He described two broad methods of exchanging information. The first involves formal institutional channels, where intelligence passes through established procedures, offices, and documentation requirements.

The second involves direct professional relationships between individuals who have established sufficient trust to communicate rapidly when operational circumstances demand it.

“There’s two types of intel exchange. You have the formal official, there’s the document, it goes to this office.”

At high-volume border crossings, he explained, circumstances can develop too quickly for every useful observation to move through a lengthy administrative process.

In areas such as Tijuana and San Diego, enormous numbers of people and vehicles cross daily. Suspicious individuals or associated vehicles may move through the same corridors within relatively short periods.

Villalpando described using trusted contacts to share identifying information about suspicious activity as events unfolded.

“I was able to develop the trust where if I saw something that was of interest and it happened at that moment, I’m already getting in touch with my contact.”

“Hey, this is the person, this is the vehicle, this is what they had. Do you know more about them?”

American counterparts might possess additional information concerning previous crossings, associated vehicles, or other individuals connected to the activity.

The resulting exchange could help officers identify broader movement patterns and prepare for additional enforcement opportunities.

“You were able to react immediately and be prepared for the next wave.”

Villalpando emphasized that these relationships depended upon a personal commitment to the mission. Officers who genuinely believe in their responsibilities are often willing to invest the time required to build professional trust across institutional and national boundaries.

“Beyond the institution, I think we all have to prove that this is more on the personal mission that you have accepted to improve the security of our countries in our hemisphere.”

“You’re not doing it for the paycheck. You’re not doing it because that’s the instruction they give you.”

“You’re doing it because you really believe you’re doing the right thing.”

At the same time, he expressed concern about political and institutional developments that could discourage information sharing. Villalpando argued that officials may become hesitant to communicate with international counterparts if they fear their actions could later be interpreted as improper cooperation.

These concerns reflect his assessment of the operational environment; specific contemporary allegations he referenced require separate verification.

His larger argument was that intelligence partnerships must balance legitimate oversight with the practical need for timely information. Without reliable cooperation, criminal organizations can exploit the gaps between agencies, jurisdictions, and national governments.

Organized Crime Inside Legitimate Businesses

One of the interview’s most important themes was the expansion of criminal influence into legitimate commerce.

Villalpando explained that organized crime is not confined to the movement of illegal narcotics. Criminal organizations may seek to exploit trucking companies, commercial transportation systems, purchasing departments, importers, exporters, and other businesses whose activities are essential to international trade.

Their objective may involve concealing illicit shipments, extracting payments, laundering money, influencing contracts, or obtaining indirect control over commercial operations.

“They don’t only try to corrupt government officials.”

“They’ll try to corrupt key people in private companies that manage the trucking, the supply chain, the purchasing, the permits.”

“They’ll try to put their hands inside of everything as much as they can, because everything’s revenue.”

For corporate security professionals, this represents a threat that extends beyond conventional concerns about cargo theft and employee safety.

A company may possess sophisticated financial controls while remaining vulnerable to manipulation through transportation vendors, local intermediaries, logistics contractors, or other operational relationships.

Criminal organizations may exploit legitimate supply chains to move prohibited goods or obtain revenue without necessarily controlling the companies involved.

Villalpando described arrangements involving kickbacks, compromised transportation processes, and companies that could be used to facilitate money laundering.

His experience suggests that multinational corporations should examine not only their direct financial transactions but also the relationships and pressures shaping commercial decisions within vulnerable operating environments.

The identity of a transportation provider, the selection of a vendor, or an unexplained payment demanded during distribution may carry implications that ordinary financial reporting does not reveal.

Foreign Terrorist Organization Designations and Corporate Exposure

Villalpando also discussed the 2025 U.S. foreign terrorist organization designations involving several Mexican cartels and their implications for companies operating in Mexico.

He argued that businesses need to understand how extensively criminal organizations may influence legitimate economic activity.

“What a lot of U.S. companies and international companies haven’t realized is that because organized crime is so involved in the economics of the supply chain, in day-to-day in many of the cities and states, you may be financing terrorism without knowing.”

His concern was particularly focused on businesses that tolerate extortion or do not adequately examine their commercial relationships.

In some locations, he explained, companies may face pressure to use designated transportation providers, make payments to criminal intermediaries, or permit arrangements that economically benefit organized crime.

“In the past, extortion was somehow accepted by some of these companies as part of doing business in the geographies.”

“Either they tell you which vendor to use, or the trucking company needs to pay some money to be able to move their trucks and deliver your products.”

Villalpando warned that the consequences of criminal infiltration could extend beyond an individual stolen shipment or interrupted transportation route.

Companies might face investigations, reputational damage, contractual disputes, and significant operational disruption if their relationships with criminal organizations attract enforcement scrutiny.

“That can disrupt your whole operation even more than if they steal a truck.”

“You’re gonna be impacted in so many different ways, economics, supply chain, reputation, and so on and so forth.”

An important distinction is necessary regarding the legal implications of these observations. A company does not automatically incur criminal material-support liability merely because it operates in a cartel-influenced region or becomes the victim of extortion. Legal exposure depends upon the governing statutes, knowledge requirements, facts of the transaction, and other applicable rules. Sanctions and other compliance frameworks may also impose distinct obligations.

Villalpando’s broader point was that companies should treat the threat as an operational risk requiring systematic attention, rather than assuming traditional anti-money-laundering procedures are sufficient.

“What used to be a more financial awareness for money laundering and so on and so forth, now you have to take it down to the operational level.”

This is a particularly significant observation for multinational companies with manufacturing, transportation, agricultural, or distribution operations in Mexico.

The vulnerabilities associated with organized crime may reside not only in the financial department but also in the ordinary decisions that determine how products are sourced, transported, stored, and delivered.

Criminal Organizations Adapt When Traditional Revenue Sources Come Under Pressure

Villalpando also emphasized the economic adaptability of organized crime.

As governments increase pressure on established trafficking operations, criminal organizations may seek alternative sources of revenue. Extortion, illicit commercial activity, supply chain manipulation, and control over legitimate business relationships can provide opportunities to replace or supplement revenue lost through enforcement activity.

“They’re gonna start putting more pressure on organized crime. And the traditional drug trafficking or other criminal operations are gonna start to minimize, but they still want their cash flow.”

His assessment highlights why disrupting narcotics shipments alone may be insufficient to reduce the broader influence of criminal organizations.

A group that loses access to one trafficking corridor may attempt to obtain revenue through another criminal market or through coercion directed at legitimate businesses.

This adaptability has important implications for law enforcement agencies and private-sector security teams. Intelligence concerning cartel activities must extend beyond conventional drug trafficking patterns to include financial behavior, commercial relationships, extortion, and the organizations that facilitate access to legitimate supply chains.

Villalpando’s experience inside Mexican Customs gave him a firsthand perspective on how such vulnerabilities can develop at international transportation hubs.

Why a Military Uniform Is Not Enough to Prevent Corruption

During the interview, Villalpando discussed the Mexican Navy, known as SEMAR, and the institution’s historical reputation for relative discipline and resistance to corruption.

His professional education through the Navy had brought him into contact with senior military personnel and provided valuable relationships that later assisted him during his customs assignments.

Nevertheless, he cautioned against assuming that military institutions are automatically protected from corruption.

The expansion of military responsibilities into customs operations brought personnel into closer contact with highly valuable commercial flows and the financial incentives associated with facilitating or obstructing those movements.

Villalpando discussed allegations involving fuel theft and fuel smuggling as examples of the corruption challenges facing institutions previously regarded as comparatively resistant to criminal influence.

He argued that the Mexican government’s decision to assign customs responsibilities to military institutions could not, by itself, eliminate corruption.

“I think when President López Obrador decided to send SEMAR and SEDENA to manage customs, he thought that was sufficient, that they had those uniforms in those institutions to protect them from corruption.”

“And that’s not true.”

The essential safeguard, he argued, is a credible system of institutional accountability.

“You need a system of consequences to be able to keep officers or members of any institutions away from corruption.”

“A uniform is not enough.”

His comments are relevant far beyond Mexico. Organizational reputation, military discipline, and institutional tradition can contribute to integrity, but they cannot substitute for effective oversight, transparent procedures, consistent enforcement of standards, and protections for personnel who report misconduct.

Villalpando believed that corruption could persist where officials considered the likelihood of accountability too low to outweigh the financial rewards or pressures associated with criminal cooperation.

The Sacrifice of Doing the Right Thing

As the interview approached its conclusion, I asked Villalpando what message he would offer to officers currently working under circumstances similar to those he had encountered.

His response returned to the individuals who had sacrificed their lives while carrying out their duties.

He spoke about the importance of maintaining professional integrity despite corruption, threats, and the temptation of illicit financial rewards.

“The sacrifice, and not only from my experience but what I’ve seen from people that I know in multiple agencies that are trying to improve the conditions of our country, the sacrifice is worth it.”

For Villalpando, government service involves a responsibility extending beyond personal advancement or financial compensation.

He framed that responsibility in terms of improving the security conditions inherited by future generations.

“It is on our hands to accept that responsibility to improve the conditions that we have in our country, to improve the conditions that our children are going to have in our country.”

He recalled the conduct of Celia Cuevas and other officers who understood the dangers associated with their responsibilities but continued performing their duties.

“Knowing that they can lose their lives, they went and did the mission. They went and did the job.”

He emphasized that professional courage should not be confused with arrogance or unnecessary recklessness.

“Not being arrogant, not being foolish, just being professional.”

“We need more of that. Because that’s the only way that we’re gonna change it.”

His advice to those facing corruption was rooted in personal experience rather than abstract moral instruction.

“Stay strong, even if there’s days where you think that it’s not worth it. Why am I doing this? The easy money’s in front of me.”

“Stay strong and the reward will come in life in the future, one way or the other. And I’ll tell you this by experience.”

Can Mexico Overcome the Cartels?

One of the final questions concerned whether Mexico could realistically overcome the influence of organized crime after decades of violence, institutional corruption, and criminal involvement in legitimate commerce.

Villalpando did not hesitate.

He rejected the idea that criminal organizations had become more powerful than the Mexican state itself.

“I am a hundred percent sure that the country and the government is stronger than any criminal organization.”

His confidence, however, was tempered by an acknowledgment of the costs associated with confronting entrenched criminal networks.

“I’m a hundred percent sure that it’s gonna take a lot of blood to change it.”

He framed the choice facing the country as one between confronting the danger and accepting the continued victimization of communities and institutions.

“We have to decide if that bloodshed comes in the fight or it’s continue to be a victim. I’d rather fight.”

The statement reflects Villalpando’s personal conviction, informed by his experience with violence, intimidation, and colleagues killed in service. It should not be understood as a comprehensive policy prescription. Mexico’s security challenges involve complex questions concerning civilian protection, institutional reform, economic development, accountability, and the appropriate use of force.

What emerged clearly from Villalpando’s interview was his belief that corruption and organized crime are not inevitable conditions that Mexican society must accept.

He viewed the country’s long-term security as dependent upon honest personnel, effective institutions, and the willingness to enforce consequences for misconduct.

An Unfinished Mission Beyond Government Service

Today, Villalpando resides in the United States and works in the private sector, applying his experience in Mexican Customs and national security to the challenges facing companies conducting business in Mexico.

He continues traveling to Mexico regularly and remains committed to improving conditions in the country where he previously served as a federal official.

For him, leaving government service did not represent abandoning the mission.

“I see the opportunity to be here as that reward that I was talking about. And I continue to be worthy of this opportunity every day.”

He now seeks to help legitimate companies understand operational risks, navigate difficult security environments, and maintain commercial activity despite the pressures created by organized crime.

“I will still help and do everything that’s in my power to improve the conditions in Mexico.”

“I’m no longer a government official. But I think that by sharing this information, helping companies be able to continue to be part of the ecosystem of economic development in my country, I’m helping my country that way.”

His perspective connects public security and economic development. Businesses require predictable transportation systems, reliable institutions, and sufficient protection to operate successfully. Communities benefit when legitimate employment and commercial investment remain viable. Criminal organizations, by contrast, can exploit environments where violence and corruption discourage investment or force businesses into coercive arrangements.

Villalpando said his current work is intended to help companies continue operating in Mexico rather than abandoning regions where security concerns have become substantial.

“I want to make sure that all the companies that are operating in Mexico stay there. And I want to make sure there’s more investment.”

He acknowledged that returning to Mexico still involves caution. The fear that once accompanied his customs assignments has not disappeared entirely.

“I still go there with a little concern sometimes. But again, I don’t want to lose that fear. I don’t want to get burnt.”

His final explanation of the relationship between security, commerce, and national development reflected the continuity between his former government responsibilities and his present work.

“If I help companies operate in Mexico, that’s good for my country. If I help companies continue to operate, that’s good for the U.S. as well because it’s economic development.”

“And you need economic development to improve the conditions of society. And you need security for economic development.”

“So I see it as my mission is the same. I’m just in a different sector.”

The Human Intelligence Ledger: The People Behind the Intelligence

The significance of Karlo Villalpando’s story extends beyond his individual career. His experiences reveal the complicated relationships that exist between intelligence collection, personal integrity, institutional corruption, and organized crime.

Modern law enforcement agencies possess increasingly sophisticated investigative technologies, financial analytical systems, communications capabilities, and surveillance resources. Yet the effectiveness of those tools ultimately depends upon the people who collect, interpret, protect, and act upon the information they produce.

Villalpando described a world in which a customs officer could become a valuable confidential source years after first meeting him during professional training. A smuggler angry about escalating bribes could provide information exposing corruption. A federal official could secretly act as an intermediary for criminal organizations. A law enforcement colleague could be murdered after refusing to overlook a routine customs violation.

Those examples demonstrate why human intelligence remains indispensable to confronting transnational organized crime. Technology may identify suspicious movements, detect financial anomalies, or reveal communication patterns, but human sources can provide insight into motivations, corrupt relationships, criminal intentions, and the behavior of individuals operating inside compromised organizations.

Villalpando’s approach to source development was particularly instructive because it began with relationships rather than immediate operational requirements. He understood that trust established during professional training could eventually provide access to information unavailable through conventional investigative channels.

At the same time, he recognized that a source relationship could never be evaluated solely on the basis of apparent cooperation. Individuals providing intelligence might possess conflicting loyalties, criminal motivations, or an interest in gathering information from the same officer they approached.

His experiences illustrate the importance of human judgment, source evaluation, counterintelligence awareness, and the careful management of professional relationships.

They also demonstrate the sacrifices that can accompany intelligence work. Information may be valuable precisely because the individual providing it is exposed to serious personal danger. Honest officers may become targets because they refuse to cooperate with criminal organizations. Even the decision to share information with another government institution can carry consequences when corruption threatens operational security.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, these are the human dimensions of intelligence that deserve greater public understanding.

Villalpando’s testimony offers an unusually candid account of a national security mission conducted in an environment where financial incentives, criminal intimidation, and institutional vulnerabilities were persistent realities. His experiences do not suggest that Mexico’s problems can be reduced to individual misconduct or solved through isolated enforcement actions. Rather, they illustrate how effective security depends upon trustworthy institutions, accountable leadership, protected personnel, and the continuous development of reliable intelligence relationships.

The story of Celia Cuevas, as recounted by Villalpando, remains perhaps the most powerful reminder of what those responsibilities can demand. She was described not as an officer pursuing an extraordinary operation, but as a government employee carrying out an ordinary customs responsibility who allegedly refused a criminal demand and paid with her life.

For Villalpando, her death represented the sacrifices of honest personnel whose contributions can become overshadowed by the corruption scandals surrounding their institutions.

His message to those continuing that work was neither complicated nor detached from the realities he had experienced.

“Stay strong.”

And perhaps the most revealing statement of the entire conversation was not about money, weapons, corruption, or the power of criminal organizations. It concerned his conviction that despite the sacrifices already made, Mexico’s future is not predetermined.

“I am a hundred percent sure that the country and the government is stronger than any criminal organization.”

Karlo Villalpando spent a decade working within an institution confronted by some of the most dangerous criminal networks in the Western Hemisphere. He encountered attempted bribery, suspected institutional betrayal, threats, and the loss of colleagues. He cultivated human sources, developed relationships with American enforcement agencies, and learned that trust could be both an operational advantage and a profound vulnerability.

Today, his work has moved from federal customs enforcement to the private sector, but the underlying responsibility remains the same: helping legitimate institutions and businesses withstand the influence of organized crime.

His experience offers a lesson that extends beyond Mexico’s borders.

The strength of an institution is not measured simply by its authority, resources, uniforms, or technology. It is measured by the integrity of the people entrusted with its mission, the systems that hold them accountable, and the willingness of individuals to uphold their responsibilities when doing so carries personal risk.

In an environment where corruption can turn colleagues into adversaries and ordinary enforcement decisions into matters of life and death, that integrity is more than an institutional ideal.

It can be the difference between a compromised operation and a successful investigation, between a protected intelligence source and a betrayed one, and, in the most tragic circumstances, between life and death.

About The Human Intelligence Ledger

The Human Intelligence Ledger is an independent publication and podcast dedicated to examining the people, relationships, and operational realities behind human intelligence, law enforcement, national security, military operations, and public safety. Through exclusive interviews and investigative reporting, the publication documents the experiences of intelligence professionals, confidential sources, federal agents, military leaders, and others whose work frequently occurs beyond public view.

Editor’s note: This article is based on Benjamin Ellis Freedland’s interview with former Mexican Customs official Karlo Villalpando. Direct quotations have been lightly edited for readability, including removal of verbal repetitions and obvious transcription errors. Specific accounts of alleged corruption, attempted bribery, enforcement seizures, and individual incidents are attributed to Villalpando and have not all been independently verified. The interview transcript contains overlapping automated speaker transcription, and quotations should be checked against the original audio before publication, particularly where wording or legal allegations are material.

Beyond the Wreckage: The First Responders Who Answered Palm Beach County’s Deadly Learjet Crash

Host at The Human Intelligence Ledger Podcast

November 1, 2026

By Sunday afternoon, November 1, 2026, images of a Learjet 60 crashing into Palm Beach County, Florida, were circulating across national news outlets and social media. The aircraft, carrying nine people, came down near Military Trail and 10th Avenue North in the Greenacres area, leaving behind an extensive debris field, a massive impact crater, fires, and a profoundly difficult scene for emergency personnel.

Federal officials confirmed that all nine occupants were killed. The circumstances surrounding the aircraft’s final moments are now the responsibility of federal aviation investigators, and determining precisely what happened will require a careful examination of the evidence.

But beyond the aircraft, the flight data, and the questions that will inevitably dominate the investigation, there is another story worth telling. It concerns the firefighters, paramedics, and law enforcement officers who responded when the emergency unfolded, whose immediate responsibilities were not to determine why an aircraft crashed, but to confront the consequences of its impact.

Their priorities included confronting fires and hazards, assessing potential casualties, protecting nearby residents, restricting access to dangerous areas, and maintaining a secure environment for the emergency response and subsequent investigation.

Those responsibilities fell principally to Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, Greenacres Fire , and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office . Each organization brought a different operational responsibility to a scene that demanded coordination across jurisdictional and professional boundaries. The complete incident record has not yet been released, and the specific assignments of every responding company and deputy remain unconfirmed. Nevertheless, public statements and local reporting already provide a meaningful picture of the work undertaken in the opening hours.

Palm Beach County Fire Rescue: Confronting an Extraordinary Emergency

For Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, the situation was far removed from an ordinary roadway incident. The aircraft struck near a populated residential area, and video from the aftermath showed substantial flames, black smoke, and debris scattered across Military Trail.

The extent of the physical destruction created an emergency environment where responders had to consider not only the wreckage itself, but also the surrounding buildings, traffic, residents, and the potential for additional hazards. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue publicly identified the situation as an aircraft incident and warned that emergency operations would continue for an extended period.

The challenges associated with an aircraft crash in a developed area are considerable. Unlike an aviation emergency contained within an airport’s established response environment, a crash on or near a public roadway can leave emergency crews confronting damaged pavement, scattered wreckage, burning material, obstructed access routes, and potentially compromised surrounding structures. Fire-rescue personnel must evaluate conditions as they develop, establish safe working areas, assess where rescue efforts may be required, and prevent the incident from producing additional casualties. These are fundamental responsibilities in an aviation disaster response, although detailed operational records are still needed to establish precisely how Palm Beach County’s companies carried out each task.

Early reporting also indicated that area hospitals were alerted to a potential mass-casualty incident at approximately 1:10 p.m. The significance of that notification should not be overlooked. In an emergency involving an aircraft carrying multiple occupants and an unknown number of people potentially exposed on the ground, medical readiness must begin before responders have a complete accounting of casualties. Hospitals and emergency medical systems need an opportunity to prepare for possible patient arrivals, even if the initial assessment later establishes that medical transport requirements are different from those anticipated.

There is a distinction between declaring or preparing for a mass-casualty response and confirming that multiple surviving patients required transportation. The initial alert reflected the seriousness and uncertainty of the emergency. By the afternoon news conference, officials reported that they had received no reports of deaths or injuries among people on the ground. That distinction matters, both in reporting the incident accurately and in understanding why emergency systems prepare for circumstances that may ultimately not materialize.

Greenacres Fire Rescue: Mutual Assistance Across Jurisdictional Boundaries

One of the more specific details emerging from the response concerns Greenacres Fire Rescue. According to WPBF 25 News, a department spokesperson confirmed that the crash occurred outside the city’s jurisdiction, but four Greenacres Fire Rescue units were nevertheless at the scene to assist with potential casualty triage and additional fires associated with the incident. The deployment provides an example of the practical importance of neighboring emergency services working together when an incident exceeds ordinary jurisdictional boundaries.

Four responding units represent a meaningful operational commitment by a municipal fire-rescue organization. Although the publicly available reporting does not identify the individual apparatus or staffing assignments, the department’s stated responsibilities addressed two immediate concerns: the possibility of casualties requiring emergency assessment and the prospect of secondary fires beyond the primary impact area. Those are particularly important considerations when an aircraft crashes near residences and a heavily traveled roadway, where the consequences of the initial impact can extend beyond the location of the aircraft wreckage itself.

The Greenacres deployment also underscores an essential feature of emergency response that receives relatively little attention outside the public safety community. Jurisdictional maps establish the primary responsibility for emergency services, but major emergencies require cooperation that transcends those administrative lines. Personnel from neighboring departments may arrive with different apparatus, staffing, command structures, and operational experiences, yet their work must become part of a coordinated response. The objective is not institutional recognition or ownership of the incident. It is the protection of life, the reduction of immediate hazards, and the effective use of available resources.

It is important, however, not to substitute assumptions for verified actions. The department confirmed that its units were deployed to assist with potential triage and subsequent fires; it has not yet publicly detailed which crews treated patients, which apparatus were assigned to fire suppression, or whether particular secondary fires required intervention. Those distinctions are worth preserving. Recognizing the seriousness of the deployment does not require inventing heroic anecdotes or attributing individual actions that have not been documented.

Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office: Securing the Scene and Protecting the Community

While firefighters and emergency medical personnel addressed the immediate hazards, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office confronted a different set of responsibilities. An aircraft crash involving fatalities, damaged public infrastructure, and a substantial debris field requires more than the arrival of patrol deputies. Law enforcement must secure the surrounding area, control movement into and around the scene, protect the public from potentially dangerous conditions, and preserve access for emergency vehicles and investigators. These duties are sometimes less visible than firefighting, but they are essential to the successful management of a large-scale emergency.

The Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Military Trail was closed in both directions between Cresthaven Boulevard and 10th Avenue North during the initial response. As the incident developed, Palm Beach County officials announced a broader closure extending from 10th Avenue North to Purdy Lane and Alameda Drive. Access to that section was restricted to emergency vehicles, with law enforcement responsible for redirecting civilian traffic and assisting nearby residents as necessary. The roadway closure was not simply a matter of managing congestion. It helped establish a controlled perimeter around an active emergency and an eventual federal aviation accident investigation.

The enormous debris field made scene security especially important. Investigators would need to evaluate physical evidence from the aircraft and its surroundings, and emergency personnel needed working space to carry out their responsibilities without unnecessary interference. In an incident that attracts widespread public attention, law enforcement must also account for motorists, nearby residents, spectators, journalists, and others attempting to approach the location. Maintaining the integrity of a crash scene while protecting public access and safety is a substantial operational undertaking, particularly when the incident has occurred along a major community roadway.

An equally significant development involved the nearby residential population. Palm Beach County officials announced that approximately 600 residents of an adjacent mobile-home community would need to be relocated because access to the neighborhood was affected by the crash and investigation. County officials coordinated shelter arrangements, identified transportation resources through Palm Tran, and worked with law enforcement on the timing and logistics of moving residents. The American Red Cross was also placed on standby to provide assistance.

The displacement of hundreds of residents demonstrates how a major aviation emergency extends well beyond the initial scene. Families may suddenly find themselves unable to return to their homes, access medication, care for pets, retrieve personal belongings, or follow their normal routines. For responding public safety agencies, these consequences create additional responsibilities that continue after the most immediate threats have been addressed. The incident becomes not only a rescue and recovery operation, but also a community protection and emergency management effort.

The Operational Reality Behind a Major Disaster Response

There is a tendency, particularly in the hours following a catastrophic event, to evaluate emergency operations through brief videos, photographs, scanner recordings, and fragments of information circulating online. Such material may capture the scale of an incident, but it seldom conveys the full operational environment confronting those who respond. A photograph of a fire engine parked beside a damaged roadway does not explain the crew’s assignment. Video showing deputies at a perimeter does not reveal the communications, coordination, or safety considerations behind their deployment. The absence of visible activity in one recording is not evidence of inactivity elsewhere.

The Palm Beach County response illustrates why restraint is important when reporting on emergency services. We know that Palm Beach County Fire Rescue responded to an aircraft crash involving fires and significant destruction. We know that Greenacres Fire Rescue deployed four units to support potential triage and secondary fire operations. We know that sheriff’s deputies established roadway closures and that law enforcement participated in managing access to the affected area. We also know that county authorities were coordinating the displacement and sheltering of hundreds of residents. What remains unknown is the complete operational chronology, the assignments of individual companies, the precise deployment of specialized resources, and the decisions made at each level of incident command.

Those details may eventually become available through official incident reports, department statements, dispatch records, and after-action reviews. Until then, the appropriate approach is to recognize the work that has been documented without constructing an artificial narrative about decisions made under pressure. There is no legitimate reason to engage in speculation about how individual firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers, deputies, or commanders should have acted based solely on footage and preliminary reporting.

For the professionals involved, the response also carries a human dimension. Emergency personnel dispatched to an aircraft crash involving fatalities may encounter traumatic destruction and circumstances that remain with them long after the emergency vehicles have returned to their stations. Their work does not necessarily end when fires are brought under control or traffic is redirected. Recovery operations, scene preservation, agency coordination, reporting requirements, and the personal effects of exposure to a catastrophic incident can continue well beyond the initial response.

Recognizing the People Behind the Response

Nine people lost their lives in the crash, and their families are facing an unimaginable tragedy. Nothing about recognizing the emergency response should diminish the significance of those losses. Nor should the attention directed toward the responders become an attempt to characterize a catastrophic event as a success simply because emergency personnel arrived and performed their duties. Those are different questions, and they deserve to remain separate.

What can be recognized is the willingness of public safety professionals to enter situations that most people instinctively seek to escape. The firefighters of Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, the personnel of Greenacres Fire Rescue, and the deputies of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office were called to a scene involving extreme destruction, dangerous conditions, and substantial uncertainty. Their respective organizations were responsible for addressing immediate hazards, supporting the emergency medical response, protecting surrounding communities, and establishing the secure operating environment necessary for recovery and investigation.

The response also reflects the importance of interagency collaboration. A major incident is not resolved by a single department acting independently. Firefighters require secure access routes. Emergency medical personnel depend on coordinated scene operations. Deputies must work alongside fire-rescue command while protecting the public and preserving access for investigators. County emergency managers must coordinate the consequences for displaced residents. Each function supports the others, and the effectiveness of the overall operation depends on those relationships.

The National Transportation Safety Board National Transportation Safety Board will lead the investigation into what caused the Learjet to crash. That work is necessary, and its findings should be allowed to develop through evidence rather than speculation. There will be time for technical analysis, investigative conclusions, and any lessons that emerge from the official record.

But the story of November 1, 2026, should not belong exclusively to the aircraft and the circumstances of its destruction. It should also include the people who responded to the scene and assumed responsibility for protecting everyone they could.

For Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, Greenacres Fire Rescue, and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, this was not a headline or a viral video. It was an emergency that demanded immediate action, interagency coordination, and sustained public safety operations under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

Their work on the ground deserves to be documented with the same seriousness as the investigation in the sky.

For nearly three decades, retired Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Special Agent Jonny Grusing has witnessed some of the darkest aspects of human behavior. His career included counterterrorism investigations, violent crime, bank robberies, kidnappings, and complex homicide cases. Yet one investigation would distinguish itself from everything else he encountered in federal law enforcement. It involved a man who learned how to manipulate the very investigative techniques designed to identify dangerous criminals, a confidential informant who exploited the FBI’s desire to prevent murders while concealing his involvement in killings, and a series of grieving families whose determination ultimately helped expose catastrophic failures in the criminal justice system.

The man’s name was Scott Lee Kimball, a convicted serial killer whose relationship with federal law enforcement began long before investigators understood the extent of his violence. Kimball was not simply another criminal supplying information in exchange for money or favorable treatment. According to Grusing, he was an exceptionally sophisticated manipulator who studied his handlers, understood their priorities, and repeatedly manufactured information that made him appear indispensable. He recognized that law enforcement would place extraordinary value on intelligence suggesting that a murder could be prevented, then exploited that priority to establish credibility with investigators.

In an exclusive interview with The Human Intelligence Ledger, Grusing described how Kimball manipulated federal agents, prison inmates, prosecutors, correctional employees, and even experienced homicide investigators. His account offers an unusually detailed examination of what can happen when a confidential source becomes more skilled at controlling the intelligence relationship than the people responsible for managing it.

“He had been tricking us,” Grusing recalled. “When I say us, it’s really law enforcement in general, but his last three to four years was the FBI. He was tricking us on how we use informants.”

For intelligence professionals, the significance of Kimball’s case extends far beyond the murders themselves. It illustrates the danger of source credibility becoming institutionalized without sufficient independent verification, particularly when a source provides information so consequential that investigators become invested in believing it.

The Two Fathers Who Refused to Give Up

Grusing entered the FBI Academy at Quantico in September 1996. After completing approximately four months of training, he was assigned to the Denver Field Office, initially working terrorism investigations before transferring to violent crime. By 2006, he had spent approximately eight years investigating violent offenses, including bank robberies and kidnappings. He had extensive interviewing experience and was familiar with how criminals attempted to conceal information, but nothing had prepared him for Kimball.

The investigation began taking shape in November 2006 after two fathers approached the FBI with troubling allegations. Their daughters had disappeared, and both men believed that the same individual might be responsible. More alarming was their belief that the suspect had an established relationship with the FBI as a confidential informant.

“Two dads came in and told my supervisor, ‘We think your informant took our daughters. We also think he’s a killer,’” Grusing explained.

One of those fathers was Bob Markham, whose daughter Jennifer had disappeared years earlier. Markham had repeatedly attempted to convince investigators that Kimball was responsible, but the confidential nature of the FBI’s informant relationship complicated the response. Agents were prohibited from confirming or denying the existence of a particular confidential source, leaving Markham searching for answers while believing that federal authorities possessed information about his daughter’s disappearance.

Grusing recalled reviewing the investigative files and observing Markham during an interview with Denver homicide detectives. What struck him was not simply the father’s frustration but his extraordinary determination to pursue information that investigators had not yet fully developed.

“He was hellbent. He was pissed, too, because his daughter Jennifer had been now missing almost three years. And he’s like, ‘Nobody’s doing anything.’”

Rather than dismissing Markham’s independent investigation, Grusing began communicating with him and reviewing what the father had discovered.

“I started speaking with Bob and I brought him into the case because I wanted to learn what he had learned over those three years of trying to investigate and see what had happened to his daughter, Jennifer.”

This decision represented an important turning point. Information assembled by a victim’s family became part of the broader investigative effort, challenging assumptions that had allowed Kimball’s relationship with law enforcement to continue.

Grusing’s supervisor recognized the potential institutional consequences immediately. If the allegations were substantiated, the FBI would be confronting the possibility that an individual receiving money as a confidential source had been committing murders while exploiting the Bureau’s credibility.

“This is a huge amount of liability for the bureau,” Grusing recalled thinking.

His supervisor directed him to place his other cases aside and determine whether the allegations were true.

“You got to find out if this is true, if this guy is taking our money as the FBI and making people disappear.”

The answer would lead Grusing into an investigation spanning multiple states, countless interviews, forensic searches, and years of direct contact with Kimball.

How a Prison Informant Learned to Manufacture Credibility

To understand how Kimball gained the FBI’s confidence, Grusing had to reconstruct his earlier interactions with law enforcement, beginning with his incarceration in Alaska in 2001.

At that time, Kimball was associated primarily with financial crimes, including check fraud and forgery. Such offenses could make an incarcerated individual appear less threatening than someone with a documented history of serious violence. For investigators attempting to prevent homicides, an inmate offering intelligence about an alleged murder-for-hire conspiracy might represent a valuable opportunity.

Kimball understood that dynamic.

“He had learned how law enforcement works. We prioritize homicide over check fraud or forgery,” Grusing explained.

The scheme involved another inmate named Arnold, whom Kimball persuaded that he could help overturn his criminal case. According to Grusing, Kimball encouraged Arnold to identify individuals connected with the prosecution, including a judge and prosecutor, while discussing a supposed plan to influence testimony from a former girlfriend.

The phrase “the fish is fat” became central to the deception. Within the conversation Kimball arranged, the expression supposedly indicated that steps were being taken to influence the witness. Kimball then approached federal authorities with an entirely different interpretation.

“He took the list, the prosecutor and the judge, [to] the FBI and the ATF at that time and said, ‘My cellmate just gave me a hit list.’”

Kimball alleged that Arnold was arranging to have the officials killed and that the coded phrase represented part of the murder conspiracy. Investigators interpreted the information as a potential threat to public officials. According to Grusing, authorities took the allegations so seriously that the judge and prosecutor were moved out of Anchorage.

“Everyone fell for it,” Grusing said.

The alleged murder-for-hire plot subsequently unraveled in court. Arnold was not convicted of murder for hire, and numerous inmates testified about Kimball’s manipulations. Arnold ultimately pleaded guilty to witness tampering, according to Grusing’s account.

Yet the consequences of the failed prosecution did not fully undermine Kimball’s reputation as a reliable source.

“Alaska had pixie dust,” Grusing explained, using a term from his book to describe Kimball’s unusual persuasive influence. “Even though the case fell apart, they still thought Scott saved the life of the judge and prosecutor. So they just thought the case fell apart and that Scott was still reliable.”

That institutional belief became a form of transferable credibility. By the time Kimball developed relationships with investigators in Colorado, his previous reporting carried the appearance of a successful effort to prevent violence.

The technique was remarkably effective because it exploited a fundamental vulnerability in human intelligence operations: a source can supply information that satisfies the investigator’s immediate objective without that information being independently established as true.

Kimball was not simply lying about crimes. He was constructing scenarios in which law enforcement could appear to have prevented crimes, thereby strengthening his own value as a confidential informant.

When the Informant Became the Suspect

As Grusing reviewed Kimball’s history, he identified disturbing similarities between the Alaska operation and subsequent events involving missing women in Colorado.

Kimball had again supplied information about supposed murder plots, this time involving individuals connected to inmates he had encountered. In Jennifer Markham’s case, he initially presented information suggesting that she might be involved in committing killings herself. Later, his account shifted toward claims that she had been murdered and buried.

Grusing discovered that Kimball’s changing narratives were not isolated inconsistencies. They reflected a broader pattern in which he used fragments of genuine information, manufactured allegations, and promises of assistance to keep investigators engaged.

“Scott was changing his story on Jennifer being the hitman to by the time I got it, Jennifer had been killed and buried somewhere up near Rifle,” Grusing recalled.

Kimball had also passed a polygraph examination while making claims about Jennifer’s possible burial location. Rather than resolving the investigation, the test added to his apparent credibility despite the continuing absence of Jennifer’s remains.

The polygraph issue became particularly troubling when Grusing examined Kimball’s earlier conduct toward his former wife, Lesa.

According to Grusing’s review of police reports and interviews, Kimball had repeatedly abducted and terrorized her while attempting to portray her complaints as false allegations motivated by their custody dispute. He allegedly used demands for polygraph examinations to challenge her credibility.

“He would call them and go, ‘Give me a polygraph. My wife is going to say that I abducted her, this crazy story, but she just wants custody of the kids.’”

Grusing described how physical evidence ultimately helped substantiate Lesa’s accounts, including material recovered from an attic where Kimball had allegedly concealed himself while waiting to enter her home.

The experience demonstrated that Kimball was capable of exploiting not only investigative procedures but also the assumptions officers made about apparently cooperative subjects.

For Grusing, the lesson was that a polygraph result could not substitute for corroborated evidence. The examination was only one component of an investigation, and Kimball’s history showed how dangerous it could be to treat it as definitive proof of truthfulness.

The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit Enters the Investigation

Grusing’s supervisor understood that conventional interrogation techniques might prove inadequate for someone who had spent years manipulating law enforcement.

He encouraged Grusing to seek assistance from the FBI’s behavioral analysis specialists, who could help him understand Kimball’s conduct and develop an interview strategy.

“You should reach out for the profilers, cuz if he’s passing polygraphs and tricking us and making people disappear, you need their help,” Grusing recalled his supervisor telling him.

The specialists did not simply provide a psychological label and instruct investigators to confront Kimball. Instead, they emphasized preparation, independent corroboration, and understanding the subject’s behavior before attempting a substantive interview.

“They told me that I need to do my homework, which means listen to all his phone calls,” Grusing explained.

The investigators reviewed recorded prison conversations, interviewed family members, obtained police reports, and tracked inmates who had shared cells with Kimball. These former cellmates became particularly valuable sources of human intelligence because Kimball had discussed aspects of his life and alleged violence during private conversations in prison.

“My priority is he is tricking his inmates, his cellmates, into talking about their girlfriends, and I think he’s making these disappear,” Grusing recalled explaining during the investigation.

Prison housing records provided an important investigative advantage. Because the federal correctional system maintains records of inmate assignments, investigators could identify individuals who had shared cells with Kimball, determine when those relationships existed, and compare their accounts with the chronology of missing persons cases.

Grusing described inmates who reported Kimball boasting about being a professional killer and offering to arrange violence outside prison.

“If you need someone taken care of on the outside, I’m your man. I’ve killed wives. I’ve killed pastors,” Kimball allegedly told other prisoners, according to Grusing.

The statements did not automatically establish additional murders. Kimball frequently made sensational claims without providing enough independently verifiable detail to substantiate them. Nevertheless, recurring accounts from different inmates helped investigators identify patterns, potential victims, and avenues for further investigation.

For human intelligence practitioners, the distinction was crucial. Inmates could offer firsthand observations of Kimball’s statements and conduct, but their reporting still required validation. Grusing had to distinguish between genuine disclosures, exaggerations, and deliberately planted misinformation.

The investigation became a sustained effort to reconstruct Kimball’s relationships and identify where his stories intersected with actual disappearances.

Inside the Interrogation Room: Letting a Manipulator Believe He Was in Control

In July 2007, Grusing traveled to Montana to conduct his first substantive interview with Kimball. By that point, he had spent approximately eight months assembling evidence, reviewing recorded conversations, and learning about the suspect’s previous relationships with investigators. The meeting would become the foundation of a relationship lasting more than a decade.

Grusing understood that Kimball possessed an extraordinary need for control and recognition. He also recognized that directly challenging the suspect’s authority at the beginning of an interview could jeopardize the possibility of obtaining useful information. With assistance from behavioral analysis specialists, Grusing developed a strategy that appeared counterintuitive: allow Kimball to believe he was controlling the interview.

“I shared my case file with him,” Grusing explained. “You’ll see video online of me giving him the FBI case file and him thumbing through it, which I had never done before.”

The decision was calculated. Grusing was not surrendering control of the investigation or allowing the suspect unrestricted access to sensitive intelligence. He was exploiting Kimball’s desire to feel important.

“Once you make a person with narcissistic tendencies in the spot where they think they should be and their feathers don’t get ruffled and whatever else, Scott settled down and talked to me for six hours the first time.”

Much of what Kimball said was false or misleading, but buried within those statements were pieces of information that would eventually lead investigators toward another victim, Leanne.

“Was most of it lies and BS? Yeah, but some of it wasn’t. Some of it led me to victim number four, who was Leanne.”

Grusing described this approach as an important interviewing lesson, particularly when confronting individuals whose primary motivation is maintaining psychological control over others.

“When you find someone who’s narcissistic, you first have to do your homework like I did, but then second of all, you have to let them win ahead of time.”

The opening minutes of the interview revealed how aggressively Kimball attempted to establish dominance. He complained about being transported to the meeting without advance notice, criticized the circumstances of his arrival, and suggested that Grusing had damaged their relationship before it had even begun.

Rather than becoming defensive, Grusing apologized for the transportation arrangements and redirected the conversation toward the investigation.

“I’m like, you know what, Scott? I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were going to throw you on a bus. I just want to talk to you.”

It was an approach he would repeat during subsequent interviews and searches. Kimball regularly tested boundaries, made demands, and attempted to establish himself as the most important person in any room. Grusing learned that temporarily allowing the suspect to feel superior could create opportunities to obtain information.

The distinction was subtle but essential: Grusing permitted Kimball to experience a sense of control without relinquishing his own investigative objectives.

Searching for the Victims: The Body Hunts

Eventually, investigators connected Kimball to four homicides. His victims included Jennifer Marcum, Kaysi McLeod, Leanne Emry, and his uncle, Terry Kimball. The transcript renders some of their names phonetically; the investigation was centered on identifying their fates and locating their remains.

Recovering the victims became one of the most emotionally difficult and operationally demanding aspects of the case. Kimball had concealed remains in remote locations, including mountainous terrain where search operations required significant manpower, specialized resources, and extraordinary patience.

Grusing described the process as a series of “body hunts,” operations during which Kimball was brought into the field to identify possible burial or disposal locations. He was accompanied by law enforcement personnel, attorneys, and evidence recovery specialists.

Yet even after agreeing to cooperate, Kimball continued manipulating the search teams.

One particularly disturbing incident occurred in Utah during the search for Leanne Emry. Kimball led investigators toward a waterfall and drew their attention to a bone lying nearby. Deputies initially believed it belonged to a sheep.

