President phone call I mean a nine fifteen pm East some of the time in the US and the nineteenth of February twenty fourteen, be as kind to and the Georgescos.
This is one the Colombian phone call.
To Flavio on the fourteenth day of My two thousand and fourteen at eight am immediately.
For two years now, Wan's been recording his phone calls with the two unrelated George Escus, Flavio and Flavio's friend in Los Angeles, Andy.
He leaves me the name, a phone number, and a great message.
He even records the voicemails. He leads for them.
Thank you, so call me back. Lizen doesn't man all the time. Just call me back. It's one thank you, I will plays A call to Flavio is twelve forty eight a m. Eastern time on the nice of July two thousand fourteen.
Want's also been keeping a secret. He is Colombian, that part's true, but he isn't working for the farc rebel group. He's working for the FEDS, and he's trying to build a so called narco terrorism case for the Drug Enforcement Administration the DEA.
The local time in eight thirty five pm. Go, I about to go to the cafeteria at the Mario Hotel to me where the flood and a compani your hairs with him. We are right now in for the inn book.
In some of wants undercover recordings, you can hear his Dea colleagues. They're helping Wan create some elaborate theater arms, trafficking theater, all designed to ensnare Flavio Georgescu. I'm Trevorarensen from Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. This is Alphabet Boys, episode six. The ramp rat Wan sting operation targeting Flavio is complex, but this thing isn't unique. It's not some sort of one off. It's part of a much larger Dea tactic that drug agents adopted during America's post nine
eleven era. To explain, I need to go on a short tangent and tell you about another similar sting.
Yeah everything, Yeah, sorry.
Time, no no problem.
How I'm sitting in a conference room in Lower Manhattan. I'm here to interview Joshua dre Tell, a criminal defense lawyer specializing in terrorism cases. So so topically, I want to talk to you about the kind of narco terrorism things in general, and also this idea of the Southern District being kind of the world Police. And then and then also about the Jamal Yusuf case. Sure in particular, one of Joshua's clients was a man named Jamal Yusuf, and.
Jamal Yusseff was a hustler, a successful hustler. The parlayed knowledge of certain geographical regions such as the Middle East and Latin America into being an effective broker for many deals that were mostly hustles.
Jamal, like Flavio, was targeted in a so called narco terrorism sting operation. Neither Flavio nor Jamal had anything to do with drugs or really narco terrorism. Now, the DEA is meant to be investigating cases involving drugs, that's obvious, But the DEA built cases around both Jamal and Flavio that centered on the idea that they were supporting terrorism by attempting to sell weapons to people who earned money
running drugs. In this episode, I'm going to explain how people like Jamal and Flavio, no real connections to terrorists, no real connections to drugs, could become in the DEA's eyes narco terrorists with the help of course of informants like jan Jamal Yusuf was born and raised in Lebanon, but he was a Syrian citizen. His background is shadowy
and suggest possible connections to Syrian intelligence. As a young man, Jamal lived and worked in several countries, including Greece, Nigeria, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates.
You could trace his evolution through the geographical areas that he basically burned bridges and could go back to.
At some point, Jamal moved to Norway, where he ran several small businesses, including a restaurant, a store selling baby clothes and cosmetics, and a kiosk offering cigarettes and candy.
And he had a good history of disappearing himself and then appearing somewhere else in a different identity or in a different context. That's how he got out of the Middle East in the first place.
Eventually, by two thousand and six, Jamal makes it to Latin America, where he starts a new hustle. He negotiates a deal to borrow two hundred thousand dollars from a group of Mexican men connected to organized crime. Jamal said he could repay the loan with weapons secretly shipped from Lebanon. Jamal has this picture of himself in front of a room full of military grade weapons. He shows the photo to the Mexicans as proof of the weapons that he
can deliver. But what the Mexicans don't know is Jamal is talking to someone else, the FBI agent stationed at the US embassy in Mexico City. It's a complicated web of people around the world. To sound familiar, but there's more. Jamal claims to the FBI agent that the weapons in the photo belonged to the US military and that they were stolen by American soldiers in Iraq. He says those soldiers then sold the weapons to the Hesbala terrorist group in Lebanon.
As any sophisticated hustler would do. Jamal's trying to play both sides.
Jamal also tells the FBI agent that he has a deal to sell those weapons to some Mexican guys, and he's willing to cooperate with the US government.
He's trying to ingratiate himself to the government so he has protection, which is why he operated overseas all the time, you know, in his original environment, and when that played out, you know, to the point where he couldn't do it anymore. He wound up in Latin America, so he's just doing the same thing.
