Episode 2: What Will the Neighbors Think?

using a new name, Ed Thomas. He grew a fu mancher mustache, wrote to Harley Davidson, and started hanging out in roadside honky talks all the while gathering intel war ahead sources up in northern Michigan bikers, and they would talk about the bikers would get their supply of weed when these big shipments would come in, you know, which is fifty thousand pounds, one hundred thousand pounds or whatever

would come into the Detroit warehouse. Ned kept hearing chatter there's this huge deal out there and involved shrimp boats and barges and airplanes, and so I told my bosses about it, you know, and they kind of said, yeah, you know, right, Tim, is what he's smoking. Ned heard that this pot might be headed to a storage facility somewhere in Detroit, the El Dorado of stash houses over at the FBI. Ned's bosses had their doubts, but Ned stayed on the trail vintel, hanging out with his informants.

Whenever I walked into a house or one of their houses or hotel or where they were, I always headed in my head, Okay, what if this happens? What if this happened? And I would go through a checklist of what I would do. You know, I had a gun, obviously, and here I was looking half the time. I turned around, and those guys had guns and they're not supposed to. Ned's main informant was still Toby Anderson, the violent, erratic

biker slash country western singer. Toby was a hand garnade with a pin onw He just just a matter of time till he's self destructed or just died in a hail of bullets or something. You just you just couldn't control him. He's just crazy. He was difficult to manage, yes, but he was also giving that just enough, you know, crumbs. He connect him with other bikers. He'd helped him set up drug busts enough so that Ned could tell his bosses, look,

I'm making progress. Like At one point, Toby introduces him to another criminal, and together the three of them set up a sting out in California. Their plan was to get meth from some dealers way out in the sticks. There's a big field and there's mountains up each side, and there's some hail billy there at the gate. And he meets us and gets us through this gate and it's you know, it's just a two track sage brush

cactus and just high mountain desert. And we get near the barn and outcomes this freaking five hundred pound pig, I mean a big pig. And I said, what the fuck is it you? Oh, that's the guard hog's woman. He said, well, he smells people if they're you know, and the mountains are trying to survey us or whatever hills. And that's true. A pig. He has one of the best noses in the world. What really surprised NED is

what these hillbuildings are feeding their prized guard pig. They'd soak a bug onion sweet onion in math and throw it to the pig. The pig loved it. I mean, he's like, you know, he wanted he wanted a fucking onion. And you know, I didn't really trust him because he's really fucking big, and he's got tossling shit and this was Ned's life now and passed a drugged up pig.

Slide open the burned door and it's all Hey, pull out a bail in the middle, and you can crawl through the You crawl through the tunnel, through the hay bales, and you come into a big room. There's thirty stations set up for when Nick cook, Ned said it was the biggest meth lab he'd ever seen. He handed off the intel and a few weeks later the authorities busted

the place, and it also clarified something for Ned. Yeah, he was a full time undercover FBI agent trying to figure out if the rumors he'd been hearing were true. But he also had another, maybe equally important job title now babysitter. We're driving someplace and all of a sudden, Toby's in the back seat and pulls out a gun. Well, he could have just easily popped one in the back of my head, but I was so pissed at him the way you pulled over, took the gun away from

and threw it off the cliff. I mean, he knew he had he had his between his legs. You know he knew he got spanked. I'm Jake Halbern and this is deep Cover Episode two. What will the neighbors think? Ned kept pushing Toby for intel, and sometimes, apparently Toby would just lose it on Ned, saying that he was scared their cover would be blown, that word might get out among Detroit's biker gangs that Toby was an informant and that they were working together. In ned noir novel,

he depicts one of Toby's panicked rants. Toby tells him they'll kill us, Bros. We fuck up and they'll kill us. You understand, no one will even find the bodies, Just shoot us and stuck us in a Vada ascid or some shit. You have any idea how fucking dangerous this shit is? Ned nodded, but Toby grabbed him by the arm, leaned in close, close enough he could smell the ether, the cigarettes, and the bo do you bros, you fucking butter because it's me and you out there dangling right

over the goddamn edge. The dialogue may sound a bit stilted, but Ned insists the essence is accurate, and that in a way, the distrust was mutual. Ned was keenly aware of how dangerous, how precarious their relationship was becoming. You don't just go out in an hour and do something and get a fugitive or whatever. We work for days. Sometimes we're staying at hotels, we're traveling, we're flying together, we're dry together. You know, if you don't trust that guy,

you get a problem. Because my neck is at risk and his neck is at risk, and both of us are at risk. So I better trust him and he'd better trust me. For the stuff we were doing. Despite the risks, Ned was increasingly comfortable in his new habitat not just that he kind of liked it, liked being ed. Thomas liked riding as Harley, staying out late in the bars, gathering intel. I must though, because I was doing it.

