Pushkin previously on Deep Cover. It was the spring of nineteen eighty five. Ned Timmins had been working undercover with bikers in the Detroit area for roughly three years. He thought he was close to finding something big to infiltrating a smuggling ring. Supposedly it was importing huge amounts of marijuana, and now he had a lead on someone who might be directly involved, a part time car salesman who went
by the nickname Shine. 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 sixty thousand at a time. Ned thought he might have enough to try and flip Shine. 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. What Ned needed was an inn an introduction, and as Ned recalls it, another one of his biker informants came up with the solution. They would all get together and have a chili cookoff see who could cook the meanest bowl of chili concarnate, because apparently Shine love to cook, so this would be a sort of informal iron chef competition. Ned says, this other biker,
his informant, set the whole thing up. Basically, he tells Shine, and I was at this guy's house and he makes the most incredible chili and it's better than nearest Shine. Well, Shines, like bull fucking shit is better than mine. We'll have a cookoff. This is also exactly how it all goes down in the novel Shine and taking the chili challenge seriously. Ned could smell the rich PEPPERI aromas from out in a neatly trimmed front yard. Every man has something he's
proud of. The deck he built, the way he cooks a steak, how well tuned his carburetors are for Shine, it was his chili. In the novel, Ned describes Shine as a jackal, a guy with bright, intelligent eyes and a body that looked ready to bite fast and hard. Ned knocks on the door of Shine's house. So we get in there and bullshit around, and I see that there in the kitchen is a regular sized shotgun. Shotgun above the door. Air fifteen in one corner, guns all
over the place. At this point, Ned says he's still very much in character, just playing the role of Ed Thomas, the badass biker who just stopped by to cook some chili and down some bruskies. He's just waiting for the right moment when everyone is relaxed, guards down. We go about an hour and we're sitting in a kitchen and I said, well, it's time to make a move. I just took my credits out of my pocket and laid him on the table and said, Shine, I'm an FBI agent.
I'm going to send you away for life. I'm gonna take this motherfucking house. I'm gonna take your cars. I'm gonna take any money you got in the bank. You're not gonna have a fucking penny, and you play ball with me or all this has gone, all of it. Ned says that it took Shine time to come around, but eventually, after many hours of hemmying and hauing, he agreed to cooperate to switch sides and start working for the FBI. But not necessarily because Ned won him over
with his tough talk or his badge. Shine I found out had his own agenda, and that agenda had everything to do with one crucial detail. It was obvious if he just looked at the guy. He'd been shot in the right thigh and took a probably eight inch circular chunk of meat out of his leg and some of the bone, and so was shorter. He had to wear a shoe with a big lift, and so he limped quite a bit. So yeah, the jackal the wild predatory dog. In real life, he was partially disabled because it turns
out someone had almost killed him. And when Ned showed up, Shine was looking for an escape. I'm Jake Albern and this is Deep Cover, episode three, El Dorado. Shine was hurt badly in the shooting. He was in a coma intubated, just lying there. Shine's son Adam, who was fifteen at the time, still remembers at all. Every day after school was kind of a death watch because he was in
an ostra for a long time. Mom, pick us up from school, just it became routine, going your homework, sit there for a couple hours, home, how was your day? And that went on for a long time. His father eventually came too, but he was in the hospital for three months before he finally was ready to go home, well,
not home exactly. As Shine gets ready to leave the hospital, he decides they can't go back to melvin Dale, the working class factory town where they lived, and as Adam remembers it, Dad had come up with a bold new plan. We were better off getting out of there. That was the way it was presented to us kids, like, hey, it's you know. We know you're leaving all your friends that you've known forever, but we need to get out
of here. So they decided to relocate. They found a place where the family could lay low escape the trouble that was brewing in Detroit. They moved to Clarkston, a rural hamlet surrounded by lakes, about forty miles north of Detroit. It would be great if we could ask Shine how he remembers all of this going down, But remember he's deceased. He got cancer in the nineties and passed away, so
we can't ask him. But we did get our hands on about six hundred pages of court testimony, all Shine under oath, telling his side of the story, and the story that emerges, well, it's not entirely consistent with Ned's version of events. Shine says he was actually looking for Ned, that he had heard about an agent he could trust from Toby Anderson, the violent country western singer. Remember that
Shine's older brother, and he vouches for Ned. In his testimony, Shine says he was looking for Ned because he was scared, scared of his bosses. He suspected it was one of them who had him shot. Shine says in the court records, it seemed to me like the group was out of control. They were smuggling cocaine more and more frequently, and I was afraid I was going to get shot again. That's the reason I went to Ned Timmins, not because of
fear of going to jail. Slowly, Shine started to tell Ned about the group, as he called it, the smugglers, and said it was a large operation involving countless people across many states, and he was in charge of security. His job was to use that mysterious briefcase with the voice stress analyzer, his portable lie detector to vet every single would be employee. If this were true, Shine was the lynch pin, the one guy who knew everyone. There was just one problem. Shine hated being an informant. He
didn't films good about it. You know it was it wasn't type of person that he was, but knew it was what he had to do to stay alize the Styckliss family. I was aware of the stress he was going through. I was aware of how much it hurt him. These were his friends. These are the guys that he went to Texas and fish Bass with. These are the guys he traveled with, and you know, they were like a team. He's trading them in and he's getting you. Yes, here his new best friend. That's what you had to do.