But the deal with the Mexicans falls through. They don't provide any money and no weapons are shipped. In two thousand and six, Jamal is arrested in Honduras on charges of using a fake passport and possessing a handgun, and by two thousand and eight, two years into his prison sentence, Jamal is desperate, so he comes up with a new hustle. Jamal meets a Colombian who claims to represent get this, the FARK rebel group. He shows the guy another photo of a room full of guns, and Jamal tells the
Colombian that he can deliver these weapons. But this photo it's not real, at least not real to Jamal. It's an image that he found online.
Yeah, it was just a photo of a room full of like RPGs and stuff in boxes, you know, crates, like typical kind of armament crates, and had a couple of stray aks and things like that lying around. It was on the internet.
Jamal arranges to sell these weapons to the FARC, but the Colombians don't know that Jamal's trying to run a scam. Once he gets the advanced payment, he plans to bounce with no weapons delivered.
Unfortunately, he was being hustled at the same time.
This might not be surprising now, but the Colombians, like Flavio's friend Juan, aren't really with the FARC. They're with the DEA. And once the DEA has built its case against Jamal, armed agents grab him off the street and hounder us throw them into an suv and speed toward the airport.
He thinks he's being killed, you know, guys with automatic weapons hooded in the back of a suv hurtling down the highway and openly gets to the airport and he gets thrown on a plane to the US.
That's how it's started.
Even though we have an extradition treaty with the hunters, this is how it's stuck.
Jamal's taken to Manhattan, where federal prosecutors charge him with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Jamal's charge was supporting FARC, even though in his case, FARC wasn't really FARK. They're the DEA, and he's brought to New York to face those charges even though the alleged crime didn't happen in New York or even in the United States. Under federal conspiracy law, a defendant doesn't need to help an actual terrorist, he just needs to think he's helping a terrorist.
Jamal's scam attempt caught him in what's known as a narco terrorism sting. These things occur exclusively outside the United States, using paid informants employed by the DEA, and then the person caught is sent to Manhattan to be prosecuted, even though there is no connection at all between the crime
and New York City. The Southern District of New York in Manhattan, the most influential and powerful US Attorney's office in the nation, has turned narco terrorism stings into its own little cottage industry.
They're imagined an event and ambitious in that way. And I don't mean that in a bad way.
I mean that in a way of like.
We're going to do these things, and we're going to cultivate a group of FBI and DA people who will master this and bring all the cases to us, will own the informants, Our network will be hours.
Joshua, the defense lawyer, says that narco terrorism stings aren't really about stopping narco terrorism. They're about numbers, arrests, prosecutions, convictions, which to federal law enforcement agents mean paychecks and promotions.
They cultivated the informants and they cultivated the people overseas as a reliable actor in the process.
You're not wasting your time.
You are going to get convictions, you're going to get paid, and you're going to have work next time.
Jamal Yusuf pleaded guilty in his case and served ten years in prison. His ultimate crime making the mistake of trying to scam a much more powerful scammer, the US government. So what does this have to do with Flavio? A lot, actually, and I'll get to that, But first I need to tell you about the guy who was Flavio in his crosshairs, the guy running the governments Wan, the wide bellied, brash Columbia. That's after the break. One is a Dea informant, but
one isn't his real name. That's Alex Diaz. The current whereabouts of Wan or Alex are difficult to pin down. He's lived at various times in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Kansas, and Colorado. The most recently available public records suggest that one lives at least part of the time in a condo in Centennial, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. I'm in a large middle class complex of three story buildings, each with wood paneledy accents on the outside. Wan's condo, or
what I think is Wan's condo, is here seven. His unit is on the third floor of the building. The doormat reads welcome to the shit Show, which seems fitting for Wan. No one's answering, so I leave a note, tucking it slightly under the welcome to the shit Show Matt. In the note, I write that I'm searching for Wan or Alex ds and then I want to discuss his work for the DEA. Jan has never contacted me, which honestly isn't surprising. Federal drug agents pay him lots of
money not to talk to journalists like me. Want's a seasoned hand for the DEA. His specialty narco terrorism cases. Narco terrorism. It sounds scary, right. Take two of the world's most villainous evildoers, drug runners or narcos and terrorists, and well combine them you get narco terrorists. They must be the world's super villains, right, or maybe and hear me out, maybe they don't exist, not really, maybe they're
just inventions. To understand how American law enforcement might have conjured up so called narco terrorists, you really have to go back to the so called war on drugs.
America's public enemy Number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all out offensive.