There's a lot of adrenal into it. You're out there on the edge, you know, hanging on to the edge of the cliff with your fingernails all the time. No one at the office was exactly telling Ned to go to these lengths, but he felt that he needed to be on duty all the time to do his job right. You know, we did a zillion other drug deals, so we always had something going on? What does this due to your home life? Just trays it. You live it.

You live at twenty four to seven, your eyes waiting for the next call, whether they wreck a car, steal a car, break into a house, shoot somebody, stab somebody. It's it's analysts. It's like taking care of juvenile delinquents that are adult killers. Back home, Ned's wife Kathy was discovering that her husband's alter ego was taking over ed Thomas now needed his own room. We had three bedrooms. One was more like a guest room, and I think we had a desk in there and stuff like that.

I recall that he said, Hey, yeah, they're going to put in an undercover phone here at the house. You know, so if it rings, you know, you're I'm gonna you know, here's your name, and just you know, answer it and be cool, you know, act like you're my girlfriend. I go, why do I have to act like me your girlfriend? Why can't I just be your wife? Kathy was an FBI agent in Detroit too, and she'd also gone undercover just once. I did one undercover thing one time, and

I was not at all comfortable with it. I felt like everybody can look at me and see that I'm a cop. Kathy had spent the night at a gambling joint run by the mob, getting to know the criminals. Then the cops busted in. Everyone hands up against the wall. Then they told Kathy you're good, you can put your hands down now. But I was I just was like, no, I don't. I'm so embarrassed now in front of these people who have been so nice to me all night,

and I just found it out of there. I was just like, yeah, don't ever make me do something like that again. That's not me. I'm not comfortable in that situation. I feel like a big fat liar is written like all across my forehead. Her husband, Ned, he didn't seem to have that problem. He seemed comfortable with the pressure and the deception. Or maybe he was more than that. I think Ned always was what one of his supervisors

gcribed Neda as an edge worker. Ned was always right at the edge of going off to the criminal side. And then one day he did the unthinkable. He brought the criminals home with him to his leafy, upscale suburban house. Just shows up with Toby and one of his sidekicks. They all just sauntered up the driveway together. Well, they looked just like motorcycle guys. The hair, the the you know, instead of having a belt having belts that are like

chains or whatever. Their jeans are not like fashionable. Their jeans are just you know, beat up jeans, and and you know they've got flu Manchu mustaches and long hair. They're not trying to give an appearance of like good looking. I thought, oh my god, what will my name think. I hope they didn't see them come in because they look like really rough characters. And my neighbors belonged to Oakland Hills Country Club. No one and I truly mean no one here would ever mistake Toby or any of

his buddies for golfers. This was like the ultimate intrusion into my life, into our life. It just is unheard of, you know, it just was. It was not appropriate, and it was it was I felt it was dangerous. People could could have you know, followed them or seen them, or you know, now they know where we live. Okay, so that's Kathy the homemaker worrying. But here's Kathy the

FBI agent, and she's also worried. I had a lot of my own informants, and they would never have come to my home or I never even would have like lunch with them or something. I mean, I'm an FBI agent, I'm a law enforcement person. Why would they even want to sit down any place and be seen with me. You've just compromised that confidential relationship. I spoke to a number of Ned's former colleagues, and they pretty much all agreed with Kathy. No one brought an informant home with them.