Kimball then suggested turning around and searching in another direction.

Grusing became suspicious. Instead of abandoning the area, he climbed farther up the canyon wall.

“I went from that bone up the canyon wall for about a five-minute hike thinking I might find a sheep or something because it was weird and ended up finding Leanne’s hair clip and a bone from her.”

The discovery revealed that investigators had been extraordinarily close to the victim’s remains while Kimball was apparently attempting to redirect them.

“He had stuffed her in a cave, and that, by the grace of God, the cave had not covered her hair clip and piece of one of her bones.”

The significance of the discovery went beyond locating another victim. It demonstrated that Kimball could continue using information about the dead to manipulate investigators even when he was already facing substantial criminal consequences.

Grusing explained that the behavior created serious difficulties during the search for Jennifer Marcum, whose remains have never been recovered.

“What we learned from him is that he’s playing games with us the whole time.”

He suspected that Kimball had brought investigators into the general area where Jennifer’s remains might be located without taking them to the actual site.

“We think he took us close to her, but didn’t get us there.”

The canyon terrain made independent searches exceptionally difficult. Investigators faced numerous similar geographical features, limited physical evidence, and a suspect who appeared to derive satisfaction from withholding critical information.

For Jennifer’s family, that manipulation produced consequences extending far beyond the criminal prosecution. A conviction could establish Kimball’s responsibility, but it could not provide the closure of bringing Jennifer home.

Even Experienced FBI Agents Were Vulnerable

One of the most revealing moments of the interview involved Grusing’s account of a senior FBI agent who encountered Kimball during the extended search operations.

By then, Grusing had spent years investigating Kimball. He understood the suspect’s ability to distort information and influence people through prolonged personal interaction. However, another experienced investigator would demonstrate just how quickly that influence could take hold.

During one search, Grusing allowed a senior FBI agent to spend approximately an hour alone with Kimball while he took a break from the exhausting daily interactions.

The agent had considerable law enforcement experience, including prior service as a state trooper. Nevertheless, the brief encounter appeared to significantly alter his assessment of Kimball.

According to Grusing, the agent returned and announced:

“You know what? I think we got the wrong guy. I don’t think Scott did any of this. I think he can help us though.”

The statement stunned Grusing because it reflected the very mechanism that had allowed Kimball to deceive law enforcement in the first place. An experienced investigator had apparently begun accepting the suspect’s narrative over the substantial body of evidence assembled against him.

Grusing and local law enforcement personnel had previously warned colleagues about Kimball’s capabilities. The sheriff, Steve White, responded to the incident with humor that carried a serious message.

“The next morning he handed the agent a riot shield and it had ‘pixie dust shield’ written across it,” Grusing recalled. “He goes, ‘You have to wear this if you’re going to be around him anymore.’”

The episode became a vivid example of the psychological hazards of investigating manipulative offenders.

Experience, rank, and professional training did not necessarily make an investigator immune to persuasion. Indeed, Kimball appeared capable of exploiting the same professional characteristics that made investigators effective, including their confidence in interviewing, their desire to solve cases, and their willingness to develop rapport.

Grusing said he had deliberately avoided being alone with Kimball during many of their interactions because he recognized the danger of prolonged exposure to his manipulation.

“I was never alone with him because I knew how persuasive and manipulative he could be.”

For supervisors and confidential source coordinators, the lesson is significant. Investigators may need independent assessments of source reporting and regular scrutiny from colleagues who are not personally invested in a particular relationship.

Four Homicide Convictions, a 70-Year Sentence, and a Deal With the Devil

By 2009, the investigation had produced enough evidence to secure Kimball’s guilty plea in connection with four homicides. But obtaining accountability required difficult negotiations because Kimball possessed information that investigators desperately needed to recover victims’ remains.

Grusing described the arrangement in stark terms.

“We had to strike what we called a deal with the devil.”

Investigators had assembled additional criminal allegations involving firearms and financial offenses. Kimball, a convicted felon, had possessed a handgun, and prosecutors could pursue those charges alongside the homicide investigation.

The eventual agreement required Kimball’s participation in efforts to locate victims, though the searches did not result in Jennifer’s recovery.

According to Grusing, the original anticipated sentence was approximately 48 years. The court ultimately imposed a 70-year sentence after considering Kimball’s continuing deception and conduct during the investigation.

“The judge sentenced him to 70 years. He upward departed because it was going to be a 48-year sentence, but because of Scott jerking our chain, not leading us to Jennifer.”

An additional federal firearms sentence increased the aggregate punishment to approximately 76 years.

The investigation was a joint effort involving federal authorities, the Lafayette Police Department, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office, and other agencies. Grusing emphasized the importance of collaboration because federal agents do not generally possess primary jurisdiction over ordinary state homicide offenses.

“Lafayette Police Department was the [agency where] Scott lived at the time. So them with the Boulder County DA’s office teamed up with me and the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

The case also illustrated the complicated relationship between federal and state criminal jurisdiction. The FBI used federal investigative authorities, including kidnapping-related warrants, to develop evidence that supported state homicide prosecutions.

Although Kimball had been convicted and sentenced, the investigation did not end in 2009. Grusing continued interacting with him until his retirement in 2021, attempting to determine whether he was responsible for additional murders.

A Serial Killer Who Continued Manipulating People From Prison

Prison did not end Kimball’s attempts to control others. Grusing described incidents involving correctional employees, other inmates, and people outside the prison system who became entangled in the convicted killer’s schemes.

In one instance, Kimball allegedly persuaded a prison employee to allow him to use a computer to create fraudulent FBI documents intended to support his claims of innocence.

“He had a warden’s secretary let him use her computer to type up fake FBI documents and submit them to his attorneys saying he’s innocent.”

In another incident, according to Grusing, Kimball induced inmates to participate in efforts that they believed might help him escape, while promising financial rewards.

“Wherever he goes, the manipulation is not just to kill people. It’s to make people inside the prison do things.”

Grusing also described how Kimball attempted to exploit the attention of individuals who admired or romanticized notorious criminals. He recalled monitoring correspondence from a person who had been sending Kimball substantial amounts of money.

“He has a fan club,” Grusing explained. “I did reach out to one of them because it was that person was sending him a lot of money and Scott was setting this person up to get arrested by the New York Police Department.”

These accounts demonstrate that incarceration does not necessarily eliminate the operational risks associated with particularly manipulative offenders. Even without physical access to victims in the community, an inmate may be capable of exploiting correspondence, institutional privileges, and relationships with employees or other prisoners.

During our conversation, we also discussed Kimball’s placement within the federal prison system and the differences between institutions housing active prison gangs and those accommodating former gang members, protected witnesses, and other prisoners requiring specialized security arrangements.

As a former federal inmate and protected government witness, I explained how institutional classification and inmate politics can profoundly influence a person’s safety. We discussed Kimball’s placement at USP Coleman II in Florida and the complications that his public notoriety and cooperation-related history could create.

Grusing confirmed that Kimball had previously been housed at the federal Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, commonly known as ADX.

The discussion reinforced an important point: Kimball’s capacity for manipulation extended into the correctional environment, creating risks that required ongoing attention even after his criminal case had concluded.

The Confessions That Became Puzzles

One of the most troubling revelations from Grusing’s interview involved his belief that Kimball may have committed considerably more murders than those established through his four homicide convictions.

Following the 2009 conviction, Kimball continued offering information about alleged victims in several states. However, Grusing explained that these disclosures frequently came in the form of incomplete stories, vague geographical clues, and descriptions that investigators could not independently verify.

Kimball appeared to understand that even the possibility of discovering additional victims could create leverage over the authorities responsible for his confinement.

“He would dangle just like he did with his cellmates with the FBI. He would dangle that he had more homicides.”

One supposed confession involved a man Kimball claimed to have killed near Lolo Pass in Montana.

“I killed a man when I was on Lolo Pass in Montana. He had a red beard. He was a mushroom picker. I shot him. I left him by the side of the road,” Grusing recalled Kimball telling him.

Grusing contacted local authorities to investigate the claim, but they could not identify a corresponding homicide.

When confronted with the discrepancy, Kimball refused to provide straightforward answers.

“No, it’s a puzzle there. Something happened. You just got to figure it out.”

Grusing said he forwarded information about alleged killings to authorities in California, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and other jurisdictions. Investigators and Kimball’s defense attorneys maintained separate lists of potential victims or related claims.

But allegations of additional homicides are not the same as proven crimes. Many of Kimball’s statements remained uncorroborated, and Grusing’s suspicions about other killings should not be confused with judicial findings.

Even so, Grusing remained convinced that Kimball’s four established victims represented only part of his violent history.

“I’m confident he did [kill] from 1986 to 2006. So he had a 20-year period.”

In one of their final meetings before Grusing retired in 2021, Kimball again discussed alleged killings in Montana and Alaska. Grusing believed the suspect was deliberately withholding details necessary to substantiate those crimes.

After years of pursuing similar claims, the former agent had reached his limit.

“I just told him, ‘Scott, I don’t have time for this.’”

He explained that Kimball appeared to want favorable consideration without providing the information necessary to justify it.

“He wanted consideration. I mean, he didn’t ask for stuff off his sentence, but that’s what he wanted.”

The episode captured the continuing dilemma facing investigators who work with criminal sources. Information about an unresolved homicide can be extraordinarily valuable, but it can also become a bargaining instrument in the hands of someone determined to manipulate the system.

What the Kimball Case Teaches Human Intelligence Professionals

Although the investigation culminated in a serial killer’s conviction, its broader significance lies in the way Kimball exploited the human intelligence process itself.

Confidential informants are indispensable in investigations involving organized crime, terrorism, gangs, narcotics trafficking, and other activities that cannot easily be penetrated through conventional investigative methods. The information they provide can identify dangerous offenders, prevent violence, locate victims, and establish criminal conspiracies.

Yet the relationship between a handler and a source is inherently complicated. Both individuals have objectives, and those objectives do not always align.

Kimball recognized that investigators wanted to prevent homicides and solve difficult cases. He presented information designed to satisfy those objectives while simultaneously increasing his own credibility and influence.

His tactics raise several important considerations for the law enforcement and intelligence communities.

First, historical source reliability should never be treated as permanent proof of trustworthiness. The Alaska case illustrates how an apparently successful operation can continue influencing institutional perceptions even after the underlying prosecution collapses.

Second, informant reporting must be independently corroborated whenever possible. Kimball’s ability to manufacture criminal narratives demonstrated that specific details, coded conversations, and apparent insider knowledge can be misleading when the source has helped create the circumstances being reported.

Third, investigators must account for the emotional and professional incentives that influence their own decision-making. A handler who believes a source has prevented a murder may become personally invested in the source’s continued credibility. That investment can create resistance to contradictory evidence.

Fourth, compartmentalization and independent oversight are critical. Investigators who spend extended periods with persuasive offenders may develop distorted assessments, particularly when the subject is skilled at building rapport and exploiting personal vulnerabilities.

Finally, the Kimball investigation demonstrates the enduring importance of traditional investigative work. Grusing’s most productive advances did not emerge from sophisticated surveillance technology alone. They came from interviewing former cellmates, reviewing historical police reports, analyzing recorded conversations, comparing timelines, and listening to victim families.

The case was ultimately built through the accumulation of human intelligence and independently developed evidence.

The Emotional Cost of Investigating Evil

Toward the conclusion of our interview, I asked Grusing how he managed the psychological consequences of spending so many years investigating an individual responsible for such profound suffering.

His answer revealed another dimension of the case, one that is often overlooked in discussions about homicide investigations and violent offenders.

Grusing acknowledged that prolonged exposure to Kimball affected his personal life. The emotional exhaustion of searching for victims, enduring the suspect’s manipulation, and maintaining relationships with grieving families occasionally followed him home.

“Every once in a while, all of Scott’s [behavior], I would spend so much time with him that that would affect me as a dad, as a husband.”

He recognized changes in his patience and behavior that were inconsistent with his normal temperament.

“I would lose my patience. I would yell at my kids. You can maybe tell from [talking to me], I’m not a yeller. I don’t yell, period.”

The cumulative stress required conscious attention. Physical activity, personal relationships, and conversations with trusted individuals became important mechanisms for managing the emotional burden.

“I think you have to talk about it,” Grusing said.

He warned that investigators who repeatedly suppress the emotional consequences of disturbing cases can experience serious psychological harm.

“It becomes cancerous if you don’t talk about stuff like this.”

For Grusing, faith also provided an essential framework for understanding the suffering he encountered. He spoke about the importance of maintaining a belief in justice and human goodness after repeatedly confronting someone he regarded as profoundly evil.

“You have to have some sort of faith outside of yourself or you get very cynical about human nature and you can just go down.”

He described how working with Kimball forced him to confront the apparent absence of empathy, remorse, and ordinary human compassion.

“For me, I had to go back to my faith to where there is a straight line, there is a God, there is justice, there is, you know, all these things of love and mercy, the things that we chase. And that Scott had chosen to do the opposite of each one of those.”

Those observations carry considerable importance for a profession in which investigators are frequently expected to maintain emotional composure while repeatedly encountering extreme violence, abuse, and human suffering.

Professional resilience cannot simply mean remaining unaffected. It also requires recognizing when a case is changing the investigator and seeking appropriate support before those effects become destructive.

The Devil I Knew: A Career Defined by One Extraordinary Investigation

Grusing retired from the FBI in 2021, bringing an end to his formal investigative relationship with Kimball. He has since continued discussing the case with students, criminal justice professionals, and audiences interested in criminal behavior and investigative psychology.

He also authored The Devil I Knew, a detailed account of the investigation and the man who consumed so much of his professional life.

The title was not selected casually.

“I chose it well. I mean, I didn’t choose it lightly because Scott is the closest thing to evil that I’ve met with.”

Grusing explained that although he investigated numerous individuals responsible for serious violence, Kimball stood apart because of what appeared to be his enjoyment of causing harm.

“He’s the only person I met who enjoyed doing it.”

Other killers, Grusing observed, often acted from recognizable motives, including anger, financial gain, revenge, or efforts to conceal another offense. Kimball’s conduct seemed different because violence and manipulation appeared to provide gratification in their own right.

“A lot of people kill because they have a secret to protect. Some kill because they’ve had an ongoing feud with the person, a family member, and they lost their temper, others to get attention. But Scott’s the only one that really liked doing it.”

Kimball even expressed an interest in being associated with a distinctive serial killer nickname.

“He wanted me to call him the opportunity killer,” Grusing recalled, explaining that Kimball characterized his violence as occurring whenever an opportunity presented itself.

Despite the extraordinary amount of time he devoted to the case, Grusing was careful not to take sole credit for the investigation. He repeatedly acknowledged the contributions of local detectives, federal agents, prosecutors, forensic personnel, behavioral analysts, and the victims’ families.

“The longer I worked on it, the more law enforcement and prosecutors I brought in. So we all worked on this as a team.”

The one outcome he could not achieve remained especially difficult: recovering Jennifer Marcum.

“I felt like I did the very best job I could for these victim families, even though we weren’t able to bring Jennifer home.”

As Grusing explained, Utah authorities have continued pursuing possible leads in the mountainous terrain where Kimball may have concealed her remains.

A Final Lesson in Trust, Manipulation, and Accountability

The Scott Kimball investigation represents one of the most disturbing examples of the risks associated with poorly understood confidential source relationships. Kimball did not simply deceive investigators about his criminal conduct. He learned their priorities, exploited their procedures, manipulated their professional instincts, and repeatedly transformed their desire to protect the public into an opportunity to advance his own interests.

His influence extended across multiple jurisdictions and institutional environments, from prison intelligence reporting and federal investigations to homicide interviews and correctional facilities. Even experienced officers sometimes struggled to recognize the extent of his manipulation.

Yet the same case also demonstrates what disciplined investigation can accomplish. Grusing and his colleagues returned to the evidence, questioned previously accepted assumptions, developed independent human sources, reviewed historical records, and refused to accept Kimball’s narratives without further scrutiny.

Perhaps most importantly, the investigation would not have developed in the same way without the persistence of the families who demanded answers.

For law enforcement executives, intelligence supervisors, confidential source handlers, and homicide investigators, the implications are unmistakable. A source who appears exceptionally valuable may also possess extraordinary incentives to deceive. The more consequential the reporting, the more important it becomes to scrutinize its origins, assess competing explanations, and establish independent corroboration.

Grusing’s experience serves as a reminder that the greatest threat to an intelligence operation is not always an unknown adversary operating beyond law enforcement’s reach. Sometimes the threat is the individual sitting directly across from the handler, offering precisely the information the investigator wants to hear.

After 15 years of interviewing Kimball, examining his crimes, and searching for victims, Grusing reached a conclusion that explains both the title of his book and the lasting impact of the case.

“He’s the closest thing to a devil. And I did know him better than probably his family, anybody else, because of the time I invested trying to bring these victims home.”

For Grusing, the investigation is over. For the families still seeking answers, its consequences remain. And for the human intelligence community, the lessons of Scott Kimball deserve to be studied long after the headlines have faded.

This article is based on an exclusive interview conducted by Benjamin Freedland for The Human Intelligence Ledger with retired FBI Special Agent Jonny Grusing. Direct quotations have been lightly edited for readability. Statements concerning uncharged crimes, alleged additional victims, and individual conduct reflect Grusing’s investigative recollections and assessments rather than independently established judicial findings.

Frank McBride was one of the most prolific and audacious liars I encountered during my nearly seven years in federal custody. I met murderers, organized crime figures, sophisticated fraudsters, drug traffickers, and individuals who had spent much of their lives manipulating other people. But McBride was particularly memorable because of the contrast between his documented criminal history and the extraordinary identity he presented to the people around him. Before he arrived at my federal prison in North Carolina in 2017, he had been implicated in a series of robberies across northeastern Pennsylvania, investigated by the FBI, and sentenced to 110 months in federal prison. Yet when he appeared in my housing unit, the story he wanted people to believe had very little to do with the banks and businesses he had robbed.

McBride portrayed himself as a former New York City firefighter who had suffered catastrophic hearing loss in a helicopter accident. He claimed to be deaf, communicated by reading lips, and said he had attended Gallaudet University, the renowned institution serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students. He displayed photographs of himself near a helicopter, although I never saw evidence establishing that he had actually served as a firefighter. To me, the entire story seemed carefully constructed. What made the situation particularly remarkable was that his claimed disability appeared to help him obtain a private prison cell, specialized communication accommodations, and coveted employment opportunities that other inmates sometimes waited years to receive.

But to understand why McBride’s prison persona was so extraordinary, it is necessary to examine the crimes that brought him into federal custody in the first place.

A Robbery Investigation Begins in Northeastern Pennsylvania

In June 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating a series of attempted bank robberies in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. The incidents attracted federal attention because investigators identified similarities in the methods used during the attempted robberies. According to the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, the perpetrator employed a similar scheme in each attempted bank robbery, providing investigators with a pattern to examine as they attempted to identify the person responsible.

Lackawanna County includes Scranton and surrounding communities, an area where banks, gas stations, and convenience stores serve both neighborhood residents and motorists traveling through northeastern Pennsylvania. The investigation would eventually establish that McBride’s criminal activity was not limited to attempted bank robberies. Federal authorities also connected him to robberies involving gas stations and convenience stores in Scranton and nearby Moosic. What initially appeared to investigators as a series of attempted offenses against financial institutions ultimately developed into a broader case involving multiple types of commercial establishments.

The repeated nature of the incidents was significant. These were not simply allegations arising from one isolated encounter. Investigators were examining a pattern of robberies and attempted robberies that had occurred at different businesses. Each incident required law enforcement to reconstruct what had happened, identify available evidence, and determine whether the same individual was responsible. The similarity among the attempted bank robberies became one of the important features of the investigation.

Robberies involving commercial establishments carry consequences far beyond the amount of money taken. Employees confronted by a robber may have little ability to determine whether a threat will escalate into physical violence. A bank teller, gas station cashier, or convenience store employee may be forced to make decisions under extraordinary pressure while simply trying to survive a shift at work. Although the publicly available FBI announcement does not provide detailed victim statements or describe the precise threats made during each incident, McBride’s convictions included offenses involving robbery and interference with commerce through threats or violence.

How the FBI Connected McBride to the Robberies

The FBI’s investigation relied on a combination of surveillance evidence and cellphone records. According to federal prosecutors, investigators reviewed video surveillance from bank locations and analyzed telephone records to identify McBride as the perpetrator of the attempted bank robberies. This combination of evidence helped investigators move from a pattern of similar offenses toward identifying a specific suspect.

Surveillance footage can provide investigators with important details about a robbery, including the suspect’s appearance, movements, and behavior before and after an incident. Cellphone records can provide additional investigative leads, depending on what information is available and how it relates to the suspected criminal activity. In McBride’s case, federal authorities specifically identified the review of bank surveillance footage and analysis of cellphone records as important factors in determining his involvement.

The FBI’s announcement does not disclose every investigative step or explain precisely how each piece of evidence was used. It does, however, establish that investigators connected McBride to the attempted bank robberies through more than an unsupported accusation. The case involved electronic evidence, surveillance review, and the identification of a common pattern among the offenses.

As the investigation progressed, law enforcement learned that McBride was also responsible for robberies at gas stations and convenience stores in Scranton and Moosic. That development expanded the scope of the case beyond the financial institutions that had initially attracted the FBI’s attention. McBride’s criminal conduct had affected multiple businesses across the region, and federal prosecutors ultimately pursued charges reflecting both bank robbery offenses and robbery involving interstate commerce.

The involvement of federal authorities was particularly consequential. Bank robbery is a federal offense under circumstances specified by federal law, and the Hobbs Act provides federal jurisdiction over robberies that affect interstate commerce. The latter statute is frequently used in cases involving commercial robberies when the required connection to interstate commerce can be established. McBride’s eventual guilty plea reflected the seriousness of the conduct prosecutors attributed to him.

The Guilty Plea and a Nine-Year Federal Prison Sentence

In March 2015, McBride pleaded guilty to bank robbery, attempted bank robbery, and Hobbs Act robbery. His guilty plea meant that the federal case would proceed to sentencing without a trial on those charges. The plea also placed him in a dramatically different position from someone merely suspected of criminal conduct. McBride had formally admitted guilt to federal robbery offenses.

On September 9, 2015, United States District Judge Robert D. Mariani sentenced McBride, then 29 years old and identified as a resident of Scranton, to 110 months in federal prison. That amounted to nine years and two months of imprisonment. The judge also ordered him to pay $9,829 in restitution and imposed three years of supervised release following his prison term. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Michelle L. Olshefski following the FBI investigation.

The restitution order was another significant element of the sentence. Although the publicly available announcement does not itemize every loss associated with the offenses, the court’s order established a financial obligation arising from McBride’s criminal conduct. The sentence also meant that his involvement with the federal criminal justice system would extend beyond his period of incarceration, with supervision required after release.

Additional reporting covered new robbery charges filed against McBride, further illustrating the scope of the law enforcement attention surrounding his activities. The FBI’s sentencing announcement provides the clearest confirmed account of the federal convictions, while the local reporting points to additional proceedings that warrant examination through the underlying court records.

McBride was not a man who had simply made a mistake and found himself facing a brief period of incarceration. His federal convictions arose from multiple robbery offenses, and his sentence reflected the seriousness of those crimes. By the time he entered the federal prison system, he had already demonstrated a willingness to repeatedly target businesses for financial gain.

What I would later observe was a very different form of behavior, one that involved persuasion, elaborate personal claims, and an apparent talent for navigating institutional bureaucracy.

From Convicted Robber to Supposedly Deaf Firefighter

In 2017, McBride arrived at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, where I was incarcerated. He was assigned to my housing unit, Georgia Tech, one of several units within the institution. Butner housed a variety of federal offenders, including high-profile prisoners and individuals who had experienced difficulties at other correctional facilities. I was accustomed to encountering unusual personalities and extraordinary personal histories, but McBride immediately stood out.

He claimed that he had served with the New York City Fire Department and had suffered permanent hearing loss in a helicopter accident. He presented himself as deaf and told inmates that he relied on reading lips to understand conversations. He also claimed to have attended Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., an institution internationally recognized for its educational programs serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students. To reinforce the story, he showed people photographs of himself with a helicopter. I never saw photographs establishing his claimed FDNY service, nor did I see reliable documentation supporting his account of the accident.

I found his stories difficult to believe. The combination of firefighting heroism, a catastrophic helicopter accident, specialized university education, and a complicated criminal history seemed extraordinary. His accounts also struck me as inconsistent. I came to believe that he had constructed a personal identity designed to influence how people perceived and treated him. I strongly suspected that his claimed deafness was part of that identity, although I did not have access to medical evidence establishing his actual hearing ability.

McBride’s claimed disability was not merely a story he told other inmates. It was associated with substantial institutional accommodations. He was assigned a cell by himself, a significant advantage in an environment where most prisoners shared living quarters. He also received access to video communication accommodations unavailable to the general population. My understanding was that he had previously generated administrative disputes at another institution concerning his treatment as a supposedly deaf prisoner. By the time he arrived at Butner, he appeared to know how to press his demands through the prison bureaucracy.

The Television Dispute That Made Him a Target of Resentment

One of the most memorable controversies involving McBride concerned television access in our housing unit. Georgia Tech had four televisions, and the viewing arrangements were governed by longstanding informal understandings among different groups of prisoners. One television was predominantly used by Black inmates, another by Hispanic inmates, and another by white inmates. These arrangements reflected the social dynamics of prison life and had existed before McBride arrived.

Anyone who has spent time in federal prison understands that television access can become an unexpectedly sensitive issue. Inmates spend years living within highly restricted environments, and familiar programs, sporting events, and news broadcasts become important parts of daily routines. Control over a television can represent status and influence, and disputes over viewing arrangements sometimes create significant hostility.

McBride decided that he wanted a television specifically designated for deaf inmates. His demand threatened to disrupt established arrangements and generated considerable resentment among prisoners who already questioned his credibility. To many inmates, it appeared that McBride was once again invoking his claimed disability to obtain something that other prisoners could not readily secure. The controversy further damaged his reputation, and he became deeply unpopular among much of the housing unit.

From my perspective, McBride appeared remarkably indifferent to whether other prisoners liked or respected him. He was persistent in pursuing his demands and seemed willing to create administrative difficulties if doing so might produce a favorable outcome. His interactions with staff often appeared contentious, but that did not seem to prevent him from obtaining accommodations and opportunities.

Three Coveted Jobs and an Extraordinary Ability to Navigate the System

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of McBride’s incarceration at Butner was his access to desirable prison employment. Federal prison jobs exist within a hierarchy, and some assignments are substantially more attractive than others. Ordinary institutional jobs often pay very little, while certain positions offer better compensation, more desirable working conditions, or greater access to institutional resources. Prisoners sometimes wait years for opportunities that become available only when positions open.

At Butner, UNICOR, the trade name for Federal Prison Industries, operated an eyeglasses manufacturing facility. Employment in the factory was highly sought after because it generally offered better wages than many ordinary prison assignments. Some inmates spent years waiting for an opening. McBride managed to secure employment there, an accomplishment that attracted attention among prisoners who understood how difficult such positions could be to obtain.

He subsequently obtained a position teaching sign language to inmates in the Adam Walsh unit, which housed individuals convicted of sexual offenses. This was another comparatively desirable assignment, and it was particularly notable because it drew directly upon the identity he promoted as a deaf individual with specialized knowledge of sign language. McBride also obtained employment in the visitation department, where he took photographs of inmates with their visiting family members. That position was another coveted opportunity that many prisoners would have welcomed.

To my knowledge, McBride obtained all three assignments during his incarceration at Butner. Whether he held them simultaneously or at different times, the pattern was remarkable. I knew inmates who had waited years for even one comparable position, yet McBride seemed capable of persuading the institution to provide him with opportunity after opportunity.

The contrast with his criminal history was striking. A man convicted of repeatedly robbing businesses was now presenting himself as a disabled public servant and obtaining some of the most desirable opportunities available inside a federal prison. I cannot establish why administrators made each employment decision, but the outcome was difficult to ignore.

The Irish Citizenship Story and Other Extraordinary Claims

McBride’s supposed firefighting career was only one part of his personal mythology. He also told me that he was an Irish citizen and had previously been detained by immigration authorities because of his citizenship. He claimed to have been incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Canaan, Pennsylvania. These stories were delivered with the same confidence that characterized his accounts of the helicopter accident and his claimed education at Gallaudet University.

I could not independently verify those assertions. What struck me was the sheer number of extraordinary experiences he claimed to have lived through. There always seemed to be another unusual circumstance, another institution where he had supposedly encountered difficulties, or another explanation for why his situation was different from everyone else’s.

His stories were not necessarily impossible when considered individually. Firefighters can suffer disabling injuries, people can attend specialized universities, and prisoners can have complicated immigration histories. But the accumulation of extraordinary claims, combined with his behavior and the institutional advantages he received, made me increasingly suspicious that he was constructing a persona designed to serve his interests.

Allegations of Fraud Inside Federal Prison Industries

Approximately a year after I left Butner, I heard allegations that McBride had been involved in fraudulent activity connected to the UNICOR eyeglasses manufacturing operation. According to information relayed to me, McBride had allegedly obtained access to purchasing resources associated with the factory and used them to acquire valuable merchandise. I was told that the merchandise was shipped to a girlfriend in Pennsylvania, who allegedly sold the items.

The alleged activity involved the improper use of purchasing funds or credit associated with the factory to obtain merchandise for personal benefit. I did not witness these transactions and have not independently verified the allegations through investigative records, criminal charges, or institutional findings. They therefore remain allegations rather than established facts.

Nevertheless, the information immediately caught my attention because it concerned the same inmate whose ability to obtain desirable jobs and institutional accommodations had astonished me. If substantiated, such conduct would raise serious questions about purchasing controls, financial oversight, and inmate access to institutional resources within Federal Prison Industries.

The Robber, the Firefighter, and the Questions That Remain

Frank McBride’s story is remarkable because it involves two very different identities. The first is established through federal criminal proceedings: a man convicted of robbery offenses involving banks and other commercial establishments in northeastern Pennsylvania, investigated by the FBI, and sentenced to more than nine years in federal prison. The second is the identity he promoted after arriving at Butner: a deaf former New York City firefighter, a helicopter accident survivor, a Gallaudet University alumnus, and an Irish citizen who claimed to have experienced immigration detention.

I personally witnessed the second identity being presented to inmates and observed many of the institutional advantages McBride received. I also developed serious doubts about the truthfulness of his stories. My belief that he was manipulating the system, including through his claimed deafness, remains based on my firsthand observations rather than an independently established finding of disability fraud.

Federal correctional institutions have an obligation to accommodate prisoners with legitimate disabilities. That responsibility is essential and should never be undermined by suspicion alone. But institutions also have an obligation to verify claims appropriately, supervise employment assignments, and ensure that limited opportunities are administered fairly.

McBride’s documented criminal history involved repeated robberies and the taking of property through criminal conduct. His behavior at Butner, as I perceived it, involved a different kind of manipulation: the use of an extraordinary personal narrative to influence the people responsible for making decisions about his confinement.

I cannot establish that every story McBride told was false, nor can I independently verify the subsequent allegations involving UNICOR. What I can say is that I lived alongside him, heard his claims, observed the controversies he generated, and watched him obtain privileges that many other prisoners could only hope to receive.

Frank McBride entered federal prison because of a series of robberies. What I witnessed afterward convinced me that his ability to persuade and manipulate people extended far beyond the crimes that brought him there.

And after nearly seven years in federal custody, he remains one of the most extraordinary individuals I encountered behind prison walls.

Sources

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Scranton Man Sentenced to Prison for Area Robberies, September 9, 2015.

WNEP, New Robbery Charges Filed Against McBride.

Author’s note: The criminal convictions and sentence described above are supported by federal records. The account of McBride’s behavior and claims at Butner is based on my firsthand recollections. His hearing status, purported firefighting background, and the subsequent allegations of UNICOR fraud have not been independently verified.

Garrett Langley has built a company whose cameras help police identify suspects, locate vehicles, and solve crimes. But as Flock‘s technology has expanded across the United States, its founder has found himself confronting something increasingly difficult to control: the national debate over government surveillance, personal privacy, and the limits of police authority.

On Sunday, at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition in Orlando, Langley confronted those controversies directly in a candid discussion with IACP President David Rausch, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

The conversation was far more than a presentation about automated license plate recognition. It was an examination of the responsibilities accompanying increasingly powerful investigative technology, the public backlash against Flock, the potential for law enforcement misuse, and the personal consequences of becoming a highly visible figure in one of America’s most contentious public safety debates.

Langley acknowledged mistakes. He criticized the way his comments have been portrayed in the media. He defended Flock’s technology against accusations of pervasive surveillance and described changes intended to strengthen accountability. And in one of the more revealing exchanges, Rausch raised the difficulty of becoming a public figure when one is naturally a private individual.

For an audience of police chiefs and law enforcement executives, the discussion presented a fundamental question: Can technology designed to make communities safer also preserve the constitutional freedoms those same agencies are sworn to protect?

A Private Man at the Center of a Public Firestorm

One of the most compelling moments came when Rausch turned the conversation away from technology and toward the man behind it. He raised the challenges of navigating intense public scrutiny as someone who had not necessarily sought a prominent public role.

Langley, whose company has become a lightning rod for criticism from privacy advocates and opponents of government surveillance, described the difficulties of communicating complex issues in an environment increasingly dominated by abbreviated interviews, headlines, and social media clips.

He suggested that statements made during longer conversations had been stripped of their original context, creating impressions that did not accurately reflect his intended message.

“You get 30 seconds, and that’s gonna get down to 15 seconds,” Langley remarked, describing the difficulty of explaining complicated issues through brief media appearances.

He also acknowledged that his years leading Flock have included decisions he would reconsider. Referring to advice from his wife about accepting mistakes, Langley discussed the importance of acknowledging errors rather than allowing criticism to prevent continued progress.

“People make mistakes,” he said, recalling that advice.

Langley also appeared to acknowledge making numerous mistakes over the company’s nine-year history, while emphasizing that the experience has provided lessons about leadership, communication, and accountability.

The exchange offered an unusually personal dimension to a debate that frequently treats technology executives as little more than representatives of their products. For Langley, the controversy is no longer confined to software specifications or municipal contracts. It has become a public examination of his judgment, his company’s intentions, and the consequences of the technology he helped create.

Is Flock Surveillance? Langley Challenges the Accusation

Perhaps no word has become more closely associated with criticism of Flock than surveillance.

Langley challenged that characterization, arguing that automated license plate recognition cameras should not be confused with systems that continuously record or monitor individuals.

“It’s important that we keep a critical point … it’s a static image,” he explained.

He described the technology as capturing images of passing vehicles rather than continuously recording everything occurring within a camera’s field of view.

“It’s not continuously recording. It only takes a picture,” Langley said, according to the rough transcript.

His argument was that photographing a vehicle at a particular location is fundamentally different from placing an individual under constant observation.

Yet the distinction is not necessarily as simple as it sounds. When individual cameras are connected across cities, counties, and jurisdictions, their observations can potentially be combined to reconstruct vehicle movements. That capability can provide extraordinary investigative value, particularly in cases involving violent crime, missing persons, and organized criminal activity. It can also create opportunities for intrusive searches if access is not appropriately controlled.

Langley broadened the discussion by pointing to the substantial quantities of personal information already collected by private companies.

“You have a cell phone in your pocket … AT&T has my location,” he observed.

The comparison raised an uncomfortable question: Why do Americans routinely surrender extensive location information to commercial entities while viewing similar investigative capabilities in government hands with considerably greater suspicion?

There are important legal and constitutional differences between commercial data collection and government surveillance. Nevertheless, Langley’s broader point was that society must confront the relationship between technology, privacy, and public safety rather than pretending those competing interests can always be reconciled without compromise.

Seven Days or Thirty? The Fight Over Data Retention

Among the most consequential issues discussed was how long Flock’s cameras should retain information about vehicles passing through their networks.

Langley explained that Flock originally adopted a 30-day retention period, even as some law enforcement executives questioned whether that window would provide sufficient time to conduct investigations.

“I think we can build a good enough product that you can solve a lot of crime in 30 days,” he recalled telling early customers.

More recently, the company recommended shortening that period to seven days, a decision that prompted concern among some police leaders.

Langley explained that the recommendation reflected an effort to anticipate changing legislative expectations.

“I’m trying to read where I think legislation is going,” he said.

But criminal investigations rarely operate on predictable schedules. Victims sometimes wait days before reporting crimes. Detectives may spend weeks identifying suspects. A vehicle that initially appears insignificant can suddenly become critical evidence after investigators develop additional information.

Reducing retention periods can protect privacy by limiting the amount of historical information available for searches. It can also eliminate potentially valuable evidence before investigators know they need it.

Langley acknowledged the competing interests and emphasized that communities should participate in determining the appropriate balance.

“We should go to city council,” he said, discussing the importance of involving elected officials in these decisions.

He characterized the broader objective as finding a workable compromise.

“I think we’ll try to find a national middle ground,” Langley remarked.

For police chiefs, the implications are significant. A seven-day retention policy may satisfy certain privacy concerns while creating serious investigative limitations. A longer period may preserve critical evidence but also expand the amount of information available for government examination.

Neither decision should be made without understanding its consequences.

Can Police Officers Abuse the System? Langley Acknowledges the Risk

One of the most sensitive subjects involved the potential misuse of Flock’s investigative technology by law enforcement personnel.

Langley acknowledged that individual officers can make improper decisions and discussed the company’s efforts to create safeguards that identify questionable system activity.

He described a feature developed in response to requests from law enforcement customers that was subsequently expanded across the platform.

“We decided to make it a mandatory feature in August,” he said.

The discussion also addressed the possibility of requiring officers to complete recurring training before accessing the system.

Langley described an approach involving training twice annually, with access dependent upon satisfying those requirements.

“I think that’ll help,” he said.

The significance of those safeguards should not be underestimated. A system capable of helping investigators locate a homicide suspect could also be misused by someone searching for a former romantic partner, acquaintance, or other individual without a legitimate investigative purpose.

Technology does not eliminate human misconduct. It can, however, be designed to make improper activity more difficult to conceal and easier to investigate.

For law enforcement agencies, the responsibility extends beyond vendor safeguards. Supervisory review, documented investigative purposes, audit trails, and meaningful disciplinary consequences remain essential.

Does Flock Sell Your Information?

Langley also addressed a recurring allegation that information collected through Flock’s cameras could be sold or commercially exploited.

His response was unequivocal.

“We have no right to resell,” Langley stated.

He asserted that the company’s contractual arrangements do not permit it to resell customer information and that Flock has no intention of pursuing such a business model.

The assurance addressed one specific concern, but it did not eliminate the broader questions surrounding who controls the information, which agencies can access it, how long it remains available, and whether searches are subject to sufficient oversight.

Those questions are particularly important because license plate recognition databases can contain information about individuals who have committed no crime.

The challenge for police leaders is to ensure that powerful investigative capabilities remain directed toward legitimate law enforcement purposes rather than becoming instruments of unrestricted information gathering.

The Real Measure of Police Success: Crimes Solved

Beyond the controversy, Langley and Rausch explored a subject that deserves considerably more attention in discussions about American policing: investigative clearance rates.

Langley argued that law enforcement agencies should focus not only on reported crime levels but also on how effectively investigators identify offenders and resolve cases.

“I think that we focus a lot on the volume of crime,” he observed.

He suggested that the public deserves to understand what police departments accomplish after a crime occurs, including their ability to identify suspects, recover evidence, and bring investigations toward resolution.

The argument has substantial implications. For decades, police departments have frequently been evaluated by whether crime rises or falls within their jurisdictions. Yet a department’s ability to solve serious offenses is another essential measure of effectiveness.

Langley referenced agencies reporting strong clearance rates and suggested that improved investigative performance can contribute to reductions in future criminal activity.

The underlying principle is straightforward: Identifying offenders can interrupt ongoing criminal behavior, while the perceived likelihood of apprehension can influence deterrence.

However, the effectiveness of any particular technology must be evaluated through reliable evidence rather than isolated success stories.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, the discussion also highlighted the continuing importance of human intelligence. Automated cameras can identify vehicles, generate investigative leads, and help reconstruct movements. They cannot independently establish criminal intent, evaluate the credibility of a confidential source, or replace the judgment of an experienced investigator.

The strongest investigations frequently depend on combining technological intelligence with witness cooperation, confidential informants, surveillance conducted under appropriate legal authority, and the relationships developed by skilled investigators.

Technology can reveal where a vehicle traveled. Human intelligence can help explain why.

Langley’s Message to Police Chiefs: Stop Letting Others Tell Your Story

Another revealing exchange focused on how police departments communicate their accomplishments to the public.

Langley argued that many agencies fail to explain the positive outcomes associated with investigative technology until controversy forces them into a defensive position.

By then, public perceptions may already have been shaped by allegations of misconduct or fears about surveillance.

He challenged police executives to become more proactive.

“What would it look like if the chief actually went on TV once a week and talked about all the good things his agency was doing for the community?” Langley asked.

The suggestion was more than a public relations strategy. When residents understand how investigators solve crimes, recover victims, and identify dangerous offenders, they are better positioned to evaluate the tools their police departments use.

Conversely, when the first public discussion of a technology occurs after an allegation of abuse, agencies may find themselves attempting to explain its benefits amid an atmosphere of distrust.

Langley suggested that police leaders should communicate investigative successes more consistently, including through short videos and other accessible forms of public engagement.

But effective communication must include more than success stories. Agencies must also be willing to acknowledge mistakes, explain safeguards, and demonstrate that inappropriate use carries consequences.

Public trust is not established simply by telling communities that technology works. It is established by showing that the people entrusted with using it can be held accountable.

“We Assumed This Would Blow Over”: Langley Admits Flock Got It Wrong

Perhaps the most consequential admission came when Langley reflected on the company’s response to the criticism it faced.

Rather than immediately addressing concerns and engaging law enforcement customers, Flock initially underestimated the controversy.

“We assumed this would blow over,” Langley acknowledged.

He then admitted that the company had been slow to respond.

“We were really slow,” he said.

For the founder of a company whose technology has become deeply integrated into law enforcement operations, the acknowledgment was significant.

Langley recognized that developing software for police agencies carries responsibilities that differ from those associated with ordinary commercial technology.

Law enforcement systems operate within institutions exercising government authority. Their products can affect investigations, individual liberty, and constitutional protections.

That reality demands higher standards of testing, transparency, and accountability.

Langley described changes intended to address those responsibilities, including more deliberate product development and outside evaluations.

“We’re going to have third-party test this software,” he said.