In nineteen seventy one, well in the middle of a fight for his political life, President Richard Nixon formally announced the War on Drugs. In hindsight, now a half century later, the rhetoric was clearly the product of a moral panic, but it was being pushed by America's highest elected officials.
Drugs are menacing our society.
They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions.
They're killing our children.
In nineteen eighty six, as part of the Just Say No campaign, President Ronald Reagan boasted in a televised address from the Oval Office that thirty seven federal agencies were engaged in the War on drugs and that funding for drug related federal law enforcement had tripled. The drug war was a feeding frenzy, an alphabet soup of dozens of federal agencies all seeking a spot at the time table, and the FBI, at the time, not tasked with investigating
drug crimes, was left out. The Bureau saw all that government money flowing to much smaller agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration the DEA, and so around the time that Reagan gave this national address, the FBI muscled in on the drug war, successfully lobbying Congress to give the Bureau concurrent jurisdiction with the DEA over drug crimes. Undercover stings, in which federal agents pretended to be drug buyers or drug sellers, became one of the FBI's primary tools, racking
up arrests, prosecutions, and convictions. There were so many cases and so many prosecutions that the war on drugs became self fueling. The moral panic meant more law enforcement funding. More law enforcement funding meant more undercover stings and more arrests. More stings and more arrests meant more hysteria. A cycle.
This This is crack cocaine.
In nineteen eighty nine, President George H. W. Bush gave a national address from the Oval Office in which he held up a bag containing crack cocaine.
Seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House.
America's panic about drugs at the time made President Bush's claim seem believable. A drug dealer was selling crackouts at the White House, but it was all nothing more than drug theater. The Washington Post later reported that DEA agents had to manipulate a drug dealer to come to a park near the White House. A decade later, America was on to a new war.
We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You're looking at the World Trade Center. We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
We don't know anything.
The War on Terror, billions and billions of dollars poured out, and among the biggest beneficiaries was the FBI, which overnight transformed into an agency whose number one priority is counter terrorism. The administration of President George W. Bush then launched something of a pr campaign to combine the old war his dad fought with the new war he was fighting. Combining the War on drugs with the War on Terror.
I helped murder families in Colombia.
It was just innocent fun.
I helped kidnap people's dads.
Hey, some harmless fun.
I help kids learn how to kill.
This was a public service announcement that ran during the two thousand and two Super Bowl, just a few months after nine to eleven.
I was just having some fun, you know.
I helped kill policemen.
I was just having fun.
I helped the bomber get a fake passport.
All the kids do it.
I helped kill a judge.
I helped blow a building.
My life, my body. The ad ends with large white letters on a black screen. Drug money supports terror, it reads. The intended message was clear, if you use drugs, dear Americans, you support those evil terrorists with the war on terror. Suddenly, the DEA found itself in the same position the FBI was in in the nineteen eighties, shut out of the biggest funding game in town. Here's Joshua dre Tell again, the lawyer specializing in terrorism cases.
They were losing their budgetary control, they were losing their career advancement through these kinds of investigations, and they were also losing their status essentially within the law enforcement and criminal justice community.
So the DEA took a lesson from the FBI and petitioned Congress to give the agency a peace of the War on terror.
So what better way to sort of reaffirm their importance by saying, Oh, this is narco terrorism problem that's out there.
The DEA was then given jurisdiction over narco terrorism, a mandate to travel the world and investigate how drug smuggling operations were secretly funding terrorist networks and terrorist attacks. The gambit worked, the money came flowing into the DEA. In two thousand and six, Congress allocated two hundred and eighty seven million dollars in the DEA budget for international enforcement. A decade later, that number had ballooned to four hundred
and sixty seven million dollars. Suddenly, the DEA has nearly half a billion dollars every year to search the world for narco terrorists, a lot of money to hire informants. And among those enlisted to help the DEA in this global search is one liason.
I want you have this thing. I know you don't want to talk to no one, and I agree, but I just wanted to go business people that I have a man this time that can make it happen.
Wan wasn't always a DEA informant, but he's been one for a very long time. Want's a former drug runner who spent decades working for the DEA, and he's earned millions of dollars in the process. And here's what I can say as fact about Wan or Alex ds. He's an only child from Colombia.
My mother hardly helped me. My mother is Moke locust Stride. However, lockus strike many and many of you.
He was born in nineteen fifty, making him about sixty four years old. When communicating with Flavio, anytime someone brings up one's age, he's quick with a joke.
O you, I'll tell you too.
One came to the United States from Colombia at age seventeen and has strong ties there.
Am miss Is. It's a good count, very big counter. It's big.