It was too risky. Oddly enough, the one person I spoke with from Ned's FBI days who had also done this was his direct supervisor. He told me that he and Ned were quote unquote rebels. For his part, Ned defends himself, saying it was a judgment call, the decision to bring Toby home. It was calculated. Well, it depends on how much trust you having your sources, and that also builds trusts with the sources, the sources that can

get you killed any second. Well, I'm curious, did you do it just out of kind of professional relationship building or did you do it because these were your friends and this was your wife. I think to build a bond with the sources you depend on those guys not to stand up and say, hey, he's a fucking FBI agent and you have to build this bond. So whatever I was doing seemed to work. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. I can't teach it. I can't say that's

what to do. But that's what I did. Kathy she didn't like it, but she didn't confront Ned or overrule him. And Ned never really asked for permission either. Oh no, no, no, no, you know no. See, Ned never checked in with me first on anything. Our marriage was more like, hey, look, we're going to move to a new house. Come here, I'll take you and you will look at it. My marriage was more traditional in that regard that, you know, he said what we were going to do back then.

I'm going to blame this on the times a lot, but probably also the way I was raised. It just did not occur to me to object to my husband. He has this, he's got this, It'll be fine. But this wasn't a one off occasion. Ned brought Toby home with him multiple times. Kathy remembers them all hanging out

on the backdeck Cookenburger's Super Casual. It was kind of the opposite of the whole undercover stick, you know, like in Donnie Brasco, where the FBI agent has two completely separate lives, one as a gangster and one is a suburban dad with a teflon firewall separating them. It was almost as if Ned Timmins and Ed Thomas were morphing into a single being. Perhaps this was inevitable given Ned's strategy of building trust, but this isn't how Kathy sees it.

You know, you don't have to choose that path. You don't have to choose to work a case in that way, you don't have to choose to go deep cover. You know, it all evolves. And but I know for him, he felt like it was just spinning into the next, into the next, into the next, And he told me that he felt like he didn't know how he was ever

going to get out of it. In the midst of all of this, Ned's game plan paid off big time when he gets the break you've been waiting for, and it involved, of all people, Toby's little brother, a guy who went by the nickname Shine. One day Ned got would seem like a big lead from Toby, though on its face it seemed a bit far fetched Toby says, Hey, I gotta tell my brother is into something really big, but he won't let us near it because he's afraid. Now, Robert,

so what is it? He says. It has to do with airplanes and boats and chapter trailer loads of dope coming to Detroit. And Toby knew he was into something big. Ned didn't know exactly what to make of this. Planes, boats, tractor trailers all filled with weed. Was it possible that Toby the Walking hand Grenade really had a brother who was a big time criminal orchestrating all of this? If this was true, how had Ned not picked up on this sooner. Toby's brother went by the name Shine. His

real name was Clinton Anderson. He died in the late nineties, so I had to kind of piece together a picture of who he was. I don't have the background as to why they called him Shine. About my uncle Clint. In my memories of him, he was a ted. This is Jesse Anderson, Toby's son. Shine was his uncle, and Jesse loved his uncle, adored him. I talked to a bunch of people who knew Shine well, and they all

described him pretty much as this big, lovable guy. One person said he would have made a perfect Santa Clause. Another said he looked like Wilfred Grimley, you know, the grandfather of the actor who started all the Quaker Oats commercials. When things got rough at home for Jesse, he actually went to live with his uncle Clint for a while.

He loved being there. Geez, just like anywhere else, right, kids running around playing football in the front yard, you know, watching football, watching baseball, you know, life in the seventies and early eighties, gambling, playing dart, shooting pool, you know, normal way of life. Little Jesse had never seen a dad who could be depended on before. I guess I

wanted that for my dad. And that's that's what I always appreciated about my uncle Clint was you know, he was I recall him always being there, and I recall him always um, you know, never having to worry m like I did with my dad and my immediate you know, a line of sight and what I recall. And maybe I was blinded by that because I was just so happy to be with my you know, have a family, have a bad wake up, go to school, not necessarily have to worry about anything, right. It was. It was great.

Jesse says the men and his family tended to be hard and have a short fuse. But I don't remember my uncle Clinton like that at all. I mean, again, for me, you know the way that I look at my uncle Clint was it was much like it was much like a savior. Shine had a son named Adam. He was Jesse's older cousin. It took me a long time to track him down. One night he finally agreed to speak by phone. All right, Jake, give me a

second here. He says that Shine was a jack of all trades, a salesman and sold cars and boats too. Though Shin didn't talk about his work a ton, you know, his work and his family's subarate. He was a good guy, but he had an edge. Shine was a striver. He was always looking for something beyond the working class suburb where they started out, a place called Melvindale, a town dominated by the nearby Ford, GM and Chrysler plants. Melvindale