He also discussed involving police executives more directly in decisions about new products and changes to existing systems.

“That’s very different than having a group of chiefs that you’ve asked to be your participant in the development process,” Langley observed.

The company, he explained, has moved toward a more structured advisory approach involving chiefs from different states and departments of varying sizes.

The intention is to give law enforcement executives a greater voice before new capabilities are introduced rather than relying exclusively on informal conversations after decisions have already been made.

Whether these measures will satisfy critics remains uncertain. But Langley’s remarks suggested that the company has recognized the consequences of developing powerful investigative technology without sufficiently anticipating the public debate surrounding its use.

A Defining Moment for Flock and the Future of American Policing

What unfolded in Orlando was more than a technology executive defending his company before an audience of police chiefs.

It was a revealing examination of the collision between innovation, government authority, personal privacy, and public accountability.

Langley defended the investigative value of Flock’s cameras while acknowledging that the company had made mistakes in communicating with the public and responding to criticism. He discussed the personal difficulty of becoming a public figure, the limitations of abbreviated media coverage, and the responsibilities that accompany developing technology used by government agencies.

For police leaders, the discussion raised questions that extend far beyond one company.

How much information should investigators be permitted to collect? How long should it be retained? Who should have access? What safeguards are sufficient to prevent misconduct? And how should agencies demonstrate that the public safety benefits justify the potential intrusion into individual privacy?

These are not questions that can be answered by technology executives alone.

They require the participation of police chiefs, elected officials, constitutional scholars, privacy advocates, investigators, and the communities whose information may be collected.

Langley’s appearance at IACP offered a glimpse of a company attempting to navigate those competing interests while continuing to advocate for the investigative capabilities it has helped introduce.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, the most important conclusion is that technology must remain a tool in the hands of accountable investigators, not a substitute for sound judgment, lawful investigative practices, or human intelligence.

The future of American policing will increasingly involve sophisticated databases, interconnected cameras, artificial intelligence, and rapidly evolving analytical systems. But the profession’s legitimacy will continue to depend on the same foundational principles that have always distinguished effective law enforcement: integrity, accountability, public trust, and respect for constitutional rights.

Flock may be helping transform how police solve crimes. The larger question is whether the company, the agencies using its technology, and the communities they serve can agree on the limits of that transformation.

The Human Intelligence Ledger reports on human intelligence, confidential source management, criminal investigations, law enforcement leadership, and the people and technologies shaping public safety.

Editorial note: Quotations are based on a rough transcription of the live discussion. Direct quotations and speaker attribution should be checked against the original recording before publication.

The Hollywood Bodyguard I Knew in 2013

In 2013, I was working as an assistant to an A-list Hollywood celebrity whose personal security operation was led by Gilad Peled, an Israeli-born private security operative who presented himself as having substantial experience in military and intelligence operations. My position placed me in direct contact with Peled and gave me firsthand familiarity with the environment in which he operated, one characterized by extraordinary wealth, sensitive personal information, elaborate security arrangements, and individuals entrusted with protecting some of the most recognizable figures in entertainment. I am intimately knowledgeable about incidents involving allegations of threats and intimidation by Peled toward people in 2013, including individuals close to me. Those experiences provided a perspective on Peled that I would remember long after my time working in Hollywood.

Because of a confidential settlement agreement, I will not identify the celebrity or discuss the private circumstances surrounding my employment. The celebrity’s identity is not necessary to understand this investigation, which concerns Peled’s background, his subsequent involvement in a federal murder-for-hire conspiracy, and the questions raised by his cooperation with federal prosecutors. What is relevant is that I knew Peled years before his name became associated with a criminal case involving two murders, extensive surveillance, military-trained operatives, and more than a million dollars in financial transfers.

For years, my encounters with Peled remained part of a largely closed chapter in my life. Then, more than a decade later, I searched his name and discovered something extraordinary. The man I had known as a prominent celebrity security operative had become a central participant in a conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of Holly Williams and William Lanway in Nashville, Tennessee. He had pleaded guilty to federal charges, cooperated with the United States government, and testified against three other defendants. The discovery led me into an investigation that revealed a disturbing intersection of private security, disputed intelligence credentials, criminal surveillance, murder, and federal cooperation.

The Mossad Claims and the Military Background Behind the Reputation

One of the most revealing aspects of Peled’s story concerns the military and intelligence credentials he reportedly used to establish himself in the American private security industry. According to investigative reporting by Texas Monthly

Texas Min its podcast The Problem With Erik, Peled promoted himself to prospective clients as someone with experience in Israel’s elite military and intelligence organizations, including the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. The prestige associated with those institutions can be enormously valuable in the private security industry, where wealthy clients may seek individuals they believe possess exceptional operational training, clandestine experience, and the ability to manage sensitive or dangerous situations.

The distinction between Peled’s reported claims and his documented military background is significant. According to Texas Monthly, Peled served his mandatory three years in the Israel Defense Forces as a tank commander. The publication reported that he trained alongside special forces personnel but was not himself an operator in those elite units. Serving as a tank commander is legitimate military experience, but it is substantially different from serving in an elite special operations unit or working as an intelligence officer for the Mossad. Each role involves distinct training, responsibilities, and operational experience, and none should be represented as interchangeable.

Federal court proceedings also reflected uncertainty surrounding the intelligence credentials attributed to Peled. Reporting by Law&Crime in July 2022 described federal charging documents that referred to him as a purported former member of the Mossad. His service in the Israeli military was subsequently acknowledged in federal proceedings, but the publicly available records cited in this article do not independently establish that he served as a Mossad officer. That distinction matters because claims of elite intelligence service can confer immediate credibility upon individuals seeking private security contracts, particularly when prospective clients have limited means of independently verifying foreign military or intelligence backgrounds.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, the issue goes beyond one man’s résumé. The private security industry relies heavily upon trust, professional competence, discretion, and accurate representations of experience. When someone claims to have served in an elite intelligence organization, that claim can influence decisions involving access to sensitive information, physical security arrangements, and the protection of influential individuals. Peled’s reported representations therefore raise legitimate questions about how he marketed his services, what his clients understood about his qualifications, and whether the prestige associated with organizations such as the Mossad helped him establish his professional reputation in the United States.

Read Texas Monthly’s compelling long-form article accompanying its investigative podcast, The Problem With Erik by clicking the following link below:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcast/the-problem-with-erik-episode-3-the-fixer/

and listen to the podcast by following the link below:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcasts/series/the-problem-with-erik/

From Celebrity Security to Speartip Security

By the time the Nashville conspiracy began, Peled was operating Speartip Security, an Austin, Texas-based private security company. The transition from protecting a prominent Hollywood celebrity to operating an independent security business was not inherently unusual. Experienced executive protection professionals frequently establish companies providing protective services, investigations, threat assessments, and other security-related work. The business can involve extensive access to confidential information, including clients’ personal relationships, movements, financial circumstances, and perceived vulnerabilities. Such access creates considerable responsibility because the same information that can help protect a client can also be misused.

The federal prosecution involving Peled demonstrated how the capabilities associated with private security and investigative operations could become part of an organized criminal conspiracy. Surveillance, information gathering, operational coordination, and the recruitment of individuals with military backgrounds all featured prominently in the Nashville case. These activities were not inherently criminal in isolation, but the evidence established that they were ultimately directed toward locating and killing two individuals. Peled’s role was particularly significant because he connected the person financing the operation with the individuals who conducted surveillance and carried out the murders.

The Affair That Set the Conspiracy in Motion

The Nashville case began with an extramarital relationship involving Erik Charles Maund, an executive associated with his family’s automobile dealerships in Austin, Texas. Maund had been involved with Holly Williams, a Nashville woman. According to federal prosecutors, William Lanway subsequently attempted to extort Maund by threatening to reveal the relationship to his family. The alleged extortion created a problem Maund apparently wanted resolved without public exposure, and rather than simply report the matter to law enforcement, he turned to Peled for assistance.

Peled became involved in investigating the situation and gathering information about Williams and Lanway. What initially appeared to be a private security or investigative assignment expanded into a much more serious operation involving additional participants, surveillance, and financial arrangements.

Peled recruited Bryon Brockway and Adam Carey, individuals with military and security backgrounds who became involved in the operation. Other individuals, including Anthony Repinski and David Conaway, participated in investigative and surveillance activities associated with the broader effort. The group gathered information about Williams and Lanway, monitored their movements, and developed knowledge of their activities.

Federal prosecutors established that the operation ultimately progressed into an agreement to have Williams and Lanway killed. Peled served as an intermediary between Maund and the individuals recruited to carry out the violence. During the subsequent federal trial, Peled testified that Maund agreed to pay Brockway and Carey $100,000 each to murder the two victims. Federal court filings also described an alleged $750,000 arrangement involving Maund and Peled to organize the killings. These amounts represented different aspects of the financial arrangements described during the prosecution, but they illustrated the extraordinary resources committed to a conspiracy that began with an alleged extortion threat.

The progression from information gathering to murder is one of the most disturbing elements of the case. Legitimate private investigators routinely gather information for clients facing extortion, harassment, fraud, or other threats. However, when surveillance is conducted for the purpose of locating, abducting, or killing individuals, the activity becomes part of a fundamentally different enterprise. In Nashville, the government’s evidence established that the victims were monitored before being murdered, demonstrating how investigative capabilities were exploited in furtherance of criminal objectives.

March 12, 2020: The Murders of Holly Williams and William Lanway

On March 12, 2020, Holly Williams and William Lanway were attacked in Nashville, Tennessee. According to federal court records, the victims were targeted outside Williams’ apartment complex in West Nashville following an extended period of surveillance and planning. Lanway was shot multiple times, while Williams was kidnapped and transported to a nearby construction site on Old Hickory Boulevard, where she was killed. Their bodies were discovered the following morning inside Williams’ vehicle. The killings were the culmination of a conspiracy involving surveillance, interstate coordination, financial arrangements, and individuals with backgrounds in private security and military service.

The murders were not spontaneous acts of violence arising from an unexpected confrontation. The evidence presented by federal prosecutors established that the killings resulted from an organized operation in which individuals were identified, monitored, and ultimately targeted. The conspirators had gathered information about the victims before the attacks, and the financial transactions surrounding the operation provided investigators with evidence connecting the individuals responsible. Peled’s role was central because he facilitated the relationship between Maund, who financed the operation, and the individuals who carried out the violence.

The human cost of the conspiracy must not be lost amid the extraordinary details of the case. Holly Williams and William Lanway were murdered because of a dispute involving personal relationships and an alleged attempt to obtain money through threats of disclosure. Whatever disagreements or alleged misconduct preceded their deaths, neither victim deserved to be kidnapped or killed. Their families were left to confront the consequences of a conspiracy in which money, surveillance, and calculated violence converged.

The Million-Dollar Financial Trail

The financial evidence became one of the most consequential components of the federal prosecution. On March 12, 2020, the same day Williams and Lanway were murdered, Maund transferred approximately $150,000 to Peled. Over approximately the following year, Maund transferred another $900,000, bringing the total documented transfers to approximately $1.05 million. Peled withdrew cash and facilitated payments to other participants, including Brockway and Carey. These transactions helped investigators establish the relationships among the conspirators and demonstrated that the financial arrangements continued beyond the date of the murders.

The amounts discussed during the prosecution require careful distinction. The alleged $750,000 agreement involving Maund and Peled, the $100,000 payments Peled described for each of the killers, and the approximately $1.05 million in documented transfers represented different aspects of the operation rather than interchangeable totals. The financial records became important corroborating evidence because they established dates, amounts, and relationships independently of witness recollections. In a prosecution involving cooperating defendants and serious allegations of criminal conspiracy, such objective documentation was particularly valuable.

The transfers also illustrated the scale of the resources devoted to the operation. What began as an alleged extortion attempt involving a personal relationship ultimately produced a financial trail exceeding one million dollars and a federal murder prosecution. The combination of substantial payments, operational coordination, and surveillance evidence helped prosecutors reconstruct how the conspiracy developed and who was responsible for financing and carrying it out.

The Federal Investigation and Arrests

In December 2021, federal authorities announced the arrests of Erik Charles Maund, Gilad Peled, Bryon Brockway, and Adam Carey in connection with the Nashville murders. The investigation involved the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, with federal prosecutors in the Middle District of Tennessee bringing the case. A superseding indictment followed in July 2022, including charges of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire, kidnapping conspiracy, and kidnapping resulting in death. The proceedings were assigned case number 3:21-cr-00288 in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.

Federal investigators reconstructed the conspiracy through financial records, electronic communications, surveillance evidence, recorded conversations, and witness testimony. The evidence described an operation in which individuals with military and private security backgrounds were recruited to gather information about two civilians who subsequently became murder victims. Peled’s position within the conspiracy was particularly important because he connected Maund to the individuals who conducted surveillance and carried out the killings. His knowledge of the arrangements, payments, and communications among the participants would eventually become a significant asset to federal prosecutors.

The investigation demonstrated the importance of examining financial transactions and communications alongside testimony from individuals involved in criminal conspiracies. While cooperating witnesses can provide firsthand information about conversations and agreements, independent evidence can establish whether their accounts are consistent with documented events. In this case, prosecutors developed a substantial body of corroborating evidence that would become important during both the trial and subsequent appellate proceedings.

Peled Pleads Guilty and Becomes a Cooperating Witness

In December 2022, Gilad Peled pleaded guilty pursuant to an agreement with federal prosecutors. Rather than proceed to trial alongside Maund, Brockway, and Carey, he agreed to cooperate with the government. His cooperation included testimony about the origins of the conspiracy, the financial arrangements, the recruitment of participants, and the roles played by the other defendants. This was a significant development because Peled was not merely an outside witness who happened to possess information about the murders. He had admitted criminal involvement in the conspiracy before becoming a cooperating government witness.

Peled’s testimony helped prosecutors explain how Maund contacted him, how additional individuals became involved, and how the operation progressed into a plan to murder Williams and Lanway. The government also presented independent evidence, including financial transactions, electronic communications, surveillance records, recorded conversations, and additional witness testimony. One particularly significant piece of evidence was a recorded conversation between Maund and Peled in which Maund made statements prosecutors argued implicated him in the conspiracy. Federal prosecutors stated that Peled’s cooperation would be considered when his sentence was determined, reflecting a familiar feature of federal criminal practice in which defendants who provide substantial assistance may receive consideration at sentencing.

The arrangement illustrates one of the most complicated realities of the federal criminal justice system. Individuals who participate in serious crimes may later become important witnesses against their associates, providing investigators with access to firsthand information that would otherwise remain concealed. Such cooperation can help prosecutors establish the internal structure of conspiracies, identify additional participants, and corroborate evidence obtained through independent investigative methods. At the same time, cooperating defendants may have powerful incentives to minimize their own responsibility or provide testimony that improves their legal circumstances. For that reason, credibility assessments, disclosure of cooperation agreements, and independent corroboration are essential components of responsible criminal prosecution.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, the case is particularly relevant because it demonstrates the distinction between a cooperating criminal defendant and a traditional confidential human source. Peled’s cooperation arose after his criminal involvement had been uncovered, and his testimony was provided in the context of a federal prosecution. The principles of source credibility, corroboration, motivation, and accountability nevertheless remain highly relevant. The government had to establish not only what Peled claimed to know, but whether independent evidence supported his account.

November 2023: The Federal Jury Convicts Three Men

On November 20, 2023, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee announced that a federal jury had convicted Maund, Brockway, and Carey following a two-and-a-half-week trial. All three were convicted of murder-for-hire conspiracy resulting in death, while Brockway and Carey were additionally convicted of kidnapping-related offenses. Peled had already pleaded guilty and testified for the government. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert McGuire and Brooke Farzad prosecuted the trial under U.S. Attorney Henry C. Leventis, and U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. presided over the proceedings.

The convictions represented a significant result for federal investigators and prosecutors, whose case connected the defendants to the murders through communications, financial transactions, surveillance activities, and witness testimony. The evidence established the roles played by the participants and demonstrated how the conspiracy developed from an alleged extortion threat into an organized operation that resulted in two deaths. Peled’s testimony was an important part of the prosecution, but it was supported by additional evidence that would become particularly consequential when the convictions were challenged.

The legal proceedings, however, were far from finished. Following the trial, an unusual procedural problem emerged involving the exhibits supplied to jurors during deliberations. The resulting dispute would eventually reach the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and threaten to undo the convictions despite the substantial evidence presented by prosecutors.

The Extraordinary Appeals Court Battle

After the November 2023 verdicts, the district court discovered that ten exhibits that had not been admitted into evidence had inadvertently been supplied to the jury, while three exhibits that had been admitted were not provided. The improperly supplied materials included recordings, transcripts, financial records, and other evidence. The defendants argued that the errors compromised the fairness of their trial, and the district court agreed, granting a new trial. Federal prosecutors appealed, asking the Sixth Circuit to determine whether the exhibit errors required the convictions to be set aside.

On February 23, 2026, the Sixth Circuit issued its decision in United States v. Maund, No. 24-5932, reversing the district court’s order granting a new trial. The appellate court concluded that the evidentiary errors did not require automatic reversal and were harmless in light of the other substantial evidence supporting the verdicts. The judges examined recorded conversations, financial transfers, surveillance evidence, and witness testimony, including Peled’s. The opinion specifically identified Peled’s testimony as evidence directly implicating Maund, Brockway, and Carey, while also discussing the recorded conversation between Maund and Peled and the independent corroborating evidence presented by prosecutors.

The ruling restored the jury verdicts and returned the case to the district court for further proceedings. It represented an important victory for federal prosecutors and demonstrated the significance of the independent evidence supporting the convictions. Although the exhibit errors were serious enough to prompt the district court to order a new trial, the appellate judges determined that the other evidence was sufficiently strong that the mistakes did not require the verdicts to be set aside.

Peled’s Testimony and the Dispute Over Evidence

One particularly revealing aspect of the appellate proceedings concerned testimony Peled gave outside the jury’s presence. According to the Sixth Circuit opinion, Peled described a July 2020 conversation with Carey concerning the murders and testified that Carey had made dismissive remarks about the victims. The trial court had ruled that this testimony could become admissible if Carey introduced certain evidence suggesting he lacked knowledge of the crimes. Carey ultimately chose not to introduce that evidence, so the related portion of Peled’s testimony was not admitted. However, the jury was inadvertently provided with exhibits containing statements favorable to Carey’s defense without receiving the potentially rebutting testimony from Peled, creating an imbalance that became part of the appellate dispute.

The Sixth Circuit ultimately determined that the error did not warrant setting aside the convictions, emphasizing the strength of the other evidence presented during the trial. The issue illustrated how Peled’s account of conversations among the conspirators remained relevant even during litigation over whether the original trial had been fair. It also demonstrated the complexity of criminal proceedings involving cooperating witnesses, particularly when testimony from individuals who participated in the underlying offenses becomes central to establishing the intent, knowledge, and responsibility of other defendants.

Where Is Gilad Peled Today?

One of the remaining questions concerns Peled’s present status. After reviewing the prosecution, I attempted to locate him through the Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator but could not find a matching public record. I have also been unable to identify a matching current local jail record through the searches I conducted. Those searches do not establish where Peled is today, and there are several possible explanations for an individual’s absence from a particular custody database, including release, custody in a different jurisdiction, differences in identifying information, or limitations in the records available to the public. His final sentencing disposition and current custodial status require further verification through federal court records.

Peled’s cooperation in a double-murder prosecution also raises the question of whether he may have received protective arrangements, potentially including consideration for the federal Witness Security Program. The program exists to protect qualifying witnesses and their families when cooperation creates serious safety risks, and Peled testified in a case involving two murders and multiple defendants facing grave criminal consequences. His testimony helped prosecutors establish the conspiracy, making protective arrangements a legitimate subject for further inquiry. However, there is no verified evidence available to me establishing that Peled entered the Witness Security Program, received a new identity, or is currently living under federal protection. His absence from my inmate-locator searches does not prove any of those possibilities.

The question remains unresolved, and the most important next step is to examine the complete federal docket to determine whether publicly available sentencing records establish what happened after his cooperation. Without that documentation, it would be irresponsible to assert that Peled disappeared, received a new identity, entered witness protection, or avoided incarceration. The available information establishes that he pleaded guilty and cooperated with federal prosecutors, but it does not independently establish his present whereabouts or custodial circumstances.

The Human Intelligence Dimension

The Peled prosecution offers a remarkable case study in the intersection of private security, surveillance, criminal conspiracy, and federal cooperation. In 2013, I knew Peled through the private security operation of an A-list Hollywood celebrity. By 2020, federal prosecutors established that he had become involved in an operation in which surveillance was used to locate and monitor two people who were ultimately murdered. Following his guilty plea, he became a source of evidence for federal prosecutors, providing firsthand information about the financial arrangements, communications, and operational planning underlying the conspiracy. The progression raises broader questions about the responsibilities and accountability of individuals operating within private security and intelligence-related professions, particularly when they claim specialized backgrounds in military or clandestine organizations.

Specialized training and access to sensitive information can be valuable tools when used lawfully, but they can also create significant risks when placed in the service of criminal objectives. The Peled case demonstrates the importance of independent corroboration when prosecutors rely upon cooperating witnesses. A cooperating defendant may possess critical firsthand knowledge, but that individual may also have powerful incentives to minimize personal responsibility or implicate others. In Nashville, the government presented substantial corroborating evidence, including financial records, recorded communications, surveillance footage, and additional testimony, which became particularly important when the convictions were challenged on appeal.

For those working in human intelligence, confidential source management, and federal investigations, the case provides a compelling example of the complexities surrounding cooperation agreements, source credibility, operational accountability, and the distinction between legitimate intelligence gathering and criminal surveillance. It also highlights the importance of examining the professional credentials claimed by individuals who operate in security-sensitive environments. A reputation built upon purported intelligence experience may create an appearance of expertise, but that reputation should never substitute for verifiable qualifications, lawful conduct, and accountability.

The Victims Must Remain Central

Amid the extraordinary details involving a wealthy businessman, private security operatives, financial transfers, federal cooperation, and appellate litigation, Holly Williams and William Lanway must remain at the center of this story. Whatever personal disputes preceded their deaths, neither deserved to be kidnapped or murdered. Their lives were taken in a conspiracy in which money, surveillance, and criminal violence converged, and their deaths remain the most consequential facts in the case. The federal prosecution established criminal accountability for the conspiracy, but no conviction can restore their lives or undo the devastation suffered by their families.

The sensational aspects of the case should never overshadow the human cost of the murders or the responsibility of those who participated in arranging and carrying them out. The involvement of individuals with military backgrounds, the enormous financial transfers, and the disputed intelligence credentials associated with Peled may make the case particularly compelling, but those details ultimately describe the machinery of a conspiracy that destroyed two lives. The tragedy of Williams and Lanway is not merely an element of a remarkable federal prosecution; it is the reason the prosecution mattered.

A Name I Never Forgot

My familiarity with Gilad Peled predates the Nashville murders by approximately seven years. In 2013, I was working as an assistant to an A-list Hollywood celebrity whose personal security operation was led by Peled, and I became intimately knowledgeable about allegations of threatening and intimidating conduct involving people close to me during that period. Those allegations are separate from the criminal conduct established in the Nashville prosecution and should not be confused with findings made by the federal courts. Nevertheless, discovering Peled’s subsequent involvement in a double murder-for-hire conspiracy was deeply unsettling, particularly given the considerable influence and authority he appeared to exercise within the private security environment in which I knew him.

The federal record establishes that Peled pleaded guilty in a conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of Holly Williams and William Lanway and that he subsequently became a cooperating witness who testified against other participants. Investigative reporting has also raised significant questions about the elite military and intelligence credentials he reportedly used to establish himself in the private security industry. What remains unresolved in my research is his present whereabouts, the final disposition of his sentence, and whether any government protective arrangements were made. This is a story about the extraordinary intersection of private security, disputed intelligence credentials, surveillance, wealth, criminal conspiracy, and federal cooperation. It is also a story about how someone who once operated within the personal security circle of a prominent Hollywood celebrity became involved in a conspiracy that ended with two people murdered.

For me, the name Gilad Peled will always be associated with memories of 2013, but for the families of Holly Williams and William Lanway, it is connected to something immeasurably more tragic. Their lives were taken, and their deaths remain at the center of this extraordinary federal case. Whatever unanswered questions remain about Peled’s background, cooperation agreement, sentencing, or present circumstances, the documented facts of the Nashville conspiracy are disturbing enough on their own. Two people were murdered, substantial financial resources were used to organize the operation, and a private security operative who reportedly claimed extraordinary military and intelligence credentials became a central participant before agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

Sources and Reporting Notes

U.S. Department of Justice — November 20, 2023: Jury Convicts Three Men in Murder for Hire Scheme. Documents the convictions, Peled’s guilty plea and cooperation, financial transfers, and roles of the defendants.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdtn/pr/jury-convicts-three-men-murder-hire-scheme

United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — February 23, 2026: United States v. Maund, No. 24-5932. Details the prosecution’s evidence, Peled’s testimony, the improperly supplied jury exhibits, and the reversal of the new-trial order.

https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/26a0050p-06.pdf

Texas Monthly — The Problem With Erik, Episode 3: The Fixer. Investigative reporting on Peled’s military background, his reported claims of special forces and Mossad experience, and his role in the conspiracy.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcast/the-problem-with-erik-episode-3-the-fixer/

Law&Crime — July 28, 2022: Reporting on the federal indictment and Peled’s purported intelligence and military background.

https://lawandcrime.com/crime/wealthy-heir-to-famous-texas-car-dealers-former-israeli-defense-forces-member-and-2-ex-marines-indicted-in-murder-for-hire-conspiracy-that-left-nashville-couple-dead/

WSMV Nashville — February 25, 2026: Appeals Court Reinstates Conviction for Texas Man Involved in Nashville Murder-for-Hire Scheme.

https://www.wsmv.com/2026/02/25/appeals-court-reinstates-conviction-texas-man-involved-nashville-murder-for-hire-scheme/

Author’s firsthand account: The author’s employment as an assistant to an unnamed A-list Hollywood celebrity in 2013, his personal familiarity with Gilad Peled, and his knowledge of allegations concerning Peled’s conduct during that period.

Editorial disclosure: The author’s account of the 2013 events is based on personal knowledge and has not been independently corroborated for this article. The allegations are distinct from the federal criminal findings. The celebrity is intentionally unnamed. No claim is made that Peled currently participates in the Witness Security Program or that his present custodial status has been established.

I was incarcerated at FCI Allenwood, the same Federal Bureau of Prisons correctional institution where Sean “Diddy” Combs has reportedly just been transferred. I also spent approximately two and a half years in restrictive housing and protective-custody circumstances during my federal incarceration. That experience provides me with a perspective on this story that is largely missing from the initial news coverage. When I read TMZ ‘s October 21 report describing Combs’ transfer from FCI Fort Dix in New Jersey to FCI Allenwood Low in Pennsylvania, I immediately recognized several important omissions about how the Federal Bureau of Prisons operates. The reporting focuses on his celebrity, the size of the institutions, and his return to general population. What it fails to adequately explain is the seriousness of his reported contraband cell phone violation, the difference between administrative detention and disciplinary segregation, the complexities of federal prisoner transfers, and the realities of the institution where he is now housed

The most interesting aspect of this story is not that Combs was transferred. Federal prisoners are transferred every day. It is the reported speed with which he moved from restrictive housing at Fort Dix to general population at Allenwood following a serious disciplinary incident. Having experienced the federal prison disciplinary system firsthand, I know that prisoners can spend weeks or months waiting for disciplinary proceedings, housing determinations, and transfers. Some remain in the Special Housing Unit long after the immediate circumstances that brought them there have changed. Whether Combs received preferential treatment cannot be established from the information currently available, but the timeline raises legitimate questions about the disciplinary process and whether his treatment was consistent with that afforded to similarly situated federal prisoners.

What the Media Failed to Explain About FCI Fort Dix and Allenwood

TMZ describes FCI Fort Dix as housing approximately 4,000 inmates and compares that population with approximately 1,000 prisoners at Allenwood, suggesting that the smaller institution makes Combs easier to monitor. That comparison is incomplete because Fort Dix is not simply one enormous, undivided prison population. The institution operates with two principal compounds, commonly identified as East and West, which divide its inmate population into separate housing and operational areas. Both Fort Dix and Allenwood Low are designated low-security federal correctional institutions. Combs was therefore not necessarily moved to a more restrictive security environment. He was transferred between facilities with the same general security classification, although the individual housing arrangements, institutional cultures, and administrative considerations may differ considerably.

Allenwood itself is part of a much larger federal correctional complex in central Pennsylvania. The complex includes the United States Penitentiary at Allenwood, FCI Allenwood Medium, and FCI Allenwood Low, along with specialized housing and institutional operations. These are distinct correctional institutions with different security classifications and inmate populations. The complex has also been associated with specialized protective-custody arrangements, including housing for inmates whose cooperation with law enforcement creates significant security concerns. I was incarcerated at Allenwood, and I understand the differences between the institutions and the inmate populations housed there. Reducing this transfer to a comparison of approximately 4,000 prisoners at one location and 1,000 at another misses the more consequential questions about classification, discipline, institutional security, and the administrative decisions that determine where a federal prisoner is housed.

A Contraband Cell Phone Is Not a Minor Prison Infraction

One of the most important details missing from the coverage is the seriousness of possessing a contraband cellular telephone inside a federal prison. Under the Bureau of Prisons’ inmate discipline regulations, possession of a contraband cell phone can constitute a Code 108 violation, which falls within the greatest-severity category of prohibited acts. Code 108 addresses hazardous tools, including unauthorized electronic communication devices. The Bureau of Prisons treats these devices seriously because they allow inmates to communicate beyond the institution’s monitored telephone and messaging systems. Such devices can be used to coordinate criminal activity, intimidate witnesses, facilitate the movement of contraband, communicate with criminal associates, or potentially assist in escape planning. The fact that a phone may appear harmless to someone outside prison does not change its classification under federal prison regulations.

Under 28 CFR § 541.3 and the Bureau of Prisons’ inmate discipline framework, a greatest-severity violation can result in substantial sanctions, including the forfeiture or disallowance of good-conduct time, loss of privileges, and disciplinary segregation. The available disciplinary segregation sanction can extend to 12 months, depending on the circumstances and the authorized disciplinary determination. TMZ reports that Combs lost 41 days of good-conduct time and received a 400-day commissary restriction. Those are significant penalties, particularly for someone whose projected release date can be affected by the loss of earned good-conduct time. However, the reporting does not establish whether a Discipline Hearing Officer also imposed a period of disciplinary segregation. That omission matters because the distinction between being temporarily housed in the Special Housing Unit and serving an actual disciplinary segregation sentence is fundamental to understanding whether Combs’ subsequent transfer and return to general population were routine or unusual.

Administrative Detention and Disciplinary Segregation Are Two Different Things

The Special Housing Unit, commonly called the SHU, is frequently described by journalists as solitary confinement, but that description does not adequately explain the different legal and administrative circumstances under which inmates are placed there. Within the federal system, there are two principal SHU statuses: administrative detention and disciplinary segregation. Administrative detention is a nonpunitive housing status that may be used when an inmate is under investigation, awaiting a disciplinary proceeding, pending transfer, requires protective custody, or presents an immediate institutional security concern. Disciplinary segregation, by contrast, is a punitive sanction imposed following the applicable inmate disciplinary process. A prisoner can be placed in administrative detention immediately following an incident while officials investigate, without having been sentenced to disciplinary segregation. The distinction is not merely technical. It determines why the prisoner is confined, what procedural requirements apply, and how that confinement is administered.

When an inmate receives an incident report involving a greatest-severity prohibited act, the case ordinarily proceeds through institutional review and may be referred to a Discipline Hearing Officer, commonly known as a DHO. The DHO reviews the evidence, conducts the disciplinary hearing, determines whether the prohibited act occurred, and imposes authorized sanctions. If disciplinary segregation is imposed, that sanction must be administered in accordance with BOP regulations and applicable procedures. It does not automatically follow that an inmate who spent time in the SHU has served disciplinary segregation, nor does a Code 108 finding automatically require a disciplinary segregation sentence. This is precisely why the Combs case deserves additional scrutiny. If he was being held in administrative detention pending investigation or transfer, his subsequent placement in general population at Allenwood may have been entirely routine. If he was serving an imposed disciplinary segregation sanction and was moved into general population before that sanction was completed, there should be a documented explanation for that decision. Without the disciplinary records, the public cannot responsibly determine which situation occurred.

I Spent Approximately Two and a Half Years in Restrictive Housing. His Transfer Timeline Deserves Scrutiny.

My perspective on this issue comes from direct experience rather than speculation about what prison life might be like. During my federal incarceration, I spent approximately two and a half years in restrictive housing and protective-custody circumstances, including periods associated with my cooperation with federal law enforcement. My status created unusual security concerns, but it did not guarantee that I would be quickly transferred, returned to general population, or provided a more favorable housing arrangement. I experienced firsthand the uncertainty of institutional classification decisions, the administrative delays surrounding prisoner movements, and the reality that a federal inmate can remain confined under highly restrictive conditions while the Bureau of Prisons determines where that person should be housed. For an inmate in the SHU, waiting for a transfer is not simply an inconvenience. It can mean prolonged confinement, limited access to programming, reduced recreation, restricted social interaction, and substantial psychological strain.

Federal prison transfers involve far more than placing an inmate on a bus and sending him to another institution. Depending on the circumstances, they can require security assessments, classification reviews, institutional approvals, coordination of available bed space, transportation scheduling, and decisions about whether a receiving institution can appropriately manage the inmate’s security needs. These processes can take weeks or months, particularly when disciplinary proceedings, protective-custody considerations, or unusual security concerns are involved. That is why Combs’ reported movement from the SHU at Fort Dix to general population at Allenwood stands out to me. I am not asserting that the Bureau of Prisons violated its policies or that Combs necessarily received improper preferential treatment. There may be legitimate reasons for the speed of his transfer, including institutional security, administrative needs, or the absence of an outstanding disciplinary segregation sanction. But a high-profile inmate’s rapid return to general population following a reported greatest-severity disciplinary violation is precisely the kind of circumstance that warrants more detailed reporting.

How the Federal Prison Transportation System Actually Works

Another aspect of this story that deserves explanation is the federal prisoner transportation system itself. Inmates are not always transported directly from the institution they are leaving to the institution where they will ultimately be housed. Federal prisoner movements are coordinated through a network of ground transportation, regional transfer points, and, when necessary, air transportation. The Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System, commonly known as JPATS or Con Air, is one component of the broader federal prisoner transportation infrastructure. I have personally experienced federal prisoner air transportation on multiple occasions, and I understand how complicated institutional movements can become when transportation schedules, security classifications, and available housing assignments must be coordinated across different facilities.

The region surrounding Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, provides transportation access to the Allenwood complex, and federal prisoners moving through the Northeast may encounter regional staging and transportation arrangements. Combs could have been moved directly by ground transportation or through intermediate transportation arrangements, but his exact itinerary has not been publicly established. It would be irresponsible to claim a specific route without documentation. What can be said is that the movement of federal prisoners is an organized administrative process that frequently operates on schedules and institutional requirements that ordinary inmates have little ability to influence. The speed of a particular transfer may reflect security priorities or administrative decisions rather than special treatment, but understanding those decisions is essential before drawing conclusions about whether an inmate received unusually favorable handling.

I Know FCI Allenwood. Low Security Does Not Mean an Absence of Prison Politics.

I have been incarcerated at Allenwood, and one of the misconceptions I frequently encounter is the assumption that a low-security federal prison is somehow insulated from the gang activity, inmate politics, and informal power structures associated with higher-security institutions. That is simply not how prison culture operates. During my time at Allenwood, there were active gang members, established inmate hierarchies, and unwritten convict rules that influenced daily life. Prisoners were expected to understand the social environment, respect certain boundaries, and recognize the relationships and affiliations that existed within the institution. Low-security designation does not eliminate those dynamics. It generally reflects the institution’s security mission, physical characteristics, and the classification of the population, not the absence of organized inmate groups or institutional misconduct.

Combs’ celebrity and substantial financial resources may influence how other inmates interact with him, but they do not remove him from the social realities of federal incarceration. His notoriety could attract attention, create opportunities for relationships with other prisoners, or produce security concerns that ordinary inmates might not encounter. His placement in general population does not necessarily establish that officials have no concerns about his safety, nor does it prove that the institution is inherently safer than Fort Dix. It establishes that prison administrators determined he could be housed in general population under the circumstances prevailing at the time. Having lived inside Allenwood, I would caution against portraying the institution as a quiet refuge simply because it has fewer inmates than Fort Dix. The reality of prison life is shaped by much more than population figures and official security classifications.

The 400-Day Commissary Restriction May Not Mean What the Public Thinks

TMZ’s reporting that Combs received a 400-day commissary restriction is another example of how prison discipline can be misunderstood by people who have never experienced incarceration. To the public, a restriction lasting more than a year may sound like an absolute prohibition on obtaining food, hygiene products, and other comforts normally purchased through the prison commissary. In practice, the existence of a disciplinary restriction does not necessarily eliminate an inmate’s access to goods circulating within the prison population. Federal institutions have informal economies in which prisoners exchange food, clothing, hygiene products, services, and favors. Some of those exchanges are permitted, while others violate institutional regulations. Inmates who are restricted from making purchases may attempt to obtain goods through other prisoners, using arrangements that can involve barter, outside financial support, or prohibited transactions.

I witnessed the operation of these informal economies during my incarceration. Prisoners with financial resources or reliable outside support can sometimes obtain access to goods and services that are difficult for inmates without those advantages to secure. A commissary restriction may prevent an inmate from personally purchasing certain items, but it does not guarantee that the inmate will be unable to obtain those items through prohibited channels. That does not establish that Combs is currently circumventing his commissary restrictions, and there is no basis to claim that he has already arranged for other prisoners to purchase goods on his behalf. It does mean that journalists should distinguish between the sanctions imposed on paper and the practical limitations of enforcing those sanctions in a prison environment where informal markets exist.

You Can Transfer the Prisoner, but You Cannot Transfer Away the Institutional Problems

The same realities apply to contraband cellular telephones. The Bureau of Prisons has faced longstanding problems involving contraband, employee misconduct, institutional corruption, and weaknesses in security procedures. Moving an inmate from one federal correctional institution to another does not automatically eliminate the conditions that make contraband available. A prisoner who obtained an unauthorized phone at one institution may eventually encounter similar illicit markets at another. The availability of those markets varies from institution to institution, and it would be inaccurate to suggest that every facility experiences identical problems or that every inmate has equal access to contraband. Nevertheless, the broader institutional challenge is well established: correctional authorities must continuously address unauthorized communications, illicit exchanges, and attempts to circumvent security procedures.

Based on my own experience, I would not be surprised if Combs eventually encountered opportunities to obtain prohibited items or other comforts through the informal inmate economy at Allenwood. That is an observation about the vulnerabilities of prison systems, not an allegation that he currently possesses another phone or that any particular Allenwood employee is facilitating misconduct. There is a meaningful distinction between explaining how contraband markets operate and accusing identifiable individuals of participating in them. The larger issue is that transferring a prisoner does not necessarily address the institutional weaknesses that allowed an initial violation to occur. If the Bureau of Prisons believes moving Combs will reduce security risks or disrupt access to contraband, that may be a legitimate administrative objective. But the effectiveness of that decision should be evaluated through actual institutional outcomes rather than assumptions about the receiving facility.

The Questions the Bureau of Prisons Should Be Asked

The initial reporting leaves several important questions unanswered. Was Combs’ reported cell phone violation formally adjudicated as a Code 108 offense? What findings did the Discipline Hearing Officer make, and which sanctions were actually imposed? Was Combs held in administrative detention while awaiting disciplinary proceedings, or was he serving a disciplinary segregation sentence? If disciplinary segregation was imposed, had he completed the sanction before his transfer, or was it suspended or otherwise modified? Was the transfer initiated because of institutional security concerns, a classification decision, available bed space, or some other administrative reason? And most importantly, was his return to general population handled consistently with the treatment of other federal prisoners facing comparable disciplinary circumstances?

These questions matter because the Bureau of Prisons is responsible for administering disciplinary procedures fairly and consistently, regardless of an inmate’s fame, wealth, or public profile. Administrative discretion is a necessary part of operating a correctional system, and not every difference in treatment constitutes favoritism. But the existence of legitimate discretion does not eliminate the need for accountability. If Combs’ disciplinary proceedings and transfer were entirely routine, the available records should help explain why. If his case involved unusual decisions or expedited administrative action, the public has a legitimate interest in understanding the basis for those decisions, subject to appropriate privacy and security limitations. The media should be seeking those explanations rather than treating the transfer as a simple celebrity relocation story.

The Real Story Is Bigger Than Sean Combs

I have been incarcerated at the same federal correctional institution where Sean Combs is now reportedly housed. I have experienced the federal prison disciplinary system, prolonged restrictive housing, protective-custody arrangements, institutional transfers, and the complicated social environment that exists inside federal prisons. My experience does not mean that I know the confidential details of Combs’ disciplinary case or the private reasoning behind his transfer. It does mean that I recognize the institutional questions that are missing from the initial reporting. The distinction between administrative detention and disciplinary segregation matters. The seriousness of a Code 108 violation matters. The time required to coordinate institutional transfers matters. And the realities of inmate politics, informal economies, and contraband markets matter when attempting to understand what life inside a federal prison actually looks like.

There may be entirely legitimate explanations for every aspect of Combs’ transfer. He may have completed all applicable sanctions, been held only in administrative detention, or been moved because of a security or classification determination that has not been made public. But those possibilities should be examined rather than ignored. My concern is not that a celebrity was transferred to a different prison. My concern is whether the public is receiving an accurate explanation of the federal prison disciplinary process and whether the same procedures are applied consistently to prisoners who do not have the benefit of international name recognition.

I was incarcerated at FCI Allenwood. I know the institution, I know the prison culture, and I know what prolonged restrictive housing can mean for a federal prisoner. The real question is not simply why Sean Combs was transferred. It is whether the Bureau of Prisons applied its disciplinary rules, classification procedures, and housing policies to him in the same manner it would apply them to any other federal inmate.

That is the story the news media should be investigating.

Benjamin Freedland is the founder of The Human Intelligence Ledger, a publication examining law enforcement, intelligence, corrections, and the people and institutions behind them. A former federal prisoner who cooperated with federal law enforcement, Freedland was incarcerated at the Allenwood federal correctional complex and spent approximately two and a half years in restrictive housing and protective-custody circumstances.