As a young man, Juan began working for American Airlines sky Chef, you know, the guys responsible for loading food and drinks on the planes. Jan eventually took a position with sky Chef in Miami. Miami International is a key hub for American airlines and a US gateway to Latin America. Miami at the time was basking in the afterglow of Miami Vice. The city had a reputation for drugs, fast cars, skimpy bikinis, and free flowing money.
That dude you showed up with tonight works undercover for the DEEA pal.
His name Scott Wheeler. And as for Leon, he's on the payroll of a Columbian. I've been too stiff. As if you were a character straight out of Miami Vice. Juan had a sideline gig at Miami International Airport. He used his position with American Airlines to smuggle a daggering amount of drugs into the United States three thousand kilos
of marijuana and four thousand kilos of cocaine. But federal drug agents figured out what Wan was up to, and he was arrested and hit with federal criminal charges and a ten year prison sentence for drug smuggling. So Wan cut a deal with the DEA. He agreed to work with drug agents as an informant in exchange for knocking down his decade long prison sentence to just three years.
Around the time that Jan was released from prison, federal agents in Miami had been noticing that baggage handlers at the airport, so called ramp rats were driving around in fancy cars and living large, which was odd for guys
earning about ten dollars an hour. Of course, the DEA had a pretty good idea of how these low paid workers might afford such a lifestyle, so federal agents launched two undercover investigations at Miami intern National Airport called Operation sky Chef and Operation ramp Rap, resulting in scores of arrest of airport workers who were helping to smuggle in cocaine, heroin, and other drugs. The Miami Herald in nineteen ninety nine published a front page story about the DEA investigations at
the airport. The newspaper described the DEA's lead informant as quote a fat man with an annoying habit of spitting an agent's faces as he talked. One is, in fact, Shorten Stocky, a fat man and spitting an agent's faces as he talked. Well, I mean, just listen to one.
Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen. If you cannot do it, then let's forget about this. And and you're killing I don't care about you. I don't care only about my business. If you're gonna work with me with it to be serious about working.
You can almost feel this hitting you in these recordings. Wan's been at this informant game for nearly thirty years, and he's been rewarded handsomely. In addition to getting to skip those last seven years of his prison sentence back in the nineties, Wan has earned nearly five million dollars working for the DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies.
If you go to Rome, I have a list of hotels that I've built, like American hotels.
Want's traveled the world with undercover work, funding a lifestyle filled with nice hotels.
You'll find was built as an American hotel because they are the biggest rooms, all.
That exclusive restaurants.
I want the ottobush and women, Oh, beautiful, women, beautiful. I'm friendly, friendly, It's good, It's good.
Wan's been delivering federal cases for decades. Experienced operator and his current target, Flavio George Escom that's after the break One makes big money as a DEA informant in part because he's the ideal frontman for a narco terrorism sting, the perfect guy to play the part of a fark agent. He's Colombian.
Maybe when you saw me, you know it was because I'm the only Latin people Columbia.
He's a native Spanish speaker, have a part head on, and he has plenty of firsthand experience with cocaine.
You have to like cocaine leaves fresh to keep your your blood pressure right.
But neither of the de nor the Justice Department maintains a publicly accessible list of so called narco terrorism stings. So we scoured federal court records and press releases to create one of the DEA's narco terrorism cases. Half involved in foremants like Juan pretending to be from the FARC. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia or FARC FAARC for the acronym in Spanish, is a gorilla group that has been in conflict with Columbia central government since nineteen sixty four.
Most of farc' supporters are in rural areas, which the Colombian government has historically neglected. As a result of the FARC's presence in remote areas where coca plants are cultivated and cocaine processed, the group's funding has come in part from the drug trade, and if you're a federal drug agent with funding to travel the world trying to prove that drugs fund terrorism. Then well, FARC is perfect for you. So I think when you talk about FARC, you really.
Kind of have this almost perfect organization from the government's purposes, sort of out of central casting.
This is what Dsie, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied narco terrorism stings.
It's a kind of an association that people will make in their minds almost automatically, And of course it leaves out the Colombian government's role in the war on drugs, which has not been to say it in exceedingly simple terms, it hasn't been a clean one. So the FARC is a useful dupe in this whole exercise. Not to say its hands are clean either, but certainly it's kind of almost like heaven sent for the government as a kind of a prosecutorial foil.