You had to get whatever information you could out of him. And during this time with Shine, do you think that he considers you his friend? Yeah? I think so. On one hand, he was a total, crazy, drunken drug addict wild man. On the other hand, he always wanted to protect his family. Something happens to me, You got to take care of my family. And did you take that seriously? Yeah.
One of the things that Ned was most curious about was a rumor that somewhere in Detroit there was a massive warehouse that smugglers were using to distribute their drugs. The place sounded mythic, the El Dorado of stash houses, and Shine basically tells Ned, Yep, that warehouse, it's ours. Yeah. Shine discussed the warehouse with me and he said, here, I'll show you in. We went and identified it. Shine
was quickly proving his worth. He knew all about this warehouse because the guy who ran it was his boss. You Shine tells me about this guy, Mike Vogel. You know. Shines said that Vogel was controlling most of the weed going into university in Michigan. Now Nen had a direct lead on him, and he put him under surveillance. After the break, I tracked down Mike Vogel, the mastermind behind Detroit's legendary drug warehouse. Think about how would you feel
if you could buy anything he wanted to? There are no rules for the wealthy, and none just all gets stupid. I meet Mike Vogel at a house in a quaint town outside of Detroit. Mike greets me at the door. He's an older guy and moves slowly, almost seems like he has a limp, but not meek, not at all, more like an old bear. Not as fast as he
used to be, but hey, don't mess with him. Grabs a cup of coffee, lights a cigarette and just starts talking, but before we get into his life as a criminal mastermind, he tells me that I have to understand where he started out, not with marijuana, but with groceries. You gotta remember, way before all this, I work for my father, Okay, And I ran the frozen food and receiving docs for
his company. Okay, And that's when I learned about wholesale distribution. Yeah, prior to being a big time drug distributor, he was moving large quantities of frozen peas. And my father's warehouse was like two and a half city blocks long, full of drags, full of can goods, and a freezer that was fifty thousand square feet. He was a grocery guy. That's how he became an expert in inventory, specifically his
father's tracking system. They used paper receipts with carving copies, you know, almost like what you'd get at the dry cleaners. Mike grows up in the grocery business, one of ten kids, goes to Catholic school. He says he was a reasonably good student in college. Mike likes to party and hang
out with girls, smoke some pot. At heart, though he's a business guy, he doesn't want to get caught, and he wants to protect himself by learning more about who might be up against, so he decides to do some homework. He starts volunteering for the police. My job was to watch to parking lots, quote unquote. I want to know the codes. I wanted to see how they were, how they acted. And police are not They're not as smart as everybody thinks. You know, They're just doing their job.
This whole experience only builds Mike's confidence, makes him think he can up his game start dealing on a larger scale. Pretty soon, he's buying five hundred pounds of marijuana down to Florida, loading it into the trunk of his Pontiac Bonneville, and driving it up to Michigan, where he sells it to smaller dealers. I knew him from high school, all Catholic Central buddies, and he just keeps on expanding. I knew how to build. You have to have the product before you can do it. So what you have to
do is have a constant supply. And that's what I had. There was a constant supply. Like any smart businessman, he had multiple suppliers. Eventually big suppliers. Some would bring the marijuana in by plane to a small airport in northern Michigan or a grass strip down in Kentucky. Others brought it in by boat to secret landing sites down south and then brought it up north by truck. Then Mike Loogal needed somewhere to put it. He would store the product in the big warehouse out an eight mile Mike
the grocery guy. He understood that when it came to selling produce, whether it was marijuana or you know, Brussels sprouts, the key to profits was moving large quantities quickly and efficiently. Last, but not least, he developed a network of trusted buyers who each had their own territory, for instance, college campuses like University of Michigan, and almost like a big retail chain.