October 18, 2026

I arrived in Wichita, Kansas, on Sunday, October 18, expecting nothing more complicated than picking up a rental car and driving approximately two hours to Topeka. My travel arrangements were carefully coordinated: fly into Wichita, collect a confirmed one-way rental vehicle from National Car Rental, conduct an interview in Topeka, and eventually return the vehicle and fly home. Instead, National abruptly canceled my reservation, leaving me stranded in Wichita with a professional engagement approaching and a return flight departing from an entirely different state.

What happened next transformed an infuriating customer service experience into a troubling question about federal law enforcement operational security. As I approached multiple rental car companies looking for alternative transportation, employees repeatedly attributed the shortage of available vehicles to federal agency reservations. Several specifically identified the United States Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) , discussing Washington, D.C., billing information and government-related rental demand. According to what I was told, federal reservations had taken priority over ordinary customers, including individuals who already held confirmed bookings.

But the story did not end with employees identifying federal agencies. During my attempts to locate a vehicle, employees discussed the categories of vehicles associated with government demand and provided information that allowed me to draw potential connections between agency reservations and available inventory. I personally inspected the rental lot, and the combination of what I observed and what employees told me raised serious questions about how much information commercial vendors were willing to disclose.

I arrived at the airport knowing nothing about federal transportation arrangements. Within a short period, I had reportedly been given information about agency-specific rental demand and prospective vehicle allocations. All because I wanted the rental car I had already reserved.

I cannot independently establish which vehicles would ultimately be assigned to federal personnel, whether any of those reservations were connected to the presidential visit, or whether confirmed customer bookings were deliberately displaced. Nevertheless, the explanations I received deserve scrutiny, particularly given the timing.

A PRESIDENTIAL VISIT AND AN UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION

President Donald Trump is scheduled to appear in the Wichita area on Monday, October 19, for a political rally supporting Senator Roger Marshall. The United States Secret Service is responsible for coordinating presidential protection, working alongside federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. Its presence at a presidential event is publicly acknowledged and entirely expected.

What is not necessarily expected is for civilian employees at commercial rental car companies to volunteer information about federal agency customers and their transportation arrangements to unrelated members of the public.

There is a substantial difference between knowing that the Secret Service is protecting a president and obtaining information that might help associate government customers with specific commercial transportation arrangements. The former is ordinary public knowledge. The latter can raise legitimate operational security concerns, depending on the sensitivity and accuracy of the information disclosed.

I am deliberately withholding identifying vehicle descriptions and prospective assignments because publishing those details ahead of a presidential appearance could unnecessarily amplify the very vulnerability I am questioning.

The absurdity is that I was not seeking federal law enforcement information. I was seeking transportation. Yet the explanations I received went far beyond anything necessary to tell me why a rental car was unavailable.

For professionals experienced in protective intelligence, this should raise an important question: Are commercial vendors supporting federal operations adequately trained to recognize when seemingly ordinary information deserves greater discretion?

I CONTACTED GREGORY BOYD, A FORMER CHIEF OF PROTECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

Recognizing the potential seriousness of what rental car employees had disclosed, I contacted Gregory Boyd , a veteran federal law enforcement and intelligence professional whose career includes senior responsibilities in protective intelligence, threat assessment, and national security. From April 2021 through July 2022, Boyd served as Chief of the Office of Protective Intelligence within the Judicial Security Division of the United States Marshals Service. His background also includes service in the United States Marine Corps and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

I posed a straightforward question: “Would you consider it an operational security concern if rental car employees openly disclosed Secret Service transportation arrangements to members of the public ahead of a presidential visit?”

Boyd’s initial response was unequivocal: “Absolutely.”

But when he elaborated, his explanation went directly to the heart of what makes this situation so concerning.

“Sure. Every aspect of a protection operation should be completely confidential. That includes support by civilian vendors. Information is power. Think about the seemingly innocuous information we have collected and built out into strategic action against enemy leadership. Information security should be built into all vendor contracts for organizations providing protection services.”

— Gregory Boyd, Former Chief, Office of Protective Intelligence, United States Marshals Service

Boyd’s observations underscore a fundamental principle of intelligence and protective operations: seemingly insignificant information can become extraordinarily valuable when collected, analyzed, and combined with other details. Intelligence professionals understand that adversaries do not necessarily require access to classified documents to develop an understanding of an operation. Ordinary logistical information, when improperly disclosed, can contribute to a much larger intelligence picture.

What makes Boyd’s assessment particularly compelling is his emphasis on civilian vendors. Federal protective operations depend on commercial partners for transportation, lodging, communications, and logistical support. Those businesses may employ individuals with little understanding of protective intelligence or the potential consequences of disclosing information about government customers. Boyd’s argument is that information security should be addressed contractually rather than left to the discretion of individual employees.

And that is precisely what makes my experience in Wichita so troubling. I was not seeking intelligence about federal operations. I was attempting to rent a car. Yet employees allegedly volunteered information about federal agency reservations and transportation arrangements that was entirely unnecessary to resolve my customer service problem.

Boyd did not independently investigate the Wichita incident or conclude that an actual security breach had occurred. His assessment concerned the security implications of the disclosures as I described them. Nevertheless, his warning is difficult to dismiss, particularly in the aftermath of the documented protective failures surrounding the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Information is power. And as Boyd makes clear, protecting it is not solely the responsibility of the agents wearing badges. It is also the responsibility of the civilian organizations entrusted with supporting their mission.

I ALSO SPOKE WITH AN AIRPORT PUBLIC SAFETY PROFESSIONAL

During the incident, I also spoke with Christopher Kowaleski an Airport Police and Fire Officer with Wichita’s airport public safety operations. I wanted to understand whether airport personnel were aware of the reported federal law enforcement rental activity and whether the circumstances raised concerns about information security.

I explained that my confirmed rental reservation had been canceled and that employees of multiple rental companies had attributed the shortage to Secret Service and FBI demand. I also raised my concern about the information being shared with ordinary customers.

Kowaleski did not confirm knowledge of the reported rental arrangements or characterize the situation as a security breach. His response was limited, and it would be inappropriate to suggest that he independently verified the information I had received.

Nevertheless, the conversation reinforced the importance of distinguishing between a reported disclosure, a potential operational security vulnerability, and a confirmed security breach. Those are not interchangeable conclusions, and determining whether protected information was actually compromised requires an appropriate assessment.

AFTER BUTLER, THE SECRET SERVICE FACES ANOTHER QUESTION ABOUT SECURITY CULTURE

The timing of this incident is particularly significant because the Secret Service continues to face scrutiny following the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. During that attack, a gunman opened fire at a campaign rally, wounding Trump, killing firefighter Corey Comperatore, and seriously injuring two other spectators.

Subsequent investigations by congressional authorities and federal oversight officials documented serious deficiencies involving protective planning, communications, threat recognition, and coordination among law enforcement agencies. The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General’s July 2026 findings identified missed opportunities to prevent or disrupt the attack, reinforcing the importance of effective protective procedures and interagency communication.

The Secret Service has acknowledged shortcomings and undertaken reforms. But Butler remains a stark reminder that protective operations depend on numerous individuals, organizations, and systems functioning together. A breakdown in one area can have consequences extending far beyond the immediate point of failure.

The Wichita incident is not evidence of a failure comparable to Butler, and there is no established connection between the reported rental disclosures and any compromise of presidential protection. However, it raises a question about the broader security environment supporting federal protective operations.

If commercial employees are willing to discuss potentially sensitive government transportation arrangements with unrelated customers, are the agencies and vendors involved doing enough to ensure appropriate discretion?

That question is particularly relevant when the Secret Service is already under intense scrutiny concerning its protective practices.

THE PRIVATE-SECTOR WEAKNESS THAT DESERVES ATTENTION

Throughout my work documenting federal law enforcement, intelligence operations, and confidential human source relationships, one principle has remained consistent: information security depends on trust, judgment, and the ability to recognize the operational value of details that might otherwise appear insignificant.

A rental car reservation is not inherently classified. A government billing address is not necessarily protected information. Even the fact that federal personnel are traveling to support a public event may be widely known. But when commercial employees begin discussing agency-specific reservations and prospective transportation arrangements, the combined information may warrant greater discretion.

Private-sector vendors are part of the operational environment supporting federal agencies. Their employees may encounter information about government customers without receiving the same training or understanding of operational sensitivities as sworn federal personnel. That creates an important question about the responsibilities of both the agencies purchasing services and the companies providing them.

The responsibility cannot simply be assumed to rest with individual counter employees. Commercial companies establish employee policies, handle government accounts, and determine what information staff members may disclose. Federal agencies, meanwhile, must evaluate the security implications of relying on outside vendors for logistical support.

A protective operation can employ sophisticated intelligence capabilities, extensive planning, and highly trained personnel, yet still face vulnerabilities when information is handled carelessly outside the agency itself.

Whether that occurred in Wichita remains to be established. But the reported conversations provide a reasonable basis for asking the question.

NATIONAL CAR RENTAL ALSO OWES ITS CUSTOMERS AN EXPLANATION

Separate from the operational security issue is the unacceptable disruption to my travel plans. I had a confirmed reservation with National Car Rental, a scheduled professional interview approximately two hours away, and a return flight arranged from another state. The cancellation left me without the transportation around which my entire itinerary had been organized.

According to employees at multiple rental counters, government-related demand had exhausted available inventory. If confirmed reservations were knowingly displaced to accommodate federal agency bookings, the rental companies should explain how those decisions were made, whether existing contractual commitments were honored, and what alternatives were offered to affected customers.

I recognize that federal law enforcement agencies have legitimate transportation needs, particularly during major presidential events. Their personnel deserve the resources necessary to carry out their responsibilities. But that does not excuse commercial companies from communicating honestly with customers or honoring confirmed reservations whenever possible.

And it certainly does not justify unnecessarily discussing potentially sensitive information about government clients with unrelated travelers.

THE BIGGER QUESTION ISN’T ABOUT A RENTAL CAR

The most troubling aspect of this experience is not that federal law enforcement agencies needed transportation. It is that an ordinary customer attempting to resolve a canceled reservation was given information about need-to-know United States Secret Service transportation arrangements that he had no legitimate reason to receive.

After Butler, every organization involved in presidential protection should understand the importance of identifying potential vulnerabilities before they become operational failures.

And that should be reason enough to ask some serious questions.

The Human Intelligence Ledger

A Career That Began Behind the Badge

For Ross Blank , leaving law enforcement did not mean leaving public safety behind. After more than a decade serving communities across Colorado, including assignments involving patrol, criminal investigations, SWAT operations, and supervisory responsibilities, Blank made the transition into the corporate world of public safety technology. His experience eventually brought him to Axon, the company widely recognized for its TASER conducted-energy weapons, body-worn cameras, and digital evidence management systems. It was a professional transformation that required him to learn an entirely new industry while discovering that many of the skills he had developed as a police officer were remarkably applicable to business development and technology sales.

During a recent conversation with The Human Intelligence Ledger, Blank reflected on his career in Colorado, the financial pressures that influenced his decision to leave sworn law enforcement, and the opportunities he discovered in the private sector. Our discussion also explored a subject that has become increasingly important to the future of policing: the integration of unmanned aircraft into emergency response operations. What emerged was the story of a professional whose understanding of law enforcement extends beyond tactical operations and arrests. Blank recognizes that effective policing, like effective business, depends heavily on communication, relationships, sound judgment, and the ability to understand the needs of others.

From Rural Colorado to the Rocky Mountains

Blank began his law enforcement career in November 2009 with the Brush Police Department, approximately 90 miles northeast of Denver. Situated along Interstate 76, Brush is a small agricultural community of roughly 5,000 residents surrounded by livestock operations, agricultural businesses, and commercial transportation routes. Although the community might appear relatively uneventful to outsiders, its proximity to a major interstate exposed officers to a variety of incidents involving travelers, commercial vehicles, and criminal activity. Officers working in smaller departments are frequently required to handle an exceptionally broad range of responsibilities, often without the specialized investigative resources available to larger agencies.

Having spent considerable time examining narcotics trafficking networks and the transportation corridors they exploit, I was particularly interested in Blank’s experience policing a community situated along Interstate 76. He acknowledged that officers occasionally encountered narcotics, although he was careful to distinguish his experience from that of officers specializing in drug interdiction. His department had limited involvement in regional narcotics task forces, and his own responsibilities were primarily centered on municipal policing rather than specialized highway enforcement. That distinction illustrates the operational realities of smaller police departments, where officers must remain versatile and prepared to address whatever circumstances arise during their shifts.

In December 2011, Blank joined the Steamboat Springs Police Department, exchanging the plains of northeastern Colorado for one of the state’s most recognizable mountain resort communities. The transition introduced him to a substantially different policing environment, where seasonal tourism, wealthy vacation homeowners, and an active nightlife economy created demands far beyond what the town’s permanent population might suggest. Blank recalled that the department employed approximately 35 officers during his tenure, while the community’s population could increase from roughly 12,000 residents to more than 30,000 people during particularly busy tourism periods.

The influx of visitors brought alcohol-related disturbances, narcotics, traffic incidents, and other challenges associated with a thriving resort economy. Blank recalled a local expression that captured the experience of policing a community where visitors occasionally discovered that their vacation activities carried legal consequences.

“The joke was, ‘Come on vacation, leave on probation.’”

Although Steamboat Springs is associated with luxury homes, skiing, and recreation, Blank emphasized that affluence does not eliminate criminal behavior. His experience reinforced the importance of approaching individuals without preconceived assumptions about their backgrounds or financial circumstances.

“I don’t think it matters where you live in the United States. There is crime. It doesn’t matter if it’s affluent. It does not matter if it’s low income. People are people, man. Geography, income, humans do some good things and bad things, and even good people make mistakes.”

Blank returned to Brush in March 2015, where he served as a police corporal until March 2020. His responsibilities included patrol operations, criminal investigations, SWAT breaching assignments, and supervision of a departmental team identified in his professional history as DART. Those assignments gave him a combination of tactical experience, operational judgment, and familiarity with the challenges facing smaller law enforcement agencies.

The Human Intelligence Value of Community Policing

One of the most compelling aspects of my conversation with Blank had little to do with tactical operations. Although his career included SWAT assignments and specialized responsibilities, he placed considerable emphasis on the importance of treating people with respect and developing relationships throughout the communities he served. When I asked whether he had worked with confidential sources or gathered information through relationships with community members, Blank described an approach to policing that emphasized accessibility and interpersonal communication rather than intimidation.

“I was like Officer Friendly. It was just uncanny, the stuff I would come across and the things people would tell me just by treating them the way that I would want to be treated if I was in their shoes.”

During his time in Steamboat Springs, Blank routinely conducted foot patrols through bars and nightlife establishments, interacting with bartenders, security personnel, and patrons. Rather than treating these encounters exclusively as enforcement opportunities, he recognized their value in building familiarity and trust. The relationships he developed helped establish him as an approachable officer, someone people could speak with without automatically expecting an adversarial interaction.

“I would almost nightly do foot patrol through the bars and just be that presence. I would talk with the bouncers, talk with the bartenders, float around.”

This philosophy has particular relevance to human intelligence, a subject central to the work of The Human Intelligence Ledger. Throughout my own experiences involving criminal organizations and subsequent cooperation with federal law enforcement, I have observed that effective intelligence gathering often begins with an investigator’s ability to establish rapport. Formal source development involves procedures for recruitment, validation, management, and reporting, but the underlying interpersonal principles are frequently rooted in the same behaviors Blank practiced during routine patrol. People are more inclined to communicate when they believe they are being treated fairly, and an officer who consistently demonstrates respect may develop access to information that would otherwise remain unavailable.

Blank also understood that a person’s behavior during a single encounter does not necessarily reflect their entire character. Financial pressure, family difficulties, emotional stress, and personal circumstances can influence how individuals respond to authority. His approach did not require compromising officer safety or abandoning accountability. Rather, it involved recognizing that professional communication can reduce unnecessary conflict while creating opportunities for cooperation.

“If you’ve ever been contacted by a police officer and did not have a positive experience, at least an impression, right? And you have the exact opposite of that, I believe that leaves a wildly different impression. And that’s what I was shooting for.”

That perspective would later become one of Blank’s most valuable professional assets outside law enforcement. The same ability to establish trust with a reluctant witness, communicate with unfamiliar people, or identify an individual’s concerns can be applied to the relationships that drive successful business development.

The Financial Reality Behind Leaving Law Enforcement

Despite his enthusiasm for policing, Blank eventually confronted financial pressures that made remaining in the profession increasingly difficult. While serving as a police officer, he also accepted part-time employment with Denver Metro Security, primarily performing traffic-control assignments around construction projects. For several years, he balanced multiple jobs, sometimes working six or seven days a week to meet his family’s financial obligations. The demanding schedule reflected his commitment to providing for his family, but it also illustrated the limitations of a profession in which officers may need substantial secondary employment to maintain financial stability.

“I was working two jobs at the same time, working six or seven days a week for like three years, just to barely make it.”

As his family responsibilities increased, particularly with a child requiring additional services and support, Blank began exploring opportunities that could provide greater financial security. His decision was not rooted in dissatisfaction with law enforcement or a desire to abandon public service. He continued to identify strongly with the profession, but he recognized that supporting his family required considering a different career path.

“I was a cop, and I’d still be a cop if I wasn’t blessed with a special-needs kid that required more services and monetary supplies than I could get as a cop.”

For many officers, leaving sworn service can be a difficult decision because policing becomes more than an occupation. It is a professional identity shaped by years of training, shared experiences, and relationships with colleagues. Blank’s transition required him to reconsider how his skills could be applied outside the traditional structure of a police department. Rather than pursuing an entirely unrelated industry, he became interested in companies developing products intended to improve public safety, allowing him to remain connected to the profession while pursuing new opportunities.

From Patrol Officer to Axon Account Executive

In March 2020, Blank joined Axon, beginning a new chapter that would take him from municipal policing into professional technology sales. Although he understood the operational needs of law enforcement agencies, he had limited experience with the business systems and processes required to succeed in a corporate sales environment. He began studying sales methodology, customer relationship management platforms, account development, and the purchasing procedures used by government agencies. His preparation included reading books, learning from experienced professionals, and developing familiarity with the technology used to manage customer relationships.

“I wanted to get hired at a company that was furthering humanity. In my eyes, Tesla was one of the ones that was really high on my radar, and Axon, because both of them were making products with the intent of furthering humanity.”

Blank entered Axon as an inside sales representative before progressing into account executive responsibilities. His professional history identifies several positions with the company between March 2020 and September 2023, including assignments involving law enforcement customers across multiple geographic territories. The transition required him to develop confidence in an unfamiliar environment, and he recalled feeling nervous during his earliest sales calls despite having spent years responding to unpredictable situations as a police officer.

Over time, however, Blank discovered that the fundamental skills required for effective sales were closely related to those he had developed in policing. Both professions involve communicating with unfamiliar individuals, asking questions, gathering information, and identifying problems that require solutions. In law enforcement, an investigator seeks to establish the elements of a crime and develop evidence supporting a case. In sales, a professional attempts to identify the operational challenges facing a customer and determine whether a particular product or service can address them.

“Being a salesperson is so much like being a cop because you are having conversations with strangers. In police, you’re trying to identify the elements of a crime. In sales, you’re trying to identify elements of pain.”

Blank explained that a successful salesperson must understand the customer’s problem before attempting to present a solution. His law enforcement background gave him familiarity with the operational concerns of police departments, allowing him to discuss technology in terms that were meaningful to officers and agency leadership. Rather than focusing exclusively on product specifications, he learned to explain how a proposed system might address practical challenges involving officer safety, accountability, evidence collection, or administrative efficiency.

From Probable Cause to the Boardroom

Perhaps the most interesting comparison Blank made concerned the similarities between building a criminal case and developing a purchasing justification for public safety technology. A conscientious investigator should gather sufficient evidence to support the allegations being investigated and prepare a case capable of withstanding scrutiny in court. Likewise, a salesperson working with a police department must help agency leadership understand the operational need for a proposed purchase and provide information that can withstand scrutiny from elected officials responsible for approving public expenditures.

“If you’re a good cop, in my opinion, you’re trying to get to beyond a reasonable doubt, even though you’re not in court, because ultimately that’s the whole point. When this goes to court, I want to have an airtight case.”

Blank applied that philosophy to the process of presenting technology solutions to law enforcement customers. A police chief seeking approval for new equipment must often explain the need to a city council or county commission, where purchasing decisions compete with numerous other budget priorities. Understanding how a product could address documented operational concerns is therefore essential to developing a credible proposal.

“The same in sales. When this goes in front of city council, I want them to understand why they need it. I want them to understand what they’re getting.”

For Blank, effective sales are not about pressuring customers into making purchases. They are about understanding operational problems, identifying appropriate solutions, and communicating their value clearly. His approach emphasizes respectful conversations and long-term relationships rather than aggressive sales tactics.

“People just want to be talked to in a way that’s respectful, and nobody wants a hard sell. So if you just have a conversation, it’s uncanny where it can lead, especially when you don’t have an agenda.”

The philosophy closely resembles his approach to community policing. Whether interacting with a bartender during a foot patrol or discussing technology with a police executive, Blank recognized that meaningful relationships are built through credibility, consistency, and an ability to listen.

Drones as First Responders: The Next Evolution in Public Safety

Our conversation eventually turned toward one of Blank’s greatest professional interests: the growing role of unmanned aircraft in law enforcement and emergency response. Particularly compelling is the concept of drones as first responders, commonly abbreviated DFR, which involves deploying unmanned aircraft to certain emergency incidents to provide aerial situational awareness before ground personnel arrive. The technology has the potential to improve how dispatchers, police officers, firefighters, and emergency medical personnel assess developing situations and coordinate their responses.

Blank described how a drone could be deployed to a serious traffic collision, providing an aerial perspective before the first ambulance or patrol car arrives. Dispatchers could potentially identify the number of vehicles involved, blocked traffic lanes, and circumstances suggesting that additional emergency resources may be necessary. Such information could help improve the coordination of police, fire, and medical personnel, particularly during incidents involving multiple vehicles or complicated roadway conditions.

“Imagine there’s a car accident. Somebody calls 911. Their thing is, they can launch up a drone in a couple seconds and get that hovering over the scene. You can see significant mechanism of injury, if there’s multiple vehicles that you need multiple ambulances for. You can get better coordination of assets.”

The applications extend beyond traffic collisions. Fire departments may benefit from unmanned aircraft equipped with thermal imaging systems capable of identifying elevated heat patterns and providing additional information about structures involved in fires. Search-and-rescue teams may use drones to examine difficult terrain, while law enforcement agencies may deploy aircraft to assess potentially dangerous situations before officers approach a location.

“In a fire, you can have this drone go to a house and identify hotspots, and if the firefighters are able to put water on that hotspot quicker, you are reducing the impact to the homeowner, to the business, society, and potentially saving lives along with money.”

Blank also described an example involving a reported armed individual at a gas station. According to his recollection of a video, a drone observed someone who appeared to possess a firearm, but closer examination suggested that the object was actually a novelty lighter resembling a gun. Although the particular incident was not independently verified during our conversation, it illustrates how aerial observation may provide officers with additional information before they approach potentially dangerous situations. Such capabilities cannot eliminate uncertainty or replace sound tactical judgment, but they may help improve the quality of information available to responding personnel.

The Growing Threat of Criminal Drone Operations

The expansion of unmanned aircraft technology also creates new challenges for law enforcement because criminal organizations are increasingly exploring the same capabilities for illicit purposes. During our conversation, I raised the use of drones to deliver contraband into correctional institutions, support narcotics trafficking, and conduct surveillance. The war in Ukraine has further demonstrated how rapidly unmanned aircraft technology can evolve, particularly when operators experiment with new tactics and countermeasures.

Blank compared the process to biological evolution, in which predators and prey continually adapt to one another’s capabilities. Criminal organizations develop new methods to avoid detection, while law enforcement agencies respond through improved investigative techniques, surveillance systems, and operational strategies.

“It’s also evolution, man. You look at the animals that develop their protective techniques, and then the predator develops a better predatory technique, and then the prey has to adapt. It’s the same thing in policing.”

For public safety agencies, understanding these developments is becoming increasingly important. Correctional institutions must consider threats from unauthorized aircraft approaching their facilities, while police departments and federal agencies must remain aware of how drones may be used to facilitate criminal activity. Counter-drone operations present their own legal and technical challenges, particularly because authority to interfere with aircraft is heavily regulated. Nevertheless, the broader lesson is clear: agencies cannot afford to ignore emerging technology simply because they have not yet incorporated it into their own operations.

Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Police Leadership

One of the most important challenges facing public safety technology companies is explaining sophisticated systems to the government officials responsible for funding them. A police chief may recognize the operational advantages of a drone-as-first-responder program, but obtaining approval often requires demonstrating how the investment will improve emergency response, enhance safety, or address a documented operational need. City councils and county commissions must weigh those potential benefits against staffing requirements, training costs, maintenance expenses, privacy concerns, and competing public priorities.

Blank understands that selling public safety technology requires more than demonstrating what a product can do. It requires explaining why a particular agency needs the technology and how the proposed investment will benefit the community. His experience in law enforcement provides familiarity with the operational challenges facing police executives, while his corporate sales background has helped him understand the financial and administrative processes that influence purchasing decisions.

“The challenge there is being able to articulate that for your city council, for your county commissioners. How do you tell them this big expensive project we want to do is going to make X amount of dollars of difference for our civilians, for us?”

That ability to bridge the gap between operational needs and corporate technology is particularly valuable in an industry where innovation frequently advances faster than government purchasing processes. Agencies must evaluate not only whether a technology is capable of performing a particular function, but whether it can be implemented responsibly, maintained over time, and integrated into existing policies and procedures. Professionals with firsthand law enforcement experience can play an important role in helping decision-makers understand those considerations.

Professional Reinvention and the Importance of Continuing Education

Blank’s transition also illustrates the importance of continuing education and professional adaptability. During our conversation, we discussed former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss and his book Never Split the Difference, which explores negotiation techniques emphasizing tactical empathy, active listening, and an understanding of human motivations. Blank expressed enthusiasm for applying those principles to professional sales, where the ability to understand a customer’s concerns can be more productive than attempting to overcome objections through aggressive persuasion.

He also recommended Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, describing it as a book worth revisiting regularly. His interest in negotiation, leadership, and personal development reflects the approach he adopted when preparing to enter the technology industry. Rather than assuming that his law enforcement experience alone would guarantee success, Blank invested in developing new skills and remained open to learning from professionals in other disciplines.

For officers contemplating careers outside sworn law enforcement, his experience offers an important example. Police work develops skills involving communication, investigation, conflict resolution, leadership, and decision-making under pressure, but transitioning into a new industry also requires understanding its unique professional demands. Blank’s progression demonstrates how operational credibility and deliberate business education can complement one another, creating opportunities that might otherwise remain inaccessible.

A Different Definition of Success

As our conversation drew toward its conclusion, Blank reflected on how his personal priorities have changed over time. Earlier in his career, financial stability had been a major concern, particularly while balancing multiple jobs and supporting a family with significant needs. Although his transition into public safety technology created new professional opportunities, he has increasingly come to value time with family and the people closest to him over the pursuit of higher compensation alone.

“The funny thing is how time and your priorities change. I remember we were talking about money being that huge thing. Well, now it’s not the money so much anymore as it is spending time with my mom, my dad, my little sister, my people.”

Blank spoke about the importance of remaining connected to family and longtime friends, particularly as the passage of time and the loss of people around him have reinforced the temporary nature of life. His perspective reflects a recognition that professional achievement, while meaningful, is only one component of a fulfilling life.

“Seeing so many people die lately, it’s a big reminder that all of this is temporary. It’s like a really, really cool video game, but you don’t know how long you get to play it.”

For someone whose career has included emergency response, tactical operations, and the responsibilities of raising a family, that observation carries particular significance. Blank’s evolving definition of success is no longer centered exclusively on professional advancement. It also involves the ability to pursue meaningful work while maintaining relationships with the people who matter most.

The Badge May Be Gone, but the Mission Remains

Ross Blank’s journey from small-town Colorado policing to the corporate world of public safety technology demonstrates how the skills developed through years of public service can remain valuable long after an officer leaves sworn employment. His career includes patrol operations, SWAT assignments, criminal investigations, and supervisory responsibilities, followed by a transition into professional sales with one of the most recognizable companies serving American law enforcement. Throughout that progression, he has relied on the same fundamental abilities: communicating effectively, understanding human behavior, identifying problems, and developing relationships built on credibility and respect.

The technologies now emerging in public safety are creating opportunities that previous generations of officers could scarcely have imagined. Unmanned aircraft may provide emergency responders with information before they arrive at a scene, advanced sensors may improve situational awareness, and digital evidence systems continue to change how agencies document and investigate incidents. Yet none of those developments eliminates the importance of experienced professionals who understand how policing actually works. Technology can improve the availability of information, but the decisions made with that information will continue to depend on human judgment, training, and accountability.

What makes Blank’s story particularly compelling is the continuity between the officer who once walked through bars in Steamboat Springs developing relationships with community members and the technology professional who later worked with law enforcement customers at Axon. The environments are different, but the underlying philosophy remains remarkably consistent. Understanding people is essential to understanding problems, and understanding problems is the foundation of developing effective solutions.

For law enforcement professionals contemplating their own futures beyond the badge, Blank’s experience offers an important lesson: the knowledge accumulated through years of policing does not become irrelevant when an officer leaves the profession. With continued education, adaptability, and a willingness to develop new skills, that experience can provide the foundation for an entirely new professional chapter.

For Ross Blank, the transition from badge to boardroom was not the end of a career dedicated to public safety. It was the beginning of a second calling, one that allows him to remain connected to the mission of protecting communities while helping bridge the gap between those who develop technology and those who depend on it in the field.

The Human Intelligence Ledger Original reporting and interviews examining human intelligence, federal law enforcement, criminal investigations, leadership, and emerging public safety technologies.

Editor’s note: This article is based on a recorded conversation with Ross Blank and his publicly presented professional background. Quotations have been lightly edited for readability while preserving their intended meaning. Certain personal recollections and operational examples have not been independently verified.

On December 7, 2005, 44 year old Rigoberto Alpizar was shot and killed by two federal air marshals on a jet bridge at Miami International Airport after authorities claimed he threatened to detonate a bomb aboard an American Airlines flight. Investigators subsequently searched his belongings and discovered that he had no explosives. Alpizar, a naturalized American citizen originally from Costa Rica, was traveling with his wife, Anne Buechner, aboard American Airlines Flight 924, a Boeing 757 preparing to depart for Orlando. Witnesses described a visibly distressed man rushing toward the front of the aircraft while his wife attempted to explain that he suffered from bipolar disorder and had not taken his medication. Within moments, Alpizar was dead, and the incident became one of the most controversial confrontations involving the Federal Air Marshal Service in the years following the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Although the shooting attracted national attention, the identities of the two federal officers involved were not publicly disclosed in the initial reporting.

Now, nearly 21 years later, The Human Intelligence Ledger has obtained information identifying the disgraced former Drug Enforcement Administration special agent convicted in one of the agency’s most extraordinary corruption scandals, as one of the federal air marshals who opened fire on Alpizar. According to a former federal law enforcement official familiar with the incident, Irizarry was among the officers involved in the fatal confrontation and personally discharged three rounds. The identification has also been corroborated by a trusted source within the DEA, according to information obtained by this publication. The Human Intelligence Ledger has contacted the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office seeking official comment and confirmation regarding Irizarry’s alleged involvement in the shooting. At the time of this report, independent documentary confirmation identifying Irizarry in the original investigative records has not been obtained.

The allegation introduces a previously unexplored connection between a nationally controversial aviation security incident and a federal agent whose subsequent criminal conduct would result in a sentence of more than twelve years in prison. Irizarry’s documented professional history includes service with the US Border Patrol and the Federal Air Marshal Service before his appointment to the DEA in 2009. Contemporaneous reporting established that one of the two officers involved in Alpizar’s death had previously served with the Border Patrol, a detail consistent with Irizarry’s career history. Although that background does not independently establish his participation, it provides an important point of comparison as this publication continues examining the identities of the officers involved.

A Fatal Confrontation at Miami International Airport

The events unfolded shortly after 2 p.m. as American Airlines Flight 924 prepared to depart Miami International Airport. Alpizar and his wife were returning from South America when he became increasingly agitated aboard the aircraft. According to contemporaneous Associated Press reporting, passengers described him moving rapidly through the cabin while his wife followed, attempting to explain his behavior to those around them. Passenger Mary Gardner recalled seeing Alpizar running with his arms flailing, while another passenger, Mike Irizarry, who was unrelated to the former DEA agent at the center of this investigation, described a man repeatedly expressing his desire to leave the airplane. Federal authorities maintained that Alpizar had threatened to detonate a bomb concealed inside his backpack, prompting two undercover federal air marshals to confront him as he moved toward the exit. James E. Bauer, then special agent in charge of the Federal Air Marshal Service’s Miami field office, told reporters that the officers responded to statements indicating the presence of an explosive device.

Alpizar exited the aircraft and entered the jet bridge connecting the Boeing 757 to the terminal. According to federal authorities, the marshals repeatedly ordered him to stop and comply with their commands, but he continued moving and appeared to reach toward his backpack. The officers opened fire, fatally wounding him. Investigators subsequently searched his belongings and determined that he was not carrying explosives, and authorities reported no evidence connecting him to terrorism.

The shooting immediately raised questions about the circumstances under which federal officers could use deadly force against an individual whose behavior might have resulted from a psychiatric crisis rather than a deliberate attempt to threaten passengers. Those questions became especially significant because the Federal Air Marshal Service had expanded dramatically following September 11, placing thousands of armed officers aboard commercial aircraft under security procedures designed to prevent another catastrophic aviation attack.

His Wife Tried to Explain His Mental Illness

One of the most disturbing elements of the incident involved accounts of Alpizar’s wife attempting to explain his condition before the shooting. Buechner reportedly told people aboard the aircraft that her husband suffered from bipolar disorder and had not taken his medication. Witnesses described her following him toward the front of the cabin while trying to communicate that he was experiencing a medical or psychiatric problem. The distinction between a passenger experiencing a mental health crisis and an individual preparing to commit an act of terrorism became central to the controversy surrounding his death. At least one passenger subsequently disputed the official account that Alpizar had threatened to detonate a bomb. John McAlhany, who was aboard the aircraft, told TIME magazine that he never heard Alpizar mention a bomb, an account that differed from the statements attributed to federal authorities.

The conflicting witness accounts generated substantial national attention and raised broader concerns about the training of federal air marshals, particularly their ability to recognize behavioral disturbances that might not constitute genuine security threats. Federal officials maintained that the marshals had confronted a rapidly developing situation in which a passenger allegedly claimed to possess explosives, ignored commands, and made movements interpreted as threatening. Passengers who witnessed portions of the confrontation described confusion, fear, and the efforts of Alpizar’s wife to explain what was happening. The incident illustrated the extraordinary difficulty of making immediate decisions in an aviation security environment where officers had been trained to treat threats involving explosives with the utmost seriousness, even when the individual making those statements might have been experiencing a psychiatric episode.

The Investigation and the Decision Not to Prosecute

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office subsequently reviewed the shooting, examining witness statements, forensic evidence, firearms records, and the accounts provided by the federal air marshals. On May 23, 2006, prosecutors announced that neither officer would face criminal charges, concluding that the use of deadly force was legally justified under the circumstances. Investigators determined that the marshals reasonably believed Alpizar presented an immediate threat and that their actions were consistent with applicable legal standards governing the use of deadly force. Prosecutors also concluded that the officers did not know Alpizar suffered from bipolar disorder when they confronted him. Although the decision resolved the question of criminal prosecution, it did not eliminate the public controversy surrounding the death of a passenger who was ultimately found to have no explosives.

The investigative materials described two federal air marshals armed with SIG Sauer P229 pistols chambered in .357 SIG. The publicly available version of the investigative report identifies the officers through numerical designations rather than their names, a practice consistent with the federal government’s longstanding efforts to protect the identities of personnel assigned to sensitive aviation security duties. The report’s forensic findings established that one marshal fired six rounds while the other discharged three, accounting for nine rounds in total. This detail is particularly significant because the federal law enforcement source who spoke with The Human Intelligence Ledger specifically attributed three shots to José Irizarry. If that identification is correct, it would correspond to the officer designated in the investigative records as Federal Air Marshal 2. That connection remains an investigative inference rather than a confirmed identification, but it provides a specific and potentially verifiable detail against which the source’s account can be examined.

The José Irizarry Connection

Irizarry’s federal law enforcement career began before his appointment to the DEA in 2009. Published accounts of his professional background establish that he served with the United States Border Patrol and later worked as a federal air marshal, placing him within the federal aviation security community during the period when Alpizar was killed. Contemporary reporting by The Washington Post described the two marshals involved in the shooting as Miami based officers who had joined the Federal Air Marshal Service in 2002, with one previously employed by the Border Patrol and the other by the United States Customs Service. The description of a former Border Patrol agent is consistent with Irizarry’s professional background, although that overlap alone does not establish his participation. The source’s identification, the corroborating information attributed to a trusted DEA source, and the specific account of three shots fired collectively warrant further examination through official records.

From Federal Air Marshal to Disgraced DEA Agent

Irizarry joined the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2009 and eventually became involved in international narcotics and money laundering investigations, including operations connected to Colombia. His responsibilities placed him in a position to investigate sophisticated financial networks used by drug trafficking organizations to move illicit proceeds through international banking systems. Those investigations frequently relied on undercover transactions, confidential sources, and financial arrangements designed to expose criminal organizations while preserving the secrecy of ongoing operations. Federal prosecutors subsequently determined that Irizarry exploited those very mechanisms for personal enrichment, working with associates to divert money from undercover DEA investigations and conceal the proceeds through fraudulent financial transactions.

According to the Department of Justice, Irizarry participated in a scheme involving approximately $9 million diverted from undercover money laundering operations and received at least $1 million in bribes and kickbacks. The proceeds helped finance luxury automobiles, expensive jewelry, real estate, and an extravagant lifestyle that stood in stark contrast to the responsibilities of a federal law enforcement officer. In September 2020, Irizarry pleaded guilty to the charges in a 19 count federal indictment, including conspiracy to commit money laundering, honest services wire fraud, bank fraud, and aggravated identity theft. On December 9, 2021, United States District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell sentenced him to 145 months in federal prison, ordered him to pay $11,233 in restitution, and directed the forfeiture of certain luxury assets. The prosecution exposed serious weaknesses in the oversight of sensitive international investigations and became a defining example of the damage that corruption within federal law enforcement can inflict on the integrity of criminal investigations.

The scandal extended beyond Irizarry’s individual criminal conduct. Subsequent Associated Press investigations examined allegations involving additional DEA personnel, questionable financial practices, lavish overseas travel, and relationships with individuals connected to international narcotics trafficking. Irizarry alleged that other federal officials had participated in or tolerated misconduct, although those accusations required independent investigation and did not establish criminal wrongdoing by everyone he implicated. The revelations nevertheless prompted substantial scrutiny of the DEA’s internal controls, supervisory practices, and ability to detect corruption within specialized investigative operations. Against that background, the possibility that Irizarry had previously participated in the fatal Alpizar shooting introduces another dimension to an already extraordinary federal law enforcement career.

The Human Intelligence Ledger’s Earlier Exclusive: Irizarry Transferred to Miami’s Residential Reentry System

In another significant development involving the disgraced former DEA agent, The Human Intelligence Ledger recently broke the story that José Ismael Irizarry had been transferred from a federal correctional institution to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Miami Residential Reentry Management system despite receiving a 145 month prison sentence in December 2021. In our exclusive investigation, titled Former Corrupt DEA Agent Jose Irizarry Now in a Miami Halfway House Nearly Seven Years Before His Original Sentence Ends, we reported that federal prison records identified Irizarry as being assigned to Miami’s residential reentry system with a projected release date of April 4, 2027. The discovery was particularly striking given the magnitude of his criminal conduct, which involved the diversion of millions of dollars from sensitive DEA money laundering investigations and the betrayal of the very agency entrusted with dismantling international drug trafficking organizations. His transition to community based placement came years before the completion of the original sentence imposed by the federal court.

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The development prompted questions about how Irizarry had become eligible for community placement so early in his sentence and what mechanisms may have contributed to the substantial difference between his original sentence and his projected release date. Federal prisoners may qualify for statutory good conduct time, earned time credits, residential reentry placement, or judicial sentence reductions, depending on their individual circumstances and eligibility. However, the specific combination of factors responsible for Irizarry’s projected release date has not been conclusively established in our reporting. Assignment to a Residential Reentry Management office also does not necessarily establish the precise facility where an individual resides or mean that the individual has been fully released from federal custody. Nevertheless, the discovery represented another remarkable development in the career of a former federal agent whose corruption had already generated widespread criticism and scrutiny within the law enforcement community.

The Human Intelligence Ledger’s exclusive reporting also attracted attention from individuals familiar with the original corruption investigation. Wendell Dulay, a retired investigator with the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, publicly commented on our report and identified the Irizarry investigation as one of his final cases before retirement, recalling the cooperation among multiple agencies that ultimately held the former DEA agent accountable. The reaction underscores the significance of Irizarry’s case to the federal investigators who spent years examining his criminal conduct. Now, with new information identifying him as a participant in the December 2005 fatal shooting of Rigoberto Alpizar at Miami International Airport, questions about his earlier federal law enforcement career have taken on additional importance.

Two Controversial Chapters of One Federal Career

The potential connection between Irizarry and the Alpizar shooting must be examined within its proper historical and legal context. The 2005 confrontation occurred during a period of heightened concern about aviation terrorism, when federal air marshals were expected to respond immediately to threats involving explosives or attempted aircraft hijackings. Prosecutors ultimately determined that the officers involved acted within the law. Irizarry’s later conviction, by contrast, resulted from deliberate financial crimes committed while serving as a DEA special agent. There is no established connection between the conduct underlying his corruption conviction and the decisions made by the marshals at Miami International Airport.

Nevertheless, the identification of a federal officer involved in a fatal encounter is a matter of legitimate historical interest, particularly when that individual subsequently becomes a central figure in a major federal corruption prosecution. Public understanding of significant law enforcement incidents depends not only on the official conclusions reached by investigators but also on the completeness of the historical record. In this instance, the identities of the officers involved in Alpizar’s death were not publicly disclosed in the original reporting, while the professional history of José Irizarry became widely documented only after his DEA prosecution. The account provided to The Human Intelligence Ledger potentially connects those separate histories for the first time.