In twenty eleven, one gets a big lead to offer the dea. I'd a Romanian guy living in Los Angeles, Andy Georgescu. Juan met Andy through another confidential informant. But I've never been able to figure out those details. What I know is that Wan tells the Dea that this Andy guy is involved in smuggling and money laundering. Wan suggests to the agents that he spent some time getting to know Andy to see where things might lead, and of course doing that means money for Wan and so
testing Andy. Wan says he wants to buy weapons for the FARC. Andy suggests his friend Flavio Georgescu, a guy over in Europe who can make things happen. Based on that and not much more, Wan starts targeting Flavio and at the same time Flavio, if you're inclined to believe his story, thinks he's collecting information for the CIA, so he works to put together the weapons deal.
For one, you're saying that you have the person. Now, what's with you that he could take care of at least.
I hear it right, Yeah, he is the person who is not the reason.
Maybe it's not reforcement. Uh huh, Okay, well I call them people. I call them people in Colombia, the fire people. Okay, and tell me that I want to look and see if I can program perhaps meeting with you.
Flavio tells one that if he wants to move forward, he has to come to Romania. But one having been stood up once already in Rome, and now tired of Flavio's constantly changing plans, says he doesn't want to go to Romania. In this call, Flavio is sitting in his car in Bucharest. Also in the car is a man Flavio has lined up to help negotiate the arms deal.
It is either you mide me in Rome or no. If not, I appreciate you very much, he all due respect. You do your business because you don't have time for me, because that means you never will get it done right. Then I'm going If you come to Rome, you mean me, I'll go with you to Romania. That's the deal. I can'not go to Romania every time you change me, or to Parish, or to Italy or to the other guy who you put me in Liverpool. Because everybody has a plan. I have a plan and the one who show up
and I want to show it up. I just need you to come, and once you come, I know you there. I mean you face to face, we like each other, you like while talking, and then we go to wherever we need to go. That's all.
That just there might have been hard to hear, but it's another person, a guy who says, I don't think so that's the guy Flavio has recruited to help him complete the arms deal. He's willing to meet with one, but only in Romania.
My friend, he said, it is not interesting when I talk with them, you find a solution.
What can I do? Okay, tell your friend that, uh, you know, it wasn't even kind off to get on the phone. I'll tell me that. That right, but no problem you you know, Kim talk with Shila, talk with him well, I mean, well what I want to talk to him about. He doesn't understand what I've been here.
Because if you if you, if you come, if you come to Romania, I have the meeting granted one hundred percent and talk with the real people. If I come to I don't know if I can come or not. But if I come, I come like a luster. I don't know nothing about this business.
You know.
It's like you said, this is a business for me to know. This is a help for me. I want to help you out. I don't need any business. I don't need any money. I don't need nothing. Believe me, an your kids.
Flavio is telling one that he doesn't want any money that he's putting one in touch with people in order to help him, which, to Flavio's credit, does seem consistent with his claims of believing that he's working for the CIA. In Flavio's mind, accepting any money as part of the deal would compromise him. So he's making it clear to one that he's not doing this for money. He doesn't want one's money.
Well me to men too. But I can't listen, I can't look. I cannot come to Romania until I meet you in Rome. I go from Rome to Romania. If I meet you in Rome, he doesn't have to come. I don't need to talk. I don't need to talk to him, or we don't need to do business. That's not because you don't need my business. That's it. In all due respect to you, you a glem.
He cannot come, What can I do?
I understand that, then then I'm not coming. That's I cannot go because I cannot take a change every day from you trying to help me, okay, which is a business, and you're gonna get help of yourself, okay. So I can't know you go to Romania thinking that I want to miss someone that said brother don't worry about it. Don't worry you change your mind, let me know you do. I want to be in Rome. Okay. Hello.
The call gets disconnected and at this point the arms deal appears to be dead. It's all a hot mess, but one he does change his mind. He's trying to build a case for the DEA after all, and he spent months grooming Flavio as a target. He's not ready to give up just yet, so he travels to Europe again and one finally comes face to face with his target.
Here I am in your town, and here I am to to doc. Okay do you I'm the Mariota Hotel.
M h okay?
Uh? True?
One.
That's in the next episode. This is up in arms, season two of Alphabet Boys. Alphabet Boys is a production of Western Sound and iHeart Podcasts. The show is reported, written and hosted by me, Trevor Aronson. For more information about the series or to drop us a tip, head to our website Alphabet Boys dot x y Z. You can contact me on Twitter or Instagram at Trevor Aronson.
The show's instagram is Alphabet Boys dot pod. If you're enjoying Alphabet Boys, tell your friends about the show, personal recommendations are the best recommendations and want to see an illegal arms deal from the inside. At Alphabet Boys dot x y Z you'll find undercover recordings and documents related to Flavio's case. Finally, you can help us ride the algorithms by leaving a rating or review on your favorite podcast app that helps other people find us and thanks for listening.