was I fall it a factory town. Pretty much everybody there worked and worked for the Big three and was working class, good people. But he was kind of like taking me out of that environment, showing me that there was more like you know, you can't achieve more. No, no, you don't have to just be a line worker all your life. Adam had a lot of memories from that time, like when his dad came home with a new gadget,

a mysterious briefcase filled with meters and electrical wires. The device was known as a p SE, which stood for Psychological Stress evaluator. It was an alternative to the traditional lie detector, and it could be used discreetly, so it didn't require hooking the subject up to any wires or anything. Supposedly, a skilled operator could use it to pick up on micro tremors in your voice. I spoke to a lot of people who knew Shine and remembered vividly him showing

up with his briefcase and testing them. Oh yes, everybody took a test. Everybody. There was a guy that always carried around this sort of big boxy briefcase. As I recall, Oh yeah, he could scarely on it. Sure he was a good bullshitter, you know it all a little nervous spot taking this Dagone thing he asked your questions. I guess it works. Ask you what your name is and

you tell him. Then you tell him a lie and so it gives him was a distinction of between the truth and lie, whether it works or now, I'd scare the shit out of you. So I imagine it would keep people straight. And I'm sure he was one of the most valuable tools they had, you know, in doing US. Shine had graduated from a special course and now he was a trained PSC operator. He took it seriously, and Adam, like any kid, was curious. So there was something different.

It was interesting. I didn't know why he's doing it on cool. Dad got a new job, you know, and the job came with perks like this. One time his dad took him on a business trip. They flew down to Houston, Texas. Together. They stayed at this cool hotel that was connected to a big shopping mall, and at some point Shine tells his son, He's like, hey, I gotta go out for a little while, you know, don't don't leave the room, don't answer the door. Alone in

his hotel room, Adam watched TV. Minutes turned to hours, and he began to think about what his dad had said. Don't answer at the door. Why not? Who was it that might come knocking. Adam wasn't worried exactly, but he began to wonder what was his dad up to. But I think maybe whoever he was working with, they had another room in the same hotel, so they could have been just down the hall. I don't believe he left. I think he just grabbed his machine and you know,

went to another room. Adam didn't ask any questions, and he didn't give it too much thought at the time, but eventually he started to think back to moments like this and wonder maybe what his father did was not entirely on the op and up. I mean, who was paying him to carry around that briefcase anyway. In fact, clues began to surface that Shine was much more than

just a suburban dad with a mysterious job. One of these clues turned up a thousand miles to the South Way down in Louisiana and a lonely by you very far from Detroit. As Ned continued to investigate the bikers in Detroit, detectives in Louisiana, we're looking into a big smuggling job. It all began with a guy named Dave Ware. Yeah, I was a helicopter pilot on the sign to Louisiana State Police in our region too southwest Louisiana. One day, Dave gets a tip about an abandoned barge, so he

goes looking for it. Flies up a lonely stretch of a Vermilion River, a seventy mile long by you in southern Louisiana. It's flat, You've got agriculture fields and then area. It's a heavy marsh and thick jungle type area. So they were just choppering along. We looked down and we see this huge barge tied off with some rope next to some trees. And we're like, well, that's odd. And we were kind of scratching our heads what to do. And I said, well, I'll just land on the barge.

I mean, it's like landing on aircraft carrier. So they land on the barge, they get out of the chopper, they start poking around. Sure enough, they find a sealed hatch welded into the deck, hidden beneath some coils of rope. And so I went to the cargo hole of my aircraft and dug it my little two bag I always carred, and got a screwdriver and started digging at this rubber ceilant and you gotta menage. The sun was out and

it was hot. And when I've popped that ceiling, the spew just you know, morstar had come up and the smell of marijuana. And we looked at each other and smile and said bingo. The barge itself was quite large and basically empty. All that remained with the dregs some psyche bales that had somehow gotten a wet at the bottom of the boat. Apparently the rest of the load, totally a few hundred thousand pounds, had all been unloaded, successfully dry and ready to smoke. A narcotics agent named

Roy Fruget took up the investigation. So we walked on the barge and we saw marijuana sees all over it. We looked through some drawers. We found a Panamanian flag, we found a Colombian flag. Well, you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that we stumbled up on

something that was large and scale and that it was international. Eventually, the agents figured out that a local marine contractor had been hired to move the barge up the river, and as luck would have it, the contractors had a receipt with the customer's callback number on it, trace the hallback number and it went to a small grocery store in a rural area in Judice, Louisiana, and the name of

the store was the Country Boy Grocery Store. So we went to the Country Boy Grocery Store, and I'm talking about a small building. It had a couple of gas pumps in front, had a small meat market inside. They specialized in Cajun food like stuffed chickens, buddha and cracklings, that sort of thing. So we talked to the owner because this guy's first language, which Cajun French, and he said, with his accent, he said, you know, in the last three months, there's been a lot of foreigners in my store.