The Unanswered Questions

Nearly 21 years after Rigoberto Alpizar was killed, the circumstances of his death remain an important episode in the history of American aviation security. The public record establishes that he suffered from bipolar disorder, that his wife attempted to explain his behavior, that federal authorities believed he posed an immediate threat involving explosives, and that no bomb was recovered. It also establishes that prosecutors investigated the shooting and concluded that the officers’ use of deadly force was legally justified. What remains unresolved in the reporting presented here is whether José Irizarry was one of the federal air marshals who fired their weapons and, if so, the precise nature of his participation.

The Human Intelligence Ledger’s reporting includes an identification provided by a former federal law enforcement official, corroborating information attributed to a trusted source within the DEA, and a specific account of three shots fired that corresponds with the number of rounds discharged by one of the officers documented in the original investigation. We have requested official comment from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office and continue to seek records and firsthand accounts that may conclusively establish the identities of the marshals involved. Until that confirmation is obtained, the identification remains a sourced allegation rather than an independently documented historical finding. What is beyond dispute is that Rigoberto Alpizar died on a Miami airport jet bridge on December 7, 2005, that investigators found no bomb, and that the officers involved were cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

For the family of Rigoberto Alpizar, the shooting was a personal tragedy. For federal aviation security, it became a defining controversy over the use of deadly force in an environment shaped by the threat of terrorism. For the historical record of José Irizarry’s federal law enforcement career, the identification supplied to The Human Intelligence Ledger presents a significant question that warrants further investigation. His later conviction for corruption and the unusual circumstances surrounding his subsequent placement in Miami’s residential reentry system have already attracted considerable attention within the federal law enforcement community. Whether his career also includes direct involvement in one of the most controversial federal air marshal shootings of the post September 11 era is a question that can and should be answered through documentary evidence.

The Human Intelligence Ledger will continue examining the records and seeking official confirmation concerning the December 7, 2005, shooting of Rigoberto Alpizar.

Sources and Reporting

The Associated Press , December 2005, contemporaneous reporting concerning the fatal shooting at Miami International Airport.

The Washington Post , December 2005, reporting on the shooting, witness accounts, and professional backgrounds of the federal air marshals.

Time Inc. , December 2005, eyewitness reporting concerning the events aboard American Airlines Flight 924.

United States Department of Justice, December 9, 2021, sentencing announcement concerning former DEA Special Agent José Ismael Irizarry.

The Human Intelligence Ledger, Former Corrupt DEA Agent Jose Irizarry Now in a Miami Halfway House Nearly Seven Years Before His Original Sentence Ends, exclusive reporting on Irizarry’s placement within the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Miami Residential Reentry Management system.

Original reporting, confidential federal law enforcement sources, and request for official comment submitted to the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, October 2026.

On October 30, 2018, James “Whitey” Bulger, the infamous Boston organized crime figure and longtime FBI informant, was brutally murdered inside the United States Penitentiary at Hazelton, West Virginia. He was 89 years old, suffered from serious medical conditions, and relied on a wheelchair for mobility. Less than twelve hours after arriving at the institution, he was dead, beaten to death by fellow prisoners. What makes his murder particularly disturbing is not simply how quickly it occurred after his arrival, but how rapidly he was attacked after being placed in a general population housing unit. His killers already knew he was coming, and within minutes of entering his cell, they carried out a fatal assault. The circumstances surrounding his transfer and subsequent murder represent one of the most troubling examples of institutional failure in the history of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. For those unfamiliar with the inner workings of federal penitentiaries, his death might appear to have been another act of prison violence. For those of us who have actually lived within the federal prison system, however, the circumstances surrounding Bulger’s transfer raise far more troubling questions about how such an extraordinarily dangerous placement was ever authorized.

I was serving time in federal prison when Bulger was transferred to Hazelton, an institution so notorious for violence that it had earned the nickname “Homicide Hazelton.” Having personally experienced the federal prison system, including its internal politics, inmate classifications, institutional culture, and the extraordinary dangers faced by government cooperators, I understood the significance of this transfer. There is an enormous difference between a federal penitentiary operating as a protective or so called soft yard and an institution populated by active gang members, organized crime figures, and prisoners who enforce the unwritten rules of prison culture through violence. These distinctions are not obscure details understood only by inmates. They are fundamental realities of federal incarceration, understood by correctional officers, prison administrators, intelligence personnel, and officials responsible for assigning prisoners to institutions. In my assessment, transferring a notorious government informant like Whitey Bulger to a penitentiary such as Hazelton was an extraordinarily dangerous decision, one whose potentially fatal consequences should have been apparent long before he arrived.

From Tucson to Coleman: Understanding the Federal Prison System

Following his 2013 conviction for his involvement in eleven murders and numerous other crimes, Bulger entered the federal prison system carrying a reputation unlike almost any other inmate in American history. He had been one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives, a powerful Boston organized crime figure, and a longtime confidential informant whose relationship with corrupt federal agents had become the subject of extensive investigations and public scrutiny. Although Bulger personally denied being an informant, federal records established that he had provided information to the FBI, and his relationship with former FBI agent John Connolly became one of the most notorious corruption scandals in the bureau’s history. For many prisoners, particularly those associated with organized crime and active prison gangs, Bulger’s documented history with federal law enforcement would have been enough to make him a target.

Bulger was initially housed at USP Tucson in Arizona before being transferred to USP Coleman II in Florida in September 2014. Both institutions were high security federal penitentiaries, but they were also known within the prison system for accommodating prisoners who could not safely function in traditional penitentiary populations. These institutions are commonly referred to as soft yards, a designation that describes their inmate populations rather than their physical security infrastructure. A soft yard can have the same fences, armed towers, restrictive movement procedures, and correctional staffing as any other federal penitentiary, but its population may include government cooperators, former law enforcement officers, gang dropouts, and other prisoners whose personal histories make them vulnerable to violence. The distinction is enormously consequential because the unwritten rules governing interactions among prisoners can be dramatically different from those found in institutions dominated by active gang affiliations and organized criminal hierarchies.

During my own incarceration, I heard accounts of Bulger’s time in these institutions from individuals familiar with the prison environments in which he had been housed. He was described as an elderly man who frequently moved through the institution in a wheelchair, sometimes pushed by fellow prisoners. Despite his notorious criminal history, there was reportedly a degree of mutual respect between Bulger and other inmates. These were accounts relayed to me within the prison system rather than interactions I personally witnessed, but they were consistent with the culture of institutions where many prisoners shared similar vulnerabilities. Bulger was not necessarily admired for his crimes, nor was he universally respected, but he was living among men who understood the realities of cooperation with federal authorities and the consequences of being labeled an informant. That environment offered a degree of protection that would not necessarily exist in a penitentiary populated by active criminal organizations.

The Confrontation With Medical Staff That Changed Everything

In February 2018, Bulger became involved in a confrontation with a nurse at USP Coleman while receiving medical attention. According to the subsequent investigation conducted by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, Bulger had been experiencing significant medical problems when an argument developed with medical personnel. Prison officials determined that he had threatened a staff member, resulting in disciplinary proceedings and his placement in the Special Housing Unit, commonly known as the SHU. He would remain in restrictive housing for approximately eight months while officials pursued efforts to transfer him to another institution. During my incarceration, I had heard that Bulger had mouthed off to a nurse and that the confrontation ultimately became the justification for removing him from Coleman. The Inspector General’s findings later confirmed the essential connection between the incident involving medical personnel and the administrative decisions that eventually resulted in his transfer.

What followed was a complicated bureaucratic process involving prison administrators, medical personnel, and officials responsible for institutional designations. Bulger suffered from serious cardiac conditions and had previously been classified as requiring Care Level 3 medical services, a designation reflecting the need for more substantial medical resources than those available at many federal institutions. Coleman officials initially pursued transfer options that would accommodate his medical requirements, but those efforts encountered administrative obstacles. Eventually, officials sought to reduce his medical classification to Care Level 2, despite his documented history of serious medical problems. The Inspector General subsequently found significant deficiencies in the handling of his medical designation and the information supplied during the transfer process. Ultimately, Bulger was approved for placement at USP Hazelton, a Care Level 2 institution with a reputation for serious violence.

The significance of this sequence cannot be overstated. An elderly prisoner with serious medical conditions, a widely publicized history of cooperation with federal authorities, and substantial mobility limitations was removed from an institution whose population was comparatively compatible with his security vulnerabilities and transferred to a penitentiary where those same vulnerabilities could expose him to immediate danger. From my perspective, the question is not simply whether prison administrators followed the appropriate paperwork procedures. It is whether the officials responsible for his transfer adequately considered the most basic realities of the federal prison system. A prisoner with Bulger’s reputation did not need to be involved in a personal dispute with another inmate to become a target. His identity alone created an obvious and potentially lethal security concern.

Homicide Hazelton: A Predictable Disaster

USP Hazelton was not another Tucson or Coleman. It was a high security penitentiary with a history of serious violence, including multiple inmate homicides, and a population that included prisoners affiliated with organized crime and active gangs. Within the federal prison system, cooperation with law enforcement can carry severe consequences, particularly in institutions where active criminal organizations exercise influence over inmate behavior. Prisoners identified as informants may face threats, extortion, physical assaults, and murder. These dangers are not hypothetical, nor are they limited to isolated incidents. They are deeply embedded in the culture of certain prison populations, where the stigma associated with informing can follow an individual for decades. Bulger’s reputation was so widely known that his presence at an institution such as Hazelton presented an obvious security concern before he ever stepped through its gates.

The Bureau of Prisons operates a centralized designation system intended to account for an inmate’s security classification, medical requirements, institutional compatibility, and other relevant factors. The Designation and Sentence Computation Center, commonly known as DSCC, plays an important role in determining where federal prisoners are housed. These officials work within an organization that has decades of institutional experience managing gang affiliations, protective custody concerns, cooperating witnesses, and prisoners whose notoriety creates substantial security risks. It is therefore difficult to understand how the dangers associated with placing Bulger in Hazelton’s general population could have been overlooked. The distinction between a soft yard and an active penitentiary is not something learned through an obscure training manual. It is a fundamental part of prison operations, understood by correctional staff and prisoners alike.

Having lived within this system, I believe the decision to transfer Bulger to Hazelton represented a profound failure of judgment. I cannot establish that federal officials deliberately arranged for him to be murdered, and the Department of Justice Inspector General did not find evidence proving such a conspiracy. Nevertheless, the absence of demonstrated criminal intent does not eliminate the question of institutional responsibility. A placement decision can be extraordinarily dangerous even when the individuals making it do not explicitly intend the consequences that follow. In Bulger’s case, the danger was magnified by his age, his medical condition, his physical limitations, and his notoriety as a former FBI informant. Each of these factors should have prompted heightened scrutiny. Taken together, they made his placement in Hazelton’s general population exceptionally difficult to justify.

A Murder Within Minutes of Entering General Population

On the evening of October 29, 2018, Bulger arrived at USP Hazelton. By the following morning, he was dead. Although Bulger was murdered within hours of arriving at the institution, the more disturbing detail is how quickly he was attacked after being placed in the general prison population. His killers were already aware of his arrival, and according to federal court records, at least one prisoner had been told that Bulger would be killed as soon as he entered their housing unit. At approximately 6:06 a.m. on October 30, surveillance footage captured two prisoners entering Bulger’s cell. Within approximately seven minutes, the attack was over. Although the precise interval between his first placement in general population and the assault has not been conclusively established in the publicly available accounts, there was remarkably little time between his arrival at Hazelton and his murder. The fact that prisoners were reportedly anticipating his death before he had even settled into the institution demonstrates the extraordinary danger he faced.

The man principally responsible for Bulger’s murder was Fotios “Freddy” Geas, a notorious Massachusetts organized crime enforcer associated with the Genovese crime family. Geas was already serving a federal life sentence for his involvement in multiple organized crime murders, including the 2003 assassination of Springfield mob boss Adolfo “Big Al” Bruno. Geas had a reputation for despising government informants, making his proximity to Bulger particularly alarming. According to federal prosecutors, Geas repeatedly struck the elderly prisoner in the head, allegedly using a padlock attached to a belt, although his defense attorneys disputed the use of that weapon. Another prisoner, Paul DeCologero, assisted by acting as a lookout. In September 2024, Geas pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and assault resulting in serious bodily injury, receiving an additional 25 years in federal prison, consecutive to his existing life sentence. Geas has been reported as incarcerated at ADX Florence in Colorado, the federal government’s most restrictive maximum security prison, where he is expected to spend the remainder of his life.

What makes this case particularly disturbing to me, having personally experienced the federal prison system, is that the individuals responsible for designating Bulger to Hazelton should have understood precisely what could happen when an infamous FBI informant was placed among active organized crime figures. This was not a situation in which Bulger became involved in a prolonged disagreement with another prisoner, violated an established prison hierarchy, or gradually developed enemies during his incarceration. His identity was enough. His reputation preceded him, prisoners reportedly knew he was coming, and men with violent criminal histories were prepared to act. The fact that an 89 year old, medically compromised prisoner could be transferred from a comparatively protective environment and murdered almost immediately after entering a general population housing unit illustrates a catastrophic failure of the federal prison designation and protection system. In my assessment, the circumstances surrounding Bulger’s death raise questions not merely about the men who killed him, but about every administrative decision that placed him within their reach.

What the Justice Department Investigation Revealed

In December 2022, the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General released the findings of its investigation into the Bureau of Prisons’ handling of Bulger’s transfer. The report documented serious deficiencies involving medical classifications, institutional designation procedures, communication between prison officials, intelligence sharing, and the protection of sensitive transfer information. Investigators found that important medical information had not been properly considered and that the process leading to Bulger’s placement at Hazelton was affected by substantial administrative failures. The report also raised concerns about the broad dissemination of information concerning his transfer, which contributed to an environment in which prisoners became aware of his arrival before adequate protective measures were in place.

The Inspector General did not establish that Bureau of Prisons employees intentionally arranged for Bulger to be murdered. That finding is important and should not be disregarded. There is a meaningful distinction between proving a deliberate conspiracy to facilitate an assassination and identifying institutional failures that exposed a prisoner to foreseeable danger. Nevertheless, the documented deficiencies demonstrate that Bulger’s death cannot be understood solely as an isolated act of violence committed by fellow inmates. The murder occurred after a series of administrative decisions involving multiple levels of the federal prison system, including officials responsible for evaluating his medical needs and determining where he would be housed. Those decisions ultimately placed one of America’s most recognizable government informants inside an institution where he was killed within hours.

The broader issue concerns the degree to which the Bureau of Prisons can be held accountable when its own classification and transfer procedures fail to protect individuals in federal custody. Prison administrators exercise enormous authority over the lives of incarcerated people, including decisions that determine their physical safety, access to medical treatment, and exposure to potentially violent inmate populations. Those responsibilities are particularly significant when officials are dealing with prisoners whose personal histories create unusual security concerns. Bulger’s case demonstrates how a combination of inadequate communication, questionable administrative decisions, and insufficient attention to institutional compatibility can produce irreversible consequences.

The Difference Between Justice and Institutional Negligence

There should be no romanticizing Whitey Bulger or minimizing the extraordinary suffering caused by his criminal activities. He was responsible for serious violence, and the families of his victims endured decades of grief, uncertainty, and frustration. His relationship with corrupt FBI agents also represented one of the most disgraceful chapters in the history of federal law enforcement, demonstrating how the improper management of confidential informants can compromise investigations, undermine public trust, and allow dangerous criminals to evade accountability. Bulger’s eventual conviction and life sentence reflected the gravity of his crimes and the importance of holding even the most powerful organized crime figures accountable under the law.

But a life sentence is not a death sentence, and the government does not have the authority to expose prisoners to lethal danger simply because their crimes make them unpopular or unsympathetic. Once an individual enters federal custody, the government assumes responsibility for providing reasonable protection from foreseeable harm. That obligation applies to every prisoner, including murderers, organized crime figures, government cooperators, and individuals whose conduct has caused tremendous suffering. The legitimacy of the criminal justice system depends in part on the principle that punishment must be imposed through lawful judicial proceedings rather than through violence carried out by other prisoners.

My concern with the Bulger case is not rooted in sympathy for his criminal conduct. It is rooted in my understanding of how federal prisons operate and how the consequences of institutional decisions can be devastating. I have personally experienced the realities of incarceration, the politics of prison populations, and the dangers associated with being identified as someone who has cooperated with federal law enforcement. Those experiences have given me a perspective on the Bureau of Prisons that cannot be fully captured through administrative reports or public statements. The distinctions between institutions, the reputations of particular prison yards, and the unwritten rules governing inmate interactions are realities that correctional professionals should understand when making decisions affecting prisoner safety.

The Questions That Remain

Nearly eight years after Bulger’s murder, the most troubling questions extend beyond the identities of the men who physically killed him. Why was an elderly, medically compromised prisoner with a notorious history as an FBI informant transferred from a comparatively protective environment into a penitentiary with a documented history of serious violence? Why were his medical classification and institutional placement handled in a manner that the Justice Department later identified as deficient? Why was information concerning his transfer allowed to circulate so widely, and why were appropriate protective measures not implemented before his arrival? Most importantly, what accountability exists when administrative decisions expose a prisoner to a danger that experienced correctional professionals should have recognized?

I believe Whitey Bulger’s murder was foreseeable and preventable. That is my assessment based on my personal experience within the federal prison system, the widely understood realities of prison culture, and the findings subsequently documented by federal investigators. It is not an allegation that a particular official deliberately ordered his death, nor is it a claim that investigators established an intentional government conspiracy. It is an argument that the Bureau of Prisons had both the institutional knowledge and the responsibility to recognize the extraordinary danger associated with this transfer and that the safeguards intended to prevent such an outcome failed.

The men who physically attacked Bulger have faced criminal consequences, but their prosecution does not resolve the broader questions of institutional responsibility. The Bureau of Prisons exists not merely to confine individuals convicted of federal crimes, but to maintain lawful custody under conditions consistent with constitutional obligations and basic standards of human safety. When those obligations are compromised, the consequences can be fatal, and the resulting failures deserve scrutiny regardless of the identity or criminal history of the victim.

Whitey Bulger was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in federal prison. He was not sentenced to be murdered by fellow inmates, nor was his notoriety a justification for placing him in an environment where that outcome was foreseeable. His death should serve as a lasting reminder that decisions made behind prison walls, often through seemingly routine administrative processes, can determine whether an incarcerated individual lives or dies.

The federal government had an obligation to keep Whitey Bulger alive while he was in its custody. On October 30, 2018, that obligation was not fulfilled. The question that remains is how many people within the Bureau of Prisons understood the danger before it was too late.

The Human Intelligence Ledger examines criminal justice, federal law enforcement, human intelligence, institutional accountability, and the realities of the American prison system through investigative reporting and firsthand experience.

Sources and further reading

U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, Investigation and Review of the Bureau of Prisons’ Handling of the Transfer of Inmate James “Whitey” Bulger (December 2022).

ABC News, Whitey Bulger killing was planned in minutes, Justice Department says (August 2022).

The Guardian, Former mafia hitman sentenced to 25 years for killing Whitey Bulger in prison (September 6, 2024).

There is a fundamental expectation that commissioned officers in the United States Army will demonstrate professionalism, sound judgment, emotional discipline, and respect for the constitutional principles they have sworn to defend. These expectations become particularly important when an officer holds the rank of major, a field-grade position associated with substantial leadership responsibilities and operational decision-making. Yet a series of LinkedIn messages sent to me by an account identifying itself as Major Gabriel Scott raises serious questions about how one individual entrusted with military leadership responsibilities conducts himself when confronted with opinions he finds objectionable. What began as a disagreement about Minnesota’s Somali American community quickly deteriorated into personal insults, accusations of terrorist sympathies, and statements suggesting that senior federal law enforcement officials could be enlisted to shut down my independent publication. The exchange was remarkable not because an Army officer disagreed with a journalist, but because of the extraordinary language he chose to express that disagreement.

Scott publicly identifies himself as an operations officer and recently announced that he had completed the United States Army’s Cavalry Leaders Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, from August 24 through September 14, 2026. In his LinkedIn announcement, Scott described the program as challenging and credited it with strengthening his understanding of reconnaissance fundamentals, security operations, and the Military Decision-Making Process. He expressed gratitude that his unit had provided him the opportunity to sharpen his skills as a cavalry squadron S3. The accompanying training certificates identify him as Major Gabriel G. Scott. The significance of this background is not that completing military training somehow obligates an officer to agree with my reporting. Rather, it highlights the contrast between the disciplined, analytical judgment expected of someone serving in such a position and the inflammatory personal rhetoric documented in our subsequent exchange.

The disagreement centered on my refusal to accept sweeping generalizations about Minnesota’s Somali American population in discussions involving allegations of fraud, immigration, and national security. There is nothing inherently objectionable about scrutinizing fraud involving public funds, investigating criminal organizations, or questioning failures of government oversight. Those are legitimate subjects of journalism, and The Human Intelligence Ledger regularly examines precisely such issues. However, investigating individual wrongdoing is fundamentally different from assigning collective guilt to an ethnic community. Scott appeared unwilling to recognize that distinction. Instead of addressing the substance of my position, he asked, “How much is the Somali lobby paying you, do you even know the difference between the clans?” He then questioned my qualifications to discuss security matters, suggested that my lack of military deployment rendered my opinions worthless, and employed crude personal insults. The implication that defending a community against collective accusations must involve financial compensation is an especially revealing feature of the exchange, although Scott provided no evidence of any such payment.

His rhetoric became even more extraordinary when he wrote, “Good call you chose being a podcaster instead of actually serving your country PUSSY.” The remark deserves examination because it illustrates a troubling assumption that military service provides an exclusive claim to expertise, patriotism, or the right to participate in national security discussions. Military service is deserving of respect, but it does not establish intellectual infallibility, nor does it diminish the constitutional rights of civilians who have chosen different professional paths. Intelligence analysts, journalists, federal investigators, scholars, confidential human sources, and countless other civilians have contributed meaningfully to the nation’s security without wearing a military uniform. An Army major should understand that national security is a multidisciplinary undertaking, not a private conversation reserved for individuals who have deployed overseas. The suggestion that a journalist’s credibility can be dismissed through an obscene insult and an appeal to military credentials is not an argument. It is an attempt to substitute status for substance.

My publication, The Human Intelligence Ledger, is an independent journalistic platform examining intelligence, federal law enforcement, military affairs, national security, organized crime, and corrections. Over the past year, the publication has generated more than 3.5 million LinkedIn impressions, developed an audience exceeding 9,000 followers, attracted approximately 3,000 newsletter subscribers, and published more than 120 articles. Its podcast features conversations with military veterans, federal law enforcement professionals, intelligence practitioners, and individuals whose firsthand experiences provide unusual insight into the institutions and subjects being examined. My professional background includes experience as a human intelligence source working with federal law enforcement, and that perspective informs the questions I ask and the stories I pursue. These accomplishments do not place my work beyond criticism, and I have never suggested otherwise. But Scott’s apparent belief that he could dismiss an independent publication through personal insults, without engaging with its reporting, demonstrates a remarkably superficial understanding of journalism and the public interest it serves.

The exchange took a more concerning turn when Scott began invoking federal authorities. “Tell my leadership and I’ll tell the FBI what you’re up to, sound good kid?” he wrote. In another message, Scott declared, “I’m sure Kash Patel never heard of you but will easily shut your operation down, I’ve already seen it happen to classmates of mine.” He concluded that particular statement with the words, “Let’s get shit popping.” These remarks raise questions that go considerably beyond an ordinary disagreement on social media. What exactly did Scott believe warranted an FBI investigation? What specific criminal activity did he think my publication had committed? Did he possess any evidence supporting such allegations, or was the reference to federal law enforcement simply intended to intimidate someone whose opinions he disliked? Most importantly, why would a commissioned Army officer suggest that the FBI director could shut down a journalistic enterprise in response to a personal dispute?

It is essential to distinguish Scott’s statements from established facts. There is no evidence in the screenshots that FBI Director Kash Patel knows Scott, that Scott has communicated with the FBI concerning my publication, or that any federal agency has contemplated taking action against The Human Intelligence Ledger. Scott’s assertions may amount to nothing more than rhetorical intimidation. Nevertheless, the language itself is significant. Federal law enforcement agencies exist to investigate potential violations of law, not to settle personal disagreements between military officers and journalists. Invoking the FBI director as though he were a personal instrument for suppressing an unwelcome publication reflects, at minimum, an alarming misunderstanding of the relationship between government authority and independent journalism. Whether Scott actually believed what he was suggesting or merely hoped the reference would frighten me is a question he should be invited to answer directly.

Scott also escalated his rhetoric by accusing me of supporting terrorism. “You’re not a journalist, you’re a terrorist mouthpiece,” he wrote. This accusation was presented without identifying a single article, interview, published statement, or documented action in which I advocated terrorism or encouraged extremist violence. It is particularly troubling because terrorism is not a casual label in the professional world Scott inhabits. Accusations involving extremist organizations, terrorist sympathies, or national security threats carry substantial implications and ordinarily require careful distinctions supported by credible evidence. For someone who publicly celebrates advanced military leadership training, Scott demonstrated little apparent interest in applying that evidentiary discipline to his own assertions. A journalist’s rejection of collective blame against Somali Americans is not an endorsement of ISIS, terrorism, or any other extremist ideology. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish those positions should concern anyone who values rigorous national security analysis.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the entire exchange is the contradiction between Scott’s publicly advertised professional responsibilities and his private communications. As a cavalry squadron S3, according to his own LinkedIn description, Scott operates in a role associated with planning, coordinating, and managing military operations. Such responsibilities demand the ability to evaluate incomplete information, distinguish evidence from assumption, exercise restraint under pressure, and communicate effectively with individuals holding competing perspectives. Yet in this exchange, he repeatedly abandoned substantive argument in favor of ridicule, unsupported accusations, and suggestions of federal intervention. It is reasonable to ask how an individual entrusted with operational planning can so readily confuse disagreement with disloyalty, criticism with extremism, and personal offense with grounds for involving federal investigators. The messages do not establish how Scott performs his military duties, but they unquestionably raise concerns about the judgment he displayed in this particular interaction.

There is also a broader question about the example such behavior sets for subordinate soldiers. Military leadership is not confined to a classroom, training exercise, or operational briefing. The character of an officer is reflected in how that individual responds to frustration, criticism, and disagreement, particularly when there is no immediate institutional audience observing the interaction. Soldiers are routinely expected to demonstrate discipline and professionalism in situations far more demanding than an argument on LinkedIn. It is therefore fair to question whether a field-grade officer who resorts to obscenities and threats of professional retaliation during a civilian disagreement is modeling the standards expected of those under his supervision. This is not a conclusion that Scott is unfit for command or has committed a punishable offense. Those determinations would require facts beyond the messages presented here. It is, however, a legitimate matter of public interest when someone holding military authority communicates in a manner so sharply at odds with the values associated with that authority.

Scott’s remarks also expose a particularly troubling misconception about the role of the press in American society. Journalists are not required to obtain approval from military officers before reporting on national security, immigration, criminal investigations, or government policy. Nor does a journalist become an enemy of the country by questioning the assertions of someone who serves in uniform. The First Amendment protects the freedom to investigate, criticize, publish, and challenge powerful institutions, subject to applicable law. Those protections do not depend on whether a journalist has served in combat, accumulated military decorations, or earned the approval of an Army major. When a government employee suggests that federal law enforcement could shut down a publication because of its reporting or viewpoints, that statement warrants scrutiny regardless of whether the individual actually possesses the power to carry out the suggestion.

I intend to provide Scott with an opportunity to explain his statements, including what he meant by suggesting that the FBI director could shut down my publication, whether he has contacted any federal authorities about me, and what evidence he believes supports his characterization of my work as terrorist advocacy. I also intend to seek comment through appropriate Army public affairs channels regarding the professional standards expected of commissioned officers communicating with civilians in a personal capacity. Such inquiries are not demands for predetermined disciplinary action. They are straightforward requests for accountability and clarification. Scott is entitled to provide context, challenge my interpretation of the exchange, and respond to the questions raised by his own words. His answers should be evaluated fairly and accurately, just as his original statements deserve to be examined in their full context.

Ultimately, this controversy is not about whether Gabriel Scott respects me, subscribes to my publication, or approves of my reporting. His personal opinion of The Human Intelligence Ledger is irrelevant to its ability to operate independently. What matters is that a man publicly identifying himself as a United States Army major chose to respond to a disagreement by directing personal insults at a civilian, making an unsupported accusation of terrorist advocacy, and suggesting that federal authorities could interfere with an independent publication. Those are his documented statements, not allegations invented by an adversary. They invite legitimate scrutiny precisely because the standards associated with military leadership are supposed to mean something beyond the completion of professional development courses.

Major Gabriel Scott may have earned his commission, attained the rank of major, and completed the Army’s Cavalry Leaders Course. Those accomplishments deserve recognition on their own merits. But military rank is not a substitute for intellectual discipline, a training certificate is not proof of sound judgment, and invoking the FBI director does not transform an unsupported accusation into a credible national security concern. The question is not whether Scott has learned the fundamentals of military leadership. The question is whether the conduct documented in his own messages reflects the principles that leadership is supposed to represent.

Benjamin Freedland

Host at The Human Intelligence Ledger Podcast

October 6, 2026

Long before Conor Fredericks found himself fighting for his life on the second tier of a South Carolina prison, his life had already taken him through environments most people will never experience. He entered the United States Marine Corps at 17, became an intelligence specialist, was selected for Marine Special Operations Command, spent four years as a police officer and ultimately entered corrections, where he rose to become a CERT commander. By the time three incarcerated men attacked him, Fredericks had spent much of his adult life preparing for dangerous situations. Nothing, however, could completely prepare him for what happened that day.

Corrections was woven into Fredericks’ childhood because his father, Arthur Fredericks ,spent more than three decades in the profession, including with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. His father’s promotions meant the family moved repeatedly around the country, exposing Connor to different communities and giving him an early familiarity with the profession he would eventually enter himself. Fredericks recalled living everywhere from California to South Carolina and Massachusetts while his father advanced through the federal system.

As a teenager in Massachusetts, Fredericks was playing hockey at a high level but faced a decision about what he wanted his adult life to become. College was one possibility. The military was another, and he did not even wait until his eighteenth birthday to choose. “I had parental consent at 17 to join the military,” Fredericks recalled.

He entered the United States Marine Corps as an intelligence specialist and spent roughly two and a half years with his first unit. His first deployment took him with a special-purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force to Sicily and Africa in support of logistical missions. Fredericks credits strong noncommissioned officers and leaders during those early years with changing the trajectory of his career because he was eventually assessed and selected for Marine Special Operations Command.

The experience came at a cost. Fredericks spent significant time overseas, without even counting the training evolutions and holidays that kept him away from home. Eventually he began asking himself whether his body and personal life could sustain the physical demands of special operations indefinitely. “Can I really do this for 20 years? Can I even do this for another five?” he remembered wondering. His answer ultimately took him out of the military, but not away from dangerous public service.

From Special Operations to the Night Shift

Fredericks became a police officer after leaving the Marines and spent four years in policing, working for three agencies and serving as a canine handler at two of them. Almost his entire policing career was spent working nights, typically from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., and he discovered that he loved it.

The darkness showed him a side of otherwise quiet communities that most residents never saw. “You have no idea what goes on at the hours of midnight to six in the morning in your own community,” Fredericks said in an earlier interview, describing people sleeping peacefully while violence and predatory behavior unfolded outside. He described one South Carolina community as appearing almost like “Mayberry” during daylight while presenting an entirely different reality after midnight.

Fredericks gravitated toward proactive law enforcement. In describing his mentality to me, he contrasted the work he wanted with spending his career stopping “soccer moms going five miles an hour over the speed limit.” He wanted the serious cases involving drugs, guns and violence. The progression from military intelligence and special operations into proactive policing was therefore not particularly surprising. He had repeatedly chosen work that put him closer to complicated and potentially dangerous situations.

One incident from his police career demonstrates what that meant in practice. In 2022, Fredericks responded with other officers to a massive apartment fire. He and his field-training officer, himself a former Marine, arrived and momentarily stared at something Fredericks had never encountered before. “We took a breath, we looked at it for what it was,” he recalled. “I’ve never seen a fire that big in my life.”

Then the officers went toward it.

“We just kind of went to work,” Fredericks recalled. Officers pulled residents from balconies while others jumped from windows into their arms. They smashed windows with their batons attempting to reach people as heavy smoke poured through the complex and strong winds carried burning embers toward additional buildings. Several officers were later treated for smoke inhalation. Fredericks received a Medal of Valor for his actions during the rescue, which involved evacuating approximately 100 people.

That episode provides important context for what would happen later. Fredericks had already demonstrated that his instinct when confronted with danger was not simply to retreat from it. He had been trained in the military to function under pressure and had carried that mentality into policing.

Crossing Behind the Walls

Fredericks did not originally expect to become a correctional officer. “I had no idea that I was going to be in corrections,” he later recalled, explaining that he had “absolutely adored” police work. A serious cancer diagnosis involving a family member, however, forced him to reconsider a night-shift schedule that made it difficult to be present during the day.

Before applying, Fredericks toured the correctional facility where he might work, accompanied by his father. The environment initially seemed less foreign than he had expected because many of the people incarcerated there resembled the same people he had encountered as a police officer. The difference, he quickly recognized, was time. A police officer arrests a noncompliant person, transports him to jail and eventually returns to the station. A correctional officer may spend an entire shift managing that same person.

His military and policing backgrounds nevertheless gave him something valuable behind the walls: experience communicating with different kinds of people. Fredericks believed corrections required the ability to interact with populations an officer might never encounter in ordinary life, and he credited his earlier career with helping him “build rapport” and function inside that environment.

Fredericks eventually became a CERT commander within the South Carolina Department of Corrections. He also developed a reputation for aggressively pursuing contraband, particularly drugs and cellphones. From his perspective, the danger was not confined to the incarcerated person caught holding the item. Every piece of contraband had entered the institution somehow, and Fredericks was deeply concerned about corruption and the possibility that trusted people could become part of the pipeline they were supposed to prevent.

That work put him directly against an underground prison economy. A cellphone inside prison can connect someone to criminal associates outside. Narcotics generate money and debts, while other prohibited commodities can become exponentially more valuable once they cross a prison perimeter. Fredericks was confiscating those commodities and interfering with the networks built around them.

Then came the day that nearly killed him.

The Ambush

Fredericks was on the second tier of a housing unit when a confrontation with an incarcerated man became physical. During the struggle, he noticed another man approaching from the side and attempting to ambush him. Fredericks maneuvered away from that attack, but in doing so eventually found himself with his back near the wall of the upper tier while two men assaulted him.

Then a third man entered the fight.

“He ended up coming up on my left flank and he stabbed me in the abdomen, and then he stabbed me twice over the top of my head,” Fredericks recalled. He later learned that the original attacker had also been striking him with a lock inside a sock. “At this point it was a three-on-one.”

Another officer was present and, Fredericks emphasized, “was doing the best that they could,” but the attack had become a desperate close-quarters fight. He was stabbed three times and repeatedly struck in the face. What he remembers most vividly is the strange psychological experience of remaining conscious through it. “It was kind of like an out-of-body experience,” he recalled. “I never lost consciousness during it, so I have a very vivid recollection of it.”

Fredericks somehow broke free.

“I was able to fight off or escape the ambush somehow,” he said. Remarkably, despite the stabbing and beating, he walked out of the housing unit under his own power. Another officer began escorting him across the yard toward the prison’s medical facility before Fredericks collapsed. He did not yet understand the extent of his injuries. The abdominal stab wound had punctured a lung. OC spray contamination had also left him barely able to see, and he remembered navigating the aftermath largely through the sound of other officers’ voices responding around him.

Medical personnel stabilized him inside the institution before he was transported roughly 30 to 40 minutes to an emergency room, where doctors fully stabilized him and the long process of recovery began.

Fredericks had spent years in military service, worked countless night shifts as a police officer and faced dangerous encounters throughout his career. He had run toward a burning apartment complex and helped residents escape. Now the Marine, police officer and CERT commander had nearly died inside the institution where he worked.

The Question Left Behind

The mechanics of the assault are clear enough: three incarcerated men attacked Fredericks, he was stabbed three times and struck repeatedly, and he escaped badly wounded. What is far more difficult to establish is whether anything larger preceded that moment.

That question cannot be answered simply from the circumstances of the attack. I have not independently established that a correctional employee intentionally compromised security, arranged the assault or conspired with incarcerated people to attack Fredericks. Those are serious allegations that would require evidence beyond the attack itself.

What can be established is that Fredericks had become known for disrupting contraband, and contraband represents money. Every cellphone seized and every quantity of narcotics confiscated potentially affects not merely the person possessing it but whoever financed, transported, distributed or expected to profit from it.

The central question therefore extends beyond who stabbed Connor Fredericks. It is whether the underground economy he had been disrupting offers lessons about the broader dynamics that can surround contraband enforcement and violence inside correctional institutions.

To explore that question, I took Fredericks’ story to someone who had spent years viewing prison from exactly the opposite perspective: a former prominent member of a California-based Hispanic prison gang who served multiple state and federal prison terms and understood firsthand the illicit economy operating behind the walls.

After hearing the circumstances surrounding Fredericks’ work and the attack, his assessment was immediate: “Sounds to me he got set up.” He did not present investigative records or direct knowledge of the Fredericks assault, and his conclusion should therefore be understood as an experienced former prison gang member’s interpretation rather than proof of what happened.

When I asked him to explain why he saw it that way, however, the conversation became about something much larger than one attack. It became a lesson about how prisons actually work when the officers go home.

Don’t miss Part 2 of this story:

EIGHT HOURS AT A TIME

What a Former Prison Gang Member Says Corrections Needs to Understand

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A Human Intelligence Ledger Conversation with Felix Gago

There are parts of San Francisco where suffering is not hidden behind closed doors. It unfolds in public, in broad daylight, in front of businesses, apartment buildings, bus stops and people simply trying to make their way through the city. Addiction, homelessness, poverty and the consequences of incarceration intersect on the same blocks, sometimes within only a few feet of one another.

Walk through those neighborhoods and it can be overwhelming. People dig through garbage looking for something of value. Others are visibly intoxicated or using drugs openly. Some are sleeping on sidewalks while hundreds of people pass them without making eye contact. After enough exposure, there is a danger that the extraordinary becomes ordinary and that the human beings inside the crisis become part of the scenery.

Felix Gagorefuses to allow that to happen.

Gago is a youth minister and a Housing Planning Specialist and case manager with New Horizons Transitional Housing, where he works with men and women coming out of prison, jail and drug treatment programs. His work places him directly in the difficult space between incarceration and freedom, addiction and recovery, failure and another opportunity. His ministry places him in many of those same spaces for a different reason.

For Felix, however, the two worlds are not really separate. His Christian faith shapes the way he approaches his work, and his work continually forces him to confront what faith looks like when it leaves the church and enters the street.

This week, our conversation began with the Book of Isaiah.

I asked Felix a question I intend to ask him regularly: What have you learned from the Word this week, and how have you applied it in your community?

His answer began with ancient Israel, but it did not stay there for long. It brought us directly back to San Francisco, to the people walking its streets, to the men and women coming home from prison and to a passage in Isaiah that speaks directly to the people Felix has chosen to serve.

The Warning Before the Fall

“This week, as we were reading through the Book of Isaiah, I saw how many times God would warn His people about doing things that were totally against what He wanted for them,” Gago told me. “But yet, He would call them back. He would call them back.”

That repetition caught his attention.

Throughout Isaiah, there are warnings about what happens when people continually turn away from what God has asked of them. There is rebellion, judgment and consequence, but there is also the repeated possibility of restoration. People can wander extraordinarily far away and still be called to return.

For Felix, that pattern feels remarkably familiar.

“It just reminds me about the many chances that we have, the opportunities that we have when we’re out here,” he said. “How we take them for granted until we’re almost out of time, or until we see no light at the end of the tunnel.”

There is something particularly powerful about hearing those words while standing in a city where so many people appear to have reached exactly that point. Some have cycled through addiction for years. Others have been incarcerated repeatedly. Some have lost contact with their families, exhausted every relationship they once relied upon or reached a point where the rest of society seems to have concluded that there is nothing left to save.

Felix does not see it that way.

The lesson he takes from Isaiah is not that consequences disappear simply because someone wants another chance. Isaiah is filled with consequences. Rather, Felix sees something more difficult and more hopeful: the existence of consequences does not necessarily mean the absence of redemption.

A person can have made terrible decisions and still be capable of making a different one tomorrow.

Isaiah 61:1: A Calling to the Broken

There is another passage in Isaiah that feels almost inseparable from the work Felix is doing.

Isaiah 61:1 begins in the English Standard Version:

“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me…” — Isaiah 61:1 (ESV)

The remainder of the verse describes a mission directed toward people who are suffering: bringing good news to the poor, tending to the brokenhearted, proclaiming liberty to captives and announcing freedom to those who are bound.

Read those words and then walk through the community Felix serves.

The connection is difficult to miss.

The poor are not theoretical. They are standing outside. The brokenhearted are not characters in an ancient story. They are people whose families have fallen apart, whose addictions have consumed years of their lives or whose decisions have left them wondering whether there is anything left to rebuild. The captives are not merely metaphorical to Felix. Some of the people sitting across from him have literally just walked out of prison or jail.

Isaiah 61:1 therefore carries particular weight in Felix’s world because it is not merely a description of suffering. It describes movement toward those who are suffering.

That distinction is important.

It is one thing to acknowledge that poverty exists. It is another to sit across from someone experiencing it. It is one thing to believe prisoners deserve another chance. It is another to help someone who has just been released figure out where he will sleep. It is one thing to speak about addiction from a distance. It is another to encounter someone in the middle of it and still recognize the human being underneath.

For Felix, scripture cannot remain safely confined to the page if it is going to mean anything in the community.

Isaiah 61:1 demands proximity.

What Isaiah Looks Like on a San Francisco Street

Shortly before this conversation, I walked outside with Felix and saw a scene that was difficult to ignore. There were people in obvious distress, people struggling with addiction and the kind of public disorder that can produce an immediate emotional reaction.

From the outside, it is easy to ask how a person got there. It is easy to wonder why someone does not simply stop using drugs, accept help, get a job or make different choices. It is much harder to stand in front of the individual person and understand the years of decisions, trauma, addiction, incarceration, broken relationships and missed opportunities that may have preceded that moment.

So I asked Felix how the Isaiah he had been reading applied to what we had just seen.

His answer did not begin with policy. It began with recognition.

“When you come in contact with these people, even though you may see them digging through the trash or getting high, you can be a reminder,” Gago said. “Like, ‘Hey, life doesn’t have to be this way.’”