He used his muscle to push out competitors. I had it in such a way that I really control the marijuana industry in Michigan and Iver and all the rest. I'd hear of someone else bring in a loud, I'd just bring in stuff and reduced my prices so they could. One guy I heard he was selling his stuff for three tan. I start saw mine at two eighty five, and I always had good product. All of this sounds
like stuff out of a classic business school textbook. Right sell large quantities, so even slim profit margins can pay off. Keep your inventory moving. If competitors emerge, undersell them. Even if you lose some money, it's worth it to maintain control of the market. I mean, this guy could be your classic Midwestern CEO, which he kind of was. But all of this has to be done in complete secrecy. For example, most buyers didn't even know where his big
warehouse was. When they came to make a pickup, he'd have them go to a rendezvous point like some truck stop. Then one of Mike's trusted drivers would take the buyer's vehicle to the warehouse, loaded up with pot, and then head back to the truck stop for the handoff. They didn't have to know or my location when nobody needed to know that unless you're a fucking thief and you're going to try to steal it, which would have been a tragedy on a lot of different levels. You can't
allow anybody to steal from you. Mike's business it was going very well. His nephew, Matt Vogel, a teenager at the time, remembers how he loved going to visit uncle Mike. I bought a Francloyd Wright style house in Milford twenty five acres thirty acres, But it wasn't just the classy architecture that intrigued young Matt. One time, in one of the back bedrooms, I remember opening the door. There was
so much money in there. It was just stacked in boxes and twenties and hundreds, so you could smell it. Money has a very distinct odor, and there was just so much of it you could you could smell it to a complete an adrenaline rush. Have you ever seen that much money and you know it's just sitting there and you could literally take it, and it'd be a long time before somebody figured it out. Matt says that hanging out with his uncle was always an adventure. You
never knew where he might take you. So I get a call, We're gonna go to the Super Bowl. We're thinking this was great, so my mom dropped me off at the Pontiac Airport. In fact, they saw George Bush Senior, who was vice president at the time, landed Pontiac Airport and hop into his motor cap, causing an epic traffic jam. But Mike, he wasn't gonna wait any traffic or deal with parking. And I'm thinking, let's to deal. Well, we're gonna take a helicopter. That's what you do. But that
was that lifestyle that they didn't care. I mean, who flies to the super Bowl because you don't want to deal with parking. Once they were at the game, Uncle Mike he seemed to love having little Matt around. Go hey, Mike, We're like, oh, give me a drinking Okay, give me a hundred dollars bell. I'd literally go up to the bar at sixteen and a silver down. There's always movie stars walking around. It's the super Bowl. Buy him and drink hour or whatever it costs. He never asked for
the change. I must have went home with two thousand dollars in my pocket. Of course, two grand was nothing to Uncle Mike. Nothing. Think about it. How would why would you feel if you could buy anything you wanted to. You could go buy a leer, jed, or you could buy this or buy that, buy an island if you want. You know, it's a great feeling. There are no rules
for the wealthy, and none. Just don't get stupid. This is the guy the FBI and the US Attorney General had conjectured about a marijuana tycoon, a man with closets that literally looked like Scrooge McDuck's volt. But here's the funny thing about Mike Vogel. Right for him, the money came so fast and easy that eventually, he says, he kind of grew tired of it. Jake, I'm gonna tell
you something. It was stressful, tough business to run on my end because I basically was involved the smuggling, in the distribution of it, and then having to get the money back out. I mean, it took a lot from me. I was I was sick of this fucking And it wasn't just exhaustion. It was the paranoia too. He wondered who might be stealing from him, who would rat on him, because it would just take one one person for everything
to crumble. It was right around this time that Mike got a call from his partner, the guy who actually smuggled the dope into the US. He had very good news. The next shipment, code named Bulldog, would be ten times the usual amount, three hundred thousand pounds of marijuana. Mike Vogel. He freaked out. I don't know, hell do you bring out three hundre thousand pounds expect? How to distribute it, how to get the money. It was just too much.