What do you mean by foreigners? He said, you know, he said, out of towner's people with blonde hair and blue eyes, and ten he said, you know, Florida looking people. So turns out these Florida looking people had rented a couple of houses nearby. The agents got search warrants. There was a three bedroom, two bath ranch style house. It was close to the Country Bar grocery store, and when we hit it, it had lots and lots of bunk beds, lots of beer bottles, lots of cans of beer, some'm

half empty, half eaten sandwiches on the floor. I remember one of my guys said it looked like a scene from Animal House. Roy starts poking around in the living room and on the coffee table, I saw a large red book and a hard bound New York Times World Atlas. I opened it up, started looking at it, looking actually for the Gulf of Mexico. Saw that there was a chart with a pen marking places through the Gulf of Mexico, and then I backed it up and it went down

to barn Kill, Columbia. It was quite literally mapped out in front of them, evidence of an international syndicate with rats for smoking tons of drugs into the United States. But everyone is gone. They don't have a single suspect. Roy and his partner, Harvey Duplantis, continued to search the house.

We found a yellow notepad with lines on it like you would use in school, and it didn't have any writing on it, but it had indentations where somebody had written on the page above it and then tore the page off. Harvey remembered from grade school. He took a number two pencil out of his truck and he scratched over the indentations and we found a note. Of course, we didn't have the whole note, just whatever came up that Harvey could scribble out there, but it basically said

he was bringing more people. More people were on the way. Harvey kneels over the table, carefully rubbing a pencil over the pad, deciphering this cryptic note word by word, the whole thing right out of a Hitchcock movie. This is exactly what carry Grant does in north By Northwest, and it works. At the bottom of the pad, there's actually a signature. Someone wrote their name as if authorizing these orders, and slowly the letters of the name appear S H, I and E. Shine. Back in Detroit, Ned had no

idea what had gone down in Louisiana. He was back at the office doing a bit of good old fashioned detective work, following up on that tip that Toby had given him about his brother, and the deeper Ned dug into Shine's life, the more he found. We're looking at what he has, a house and cars and everything, and

no source of income. And then we're pulling phone records, bank records and everything, and huge deposits of fifty to sixty thousand at a time, and we're getting travel records from credit cards, and Ned says that those travel records were suspicious. For instance, Shine its spend some time down in the Cayman Islands, which was known as a money laundering hub. So might Shine be his guy, the one Ned had been looking for the key to it all.

If Ned was right, he had found his link to a distant, shadowy drug network, But it didn't seem like he had quite enough to go on. Ned believed if he could just sit down with Shine, talk to him, man to man, he might be able to work him, maybe even flip him. He was starting to strategize, even though he didn't have much to threaten Shine with except maybe his badge. It sounds like you were doing some serious bullshitting of your own. And also you could be

barking up the wrong tree. You don't know for sure the magnitude or the right part of the game. Yeah, the FBI knows a lot, but a lot of it is a game to try to ferret out the information you need. When you throw down the FBI badge and credentials, it horrifies guilty people. They think the FBI knows everything. Next time, a deep Cover, Ned goes to flip Shine. Shine had a family, and it was really a devoted family guy. You know, I just I'm gonna take every

penny they got. I'm gonna take the house, I'm gonna take the cars, I'm gonna take the bank accounts. Everything's gonna be gone. And that struck a dagger in them. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by Karen Shakerji. Our story editor is Jack Hitt. Original music and our theme was composed by Luis Gara and Flawn Williams is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Mia Lobell is Pushkin's executive producer. Ned's novel is read by

Walton Goggins. Special thanks to Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Mcgliori Lee, Tom Mullad Mayakining, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Special thanks also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. I'm Jake Albern