That may sound simple. In practice, it requires something many people have stopped doing. It requires seeing the person.

“They Are People With Souls”

Felix understands that telling someone their life can change means very little if your behavior toward them communicates that you have already decided they are worthless.

“Just reaching out to them and treating them like humans,” he told me. “They’re not trash. They’re not refuse. They are people.”

Then he added the line that, to me, defined our entire conversation: “They are people with souls. They are people that can have a future.”

There is a tremendous amount packed into those words.

When a person becomes visibly addicted, homeless or repeatedly incarcerated, their identity can slowly be replaced by a label. A man becomes an addict. A woman becomes homeless. Someone leaving prison becomes an offender or an ex-con. The description of a circumstance becomes the definition of the person.

Felix rejects that reduction.

He does not deny the circumstances. If someone is addicted, the addiction is real. If someone committed a crime, the crime happened. If someone has destroyed relationships or squandered opportunities, pretending otherwise does not help them. Accountability and compassion do not have to be opposites.

What Felix refuses to accept is the idea that a person’s present condition establishes the limit of that person’s future.

The man digging through the garbage is still a man. The woman struggling with addiction is still a woman with a history that began before the addiction and a future that may extend beyond it. The person walking out of prison is not merely an inmate who has been relocated from one side of a wall to the other.

“They are people with souls,” Felix said.

That belief echoes the heart of Isaiah 61:1. The poor, the brokenhearted and the captive are not described as people to be discarded. They are precisely the people toward whom the message is directed.

Felix Knows Something About the Wrong Road

There is another reason Felix speaks about redemption differently than someone observing these communities from a distance.

He has needed it himself.

“I was someone that was going down the wrong road,” he told me.

Felix’s story is not identical to the stories of the people he serves. He was not describing the same type of drug addiction he encounters on the streets or among some of his clients. His attraction was to something different: the lifestyle.

When I described it that way to him, he agreed.

There are forms of addiction that are easy to identify because they involve a substance, but human beings can also become attached to identities, environments and ways of living that are destroying them. Money can become intoxicating. So can status, excitement, belonging, power and the feeling that comes from living outside conventional boundaries.

A person can recognize that a road is dangerous and continue traveling down it anyway. Felix understands that contradiction because he has experienced it.

“I know better,” he said. “And I know that I was able to turn around.”

That sentence changes the context of everything else he says.

When Felix approaches someone coming home from prison, he is not simply a professional with a caseload explaining what the client should do next. When he speaks to someone whose life appears to be collapsing, he is not speaking from a place of believing he has never made destructive choices.

He knows what it means to look backward and realize that another version of your life was possible. More importantly, he knows what it means to discover that another version of your future may still be possible too.

The People Coming Home

Today, Felix works at New Horizons Transitional Housing, where he serves as a Housing Planning Specialist and case manager.

“I’m a case manager for people that are coming out of prison, out of jail and out of a drug program,” he explained.

Those few words describe a complicated population at a particularly vulnerable moment.

Release is often described as freedom, but freedom does not automatically provide housing, employment, transportation, identification, stability or a repaired relationship with family. A person can walk out of an institution carrying everything they own and immediately face a series of decisions that most people rarely have to contemplate simultaneously.

Where will I sleep? How will I get there? Who is willing to hire me? How do I explain the years missing from my résumé? What happens when I encounter the people I used to run with? What happens when I feel overwhelmed? What happens when the environment I return to is the same environment that contributed to sending me away?

These are not abstract questions for Felix. They are part of the world in which he works.

Housing is therefore more than finding an address. Stable housing can become one of the first physical foundations upon which someone begins reconstructing a life. It gives a person somewhere to wake up tomorrow and somewhere to return to tonight. It creates the possibility of routine, responsibility and planning beyond the next several hours.

Felix is helping people navigate that transition while carrying an understanding that some of them will not move through it perfectly.

That makes the language of Isaiah 61:1 especially striking. When Isaiah speaks about liberty for captives and freedom for those who are bound, Felix encounters people for whom captivity is not simply a theological metaphor. Prison gates, jail cells and institutional walls have been physical realities in their lives.

Freedom, Felix understands, is only the beginning of coming home.

What Happens When Someone Fails Again?

This is where Felix’s reading of Isaiah becomes particularly relevant.

When someone walks through the doors after incarceration or treatment, Felix is not simply looking at a case file. He is looking at another human being standing at a crossroads. Some people will seize the opportunity immediately while others will struggle. Some may relapse, some may violate conditions placed upon them, and some may eventually return to jail or prison. Felix understands those realities without believing that failure somehow erases a person’s humanity.

That is an important distinction because second chances are easy to celebrate when they work. The more difficult question is what happens when someone wastes one, receives another opportunity and fails again.

At what point does society decide that the person standing in front of us has exhausted the supply?

That is part of what Felix sees in Isaiah. God’s people are warned repeatedly. They stray repeatedly. Consequences follow, but so does the recurring call to return. For Felix, that ancient pattern does not provide an excuse for destructive behavior. It provides a framework for understanding that accountability and redemption can exist simultaneously.

A person’s worst chapter does not necessarily have to become the final chapter.

Ministry Outside the Church Walls

Felix’s role as a youth minister adds another dimension to this work because ministry, as he practices it, is not confined to a pulpit. It happens in conversations, when someone is coming home from prison, when a person is struggling to find housing and when someone who has become accustomed to being judged encounters another human being willing to look them in the eye.

There is an important difference between preaching at someone and being present with them. Felix’s approach is rooted in the belief that dignity has to come before almost everything else. If you want someone to believe that his life has value, your interaction with him cannot communicate the opposite.

That is why the phrase “they are not trash” matters.

He is not suggesting that society ignore destructive behavior. He is saying that destructive behavior does not transform a human being into human refuse.

The distinction may determine whether someone who believes there is “no light at the end of the tunnel,” as Felix described it, can begin imagining something beyond the tunnel at all.

Isaiah 61:1 gives that philosophy a scriptural foundation. The response to brokenness described there is not abandonment. It is engagement. The message goes toward the poor, the wounded and the captive.

That is where Felix believes ministry belongs too.

Human Intelligence Begins With the Human

The Human Intelligence Ledger usually explores human intelligence through a very particular lens. We talk to investigators, agents, police officers, intelligence professionals and people who have spent careers learning how relationships produce information that technology alone cannot obtain.

Again and again, those conversations return to the same principle: human beings respond to human beings. Trust matters. Listening matters. Understanding someone’s motivations matters. Recognizing the person behind the information matters.

Felix Gago operates in an entirely different environment, but there is something remarkably similar at the center of his work.

Human intelligence begins with the human.

Before the case number, there is a person. Before the criminal record, there is a person. Before the addiction, there is a person. Before the tent, the jail cell, the relapse or the garbage bag someone is digging through on a San Francisco sidewalk, there is a human being whose story is larger than the moment in which you encountered them.

That does not mean ignoring reality. It means refusing to believe that the reality you are witnessing is necessarily permanent.

The Man Standing on the Other Side

Perhaps one of the most powerful things Felix can offer someone struggling to change is not a sermon at all.

It is the evidence of his own life.

When he tells someone that another life is possible, he is not speaking entirely in hypotheticals. He remembers moving in the wrong direction. He remembers the attraction of a lifestyle that could have continued pulling him further away from the person he wanted to become.

Now he stands on the other side of that decision working with people facing their own versions of it.

That gives weight to a simple sentence like, “Life doesn’t have to be this way.”

It also changes what redemption looks like. Redemption is not always dramatic. It may not arrive as one enormous moment in which everything suddenly changes. Sometimes it is a series of ordinary decisions repeated long enough that a different life begins to emerge. Someone accepts help, attends the meeting, finds housing, shows up tomorrow, stays away from the people pulling him backward and makes the next right decision. Then he has to wake up and make another.

Felix knows that process can fail. He also knows failure does not mean the process can never begin again.

From Isaiah to the Streets

This is ultimately where Isaiah 61:1 and Felix Gago’s work meet.

The verse speaks of good news reaching the poor, healing being brought toward broken hearts and liberty being proclaimed to people in captivity. Felix spends his days among people for whom those descriptions are not poetic abstractions.

He encounters poverty.

He encounters brokenness.

He encounters people emerging from literal captivity.

And his response is remarkably simple: see them.

Treat them as human beings before asking them to rebuild themselves into something society finds more acceptable. Recognize that accountability for yesterday and hope for tomorrow can occupy the same space.

For Felix, Christianity cannot only be something proclaimed inside a sanctuary to people who already believe. If the message has something to say about the poor, the brokenhearted and the captive, then eventually someone has to carry that message to where those people actually are.

Sometimes that means the street.

Sometimes it means transitional housing.

Sometimes it means sitting across from someone who has just come home from prison.

Sometimes it means approaching someone whom everyone else has learned to walk past.

Called Back

Our conversation began with Isaiah, but by the end of it, the connection Felix was making had become much clearer.

He was reading about people being warned and wandering anyway. He was reading about consequences and about people being called back after they had already been given opportunities they failed to appreciate. In Isaiah 61, he was also encountering a vision in which the poor, brokenhearted and captive are not abandoned at the margins but become the very people toward whom the message is carried.

Then Felix walked outside into San Francisco and saw people living their own versions of that story.

Some have burned through opportunities. Some have hurt themselves and other people. Some may have been offered treatment before and rejected it. Some have served prison sentences for serious crimes. Others may be standing at the beginning of a descent rather than the end of one.

Felix does not know how every story will finish, and neither does anyone else.

What he knows is that he cannot determine someone’s ending simply by looking at the chapter they are living today.

That may be the most important lesson he has carried from Isaiah into his community this week. Warnings matter, consequences are real, and choices have weight. People can travel extraordinarily far down the wrong road and sometimes cause enormous damage along the way. None of that has to be minimized in order to believe that redemption remains possible.

Felix has traveled far enough down his own wrong road to understand the difference between the person someone has been and the person they may still become.

So when he encounters a man digging through garbage, someone getting high on the street or a person walking out of prison uncertain about what comes next, he tries to begin somewhere society too often forgets to begin.

With the human being.

“They’re not trash. They’re not refuse. They are people,” Felix told me. “They are people with souls. They are people that can have a future.”

Isaiah wrote of good news for the poor, healing for the brokenhearted and liberty for the captive. Thousands of years later, Felix Gago is trying to live out that calling among people who can understand each of those words firsthand.

In a city where it can become easy to stop seeing the people standing directly in front of us, he is trying to make sure they are seen.

And sometimes being seen is where the road back begins.

Some of the most attractive small business investments are not companies waiting to be created. They are existing businesses that already have customers, revenue, operating experience, and demonstrated demand, but have never had the outside capital or marketing infrastructure necessary to determine how large they could become.

That is what has recently drawn my attention to an existing cleaning business in Minnesota.

The company is licensed, insured, and bonded and provides a diverse range of services including residential cleaning, commercial properties, office spaces, deep cleans, special events, and specialized projects. It is already operating and generating business. The proprietor understands the day to day operation and has an existing foundation from which to grow.

That is important because this is not a turnaround concept. I am not interested in finding a failing business and attempting to rescue it. I am interested in the opposite.

Find something that already works and determine what happens when you put meaningful resources behind it.

A cleaning company presents an especially interesting opportunity because the fundamental expansion costs are relatively straightforward. Additional cleaners create capacity. Vehicles create mobility. Equipment and supplies allow additional crews to operate. Working capital provides breathing room for payroll and expansion. Marketing generates additional demand.

The investment thesis is therefore relatively simple. Capital should not replace the existing business model. It should accelerate it.

The first step would be increasing capacity. If incoming business exceeds what the existing operation can comfortably service, additional marketing accomplishes very little until the company has the people and infrastructure necessary to fulfill that demand. Investment could provide additional vehicles, equipment, supplies, recruiting, training, scheduling technology, and working capital necessary to establish additional crews.

Once that capacity exists, marketing becomes the accelerator.

This is where I believe there is enormous untapped potential in local service businesses. A cleaning company naturally produces the type of visual material that performs well online. Before and after transformations, customer testimonials, challenging projects, residential cleans, commercial spaces, special events, and educational content can all become original video.

That content can then be distributed through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, and YouTube while paid advertising is geographically concentrated on the communities the business can actually service.

The objective is not simply generating views. It is generating customers.

Every advertising dollar should eventually be connected to measurable results. How much does a qualified lead cost? How many leads become customers? How many customers become recurring accounts? What is the annual value of a residential customer? What is a commercial account worth? How much productive capacity does one additional crew create?

Answer those questions and growth begins to become mathematical.

If an additional crew requires a certain amount of investment but can reliably generate substantially more profitable revenue, the business has discovered a repeatable expansion model. Add capacity. Fill that capacity. Measure performance. Reinvest. Add another crew. Expand geographically. Repeat.

This is also where an angel investor can provide considerably more than a check.

The existing operation already understands cleaning and customer service. An investment partner can complement that knowledge with capital, digital advertising, content production, branding, customer acquisition, business development, and growth strategy.

Neither side needs to replace the other.

The goal is to combine an existing operating business with resources it has never previously had available at scale.

That is ultimately what makes this particular opportunity interesting to me. The question is no longer whether a cleaning business can be created or whether customers will purchase the service.

Those things already exist.

The more compelling question is this:

What happens when an existing local business that is already working suddenly has the capital, capacity, marketing, and resources to pursue its real potential?

That is an investment thesis worth exploring.

Benjamin Freedland

Host at The Human Intelligence Ledger Podcast

September 29, 2026

It sounds like the setup to a joke: a spoon covered in SpaghettiOs residue is mistaken for methamphetamine. But for Ashley Gabrielle Huff, a 23-year-old Georgia mother, what happened in 2014 was anything but funny. A traffic stop, a search and a presumptive drug test helped turn an ordinary spoon into evidence supporting a felony methamphetamine charge. By the time laboratory testing determined that the spoon contained no controlled substances, Huff had already spent weeks entangled in the criminal justice system.

On July 2, 2014, Huff was a passenger in a Ford Explorer stopped by officers with the Gainesville Police Department in Gainesville, Georgia. According to contemporary reporting, officers stopped the vehicle for a tag-light violation near Green and Candler streets. There were four people inside. Police reported that the driver appeared nervous and that officers eventually received permission to search the vehicle. During that search, an officer discovered a pink bag with the name “Ashley” on it. Huff reportedly denied that the bag belonged to her. Inside another bag, police found a metal spoon containing what an officer described as a clear, crystal-like substance, as well as a glass smoking device.

Huff’s explanation for the spoon was remarkably ordinary: she had used it to eat SpaghettiOs. Police, however, suspected that the residue was methamphetamine. A field drug test was performed, and according to the police account reported at the time, the test indicated positive for methamphetamine. Huff was arrested, charged with possession of methamphetamine and booked into the Hall County Jail.

Huff continued to maintain that the substance wasn’t methamphetamine. Her attorney, Hall County Assistant Public Defender Chris van Rossem, later told the Gainesville Times that Huff had maintained her position throughout the case. Court information cited by the newspaper also indicated that she had not previously been charged with a felony or drug offense. What began as a traffic stop had suddenly placed a young mother in the position of defending herself against a felony drug allegation based in significant part on a preliminary chemical test.

The circumstances surrounding Huff’s time in jail are more complicated than some versions of the story circulating online suggest. She initially attempted to participate in Hall County Drug Court but did not make all of her required appointments. She was subsequently incarcerated again and unable to make bond, while the suspected substance still awaited definitive laboratory analysis. Those details matter because it would be misleading to suggest that every day she spent incarcerated resulted exclusively from the spoon. But the underlying methamphetamine case remained unresolved, and the substance police believed was meth still had not been scientifically confirmed as meth.

Perhaps the most troubling part of the story came while Huff was waiting for that answer. Van Rossem said his client was potentially prepared to accept a felony resolution simply to get out of jail, despite continuing to maintain that she had not possessed methamphetamine. That illustrates a reality of pretrial incarceration that extends far beyond this single case: the pressure to resolve a criminal case can become enormous when a defendant is sitting in jail waiting for evidence to be tested.

Then the laboratory results arrived, and they changed the case completely. No controlled substances were detected on the spoon. The Hall County District Attorney’s Office dismissed the methamphetamine charge, and Huff was released from the Hall County Jail in September. The definitive laboratory analysis had failed to confirm what the presumptive field test reportedly indicated.

The Difference Between “Presumptive” and “Confirmed”

Huff’s case is important because field drug tests are not designed to provide the same level of certainty as full forensic laboratory analysis. Color-based field kits are generally presumptive tests. They can provide officers with an immediate indication that a substance might belong to a particular drug category, but that is fundamentally different from conclusively identifying the chemical composition of the substance.

The National Institute of Justice has examined the limitations of presumptive drug-testing technology, including the possibility of false-positive results and the advantages of more sophisticated analytical techniques. Field tests serve a legitimate investigative purpose because officers cannot send every suspected substance to a laboratory before making a decision on the street, but their speed comes with limitations. A preliminary color reaction and a laboratory identification should not be treated as scientifically interchangeable.

That distinction is something I understand not only from reading cases like Huff’s, but from my own experience inside the federal prison system.

What I Saw With NIK Tests in Federal Prison

During my own incarceration in federal prison, I became familiar with NIK presumptive drug-testing kits and saw firsthand how these tests could produce results that did not reflect what a substance actually was. On one occasion, material that I knew to be completely legal was subjected to presumptive testing and produced a reaction that was interpreted as indicating amphetamines. There were no amphetamines involved, yet I watched a legal substance generate a presumptive drug result that suggested otherwise.

That experience stayed with me because inside a correctional institution, the words “positive drug test” can carry enormous weight. When you’re incarcerated, an allegation involving contraband can potentially affect disciplinary proceedings, privileges, housing decisions and how staff view an inmate. Watching something I knew to be legal produce an apparent amphetamine-positive result made the limitations of presumptive testing impossible for me to ignore.

My experience is anecdotal and should be understood as exactly that. I am also not suggesting that Gainesville police used a NIK-branded test in Ashley Huff’s case; the contemporary reporting I reviewed describes a field test but does not establish the manufacturer. The connection is instead the broader issue of presumptive testing. NIK and similar color-based systems are screening tools, and their results need to be understood within the limitations of that technology.

When the Consequences Come Before Confirmation

The fundamental problem exposed by cases like Huff’s is one of timing. A presumptive test can be performed almost immediately, allowing an arrest and criminal charge to follow before a laboratory has conclusively identified the suspected substance. Confirmatory testing can take much longer, and during that interval the criminal justice system does not necessarily stand still. A defendant can be booked into jail, required to post bond, miss work, retain or be appointed an attorney and begin making consequential decisions about how to resolve the case while everyone is still waiting to learn what the physical evidence actually contains.

For someone who cannot afford bond, that distinction can become especially consequential. A defendant waiting at home can continue working and caring for family while the laboratory processes evidence. Someone waiting in jail experiences that same delay very differently. In Huff’s case, contemporary reporting said that she lost her job and missed her children’s birthdays during the ordeal.

The fact that Huff’s attorney said she was potentially prepared to resolve the felony case before the laboratory results arrived makes the story even more significant. Had a defendant in circumstances like hers entered a guilty plea before confirmatory testing was completed, the legal consequences could potentially outlast the evidence that originally produced the charge. Huff’s laboratory result ultimately arrived before that happened and established that the spoon did not contain a controlled substance.

Could Ashley Huff Have Sued?

Following her release, Huff was reported to be considering legal action, but there is an important difference between considering a lawsuit and successfully filing or settling one. I have not found reliable public documentation establishing that Huff ultimately received a civil judgment or settlement arising from the SpaghettiOs incident.

A negative laboratory result also would not automatically establish that the officers committed a civil-rights violation. A potential false-arrest or unlawful-detention case could involve questions about what the officers knew when the arrest occurred, what the field test appeared to show, what other evidence they observed, whether probable cause existed at that moment and what subsequently caused Huff’s continued detention. Those legal questions are separate from the scientific question that the laboratory ultimately answered.

What is documented is extraordinary enough without embellishment. Police encountered a spoon containing suspicious residue. Huff said the residue came from eating SpaghettiOs. A presumptive field test reportedly indicated methamphetamine. She was arrested and charged with possession. When the evidence was finally subjected to laboratory analysis, no controlled substances were found, and the methamphetamine charge was dismissed.

A Spoon Shouldn’t Tell the Whole Story

Police officers routinely have to make decisions without having a forensic laboratory available on the side of the road, and presumptive testing exists for a reason. Ashley Huff’s case does not establish that every field test is unreliable or that an officer necessarily acts improperly whenever a presumptive result later proves incorrect. What it does demonstrate is the importance of remembering exactly what the word presumptive means.

I saw that limitation personally when legal material produced what appeared to be an amphetamine-positive result during my incarceration. Huff experienced the stakes in a far more public way when a spoon she said had been used for SpaghettiOs became part of a felony methamphetamine case. In both situations, the lesson is that a rapid chemical reaction can provide information, but it is not a substitute for definitive analysis.

For Ashley Gabrielle Huff, the laboratory eventually provided that definitive answer. The spoon did not contain methamphetamine or another controlled substance, and the charge was dismissed. But by the time science caught up with the accusation, the consequences of the accusation had already become real.

The laboratory could clear the spoon. It couldn’t give her the lost time back.

James Reeman

Mentor, Fighter Pilot (Ret.) | Delta Air Lines Check Airman | President, Mile High Path2Pilot & Reeman Farms | Space Squadron Commander (Ret.) | Board Member, Wings Over the Rockies

September 11, 2026

Twenty-Five Years Later, I Still Remember Walking Out of That Simulator

Twenty-five years ago this morning, at 8:46 a.m. Eastern Time on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I was not in New York, sitting alert in an F-16, at the Pentagon or inside an operations center preparing for war. I was at the Delta training center, inside an airline simulator with another fighter pilot, Rich “BLADE” Armstrong. It is difficult to explain now just how ordinary that morning had been before it suddenly wasn’t, or how impossible it would have been for either of us to understand that the events unfolding outside our simulator were about to send our two aviation careers in directions neither of us could have anticipated.

BLADE and I were both instructors at a major U.S. airline . Although I had only been at the airline for several years, I was already working as a simulator instructor, as was he, so the training we were completing that morning was familiar territory. We were essentially going through training that we normally gave to other pilots. It wasn’t a formality, and we certainly took it seriously, but it also wasn’t the kind of high-threat training environment in which either of us was worried about successfully completing the session. We knew the material, understood the airplane and were locked into the task in front of us.

A simulator session was roughly four hours long, and somewhere around 90 minutes to two hours into ours, we came out for a break. There were televisions showing what was happening, and people were gathered around them in shock. The world seemed to be stopping in front of us. There was an almost surreal quality to standing inside an airline training center and watching commercial airliners impact buildings, particularly because BLADE and I weren’t simply casual observers of aviation. These were the same kinds of airplanes, crews and operations around which our civilian careers revolved.

I had been in the Air National Guard for almost eight years at that point and at the airline for roughly three, which meant I was processing what I was seeing through two different professional identities simultaneously. I was an airline pilot, but I was also an F-16 pilot and military officer. There was shock, patriotism and tremendous sadness. There were immediate thoughts about the families and prayers for the firefighters, police officers and first responders who were moving toward something the rest of us were watching on television. At the same time, the fighter pilot part of my brain was beginning to process another reality: things were going to change. We didn’t know how, we didn’t understand the magnitude of what had happened, and we certainly couldn’t have envisioned the next 25 years, but both of us knew that whatever our lives as military aviators had looked like when we entered that simulator, they were not going to look the same when we came out.

They Were Pilots Just Like Us

As I have reconsidered that morning approaching this anniversary, I have found myself thinking more about the pilots themselves. A great deal of what passed through my mind, and through BLADE’s, concerned the pilots and their families because those were guys just like us. They had reported to work that morning expecting to fly an ordinary trip, and they were confronted with something for which commercial aviation had never adequately prepared them. They were completely taken by surprise, and that fact affected both of us profoundly.

There were eight pilots on the flight decks of the four hijacked aircraft that morning: Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr. aboard American Airlines Flight 11; Captain Victor Saracini and First Officer Michael Horrocks aboard United Airlines Flight 175; Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame III and First Officer David Charlebois aboard American Airlines Flight 77; and Captain Jason Dahl and First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr. aboard United Airlines Flight 93. Those names deserve to be remembered because they weren’t simply names associated with a historic event or entries in a casualty count. They were professional airline pilots who had gotten dressed for work, reported for their trips, walked through airports and climbed into their cockpits to perform essentially the same profession BLADE and I performed.

Professional aviation is built around trying to stay ahead of the airplane and ahead of the situation. Pilots spend careers preparing for things we hope will never happen, repeatedly training for mechanical failures, fires, severe weather, decompressions, rejected takeoffs, medical emergencies and complicated combinations of problems because the worst possible time to begin thinking through an emergency is after it has already started. What the pilots aboard those four airplanes encountered, however, existed outside the assumptions around which commercial aviation had been built. The cockpit itself became the objective, and the airplane was no longer simply the thing being hijacked. The airplane itself was going to become the weapon.

That distinction was deeply personal for BLADE and me. These were fellow pilots sitting in the same kinds of seats we occupied every day, responsible for passengers and crews who trusted them to arrive safely at their destinations. Behind each of those pilots was also a family that expected that person to come home. There were flight attendants aboard those aircraft who were thrust into an unimaginable situation and, in some cases, managed to communicate critical information to people on the ground while the attacks were still unfolding. None of those crew members had reported for combat. They had reported for ordinary commercial flights on an ordinary Tuesday morning, and the assumptions governing their profession disappeared around them.

For those of us in aviation, September 11 therefore carried a uniquely disturbing dimension. The machines we had devoted our professional lives to operating safely had been transformed into weapons, the sanctity of the flight deck had been violated, and fellow pilots had been attacked in the place where they should have been most in control. BLADE and I made a resolve that morning that a surprise like that could never be allowed to happen again. Obviously, no pilot can guarantee that he will never be surprised, no military can eliminate uncertainty and no security system can anticipate every conceivable threat, but the sentiment mattered. We were going to prepare differently, think differently and defend American aviation differently.

We Went Back Into the Simulator

There is a detail about that morning that may sound strange to someone outside fighter aviation: BLADE and I went back into the simulator and finished our training. We were approximately halfway through the session, and if we didn’t complete it, there were currency consequences. Our instructor essentially asked us what we wanted to do, and both of us became very mission focused. We wanted to finish the second half, put the training behind us and make ourselves available for whatever our respective military units were going to require next.

That decision wasn’t an indication that what was happening outside wasn’t important, nor did we somehow believe our simulator training mattered more than the thousands of people whose lives were in danger. It was compartmentalization, something fighter pilots learn because there are moments in aviation when fear, emotion, uncertainty and everything else occurring around you have to be temporarily placed somewhere else so you can accomplish the immediate task. You don’t eliminate those emotions or pretend they don’t exist; you suitcase them temporarily, accomplish the mission and deal with them afterward. That is essentially what BLADE and I did when we climbed back into the box and completed the second half of our training.

Looking back, the contrast is difficult to ignore. BLADE and I were sitting safely inside a simulator practicing emergencies while eight airline pilots were experiencing an emergency for which the commercial aviation system had never adequately prepared them. We could freeze the simulator, reset it, reposition the aircraft, discuss what happened and try again. They had none of those luxuries. We couldn’t change what had happened to them or help the people already aboard those aircraft, but we could remain current, finish the task in front of us and prepare ourselves for whatever came next. At that point neither of us knew what “whatever came next” was going to mean, but we were about to find out.

Fighter Jets Over America

BLADE was a reservist with a unit at Homestead, Florida, while I was a Guardsman in Colorado. Almost immediately, phones began ringing throughout the fighter community as units tried to determine where their people were, who could get to the base and who was available. Fighters were launched from my own Guard unit in Denver simply to establish a presence, and across the United States Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve fighters were suddenly being launched from units that had never routinely sat homeland-defense alert.

That distinction is important because there had always been traditional alert units positioned strategically around the country, but many of us belonged to general-purpose fighter units. We trained air-to-air and air-to-ground and flew multirole F-16s, but most of us had never seriously contemplated intercepting a civilian aircraft over an American city because someone aboard that aircraft intended to use it as a weapon. We had not mentally or tactically built our professional lives around defending domestic American airspace in that way. September 11 changed that in a matter of hours.

I would later become relatively close with members of the D.C. Air National Guard because my first combat deployment involved a combination of Guard units, including members from D.C. and Alabama.

Two people who eventually became friends of mine were Marc “Sass” Sasseville and Heather Penney F-16 pilots with the D.C. Air National Guard who launched during the September 11 response as the military scrambled to protect Washington. They took off without live weapons and were prepared, if necessary, to use their own aircraft to stop a hijacked airliner from reaching another target. That fact says something important about the urgency and uncertainty of that morning. America was responding to an attack for which there was no neat playbook, and fighter pilots were climbing into airplanes because their country needed them in the sky immediately. Years later, Sass and Lucky would become part of my own circle in fighter aviation, but on that morning they were among the people confronting an unimaginable question in real time: how far are you prepared to go to stop another attack?

The Guard I Knew Was About to Change

The National Guard occupies a unique place in American life because its members aren’t simply military personnel stationed somewhere far from the communities they protect. Guardsmen are themselves members of those communities. They are neighbors, parents, airline pilots, police officers, firefighters, business owners and countless other things in their civilian lives, and that relationship between military service and local community became increasingly important to me after September 11.

I had friends who died in the towers. They were a little older than me and were people I knew through my fraternity. I therefore had to reconcile the enormous national and international significance of what had happened with something much more personal. New York had been attacked, but New Yorkers were the people immediately responding. The New York City Fire Department , the New York City Police Department and ordinary citizens of New York were experiencing something locally that would simultaneously transform American foreign policy, national defense and military operations around the world. That relationship between a local community and a national crisis would influence the way I thought about the Air National Guard for years afterward.

The response reached my own life extraordinarily quickly. Days after September 11, I went on military orders with Jim “Homie” Fogel, and we traveled to Washington, D.C., to the Air National Guard Readiness Center. We became part of an action group involved in cutting orders and activating Guard units around the country for homeland defense. Only days earlier I had been inside a simulator watching the attacks on television; now I was participating on the administrative side of standing up Guard forces that would defend American airspace.

The speed of that transition is still remarkable to me because there wasenormous uncertainty on both sides of my professional life. Nobody at the airlines knew how quickly commercial aviation would recover or what the industry would look like afterward. At exactly the same time, an entirely new military requirement was expanding rapidly. Guardsmen, the citizen-airmen of America’s states and communities, were going to be defending the homeland, and the two halves of my professional life were beginning to move in opposite directions. I simply didn’t yet understand how far apart those trajectories would eventually go.

The Morning Became a Mission

When Americans remember September 11, they understandably remember the images of the towers, the smoke, the Pentagon, the field in Pennsylvania, the firefighters and police officers moving toward danger, the people running through lower Manhattan and the families desperately searching for information about missing loved ones. Those images belong permanently to our national memory. My memories are connected to all of them, but they also include an airline simulator, another fighter pilot, a room filled with people staring at televisions and the realization that the profession around which I had built my life had just been changed forever.

I remember thinking about the pilots and their families, and I remember understanding that they had been taken completely by surprise. The resolve BLADE and I made that morning wasn’t a promise that America would never again be attacked or that aviation could somehow eliminate the fog and uncertainty inherent in human behavior. It meant that we were no longer willing to knowingly operate under the same assumptions. That resolve would eventually manifest itself in radically different cockpit security, different airline procedures, different relationships between flight crews and a dramatically different military relationship with American domestic airspace.

For the Air National Guard, September 11 would mean homeland-defense alert, a far greater operational tempo, deployments and eventually combat. For commercial aviation, it would mean enormous economic disruption, furloughs, bankruptcies and what many of us would eventually call the lost decade. For my family, it would mean that what had been a relatively predictable balance between airline flying and Guard service was about to become something much more demanding. None of that was apparent to BLADE and me when we walked out of the simulator and looked at those televisions, but the trajectory had already begun.

Part One of my September 11 story therefore ends where the next chapter of my life really began. We didn’t know that the airline industry was about to endure years of stagnation, that pilots would watch careers move backward, that the Guard would transform from something many of us experienced as predominantly part time into an operational force demanding enormous portions of our lives, or that less than two years later I would be flying an F-16 in combat. We didn’t know how much time would be taken from our families or how many friendships and relationships would emerge from everything that followed. We only knew that things were going to change, and in the days immediately after September 11, we began discovering just how dramatically they would.

The Lost Decade, the Guard Goes to War, and What September 11 Took From My Family

One Career Stopped While the Other Accelerated

On September 11, 2001, I had two aviation careers. I was an airline pilot at Delta and an F-16 pilot in the Air National Guard, and until that morning those careers had existed reasonably comfortably beside one another. The airline provided my civilian profession, while the Guard gave me the privilege of continuing to fly fighters and serve my country. September 11 sent those careers in almost completely opposite directions. At Delta, the career escalator effectively stopped, while in the Guard everything accelerated. Within days of the attacks I was on military orders helping activate Guard units for homeland defense, and within two years I would be flying combat missions. Meanwhile, commercial aviation entered one of the most difficult periods in its history.

Looking back 25 years later, that contrast may be the clearest way I can explain what September 11 did to my professional life. Sometimes I think about the distance between the two cockpits I occupied during that period. On September 11, I was sitting inside an airline simulator completing recurrent training, while less than two years later I was sitting inside an F-16 in combat. One cockpit represented the commercial aviation career I had expected to spend decades steadily building, while the other represented a military career that had suddenly become something far larger and more demanding than the predominantly part-time commitment I had known before September 11. There is a direct line between those two cockpits, and almost everything along that line traces back to what happened that morning.

The Lost Decade

Airline careers revolve around seniority, and when an airline grows, that seniority system can function almost like an escalator. New pilots are hired beneath you, senior pilots retire, aircraft arrive, opportunities open and pilots progress through equipment, seats and eventually into the captain’s chair. When I arrived at my airline, that escalator was moving. The atmosphere reflected it, and as a simulator instructor I was seeing motivated young pilots who had just been hired and were excited about beginning careers at a legacy airline they believed would continue moving forward for decades.

September 11 dramatically altered that environment. Instead of training enthusiastic new pilots entering the airline, I began training wide-body pilots who were moving backward through the fleet because they had been displaced from aircraft such as the 767 or 777 back to the 737. These were people who had spent years progressing through a seniority-driven career and suddenly found themselves moving in the opposite direction. The mood changed accordingly. It wasn’t a happy period, and cynicism understandably increased as pilots were furloughed, others spent years wondering whether they would be next and some people who lost their airline jobs ultimately left aviation altogether and built entirely different careers.

For younger airline pilots today, particularly those whose careers have largely coincided with the extraordinary growth the industry experienced after roughly 2010, stories about those years may occasionally sound like older pilots exaggerating how difficult things used to be. They aren’t exaggerations. At the legacy carriers we came to call it the lost decade because for roughly a decade careers barely moved. September 11 wasn’t the only reason, because the industry itself was simultaneously undergoing structural changes involving regional jets, regional carriers and the economics of traditional hub-and-spoke systems, but the combination produced an extraordinarily difficult environment for pilots who had entered the profession expecting a very different trajectory.

The major legacy carriers struggled and eventually went through bankruptcy reorganizations, and for pilots those bankruptcies weren’t abstract financial events occurring in corporate boardrooms. They affected our compensation, benefits, retirement and families. During one period of contract restructuring, when we considered the cumulative effects on pay, benefits and retirement, our estimate was that total compensation had declined by roughly 40 to 47 percent depending upon where an individual pilot was positioned. Those were lean years, and I was extraordinarily fortunate because I wasn’t furloughed. That fact would influence an important decision I made on the military side of my aviation life.

I Still Had a Job While Some of My Brothers Didn’t

September 11 created a strange collision between the airline industry and the Air National Guard because at almost exactly the same moment airlines were furloughing pilots, the Guard suddenly needed far more people. Homeland-defense alert sites required pilots, supervisors, maintainers and support personnel, as well as people capable of building and sustaining an operational mission that had expanded dramatically almost overnight. Many airline pilots were also Guardsmen or Reservists, which meant some pilots who had suddenly lost their civilian careers found that full-time military opportunities were becoming available.

At that point, military compensation compared much more closely with airline compensation than people familiar only with today’s airline salaries might assume, so those full-time military positions could be extremely important to someone whose airline career had suddenly disappeared. I could have competed for one of those jobs, but I made the decision not to because I wasn’t going to compete with a brother of mine who had been furloughed from the airline for a full-time military position while I still had my airline job. I was junior and my own career progression had effectively stopped, but I still had a paycheck, while some of my friends did not.

Twenty-five years later, I remain grateful that I wasn’t furloughed. Even during the most difficult years of the industry, I continued believing something that remains true for me today: any day somebody pays you to defy gravity for a living is a privilege. The privilege didn’t mean the economic consequences weren’t real, nor did it mean the lost decade didn’t affect families and careers profoundly, but it provided perspective at a time when many pilots who had spent their entire adult lives building aviation careers suddenly had to determine what they were going to do next.

The Part-Time Guard Became Very Full Time

While my airline and the broader airline industry were entering the lost decade, the Air National Guard was undergoing an equally dramatic transformation in the opposite direction. Before September 11, there was considerable truth behind the traditional citizen-airman concept. The stereotypical description of Guard service was one weekend a month, although fighter pilots obviously required substantially more time than that to maintain tactical proficiency. Even so, many of us had structured our lives around two careers, with civilian employment, families and military responsibilities existing in a balance that was demanding but relatively predictable.

After September 11, that balance changed dramatically. For many Guard pilots, military service effectively became a full-time job, and even those of us who technically continued serving part time could find ourselves working at the airline and then spending much of our remaining availability performing the military mission. If you weren’t flying for the airline, you might be sitting alert, and beginning in 2003 you might be preparing for a deployment. Then you deployed, came home, returned to the airline and eventually began preparing to go again. For many of us, deployments became part of a recurring rhythm, sometimes lasting 60 days, sometimes 90 and sometimes 120, often recurring roughly every 18 months.

I always want to acknowledge my active-duty brothers and sisters when discussing this because many of them deployed for substantially longer periods, and their families carried an extraordinary burden. Guard service, however, created its own complications because many of us had civilian employers, airline schedules and families whose lives had been constructed around the assumption that the Guard was one part of our lives rather than something that could suddenly consume enormous portions of them. The cumulative amount of qualifying active service performed by Reserve and Guard personnel during these years eventually became significant enough that changes in federal retirement law recognized certain qualifying service by reducing the age at which some reserve-component retirees could begin receiving retired pay. In my own case, my eligibility age ultimately moved from 60 to 58 because of the amount of qualifying active service I accumulated.

That fact alone tells you something about how dramatically my experience in the Guard changed. I had joined a force built around the citizen-airman concept and a predominantly part-time commitment, but September 11 and the wars that followed transformed significant portions of that career into sustained operational service. The airline career that had once seemed like the dominant professional trajectory of my life had stalled, while the military career that had existed beside it was suddenly consuming years.

The Men Who Taught Us to Fight Had Never Fought Their War

To understand what combat eventually meant to my generation of fighter pilots, it is important to understand the generation that trained us. Many of the men who taught us were extraordinary Cold War fighter pilots who had spent their careers preparing to fight the Soviet Union. They sat alert, including nuclear alert, and became exceptionally proficient at every aspect of fighter aviation. During the Reagan era, the Air Force had enormous fighter capacity, and F-15 and F-16 units trained relentlessly for a conflict everyone hoped would never occur.

For many of those pilots, that war never came, and I don’t regard that as a failure in any sense. In my view, they won the Cold War because their victory was deterrence. They out-prepared the Soviet threat and demonstrated that readiness itself could prevent the conflict for which they were preparing. They held themselves to extraordinary standards despite never knowing whether the day would arrive when they would actually employ what they had spent their careers mastering, and my generation inherited their standards, tactics, discipline, debrief culture and expectation that preparation mattered even when nobody could promise the preparation would ever be tested.

September 11 changed the equation for our generation. There had certainly been significant American air combat between Vietnam and the wars that followed September 11, particularly during Desert Storm and Kosovo, and I don’t want to minimize the fighter pilots who had already experienced combat. But for a large portion of the fighter community, combat remained something we had studied, trained for and discussed rather than personally experienced. The generation that had been trained by Cold War warriors was now entering a period in which deployments and actual combat would become a recurring part of military aviation.

Less Than Two Years Later, I Was in Combat

By 2003, the trajectory that had begun for me inside that Delta simulator had taken me to combat. Our original mission involved counter-SCUD operations in western Iraq, but much of what we ultimately did became close air support for Special Forces personnel operating on the ground. Those men were doing extraordinarily dangerous work, and although there is obviously risk involved in flying an F-16 in combat, I never confused my situation with theirs. The people operating on the ground were exposed in ways we weren’t, and I considered them extraordinarily brave. Our responsibility was to provide the air support they needed to accomplish their mission and come home.

Eventually I employed ordnance in combat, and there is no reason for me to rewrite my feelings 25 years later in an effort to make them sound more sanitized. It was exhilarating, thrilling and exciting because fighter pilots spend years training to perform a mission. We study weapons, practice employment, debrief mistakes, fly again and continually try to become better, and then suddenly there is a moment when you are actually doing what the airplane and all of that training were designed to allow you to do. After my first combat mission, I thought about the Cold War warriors who had trained us and reached out to some of them because they had spent careers preparing for the game, while my generation had now actually entered it.

There is an emotional complexity to that experience that I think deserves honesty because warfare isn’t a video game and ordnance isn’t theoretical. When a 500-pound or 2,000-pound weapon hits the ground, there is an explosion and there are consequences. At the same time, there is something very real about the satisfaction a warrior experiences when successfully performing the mission for which he has spent years preparing. Both things can be true simultaneously. I could understand the seriousness and consequences of what we were doing while still experiencing the exhilaration of finally performing the mission in combat.

The Distance Between Two Cockpits

Sometimes I think about the distance between the two cockpits I occupied during those first years after September 11 because they illustrate better than almost anything else how dramatically my life changed. On the morning of the attacks I was sitting inside an airline simulator with BLADE completing recurrent training, watching a commercial aviation career that I expected to spend decades building. Less than two years later I was sitting inside an F-16 in combat, participating in a military mission that had become vastly larger and more demanding than the predominantly part-time Guard commitment I had known before September 11. Those two cockpits may appear to represent completely different worlds, but in my life there is a direct line connecting them.