To compound his fears, Mike got a tip from a trusted friend, another smuggler, a guy who knew things, and this guy tells him the Bulldog shipment has been compromised. The FEDS know about it. This suggested there was a rat. I became really distrustful of Shine, Okay, really distrustful. Shine and Mike Vogel had been working together for a while. At this point, Shine betted everyone with his light detector machine, so if there was a rat, he had somehow slipped
patch Shine, unless, of course, the rat was Shine. You know, once you've been in that business and you're always worried about what's going on around you. I'm not a dumb person, and he just didn't fit. This bout of paranoia occurred around the same time as Bulldog, well over a year before Shine actually flips, So at the time, Shine was not an informant and he basically tells his boss, look, there's no way our smuggling ring has been compromised. Shine
remembered this conversation and actually recounted it at trial. I'm just going to read you a bit from the court trans Shine. I told him there was no way in the world there could have been any type of infiltration. I had tested everybody. And Michael said, you're either a cop or they paid you off. And I said, well, I'm neither. I told him they could test me. Prosecutor, did he shine, Yes? Prosecutor did anyone interpret that test? Shine? Well, he interpreted. I had to chart it for him, but
it did take place. Prosecutor, did you pass Shine, Yes, I'm here. They told me. If I flunked, I was dead. But it didn't matter. Mike Vogo couldn't shake off his suspicions, and so he bailed on the operation. He walked away from the three hundred thousand pound load what was arguably one of the largest loads of marijuana in US history. In the months to come, Mike Vogo continued to nurse his suspicions about Shine. It was like, once this idea had wormed its way into his mind, he just couldn't
let it go. And then one day towards the end of nineteen eighty three, a member of Mike's outfit blasts Shine with a shotgun at close range, almost kills him. This is how Shine ends up in the hospital in a coma with his son sitting by his side, and this is why Shine walks with a limp for the rest of his life. In reporting this out, I've heard so many different versions of why Shine shot. No one can agree. Some claim was just a stupid quarrel that
got out of hand. For his part, Mike Vogel denies that he had anything to do with this, though he did speak with the shooter and told him, well, the problem with you is you're a bad fucking shot. Oh she had killed the son of a bitch. You can still hear a bit of rage in his voice all these years later. It just kind of flares up. And Shine talks about my temper too. Says that sometimes Mike
seemed to become unhinged, that he was acting irrationally. He said that Mike was quote turning into a Doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde character. There's still a little Jacqueline hide in him. I caught a glimpse of this myself when I visited Mike Vogel at his house. He was for the most part, very cordial and welcoming consummate Doctor Jekyl. And then one afternoon showed up with Matt Vogel, his nephew,
and I got kind of weird. Mike seemed to think that me and Matt, his own nephew, were conspiring against him somehow when we first arrived. Don't fuck with me seriously. It's like, as I said, when you guys walked in and you said that you guys have gotten together, and I was thinking about the other night. I said, you know what, in the olden days, I would have just called Ale and another couple of bikers and explain to you what happens if you keep on going the way
you're going. That's kind of disturbing. Why it would only be disturbing if you were in the trunk of a car and you're going to some other place field and you get out and they beat the fuck out of here and leave you there. Matt and I just kind of looked at each other. Was Uncle Mike serious here? I mean, didn't seem like he was joking. And then just like that, Mike was back to being Doctor Jekyll, friendly, thoughtful, intelligent. Mike may have been an intimidating figure. But Shine, it
turns out, had taken measures to protect himself. He had dirt on his boss, incriminating evidence, rental car receides, hotel records, and other evidence. He even bugged a hotel room in Tampa and surreptitiously made recordings of Mike Vogel talking. Later on at trial, Shine discussed this here he is in
the transcripts talking about all the evidence he had. Shine, I refer to them as my ace and the whole you know, in case Vogel made any more threats on my life, and I told him I had documentation to back up my credibility. I could corroborate certain times and dates of smuggling. Prosecutor, you threatened Vogel that you had documentation, Shine, Yes. In the end, Mike Vogel's paranoia it may have been justified.