That line began when BLADE and I walked out of the simulator and saw airliners striking buildings on television. Within days I was helping activate Guard units for homeland defense, and the operational tempo continued to increase as alert missions expanded, deployments began and the United States entered sustained military operations overseas. Meanwhile, at Delta, pilots were being furloughed, wide-body pilots were moving backward through the fleet, compensation was being reduced and an entire generation of airline pilots was losing years of expected career progression. The two careers I had previously managed beside one another were responding to the same historical event in almost opposite ways: my airline career went into neutral while my Guard career accelerated toward war.

What September 11 Took From My Family

Twenty-five years later, if I could walk back into that Delta training center and sit beside the younger version of myself before BLADE and I climbed back into the simulator, I think we would still finish the training because that part of our mentality probably wouldn’t change. What I would change is the conversation I had with myself and, more importantly, the conversation I had with my family. I would tell the younger version of myself to recalibrate what being an American military officer and fighter pilot was about to mean because the military was no longer going to occupy the same predictable space in my life that it had before September 11.

My daughter hadn’t been born yet, and I had two sons and a wife. None of us understood what the coming years were going to require or how dramatically my military service would affect the time I had with them. If I knew then what I know today, I think I would have tried harder to bring my family into that reality from the beginning and prepare them for the fact that the comfortable balance we had known was disappearing. September 11 didn’t take my family from me, and I don’t want to use language that dramatic, but it absolutely took time. It took a relatively comfortable lifestyle and made it less comfortable, and it transformed a military career that had fit reasonably neatly beside an airline career into something that repeatedly pulled me away from home.

That experience taught me one of the lessons of war that doesn’t fit neatly into a cockpit story. War doesn’t only happen to the person wearing the uniform, because readiness, alert commitments, workups and deployments consume time that belongs to families as well. A deployment isn’t experienced only by the person getting on the airplane to leave; it is also experienced by the spouse managing the household and by the children growing up while a parent is somewhere else. That realization gave me a much deeper appreciation for generations of military families who had absorbed those costs long before mine did.

Understanding My Father’s War Differently

My father served in Korea, and before my own combat experience I respected that fact, but afterward I understood it differently. There is an enormous difference between intellectually knowing that someone went to war and personally experiencing even a small portion of what deployment and combat do to a person’s life and family. My own service therefore gave me a deeper appreciation not only for my father but also for generations of Americans who had gone before us and carried burdens that can be difficult to comprehend from the outside.

It also made me think about how increasingly disconnected much of American society has become from the people who fight its wars. During World War II, an enormous portion of the country knew someone serving, and families throughout America were directly connected to the conflict. Korea touched a smaller percentage, Vietnam a smaller percentage still, and by the Global War on Terror a comparatively small portion of the American population was carrying much of the direct burden of repeated deployments. Millions of Americans could continue their ordinary lives while another group of Americans deployed again and again. After September 11, neither I nor my family were disconnected from that reality anymore.

What September 11 Gave Me

It is difficult to write about what September 11 “gave” me because nearly 3,000 people were killed that morning, families were destroyed, first responders entered buildings and never returned, airline crews doing the same profession I did were killed along with their passengers, and the attacks initiated a period of war whose consequences lasted for decades. There is no silver lining to any of that, and I would never try to manufacture one. At the same time, if I’m going to examine my own life honestly, I can’t pretend that the events that followed didn’t profoundly shape the person I became.

September 11 changed my understanding of service, family, sacrifice and aviation. It introduced me to extraordinary people, transformed my Guard career from something largely part time into sustained operational service and eventually took me into combat. Combat taught me the exhilaration a warrior can experience when finally performing the mission for which he has spent years preparing, but it also taught me about the impact that mission has on a family and on a life. Ultimately, anyone who serves hopes that the sacrifices made by the individual and by the family have some positive impact on the nation they are serving, even when that impact isn’t immediately visible.

Twenty-Five Years Later

Today I can look backward across a flying career that the younger man sitting inside that Delta simulator couldn’t possibly have imagined. I spent 25 years flying fighters, commanded, deployed and flew combat. I watched the Air National Guard transform, watched the airline industry collapse into the lost decade and eventually recover, watched friends lose airline jobs and rebuild careers, and watched citizen-airmen discover how quickly a predominantly part-time military commitment could become a full-time operational mission. I also served alongside extraordinary people, and somewhere along the way I learned that the airplanes themselves were never really the most important part of the story.

At the end of roughly 40 years of flying, it isn’t really about my logbook. It’s about the relationships. A logbook can tell you where you went, what aircraft you flew and how many hours you accumulated, but it cannot tell you what the person sitting beside you meant to your life. It cannot capture the pilots who trained you, the friends you deployed beside or the phone call you made after your first combat mission to someone who spent his career preparing you for that moment. It cannot capture what your wife and children experienced while you were gone, explain why you declined to compete for a military job because another pilot had been furloughed and needed it more, or convey what it felt like to walk out of a simulator on an ordinary Tuesday morning and discover that the world had changed.

The Resolve That Connected Everything

The thought that connects the two parts of this story more than anything else is the idea of surprise. On September 11, BLADE and I thought about Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr., Captain Victor Saracini and First Officer Michael Horrocks, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame III and First Officer David Charlebois, and Captain Jason Dahl and First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr. They were professional airline pilots like us who had reported to work expecting to fly ordinary trips, and they were confronted with something the aviation system had not adequately prepared them to face. They were completely taken by surprise, and BLADE and I made a resolve that morning that a surprise like that could never simply be accepted again.

That resolve helps explain much of what followed because it was reflected in fighters launching across America, Guard units that had never routinely sat alert becoming part of homeland defense, my own trip to Washington days later to help activate those units and the transformation of cockpit security and airline procedures. It also helps explain the larger transition of a generation of military aviators who went from preparing for war to actually fighting one. The institutions, missions and procedures that followed September 11 are complicated and deserve thoughtful examination with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, but none of that should obscure the uncertainty we faced in those first hours and days when nobody knew whether another attack was coming.

September 11 sent my two aviation careers in opposite directions, with the airline escalator stopping while the Guard accelerated toward sustained homeland defense and war. Somewhere between those two worlds, I learned more about aviation, service, family, sacrifice and relationships than I ever could have learned from a logbook. Twenty-five years later, I remain grateful for the people who trained me, the people I flew beside, the people on the ground who performed work far more dangerous than mine and the families who carried the cost of our service. I also remain conscious that my story is a very small one inside an event that took thousands of lives and changed millions more.

Perhaps that is why individual stories from September 11 still matter. History isn’t only casualty figures, military operations, government policies or dates in textbooks; it is also a couple of pilots walking out of a simulator and staring at a television, a telephone ringing at a Guard unit asking who can get to the base, an airline pilot watching his career progression stop while his military career accelerates toward war, a fighter pilot trained by Cold War warriors finally employing a weapon in combat, and a family learning what repeated deployments actually mean. It is also eight airline pilots who went to work on an ordinary Tuesday morning believing they were going to fly their passengers safely to their destinations and instead found themselves at the center of an event that would change aviation forever.

At 8:46 a.m. Eastern Time on September 11, 2001, the first aircraft struck the World Trade Center while I was inside a Delta simulator. Twenty-five years later, I can still remember walking out and seeing those television screens, the shock of trying to comprehend what we were watching and the thoughts about the pilots and their families. BLADE and I couldn’t possibly have known what the next quarter century would bring, but the fighter pilot in both of us understood something immediately: things were going to change. Looking back across everything that followed, from the lost decade at the airlines to homeland defense, deployment, combat and the impact on our families, it is difficult to imagine a greater understatement.

The Lost Decade, the Guard Goes to War, and What September 11 Took From My Family

One Career Stopped While the Other Accelerated

On September 11, 2001, I had two aviation careers. I was an airline pilot at Delta and an F-16 pilot in the Air National Guard, and until that morning those careers had existed reasonably comfortably beside one another. The airline provided my civilian profession, while the Guard gave me the privilege of continuing to fly fighters and serve my country. September 11 sent those careers in almost completely opposite directions. At Delta, the career escalator effectively stopped, while in the Guard everything accelerated. Within days of the attacks I was on military orders helping activate Guard units for homeland defense, and within two years I would be flying combat missions. Meanwhile, commercial aviation entered one of the most difficult periods in its history.

Looking back 25 years later, that contrast may be the clearest way I can explain what September 11 did to my professional life. Sometimes I think about the distance between the two cockpits I occupied during that period. On September 11, I was sitting inside an airline simulator completing recurrent training, while less than two years later I was sitting inside an F-16 in combat. One cockpit represented the commercial aviation career I had expected to spend decades steadily building, while the other represented a military career that had suddenly become something far larger and more demanding than the predominantly part-time commitment I had known before September 11. There is a direct line between those two cockpits, and almost everything along that line traces back to what happened that morning.

The Lost Decade

Airline careers revolve around seniority, and when an airline grows, that seniority system can function almost like an escalator. New pilots are hired beneath you, senior pilots retire, aircraft arrive, opportunities open and pilots progress through equipment, seats and eventually into the captain’s chair. When I arrived at Delta, that escalator was moving. The atmosphere reflected it, and as a simulator instructor I was seeing motivated young pilots who had just been hired and were excited about beginning careers at a legacy airline they believed would continue moving forward for decades.

September 11 dramatically altered that environment. Instead of training enthusiastic new pilots entering the airline, I began training wide-body pilots who were moving backward through the fleet because they had been displaced from aircraft such as the 767 or 777 back to the 737. These were people who had spent years progressing through a seniority-driven career and suddenly found themselves moving in the opposite direction. The mood changed accordingly. It wasn’t a happy period, and cynicism understandably increased as pilots were furloughed, others spent years wondering whether they would be next and some people who lost their airline jobs ultimately left aviation altogether and built entirely different careers.

For younger airline pilots today, particularly those whose careers have largely coincided with the extraordinary growth the industry experienced after roughly 2010, stories about those years may occasionally sound like older pilots exaggerating how difficult things used to be. They aren’t exaggerations. At the legacy carriers we came to call it the lost decade because for roughly a decade careers barely moved. September 11 wasn’t the only reason, because the industry itself was simultaneously undergoing structural changes involving regional jets, regional carriers and the economics of traditional hub-and-spoke systems, but the combination produced an extraordinarily difficult environment for pilots who had entered the profession expecting a very different trajectory.

The major legacy carriers struggled and eventually went through bankruptcy reorganizations, and for pilots those bankruptcies weren’t abstract financial events occurring in corporate boardrooms. They affected our compensation, benefits, retirement and families. During one period of contract restructuring, when we considered the cumulative effects on pay, benefits and retirement, our estimate was that total compensation had declined by roughly 40 to 47 percent depending upon where an individual pilot was positioned. Those were lean years, and I was extraordinarily fortunate because I wasn’t furloughed. That fact would influence an important decision I made on the military side of my aviation life.

I Still Had a Job While Some of My Brothers Didn’t

September 11 created a strange collision between the airline industry and the Air National Guard because at almost exactly the same moment airlines were furloughing pilots, the Guard suddenly needed far more people. Homeland-defense alert sites required pilots, supervisors, maintainers and support personnel, as well as people capable of building and sustaining an operational mission that had expanded dramatically almost overnight. Many airline pilots were also Guardsmen or Reservists, which meant some pilots who had suddenly lost their civilian careers found that full-time military opportunities were becoming available.

At that point, military compensation compared much more closely with airline compensation than people familiar only with today’s airline salaries might assume, so those full-time military positions could be extremely important to someone whose airline career had suddenly disappeared. I could have competed for one of those jobs, but I made the decision not to because I wasn’t going to compete with a brother of mine who had been furloughed from the airline for a full-time military position while I still had my airline job. I was junior and my own career progression had effectively stopped, but I still had a paycheck, while some of my friends did not.

Twenty-five years later, I remain grateful that I wasn’t furloughed. Even during the most difficult years of the industry, I continued believing something that remains true for me today: any day somebody pays you to defy gravity for a living is a privilege. The privilege didn’t mean the economic consequences weren’t real, nor did it mean the lost decade didn’t affect families and careers profoundly, but it provided perspective at a time when many pilots who had spent their entire adult lives building aviation careers suddenly had to determine what they were going to do next.

The Part-Time Guard Became Very Full Time

While my airline and the broader airline industry were entering the lost decade, the Air National Guard was undergoing an equally dramatic transformation in the opposite direction. Before September 11, there was considerable truth behind the traditional citizen-airman concept. The stereotypical description of Guard service was one weekend a month, although fighter pilots obviously required substantially more time than that to maintain tactical proficiency. Even so, many of us had structured our lives around two careers, with civilian employment, families and military responsibilities existing in a balance that was demanding but relatively predictable.

After September 11, that balance changed dramatically. For many Guard pilots, military service effectively became a full-time job, and even those of us who technically continued serving part time could find ourselves working at the airline and then spending much of our remaining availability performing the military mission. If you weren’t flying for the airline, you might be sitting alert, and beginning in 2003 you might be preparing for a deployment. Then you deployed, came home, returned to the airline and eventually began preparing to go again. For many of us, deployments became part of a recurring rhythm, sometimes lasting 60 days, sometimes 90 and sometimes 120, often recurring roughly every 18 months.

I always want to acknowledge my active-duty brothers and sisters when discussing this because many of them deployed for substantially longer periods, and their families carried an extraordinary burden. Guard service, however, created its own complications because many of us had civilian employers, airline schedules and families whose lives had been constructed around the assumption that the Guard was one part of our lives rather than something that could suddenly consume enormous portions of them. The cumulative amount of qualifying active service performed by Reserve and Guard personnel during these years eventually became significant enough that changes in federal retirement law recognized certain qualifying service by reducing the age at which some reserve-component retirees could begin receiving retired pay. In my own case, my eligibility age ultimately moved from 60 to 58 because of the amount of qualifying active service I accumulated.

That fact alone tells you something about how dramatically my experience in the Guard changed. I had joined a force built around the citizen-airman concept and a predominantly part-time commitment, but September 11 and the wars that followed transformed significant portions of that career into sustained operational service. The airline career that had once seemed like the dominant professional trajectory of my life had stalled, while the military career that had existed beside it was suddenly consuming years.

The Men Who Taught Us to Fight Had Never Fought Their War

To understand what combat eventually meant to my generation of fighter pilots, it is important to understand the generation that trained us. Many of the men who taught us were extraordinary Cold War fighter pilots who had spent their careers preparing to fight the Soviet Union. They sat alert, including nuclear alert, and became exceptionally proficient at every aspect of fighter aviation. During the Reagan era, the Air Force had enormous fighter capacity, and F-15 and F-16 units trained relentlessly for a conflict everyone hoped would never occur.

For many of those pilots, that war never came, and I don’t regard that as a failure in any sense. In my view, they won the Cold War because their victory was deterrence. They out-prepared the Soviet threat and demonstrated that readiness itself could prevent the conflict for which they were preparing. They held themselves to extraordinary standards despite never knowing whether the day would arrive when they would actually employ what they had spent their careers mastering, and my generation inherited their standards, tactics, discipline, debrief culture and expectation that preparation mattered even when nobody could promise the preparation would ever be tested.

September 11 changed the equation for our generation. There had certainly been significant American air combat between Vietnam and the wars that followed September 11, particularly during Desert Storm and Kosovo, and I don’t want to minimize the fighter pilots who had already experienced combat. But for a large portion of the fighter community, combat remained something we had studied, trained for and discussed rather than personally experienced. The generation that had been trained by Cold War warriors was now entering a period in which deployments and actual combat would become a recurring part of military aviation.

Less Than Two Years Later, I Was in Combat

By 2003, the trajectory that had begun for me inside that Delta simulator had taken me to combat. Our original mission involved counter-SCUD operations in western Iraq, but much of what we ultimately did became close air support for Special Forces personnel operating on the ground. Those men were doing extraordinarily dangerous work, and although there is obviously risk involved in flying an F-16 in combat, I never confused my situation with theirs. The people operating on the ground were exposed in ways we weren’t, and I considered them extraordinarily brave. Our responsibility was to provide the air support they needed to accomplish their mission and come home.

Eventually I employed ordnance in combat, and there is no reason for me to rewrite my feelings 25 years later in an effort to make them sound more sanitized.

It was exhilarating, thrilling and exciting because fighter pilots spend years training to perform a mission.

We study weapons, practice employment, debrief mistakes, fly again and continually try to become better, and then suddenly there is a moment when you are actually doing what the airplane and all of that training were designed to allow you to do. After my first combat mission, I thought about the Cold War warriors who had trained us and reached out to some of them because they had spent careers preparing for the game, while my generation had now actually entered it.

There is an emotional complexity to that experience that I think deserves honesty because warfare isn’t a video game and ordnance isn’t theoretical. When a 500-pound or 2,000-pound weapon hits the ground, there is an explosion and there are consequences. At the same time, there is something very real about the satisfaction a warrior experiences when successfully performing the mission for which he has spent years preparing. Both things can be true simultaneously. I could understand the seriousness and consequences of what we were doing while still experiencing the exhilaration of finally performing the mission in combat.

The Distance Between Two Cockpits

Sometimes I think about the distance between the two cockpits I occupied during those first years after September 11 because they illustrate better than almost anything else how dramatically my life changed. On the morning of the attacks I was sitting inside an airline simulator with BLADE completing recurrent training, watching a commercial aviation career that I expected to spend decades building. Less than two years later I was sitting inside an F-16 in combat, participating in a military mission that had become vastly larger and more demanding than the predominantly part-time Guard commitment I had known before September 11. Those two cockpits may appear to represent completely different worlds, but in my life there is a direct line connecting them.

That line began when BLADE and I walked out of the simulator and saw airliners striking buildings on television. Within days I was helping activate Guard units for homeland defense, and the operational tempo continued to increase as alert missions expanded, deployments began and the United States entered sustained military operations overseas. Meanwhile, at Delta, pilots were being furloughed, wide-body pilots were moving backward through the fleet, compensation was being reduced and an entire generation of airline pilots was losing years of expected career progression. The two careers I had previously managed beside one another were responding to the same historical event in almost opposite ways: my airline career went into neutral while my Guard career accelerated toward war.

What September 11 Took From My Family

Twenty-five years later, if I could walk back into that training center and sit beside the younger version of myself before BLADE and I climbed back into the simulator, I think we would still finish the training because that part of our mentality probably wouldn’t change. What I would change is the conversation I had with myself and, more importantly, the conversation I had with my family. I would tell the younger version of myself to recalibrate what being an American military officer and fighter pilot was about to mean because the military was no longer going to occupy the same predictable space in my life that it had before September 11.

My daughter hadn’t been born yet, and I had two sons and a wife. None of us understood what the coming years were going to require or how dramatically my military service would affect the time I had with them. If I knew then what I know today, I think I would have tried harder to bring my family into that reality from the beginning and prepare them for the fact that the comfortable balance we had known was disappearing. September 11 didn’t take my family from me, and I don’t want to use language that dramatic, but it absolutely took time. It took a relatively comfortable lifestyle and made it less comfortable, and it transformed a military career that had fit reasonably neatly beside an airline career into something that repeatedly pulled me away from home.

That experience taught me one of the lessons of war that doesn’t fit neatly into a cockpit story. War doesn’t only happen to the person wearing the uniform, because readiness, alert commitments, workups and deployments consume time that belongs to families as well. A deployment isn’t experienced only by the person getting on the airplane to leave; it is also experienced by the spouse managing the household and by the children growing up while a parent is somewhere else. That realization gave me a much deeper appreciation for generations of military families who had absorbed those costs long before mine did.

Understanding My Father’s War Differently

My father served in Korea, and before my own combat experience I respected that fact, but afterward I understood it differently. There is an enormous difference between intellectually knowing that someone went to war and personally experiencing even a small portion of what deployment and combat do to a person’s life and family. My own service therefore gave me a deeper appreciation not only for my father but also for generations of Americans who had gone before us and carried burdens that can be difficult to comprehend from the outside.

It also made me think about how increasingly disconnected much of American society has become from the people who fight its wars. During World War II, an enormous portion of the country knew someone serving, and families throughout America were directly connected to the conflict. Korea touched a smaller percentage, Vietnam a smaller percentage still, and by the Global War on Terror a comparatively small portion of the American population was carrying much of the direct burden of repeated deployments. Millions of Americans could continue their ordinary lives while another group of Americans deployed again and again. After September 11, neither I nor my family were disconnected from that reality anymore.

What September 11 Gave Me

It is difficult to write about what September 11 “gave” me because nearly 3,000 people were killed that morning, families were destroyed, first responders entered buildings and never returned, airline crews doing the same profession I did were killed along with their passengers, and the attacks initiated a period of war whose consequences lasted for decades. There is no silver lining to any of that, and I would never try to manufacture one. At the same time, if I’m going to examine my own life honestly, I can’t pretend that the events that followed didn’t profoundly shape the person I became.

September 11 changed my understanding of service, family, sacrifice and aviation. It introduced me to extraordinary people, transformed my Guard career from something largely part time into sustained operational service and eventually took me into combat. Combat taught me the exhilaration a warrior can experience when finally performing the mission for which he has spent years preparing, but it also taught me about the impact that mission has on a family and on a life. Ultimately, anyone who serves hopes that the sacrifices made by the individual and by the family have some positive impact on the nation they are serving, even when that impact isn’t immediately visible.

Twenty-Five Years Later

Today I can look backward across a flying career that the younger man sitting inside that Delta simulator couldn’t possibly have imagined. I spent 25 years flying fighters, commanded, deployed and flew combat. I watched the Air National Guard transform, watched the airline industry collapse into the lost decade and eventually recover, watched friends lose airline jobs and rebuild careers, and watched citizen-airmen discover how quickly a predominantly part-time military commitment could become a full-time operational mission. I also served alongside extraordinary people, and somewhere along the way I learned that the airplanes themselves were never really the most important part of the story.

At the end of roughly 40 years of flying, it isn’t really about my logbook. It’s about the relationships. A logbook can tell you where you went, what aircraft you flew and how many hours you accumulated, but it cannot tell you what the person sitting beside you meant to your life. It cannot capture the pilots who trained you, the friends you deployed beside or the phone call you made after your first combat mission to someone who spent his career preparing you for that moment. It cannot capture what your wife and children experienced while you were gone, explain why you declined to compete for a military job because another pilot had been furloughed and needed it more, or convey what it felt like to walk out of a simulator on an ordinary Tuesday morning and discover that the world had changed.

The Resolve That Connected Everything

The thought that connects the two parts of this story more than anything else is the idea of surprise. On September 11, BLADE and I thought about Captain John Ogonowski and First Officer Thomas McGuinness Jr., Captain Victor Saracini and First Officer Michael Horrocks, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame III and First Officer David Charlebois, and Captain Jason Dahl and First Officer LeRoy Homer Jr. They were professional airline pilots like us who had reported to work expecting to fly ordinary trips, and they were confronted with something the aviation system had not adequately prepared them to face. They were completely taken by surprise, and BLADE and I made a resolve that morning that a surprise like that could never simply be accepted again.

That resolve helps explain much of what followed because it was reflected in fighters launching across America, Guard units that had never routinely sat alert becoming part of homeland defense, my own trip to Washington days later to help activate those units and the transformation of cockpit security and airline procedures. It also helps explain the larger transition of a generation of military aviators who went from preparing for war to actually fighting one. The institutions, missions and procedures that followed September 11 are complicated and deserve thoughtful examination with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, but none of that should obscure the uncertainty we faced in those first hours and days when nobody knew whether another attack was coming.

September 11 sent my two aviation careers in opposite directions, with the airline escalator stopping while the Guard accelerated toward sustained homeland defense and war. Somewhere between those two worlds, I learned more about aviation, service, family, sacrifice and relationships than I ever could have learned from a logbook. Twenty-five years later, I remain grateful for the people who trained me, the people I flew beside, the people on the ground who performed work far more dangerous than mine and the families who carried the cost of our service. I also remain conscious that my story is a very small one inside an event that took thousands of lives and changed millions more.

Perhaps that is why individual stories from September 11 still matter. History isn’t only casualty figures, military operations, government policies or dates in textbooks; it is also a couple of pilots walking out of a simulator and staring at a television, a telephone ringing at a Guard unit asking who can get to the base, an airline pilot watching his career progression stop while his military career accelerates toward war, a fighter pilot trained by Cold War warriors finally employing a weapon in combat, and a family learning what repeated deployments actually mean. It is also eight airline pilots who went to work on an ordinary Tuesday morning believing they were going to fly their passengers safely to their destinations and instead found themselves at the center of an event that would change aviation forever.

At 8:46 a.m. Eastern Time on September 11, 2001, the first aircraft struck the World Trade Center while I was inside a Delta simulator. Twenty-five years later, I can still remember walking out and seeing those television screens, the shock of trying to comprehend what we were watching and the thoughts about the pilots and their families. BLADE and I couldn’t possibly have known what the next quarter century would bring, but the fighter pilot in both of us understood something immediately: things were going to change. Looking back across everything that followed, from the lost decade at the airlines to homeland defense, deployment, combat and the impact on our families, it is difficult to imagine a greater understatement.

As Burning Man comes to an end this year and tens of thousands of people begin the long journey out of Black Rock City, there is one story from the playa that should not disappear beneath the dust.

A year ago, 37-year-old Vadim Kruglov was found fatally stabbed at Burning Man as participants gathered for the burning of the Man. One year later, no arrest has been announced. Investigators continue trying to determine what happened during the final hours of his life.

I have been to Burning Man a few times, and most recently I experienced another side of the event while helping transport RVs into and out of Black Rock City. Having actually been on the playa makes this case particularly difficult for me to ignore.

If you have never been there, it is difficult to understand just how enormous, chaotic and temporary Black Rock City really is. Tens of thousands of people move through the desert on bicycles, on foot and aboard art cars. Dust can reduce visibility dramatically. People wear costumes and masks. Strangers wander between camps throughout the night. You can meet someone, never learn their real name and never see them again.

Then, almost overnight, the city disappears.

Burning Man itself describes Black Rock City as ephemeral, saying the city rises for eight days and then “disappears without a trace.” That sounds poetic until you consider what it means when someone is murdered there.

Kruglov’s body was discovered at approximately the same time the Man was burning. Law enforcement immediately faced an extraordinary problem: their crime scene existed inside a temporary city that was already preparing to dismantle itself. Camps would soon disappear, vehicles would leave Nevada and potential witnesses would scatter across the country and around the world. The Pershing County sheriff described the investigation as complicated precisely because Black Rock City would soon be gone.

That is an investigator’s nightmare.

New reporting makes Kruglov’s final hours even more disturbing. Friends reportedly said he had become fearful and believed someone might be tracking him. He was taken to Burning Man’s temporary medical facility and released only hours before his death. Investigators reportedly recovered his phone and a knife containing multiple DNA profiles, yet the case remains unresolved.

None of that proves Kruglov’s earlier fears were connected to his murder. But from a human-intelligence perspective, the unanswered questions are impossible to ignore.

Who saw him after he left medical care? Who spoke with him? Who knew where he was going? Who was around the tent where he was killed? Did someone witness something unusual but dismiss it as another strange encounter on the playa?

Someone may possess one seemingly insignificant piece of information that changes this investigation.

And this is where I believe Burning Man’s leadership deserves greater scrutiny.

After Kruglov’s death, Burning Man Project CEO Marian Goodell expressed condolences to his family and said the organization was assisting investigators. She spoke about compassion for participants, volunteers and staff and about upholding the values of the Burning Man community. Those were appropriate sentiments.

But a year later, condolences are not enough.

When you oversee an event that effectively constructs a temporary city containing tens of thousands of people, leadership cannot talk only about community, radical self-reliance and shared values. It also has to confront the uncomfortable realities that come with creating that city.

Burning Man is not responsible for every crime committed by someone who enters Black Rock City, and there is no basis to blame Goodell personally for Kruglov’s death. But leadership should be challenged about what has been learned from it.

What changed after the murder? What systems were reviewed? What lessons were learned about preserving evidence in a city designed to disappear? What procedures exist when someone presents at a medical facility frightened or paranoid and is subsequently released back onto the playa? What more can be done to identify witnesses before thousands of people scatter across the world?

Those are not attacks on Burning Man. They are questions responsible leadership should welcome.

They are especially relevant as the 2026 Burn itself closes after another difficult week. Two participant deaths have been reported this year, although authorities have not publicly connected them to foul play. The event has also dealt with severe weather, injuries and arrests.

I have seen what makes Burning Man remarkable. I understand why people return. There is creativity, generosity and an extraordinary sense that the normal rules of society have temporarily been suspended.

But the normal dangers of society are not suspended.

As the final camps come down this year and another Black Rock City begins disappearing into the Nevada desert, Vadim Kruglov’s name deserves to be remembered.

Last year, a man was killed in a city surrounded by tens of thousands of people. The Man burned. The music eventually stopped. The RVs and cars headed toward the highway. The camps vanished.

The murder did not.

Somewhere, someone may still know what happened.

Burning Man prides itself on leaving no trace.

Justice for Vadim Kruglov cannot become another thing the playa leaves behind.

Burning Man Project sells an extraordinary idea. For one week every year, tens of thousands of people travel into Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and construct a temporary city that is supposed to operate according to a culture radically different from the one they left behind. Money largely disappears from the visible experience. People give instead of sell. They participate instead of consume. They build community, create art, endure an unforgiving environment together and are encouraged to rely upon themselves rather than the conveniences and services that define ordinary life.

Burning Man formally expresses that culture through its Ten Principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation and Immediacy. They are admirable ideas, and I understand why they have attracted generations of people to the Black Rock Desert. My problem is that after spending several years around Burning Man from an unusual vantage point, I found that those ideals could bear remarkably little resemblance to what I actually witnessed.

I did not come to Burning Man as a journalist looking for a story. I wasn’t a lifelong Burner, and I didn’t arrive determined to criticize the culture. My introduction to Burning Man came through my work transporting recreational vehicles. That work eventually gave me an unusual view of the event because I saw it from the highway, from behind the wheel, from inside upscale camps and eventually from the vendor side of the enormous logistical operation required to make Black Rock City possible. The closer I got to Burning Man, the harder it became for me to reconcile what the event says about itself with what I saw happening around me.

My first exposure came when I was contacted by a very eccentric physician from Miami who had extremely particular requirements concerning the transportation of his recreational vehicle. He was renting an RV from Cruise America, and the arrangement was made in my name so I could be properly covered as a driver. He paid me approximately $2,000 to transport it between the Los Angeles area and Reno and back. I didn’t actually make it inside Burning Man that first year, but I had been introduced to the enormous logistical ecosystem surrounding the event, and that alone fascinated me.

The following year, I became considerably more involved. Instead of having the physician rent another RV from Cruise America, I rented him one of my own units for approximately what he otherwise would have paid commercially. From there, my involvement expanded. I rented additional units and transported others, and eventually I was involved in moving approximately 14 recreational vehicles between Southern California and Black Rock City. At that point, I wasn’t simply hearing stories about Burning Man. I was helping transport the infrastructure that made a certain version of Burning Man possible.

That was when one of the event’s most celebrated principles began sounding very different to me: Radical Self-reliance. Burning Man describes the principle as encouraging people to discover, exercise and rely upon their own inner resources. There is something inherently strange about hearing that language after being paid thousands of dollars to transport someone’s recreational vehicle hundreds of miles so that an air-conditioned home on wheels can be waiting for them near the playa. The contradiction becomes even more pronounced when you understand how much additional infrastructure can surround that RV.

Someone rents the vehicle. Someone transports it. Someone provisions it. Someone arranges the fuel. Someone handles maintenance. Someone deals with sanitation. Someone provides food. Someone builds the camp. Someone can even provide security. Then the participant arrives in Black Rock City and participates in an event celebrating Radical Self-reliance. I am certainly not criticizing RVs themselves. I own them, rent them and transport them. I have made money doing precisely that. My criticism is directed at the mythology surrounding an experience that, for some people, has become remarkably dependent upon paid services.

If Burning Man simply described itself as an enormous desert arts festival where people build incredible things, listen to music, experiment, party and enjoy themselves, I would have considerably less to criticize. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. But Burning Man attaches something much larger to the experience. It presents a philosophy built around Decommodification, Participation, Communal Effort and Radical Self-reliance. Once I began seeing how the wealthier end of Burning Man actually operated, those words became increasingly difficult for me to reconcile with reality.

One of the experiences that fundamentally changed my perception occurred when I rolled into the event with a group of Danish models who needed transportation. Through that experience, I gained access to an extremely upscale camp, and what I encountered wasn’t people roughing it in the desert. It was decadence. There were luxury RVs, elaborate accommodations, sophisticated dining arrangements and expensive infrastructure designed to insulate participants from many of the very hardships supposedly central to the Burning Man experience. I encountered private security and saw an environment that, in some respects, felt considerably closer to luxury hospitality than an experiment in Radical Self-reliance.

The cost of participating at that level can become extraordinary. Once you begin combining tickets, transportation, recreational vehicles, camp dues, supplies, food, equipment and logistics, spending well into five figures is hardly unimaginable. There is nothing inherently immoral about wealthy people enjoying themselves, and I have no objection to somebody spending their own money on an extravagant vacation. If you want an air-conditioned RV, excellent food and a comfortable bed in the middle of the Nevada desert, that’s your decision. But at some point, we should be willing to acknowledge that purchasing your way around nearly every uncomfortable element of the experience sits awkwardly beside a philosophy centered on Radical Self-reliance.

The difference between participants also became impossible for me to ignore. There are people sleeping in tents, building their own camps, preparing their own food and spending months creating art they will give to the community. There are volunteers working incredibly hard to make Black Rock City function. Those people unquestionably exist, and I don’t want my criticism to diminish their contributions. But there are also people with enough money to outsource enormous portions of their experience. Those two people may technically be attending the same Burning Man, but economically and practically, they aren’t necessarily experiencing the same event.

Burning Man itself has recognized this tension for years. The organization has wrestled publicly with what it has called “plug-and-play” or turnkey camps and the concept of “PAYticipation,” where people effectively purchase an experience rather than meaningfully helping create it. Burning Man has acknowledged that this can undermine Participation, Communal Effort, Decommodification and Radical Self-reliance. That acknowledgment is significant because it means the contradiction isn’t simply something critics have invented. The organization itself knows that money can create class divisions inside a supposedly communal experiment.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to continue working around Burning Man, I wanted to operate within its official system. I applied to become an approved Outside Services provider, commonly referred to as OSS, and was accepted as an RV-related vendor. The Outside Services Program exists to regulate approved companies providing certain services and infrastructure connected to Black Rock City. Becoming part of that system gave me another perspective on Burning Man, and in some ways it was even more revealing than seeing the luxury camps.

The rules and regulations were voluminous. There were requirements for seemingly everything, and some of that is completely understandable. Black Rock City is effectively a temporary municipality constructed in an extremely difficult environment on federal land. Tens of thousands of people, vehicles, generators, sanitation systems, camps and massive art installations cannot simply appear in the desert without substantial planning and regulation. Public safety matters. Environmental protection matters. Transportation matters. I don’t object to Burning Man having rules. What frustrated me was experiencing an organization capable of generating enormous amounts of bureaucracy that sometimes seemed remarkably incapable of making straightforward decisions.

At one point, I was contacted about potentially housing an operations team associated with the event. This was not a minor proposal. We were discussing approximately 20 trailers positioned close to the event for roughly two months. For my company, that represented a substantial potential commitment. Equipment needed to be reserved, transportation needed to be planned, drivers and personnel needed to be considered, and other business opportunities might have to be declined because those units would potentially be committed to Burning Man.

Negotiations progressed, and we became very close to an agreement. Eventually, however, I needed an answer. A decision was supposed to be made by a particular date. That date arrived and was extended. Another deadline approached, and that was extended as well. This happened repeatedly until my point of contact essentially conveyed the underlying problem to me: nobody seemed capable of making the final decision. For a business trying to plan equipment and personnel, that level of uncertainty is incredibly difficult to manage.

That experience came to symbolize Burning Man for me. I encountered an organization with enormous volumes of procedures explaining precisely what vendors were expected to do, yet obtaining a straightforward organizational decision could become extraordinarily difficult. The irony was difficult to miss. An event that celebrates Immediacy had developed layers of bureaucracy. An event celebrating Radical Self-reliance depended upon an enormous network of outside infrastructure. An event celebrating Decommodification had developed a formal system for managing the commercial providers required to support it.

Decommodification became perhaps the strangest contradiction of all. Burning Man says it seeks to create an environment free from commercial sponsorships, transactions and advertising and wants to resist replacing participation with consumption. Again, I admire the concept. But follow one recreational vehicle from Los Angeles to Black Rock City and tell me that commerce has disappeared. Someone bought it. Someone rented it. Someone insured it. Someone transported it. Someone filled it with fuel. Someone provisioned it. Someone maintained it. Someone cleaned it. Someone transported it home. Money changed hands repeatedly before and after that RV ever reached the playa.

Multiply that by thousands of participants, vehicles, generators, trailers, equipment, flights, hotels, storage facilities, food suppliers, drivers, transportation companies and professional services, and the economic footprint becomes enormous. Burning Man hasn’t eliminated commerce. In many respects, it has simply pushed commerce beyond the visible boundaries of Black Rock City. The credit card gets used before you reach the gate. I know that because people like me were on the other side of those transactions.

I participated in that economy, and I profited from it. I am not embarrassed to acknowledge that because providing transportation is legitimate work. What I find increasingly ridiculous is pretending that the economic machinery somehow doesn’t count because the transaction occurred in Los Angeles, Reno or somewhere along Interstate 80 rather than underneath the Man. The entire peripheral economy exists precisely because Burning Man exists. Decommodification hasn’t eliminated the market surrounding Burning Man. Burning Man has helped create that market.

Then I read what John Law had to say.

Law isn’t someone criticizing Burning Man because he doesn’t understand it. He is one of the people who helped create it and was instrumental in bringing the gathering to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in 1990. In a recent essay subsequently covered by Yahoo, Law argued that Burning Man has “lost its anarchist soul,” contrasting the modern event with the radically different gathering he remembers from its earliest years.

That caught my attention because Law’s perspective and mine couldn’t be more different. He saw Burning Man near the beginning. I entered its world decades later through the commercial and logistical machinery surrounding it. Yet we appear to have arrived at remarkably similar concerns. Law remembers a gathering where people largely created the experience themselves. I transported accommodations so people wouldn’t have to. He remembers something anarchistic and improvisational. I encountered vendor programs, elaborate infrastructure, expensive camps, professional services and layers of organizational bureaucracy.

Law has also criticized the transformation of Burning Man into something increasingly oriented toward wealthy elites and the creative professionals who service them. Reporting on his comments describes his criticism of luxury camps, private chefs and wealthy attendees arriving by private aircraft. That description immediately resonated with me because I had witnessed my own version of precisely that world. I wasn’t reading an abstract criticism of something I had never seen. I had transported part of the infrastructure supporting it.

There is also an important historical detail that complicates Burning Man’s mythology. The famous Ten Principles weren’t written at the beginning of Burning Man. Larry Harvey formally articulated them in 2004 as Burning Man expanded its regional culture. That doesn’t make the principles meaningless, but it does illustrate how Burning Man evolved from an improvised gathering into an institution that eventually needed to formally explain what its culture was supposed to represent.

Perhaps that evolution explains some of what I witnessed. The larger and more institutionalized Burning Man became, the more necessary it became to articulate Radical Self-reliance while simultaneously building systems for outside service providers. It celebrated Decommodification while an enormous commercial ecosystem developed around it. It emphasized Participation while wealthy attendees increasingly possessed the ability to purchase services that removed much of the work from participating. The principles remained constant on paper while the economic and organizational reality surrounding them changed dramatically.

One detail from Law’s description of the early years captures the transformation particularly well. The first Black Rock Desert gathering in 1990 involved only around 80 people, some of whom slept directly on the desert floor in sleeping bags. Compare that with the Burning Man I encountered decades later, where I was transporting recreational vehicles hundreds of miles so participants could arrive with beds, refrigerators, bathrooms, generators and air conditioning. From sleeping bags to luxury RVs is almost a perfect metaphor for what happened to Burning Man.

Again, I don’t believe every Burner is a hypocrite, and I don’t believe everything about Burning Man is fraudulent. That would be unfair. There are artists who devote enormous amounts of time and money to creating extraordinary things simply because they want other people to experience them. There are volunteers, builders and ordinary participants who genuinely embody the principles Burning Man promotes. There are people who save money all year to attend and people for whom the experience has produced friendships and memories that genuinely changed their lives. I have no interest in dismissing those experiences.

My criticism is directed at the widening gulf between Burning Man as an idea and Burning Man as an institution. Something can be genuine while simultaneously becoming hypocritical. The art can be extraordinary while the economics become absurd. The community can be meaningful while wealth creates obvious class distinctions. Participants can genuinely practice Radical Self-reliance while other participants effectively purchase their way around it. All of those things can be true simultaneously.

The wealth question is particularly difficult for Burning Man to escape because wealth changes the nature of almost any environment. A billionaire and a schoolteacher can stand beside each other watching the Man burn, but their ability to navigate the week can be radically different. One participant may be assembling a tent in the dust, rationing supplies and cooking meals over a small stove while another returns to an elaborate air-conditioned camp with professional food service and hired assistance. They occupy the same geographic space, but it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that socioeconomic status has somehow disappeared.

The desert doesn’t erase class. It doesn’t erase money. It doesn’t erase privilege. It simply creates an unusual environment in which people can temporarily pretend those distinctions have become less important. But when enough money allows someone to outsource the very difficulties supposedly responsible for making Burning Man transformative, wealth fundamentally changes the experience.

Maybe I would feel differently if I had experienced Burning Man only as a participant. Perhaps my strongest memories would be the art, music, sunrise, friendships and conversations with strangers. But that wasn’t my Burning Man. My Burning Man involved logistics, transportation, contracts, insurance, recreational vehicles, trailers, drivers, vendor approvals, rules, deadlines, negotiations and customers willing to spend substantial amounts of money to make their supposedly radically self-reliant experience considerably more comfortable.

I saw the machinery behind the mythology, and once you see the machinery, it becomes difficult to pretend it isn’t there. There is an almost perfect irony in the fact that I entered Burning Man through RV transportation because I didn’t simply observe the contradiction. I helped deliver it. I transported the air conditioning, beds, refrigerators, bathrooms and shelter. I helped bring the comforts of conventional American life into the middle of a desert where people were supposedly traveling to escape conventional American life. I made money doing it, the participants received what they wanted and the system worked exactly as designed. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, everyone continued talking about Radical Self-reliance and Decommodification.

That ultimately leaves me with a very simple question: what exactly are we proving? Why travel hundreds or thousands of miles into a brutally hot desert only to spend enormous amounts of money recreating the comforts you supposedly went there to escape? Why transport an air-conditioned apartment into Black Rock City to experience Radical Self-reliance? Why pay other people to build, transport, provision and maintain your experience while celebrating Participation? Why construct luxury camps while preaching Decommodification? Why build an increasingly complicated institutional bureaucracy around something supposedly devoted to Immediacy?

If you want to party, party. If you want extravagant food, eat extravagant food. If you want to spend five figures on a weeklong vacation, spend it. If you’re a millionaire or billionaire and want to create an extraordinary desert playground for yourself and your friends, that’s your prerogative. I don’t object to any of those things individually. What bothers me is conspicuous consumption dressed in the language of anti-consumerism and dependence on an enormous service economy dressed in the language of Radical Self-reliance.

Burning Man nevertheless remains an extraordinary logistical accomplishment. Building a temporary city in the Black Rock Desert is remarkable. Some of the art is breathtaking, some of the engineering is astonishing, and the amount of human labor necessary to construct Black Rock City and then dismantle it is difficult to comprehend. I met fascinating people because of Burning Man, made money because of Burning Man and experienced situations I probably never would have encountered anywhere else. I don’t regret those experiences, and I don’t need to pretend that everything about the event is terrible in order to criticize what I believe it has become.

John Law hasn’t attended Burning Man since 1996, and there is something almost poetic about that. He remembers an event that bears increasingly little resemblance to the institution that exists today. He remembers an anarchistic collaboration of people building something strange in the desert because they wanted to, without the sprawling infrastructure, luxury accommodations, professional services and bureaucracy that surround the modern event. I encountered the descendant of that experiment from an entirely different perspective. I dealt with the vendors, logistics, transportation, RVs, regulations and money. I saw luxury camps firsthand, and I watched people spend extraordinary amounts of money insulating themselves from many of the hardships that Radical Self-reliance supposedly asks participants to embrace.

Burning Man may still be an extraordinary party, and I have no doubt that it continues to produce extraordinary art, remarkable friendships and experiences that genuinely change people’s lives. What I cannot overlook anymore is the enormous gulf between the values Burning Man publicly celebrates and the reality I personally witnessed. Radical Self-reliance becomes a strange phrase when somebody else transports your luxury accommodations to the desert. Decommodification becomes increasingly difficult to defend when an enormous commercial economy exists to support the experience. Communal Effort means something very different when wealth allows one participant to outsource the difficult parts while another spends days building everything themselves.

Perhaps the greatest irony of modern Burning Man is that you can supposedly escape capitalism for a week in the Nevada desert, but you may have to spend an extraordinary amount of money getting there, staying there and protecting yourself from the very environment you traveled thousands of miles to experience. The money hasn’t disappeared. The commerce hasn’t disappeared. The class differences haven’t disappeared. In many cases, they have simply been moved outside the gates or disguised beneath the language of participation, gifting and community. The desert does not magically erase wealth, privilege or consumerism simply because there aren’t corporate logos hanging everywhere.

That is ultimately why my perspective on Burning Man changed so dramatically. I wasn’t standing outside Black Rock City criticizing something I had never experienced. I participated in the system that made the modern experience possible. I rented the RVs, transported them, worked through the vendor process, dealt with the bureaucracy and saw the upscale camps. I benefited financially from that system, and I am perfectly willing to acknowledge my own role in it. In fact, that is precisely why I believe my perspective matters. I didn’t simply witness the contradiction. I helped deliver it.

John Law remembers what Burning Man was. I saw, from a very different vantage point, what it has become. Maybe Burning Man can eventually rediscover some of the culture that made it revolutionary in the first place, or perhaps it has simply grown too large, too expensive and too institutionalized ever to return to that version of itself. Either way, I have seen enough to make my own decision. I helped deliver Burning Man’s luxury, I saw what existed behind the mythology, and I watched its principles collide with the reality on the ground. For me, the contradiction eventually became impossible to ignore, and I have no desire to participate in it anymore. I will not be back.

Roger Rogoff has spent more than three decades inside the American justice system, but there is no single title that fully explains his career. He has been a county prosecutor, an Assistant United States Attorney, a criminal defense attorney, a King County Superior Court judge, corporate counsel, the director of Washington State’s Office of Independent Investigations and, today, a trial lawyer once again. He has prosecuted serious criminal cases, presided over courtrooms, evaluated witnesses, worked around confidential sources and cooperating defendants, taught trial advocacy and helped build an investigative agency designed to examine the conduct of law enforcement itself.

What interested me most, however, was not simply the breadth of the résumé. Plenty of accomplished lawyers have long résumés. What interested me was what happens to someone’s understanding of people after occupying so many different positions inside the same justice system. A prosecutor looks at a case differently than a defense attorney. A judge sees things neither side necessarily sees. An investigative leader encounters an entirely different problem when the credibility of the institution itself becomes part of the investigation. Rogoff has lived inside all of those perspectives, and throughout our conversation he kept returning to the same idea: if you want to understand what is actually happening, you have to listen.

That sounds elementary until Rogoff explains what he means. “I think the biggest mistake people make is in any situation when they are working criminal cases is listening to respond instead of listening to understand,” he told me. That sentence became the organizing principle of our conversation because it reaches far beyond trial advocacy. It applies to the investigator interviewing a witness, the prosecutor sitting across from a cooperating defendant, the judge listening to two sharply different versions of the same event and the attorney trying to determine whether a potential client is telling the truth. It applies equally to intelligence work, where the person supplying the information may have complicated motivations and where misunderstanding one sentence can alter the trajectory of an investigation.

Rogoff’s distinction is simple but important. Listening to respond means you are waiting for the opening that allows you to defend what you already believe. Listening to understand means you are permitting the other person to potentially change your understanding. The first approach is adversarial by nature. The second is investigative.

For The Human Intelligence Ledger, that distinction matters enormously. Human intelligence is fundamentally about understanding people who possess information that cannot always be obtained through technological means. Surveillance may show where someone went. Financial records may establish that money moved. A telephone may establish that two people communicated. A wiretap may capture what they said. But understanding why a meeting occurred, who actually controls an organization, what coded language means, why money was transferred or what a particular relationship represents often requires someone who understands the human context.

Rogoff knows that environment from experience. When I asked him how important human sources and cooperating witnesses had been during his years as a federal prosecutor, he answered immediately.

“I mean, it’s everything.”

He had prosecuted federal cases involving violent crime, firearms, gangs and other serious offenses, and he had also worked drug trafficking investigations and wiretap cases. Those kinds of investigations routinely involve information coming from people who exist somewhere inside the criminal ecosystem being investigated.

“Having someone who can talk about what is actually happening and connect you to evidence that you can use and sort of making all of this real and understandable is everything to a case,” Rogoff said. He continued by making an observation that experienced investigators will recognize instantly. “There’s not a case that happens that doesn’t at least start with some human source saying, ‘Hey, this happened,’ or someone getting arrested for something very minor and saying, ‘Hey, I know something more.’”

That “something more” is often where an ordinary investigation becomes consequential. A seemingly peripheral person may know who directs an organization. Someone arrested on a relatively minor charge may understand a supply chain stretching across several states. A cooperating defendant may explain the significance of conversations investigators have already intercepted but do not fully understand. A witness may reveal that the person publicly associated with a criminal enterprise is not actually the person exercising authority.

Human intelligence creates context. Rogoff’s understanding of that process did not begin with federal law enforcement. It began much earlier, in a household where he watched his father work with people facing some of the most frightening moments imaginable.

Rogoff described growing up in a privileged environment. His father was a radiation oncologist, which meant he spent his professional life around people with cancer, including people confronting the possibility of death. Yet the stories his father brought home were rarely centered on the technical details of medicine. “The thing that struck me about my dad was that all of his stories were not about medicine and disease, but about people,” Rogoff said. “He was incredibly interested in all of his patients.”

His father protected their identities, of course, but he talked about their histories, personalities and the extraordinary people he encountered during the course of his work. “He would come home and, you know, he would not use their names, of course, but he would talk about histories of people and these incredible folks that he got an opportunity to meet and work with and help while they were at their worst.” That left a lasting impression. “The idea of helping people in their worst moments was really attractive to me because of that,” Rogoff said.

That is an interesting foundation for a career in criminal law because the criminal justice system frequently encounters people at precisely those moments. Crime victims may be living through the worst event of their lives. Defendants may be facing the loss of freedom, family, reputation and livelihood. Witnesses can be frightened. Families can be devastated. Investigators can encounter violence and trauma repeatedly. Prosecutors make decisions that can change a person’s life in a matter of minutes.

Another influence came from Rogoff’s uncle, a successful attorney in Philadelphia who had previously been a prosecutor. Rogoff remembers reading about a particularly significant domestic violence case his uncle handled after leaving prosecution. His uncle was defending a woman who had killed her husband following a prolonged history of abuse, and the case involved an early use of self defense principles in the context of domestic violence. Rogoff remembered seeing newspaper coverage of the case. “There were pictures of them crying and hugging together,” he recalled.

Those experiences began shaping his understanding of what lawyers could do. The profession was not only about statutes, motions and argument. It could place someone beside another human being when that person was facing circumstances that might permanently alter the course of his or her life.

Rogoff attended Emory University before going to law school at the University of Washington. He went essentially straight from college into legal education and admits that he entered law school without much of the ordinary life experience that made some legal concepts immediately relatable. “I frankly, and I grew up privileged, I really didn’t know a lot,” he said. Some areas of law felt abstract. “I never had a mortgage before. I didn’t understand real property. I didn’t understand, you know, torts. That was all real strange to me.”

Criminal law was different. “I could definitely understand that you’re not supposed to hit someone over the head or that you’re not supposed to steal things.” There was also something about the moral architecture of criminal prosecution that appealed to him. “I didn’t like bullies,” Rogoff said. “And the idea of prosecuting people who had been bullies was real attractive to me.”

He wanted to be in court, and the prosecutor’s office offered an obvious path. He interned during law school and, after graduating, went to work for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Rogoff began in district court handling cases such as DUIs and fourth degree assaults before moving through the office and eventually handling serious felony cases. He spent approximately thirteen years there and ultimately specialized substantially in domestic violence and sexual assault prosecutions.

Those years gave him one perspective on the justice system. The decades that followed would give him several others. Looking back now, Rogoff says one of the most important things he has learned is that human beings cannot always be neatly categorized according to the worst thing they have ever done. “Doing bad things doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person,” he told me.

That is not a declaration that people should escape responsibility. Rogoff spent much of his career prosecuting people. His point is about the limits of the justice system and the complexity of the people entering it. “There are a thousand reasons that people end up doing the things that get them in trouble and get them into the system,” he said. Those reasons can include addiction, trauma, poverty, greed, impulsivity, desperation, environment, coercion, opportunity and personal choice. Frequently several exist at the same time. Courts must nevertheless take enormously complicated human circumstances and process them through defined legal categories.

“The justice system is just not capable of answering all of those questions in the right way all the time because it’s just limited in what it can do,” Rogoff said. He described criminal behavior and the reasons people commit crimes as complicated and layered. “When people talk about the criminal justice system solving those problems for people and going to root causes and fixing things, it’s just a huge lift.”

That helps explain why public debates about criminal justice frequently sound so dissatisfied. Society asks courts to punish, deter, rehabilitate, incapacitate, compensate victims, protect constitutional rights, address addiction, confront mental health problems and fix social conditions that existed long before a particular defendant ever entered the courtroom. The system can do some of those things. It cannot reliably do all of them.

Rogoff believes that reality makes professional roles extraordinarily important. “The best thing that you can do as a person participating in or working in the justice system is to do your role incredibly well,” he said. That means prosecutors must understand what prosecutors are permitted to do. Defense attorneys must understand their obligations. Judges must remain within the authority granted to them. Investigators must gather evidence within legal and ethical boundaries.

“Following those rules and those strictures on what you’re allowed to do and not to do is so incredibly important.” Rogoff sees danger when people begin expanding their roles because they believe a particular outcome is desirable. “When prosecutors start trying to color outside the lines and fix things for defendants, when judges try to do more than they’re permitted to do, that’s when problems start to happen and the system starts to break down.”

That concept would follow him throughout his career. After his years in the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Rogoff eventually became an Assistant United States Attorney. He served as a federal prosecutor from 2007 through 2013 and worked in the Terrorism and Violent Crimes Unit, handling cases involving illegal firearms, gangs and violent crime. He also coordinated gang prosecutions and worked around matters involving child victims and sexual abuse.

The federal system brought him more deeply into investigations involving confidential sources, cooperating defendants and human intelligence. When I described my own experience as a source and cooperating witness and asked how prosecutors establish effective communication with someone who may be sitting across the table primarily because he wants a reduction in his sentence, Rogoff acknowledged the obvious reality. “Of course, the promise of a reduced sentence is a motivating factor for anyone who wants to be involved in that world.”

But incentives alone do not produce high quality information. The prosecutor still has to communicate. “You’ve got to be able to communicate it if you’re a prosecutor,” Rogoff said. “And it can’t be, you know, some high level, you know, using crazy language that people don’t understand.”

That observation seems almost too obvious until one considers how often professionals communicate using language developed primarily for other professionals. Prosecutors understand substantial assistance. Agents understand source classifications. Attorneys understand procedural terminology. Defendants may understand none of it.

“You’ve got to be able to talk people and not talk at them,” Rogoff said. That phrase matters. Talking at someone communicates authority. Talking to someone creates an exchange. “You need to be open to answering questions. You need to be able to help them understand what the risks and rewards are.”

Rogoff believes the same skill matters with juries and opposing attorneys. “Being able to talk to people in a normal way is incredibly important,” he said. “It’s incredibly important in that situation. It’s incredibly important when you’re talking to a jury, which is just a collection of people from all over the place. It’s an important skill when you’re talking to opposing counsel, because people are just people.”

That last phrase could almost serve as the subtitle for the entire conversation. People are just people. Titles do not eliminate psychology. Uniforms do not eliminate emotion. Robes do not eliminate ego. Criminal histories do not eliminate dignity. Law degrees do not automatically create wisdom. Security clearances do not automatically create curiosity. And credibility does not automatically come with authority.

“If you’re trying to negotiate a case and get a result that you want, having that ability to talk like a normal human is everything because people are going to trust that,” Rogoff said.

I asked him where he learned it. The ability to build rapport is frequently discussed within law enforcement, but it is difficult to teach in a classroom. Some investigators seem naturally capable of entering a room and making a stranger comfortable. Others can have decades of experience and still make every interaction feel like an interrogation.

Rogoff again returned to the dinner table. “I like people,” he said. “I like stories.” He remembers listening to his parents describe what had happened in their lives. “The idea of hearing stories from my mom and my dad about what they were doing was like the highlight of the day.”

That taught him something that became central to his professional life. “Listening, doing a lot of listening, especially when you’re younger, I think is essential to learning how to communicate with people.” Then came one of the most concise descriptions of communication I have heard in these interviews. “Listening is just the opposite end of talking and frankly, the more important end.”

Rogoff still teaches trial advocacy to law students, and he has developed a memorable way of explaining direct examination. “If you want to figure out how to do direct examination and you’re single, start going on a lot of first dates.”

The point is not the dating itself. The point is curiosity. You can sit across from another person and fire questions mechanically, making the conversation feel like a deposition, or you can genuinely want to know who that person is. “You can either do it in a super creepy way and they hate you and never talk to you again, or you can do it because you’re curious and interested and want to know more about them, in which case they’re going to be interested in giving you the information and maybe get a second date.”

My father, who joined us for the interview and spent years teaching communication, immediately recognized the principle. Genuine curiosity changes the experience of being questioned. The listener is not simply collecting data. The listener is demonstrating that the answer matters.

Rogoff agreed. “People are cool,” he said. He believes nearly everyone carries experiences that are rarely discussed but have profoundly shaped who they became. “Everyone has these experiences that they don’t talk about very much, and it forms who they are.” If the interviewer has enough patience, those experiences often reveal something worth understanding. “If you have enough patience and time to get to it, it’s usually worth your time.”

That principle goes directly to human source development. An effective source relationship cannot be reduced entirely to transactional exchange. Money can motivate. Sentence reduction can motivate. Revenge can motivate. Fear can motivate. Loyalty can motivate. Those incentives explain why someone agrees to participate. They do not necessarily explain why someone eventually trusts a handler enough to disclose the information that matters most.

Rogoff believes people have an intuitive ability to detect whether the person listening actually cares. “Human interaction and people believing that you care about what they say” is important, he said. Then he added the critical limitation. “The only way that they will actually believe it is if you do care about what they say. There’s no faking it.”

That should be required reading for anyone who thinks rapport is simply a collection of interviewing tricks. There are techniques that help communication. Asking open ended questions matters. Avoiding accusatory language can matter. Understanding the person’s background matters. Finding common ground can matter. But techniques are not authenticity.

A sophisticated source may have spent years around people attempting to manipulate him. A cooperating defendant may have participated in deception professionally. Someone operating inside a criminal organization may be unusually attentive to body language, inconsistency and ulterior motive. The interviewer who is merely performing curiosity may eventually be recognized as performing it.

Rogoff’s approach is different. Actually be curious. Actually listen. Actually care what the person is saying. Then verify it.

That final part is essential because human intelligence brings a second problem: people lie. Sometimes they intentionally lie. Sometimes they exaggerate. Sometimes they minimize. Sometimes they protect someone. Sometimes they protect themselves. Sometimes they misremember. Sometimes they honestly believe something that simply is not true.

I asked Rogoff how he approaches a witness or defendant who has strong reasons to deceive him. He resisted pretending that decades in court had given him some mystical ability to detect dishonesty. “I don’t profess to be an expert in divining the truth from people.”

Instead, he emphasizes preparation. “You’ve got to, first of all, know everything you possibly can about the situation that they’re going to be talking about so that you can honestly and fairly measure what they’re saying against the immutable facts that you know.”

That is the foundation. Before the conversation begins, know the case. Know the records. Know the timeline. Know what can be independently established. Know what cannot.

“If you go into a conversation with a critical witness whose truth telling is really important to your case or really important to the situation, and you haven’t taken the time to really know your case and know the situation as well as you can without them, then you’re at a disadvantage in figuring out whether they’re going to tell the truth.”

That is as applicable to intelligence work as it is to trial preparation. A human source should provide intelligence that can be tested against independently established information. If an investigator knows the source is describing a meeting that occurred on Tuesday, phone records may establish who was in the area. Cameras may establish when people arrived. Financial records may establish what happened afterward. Messages may corroborate portions of the account.

The source provides context. The evidence tests the source.

Rogoff then emphasizes patience. “Doing more listening than talking is incredibly important.” He recommends pushing for details. “Continuing to push for details, push for information, push for the things that folks wouldn’t know or wouldn’t be able to describe if they didn’t feel it, see it, touch it, smell it.”

That does not mean every detailed story is truthful. Skilled liars can provide detail. What detail provides is additional material that can be compared against facts.

The larger point is that credibility assessment requires concentration. “You can’t just sit there and sort of nod your head and be thinking of 100 different things while they’re talking to you,” Rogoff said. You have to actually be present. “You got to be in the moment, focused on what they’re saying, focused on how they’re saying it, focused on how it fits into everything else you know.”

That kind of listening is exhausting. “It takes emotional energy to listen carefully and really understand what people are saying.” Rogoff observed that good trial lawyers can finish an important witness interview or a long trial day utterly drained because listening at that level requires sustained concentration.

That resonated with me from the opposite side of the table. Long proffer sessions can feel equally exhausting for the person providing information. You are reconstructing conversations, relationships, transactions and decisions, sometimes stretching back years. The prosecutor and investigators may already know portions of the story. They may deliberately remain silent to see whether your account matches independent evidence. They may ask the same question several different ways.

The source is being evaluated constantly. So is the interviewer. That relationship can determine the quality of what follows.

Rogoff eventually carried these lessons from the prosecutor’s office to the bench. After serving as an Assistant United States Attorney, he became a King County Superior Court judge at the beginning of 2014.

Becoming a judge is a strange professional transition. Attorneys may spend decades watching judges, appearing before judges, criticizing judges privately and thinking about what they themselves would do differently. Then one day someone hands you a robe.

Rogoff acknowledged that there is training. “There is a PowerPoint presentation,” he joked. New judges receive a crash course and learn the procedural fundamentals. “They send you to judge school for a couple weeks to help you figure out the basics, nuts and bolts.”

But no training program can fully explain how it feels to suddenly become the person everyone is watching. “You have no idea how to do it until you start doing it.” Most experienced attorneys arrive with mental models accumulated over years. “You have those judges that you’ve been in front of who you loved, and that’s who you want to be.” Then you begin figuring it out for yourself.

Rogoff remembers his first day as a judge vividly. He entered an elevator at the courthouse and was riding toward his office when the doors opened on the floor housing prosecutors. Several prosecutors were waiting. One was an old friend. The friend looked at Rogoff, smiled and said, “Oh, hello, Your Honor,” while making quotation marks with his fingers.

Rogoff was fortunate to have people like that around him. “I am very fortunate to have friends and people in my orbit and people who I love who would never let the sort of fancy part of being a judge impact who I am and what I think and what’s important.”

That grounding becomes necessary because the social environment surrounding a judge changes dramatically. Everyone stands when you enter. People address you formally. Your words can carry enormous consequences. And, Rogoff discovered, your sense of humor suddenly improves.

“Suddenly everything you say is hilariously funny when you want to be funny,” he said. There is another phenomenon. “Everything you say is really smart, even if it’s not.”

That creates an unusual psychological problem. People calibrate themselves through feedback. We know whether a joke works because people laugh. We know whether an idea sounds absurd because someone challenges us. We know whether we are dominating a conversation because someone interrupts or disengages.

Judges do not receive ordinary feedback.

“It’s really hard to calibrate your behavior and your decision making when you’re not getting feedback from other people all the time,” Rogoff said. He considers that one of the hardest parts of judging.

When I described a judge as the captain of the ship, Rogoff pushed back in a way that completely reframed the role. “You could look at it as you’re the least important person in the room.”

That is an extraordinary thing to hear from someone who spent seven years occupying the most powerful chair in the courtroom.

Rogoff explained why. The judge may actually be the only person who will not be personally affected by the outcome. The defendant may lose freedom. The victim may be living with trauma. Family members may have waited years for resolution. Lawyers carry responsibilities to clients. Witnesses may have reorganized their lives to appear. The judge makes the decision, but the judge goes home afterward.

Rogoff compared the role to a referee. “You’re more of a referee who, if you’re watching, you know, a football game, is the least important participant on the field.”

That does not reduce judicial responsibility. It increases it. The judge has to communicate the decision carefully because everyone else has to live with it. “The key for you is to communicate the decisions you make so everyone understands them and to be really careful and thoughtful.”

Communication from the bench became extremely important to Rogoff because courts regularly make decisions that seem irrational to the people affected by them. A procedural restriction may have constitutional origins. A seemingly inconvenient requirement may protect another litigant’s rights. A judge may be legally prohibited from doing the thing everyone in the room thinks would be most practical.

Rogoff experienced this directly during the COVID era, when courts were trying to determine how centuries old constitutional rules applied to technology that had become necessary almost overnight. His courtroom participated in one of the early Zoom jury selection processes. “We did one of the very first Zoom jury selections in the country when COVID happened in my courtroom.”

What looked superficially like a technological problem was actually a constitutional one. “Trying to go through and figure out whether we were capable or allowed to do that, whether it was fair, whether it was constitutional, was insanely complicated.”

That experience reinforced his belief that judges should explain themselves. “What I think judges, what is really important for judges to do is to be really good at communicating to litigants and communicating to people whose lives are impacted by your decisions and make sure that people really understand what you’re saying and why you’re saying it.”

People may still disagree. They may still be angry. They may still appeal. But understanding why the court acted can preserve something important: legitimacy.

Rogoff’s time in juvenile court gave him another perspective on the relationship between authority and credibility. He encountered young people who had entered the system but had enormous potential. “One of the positives, especially when I worked in juvenile court, was getting to see kids that had been in front of me who were smart and were motivated, just had ended up in the wrong direction for a whole host of reasons.”

Some eventually graduated from high school. Rogoff made them a promise. “If you graduate, I’ll be there.” And when they graduated, he went. “Oh, yeah,” he said when I asked whether he had actually attended the ceremonies.

For a judge, attending a graduation might seem like a modest act. For the young person, it may have meant considerably more. The judge who once represented the authority of the justice system was now sitting in the audience because the person had accomplished something good.

Rogoff understood that judicial boundaries still mattered. “There’s limitations, right?” Judges cannot simply insert themselves into people’s lives. “You can’t get involved in the way that you might want to.” That could be frustrating. “One of the things about a judge, you can’t go out and fix anything and do anything.”

Judges have authority, but it is limited authority. “You have limited decisions you can make, and those decisions are limited by the law and what you’re allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do.”

Juvenile court, particularly within an environment focused on reform, offered some additional flexibility. “It’s a little looser,” he said. “You have a little bit more ability to kind of draw outside the lines.”

Attending a graduation after the court’s involvement ended seemed like an appropriate way to acknowledge a young person’s progress. “It gave the juvenile an opportunity to prove something and to feel good about it and to have somebody who saw the struggle be there for them when it was over.”

My father, who participated in the interview, described it as recognition of redemption. That word fits. Criminal justice systems necessarily focus on past conduct. Redemption focuses on what happens afterward. Rogoff has seen both.

I told him something judges rarely hear directly from defendants: people in holding cells talk about judges constantly. Before going upstairs, defendants exchange information. Who did you get? Is the judge fair? Is the judge harsh? Does the judge listen? Does the judge explain things? Will the judge give someone a chance? It is an informal intelligence network operating beneath the courtroom. A judge’s reputation arrives before the judge does.

Rogoff understood why that matters. A judge does not need defendants to like him. A judge does want defendants to follow the court’s orders and ideally never return.

“What you really want is when they leave the courtroom after you handed down your decision or sentence or whatever you’re doing with them, that they follow through on the things that you want them to so that they don’t end up back there again.”

Then he said something that should probably be printed inside every criminal courthouse. “We don’t want more business, we want less business.” Respect can help. “If they respect you and they believe that you’re being fair, then I think it’s easier to get to that point.”

Fairness does not mean leniency. A judge can impose a significant sentence while remaining respectful. A prosecutor can aggressively prosecute a case while remaining professional. An investigator can confront a witness with contradictory evidence without humiliating that witness. Accountability and dignity are not opposites.

This became especially clear when I described one of the most difficult moments of my own interaction with the justice system. After receiving a lengthy federal prison sentence, I remember being escorted from the courtroom while devastated by what had happened. At nearly the same moment, I heard casual conversation among courtroom professionals about an ordinary family topic. To them, it was probably nothing. To me, it was unforgettable.

Rogoff immediately understood the larger issue. At Washington’s Office of Independent Investigations, he said, they discussed precisely this problem. Investigators working traumatic scenes develop coping mechanisms. Gallows humor exists for a reason. People who regularly encounter death cannot emotionally collapse every time they go to work. But context matters.

Rogoff explained that “what you say and then what you do in the moment” can determine how the public understands an investigation. “When you’re at a scene investigating a homicide, investigating a situation where a police officer killed someone, the media cannot catch you laughing and joking with your colleagues at the scene.”

The investigators may not be talking about the case. They may be trying to manage stress. They may be discussing something completely unrelated. It does not matter. “Nobody can see that in the moment, on camera at a scene, because you just lose trust and you lose credibility.”

That word appeared repeatedly during our discussion.

Credibility.

It is central to human intelligence. It is central to prosecution. It is central to judging. It is central to institutional legitimacy. And it became central to Rogoff’s next major role.

After leaving the bench and spending time in corporate legal work, Rogoff became director of Washington State’s Office of Independent Investigations. What attracted him was precisely that it had not been done before. “The first thing that attracted me to that job was it had never been done before.”

The concept was unusual: create an agency responsible for investigating incidents in which police seriously injured or killed someone without relying on current law enforcement officers to conduct the investigation. “There had never in this country been an agency whose job it was to investigate the behavior of the police when they seriously hurt or killed somebody without any current law enforcement being part of the investigation.”

That structure was intended to address one of the most persistent credibility problems surrounding police use of force investigations. If police investigate police, communities may question the independence of the process before investigators gather the first piece of evidence.

Rogoff saw an opportunity to build something different. He described it as “something that gives the community who are enduring these incidents when they happen some trust and some belief in the credibility of the investigative agency.”

The idea was straightforward. “If you’re investigating the cops, you’re not just another cop investigating other cops.”

Executing that idea was far more complicated. The new agency needed communities to trust it. Law enforcement also needed to believe the investigators understood what they were doing. The investigations had to be independent without becoming reflexively hostile toward police. They had to be technically competent without simply replicating traditional police investigative culture.

Rogoff found that challenge compelling. “The ability to do that in a credible way that made people, including law enforcement, including the community, believe that it was being done right, I just thought a really cool challenge that nobody had ever done.” He described the work as difficult but deeply rewarding. “It was really gratifying. Really hard, but really gratifying.”

His experience there changed the way he thinks about oversight. Oversight sounds uncomplicated in political rhetoric. Create an independent board. Assign an inspector. Appoint another reviewer. Require another report. Rogoff has seen why simply adding oversight does not necessarily produce accountability.

“Oversight can be really feckless and not very helpful when it’s just someone sort of watching what happened.”

The problem is epistemological. To properly evaluate a complicated institution, you need to understand it. But understanding often requires getting close to it. “In order to really know, you’ve got to get really involved.” And that creates the opposite problem. “Once you’re really involved, it’s hard to be unbiased.”

That is one of the most important institutional tensions in oversight. Distance creates independence but can undermine expertise. Proximity creates expertise but can undermine independence. A credible investigative body must somehow maintain both.

Rogoff therefore agrees that oversight matters, but he rejects the assumption that merely creating oversight solves the problem. “Oversight is a good thing, but making it work right is really difficult.”

That same balance appears constantly in human intelligence operations. A handler who is too distant from a source may never develop enough trust to obtain valuable information. A handler who becomes too personally invested may lose objectivity. An investigator who approaches every source as a liar may destroy communication. An investigator who believes everything a source says may destroy the case.

The job requires proximity without capture. Curiosity without gullibility. Empathy without blindness. Trust without abandoning verification.

Rogoff’s philosophy of listening becomes particularly valuable in that environment because he does not equate listening with believing. Listening is how you gather the information. Preparation and corroboration are how you test it.

That distinction also explains his advice to younger prosecutors. Law school teaches argument. Litigation rewards argument. Attorneys are trained to choose positions and defend them. That training becomes dangerous when every conversation turns into advocacy.

“As a lawyer, your job is to argue, right?” Rogoff said. “Your job is to persuade a judge or opposing counsel that the position you’ve taken is the right one.”

Young prosecutors can sometimes internalize that role too deeply. “They get into this mode of my case must be right, my argument must be right, because I’m the prosecutor.”

The prosecutor begins listening to defense counsel in order to rebut. Listening to witnesses in order to confirm. Listening to defendants in order to expose contradictions. Everyone becomes an opponent.

Rogoff believes that is a mistake. “They’re constantly listening to opposing counsel, listening to witnesses, listening to defendants in order to respond and in order to prove that they are indeed right.”

The better approach is to listen for understanding.

“If you’re right, that never will go away.”

A strong case does not become weak simply because a prosecutor understands the defense. “You will always have the opportunity to get in the courtroom and prove that you were right.”

Therefore, Rogoff sees remarkably little downside to genuine listening. “There is just no downside to just shutting up and listening when you’re not in the courtroom and understanding what people are telling you.”

That may be one of the hardest lessons for accomplished professionals to learn. Silence can feel passive. It is not. In an interview, silence can be analytical. In negotiation, silence can be strategic. In intelligence collection, silence can create space for information that would never emerge if the interviewer filled every pause.

Rogoff tells lawyers to ask good questions and then allow the answers to exist. “There’s just no downside to just being quiet, asking good questions and listening in order to understand what that person is saying.”

He also argues that understanding the opposing position actually strengthens advocacy. “I used to always tell lawyers, if you can make the other side’s argument more effectively than they can, then you’re probably in the position to win the case.”

That is an exceptionally useful concept outside of litigation. An investigator who can articulate the strongest innocent explanation for suspicious evidence has probably examined the evidence carefully. An intelligence analyst who can articulate the strongest competing hypothesis has probably tested the assessment. A prosecutor who understands precisely why the defense theory might persuade a jury is better prepared to address it.

Understanding an argument does not require agreeing with it. It requires intellectual discipline.

Rogoff’s career also demonstrates another form of discipline: treating cases according to their importance to the people involved rather than their importance to the press.

I asked him to identify a prosecution he was especially proud of. He could have named a large federal investigation. He could have identified something involving terrorism, gangs or organized crime. Instead, he talked about cases most people never heard about.

“I’ve done a lot of cases as a judge that got a lot of media attention and were really complex that I am proud of,” Rogoff said. But that was not where he wanted to focus. “I think it’s the cases that nobody cares about and nobody hears about that I’m most proud of doing well.”

He remembered sexual assault prosecutions that were extraordinarily consequential to the victims but received little public attention. “I had sexual assault cases that were unbelievably consequential to the people who were involved.”

Some involved people from communities that received very little media attention. “Because they involved underserved communities or kids of color or kids who sort of, in the media’s world, didn’t matter, nobody cared.”

No reporters came. “Nobody showed up.” Nobody wanted an interview. “Nobody from the media wanted to be a part of it.”

But the consequences were enormous to the people living through those cases. “It is the work I did on those cases, the hard work I did on those cases, and the care I put into them that I’m most proud of.”

That answer says something important about professional maturity. Public institutions are vulnerable to headline gravity. The largest investigation receives attention. The most famous defendant receives resources. The sensational prosecution becomes part of someone’s biography.

But justice is experienced individually.

For the victim in a case nobody covers, that case is still everything.

Rogoff has watched enough of the system to recognize that distinction. “Time and experience for a lot of people who are in this system sort of teach you, if you’re listening, if you’re paying attention, it teaches you what’s important.”

Again, that qualifier appears.

If you’re listening.

Experience by itself does not guarantee wisdom. Experience can just as easily produce cynicism. A prosecutor can become hardened. A judge can become dismissive. An investigator can begin believing every person is lying. A defense attorney can assume every government action is malicious.

Experience becomes valuable only when someone allows it to alter his understanding.

Rogoff’s time as a judge appears to have done precisely that. He had spent years advocating. Then he had to sit between advocates. He had spent years asking judges to rule. Then he became responsible for explaining why a ruling was right. He had spent years thinking about cases from the prosecution’s perspective. Then he had to evaluate the entire case without belonging to either side.

One of the most difficult aspects was recognizing how much authority can distort ordinary human interaction. The courtroom is not a normal social environment. People do not speak to judges the way they speak to everyone else. Few people tell the judge that a joke was bad. Few tell the judge that an explanation was confusing. Few tell the judge that he is talking too much.

Friends outside the courthouse therefore became valuable precisely because they were unwilling to participate in the mythology of the robe.

That humility influences Rogoff’s view of institutional power more generally. Rules matter. Roles matter. Boundaries matter.

That theme also surfaced when our conversation briefly turned toward disputes over the structure of federal prosecutorial authority. Rogoff framed his concern around process. “We all have roles in the criminal justice system.” Those roles are not arbitrary. “Those roles ultimately are created by the Constitution and the law.”

Rogoff’s concern is what happens when officials stop respecting them. “If you are in the criminal justice system or the justice system generally, and you aren’t abiding by your role, then the system starts to break down.”

That is why process matters even when the desired outcome seems obvious. “It’s incredibly important to me that we follow the law and we do what we’re supposed to do.”

The rule cannot simply be that everyone obeys the process when the process produces the result they want. That concept connects directly to Rogoff’s earlier warning about prosecutors and judges coloring outside the lines. Institutions are strongest when powerful people voluntarily remain within the limits of their authority. The limits matter most when ignoring them would be convenient.

Today, after moving through all of those positions, Rogoff has returned to trial practice. He is working with a Seattle law firm where he had previously practiced before returning to public service.

“The folks I was working for right before I got appointed has been lovely to me and, of course, welcomed me back,” he said.

The work allows him to continue helping people through difficult circumstances. “I continue to help people. That’s what I’m doing with them.”

His practice includes medical malpractice, civil rights and other litigation. “It’s an important practice and we help people who have been hurt or been injured and we help people who aren’t being treated right and trying to make sure that they do get treated right and get the help that they need.”

Rogoff is not simply advising from a distance. “I’m working cases.” That has been meaningful after years of managing institutions and occupying roles where the responsibilities were much broader.

“For the first time in a long time I just get to focus on, you know, my cases, my clients, my things and get to work toward a trial.”

He hopes to return fully to what originally attracted him to law. “Hopefully get to start trying cases again, which would be amazing.”

There is an elegant circularity to that. The young lawyer who entered prosecution because he wanted to stand in court eventually spent decades moving through nearly every major role surrounding the courtroom. Now he is back preparing cases for trial.

But he returns with a perspective he could not possibly have possessed at the beginning. He knows what prosecutors see. He knows what defense lawyers see. He knows what judges see. He knows what investigators see. He knows what institutional leaders worry about. He knows what oversight can accomplish and where it can fail. He knows how much authority can distort feedback. He knows how much credibility matters.

And above everything else, he knows how much information can disappear when professionals stop listening.

That is why Roger Rogoff’s career belongs within a publication devoted to human intelligence. HUMINT is sometimes discussed in technical vocabulary: recruitment, placement, access, validation, motivation, handling, reporting and corroboration. Those concepts matter tremendously. But there is a simpler reality beneath all of them.

There is a human being sitting across the table.

That person has a story. That person has motives. That person has fears. That person has loyalties. That person may be telling the truth. That person may be lying. Usually the person is doing something more complicated than either.

The professional sitting across from that person has all of those characteristics too.

That is why communication cannot be separated from intelligence. The relationship affects what gets said. What gets said affects what gets investigated. What gets investigated affects what gets corroborated. What gets corroborated may eventually become evidence. Evidence becomes decisions. Decisions alter lives.

Rogoff has witnessed that chain from almost every possible position. His advice is not glamorous. Know the case before interviewing the witness. Ask questions because you actually want answers. Talk to people instead of talking at them. Do not confuse incentives with credibility. Do not confuse credibility with truth. Push for details. Corroborate what can be corroborated. Recognize your own role. Do not allow authority to convince you that you are automatically correct.

And listen.

Really listen.

The phrase Rogoff used earlier deserves repeating because it may encapsulate the entire discussion: “Listening is just the opposite end of talking and frankly, the more important end.”

That lesson applies far beyond courtrooms. Modern investigations increasingly rely on extraordinary technical capabilities. Phones can expose networks. Cameras can reconstruct movement. Financial systems can identify patterns. Digital forensics can recover conversations people thought had disappeared. Artificial intelligence can process information at a scale that would once have required teams of analysts.

But technology does not automatically explain human behavior.

A machine can tell an investigator that two people communicated. It may not explain why. A surveillance camera can show someone entering a building. It may not explain what happened inside. A bank record can show money moving. It may not explain what the payment meant. A wiretap can capture a phrase. It may not explain the coded significance understood by the people speaking.

Eventually someone has to interpret.

Often that person is a human source.

And eventually someone has to decide whether that source is credible.

That person is also human.

This is why technical sophistication cannot replace interpersonal competence. The investigator who cannot listen may fail despite possessing excellent technology. The prosecutor who cannot understand the defendant’s explanation may misunderstand the case. The judge who cannot explain a decision may issue a legally correct ruling that nevertheless damages confidence in the institution. The oversight agency that cannot establish credibility may produce an accurate investigation nobody trusts. The leader who does not understand how behavior appears to the public may lose legitimacy in seconds.

Rogoff has lived through versions of all of those problems.

His conclusion is not that communication solves everything. It does not. People will still lie. Investigations will still fail. Judges will still make mistakes. Prosecutors will still disagree with defense attorneys. Communities will still distrust institutions.

But communication determines whether those institutions have any chance of understanding the people they serve.

“People are just people,” Rogoff said.

That may sound obvious. It is surprisingly easy to forget.

The defendant becomes a case number. The witness becomes a statement. The informant becomes a source identifier. The victim becomes a file. The police officer becomes a subject. The judge becomes an institution. The prosecutor becomes the government.

The human being disappears behind the role.

Rogoff’s career suggests that the best professionals resist that transformation. They remember that there is still a person there. That recognition does not make justice weaker. It makes judgment better.

You can hold someone accountable while listening to them. You can distrust a source while treating the source with dignity. You can challenge a witness while remaining curious about the answer. You can impose a sentence while explaining why. You can investigate police officers while respecting the difficulty of police work. You can represent someone injured by an institution without assuming everyone inside the institution acted maliciously. You can advocate fiercely while still understanding the strongest argument against you.

None of those positions require surrender.

They require discipline.

Rogoff has spent decades developing that discipline. The young prosecutor who once wanted to stand up to bullies eventually learned that the human beings arriving in criminal court could not always be divided neatly into good people and bad people. The federal prosecutor learned that cooperating witnesses and human sources could provide the context that transformed evidence into understanding. The judge learned that being the most powerful person in the courtroom did not necessarily make him the most important. The juvenile court judge learned that sometimes showing up at a graduation could matter just as much as something said from the bench. The investigative director learned that independence without credibility is insufficient and that credibility can disappear through something as ordinary as the appearance of laughter at the wrong moment. The trial lawyer learned that the strongest advocate is often the person capable of understanding the opposing argument better than the opposition itself.

And throughout all of those transitions, the same skill kept appearing.

Listening.

Not the performative listening used while constructing the next rebuttal. Not waiting for someone to stop speaking. Not searching selectively for confirmation.

Listening to understand.

For anyone working in intelligence, investigations, prosecution, law enforcement or leadership, that distinction is consequential because the quality of the information you receive is often connected to the quality of the relationship you establish with the person providing it. The quality of your judgment is often connected to how seriously you considered the information contradicting what you already believed. Authority may compel someone to sit across from you, but authority cannot compel honesty.

Credibility helps. Preparation helps. Curiosity helps. Respect helps.

And listening may matter most of all.

Roger Rogoff has spent more than three decades learning that lesson from nearly every side of the American justice system. His career includes titles that can easily fill a biography, but the most useful thing he offered during our conversation was not a title, a verdict or a famous case. It was a way of approaching another human being.

Know what you can before you walk into the room. Ask the question. Pay attention to the answer. Allow yourself to understand what the other person is actually saying before deciding how you are going to respond.

And remember that sometimes the most important intelligence in the room begins to emerge only after the person with the most authority stops talking.