Either that or it became a self fulfilling prophecy, like he was so worried that Shine was an informant, so certain that this was true, that he accused him of being a rat, made him take his own my detector test, even wished him dead in front of others, And all of this seemed to spook Shine so badly it sent him right into the open arms of the FBI. Coming up. Ned discovers the Shine. He has far more secrets to tell, secrets that will lead them both on a bit of
a wild goose chase very far from Detroit. Ned and the FBI. They didn't go after Vogel right away. As big as Vogel was, as impressive as he was, he was just the distributor. And if you really wanted to understand how drugs were coming into the country and try to shut it down, then he didn't just go after the distributor. He wanted the smugglers, the supply chain, the financiers,
the whole magilla. The FBI prides itself and working the entire case, however long it takes to get everybody, not just to grab a kilo or a bail or you know, seize a couple of cars or something. Their game plan is to get the whole organization. Plus, if Ned arrest had Vogel, then that would tip off the other players in the organization. Ned he was still an undercover investigation mode. He had just begun to tap into what Shine knew. Remember, Shine was the guy who used his lie detector machine
to vet everyone. I mean, basically he was the one man HR department of a national drug ring. But getting Shine to divulge all that information, well that was not so easy. You'd ask him question and he'd be forthright on it. But again you couldn't you know, you knew you only had so long with him, and he would just like overheat. Ned says he'd do whatever he could to get inside of Shine's head. For example, he'd take
him fishing so Sein would relax. They'd have a few beers, and sometimes Ned says he'd even try to speak with a Texas drawl when they chatted, because Shine apparently had a soft spot for Texans. You know, I just say, I can't come on, Shine, you know, let's have another beer. I think my bass was two inches bigger than yours, and and he would he would get pissed. He's, no, let me let measure that. Get the get the measuring thing out. You know, we gotta measure that fish. I
think my fish was bigger from the outside. At least Ned and Shine they seem like they were really tight. Ned's partner at the office, Linnis, then a Lavicius. He picked up on this he and Ned were probably fairly identical to each other, had the same qualities and same gift of gab. That's why probably Ned was able to convince him to flip. The difference between one and the other is ones involved in the legal activity and the other ones involved in law enforcement activity. But the personalities
almost match identical. But Ned says he was just acting that it was all fake. In other words, he was just doing his job and doing it well, trying to get as close to this guy as he could building. I guess you'd call it intimacy, or maybe it was more like emotional manipulation. In any case, Ned says that the effort of doing this day in and day out, it started to wear on him. I think it's almost
a form of PTSD. You're so psychologically involved with these people, and I said, you know, you're solving problems for their family, for their kids, for their relatives or whatever. You know, they bring every problem to you and you have to solve it within the rules of the FBI. These two guys, they needed each other. Ned needed Shine to make his case, and Shine, oh, you know, he needed Ned to help him and his fa Emily find a way out and
escape in a way. It was your classic symbiotic relationship, but honestly, I think it was more than this. Shine and Ned shared something. There was a strange symmetry to their lives. Ned was that dude living near the country club who'd grown a Fu Manchu mustache, learned to ride a Harley, and was passing as a biker with access to meth. Shine was a clever criminal from the working class streets of Melvyndale who was now laying low in the suburbs, passing as just another guy with a dad bod.
They were both essentially undercover agents, but not identical. They were mirror images of one another. And then one day Shine really starts to talk. We got our hands on an FBI report. They cataloged everything he told Ned. In one session they had together, Shine charts out the whole network,
giving Ned an organized chart of the whole company. He tells them locations Sheridan Hotels in Tampa, Florida, a house and slide down Louisiana, places in Ohio, Kentucky, Boston, Detroit, and he confirms the size of some of their loads twenty seven thousand pounds, thirty five thousand pounds, three hundred thousand pounds, and then he had names for Ned. Allegedly, those involved included an American diplomat, a Texas billionaire, a
Teamster executive. The list went on and on. Shine knew everyone from the ship captains to the guy working the radios to the offloaders. Shine basically tells Ned, if you can stop this organization, you're going to stop most of the marijuana coming into the United States. I was excited. I know it was a massive operation, and I knew that we had the key to the safety deposit box to open it all up. Shine also tells Ned in so many words, I know how the smugglers did it.
I know what boats they used. I know where the secret offload sites were. I know how it all works because I was there on the ground when some of these ships came in. I know the whole system. So Ned and Shine they started taking some trips together, and they go deep into the swamps of North Carolina to the marshy inlets that pirates once used. Next time a deep cover he called me up just to shoot the bull.
He said, Bob, place some of us boards because unleds pop. I says, oh yeah, he was dressed for a disco flat pants. He had a shirt that was silk and it was open to his Sternham. He had gold chains. All these items you don't wear on an open boat and Carter at County. Deep Cover is produced by Jacob Smith and edited by Karen Shakergie. Our story editor is Jack hit. 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 had their Fame, Carly mcgliori, Leeta Mullatt, Maya Caning, Eric Sandler, Aggie Taylor, Kadija Holland, Zoe Gwenn and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries. Special thanks also to Jeff Singer at Stowaway Entertainment. I'm Jake Calpern